Manufacturing the Deadhead and the New Dark Age

Zen Gardner

Postflaviana In 2012 Jan Irvin made an important discovery.  In the course of re-publishing The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross by the Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John Allegro,[1] Irvin had been researching the letters of one of Allegro’s most prominent critics, Gordon Wasson, at various university archives (including Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, and the Hoover Institute at Stanford) when he came across primary documents – letters actually written by Wasson – showing that he had worked with the CIA.[2]  

Though Gordon Wasson was both chairman for the Council on Foreign Relations and the Vice President of Public Relations for J.P. Morgan Bank, he is most famous as the individual who “discovered”, or more accurately popularized, magic mushrooms. An article in Life magazine described fantastic visions and experiences Wasson claimed to have had while under their influence (see Life, May 13, 1957 – Seeking the Magic Mushroom). Wasson’s claims were the first description of the effects of psilocybin (“magic”) mushrooms presented to the general public.

Irvin saw troubling implications in his discovery. He was aware, of course, of the CIA’s infamous Project MK-ULTRA, in which the organization had given LSD to unsuspecting U.S. citizens. He also knew of the many conspiracy theories claiming that the government has been somehow involved with the creation of the ‘drug culture’. He was also aware of Dave McGowan’s research on the drug and music movement that had come out of Laurel Canyon in the 1960‘s, which showed that many of the ‘rock idols’ who created it were the children of members of military intelligence.[3]

So the fact that a member of the CIA had also been involved with the discovery of Psilocybemushrooms fit into a large collection of troubling linkages between the American government and the drug culture that emerged during the 1960’s. Irvin decided to do further research into the government’s involvement with the ‘psychedelic movement’.  An obvious question he hoped to answer was: Had Wasson been somehow involved with MK-ULTRA?

During this research, Irvin came in contact with another scholar, Joe Atwill, author of Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus. Atwill’s research into the origins of Christianity had led him to conclude that Rome had invented the religion. Further, he believed that the Caesars had deliberately brought about the Dark Ages. They had used Christianity as a mind control device to give slavery a religious context intended to make it difficult for serfs to rebel.  Like Irvin, Atwill had become suspicious of the U.S. government’s many connections to the psychedelic movement, which reminded him of the Caesars’ intellectual debasing of their population to help bring on the Dark Ages.

When comparing the results of their research, Irvin and Atwill developed a theory about the origin of the psychedelic movement of the 1960’s: The ‘counterculture’ had been developed by elements within the U.S. government and banking establishment as part of a larger plan to bring about a new Dark Age; or, as it was marketed to potential victims, an “archaic revival.”[4]

In 1992 Terence McKenna published in his book The Archaic Revival:

These things are all part of the New Age, but I have abandoned that term in favor of what I call the Archaic Revival—which places it all in a better historical perspective. When a culture loses its bearing, the traditional response is to go back in history to find the previous “anchoring model.” An example of this would be the breakup the medieval world at the time of the Renaissance. They had lost their compass, so they went back to Greek and Roman models and created classicism—Roman law, Greek aesthetics, and so on.[5] [emphasis added]

~ Terence McKenna

In another chapter regarding his timewave theory, he states:

Within the timewave a variety of “resonance points” are recognized. Resonance points can be thought of as areas of the wave that are graphically the same as the wave at some other point within the wave, yet differ from it through having different quantified values. For example, if we chose an end date or zero date of December 21, 2012 A.D., then we find that the time we are living through is in resonance with the late Roman times and the beginning of the Dark Ages in Europe.

Implicit in this theory of time is the notion that duration is like a tone in that one must assign a moment at which the damped oscillation is finally quenched and ceases. I chose the date December 21, 2012 A.D., as this point because with that assumption the wave seemed to be in the “best fit” configuration with regard to the recorded facts of the ebb and flow of historical advance into connectedness. Later I learned to my amazement that this same date, December 21, 2012, was the date assigned as the end of their calendrical cycle by the classic Maya, surely one of the world’s most time-obsessed cultures. [6] ~ Terence McKenna

Notice that the date McKenna chose – 12-21-2012 – was earlier falsely claimed to be the date of the Apocalypse foreseen in the Mayan calendar by professor and CIA agent Michael Coe in his 1966 book The Maya[7], although it was changed by McKenna in 1993 from Coe’s 2011 date to December 21, 2012.[8] Moreover, McKenna sees this date as resonating with the beginning of the Dark Ages. If, as the authors believe, the psychedelic movement was part of a general plan to usher in a new Dark Age, this suggests that McKenna’s promotion of a drug-fueled “Archaic Revival” was also a part of the plan.

 I guess am a soft Dark Ager. I think there will be a mild dark age. I don’t think it will be anything like the dark ages that lasted a thousand years […][9]

~ Terence McKenna

Most today assume that the CIA and the other intelligence-gathering organizations of the U.S. government are controlled by the democratic process. They therefore believe that MK-ULTRA’s role in creating the psychedelic movement was accidental “blowback”. Very few have even considered the possibility that the entire “counterculture” was social engineering planned to debase America’s culture – as the name implies. The authors believe, however, that there is compelling evidence that indicates that the psychedelic movement was deliberately created. The purpose of this plan was to establish a neo-feudalism by the debasing of the intellectual abilities of young people to make them as easy to control as the serfs of the Dark Ages. One accurate term used for the individuals who were victims of this debasing was “Deadhead,” which is an equivocation for a “dead mind” or “a drugged, thoughtless person”.

