The Origins of the Counterculture Movement: A Gathering of Anarchists, Occultists and Psychoanalysts for a New Age
CYNTHIA CHUNG
MAR 1, 2023
The following is from my Substack page Through A Glass Darkly by Cynthia Chung.
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The Origins of the Counterculture Movement A Gathering of Anarchists, Occultists and Psychoanalysts for a New Age
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The following is a quote from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World Revisited.
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If the first half of the 20th century was the era of technical engineers, the second half may well be the era of the social engineers, and the 24th century, I suppose,
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will be the era of the world controllers, the scientific caste system and brave new world.
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The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and mysteries.
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Under a scientific dictatorship, education will really work, with the result that most men and women will grow to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.
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There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown."
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This new era of the world controllers where revolution will become irrelevant since the masses will come to love their servitude is referred to as the ultimate revolution by Huxley, a clearly borrowed phrase from HG Wells' 1933 book, The Shape of Things to Come, The Ultimate Revolution.
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It is the ultimate revolution since it will be the last of the revolutions, the most perfect revolution that will end any need for further change since we will finally have achieved a stable world order.
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It will be the beginning of the era of the world controllers and it will be regarded as a modern utopia
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For everyone will be supposedly content within the controlled reality that shapes their caste, a caste that has been scientifically determined.
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Anyone wishing to understand today's great reset agenda, which professes to radically alter humanity's values amidst a vast systemic collapse, would do well to see how these ideas took root well over a century ago in a strange village in Switzerland.
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Montverita, The Mountain of Truth, A Modern Utopia In 1900, artists Henry Odenkoven and Ida Hoffman founded an anarchist, bohemian, nudist, sun-worshipping, vegetarian artist's colony within the small village of Ascona, Switzerland, and named it Montverita, meaning Mountain of Truth.
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The concept of Montverita began with the arrival of Mikhail Bakunin, the recognized leader of international anarchism in 1870, when he moved to Locarno, Switzerland, less than two kilometers away from Ascona, and lived there for several years attracting expressionist writers, artists, anarchists and radicals who took up residence in the surrounding region.
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Bakunin's influence in the area would be the inspiration for the formation of a commune years later.
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That is, Mount Verita.
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Mount Verita became the international meeting place for all those who rebelled against science, technology and the rise of the modern industrial nation-state.
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On the surface it was and is popularly regarded as a nature cure resort, offering treatment that includes a vegetarian diet, health foods, fasting, earth cures, water cures, nude sun baths, nude air baths and nature hikes.
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The region of Ascona attracted an eclectic array of guests from anarchists, theosophists, communists, psychoanalysts, vegetarians, rhythmic dancers, nudists and bohemians alike.
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Among the notable regulars at Ascona were Herman Hesse, Carl Jung,
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Peter Kropotkin, who became an anarchist after joining the Watchmakers of Jura in Switzerland, who were the disciples of Bakunin Rudolf Steiner, D.H.
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Lawrence, a mentor of Aldous Huxley, and the list goes on
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It had developed such a strong reputation as a utopia that even H.G.
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Wells was smitten, placing his Utopia in Ticino, the Italian region of Ascona, in his Modern Utopia, published in 1905, and In a World Set Free in 1914, setting the rebirth of society in Lago Maggiore near Ascona.
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In 1905, Otto Gross, an early disciple of Sigmund Freud, moved to Ascona and quickly became a sort of ruler amongst the diverse membership.
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Otto Gross was considered a major force in the burgeoning field of psychoanalysis and also became a key figure in the anarchist, psychoanalytic and spiritual circles.
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He would conduct psychoanalysis sessions where he would advise his subjects to act out their sexual fantasies
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often with himself and or his wife.
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Gross wanted to revive pagan mysticism with the freedom to engage in heavy doses of sex orgies.
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In 1908, Gross' addiction to morphine and cocaine, to which his mentor, Freud, shared, would lead him to commit himself to the Bergolizzi Mental Hospital in Zurich, where he was put under the care of Carl Jung.
