Notes on the San Francisco Oracle
by
It began as a dream and ended as a legend. One morning in the late spring of 1966 I dreamt that I was flying around the world. When I looked down, I saw people reading a newspaper with rainbows printed on it -- in Paris at the Eiffel Tower, in Moscow at Red Square, on Broadway in New York, at the Great Wall of China -- everywhere. A rainbow newspaper!
I told my companion Laurie about the dream and she went out early for a walk up the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park to Haight Street telling everyone along the way -- artists, writers, musicians, poets, dope dealers, merchants -- about the rainbow newspaper. When I went out later, people were exploding with rainbow newspaper consciousness.
I strolled into Ron and Jay Thelin's Psychedelic Shop where the icons of the new emerging culture were gathered, displayed and sold. Books on Eastern religion and metaphysics and the Western occult were offered, along with Indian records, posters, madrases, incense, bead necklaces, small pipes, and other paraphernalia. Ron Thelin immediately contributed start-up money for publishing a Haight-Ashbury newspaper. He called his brother Jay, who had a weekend car-parking business at Lake Tahoe to supplement the losses at the Psychede lic Shop, and Jay sent about $500. I was stunned to see how quickly a dream could begin to become reality.
The Haight Ashbury Seed Pod
The Haight-Ashbury was still unknown to the world. The community was an artists' bohemia, and seed pod which was destined to catch the wind and blossom throughout the world. Since World War II, the Haight had been an inter-racial, working class neighborhood bounded by Golden Gate Park, middle class Victorian houses on Ashbury Heights and the mostly black Fillmore District.
The San Francisco State College campus had been located on lower Haight Street before it moved to the southern outskirts of the city, so its students, teachers, dropouts and alumni were still living in the area. Artists and poets, who had escaped the police crackdown of the North Beach Renaissance several years before, had also taken refuge in the Haight. Rents there were cheap. Six rooms in an elegant Victorian or Edwardian house built after the earthquake rented for $120. The houses and apartments were large enough to share, and cooperative living was common. Later, when the world descended upon the Haight, many flats would become crash pads to house America's teenage refugees.
It wasn't difficult in 1966 to work occasionally, sell marijuana or LSD intermittently, and thereby earn a living for oneself and friends. One could devote most of one's time to art, writing or music, experience the enhanced and ecstatic states of mind accessible through the use of marijuana and LSD, interact with other artists, get high and talk until the sun's rays erased the night. In these years, and in these ways the particular styles of music, art, and the way of life identified with the Haight, the 60s and the Hippies developed.
The Dialectical Pendulum
The years 1963-67 were formative to the Haight-Ashbury Hippie phenomenon. Swings of the dialectical pendulum of American history underlie the extraordinary changes that were about to occur in America. World War II was an abyss of planetary violence endin g with the development and use of the atomic bomb. The US emerged from the war as the economic and military leader of the world. The generation that fought the war became the conservative builders and maintainers of an economic empire whose worldwide interests had to be defended, while in their off hours they engendered the largest generation of children in our history.
Women returning to traditional family life relinquished the workplace to the men, and a housing boom brought jobs and homes for the new post-war families. Faceless suburbs arose on the farmland surrounding cities. TV emerged and began to dominate human communications. Gray flannel suits defined the rising middle class, and a cold and sometimes hot war engendered the military-industrial complex. Protecting American capital interests around the world from the rise of socialism and communism became the obsession of our political, economic and military policy.
But the 60s would also bring pivotal and generational change to America. The Fifties of the Cold War, the inquisitions of McCarthy, the Eisenhower uniformity and America's rise to economic world dominance started to give way to a new social energy with the election of John Kennedy, the racial crises and the renewed idealism of the Civil Rights movement. The assassination of Kennedy and the buildup of colonial war in Vietnam were counterattacks intended to rein in the forces of cyclical and generational change that had begun to emerge. Though the seat of government was back in the fists of the military-industrial junta, streets and campuses were occupied by a new idealistic generation who thought they could taste and control the future.
Dionysius Rising
In the late fifties torrential Dionysian winds that would shake the tree of history began to blow. The American yearning for liberty and rebellion burst forth in the poetry and prose of the Beat Generation, the painting of the Abstract Expressionists, and the emergence of rock n' roll music. These creative energies erupted within a culture gone rigid with profits, conformity, weapons of destruction and the politics of suppression of dissent.
Such buried, unconscious energies could not be confined. They celebrated the primacy of the individual and the experience of the body as universe center. It seemed that all forms and institutions would fall away and dissolve before the soaring experience of the Whitmanesque Self and its sensuous delight in the American earth. These rising vital energies found their correlatives in the occult philosophies of the West, the meditative philosophies of the East, the sensibilities of the Afro-American ghetto culture with its improvised jazz and marijuana high, and the ancient tribalism of the oppressed American Indian.
LSD -- The Rocket Engine
The Rise of the Universal Self has had its ups and downs since the late 50s, but its peak came with the discovery and use of LSD by American youth and intellectuals during the 60s. The rebellion, insight and visionary experiences of the artists of the late 50s would now come wholesale to anyone who wanted or needed to get out on the edges of the only frontier left in America -- their own mind and their own senses.