Aldous Huxley predicted that drugs would one day become a humane alternative to “flogging” for rulers wishing to control “recalcitrant subjects.” He wrote in a letter to his former student George Orwell in 1949:

But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. [emphasis added] [10]

~ Aldous Huxley

Decades later, one of the CIA’s own MK-ULTRA researchers, Dr. Louis Jolyon West, while citing Huxley had this to say on the matter:

The role of drugs in the exercise of political control is also coming under increasing discussion. Control can be through prohibition or supply. The total or even partial prohibition of drugs gives the government considerable leverage for other types of control. An example would be the selective application of drug laws permitting immediate search, or “no knock” entry, against selected components of the population such as members of certain minority groups or political organizations. But a government could also supply drugs to help control a population. This method, foreseen by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932), has the governing element employing drugs selectively to manipulate the governed in various ways.

To a large extent the numerous rural and urban communes, which provide a great freedom for private drug use and where hallucinogens are widely used today, are actually subsidized by our society. Their perpetuation is aided by parental or other family remittances, welfare, and unemployment payments, and benign neglect by the police. In fact, it may be more convenient and perhaps even more economical to keep the growing numbers of chronic drug users (especially of the hallucinogens) fairly isolated and also out of the labor market, with its millions of unemployed. To society, the communards with their hallucinogenic drugs are probably less bothersome-and less expensive-if they are living apart, than if they are engaging in alternative modesof expressing their alienation, such as active, organized, vigorous political protest and dissent. […]

The hallucinogens presently comprise a moderate but significant portion of the total drug problem in Western society. The foregoing may provide a certain frame of reference against which not only the social but also the clinical problems created by these drugs can be considered.[11]

~ Louis Jolyon West

The idea of drugs for control seems to be an ancient one. Italian professor Piero Camporesi, writing on Medieval Italy in his book Bread of Dreams, says:

 Adulterated breads had been put into circulation by the untori of Public Health: criminal attacks orchestrated by the ‘provisionary judges’ who were supposed to oversee the well-balanced provisioning of the public-square.

On the 21^st, a Sunday, with Monday approaching, Master … [blank in the manuscript] Forni, Judge of provisions in the square of Modena, was arrested, along with the bakers, for having had forty sacks of bay leaf ground to be put into the wheat flour to make bread for the square, where it caused the poverty to those who brought it to worsen, so that for two days there were many people sick enough to go crazy, and during this time they could not work or help their families.[xii]

Camporesi later continues:

 It would be wrong to suppose that one must wait for the arrival of eighteenth-century capitalism, or even of imperialism, in order to see the birth of the problem of the mass spreading of opium derivatives (first of morphine and then, today, of heroin) used to dampen the frenzy of the masses and lead them back – by means of dreams – to the ‘reason’ desired by the groups in power. The opium war against China, the Black Panthers ‘broken’ by drugs, and the ‘ebbing’ of the American and European student movements (supposing that hallucinogenic drugs were involved in the latter, as some believe), are the most commonly used examples – we don’t know with what relevance – to demonstrate how ‘advanced’ capitalism and imperialism have utilized mechanisms which induced collective dreaming and weakened the desire for renewal by means of visionary ‘trips’, in order to impose their will.

The pre-industrial age, too, even if in a more imprecise, rough and ‘natural’ manner, was aware of political strategies allied to medical culture, whether to lessen the pangs of hunger or to limit the turmoil in the streets. Certainly we could laugh at interventions which are so mild as to appear almost surreal, amateurish or improvised; but we must not forget that both in theory and in practice the ‘treatment of the poor man’, cared for with sedatives and hallucinogenic drugs, corresponded to a thought-out medico-political design.[xiii]

~ Piero Camporesi

A key element in the creation of America’s drug counterculture was “The Grateful Dead”, a rock band that passed out LSD to people attending its concerts in the 1960’s.  At their concerts listeners were encourage to take LSD and to “tune in, turn on, and drop out.” An expression that instructed the LSD takers to abandon the modern world and join what McKenna coined the “archaic revival”.

There is a recording of Dr. Timothy Leary actually describing the retrograde culture that those who ‘dropped out’ would participate in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7FoZvlkUS8 (Audio only – copied below:)

Audio Player

In this talk, Leary, Alan Watts, Alan Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Allen Cohen describe how those that “tune in, turn on, drop out” would abandon modern culture and return to the status of a peasant.

