The Past Was Stranger Than We Think (Part III)

This article is part three of a series. If you’d like, read parts one and two here first.

So far in these essays, we have been over the likelihood that Paleolithic peoples considered the groups we now think of as minority groups — the disabled, the queer, those who hear voices, outsiders, and so forth — to make up a reverential stratum of society, who were feared and venerated enough to give elaborate burials. You may be wondering what all this talk about anti-fascism and stone age gender has to do with psychedelic culture.

Most psychedelic users are moderate liberals or libertarians. While this is still true, people are familiar with the movement toward the alt-right of some factions in psychedelic culture in the past few years. If we are to respond to this development as leftists within the psychedelic scene, we must realize our problem's true scope.

Liberalism has always been tightly coupled with fascism and colonialism as well. As James Q. Whitman says in Hitler’s American Model, there are two Americas, America, the liberal democracy, and America, the white nationalist terror state. Democracy is built on top of the regime of racial terror. It would not have had a clean slate to create itself without the genocide and slavery accompanying it.

The European Enlightenment philosopher John Locke, for instance, was secretary during the drafting of The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), which gave white men ‘absolute power’ over their African slaves, and he “invested heavily in the English Trans-Atlantic slave trade through the Royal African Company.” Georg Hegel also claimed at one point that “slavery is necessary” as part of a historical developmental process.

It has even been argued that the revolutionary critiques of European society that so inflamed the people of Europe in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries were first articulated by indigenous people due to their dealings with European colonizers.

In the sense that European liberal democracies would have been impossible without genocidal colonialism, the visible white supremacists of The Proud Boys, QAnon, the January 6th insurrectionists, or those of the Atomwaffen sort are just the visible crest of a much deeper wave. We in the psychedelic community must also search within ourselves to identify the colonial and patriarchal logic in our lives.

Because psychedelics have been so controversial for a long time, people fond of them often develop a habit of questioning other social narratives. Many psychedelic books recapitulate the narrative of human origins, with psychedelics as a central, hidden element in that history. Terence McKenna does it in Food of the Gods, and Gordon Wasson does it in Persephone’s Quest. There are elements of it present in Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson, to name a few classic but relatively benign examples.

A less benign example is found in Timothy Leary in the ’70s, as Jules Evans documents in a fascinating essay about racism and evolutionary spirituality that also implicates several other psychedelic luminaries such as “Havelock Ellis, WB Yeats, Aleister Crowley, HG Wells, Aldous, and Julian Huxley, Gerald Heard, Abraham Maslow and, to a lesser extent, Terence McKenna,” saying:

In the 1970s, Timothy Leary, high priest of LSD, starting preaching a new gospel. He become obsessed with the idea of a hierarchy of different genetic castes spread throughout the Earth, at different levels of evolution, culminating in a super-caste of Californians destined to leave Earth and continue their evolution in space. He preached selective breeding to enhance intelligence, and even suggested Hitler was ahead of his time. ‘Whatever happened to Timothy Leary?’ as Aldous Huxley once asked.

And other writers, who are not writing about psychedelics per se, but about, shall we say, metaphysical counterhistories, often cited in psychedelic mythmaking, usually take this idealized worldbuilding tendency in this same, more reactionary direction.

Writers Like John Mitchell, famous for his syntheses of the Earth Mysteries Tradition for the New Age movement and a significant influence on the English hippy movement who promoted the idea of “England as a site of spiritual redemption in the New Age,” and who integrated “ideas about sacred geometry, Druids, sacred landscapes, earth energies, Atlantis, and UFOs,” according to an article about him in a British magazine. Mitchell is one of several authors whose writings have been termed “pseudoarcheology,” they often perform the same motion in their historical narratives that McKenna does. Still, rather than his story about psychedelics, they focus on stories of lost continents and alien visitors as the central motor of human history.

For whatever reason, many of these pseudohistorians are also deeply politically conservative. Mitchell has admired the esoteric ideas of Italian “superfascist” writer Julius Evola. Evola also dabbled in what can be referred to as a politicized version of Traditionalism, derived from the school of perennial wisdom tradition led by Rene Guenon.

His biographer has politically characterized Mitchel himself as a “third positionist.” This ideology is otherwise known as the red-brown tendency or Strasserism, and it attempts to synthesize fascism and communism into culturally conservative socialism. Further, much of Mitchell’s writing takes the form of, as Evola named one of his books, a revolt against the modern world.

Another example of this type of thinking is the dubious classic, Chariots of the Gods. Accepting the premises of the ancient alien hypothesis requires the reader to believe that Paleolithic and indigenous peoples worldwide would not have been capable of monumental architecture without otherworldly assistance.

While Von Daniken’s political ideas do not appear as thought out as Mitchell’s positions, it is impossible to hold this perspective without some racial chauvinism. And Mitchell and Von Daniken’s ideas are still current in the psychedelic community, having apparent similarities to contemporary authors like Graham Hancock.

To look at images of the historical artifacts of the peoples subjugated by your people and to decide that they must have an otherworldly origin is an act of intellectual colonization. Because it accepts the idea that ancient humanity, particularly the ancient peoples of the colonized world, were less creative, less empirical, and less capable of collective production than modern people, that is to say, less human.

