A couple of weeks ago, the Diva and I found, and walked, the labyrinth pictured below. It’s at Land’s End, and has a great view of the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s one of at least four in San Francisco—there are two at Grace Cathedral, and one at the California Pacific Medical Center; as it happens, I’ve walked them all. The Land’s End labyrinth is easily the most vulnerable of the four, made simply of rocks and gravel found nearby and raked and set into the labyrinth outlines—in fact, it’s been destroyed by cretins, and remade, at least once. It’s beautifully sited on a promontory, with a spectacular view of the Golden Gate Bridge and the bay. Though it must have taken substantial effort to make, and appears timeless, in fact it was laid out in 2004 by one man, Eduardo Aguilera.

The Land’s End labyrinth depends for its survival on the kindness of strangers, and as the Diva and I negotiated its twisty inevitability we both, without discussion or premeditation, found ourselves tidying and rectifying the pattern by nudging stray rocks back into place. It felt like instinct.

I was reminded of the medicine wheels that appear in (presumably) sacred sites across vast swathes of North America. They are referred to as ‘Indian’ or ‘Native American’ but in fact they are far older than any extant culture and archaeologists tell us that they have existed for several millennia, serving—and being served by—several of the cultures that washed across their range like oceans receding and swelling. Think about that. Medicine wheels—which, like the Land’s End labyrinth are simple patterns of rock laid on the ground—have proven more durable than several civilizations, while also depending on civilizations for their creation, maintenance, and renewal; is it not flabbergasting? Our own civilization protects them carefully, with fences and guards, preserving them for… what?

placing our feet with Jain-like care

Of course, much the same can be said of cities, languages, religions, and other human constructs that outlive humans, and nations, and yet depend on humans for continued existence. It’s as if we are parasitized by patterns of varying complexity who make use of our bodies and minds as a means of life. Think of a medicine wheel filmed from above, its 1,000s of years of existence compressed into a movie of, say, an hour’s duration; it alone would persist while forests shimmered in its margins, while humans, like flickering brown worms, swarmed about and kept it repaired, occasionally adding or deleting pieces of the pattern according to some unguessable logic. I think it would look much like a cell under a microscope, or like a city seen from a satellite. It would be a living, lordly thing, and we its vassals.

The Diva and I walked the labyrinth with something like trepidation, eyes cast down, placing our feet with Jain-like care. I can’t tell you the unknowable vastness of her thoughts, but I know that I was contemplating the labyrinth as a metaphor. Because they are twisty and surprising and yet, in retrospect, inevitable, labyrinths are unavoidable metaphors for relationships, careers, and life itself. And so the walking of a labyrinth should be conducted reverentially, for our passage through it is like our passage through this life. Missteps are likely to find some expression in our circumstances.

I know whereof I speak. For once I walked another labyrinth, with another girl, and though we arrived at its center without mishap she made a fetish of being unrestrained by convention and walked straight out, across the lines, without a backward glance. I felt it like a blow to my heart, and followed her with dread. And in fact that was our last good day together—everything went bad after that, and we both crossed lines that I, at least, came to regret.

These patterns we walk, and live within, and build and maintain and renew; we make them and then they shape us. So much of what we do is set in stone, long before our individual selves exist. So much of what we do is inevitable, but only in retrospect—in the moment of walking, the best we can do is note the lines as best we can and walk with care. And should we choose to flout a line, as sometimes we must, we should do so consciously and face the consequences with open eyes.

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It sometimes seems that reading movie reviews is my primary online activity—I read Roger Ebert religiously and, nearly always, the Salon and Slate reviews of whatever is current. Then I troll metacritic, and look up New Yorker and New York Times reviews—I know, it’s obsessive. And I see a lot of movies, too, but even selfish, irresponsible, self-employed people can’t see everything so I actually rely on reviews when making decisions about what to see.

So I wasn’t expecting much—a pleasant diversion, no more—when I went, by myself and suitably prepared, to see Astro Boy yesterday afternoon. Even the best reviews were the equivalent of Ebert’s three-of-four stars, and there were plenty of ‘metacritic 50s’. Put another way, no one was really panning Astro Boy, but lots of people were damning it with faint praise. Typically, reviewers were employing some variant of Ebert’s line, “The movie contains less of its interesting story and more action and battle scenes than I would have preferred.” As if they (or anyone) attend animated children’s movies in search of material for their next dissertation.

Look, this is a movie for stoners

Look, this is a movie for stoners, and for children past toddlerdom—I suppose there’s some overlap there. These two groups should definitely make the effort to see Astro Boy while it’s still on the big screen. The kids will enjoy rooting for a plucky, conflicted hero, stoners will find great satisfaction ferreting out ample cultural references and reworkings of mythological and philosophical tropes, and both group’s jaws will drop during the big, bright, beautifully choreographed action and (bloodless) battle sequences.

I won’t repeat the story of Astro’s origins here, or recount plot details—I leave that task for lesser reviewers. But for stoners, probably my core audience, here are a few things to look for:

• Hayao Miyazaki references: In his many beautiful movies Miyazaki has created a visual language for animators seeking to express flight and buoyancy. And Pixar, in films like The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, and of course Up, have extended that language to computer animation. Now I love Pixar films, and they’ve done right by Miyazaki, but they inevitably use his ‘language’ in a way that feels ‘American’, if you will. In Astro Boy, the language remains closer to its Japanese origin. When Astro discovers his ability to fly, when robots and cars bob about on errands, when a city in the sky lists and sinks or when Leonardo’s notebooks are transformed into the flying fancies they depict, similar motifs from Miyazaki are powerfully recalled, without coming across as plagiarism. Simply put, Miyazaki fans will want to see this interesting homage. And it’s not just the flight sequences that recall Miyazaki. Astute fans of the director’s work will note that Astro Boy’s robot aesthetics quote Castle in the Sky, as do the scenes of robot reanimation. In my not so humble opinion, the movie is worth seeing for this alone.