It is important to note that marketing and PR expert Marshal McLuhan, who had a strong influence on Leary and later McKenna, is the one who actually developed the expression “Tune in, turn on, and drop out”:

In a 1988 interview with Neil Strauss, Leary stated that slogan was “given to him” by Marshall McLuhan during a lunch in New York City. Leary added that McLuhan “was very much interested in ideas and marketing, and he started singing something like, ‘Psychedelics hit the spot / Five hundred micrograms, that’s a lot,’ to the tune of a Pepsi commercial. Then he started going, ‘Tune in, turn on, and drop out.’[xiv]

It is also notable that two individuals associated with the Grateful Dead were once employees of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program – band member and lyricist Robert Hunter [xv], and author Ken Kesey[xvi] whose ‘Merry Pranksters’ were often at the Grateful Dead shows promoting LSD use to the ‘Deadheads’. Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest promoted the ‘archaic revival’ by concluding with a heroic American Indian escaping from modern tyranny and returning to a primitive culture. Furthermore, Grateful Dead song writer John Perry Barlow, in 2002, admitted in aForbes magazine interview ironically titled “Why Spy?” that he spent time at CIA headquarters at Langley.[xvii]

MK-ULTRA ran a number of its operations near Haight-Ashbury, the San Francisco district where LSD would become commonly used. Declassified CIA records show that there were at least three CIA ‘safe houses’ in the Bay Area where ‘experiments’ – the giving of LSD to unsuspecting citizens – went on. This subproject of MK-ULTRA was code-named “Operation Midnight Climax”. Chief among Operation Midnight Climax’s ‘safe houses’ was the one at 225 Chestnut on Telegraph Hill, which operated from 1955 to 1965.

While the odd role that MK-ULTRA played in launching the psychedelic movement is well known, its involvement in bringing about another part of America’s descent into intellectual neo-feudalism is not. Incredibly, MK-ULTRA was also involved in bringing about the ‘New Age’ quasi-religious movement, which debased the reasoning of anyone who succumbed to its philosophies. Another progenitor of this movement, which believes in ‘channeling’ and other fictional elements, was the book A Course in Miracles, written by two MK-ULTRA employees; William Thetford and Helen Schucman.[xviii] In the book the reader is asked to believe that Helen Schucman, a Jewish scientist hired by the CIA to study how to control the mind, was chosen by Jesus Christ to ‘channel’ his current ideas to humanity.

At the same time the Grateful Dead was promoting LSD use in San Francisco, another music drug counterculture scene with many suspicious connections to military intelligence began promoting the drug to the young people attending the music clubs on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. The counterculture scenes in LA and San Francisco were part of a larger whole that included Britain and New York. The media gave the new music drug culture almost unlimited exposure, which reached its zenith with Life magazine’s coverage of the Woodstock ‘music festival’. Although Lifepresented Woodstock as three days of ‘Love and Understanding’ it was in fact a culturally debased event – a true ‘archaic revival’ – that featured drugged teenagers fornicating in the mud while theirrock idols provided encouraging background music.

Many of the events that led up to the counterculture and Woodstock have been presented as accidental. For example, the string of occurrences that led to the publication of Life magazine’s cover story about Gordon Wasson’s experiences upon taking the psilocybin mushroom. Irvin has shown, however, in his paper Gordon Wasson: The Man, the Legend, the Myth, that there were too many contradictions in his story line for Wasson to have had the “chance meeting” with the editors of Life that led to the publication of the article:[xix]

Wasson’s direct boss at J. P. Morgan was Henry P. Davison Jr. Davison was a senior partner and generally regarded as Morgan’s personal emissary.[xx] As it turns out, it was Henry P. Davison who essentially created (or at least funded) the Time-Life magazines for J.P. Morgan in 1923. After a row with Henry Luce for publishing an article against the war for Britain in Life, Davison “became the company’s first investor in Time magazine and a company director.”[xxi]

Another J.P. Morgan partner, Dwight Morrow, also helped to finance the Time-Life start-up.

Davison kept Henry Luce in charge of the company as president, as he and Luce were both members of Yale’s Skull and Bones secret society, being initiated in 1920. In 1946 Davison and Luce then made C. D. Jackson, former head of U.S. Psychological Warfare, vice-president of Time-Life. It seems to me that the entire operation at Time-Life was purely for spreading propaganda to the American public for the purposes of the intelligence community, J.P. Morgan, and the elite. […]

Yet another Skull and Bonesman behind the establishment of Time-Life was Briton Hadden, who worked with Davison, Luce and Morrow in setting up the organization. Hadden was also initiated into Skull and Bones in 1920. The list of Bonesmen that tie in directly to Wasson and his clique is astounding, and also includes people like Averell Harriman, initiated 1913, who worked with Wasson at the CFR[xxii], and was a director there.[xxiii] […]

Documents also reveal that Luce was a member of the Century Club, an exclusive “art club” that Wasson had much ado with and may have held some position with, and which was filled with members of the intelligence and banking community. Members such as George Kennan, Walter Lippmann and Frank Altschul appear to have been nominated to the Century Club by Wasson himself.[xxiv] Graham Harvey in Shamanism says that Luce and Wasson were friends, and this is how he came to publish in Life:

 A New York investment banker, Wasson was well acquainted with the movers and shakers of the Establishment. Therefore, it was natural that he should turn to his friend Henry Luce, publisher of Life, when he needed a public forum in which to announce his discoveries.[xxv]

~ Graham Harvey

[…]

However, the most common version of the story is the one told by Time magazine in 2007:

 Wasson and his buddy’s mushroom trip might have been lost to history, but he was so enraptured by the experience that on his return to New York, he kept talking about it to friends. As Jay Stevens recalls in his 1987 book Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, one day during lunch at the Century Club, an editor at Time Inc. (the parent company of TIME) overheard Wasson’s tale of adventure. The editor commissioned a first-person narrative for Life.

