Serpent Power

The subconscious mind is aware of its own immortality.
— Aleister Crowley, Diary (1919)

The people of this world are assuredly insane … If these people are sane, as they believe themselves to be, let us all hasten into what they would call insanity.
— Ajnabi, medieval Sufi teacher, quoted by Idries Shah, The Dermis Probe

Impeach Nixon, Impound Agnew.
— Malaclypse the Younger, Greater Poop, 1969

Now if a man worships a deity, thinking the deity is one and he is another, he does not know.
— The Upanishads

People believe the damndest things. The average American, for instance, will tell you that torture was used as a punishment in the middle ages, but has been abolished since then. He will then walk past a jail without any mental activity or rumination or any var­iety of dawning awareness that he has been talking nonsense. Locking people in cages is not torture, in the popular estimation. Why? Because only cruel nations in the dim past practiced torture; what we do, today, is by definition not torture. The demand that prisons be abolished only arises from a few eccentric and anarchist thinkers and is regarded as absurd. “But what will we do without jails?” people ask just as they once asked other reformers, “But what will we do without thumbscrews and iron boots?”

Or: consider the right to live on the planet. It is popularly believed that feudalism has been abol­ished; the people who believe it pay their monthly tribute (rent) to the lord-of-the-land, now abbreviated to landlord, just as if feudalism still existed. When really pissed off, they will have a “rent strike,” and withhold the rent for a short time, until some “re­form” is grudgingly granted. The idea that we have as much right to live on this planet as horses or birds or monkeys do, and don’t have to pay anybody any­thing for that right, does not percolate.

And some even believe that slavery has been abolished. It has — until the government decides to reinstitute the draft again, which it might at any time.

“He (the average citizen) does not see the real world. The real world is hidden from him by the wall of imagination. He lives in sleep … There is a war going on at the present moment. What does it sig­nify? It signifies that several millions of sleeping people are trying to destroy several millions of other sleeping people. They would not do this, of course, if they were to wake up … How many times have I been asked if wars can be stopped? Certainly they can. For this it is only necessary that people should awaken … ”
— Gurdjieff, quoted in The Morning of The Magicians, by Pauwels and Bergier

“What is the hardest thing of all? That which seems to you the easiest: to see with your eyes what is before your eyes.”
— Goethe, quoted by Wilhelm Reich in Cosmic Superimposition

Reich’s books were burned by the Federal Gov­ernment in the Vandivoort Street incinerator, in New York City, in 1956. Literally: it was the first book-burning actually performed by Our Leaders in Wash­ington in this century. It will not be the last. At the time, only 18 psychiatrists in the whole country pro­tested. You would think that after the Holy Inquis­ition, after Hitler’s Germany, after Stalin’s Russia, the learned professions should have learned a lesson: hun­dreds of thousands of them should have called a pro­test strike, at least. No: Reich had “gone too far;” he was too dangerous. (To whom? To what?)

Timothy Leary sits in a cage at Folsom, and the same apathy exudes from every pore of the academic community. Let him rot: like Reich he has “gone too far.” He is dangerous. (To whom? To what?)

Every student of the occult arts and sciences, every sexual heretic and deviant, every scientist who dares to dissent from “established” opinion, should remember: they burned about 9,000,000 of us in the heyday of the Inquisition. They used the thumb­screw, and the Iron Boot, and the rack, and the Iron Maiden, and dozens of similar sado-maso toys. Homer Smith figures, in Man and His Gods, that the forcible Christianizing of Europe and the Americas cost about 60,000,000 human lives in all, including those wasted in the futile attempts to Christianize the Near East. Michael Aldrich, Ph.D., calls it “psychedelic geno­cide:” the attempt to abolish certain high states of consciousness often (although not exclusively) assoc­iated with psychedelic drugs. For this altered consci­ousness was the chief offense of the Gnostics and other pagan mystics, of the witches, of the magicians and warlocks, of the Knights Templar and Albigenses, of all those (in short) who maintained the primoridial magicko-religio-scientific art of Serpent Power in the face of Christian bigotry.