These forms of thought owe much to previous esoteric systems like Theosophy, which contributed much to New Age ideology, in no small part through the book The Morning of the Magicians. A strange little book written by a former French Resistance member and his collaborator, the book is a significant connection between the pre-war and post-war occult scene. It draws on the self-concept of the pre-war Theosophical movement as a benevolent spiritual hierarchy rooted in ancient times.

The book then inverts Theosophy’s claims, suggesting instead that Theosophy discovered a connection to the “Luciferian East” and painting the society as an outgrowth of an ancient secret society endeavoring to manipulate historical events for its ends. The book became enormously influential in the nascent 60s counterculture and would influence Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods and other pseudo-histories. Contemporary psychedelic band The Flaming Lips even have a song about it.

After becoming a Christian and renouncing his previous work, one of its authors, Lewis Pauwels, would become an associate of Alain de Benoist, the key figure in the French New Right. De Benoist dedicated his book How Can One Be a Pagan? to Pauwels in 1981, and Pauwels offered De Benoist a position at a news magazine Pauwels edited. Pauwels also joined the ethno-nationalist think tank GRECE.

But let’s delve further into the system that lurks behind the half-joking grandiosity of The Morning of the Magicians, Theosophy. This subject deserves its own article, but I will make a few remarks here. Looking back at it now, Theosophy seems so racist that it is almost funny. Still, back in its era, it was considered a progressive force, at least to the extent that it was one of the first European ideologies to take Eastern spiritual thought seriously. The elements of Theosophy that have provided the most fodder for its reactionary currents are its pseudo-evolutionary idea of Root Races and its misrepresentation of Eastern Religions.

The first two root races are entirely fictional, etheric, and glowing beings that reproduced through budding. But the third, fourth, and fifth root races are considered the mythical origins of various ethnic groups worldwide. The third or Lemurian root race descended into groups such as the Khoikhoi and San peoples, the Bantu people, the Dravidian peoples, and the Melanesian and Australian Aboriginal peoples.

The fourth or Atlantean root race descended into Cro-Magnons, North American indigenous peoples, Turkic peoples, the Phoenicians, Akkadians, and Mongolians. The fifth root race was the Aryan race. The sixth root race was intended to be produced from loyal Theosophist stock through a Bene Gesserit-style eugenics program.

We can already see the issues emerging here, as Theosophists linked race and spiritual development, claiming that a ‘sacred spark’ is missing from the inferior (non-Aryan) races. The idea of racial descent into animal-like attributes (in Lemuria's descendants) aligns too well with the now-debunked theories of scientific racism common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Splinter groups like Anthroposophy and Arianosophy would go on to center these racial divisions and influence the development of German (if not Italian) fascism. And, of course, as is well known, the SS had a pseudohistorical division, the Ahnenerbe, that sent an expedition to Tibet looking for traces of the Aryans, among other similar ventures.

It is worth noting that Rene Guenon of the Traditionalist school mentioned above considered Theosophy a pseudo-religion. So, we can see some conflict within the milieu of syncretic neo-spiritual universalism. However, the thinkers who followed these groups after World War Two would not be so ideologically particular. We see this primarily in the far-right outgrowths of these worldviews, such as Esoteric Hitlerism.

Writers like Savitri Devi, Robert Charroux, and Miguel Serrano were influential occult voices that provided mystical justifications in the immediate post-war era, continuing fascist ideology after its defeat. Devi came first, drawing on the Nazi’s Aryan imaginaries, themselves secondary derivations of the Theosophical race classifications, to deify Hitler as a new incarnation of Vishnu.

Charroux, in many ways, is more in line with John Mitchell or Erich von Daniken. Still, alien-tinged Nordic supremacism and his influence on Serrano outline a harder, conservative political edge to his conspiracies. We can also see the indirect impact of Pauwels on Serrano as well.

Serrano himself is the origin of the kooky seeming idea that you will occasionally hear in hippy circles that Nazi UFOs are hiding under Antarctica. He also deifies the Aryan race and assigns Jews a place as the people of an evil gnostic demiurge. These may seem like obscure fringe writers of no importance.

However, a small but thriving nucleus of far-right mysticism draws on these ideas, sometimes in conjunction with psychedelic practices, including the structured use of these substances in ritual. An example of this would be the psychedelic ceremony in which the Nazi group The Base sacrificed a goat while under the influence of LSD. Right-wing politics are also typical in neo-pagan circles, as writers like Alan Piper have noted since the nineties.

So, despite the normative association with psychedelics with right-wing politics, we can see how closely the intellectual history of a sizable portion of the movement tracks to reactionary race science and bigotry. Now that we have problematized the traces of fascist origin narratives within psychedelic ideology and begun to trace the contours of an antifascist counternarrative, in Part 4 of this article we will continue our examination of the latent possibilities of different forms of life implicit in pre-modern societies, and attempt to begin a synthesis that can serve as a platform for contemporary antifascist psychedelic mythmaking.