• Changeling myths reworked: The non-human thing that mimics humanity is an ancient idea that grows in relevance as we close in on genuine artificial intelligence. Versions include the Pygmalion myth, Pinocchio, and the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica. Astro Boy doesn’t add anything to this substantial corpus, but it rings many of the changes satisfactorily. Dr. Tenma’s rejection of Astro is particularly poignant. And I enjoyed seeing a substantial discussion of identity issues sugar-coated for kids, and hope that I’m not the only one who pursued the topic later, with friends, over beer.

• Interesting cultural quotes: I’m sure I missed the majority of references to other art, but I caught enough to be convinced that the filmmakers were playing an interesting game. For instance, when Astro is forced to play the gladiatorial “Robot Games” a similar scene from Spielberg’s A.I. is clearly being reshot, with a meaningfully different outcome. Metro City (and the ruined Earth it hovers over) owes a lot to the overhead world in Wall-E and, for my money, is an altogether more appealing place. See also Metropolis, Asimov’s robotic laws, Jewish golem stories, manga and anime, Spiderman, The Thing, etc., etc., etc. It is a very rich stew for a movie that remains perfectly acceptable children’s fare, and a lot of fun to puzzle over.

In short, if you like animation, brilliant action, cultural cleverness, and/or worthy reworkings of old ideas, Astro Boy should be on your short list of movies to see while still in wide release. Tell them I sent you.

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That our conscious minds bob about on vast unconscious capacity is both scientifically accepted and intuitively obvious. A widely cited—but probably apocryphal—figure holds that we use less than ten percent of our mental abilities for conscious thought; in fact, the relationship between conscious and unconscious mental capacities is too complex and variable to assess meaningfully with a tool so blunt as a ratio. But it is clear that we have a lot more going on ‘under the hood’ than we generally acknowledge. Consider, for example, an act as simple as a free throw. Factors like gravity, wind, distance, grip, and strength are assessed and synthesized instantly, and a 22-ounce ball is tossed 15 feet and landed in a 18-inch hoop, and some humans can perform this computation constantly and near perfectly. Obviously there is no conscious calculating going on—somehow, an ungoverned savant side of ourselves does all the work, with little useful assistance from ‘us.’

Similarly, some conductor continually orchestrates hormones, enzymes, cells, glands, organs, and the islets of Langerhans to keep most of us in mostly good health most of the time and again, our attempts to consciously assist this process are clumsy and often counterproductive. There is some vast computational agency working always on our behalf—residing, apparently, somewhere inside us—and it jealously excludes consciousness from its realm.

Conversely, the relationship between consciousness and the things outside our head seems relatively straightforward; we collect data with our senses in order to appraise the world around us. But a little thought shows that this relationship, too, is unequal. For example, we see a very small slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, hear very little of the range of vibratory frequencies, taste and smell relatively few chemicals and, generally, get by with a picture of the world based on a tiny percentage of the available data. Even in the range of data we are able to apprehend, we fail to consciously observe almost everything. The all-that-is presents several oceans-worth of data, and we sup with a teaspoon. It is as if, in Huxley’s phrase, consciousness works as a “reducing valve” that actively filters out information, so that the world we experience is a product of the data selected for consideration.

I contend that the reducing valve works both ways, that the relationship of consciousness to both outer and inner worlds is one of filtering and exclusion, and that the existence of a conscious mind probably depends on filtering and exclusion.

If this is the case, there is the interesting possibility that the fast and vastly powerful computing savant we house is constantly working with unknowably gigungous amounts of external data, and presumably knows far more about the world than we can consciously access. Reality, in this view, is a choice, not an inevitability. Our conscious and unconscious selection of the data we engage with creates the world we experience.

But let’s drop the faux-scholarship for a bit and consider, instead, a peculiar being that I, and at least some others, work with in order to ease our way through challenging traffic. I refer, of course, to the magickal entity Goflowolfog.

Goflowolfog: traffic management for (some of) the masses

Goflowolfog, according to that useful grimoire known as ‘the internet’, was created during a magickal workshop that took place in London, conducted by noted chaos magickian Phil Hine. He has a describable appearance, a sigil, preferred modes of action, etc. I have found no details concerning the exact method of his creation—magickal types tend to be secretive about such things—but I assume he was created and ‘charged’ in some suitably outré manner. Interestingly, and unusually, he was intentionally created for use by anyone who cares to call on him. His purpose can be derived from his name, which is a forced palindrome of ‘Go Flow’—Goflowolfog lives to keep the traffic flowing.

Goflowolfog is one of those irritating phenomena that produces little in the way of scientifically verifiable evidence forcing one to fall back, instead, on anecdote and direct experience. In my own case, I find that invoking Goflowolfog—just say his name in an invoking manner—yields fast results and that I am often efficiently extricated from seemingly stopped traffic. On the other hand, he isn’t very good at finding parking spaces (try Ganesh for this purpose). As a way of giving back, I like to donate pennies to those little change trays you sometimes see next to cash registers, and I make a point of using those pennies, if available. I reason that Goflowolfog is, presumably, pleased by improved flow of all kinds.

This is nutty of course, but as a gedankenexperiment let’s consider the possibility of an intangible, traffic-manipulating entity in the light of my hypothesis, that is, that our super-potent mental capacities are constantly assessing vast amounts of data beyond our ken. If it’s really true, then we might very well have extensive unconscious knowledge of traffic conditions outside our conscious sensory range. We might have unconscious knowledge—due, say, to the particular play of light on the underside of clouds—of an unobstructed side street. Further, we might also unconsciously possess at least the capacity to affect external matters profoundly; it’s possible, for example, that we can regulate the pace and direction of our driving in ways that subtly cue and control other drivers. It is possible, in other words, that the same subconscious abilities that instantaneously coordinate sports miracles and bodily functions can also be marshaled to direct ourselves and others in ways that reduce the traffic we encounter.

So how does Goflowolg figure into my wacky theory? I posit that ritual, visualization, spell work, affirmation, prayer, and the like are all methods for manipulating symbol, and that symbol is the ‘language’ of the unconscious! So Goflowolfog emerges as a symbolic system well-adapted for communicating my traffic desires to the super-potent unconscious. His dramatic origin, and my conscious investment in the spooky technology that produced him, facilitate conscious direction of abilities that are usually inaccessible to intentional direction.