My Sex and Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits provides a chart which can be used to measure our “progress” since the Dark Ages, It compares a typical witch-trial of the 14th century with a typical drug bust of today:

The accused are arrested in a woodland meeting place. The accused are arrested in a rural commune.
The accused are said to worship a Horned God, perhaps Satan Himself. The accused are said to worship Hindu or American-Indian or other non-Christian dieties.
The accused are alleged to have engaged in “obscene” or “bestial” orgies The accused are alleged to have engaged in “obscure” or “bestial” orgies or, at least, to be sexually casual.
The accused are said to seek religious visions with drugs, most commonly belladonna, thorn apple or mandrake. The accused are said to seek religious visions with drugs, most commonly LSD, hashish, peyote or marijuana.
The accused are typically defiant, in the manner of heretics, not guilty in the manner of ordinary criminals. The accused are typically defiant, in the manner of heretics, not guilty in the manner of ordinary criminals.
The accused usually come from either the lower class (peasants, serfs) of from the young scholars The accused usually come from either the lower class (blacks, Mexican American) or from the young intelligensia (students)
The offense is a “crime without victims,” not a real crime against persons or property. The offense is a “crime without victims,” not a real crime against persons or property.
But society paradoxically demands harsher penalties than are given for crimes against persons or property. But society paradoxically demands harsher penalties than are given for crimes against persons or property.
General charges of Satanism, anarchism, black magic, murder, etc. are often directed against the class of offenders (the “witches”) General charges of treason, communism, black magic, “un-American,” etc. are often levelled against the class of offenders (the “dope fiends”)

Dr. Aldrich’s term, “psychedelic genocide,” seems to describe the pattern of persecution in both cases.

Dr. Thomas Szasz points out, in The Manufacture of Madness, that when liberalism or rationalism succeed in stopping one type of persecution, another type usually is created to fill the vacuum. Authoritar­ian society, hierarchical society, caste-and-class society needs scapegoats as warnings to keep everybody else in line. Thus, as Szasz notes, the celebrated and particularly atrocious Spanish Inquisition hardly ever burned witches, unlike the Inquisition in the rest of Europe, because Spain didn’t need witches: they had Jews and crypto-Jews (converts to Christianity, who could be suspected of backsliding and practising Judiasm in private) and this kept their pyres burning, just as the looted property of these heretics kept the Church treasuries growing. Szasz also indicates how the Victorian masturbation-hysteria, the fear that onanism could destroy mind and body, grew in in­tensity as the fear of witches declined: adolescent boys became the new witches to be watched and harassed.

(This mania is hardly ended. A great deal of Marxist neo-puritanism, the Carrie Nation faction of Womens Liberation, the New Nixonized Supreme Court, etc. rests on the unstated assumption that “sexy” or “sexist” art, Deep Throat, Playboy foldouts, etc. is a menace slightly more dangerous than bubonic plague. Behind this is a fear that somebody, somewhere, might be jacking off and enjoying it.)

“I will have thee to know, moreover, my dear Son, the right Art of Conduct with them whom I shall give thee for Initiation. And the Rule thereof is one Rule: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. See thou constantly to it that this be not broken; especially in the Section thereof (I dare say so) which readeth Mind Thine Own Business. This is of Application equally to all, and the most dangerous Man (or Woman, as hath occured, or I err) is the Busy-Body. Oh how ashamed are we, and moved to Indignation, seeing the Sins and Follies of our Neigh­bors! Of all the Occasions of this Grievance the most common is the Desire of Sex unsatisfied; and thou knowest already, even in thy young Experience, how in that Delerium the Weal of the whole Universe appeareth of no account. Do thou then wean thy Babes from that Simplicity, and instill the sense of true Proportion. For verily this is a Way of Madness, Love, unless it be under Will … O my Son, if every Man doth his own Will, there is no more to say! But the Busy-Body nor mindeth his own Business, nor leaveth others to mind theirs. Be thou instant there­fore with such an one, to cure him by enlightening his Will, and speeding him therein,” — Aleister Crowley, Liber Aleph, op cit.

Eminently sane words, these; they have not been generally understood and adopted, just as the same thought in the more secular language of ration­alistic libertarians like Jefferson, Mill, Paine, Stirner, Tucker, et. al. has not been understood or applied.