Harvard University with its highly publicized suppression of the psilocybin and LSD experiments of Drs. Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner brought instant Universal Selfhood and Dionysian release from social constraint to the awareness of anyone with the courage to journey to the frontiers of the mind.
LSD was the rocket engine of most of the social or creative tendencies that were emerging in the 60s. It sped up change by opening a direct pathway to the creative and mystical insights that visionaries, artists and saints have sought, experienced and communicated through the ages. But there were casualties of the LSD voyages including the psychologically wounded, badly guided, severe over-users, and victims of the CIA's irresponsible experiments with the psychedelic.
Millions of people took LSD, and for most of them it was a decisive instrument that accelerated change. It released energies that are still reverberating through our world. This brush with cosmic consciousness stimulated pagan and Dionysian energies, but it also resulted in the rise of authoritarian religious cults and the social and political reaction of religious fundamentalism. A vision of eternity and freedom was revealed to some while others in fear of such a vision sought the protection of authority and the old dogmas.
At The Handle of the Kettle
There were two visible handles on the symbolic kettle of the Haight as it boiled its way into history. They were held by the Diggers and by the Oracle. But the Diggers and the Oracle each represented a different philosophy and lifestyle. The Diggers were a loose association of non-members inspired by some former Mime Troupe actors including Peter Berg, Emmett Grogan, Peter Cohon, Kent Minnault, Billy Murcott and a dynamic Hell's Angel poet, Bill Fritsch. They brought improvisation, dramatic confrontation and ritual from their theatrical background into the everyday life of the Haight. They were anarchistic, original, and intellectually insightful in their criticism of society and the fulfillment of their own goals. They intended to act out and bring into existence a total transformation of economic and human relations in our society. When anyone wanted to become a "Digger", they were told that they already were Diggers and they should "Do their own thing."
The Diggers were "psychedelic" but did not exclude hard drugs or alcohol from their pharmacology. They were passionately critical of the commercialization of the Haight and of the otherworldliness of the more transcendental school of psychedelic rangers. They wanted to abolish social authority and class structure by eliminating the use of money. "Freedom means everything free," said Emmett Grogan to emphasize their radical common sense. Emmett was not averse to refusing donations of money, or even burning it to make the point.
The Diggers began giving away free food daily at the Panhandle the week after the Love Pageant Rally. They opened a free store and continued putting on free events, rituals, and actions, including the Death of Money parade at which two Hell's Angels were busted and bailed out with a Hippie bail money collection.
The Diggers had a tendency toward anarchy that bordered on violence. They once planned a street happening during which mirrors were to be shined from Haight Street roof tops into the eyes of drivers going up the street. The Haight merchants, in defense against the Digger's demand to share their profits with the community, accused them of threatening extortion and violence.
Though the Diggers' sense of altered reality conflicted with the Love and Nirvana Now view of many other Hippies, the Oracle was receptive to their input, and they often sat in at our editorial meetings. At one junction when a Be-In was being planned on Hopi Indian Land, Emmett Grogan convinced me of its colonialist connotations and its physical impracticality. I represented this view to the Oracle staff, and it prevailed. Our refusal to support the proposed Hopi Be-In canceled the project. Generally, the atmosphere around the Diggers was desperate, dark and tense, while at the ordinary hippie pad, it was light, meditative, and creative with a mixture of rock and raga music, oriental aesthetics and vegetarian food.
Steve Lieper in "At the Handle of the Kettle" described the Diggers providing free food at the Panhandle and for Thanksgiving at their Free Frame of Reference garage. Just before we got to press the Health Department closed down the Digger garage. Lieper reported the dark confusion and revolutionary anarchy that hovered around the Diggers.
The Oracle Staff
Around this time most of the artists and writers, secretaries and business people who were to steer the Oracle on and off course in the year and a half to follow had gathered together: Stephen Levine, a New York poet who had moved to Santa Cruz and then to San Francisco; Travis Rivers, a Texan who brought Janis Joplin to San Francisco and managed Tracy Nelson, another blues singer; and George Tsongas, a poet and novelist from Greece and San Francisco. Though Tsongas had left after Oracle #2, he would return later and play a major role both artistically and editorially. Hetti McGee, originally from Liverpool, England, and Ami Magill were our staff designers. Along with Gabe Katz they originated and/or implemented the techniques -- split fountains, screens, double burns, rubylith overlays -- that made the Oracle palette come to life. Other staff included Harry Monroe, poet, world traveler and inspiration to all who would sit through the night and listen to him talk; Dangerfield Ashton, the best pen and ink artist South Carolina ever gave to America; Gene Grimm, a 6ft. 6in. former marine who had become as gentle as a butterfly; and Steve Lieper, a lanky Tennessee hillbilly who did a lot of everything.
Artists who designed and illustrated many Oracle pages, often anonymously, included Mark Devries, Steve Schafer, Michael Ferar, Armando Busick, and Gary Goldhill. Those who typed and organized our words, business and circulation, (many of whom were also artists and writers), included Tiffany, Lynn Ferar, Joan Alexander, Alan Russo, Arthur Goff, and Penny DeVries. There are many others too numerous to mention, some who were anonymous and others who you will meet in the Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties CD-ROM or the San Francisco Oracle Facsimile Edition. All their collective, selfless and creative work built the Oracle into a unique monument of American arts and letters.