Viewed this way, my invocation of Goflowolfog is very like the prayer of the faithful, the visualization of those devoted to The Secret, the spell work of Wiccans, and countless other systems, past and present, that promise some uncanny effect in the all-that-is.

Finally, there is a possible weird effect of Goflowolfog knowledge that may cast light on the birth and death of religions. Consider: when almost no one knows about Goflowolfog, it is probably harder to benefit from his powers. One person in a traffic jam, cuing and signaling, will have very little to work with when it comes to easing traffic. On the other hand, if everyone is busily invoking the entity, then their efforts will cancel each other out and nothing will change. Somewhere between the two extremes is a sweet spot, where the devotees of Goflowolfog unknowingly work with each other to ease their individual routes through traffic.

Might not religions have a similar arc? They are born weak, build power as they add followers and thereby generate miracles and then, as they become consensus reality, the dramatic powers they once commanded are vitiated.

So please, will just a few of you, not too many, begin to call on Goflowolfog? It will make my subjective experience of traffic so much nicer.

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I was given a shot of Valium before my scrotum was shaved. At the initial consultation, several days earlier, the doctor had asked me not to shave it myself and though I have since taken up the practice I was, at the time, able to resist the temptation easily.

the surgeon held up a piece of vas deferens

Intravenous Valium is a wonderful thing, and I imagine it being administered on one’s first day in Heaven, for which our world is merely the initial consultation. At any rate, I instantly felt better about everything, relaxed and expansive. And talkative. I asked about the ceiling fixtures, which seemed unusually tasteful for an outpatient surgical theater. A nurse came in to assist with the cutting and snipping and cauterizing and such, and I began to talk about the three-and-a-half foot angel shark I had captured with a spear the day before, while scuba diving.

I had mistaken him for a halibut. Angel sharks resemble halibut in that they are both flattened out bottom feeders with sandy top halves, but the differences between them are striking, particularly in the region of the teeth. The angel shark’s mouth is broad, a great gash in its flat wide head, filled with the usual seven layers of hooked teeth. And angels are uniquely formed; in fact, they look a little weird, like grey-camoed death machines with meaty pterodactyl wings. Stealth fighters of the sea. So normally I wouldn’t have confused the two, but this one had set up ambush, riffling into the sand and obscuring his presence. But I could see him. He was a large rough diamond outline, a big halibut I thought, seeing what I had been looking for all morning. I floated several feet above, gloating at the size of the fish I was about to spear. The moment was calm: just the shark, the sandy bottom, and me. A lull before battle.

The nurse followed my story with interest, commenting and asking questions while looking intently at my penis, and the incisions that had begun to appear in my scrotum. But the doctor seemed unimpressed, even bored. The Valium kept me from being truly annoyed and in retrospect I have reason to be glad of his disinterest. But at the time it rankled, a mild, far off irritation like, well… like the scrapings of a knife slicing into my testicles, muffled by sedatives and local anesthetic.

Hanging there in the hazy blue calm, I passed my hand through both of my spear’s rubber slings and looked intently at the shark’s blurred outline, deciding where I would pierce his body. We were both so ignorant. I was ignorant of the angel’s teeth, and that he was, you know, a shark, a shark known as a man-biter. And the shark was ignorant of my ignorance. He assumed I knew of his special immunity in these waters; being at the top of the Central Coast’s food chain meant that he was deferred to automatically, like a mafia don in Little Italy. Sticking a spear in an angel shark simply isn’t done.

But I thought he was a halibut. So I cocked the spear, holding it tightly in my fist and drifting down like an angel of angel shark death. The shark, for his part, seemed a little bored, like my damned surgeon. My spear struck home and I was instantly being bucked, shaken about like a puppet on a stick.

The surgeon held up a piece of vas deferens, interrupting me. It was about a half-inch long, and looked very like a section of string bean, badly overcooked. He seemed to expect a response, but I could think of nothing jocular to say and merely grunted approval. He returned to his slippery task and I returned to my story.

It occurred to me, much later, that having an angel shark at one end of a five-foot spear, and me at the other, was the marine equivalent of having a tiger by the tail. But at the time I reacted with an instinctive brio that I have never since attained, deciding instantly and without benefit of logic that the only thing worse than a shark on the end of one’s spear was a shark that had recently escaped from the end of one’s spear, and it struck me as imperative that this particular shark not wriggle free. I pumped hard with my fins, trying to keep him pinned against the ocean floor. The contest had the flavor of a bull ride, and could last no longer; one way or another, my relationship with this shark was about to change.

I remembered that snake charmers sometimes kiss their colleagues on the back of their hooded heads, safely, because cobras are not able to strike backwards. I concluded that angel sharks must have a similar deficiency—such is the way my mind works under stress. So I threw my free arm around the angel and hugged him to me, forcing the spear entirely through his body. I grabbed the other end, holding him like a skewered roast. Now I had him. He could buck and snap like a bronco, but so long as I held tight with both hands he was mine.

I surfaced, inflated my buoyancy control vest, and let it support the shark and me while we rested. I looked toward shore and almost sobbed. It was a half mile away, a long kick against tide.

The nurse was a runner, and the introduction of an aerobic challenge revived her interest, which had flagged somewhat. She peppered me with questions in a voice as high-pitched and irritating as a smoke alarm. I was okay with her voice. My blood was full of Valium.

Did he try to bite you? she asked. Yes indeedy, I replied. The angel shark’s mouth is adapted for ambushing passing fish, and in addition to the impressive teeth his jaws are able to extend beyond his mouth, a startling discovery to make when one is hugging him close. But this was a relatively small shark, I said modestly. Had he aspired to bite my arm off, he would have required two or more bites to do so.

And did he bite you? she asked. No ma’am, I said heartily. He made not so much as two small incisions in my tender flesh.

A silence fell. I did not tell of the long swim back to shore, the fatigue I felt as adrenaline drained out of me, the clingy kelp, the intermittent activity of the dying shark… though significant to me, the tale lacks drama. The doctor snipped and tugged and cauterized. I sniffed occasionally, but could smell no searing meat. I felt almost nothing. It could have been happening to someone else.