[…]

Since this article was written in the post-Luce and Jackson age, the author was a little more candid about the Wasson/Luce/J.P. Morgan/psychedelic revolution connections:

 After Wasson’s article was published, many people sought out mushrooms and the other big hallucinogen of the day, LSD. (In 1958, Time Inc. cofounder Henry Luce and his wife Clare Booth Luce dropped acid with a psychiatrist. Henry Luce conducted an imaginary symphony during his trip, according to Storming Heaven.) The most important person to discover drugs through the Life piece was Timothy Leary himself. Leary had never used drugs, but a friend recommended the article to him, and Leary eventually traveled to Mexico to take mushrooms. Within a few years, he had launched his crusade for America to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” In other words, you can draw a woozy but vivid line from the sedate offices of J.P. Morgan and Time Inc. in the ’50s to Haight-Ashbury in the ’60s to a zillion drug-rehab centers in the ’70s. Long, strange trip indeed.[xxvi]

In The Sacred Mushroom Seeker, a third version of this story was told by Allan Richardson:

 Sometime just before or soon after our return from the ’56 expedition, Gordon and I were dining at the Century Club in New York. He noticed Ed Thompson, the managing editor of Life magazine, alone at a table nearby, and asked him to join us. We talked about the article Gordon was working on to publicize what he’d discovered in Mexico. Thompson said Life might be interested in publishing it, and invited us to make a presentation at his offices.

~ Allan Richardson

As we noted above, nowhere do these accounts mention Valentina’s write-up of her and Gordon Wasson’s mushroom experiences in This Week magazine, which was released that same week (May 19, 1957) to 12 million newspaper subscribers. Also coincidently, This Week was published by Joseph P. Knapp, who was a director of Morgan’s Guarantee Trust, where Wasson had begun working for Morgan in 1928. If Wasson’s claim that the publication of the Life article was the result of a chance meeting, how had it come to pass that Valentina’s parallel article was published in the same week?

In light of the above, the idea that Wasson published his “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” article in May, 1957, in Life, due to a “chance meeting with an editor” seems ridiculous. In fact, Abby Hoffman is quoted as saying that Luce did more to popularize LSD than Timothy Leary (who first learned of mushrooms through Wasson’s Life article). Luce’s own wife, Clare Boothe Luce, who was a member of the CFR, agreed:

 I’ve always maintained that Henry Luce did more to popularize acid than Timothy Leary. Years later I met Clare Boothe Luce at the Republican convention in Miami. She did not disagree with this opinion. America’s version of the Dragon Lady caressed my arm, fluttered her eyes and cooed, “We wouldn’t want everyone doing too much of a good thing.”[xxvii]

~ Abbie Hoffman

If one compares the culture of Woodstock and the music drug scene of the 1960s with that of America at the beginning of the century, a number of distinct differences are visible:

1. Overt sexual images in the popular media (pornography)
2. Wildly uninhibited dancing
3. music idols
4. feminism
5. integration
6. psychedelic drug use

Culture normally changes slowly and for many reasons, and the 60’s American drug counter culture was certainly a long time in the making. But, incredibly, most of the events that led to it can be traced back to two men: Gordon Wasson and his close friend Edward Bernays, the father of propaganda. Given Bernays’ background and political perspective, his role in bringing about the drug culture is highly suspicious.

Bernays wrote what can be seen as a virtual Mission Statement for anyone wishing to bring about a “counterculture”. In the opening paragraph of his book Propaganda he wrote:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.[xxviii]

Bernays’ family background made him well suited to “control the public mind”. He was the double nephew of Jewish psychoanalysis pioneer Sigmund Freud. His mother was Freud’s sister Anna, and his father was Ely Bernays, brother of Freud’s wife Martha Bernays.

When considering his influence on his nephew, it is important to bear in mind that though Freud is famous for his theories of individual psychoanalysis, he and the group that surrounded him developed the first theories concerning how to “pull the wires which control the public mind”. Among the key members of the Freudian psychoanalysis movement in England, most of whom were associated with the Tavistock Institute, were Gustave Le bon, the originator of the term “crowd psychology”[xxix]; Wilfred Trotter, who promoted similar ideas in his book ‘Instincts of the Herd in War and Peace’[xxx], and Ernest Jones who developed the field of Group Dynamics.[xxxi]Bernays refers to all of these theorists in crowd control in his writings.

“Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: It is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them.”[xxxii]

~ Gustave La Bon

Freud often pointed out the positive effects of sublimation. In other words, that in order to maintain civilization, individuals needed to sublimate many sexual and violent urges. For example, Freud cited the need for males to sublimate what he named the Oedipal Complex, which he claimed was the innate desire of young males to kill their fathers in order to have intercourse with their mothers.

Certainly Bernays knew of Freud’s theories on civilization’s requirement for sublimation, as he constantly promoted his uncle’s work. Therefore the fact that Bernays helped bring about so many of the destructive elements that led to the music/drug counterculture in the 1960s demands an explanation.

Prima facie it seems that Bernays used his uncle’s insights to deliberately break down the structure of American civilization. To understand this requires recognizing that none of the elements of the counterculture of the 1960’s described above occurred without some prior events that shifted culture and made them permissible. This is self-evident because anyone acting like a ‘Deadhead’ in 1920 would have been arrested. All of the aspects of the counterculture had been preceded by events that led to the subtle cultural shifts that permitted the public to accept them. And Edward Bernays was at the root of these cultural shifts.

1. Overt sexual images in the popular media 

1913 Bernays was hired to protect a play that supported sex education against police interference. Typically, Bernays set up a fictitious front group called the “Medical Review of Reviews Sociological Fund” (officially concerned with fighting venereal disease) for the purpose of endorsing the play and intimidating critics. When reviewing the play the New York Times glowed: “it is ‘sex’ o clock in America.”

2. Uninhibited dancing

Bernays produced the performances of Vaslav Nijinsky who mimed masturbation onstage, causing an outrage and sometimes actual riots; “The whole country was discussing the ballet,” Bernays wrote: “The ballet liberated American dance and, through it, the American spirit. It fostered a more tolerant view toward sex; it changed our music and our appreciation of it… The ballet scenarios made modern art more palatable; color assumed new importance. It was a turning point in the appreciation of the arts in the United States. ”

An example of how the elements Bernays introduced would eventually blossom into the counter culture is Jim Morrison of “The Doors” (named after Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception). Morrison performed the same on-stage miming of masturbation that Nijinsky had but to a far larger audience. To further debase his listeners, Morrison sang about a young man acting out Freud’s Oedipus complex in “The End”, an ode to an apocalypse of a culture where “all the children are insane”:

 “The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on

He took a face from the ancient gallery

And he walked on down the hall

He went into the room where his sister lived, and…then he

Paid a visit to his brother, and then he

He walked on down the hall, and

And he came to a door…and he looked inside

Father, yes son, I want to kill you

Mother…I want to…WAAAAAA”

While Morrison sang about a young man acting out the Oedipal Complex, another culturally debasing activity was taking place right in front of him. Uninhibited ‘freak’ dancing was part of the counterculture’s promotion of drug use and appeared on the Sunset Strip music clubs at the same time that LSD did. ‘Freak dancing’ as it was called, was introduced through the efforts of Vito Paulekas. Notice in the following video clip that though Paulekas seems to be dismissing LSD, he actually provides a number of reasons for taking it. At the end of the clip his wife Szou, who seems to be a victim of mind control, cites Vito’s belief that people learn from those younger than themselves and that she has learned from her child, obviously a culturally destructive pattern of learning. Moreover, she claims at the end of the clip that LSD is a “military plot”. This begs the question of how someone who appears mentally deficient came up with this idea.

“[LSD] it’s a military plot” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2c_RfDihZk

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People who are loaded behind that kind of thing, don’t do anything. This heavy kind of insistence everyplace you go with all the media about “Wow, look at the colors, look at the lights, look at the strobe things blinking! Man, you can really find a trip if you get loaded behind this stuff.” There’s a lot of that kind of thing insisting that we become aware of it, that we become sensitive to it. And a lot of the young people are sensitive to it, and they become curious about it. So they say “which of it is bad?”, and I say “Man, all of it’s bad”. […] “I’m just going to get wiped out and I’m going to stay wiped out baby, and nothing’s going to get through to me.”

~ Vito Paulekas

The following video clip of Vito’s ‘freak dancers’ shows that their dancing obviously led people into LSD use, a fact that he could not have been unaware of.

“Vito’s Freak Dancers” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVIO5k6U46o

Vito made sure that his ‘freak dancers’ attended the shows of the fledgling rock idols to assist the LSD promoting bands of Laurel Canyon to become as popular as the Beatles.

Vito was in his fifties, but he had four-way sex with goddesses … He held these clay-sculpting classes on Laurel Avenue, teaching rich Beverly Hills dowagers how to sculpt. And that was the Byrds’ rehearsal room. Then Jim Dickson had the idea to put them on at Ciro’s, on the basis that all the freaks would show up and the Byrds would be their Beatles.

~ Kim Fowley http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr98.html

3. Music Idols

Bernays wrote: “Human beings need to have godhead symbols, and public relations counsels must help to create them.”[xxxiii] Bernays saw his idol-making as vital to the salvation of society: “We have no being in the air to watch over us. We must watch over ourselves, and that is where public relations counselors can prove their effectiveness, by making the public believe that human gods are watching over us for our own benefit.” These human gods, created by astute public relations, would keep order by giving their followers reasons to live and goals to accomplish.