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At Bergolizzi, Jung diagnosed Gross as a schizophrenic.
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Over the course of the therapy, however,
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Carl Jung claimed his entire worldview had changed when he attempted to analyze Grosz and partially had the tables turned on him.
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This led Jung to visit Ascona for himself, whereupon he adopted the ideas of Grosz, turning to pagan sun worship and sun mythology.
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Hermann Hesse and Carl Jung are described as among the many who had found themselves under Otto Gross's spell.
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Historian Arthur Mitzmann writes in his Anarchism, Expressionism and Psychoanalysis that, quote, Otto Gross, as Jung's guru throughout most of this evolution and a man capable of exerting a remarkable charisma among the bohemian artists and outcasts in Munich, Berlin, Ascona and Vienna,
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must be considered the principal source of the ideas inspiring Jung and his friends in the decade before 1920.
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What was Otto Gross's philosophy?
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Gross believed that in order to achieve freedom, one must never repress any desire.
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Nothing was forbidden, no matter how seemingly irrational, even the encouragement of suicide, if his patient so desired.
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Gross believed that Western civilization lay at the center of this oppression of the individual's freedom.
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Those who were coming to Mount Verita were ultimately all sick, and they were made sick by the repressive ideals and values of Western civilization.
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At Mount Verita, Gross promised to cure them by arousing the animal desire from within, promising to free them from their inhibitions, fears and self-imprisonment.
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It was uncommon for Gross not to have sexual intercourse with his treating patient as part of the prescribed therapy.
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Gross became increasingly political, particularly in Escona, where Young himself writes, Gross had planned, quote, to found a free college from which he thought to attack Western civilization, the obsessions of inner as well as outer authority, the social bonds which these imposed, the distortions of a parasitic form of society in which everyone was forced to live from everyone else to survive, end quote.
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One particular individual named Max Weber found himself devoting his passion to Otto Gross in the construction of this free college.
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Although this project didn't really become reality as these reformers hoped, Otto Gross became too unstable to lead anything,
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It is interesting to note that among the goals of the new school was the merging of Freudian psychoanalysis with Marxist theories of sociology in order to engage in an international cultural war that would create the conditions for an ultimate global revolution.
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Gross would encourage the suicides of Lothar Hattenheimer in 1906 and Sophie Benz in 1911 as the only way to liberate themselves.
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They had also been among his many, many lovers.
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He had diagnosed the two women as having suffered from incurable mental illness, dementia praecox.
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He had left the poison with which Lotte Hettemer killed herself lying within her reach.
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He informed psychiatrists in 1913 during one of his many visitations to the asylum between 1912 and 1920, quote, when I could no longer intervene analytically, I had a duty to poison her, end quote, in reference to Sophie Benz.
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Gross is also quoted commenting, quote, a beautiful life, a beautiful death is better than a low probability of cure, end quote.
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Before Jung, it had been the expectation of Freud that Gross would be his heir to the psychoanalytic field.
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However, Gross was becoming increasingly unstable.
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By 1912, Gross was forcibly interned in a psychiatric institution in order to avoid being tried for murder and assisting suicide.
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Otto's father, Professor Hans Gross, who is considered the founder of criminology, was behind this intervention.
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In 1913 at the Lunatic Asylum in Thun, Gross was recorded saying, quote, My whole life was focused on overthrowing authority, for example that of the father.
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In my view there is only the maternal right, the right of the horde.
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So when I've finished my work, let come what may.
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Actually, I would like to live to the age of 45 and then go under, preferably participating in an anarchist assassination.
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That would be the most beautiful way."
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End quote.
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Some have credited Otto Gross as the founding grandfather of the 20th century counterculture, a pioneer as the first rock'n'roller hard punk lifestyle, so to speak.
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And he did not disappoint.
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Gross died in 1920 at the age of 43, a few days after being found in the street, near starved and freezing,
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After eight years of going in and out of asylums, largely revolving around drug addiction, not even Sid Vicious could ask for a more apt role model.