This has nothing to do with ideology or philosophy in the academic sense. As Reich said, in The Function of the Orgasm, the authoritarian principle is anchored in the muscular-glandular reflexes of present-day humanity. In Leary’s terms, the Second Circuit (up-down, authority-submission) is imprinted with the roles of caste and class, and the transvaluation of these values cannot begin until the fifth and sixth circuits (Rapture and Ecstasy) are opened and re-imprinting, serial imprinting, self-programming begins.

Lacking the keys to such serial imprinting, humanity seems trapped in the up-down Authority-and-Submission pattern of the Second Circuit, reinforced by the good-evil “morality” of the Fourth Circuit. “Revolutions” within the iron cage of these neurologic grooves merely changes the roles or definitions (who is up, who is down; who takes orders, who gives them; what is officially “right,” what is officially “wrong.”) The sleep-walking described by Gurdjieff (and Buddha) continues; the people are merely dreaming a slightly different dream. Dopefiends replace witches; the game is unchanged.

“The Age of Responsible Society (Circuit Four) first appeared around 40,000 years B.C., homo socians, Cro-Magnon, and now rules in the grim socialisms of China, Russia and America … The materializations of Marx and the capitalist-calvinists have produced a crude religion of security, comfort, duty, work, responsibility which threatens to destroy free life on the planet …” — Timothy Leary, Neurologic, op. cit.

“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of each of its members.” — Emerson, Essays. (And the womanhood of its female members.)

EXPERIMENT FOUR: Run the following program, after opening the Rapture Circuit: “I am not the left frontal lobe” (where Verbal “thinking” and ego-identification reside). “I am also the right frontal lobe, the silent hemisphere.” (Try writing with your left hand for five minutes, to activate the right frontal lobe.)* “I am also the Central Nervous System.” (Run the “There is no God//Except God” mantra, to activate the chakras.) “I am also the autonomic nervous system.” (Imagine a circle 8 feet in diameter, blue-silver in color, surrounding you. Try to feel out to the perimeter of that circle. It is the “astral field” of which your autonomic nervous system is the magnetic core.) “I am not a noun, a dead thing; I am a verb.” (Feel the electro-kundalini or “orgone” energy pulsing, rushing, hurtling madly about in your 8-foot astral egg. You are this inter-action; you are not the imaginary static center with which you normally identify.) If space-time implode or explode at this point, and memories of “reincarnation,” or “racial memory” or animal consciousness emerges, you have done this exercise properly. If not, try running this program several more times.
* Left-handed people, of course, should reverse these instructions.

Surrealism aims at the total transformation of mind and all that resembles it.
First Surrealist Manifesto, 1923

The tide is turning … The enemy is suffering terrible losses …
— Gen. George A. Custer, Little Big Horn

Ye have locked yourselves up in cages of fear, and behold, do ye now complain that ye lack freedom!
— Omar Ravenhurst, The Honest Book of Truth

Every public opinion poll since the Watergate hearings began (unveiling the activities of the “little Mafia” Nixon set up in the White House) has come to the same conclusion: the majority are grudgingly convinced that all this burglary, perjury, bribery, forgery, etc. was not going on without Dick being aware of it; and the majority does not favor impeachment. Ergo, the majority wants to be governed by a cabal of burglars, perjurers, bribe-takers, forgers, etc. Is this a surprise? We’ve known for more than ten years that the majority has no objection to being governed by murderers; why should they get squeamish about misdemeanors when they have long tolerated atrocities and genocides?

Circuit Two still governs humanity. Observe the aborted French Revolution of 1968 – the wildfire spread of insurrection up to the point when the government was on the edge of falling, then the rapid about-face and return to the fuhrership of le Grand Charles.

Circuit Two still governs humanity. Observe when a true “revolutionary situation” arises: the majority rushes to support just that group among the revolutionaries who seem most likely to restore authority (law’n’order, etc.) as promptly as possible. A few mystics, epileptics, marijuana-adepts and other freaks, every generation, are striving for freedom, for the Rapture Circuit and beyond. The majority, in every social upheaval, are seeking to advance upward in the Circuit Two hierarchy structure; the last thing they want is to get outside the hierarchy entirely.

Circuit Two still governs humanity. The most dedicated revolutionaries, everywhere, everywhen, are those most vehemently convinced that they could do a better job of running things, if they could get to the top of the hierarchy. That is precisely what the group already in power thought when they first started plotting, planning and scheming their own rise upward … It is Circuit Two thinking and leads nowhere but the continuation of Circuit Two games of status, caste and obedience.