Bernays manufactured the public’s adoration of Enrico Caruso, who is often called the first American ‘Pop Star’.  Bernays wrote: “The overwhelming majority of the people who reacted so spontaneously to Caruso had never heard him before.”  “The public’s ability to create its own heroes from wisps of impressions and its own imagination and to build them almost into flesh-and-blood gods fascinated me. Of course, I knew the ancient Greeks and other early civilized peoples had done this. But now it was happening before my eyes in contemporary America.”[xxxiv]

In his 1980 interview in Playboy magazine John Lennon also claimed that the military and the CIA created LSD, though this did not stop him from encouraging its use:

 We must always remember to thank the CIA and the Army for LSD. That’s what people forget. Everything is the opposite of what it is, isn’t it, Harry? So get out the bottle, boy — and relax. They invented LSD to control people and what they did was give us freedom.

In light of the discovery that the CIA funded Gordon Wasson’s trip to Mexico, Lennon’s comments begs the question as to how he came to his understanding about the CIA creating LSD, and raises additional questions about his assassination.

The research of David McGowan has shown that the connections between military intelligence and the music idols that promoted drug use to America’s youth were too numerous to have been accidental. Among the many examples, Frank Zappa was the son of a specialist in chemical warfare. Jim Morrison’s father was Admiral Morrison, the same Admiral Morrison who oversaw the false flag Gulf of Tonkin incident that launched the Vietnam War that was genocide against the Vietnamese, and killed tens of thousands of American boys. Other ’rock idols’ with direct connections to the military included the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, the Mamas and the Papas, Jimmy Hendrix, the Grateful Dead and the Police.

The father of Police band member Stewart Copeland, was the founder of the Office of Strategic Service (OSS) – the precursor to the CIA, and he also co-founded the CIA. Ian Copeland, Stewart’s brother, went on to start the “New Wave” music movement, promoting bands such as his brother’s The Police, and also Squeeze, B-52s, The Cure, Simple Minds, The English Beat, and The Go-Go’s. David McGowan also pointed out that Ian Copeland deliberately associated government power with the pop music counterculture by the names he gave his organizations: “I.R.S. Records”, the band “The Police”, and his “F.B.I.” talent agency. [xxxv]

We would note that this is just a small part of McGowan’s research and hope that our readers study his work.

Many of the so-called leaders and pioneers of psychedelic research became ‘media idols’: Gordon Wasson, Terence McKenna, and Timothy Leary have been virtually worshipped as gurus or gods. It is of note that two professors: one who taught at Harvard and wishes to remain anonymous, and Prof. Bart Dean who studied there, have informed Irvin that, aside from the Wasson library, there is actually a chapel at Harvard dedicated to Wasson worship.

Ironically, as this article was being written, a new book of this genre was being published: Albert Hofmann: LSD and the Divine Scientist.

Though like many of those associated with the origins of the psychedelic movement, Albert Hofmann is called “divine”, evidence has come to light which exposes him as both a CIA and French Intelligence operative. Hoffman helped the agency dose the French village Pont Saint Esprit with LSD. As a result five people died and Hofmann helped to cover up the crime. The LSD event at Pont Saint Esprit led to the famous murder of Frank Olson by the CIA because he had threatened to go public. It was the exposure of Olson’s murder and his involvement with the MK-ULTRA program that caused the national uproar leading to the Church Commission.[xxxvi]

Incredibly, a paper to be published in Time and Mind this July by English researcher Alan Piper shows that LSD was known about years before Albert Hofmann supposedly “invented” it on 16 November 1938 (Hofmann claims to have not been aware of LSD’s properties until 16 April 1943). Piper has noted that in 1933 Jewish author Leo Perutz wrote the novel Saint Peter’s Snow wherein a new drug made from a fungus from wheat is secretly tested and used in a failed attempt to bring about a return of religious beliefs and return a Roman Emperor to his throne, with a priest who warns that it’s instead the worship of Molech. Rather than a return of Christian belief, the book ends in a communist rebellion. The relationship between psychedelics and communist or socialist political leanings is not uncommon and should be noted. Piper saw the parallelism between Perutz’s psychedelic drug and LSD as a mystery. The authors maintain that in light of the evidence showing that the psychedelic movement was part of a multi-generational plan, Perutz’s book clearly shows an awareness of that agenda. It’s ironic too that Perutz chooses the name of St Peter’s Snow for the title of the book from the following quote, as it states on page 93 that “in the Alps it was called St Peter’s Snow” and of course the Alps are primarily in Switzerland – where Hoffman supposedly invented the drug:

A few months later I came across the incomparably more important testimony of Dionysus the Areopagite, a fourth-century Christian Neo-Platonist, who states in one of his works that he imposed a two-day fast on the members of his community, who longed for the real presence of God, and he then regaled them with “bread made with holy flour’. […]