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The same year that Gross was forcibly interned in a psychiatric institute, the start of his downward spiral of individual freedom to do whatever one wishes,
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Chung published The Psychology of the Unconsciousness where he began to spiritualize the psychoanalysis movement and wrote of Sun worship and Sun mythology as the original natural religion of the Aryan people.
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It gave an academic respectability to Ascona's Aryan Sun religion and he began to receive followers from all over the world who wanted to experience the mythos of their own unconsciousness.
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With the publishing of The Psychology of the Unconsciousness, a split began to develop between Jung and Freud.
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In the years that followed, it became fashionable among banking and intelligence circles to go under analysis with Jung.
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In 1913, Edith Rockefeller traveled to Zurich to be treated for depression by Carl Jung and contributed generously to the Zurich Analytical Psychology Club.
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She would later become a Jungian analyst with a full-time practice in the states attracting many socialite patients.
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She also paid for Jung's writings to be translated into English in order to help disseminate his ideas.
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Paul, son of Andrew Mellon, co-founder of the Mellon National Bank, and Mary Mellon, financed the Bollingen Foundation, dedicated to disseminating Young's work.
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In 1957, Fortune magazine estimated that Paul Mellon, his sister Elsa, and his cousins Sarah and Richard Mellon were all among the richest eight people in the United States with fortunes between $400 to $700 million each,
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Around 3.7 to 6.5 billion dollars in today's amounts.
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Through these initiatives there was a spillover of the ideas of Ascona into the circles of the rich and powerful.
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British central banker Montague Norman and members of the Dulles family also went under Jungian analysis.
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Alan Dulles would be at the center of the formation of a vicious CIA program named MKUltra during the Cold War.
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The relevance of this will be made clear in Part 4 of this series.
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Ordo Templi Orientis, The Secret Doctrine of Sex Magic Do without wilt shall be the whole of the law, the core tenet of the Ordo Templi Orientis.
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Ascona was considered sacred ground for occultists going back hundreds, even thousands of years, the area containing ruins of ancient ritual sites and artifacts.
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In 1916, Theodore Roos, under the sponsorship of Henry Udenkoven and Ida Hoffman, the founders of Mount Verita, arrived in Ascona.
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Roos had been building a Masonic empire and he wanted to transfer its headquarters to the Swiss village.
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While in Basel, Switzerland,
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He studied the Anational Ground Lodge and Mystic Temple of Ordo Templi Orientis and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light at Mount Verita.
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The Ordo Templi Orientis is the ecclesiastical arm of the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica dedicated to the advancement of light, life, love and liberty through alignment with the Law of Thelema.
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The Law of Thelema follows the mandate that each person follow their true will to attain fulfillment in life and freedom from restriction of their nature.
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Alistair Crowley is credited as the early developer of Thelema as a spiritual philosophy and religious movement.
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Its maxim is, do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
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It was to herald a new age.
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Such a maxim was in full accord with the anarchist views of Mikhail Bakunin followed by Otto Gross and those he influenced.
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The founders of Malte Verita were very clear in what they intended as a desired ideology for their followers.
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Roos would be issued warrants allowing for him to operate three systems of high-grade masonry, the Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis, the Ancient and Primitive Rite of Mizraim, and the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite.
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Along with Roos's control of the Swedenborg right, the rights combined provided Roos with a complete system of Masonic initiation independent of the regular British Masonic system.
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In 1905, out of this new system of masonry, which was the Ordo Templi Orientis, Rus formed the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light as a branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis, which was located at Mount Verita.
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Rus declared himself the Outer Head of the Order.
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The Ordo Templi Orientis distinguished itself by allowing membership to women and advocating a new secret doctrine called sex magic.
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Sex magic is the corrupted Western version of Kundalini Yoga or Tantric Yoga of the East.
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It is sometimes referred to in the translation of Sanskrit into English as serpent power.