I thought about my clumsy butchery of the shark. Lots of incisions, long and ragged. And inside, along with peculiar organs, a packet of eggs. They were round and yellow, exactly like the yolks of chicken eggs. So this shark had been a female, a momma; a fact I suppress.

The doctor was putting in sutures now, tugging firmly, explaining that they were synthetic catgut and would eventually dissolve. We talked about the days when catgut was really catgut, and what a heckuva job someone once had, producing that stuff commercially.

Three days before a vasectomy, by California state law, a man—and, if he is married, his wife—must view a video. The video explains, repeatedly and emphatically, that “sterilization” is “potentially irreversible”. And I thought, ‘I need a video to tell me that something is potentially irreversible?’ Because after all… what isn’t?

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Whitewater at the Top of the World: Craig Childs presents the story of the first ever passage of Tibet’s Salween River

Craig Childs is an extreme traveler, NPR commentator, winner of the Galen Rowell Art of Adventure Award, and author of House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest and The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild. In September 2007, Childs joined a 16-person expedition for the first ever descent of the upper Salween River in Tibet. At the time, the Salween was one of the world’s longest, highest, and most remote unexplored rivers, and it promised world class whitewater. After many months of preparation and travel, the expedition arrived in Tibet during record rainfalls, and the Salween was dangerously flooded. Since the river is remote and winds through unknown canyons, embarking was an irrevocable decision to face unknown perils. Childs, a famously compelling speaker, tells the thrilling tale of the Salween expedition with breathtaking images and exclusive video footage.

Fans of Into Thin Air, Touching the Void, and other tales of first-person adventure will want to meet the man of whom the New York Times says, “Childs’s feats of asceticism are nothing if not awe inspiring: he’s a modern-day desert father.”

Thursday, October 15th, 7:00 p.m. at KoKo Cocktails, 1060 Geary Street (at Van Ness), San Francisco

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So I was shopping at Wal-Mart the other day, with that sinking feeling I get whenever I betray humanity, when the words of writer, farmer and secular saint Wendell Berry came to mind. One of his themes is the human cost of loss of community and one compelling example he cites is insurance. Berry points out that citizens in an average small town—say, for example, my beloved Paonia—annually pay out far more in health, home and car insurance than it would actually cost to care for our own sick, repair our own cars, rebuild our own homes and pass the hat as needed. In other words, a community made up of people willing to help each other would wind up expending far less time, energy and money than is now required to pay for our various insurances. In other other words, because we don’t work together we all pay the middleman, and the middleman grows fat on our dollars.

But who is the middleman? Typically it’s a corporation preying on many communities, collecting dollars and grudgingly dispensing a bare minimum of mediocre service in return.

we all pay the middleman, and the middleman grows fat on our dollars

I don’t have a solution for this, but it’s worth pointing out that in this area and in many others, corporations and communities are necessarily opposed; corporations thrive when communities are made up of scared, paranoid, alienated individuals, and communities thrive when they are composed of trusting, generous, openhearted humans. So corporations are, by their nature, always and inevitably engaged in a sort of clandestine propaganda war against community. Using the TV stations, radio and other media they own outright, and also using the governments they control indirectly, corporations present the world as dangerous, and portray our fellow humans as greedy, deceitful and violent. In fact, the opposite is far more true: this planet we live on is astonishingly abundant, and humans are generally, in my experience anyway, generous, brave and kind. It’s corporations that can be described as dangerous, deceitful, greedy and violent – not always, of course, but that’s certainly the way to bet. As Wendell Berry says, “Rats and roaches [and I would add corporations to this list] live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”

Berry has also said that “To be sane in a mad time is bad for the body and worse for the soul.” and the word on the street is that we do live in mad times. But we are not doomed to live in a world governed by corporate fascists. Solutions are close at hand everywhere, in your own neighborhood and hometown. Support your neighbors, your community radio, your local art center, the library and all the other blessings to be found in a healthy community. Be generous and trusting. Not only will you instantly improve your own life and the life of your region, you’ll also be starving the corporations into submission and irritating the Walton family.

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Remember, Be Here Now, by Ram Dass

Even on the increasingly rare occasions that Timothy Leary’s LSD-popularizing antics are really discussed, the man known then as Richard Alpert appears as little more than a sidekick—Robin, to Leary’s Dark Knight—and his book, Be Here Now, a mere punch line to a forgotten 60s joke. But in the decades since, with Leary’s needle stuck at ‘groovy’ right up until his relatively early death, Alpert’s fully disclosed spiritual struggles, his open record of extreme growth and change, and of course his transformation into America’s own guru, Ram Dass, have left him, perhaps, the greater figure. By any reckoning, he is a scarred and worthy chronicler of a numinous time, and an interesting living experiment that still unfolds.

I had the good fortune to be handed Be Here Now in the midst of one of my very first acid trips, when I was still convinced that there was meaning beneath all the fireworks. I puzzled over it quite happily for hours, imprinted on it, and it has affected my subsequent spiritual life as surely as childhood religious instruction; and like childhood religious instruction, the influence has not always been positive and shaped me by my resistance at least as much as by my acquiescence. For example I, for far too many years, accorded Hindu-flavored spirituality far more respect than I now feel it deserves.

It is a concise classic of drug writing, a genre that deserves more respect than it gets

Be Here Now is actually three books in one. The introduction is Alpert’s tale of the years with Leary, his travels in India, and the encounters with the fabulous guru, Neem Karoli Baba, that remade Alpert as Ram Dass. It is a concise classic of drug writing, a genre that deserves more respect than it gets. The middle, longest, section is a hand lettered and illuminated attempt to convey, experientially, certain verities of the psychedelic experience. It is strange, strangely powerful, and I am not able to capture it in a net of mere words—take strong hallucinogens (or, if you prefer, entheogens) and read it for yourself. And finally, the book concludes with an adequate primer of the aforementioned Hindu-flavored spirituality—meditation, yoga, veganism, etc.—the efficacy of which is demonstrated by the easy competence with which India governs herself and cares for her people. Am I too cynical? Very well, paw through this section yourself and carry away the bits you find shiny… that’s certainly what I did, and I can’t say I regret it.