I came across an ancient Roman rural priests’ song, a solemn invocation of Marmar or Mavor, who at that time was not yet the bloodthirsty god of war but the peaceful protector of the fields. ‘Let your white frost invade the crop so that they acknowledge thy power,’ it said. Like all priests, Roman rural priests knew the secret of the hallucinogenic drug that produces a state of ecstasy in which people ‘become seeing’ and ‘acknowledge the power of the god’. The white frost was not a kind of wheat, but a wheat disease, a parasite, a fungus that invaded the wheat and fed on its substance.” […]

“There are many kinds of parasitic fungi,” the baron went on, “the ascomycetes, the phycomycetes, and the basidiomycetes. In his Synopsis Fungorum Bargin describes more than a hundred varieties, and nowadays his work is regarded as out-of-date. But among that hundred I had identified the only one that produces ecstatic effects when it is introduced into human food and thus finds its way into the human organism.” […]

There is – or was – a wheat disease that was often described in earlier centuries and was known by a different name wherever it appeared. In Spain it was called Mary Magdalene’s Plait, in Alsace it was known as Poor Soul’s Dew. In Adam of Cremona’s Physician’s Book it was called Misericord Seed, and in the Alps it was called St Peter’s Snow.[xxxvii]

The book continues later on with the same theme we’re discussing here, where two of the main characters of the plot argue over whether they should test the drug on themselves:

I did not at first realize that she was talking about the baron. “I’ve been quarrelling with him,” she went on. “A very serious quarrel. With whom? The baron, of course, about the hallucinogen. He maintained that we two, he and I, should not take it, but I disagreed. We were the leaders, he said, we must remain clear-headed and dispassionate and be above things, our task was to lead and not be carried away. That’s what the quarrel was about. I said that being above it meant being out of it, and just because he was the leader he must feel and think what the crowd thought and felt.[…]” [xxxviii]

Later in the story we discover that the woman, Bibiche, who created and tried the drug, is the one who headed the communist rebellion.

4. Feminism

In the 1920s, working for the American Tobacco Company, Bernays sent a group of young models to march in the New York City parade. He then told the press that a group of ‘women rights marchers’ would light ‘Torches of Freedom’. On his signal, the models lit Lucky Strike cigarettes in front of the eager photographers. The New York Times (1 April 1929) printed: “Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of ‘Freedom’”.

The study of the origins of feminism itself is an important one. A semi-anonymous Canadian researcher and author, Karen, who calls herself “Girl Writes What,” has spent the last several years investigating the history and origins of feminism, and found, like the ‘psychedelic movement’ many of the claims concerning its foundations are fraudulent.[xxxix]

5. Integration

In 1920 Bernays produced the first NAACP convention in Atlanta, Georgia. His campaign was considered successful simply because there was no violence at the convention. Bernays focused on the important contributions of African Americans to Whites living in the South. He later received an award from the NAACP for his contribution. During this decade he also handled publicity for the NAACP.

Though this is an obviously sensitive issue, it must be remembered that at the beginning of the nineteenth century rock and roll was almost strictly African-American music. If Bernays saw that music as helping to release sexual restrictions, integration would have been useful. Moreover, since they were emerging from slavery, the culture of African Americans in the 19^th century was much closer to the “Archaic Revival” promoted by the creators of the counterculture than that of white America. Thus, Bernays’ promotion of ‘integration’ was likely an attempt to debase the culture of white America, rather than uplift African Americans.

6. Psychedelic drugs

Though Bernays is not known to have overtly promoted LSD, as noted above, he did assist in establishing smoking tobacco as a socially desirable act, thereby seeding the ground for other drug use. Moreover, Bernays created the propaganda that enabled a destructive drug to be accepted by the American public – the PR campaign that fooled the country into believing that water fluoridationwas safe and beneficial to human health.

The wide-scale U.S. acceptance of fluoride-related compounds in drinking water and a wide variety of consumer products over the past half century is a textbook case of social engineering orchestrated by Sigmund Freud’s nephew and the “father of public relations” Edward L. Bernays. The episode is instructive, for it suggests that tremendous capacity of powerful interests to reshape the social environment, thereby prompting individuals to unwarily think and act in ways that are often harmful to themselves and their loved ones. […]

In fact, sodium fluoride is a dangerous poison and has been a primary active ingredient in a wide variety of insecticides and fungicides. The substance bioaccumulates in mammals, has been linked to dulled intellect in children, and is a cause of increased bone fractures and osteosarcoma.[…]

In the 1930s, Edward Bernays was public-relations adviser to the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa). Alcoa’s principal attorney, Oscar Ewing, went on to serve in the Truman administration from 1947 to 1952 as head of the Federal Security Agency, of which the Public Health Service was a part. In that capacity, Ewing authorized water fluoridation for the entire country in 1950 and enlisted Bernays’ services to promote water fluoridation to the public.