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In 1912, Gruss conferred Aleister Crowley the 9th degree and appointed him National Grand Master General of the 10th degree for the Ordo Templi Orientis in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland by charter dated June 1st, 1912.
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In August 1917, Roos issued a manifesto for his A-National Grand Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis called Verita Mystica.
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He then held the A-National Congress for Organizing the Reconstruction of Society on Practical and Cooperative Lines at Mount Verita on August 15th to 25th in 1917.
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He wanted to create a new ethic, a new social order, a new religion to be achieved through the establishment of utopian bohemian colonies and settlements throughout the world.
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By 1921 Crowley succeeded Roos to become the outer head of the order.
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Crowley had become notorious for his excesses with drugs and women and for his practice in sex magic, which he held as of a high occult importance.
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He became known as the Great Beast 666 and the wickedest man in the world and would become an icon for the counterculture movement.
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Sonen Kinder The Children of the Sun
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Another theme of Mount Verita that hopefully has become apparent to the reader is the worshipping of the sun.
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This appears to have been largely influenced by the work of Johann Jacob Bachofen, whose theory of cultural evolution in his 1861 work Das Mütterrecht was described as four phases, one, wild nomadic phase, proto-Aphrodite,
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2.
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Matriarchal Lunar Phase, Early Demeter 3.
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Transitional Phase, Original Dionysus 4.
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The Patriarchal Solar Phase, called the Apollonian, in which all trace of the matriarchal and Dionysian past are eradicated and modern civilization emerges.
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Bakufan's cultural evolution theory greatly influenced Otto Gross and thus was adopted as a central philosophy of Mount Verita.
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As already mentioned, Carl Jung's work became very much focused on this Aryan sun-worshipping religion to which he wrote Psychology of the Unconscious, a study of the transformations and symbolisms of the libido, a contribution to the history of the evolution of thought.
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D. H. Lawrence had also been forever changed by the influence of Otto Gross and Hermann Hesse, the latter whom Timothy Leary has credited as the patron saint of cyberpunk.
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Leary was turned on to Hesse by Aldous Huxley.
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More on this in Part 4.
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Although Aldous Huxley would first meet D. H. Lawrence in 1915, it would be during the period of 1926 to 1930 that they would become close friends.
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1930 was the year D. H. Lawrence died at the age of 44.
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The timing could not have been more ripe, it seems, for Aldous' introduction into mysticism, having just written Those Barren Leaves in 1925, whose title was derived from William Woodsworth's poem The Tables Turned, to which it ends with,
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Enough of science and of art.
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Close up those barren leaves.
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Come forth and bring with you a heart that watches and receives.
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Aldous concludes that for all the high education of the cultural elite, they are nothing but sad and superficial individuals.
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This was a rather typical commentary from the lost generation that was to form as a consequence of the despair after World War I and the belief that civilizations striving towards industrialization and scientific progress had been the cause of this seemingly pointless world war.
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and that it was just a taste of what awaited humanity in the future if it did not correct its ways.
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Aldous had abandoned the false altars of knowledge through science and art.
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He was ready for entry into the secret arts, and D.H.
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Lawrence would be his guide.
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After all, his grandfather, T.H.
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Huxley, was the one to coin the term agnosticism, thus it was only natural that he keep an open mind.
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It should also not be lost on the reader the relevance of Aldous' uniting of his grandfather's promotion of Darwinian evolution and that of Bacuffin's cultural revolution.
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For more on this, see part 2 of this series.
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Through D. H. Lawrence, Aldous was taught Lorentzian metaphysics.
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At the core of this was that self-division was the source of the woes of Western civilization, a dualism in which modern life had caused the splitting of humanity into two conflicting forces, passion and reason, that there were always at war with the individual.
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As a way to save humanity from reason's tyranny dominating over passion, Lawrence preached the cult of the body and of the, quote, dark night life of the blood, end quote.
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He believed that this was the only way to return humankind to its true heritage of the emotions.