Separately, none of these parts is indispensable, but like the disparate, ridiculous books of the Bible (have you ever read the Book of Jonah?) when gathered together (along with an excellent bibliography) they amount to scripture. And, like scripture, they can remake your world to the extent you let them.

Alpert/Dass is, it must be said, a substantial spiritual fuck up, but I will always love him for this book, and for the way he once compared the way he figuratively fell on his face over and over to a man making his way to a holy city by means of continual prostrations—it was too apt a description of my own life to ever forget.

Promethea, by Alan Moore

Alan Moore is a literary titan whose medium happens to be comic books: deal with it. The fact is, Moore is positively Joycean in the way he packs layers of meaning into words and, unlike Joyce—or Pynchon, or Wallace—he has the whole playground of image to play with as well.

The substantial success Moore attained with his scripts for Watchmen, From Hell, V for Vendetta, and other titles—and the substantial disappointments he suffered as those graphic masterpieces were translated to the screen—both allowed him and drove him to focus on more insular, idiosyncratic work… one can almost hear him muttering, ‘make a movie of this you effing bastards,’ as he completed his pornographic masterwork Lost Girls, or the swirl of Cabala, sex magick, metaphysics, and superhero mythology comprising the work I extol here, Promethea.

Available in five volumes that collect the original comics, the spine of Promethea is conventional for the costumed vigilante genre: a young lady, Sophia Bangs (pay attention to those names, reader) finds herself blessed/cursed with the ability to transform herself into the curvaceous superheroine Promethea, who is able to fly, shoot beams of force from her caduceus, and so forth. In coming to terms with her new powers, she meets and beats assorted villains, and ushers in the end of the world.

Wait; what was that last part? End of the world? It’s hardly a spoiler to tell you so—from early on in Book One it’s clear that Promethea’s world faces the end of history.

But not by nuclear annihilation, as in Watchmen, but by Armageddon, Kali Yuga, Ragnarök, or some other name drawn from the end time theologies so often found in human spiritual systems. In her quest to understand her role as Destroyer, Sophie/Promethea thoroughly explores the Western esoteric tradition.

In his personal life, Moore is an accomplished ceremonial magickian and here, like Philip Pullman in His Dark Materials, he uses an exciting, bawdy, page-turning tale to sugarcoat serious philosophical instruction. The attentive reader will come away from Promethea with a useful grounding in tarot, cabala and the tree of life, Crowleyan ritual, and will even get an intriguing and accurate glimpse of Goetic demonology.

More importantly, by reading this book and letting it’s glorious graphics seduce you, you will imbibe a certain mindset and realize at gut level that what we are pleased to call reality is merely an insubstantial scrim imperfectly concealing the actual nature of existence. And as Sophie—and her entire world—are forced to acknowledge, confronting an unveiled all-that-is is both terrifying… and thrilling.

Travels, by Michael Crichton

I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but the fact is, I like Michael Crichton’s novels and have read most of them. And of course, I’m not alone in that—Crichton’s books have sold 150 million copies worldwide. But relatively few have read Travels, which makes sense because it’s pretty much the opposite of a ‘Crichton book’. It’s short not long, it’s a memoir not thriller fiction, and it’s written in a graceful, unaffected voice, not the thudding, heart-pounding! thriller prose that Crichton mastered long before writers like Dan Brown or David Baldacci began to hammer readers over the head with it. I think he missed his audience with this one; Travels is not for the average thriller reader.

As you might guess from the title, Crichton is here writing a travel memoir but, crucially, he includes inner journeys as well. Beginning with his experiences as a 6’9” medical student who put himself through medical school writing potboilers—and the The Andromeda Strain—and continuing with multiple world trips, and his experiences meditating, directing movies, learning to see auras, tripping intensely, bending spoons, diving with sharks, etc. etc. His clear exposition of the events experienced and of his own mental state while they unfolded is what makes Travels remarkable. Also, his motivation for writing Travels is unimpeachable; he certainly didn’t need the money, and must have known that this book wouldn’t make him much anyway. Nor would it exactly burnish his reputation… the questing, skeptical-but-believing Michael Crichton on display in Travels is not the Michael Crichton he would want Hollywood agents to negotiate with.

So ultimately, Travels is immensely credible. Crichton tells me that he learned to bend spoons one evening, and I believe him. He tells me that a weekend workshop gave him the gift of seeing auras, and I start looking for such a workshop to attend myself…

And thus is reality undermined.

His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman

Just to get it out of the way, yes, these are Young Adult novels. And they’re based on Milton’s Paradise Lost… or so I’m told. But so what?—we must take wisdom where we find it, and in the three books of His Dark Materials—The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass—Pullman is not only wise, but brave, taking on, as he does, conventional religious thinking in general and the Catholic Church in particular. Most reviews of His Dark Materials focus on daemons, the animal-guised, familiar-like soul analogues that Pullman brilliantly fishes up from exceedingly deep archetypal waters and, yes, daemons are cool but for my money even more attention should be paid to his frankly anti-church agenda; read at the cusp of adolescence, these books will effectively immunize against excessive religiosity. I read them when I was struggling with my own religious addictions—I’m a recovering fundamentalist—and they were the kick in the ass I needed to actually change.

None of this would matter if Pullman was preachy or didactic, but fortunately—and unlike myself—he is neither. Instead, he couches his serious life lessons in a compulsively readable coming-of-age tale, set against a backdrop of witches, armored bears, dirigibles, and passages between worlds. As you are pulled from page to page, you will also be reordering your views on spiritual expression… so read with care.

My Life With the Spirits, by Lon Milo Duquette

Though I have cast spells, performed sex magick rituals, and worshipped my patron goddess Ostara under a full moon at Summer Solstice, the fact is I am a dilettante, not a practicing magickian. But even an armchair magickian must read astonishing quantities of written material, for surely it is the wordiest of hobbies, with tome after tome devoted to the arcana of divination, cabala, Crowleyan ritual, chaos magick, Enochian scrying, and so forth and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. And in all this vast, mostly fascinating, swamp of literature there is one writer, Lon Milo Duquette, who stands apart because he sees himself with without illusion, and because he writes with exceptional clarity, self-deprecation, and humor.