Bernays recalled the fluoridation campaign in which he was involved as merely another assignment. “The PR wizard specialized in promoting new ideas and products to the public by stressing a claimed health benefit,” […]

One such approach to prompting public opinion involved correspondence from the City’s Health Department to the presidents of the NBC and CBS television networks, informing them “that debating fluoridation is like presenting two sides for anti-Catholicism or anti-Semitism and therefore not in the public interest.” Another method involved laying the ground work for making fluoridation a house-hold term with a scientific patina. He advised his clients to send letters to the editors of leading publications discussing what the specific aspects of fluoridation required. “We would put out the definition first to the editors of important newspapers,” Bernays recalled. “Then we would send a letter to publishers of dictionaries and encyclopedias. After six or eight months we would find the world fluoridation was published and defined in the dictionaries and encyclopedias.”

In 1957, the Committee to Protect Our Children’s Teeth suddenly emerged to tout fluoridation with several celebrity figures on its roster…[xl]

But the most direct connection between Bernays and the psychedelic movement is that he was a close friend, advisor and promoter of the above-mentioned Gordon Wasson – the so-called discoverer of ‘magic mushrooms’. Bernays wrote:

 Gordon Wasson was one of those newspapermen who consciously or unconsciously recognized the implications of the contacts he made in that capacity. He found these contacts important, outstanding. This led to other places and other things. In the New York Tribune financial department he had made contact with the house on the corner, Broad and Wall – J. P. Morgan. Then he had given up newspaper work and become associated with the home [Morgan’s “house on the corner”]. First he was in the publicity department. When Martin Eagen died, he assumed the function of publicity man with J. Pierpont Morgan. He was highly respected by his own people. He was intelligent, smooth. His mind was a highly, splendidly geared functioning mechanism. […] Wasson made it his business and he got pleasure out of it too, of associating with a broad segment of society. This was not unimportant in maintaining contacts for the house on the corner [Broad and Wall – J.P. Morgan], with the rest of the world.

Not until long after I knew him did I find out in [Prof. Raymond] Moley’s book “The First Seven Years” [sic] published in 1939, a reference to Gordon Wasson. Moley wrote a memo in 1934 and made recommendations for the Stock Exchange Commission membership. Next to Gordon Wasson, whom he recommended, he added, “a resident of New Jersey, handled foreign securities for Guaranty Company, has acted a liaison between Wall Street and Landis, Cohen and Corcoran because his friendship with them was known downtown. Knows security business and the Act thoroughly having helped in its drafting, very well-liked by treasury and commerce, would certainly be recommended by the Guaranty and Stock Exchange and therefore would be acceptable to Wall Street. I saw Wasson very often between 1934 and ’44[…].[xli]

~ Edward Bernays

An example of Bernays’ influence on Wasson is Wasson’s article of September 26, 1970 in the New York Times, wherein Wasson claimed to feel remorse regarding the reports of “hippies, psychopaths and adventurers and pseudo-research workers” that had descended on Huautla de Jimenez in Oaxaca, Mexico to take magic mushrooms:

Huautla, when I first knew it as a humble out-of-the-way Indian village, has become a true mecca for hippies, psychopaths, adventurers, pseudo-research workers, the miscellaneous crew of our society’s drop-outs. The old ways are dead and I fear that my responsibility is heavy, mine and Maria Sabina’s. […]

As for me, what have I done? I made a cultural discovery of importance. Should I have suppressed it? It has led to further discoveries the reach of which remains to be seen. Should these further discoveries have remained stultified by my unwillingness to reveal the secret of the Indians’ hallucinogens?

Yet what I have done gives me nightmares: I have unleashed on lovely Huautla a torrent of commercial exploitation of the vilest kind. Now the mushrooms are exposed for sale everywhere—in every market-place, in every village doorway. Everyone offers his services as a “priest” of the rite, even the politicos. […] The whole of the countryside is agog with the furtive movements of hippies, the comings and goings of the “federalistas,” the Dogberries with their blundering efforts to root them out. [xlii]

~ R. Gordon Wasson

However, in a later letter to Bertram Wolfe that was found at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, Wasson remarks:

October 13, 1970:

Dear Mr. Wolfe: […] Do you remember your last letter to me? I was asking you where Tolstoy had said the printing press was a mighty engine for disseminating ignorance. This Mazatec affair is a case in point. [emphasis added][xliii]

~ R. Gordon Wasson

We can be certain now that Wasson was engaging in a Bernays-style misdirection to hide the truth with his claim to be sorry that he had ruined “lovely Huautla”. Within the trove of documents made public by the CIA on MK-ULTRA are some brought to the attention of Jan Irvin by MK-ULTRA expert Dr. Colin Ross. These documents prove that Wasson’s journey had been financed by the infamous organization. In other words, the resulting magazine articles from Life and This Week, cited above, were describing an operation funded by the CIA’s MK-ULTRA Subproject 58. These documents will be analyzed in a separate article but show that Wasson lied to conceal his agenda.

For brevity we’ll only include three of the CIA letters here. Other documents include financial information for the camera and recording equipment, a note stating that J.P. Morgan Bank and the National Philosophical Society were the subcontractors, and letters from Wasson requesting MK-ULTRA reimburse his expenses for his trips to gather hallucinogenic mushrooms, and several letters between Wasson and Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, in the weeks before the Lifemagazine article was published – including an invitation from Dulles to Wasson to come and visit him.

MUCH MORE>>

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