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The only way to live as a whole man was to abandon mental self-consciousness and rediscover instinct to unify oneself to put back the fragmentation that modern civilization had caused.
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According to Lawrence, this division within an individual was the root of all evil,
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and that the natural appetite, spontaneous instinctive desires were the pure and the good.
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That it was the imagination, the intellect, its moral principles, its tradition and education that were the corrupting influence of modern civilization.
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Through Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Gerald Hurd and Christopher Isherwood would be forever changed by the ideas of Ascona.
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They would later be called the Sonnenkinder, the Children of the Sun, a term that came from Johann Jacob Bakkefen and would become the leading influence that would shape the Human Potential Movement and the Esalen Institute.
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Though it is beyond the scope of this paper to go through in detail how Ascona propagated a perversion of aspects of Indian philosophy, Herman has played a large part in introducing this into Ascona.
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It should be noted that there is consistently an overlap with the Aryan Sun Worship religion and certain aspects of Indian philosophy within Ascona, the Ordo Templi Orientis and the Sonen Kinder.
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This especially revolves around the Bardo Thodol liberation through hearing during the Intermediate State, otherwise known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
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The Tibetan Book of the Dead focuses on the experiences that the consciousness has after death in the bardo, the interval between death and the next rebirth.
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Through the lens of Lorentzian metaphysics, the Son and Kinder would adopt the philosophies of the Tibetan Book of the Dead to their core.
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Aldous made no secret that during his last years of life the book had become a sort of bible for him.
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Aldous would also introduce Timothy Leary to this, which in turn became a major influence on the counterculture guru.
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According to Timothy Leary, his co-written book The Psychedelic Experience, published in 1964, was loosely based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
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Leary and his co-writers described the Tibetan Book of the Dead as, quote, a key to the innermost recesses of the human mind and a guide for initiates and for those who are seeking the spiritual path of liberation, end quote.
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It should also be noted that there is a great deal of overlap with the Ascona philosophy of Aryan sun worship and that of Alice Bailey, who was influenced by the Theosophical Society of Madame Blavatsky, a sort of sister branch of Mount Verita.
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Bailey's first work was titled Initiation, Human and Solar.
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In Bailey's Esoteric Psychology II, heavily influenced by Madame Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, she references the mystery of the descent of fall to earth of the rebellious angels, the solar angels or Agnishvatas, to which Lucifer is the best-known representative.
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and that the only true evil is the sin of separatism to which she refers, quote, the mind is the slayer of the real, slay thou the slayer, end quote.
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Bailey has stated that the majority of her works have been telepathically dictated to her by a master of wisdom initially referred to as the Tibetan, or by the initials D.K., later identified as Jowal Kul.
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In 1922, she co-founded the Lucius Trust with her husband, originally called Lucifer Publishing Company, which has played a major role within the United Nations to this day.
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It should also be noted that Alice Bailey's interpretation of the mythology of Lucifer has a great deal of overlap with that of the Scottish Rite.
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Theodore Rousse, followed by Alistair Crowley, oversaw a branch of the Scottish Rite in Germany, and as already discussed, Ascona had become a headquarter for the Ordo Templi Orientis, and thus we come around full circle.
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Children of the Sun in this context could also be connoted as children of the solar angels, and thus the children of Lucifer.
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In the words of Alice Bailey, we must add, quote, darkness onto light so that the stars appear, for in the light the stars shine not, but in the darkness light diffused is not, but only focused points of radiance, end quote.
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Thus, we must bring forth the darkness, according to Alice Bailey.
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In 1935, Crowley founded the Agape Lodge No.
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2 in Los Angeles.
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In 1937, Aldous would move with his family and his fellow son and kinder, Gerald Hurd, to Hollywood, where he would remain until his death.
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Christopher Isherwood would make the move to Hollywood in 1939.
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And just like that, the teachings of Ascona in Hollywood became a primary focus of Crowley and the Sonnenkinder, and together they would dominate the scene out of which the counterculture movement would be born.