His Chicken Qabalah is a useful and lucid explication of how and why a non-Jew might explore Cabala for spiritual purposes, Angels, Demons & Gods of the New Millennium is a perfectly acceptable primer for those interested in Western ceremonial magick, and should you decide to flirt with high strangeness and engage the Beast directly, you can have no better Virgil than Duquette in his books, Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, The Magick of Aleister Crowley: A Handbook of the Rituals of Thelema, and Aleister Crowley’s Illustrated Goetia: Sexual Evocation.

But before you read any of these (and even if you have no intention to read these, or any, books on magick) read My Life With The Spirits: The Adventures of a Modern Magician. Like three other books on this list, it is a memoir of alternative spirituality. Conventionally autobiographical, My Life With The Spirits follows Duquette from early childhood through delightfully rock-and-roll-and-magick infused hippie years, and into an adulthood as a sober and respected bishop of the Ordo Templi Orientis. Like all my favorite people, Duquette has a zest for direct experience and he exuberantly dives into yoga, communal life, magickal ritual, and whatever else captures his interest. And he writes up his experiences with the brio and humility that I associate with truth telling. His tales of Goetic evocation, for example, are masterpieces of immersion journalism: accurate, frightening, and funny.

Duquette’s writings undermine my grasp on conventional reality because they have the ring of truth. Based on my own (relatively trivial) magickal experimentation and his clear reporting, I am forced to accept that demons (and angels) are real and can act on our plane, that Enochian calls effectively summon visions of another world, and that a dead kitten can, under the influence of the right prana master, be restored to life.

Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of Duquette’s oeuvre is his attitude of, if you will, ‘dogmatic agnosticism’. He doesn’t insist that you believe him, doesn’t attempt to convert, and freely concedes that everything unusual that he experiences may well be ‘all in his head’. “But,” he continues (a little dogmatically), “you have no idea how big your head is!”

Living With Joy, by Sanaya Roman

I didn’t set out to become a fan of channeled material, and I can’t tell you how I came across Living with Joy: Keys to Personal Power and Spiritual Transformation, but in the six or so years that have passed since I abandoned fundamentalist Christianity no genre of literature has affected me more profoundly. Seth, I confess, is too intellectual for me, but Abraham and sometimes Kryon move me profoundly. And though he has a relatively small following—bad PR?—the entity who styles himself Oren, channeled by Sanaya Roman, has gradually and completely upended my world view, and Living with Joy is my bedside scripture.

There may be more to this world view than I am able to express, or I may be distorting it—I’ve been forced to admit in recent years that I am able to grasp only a small fraction of the data presented to me—but here is some of what I have gleaned:

• The all-that-is actively engages with individuals, reshaping itself to conform to an individual’s basic beliefs and expectations about reality. The all-that-is is like a nervous new lover, eager to conform to the beloved’s illusions.

• Our basic beliefs and expectations about reality are entirely within our control. Which is to say, the suite of beliefs we use to order and understand the all-that-is are choices, not understandings or deductions or inevitabilities. Likewise, we are free to expect whatever we like. Note: this is not to say that we control the all-that-is. It is more as if the all-that-is is an agreeable maestro, presenting itself in a way that is consonant with the observer’s disposition. But even so, certain verities persist, which is why day-to-day reality does not shift instantly to accommodate our fancies, as in a lucid dream.

• This being the case, it makes sense to deliberately choose our beliefs and shape our expectations so that we gradually create the most enjoyable life possible. We can also, incidentally, change our pasts by deliberately reinterpreting our memories.

• There are myriad techniques that accomplish this restructuring: prayer, spells, visualizations, drugs, ritual, are just a few effective examples. Different entities tend to focus on different techniques.

• You can start now.

By dipping into Living with Joy regularly, my thinking has gradually taken on this world view. I now pay attention to the tenor of my thoughts, state my goals in positive language, assume responsibility for my circumstances, etc., etc. And consequently, reality is now different for me. Delightful synchronicities abound, I live in freedom, experience joy, and no longer feel that I am a victim in a hostile environment. My fundamental belief about the way the world works is that the all-that-is is a wish granting machine, and that it dances with me every day.

Cosmic Trigger, Robert Anton Wilson

I didn’t realize until compiling this list that I have read a lot of spiritual memoirs, and have been largely remade in their image. None have affected me more profoundly than Robert Anton Wilson’s (PBUH) Cosmic Trigger I : Final Secret of the Illuminati, the essential first volume of his three volume autobiography.

For me it has always been books, not teachers, that appeared when I was ready, and Cosmic Trigger showed up when I first decided in my heart—where it mattered—that I could no longer abide the fundamentalist Christian cult I had faithfully espoused for the first 17 years of my adult life. I knew others who had left what I was then pleased to call, “The Truth.” Some were always sad or bitter, some fairly groveled in their efforts to reinstate themselves, some gave themselves over to unattractive dissipation, and at least one—a smart fellow, like me—was dead of suicide. I didn’t know of any, at the time, who had made a success of their heresy and infidelity, none who had attained the happy, creative heathenism that I so craved.

Cosmic Trigger broke me open like a thunderbolt, like the divine bolt of lightning that is seen in the tarot’s Tower card, redefining an individual existence. It was Wilson’s contention that we all live in “reality tunnels,” self-manufactured existences made up of our beliefs, hopes, and fears about the way things ‘really’ are. Had he said only this, it would have been enough, for just the phrase and his explication gave me a way to understand and work with the morbid eschatology I had lived within for so long.

But Wilson went further, describing his experiments with “rapid brain change.” In his efforts to overcome a “normal” Catholic upbringing (and parenthetically, I have always found it fascinating that so many interesting writers have Catholic school in their past—might the need to assert themselves early against an ancient propaganda set them on the road to literature?) Wilson deliberately made use of the brutal shocks to consciousness available via psychedelic drugs, taboo violation, ceremonial (especially Crowleyan) magick, the books of James Joyce, Sufi exercises, and the like. And by writing constantly and surrounding himself with a good wife and good friends, he managed to integrate the inrush of change that resulted and ended up—at least by his own estimation—a happier and saner man.