We now have an official State system of medicine and psychotherapy in America. The “right to prescribe for yourself”, urged as a basic civil liberty by Dr. Thomas Szasz, is nowhere recognized in our law. The State can take away the chemicals you think are good for you (grass, acid); it can also force upon you chemicals that you think are harmful, if you’re in a “mental” jail (hospital) or if you’re an over-active student in certain classrooms when ritalin is now coercively administered to the allegedly “disturbed.” (What sane child isn’t disturbed by the shit that comes down in an American classroom?) The harassment of health food adepts continues, and escalates; believers in the therapies of Dr. Reich or Dr. Ivy or Dr. Shelton are still fighting for the right to practice upon themselves the therapies they believe really work. Nothing outside the official line of the AMA and the big pharmaceutical corporations (which staff the Food and Drug Administration) is safe from legal and extra-legal harassments.

This is scarcely surprising. We are not even trusted to prescribe our own reading, TV viewing, movie-going or other artistic or entertaining past-times. All of these must pass censorship and we are allowed to enjoy only what the Authorities decide is good for us. Circuit Two still governs mankind. Every ethologist knows that zoo animals are crazy, because caging is torture; but society continues to cage its heretics and dissenters. We still pay rent to “land-lords.” If pollution continues, we will be paying rent to “air-lords,” probably. The Primal Horde governed by alpha-males continues, as it does among the baboons. We haven’t evolved that far yet.

The techniques of escape, through the Rapture Circuit and beyond, have’been known empirically for 2000 to 3000 years, minimum, but this empirical knowledge was rule-of-thumb, traditional, modified by the Guru’s intuitive guesses about which of the yogic or magick tricks would work best with a given pupil. Since 1962, the picture has changed, largely due to Dr. Timothy Leary and a few others less brave and more prudent than him who haven’t yet gotten the government down on them. The techniques of imprint, re-imprint and serial imprint are now subject to scientific study and constant improvement. We are at a turning point in human neuro-psychology, as we went through a turning point in energy economics in the Industrial Revolution.

What Korzybski called time-binding, the exponential acceleration of progress in a free scientific community, goes ahead by leaps and bounds, increasing in geometric rather than linear fashion. This is what happened in the Industrial Revolution; it is what can happen in the Neurological Revolution Our techniques of mind-expansion and self-programming in 1993 can be as far ahead of Leary’s program manuals as the auto technology of 1940 was ahead of 1920. Leary’s mistakes (there must be dozens of them) can all be corrected. The best insights of other researchers in the field, Lilly and Osmund and Masters-Houston and dozens of others, can be escalated and synergetically combined into a theory as revolutionary as Einstein’s Relativity, with many more technological products than the atom bombs and TV-sets that came out of e=mc². Leary’s brilliant incorporation of the best insights of non-scientific mindworkers, from Zen Buddhism to Crowleyanity and American Indian shamanism, can be expanded to take in whatever is valid in Scientology, Christian Science, traditional druidic witchcraft, etc. The dream of the Illuminati, the total awakening of mankind and womankind, can happen .. in a free scientific community.

The lack of such scientific freedom, the government lock on the door of psychedelic research, is the major intellectual atrocity of our time, ranking with Vietnam, the major moral atrocity.

Those who understand this escape kit (it is not an article) will know what must be done. We must fight with letters to the editor, fight with alternate tribes and communes and oases of all sorts, fight with humor and love always (“they” are not “wrong;” wrong is a Circuit Four dualistic fallacy “they” are merely out of step with evolution), fight with all the imaginiation and intellect and moxie and chutzpah we can muster. We must get Tim Leary out of his cage, and science out of its cage, and all free life everywhere out of the cages that have been built for it! If we can open our hearts enough, we can learn how to open the cages. We have nothing to lose but our obsolete ape-circuits; we have All Time and Space to transcend.

The End

by Robert Anton Wilson, High Priest, Order of the Illuminati appeared in The Chicago Seed, Volume 9, Issue 8 (October 1973).
Tom Jackson (RAWIllumination.netfound the article 2011.