I copied him. I ingested LSD and psilocybin and salvia divinorum and lots of pot, I donned ceremonial garb and performed pagan rites, and I attended Sufi dances. And I found my own way, as well; since the cult to which I had formerly been faithful especially reviled tobacco and tarot, I bought myself some fine cigars and learned to smoke them while laying out a Celtic cross, and since I had so repetitiously heard that the Boss of all-that-is hates extramarital sex I made sure to have some ASAP. And I’ve done other things, too, meditations and visualizations, group sex and odd sex, sought out strange places and strange companions, and through it all I wrote constantly and surrounded myself with good friends… the wives came and went. And of course I had the guidance of Wilson himself, via his many books, and I have to say that at the end of it all I am—by my own estimation—a happier and saner man.

Cosmic Trigger is, of course, more than an extreme self help program. Wilson’s thoughts on personas, for example, are revelatory and his insights into the writer’s life remain a guide for me. Most of all, he tells his tales of an interesting life and philosophy in the whiskey-warmed, unpretentious voice of an ideal barstool companion.

Buy it, read it, live it. You have nothing to lose but all your illusions.

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My thoughts profound
divine do sound
when in my skull
I do expound.

But when I venture to uncover
my thoughts to others, I discover
that instead of these thoughts,
I should have others.

So back into my skull I go
to upset my mental status quo
& reassemble chunks of knowledge
for a better grasp of what I know.

& then bring forth my thoughts again;
this ebb and flow should never end.

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when it comes to world cataclysm I say, ‘put up or shut up’

I am not a particularly old man, but even so I’ve already lived through more than one doomsday scenario. I can remember, for example, ducking under my kindergarten desk in drills intended to preserve me during nuclear attack and I witnessed the rise of sunscreen thanks to the thinning of the ozone layer and water has always been scarce and various toxic wastes and carcinogens have poisoned my environment and somehow I avoided ebola and tuberculosis and cholera and let’s not forget the 17 years I spent as a fundamentalist Christian, absolutely convinced that a wrathful God was poised to unleash Armageddon and reader, I promise you, I worried about all these things intensely and discussed them earnestly in coffee shops and classrooms and read the books and watched the PBS specials and frankly, I’m done: when it comes to world cataclysm I say, ‘put up or shut up’. So near as I can tell, the world has always been going to hell in a hand basket, and yet it never gets there, quite.

And we are not the first generation to cope with such a proliferation of threats, either. 14th century Europe quailed under the onslaught of what they took to be worldwide plague, the world’s various holy books betray an unhealthy fascination with divine mass murder and various native peoples in all times and places have interpreted omens in the most dire possible manner. It’s almost as if humans have a genetic propensity to believe the worst possible future scenario and this even makes evolutionary sense; after all, paranoia is a useful survival skill.

The fashionable world ending scenario nowadays is of course global warming, unless you prefer agricultural collapse due to honeybee decline or biological collapse due to extinction of keystone species. And yet, here I am: though the planet appears to be in its death throes, again, I continue to exist in reasonable comfort, as do most of my acquaintances, and I have every expectation of living out a typical human life span. As a sage of my acquaintance sometimes asks, “Why is the view out my front window less meaningful than the view on TV?”

I’m not suggesting that everything is rosy, that humans around the world aren’t dealing with serious difficulties, and I’m certainly not suggesting that your particular crusade, whatever it is, isn’t right and holy and urgent or that I won’t contribute to your fundraiser, whatever it happens to be this week. But I am suggesting that humans in general, and you and me in particular, are predisposed to fear apocalypse, to assume that our world is about to collapse. And when selecting our paranoid obsessions, it may be a good idea to keep this in mind.

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One of the problems with not being a conspiracy theorist is that one has no easy explanations when faced with some of the more glaring oddities of the world around us. It is, for example, passing strange that the dollar bill features an all-seeing eye and pyramid and the fact that it can be explained does not mean that it has been explained, if you follow my drift. Similarly, the non-conspiracy theorist is forced into some fancy mental gymnastics when considering glaringly obvious phenomena, such as the presence of two Skull-and-Bonesmen in the 2004 presidential election (the Bonesmen won either way), the screwy layout of Washington D.C., and the pentagonal shape of the world’s most powerful military headquarters. Mundane explanations exist for all of these, but since they are bizarre facts to begin with, the mind is more comfortable with bizarre explanations involving the Illuminati, aliens, or the occult.

since they are bizarre facts to begin with, the mind is more comfortable with bizarre explanations

My own personal example of this began one morning when I was considering the Public Lands Survey System (PLSS) township layout, the 6×6 boustrephedonic square made up of 36 square mile ‘sections’. ‘Boustrephedonic’, incidentally, is the word for the right-to-left, left-to-right layout of the square – it’s from the Greek, and means ‘as an ox plows’ and in this case describes the descending, switchbacking layout of the square – see the illustration. I’ve always wondered about the township layout; why, for instance, is it boustrephedonic, and why is it 6×6, and not some other number? Idly, I added up the columns and rows, to see if there were any ‘magic square’ properties in the design. The columns all add up to 111 – try it yourself. A little experimentation showed that this is a feature of boustrephedonic squares with even, but not odd, numbered sides, so this is not mysterious. The rows, on the other hand, seemed to yield no pattern of interest… until I took one more step. I ‘reduced’ the numbers numerologically to yield a single digit number. That is, I added together the digits of the multi-digit numbers, and if the result was multi-digit I added again until a one digit number resulted. As seen below, the numerological sum of all the rows is three, and it takes no special flash of insight to see that the numerological sum of 111, the column sum, is also three. Curious.

I should say, here, that I am not much of a numerologist. I don’t work out year numbers, or look for numerological significance in the dates of my life. Still, I did read a book about it once, and took away numerological reduction as a sort of ‘mental fidgeting’. And number mysticism has a history in the West that goes all the way back to Pythagoras and his followers. Many great minds have succumbed, and the results are not always pretty. Isaac Newton, for example, spent at least as much time on numerical Biblical exegesis as he did on scientific work and his writings on those topics strike modern readers as deranged. Many movies, such as Pi and A Beautiful Mind, explore the tendency of the mind to project numerological meaning onto complex phenomena.

Be that as it may and ignoring, for the moment, the possibility that I was succumbing to number mysticism, the undeniable fact remained that the Government Land Office (GLO) township is a numerological magic square. I worked out boustrephedonic squares from 2×2 to 9×9, and only the 6×6 square has this property.

So; now what? Well, not having all that many facts at hand, I immediately began to theorize. Eventually, I came up with rather an elaborate scenario involving Thomas Jefferson, the Illuminati, and aerial photography – it was good for at least 20 minutes of happy hour conversation. But, upon investigation, the hypothesis broke down. Jefferson, for example, preferred a 10×10 square and there is no evidence of Illuminati involvement… but then, there wouldn’t be, would there? So I began to tire of the whole thing; not that I disbelieved my nutty theory, necessarily, but I began to bore even myself.

Kaballah?

It turns out that conventional magic squares are important in Kaballah, and are associated with the planets and astrological magic. The 6×6 square is associated with the sun, and is therefore the most powerful of these. One text of Western Occultism (for which Kaballah is a major source), dating from the 1400s, says of it, “The figure of the Sun is appropriated for kings and princes of this world, and it is square and has a grid of six, and it is the figure of total power.”

early Americans were determined to stamp the ‘figure of the Sun’ across the entire Continent – and nearly succeeded

Now, I only sort of believe in astrological magic, or rather, I’m learning to suspend judgement about the exotic belief systems of others, but it is a fact that humans have apparently always used the progressions of the night sky for mystical purposes, and after 1,000’s of years, astrology very much remains part of our world – something about it is irresistibly seductive to some human minds. And interestingly, amazing feats of engineering have a long association with astronomy and astrology. The Pyramids, of course, and Stonehenge, are just two of the many examples of major ancient accomplishments which are now believed to have been largely motivated by astrological concerns. But considered as a whole, the township system is this planet’s most significant man made feature – it would swallow thousands of Great Walls. It is easily visible from space. Which leads to the rather strange thought that future archaeologists, investigating the wonder that was America, will uncover the whole system of townships and naturally conclude that early Americans were determined to stamp the ‘figure of the Sun’ across the entire Continent – and nearly succeeded.

An Apocalyptic Sum

Here is the key; and anyone who has intelligence may work out the number of the beast. The number represents a man’s name, and the numerical value of its letters is six hundred and sixty-six. –Revelation 13:18, New English Bible

Now What?

Now what is the poor non-conspiracy theorist to do, faced with such a rich source of peculiarity? Probably the best thing to do is to ignore such rabbit holes, but instead I began to wonder about possible motivations. That is, if there were some shadowy group behind all this, what might their motives have been?

Because the GLO square has definitely had a major effect on the United States, quite aside from its impact on surveying. Fly over the United States, or look at aerial photos. You will see a grid, a chessboard; square fields or developed blocks bounded by straight roads. No other sector of the Earth is laid out like this. Fly over any part of Europe, or Asia, or South America, or… anywhere but here, really. You will see roads and fields that follow contours, that give way to hills and mountains, that nestle up to forest edges and creeks. You will see a human landscape that is shaped by the natural world; but in the United States, most of us live in a landscape that is—thanks to ownership lines imposed arbitrarily—imposed upon the natural world, laid over it like graph paper on a map. The township system is part of the structural underpinning of U.S. culture, part of every American’s mental furniture. It may not be, quite, the air we breathe but it is certainly the ground we walk on. It shapes our visible world and it shapes us.

Is it too crazy, too speculative, to say that Americans are a different people as a result of our different environment, that our national culture is partially a product of our national landscape? As a nation, we do tend to ride roughshod, at times, over the natural world. Could our straight roads and square fields be shaping us as much as we shape them?

Now here I speculate wildly, but bear with me. One word for the tendency to impose order on nature is ‘Apollonian’. The sun god, Apollo, has long been associated with classical order, control, discipline and masculinity – as opposed to the Moon Goddess, traditionally associated with wildness, paganism, and femininity. As a nation, the United States is considerably more ‘solar’ than ‘lunar’.

But since the 6×6 square is a solar device, a fascinating (and, yes, nutty and conspiratorial) possibility comes to mind. There is the interesting, unlikely, crazy possibility that some person or group manipulated the choice of GLO township layout in an attempt to cast a Kabbalistic spell over an entire nation… and there is the possibility that it worked.

Of everything I’ve written, the above piece has generated by far the most response. I’m glad. It’s one of those stories that took a couple of years to write, as different puzzle parts fell into place. There were a couple of things I didn’t try to include in the published article (which first appeared in a magazine for land surveyors) or on my radio show. For one, it was really odd how information came to me about this. For example, the occult book mentioned (it is alarmingly titled, Conjuring Spirits) practically jumped out at me from a bookstore shelf and opened in my hands to the Kaballah square that began to tie everything together. Another, weirder, happenstance had to do with my study of a classic ‘master’ conspiracy theory known as the Sirius Mystery, and centering on a book of that title by Robert Temple, and also on an underground bestseller by über conspiracy theorist Robert Anton Wilson titled Cosmic Trigger. The basic idea of the Sirius Mystery is that beings from the Sirius star system visited several ancient civilizations to jumpstart human technology, while also providing the magickal basis for every conspiracy since, from the Knights Templar to the Priory of Sion (don’t ask). Naturally, they are in psychic contact with some humans, and intend to return fairly soon…

Anyway, Wilson’s book mentioned that he and two other writers, Doris Lessing and Phillip K. Dick, all wrote books about aliens from Sirius at more or less the same time, and without having any contact each other. I’d read Dick’s book, and decided to read Lessing’s, Shikasta. It’s a good read, but most notable for me was one of the book’s concluding passages, which described the gridded look of the sectionalized United States and attributed it to the evil ‘Shikasta’ influence! It was an odd moment; two separate conspiracy type thingies that I had been studying and thinking and talking about obsessively for more than a year suddenly and unexpectedly came together with a bang. For a couple of days, the world was a different place for me.

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