Our first offices were the small upstairs spaces behind the Print Mint, a large poster shop on Haight Street that Travis Rivers managed. We converted even the tiny bathroom into an artists' workroom. Dangerfield would stay in there all night working on his elaborate mandalic designs.
Oracle Economics
Around this time we got some cash donations from marijuana dealers to help us expand from twelve pages to sixteen. Alex Geluardi, who was a benefactor and comforter to many San Francisco writers and artists, also donated money toward the Oracle's growth. Cash flow never did catch up to costs, so we occasionally had to borrow money to print. At one point Jay Thelin would get an unsecured $6,000 loan from the local Haight Street bank. One of the bank executives was pleased to lend the Oracle money, because he had just won a free trip to Hawaii for opening more accounts than any other bank in the state. Even Bill Graham, the rock impresario, with his reputation for realism and grouchiness, lent the Oracle $1,000. But after the first few issues the only outright donation we got was $5,000 from Peter Tork of the TV rock group, the Monkees. There was a karmic retribution to that contribution. My companion Laurie fell in love with Tork's business associate during an LSD trip, and on Christmas day drove away with him to LA in his Mercedes.
But by Oracle #8 we would be mostly self-sustaining. The paper was able to pay the rent and food costs for most of the staff, many of whom were living together in several small communes. We had started the paper printing 3000 copies and grew gradually to about 15,000 by Oracle #4. We jumped to 50,000 for #5, the Be-In issue, and grew to almost 125,000 by about Oracle #7. We estimated that five or more people read each issue, lifting circulation to over 500,000. We sent Oracles as far west as New Zealand, India and Vietnam (we would receive Vietnamese marijuana from soldiers in return) and as far east as Prague and Moscow hidden in the bottom of boxes of second-hand clothing.
Oracles were sold in the streets of San Francisco and Berkeley by Hippies for whom it was often the sole means of support. We let anyone take a free ten copies to sell in order to get a stake, and then buy more. The Oracle was the largest employer on the scene. We had a large worldwide subscription list, and backpackers and gypsies would buy as many as 100 to take back to their hometown.
Oracle Aesthetics
The Oracle would go from hand to hand and mind to mind in the evocative states unveiled by marijuana and LSD. It was a centering instrument for that intense, aesthetic, and expanded perceptual universe. To this day I meet people who tell me how they had seen an Oracle in some small town in West Virginia, or thereabouts. They attribute to that sighting of the Oracle their recognition that they were not alone on a dark planet in an empty universe. From that moment on they date the beginning of their journey toward self-realization.
To achieve the oracular effects we wanted we would give the text, whether prose or poetry, to artists and ask them to design a page for it, not merely to illustrate it, but to make an organic unity of the word and the image. Most of the artists would conceive and manifest their designs in a state of expanded awareness. Thus, the Oracle pages correspond to the methodology of the Thanka art of Tibet and Byzantine art in which artists established a visionary state of mind, through meditation, chanting, abstinence and/or prayer, and tried to convey that vision in their painting.
The perceivers of the art then could mount to that same elevation, and experience within their mind the same visionary state. So, looking at an Oracle could be a sort of occult trance experience communicated across the dimensions of space and time, through the tabloid medium, from one explorer of inner worlds to another. That was the magic, the fire, that spread from mind to mind with the Oracle. Motifs and techniques were universal -- from ancient Chinese spirals to Sci Fi. Wings, rays, auras, arabesques, swirls, unicorns, and centaurs, mandalas, collages, flying saucers and their inhabitants, op-art, flowers and paisley, nudes, feathers, and ghosted images were interwoven into a dazzling cross-cultural spectacle of multidimensional depth, pattern and flow.
Oracle #5: Human Be-In Issue
Oracle #5 established the basic format that the paper was to develop for the next seven issues. The front page announced the Human Be-In with a purple, ash covered saddhu (wandering Indian holy man) with three eyes and matted hair staring at the reader. This was our first color experiment with 8 pages in two shades of purple. The color pages were our rainbow brush and never were used to enhance advertising. The first four and last four pages and the center spread were the head, feet and spine of the Oracle and were used for major art work, articles and poetry. The center spread was used especially for a central theme or important poem, and always received a lavish design. Most of these principles of format had appeared in the previous issues, but were consciously solidified and enhanced in this issue. Our use of shaped text instead of straight columns appears here for the first time.
Another practice we had begun in Oracle #4, with the Leary press conference and the symposium of the "Six Professors in Search of the Obscene", was to print all interviews in full except for stuttering and repetition. This practice would prevent common newspaper terrors such as quoting out of context, downright misquoting, and a reporters subjectivity or political leaning from distorting the actual spoken word. All Oracle interviews were printed as they were spoken even if we had to continue them in small print to fit. The interested reader might have to squint, but what he read was everything that was said, warts and all.
By Oracle #5 we realized that in order to publish with the artistic and visionary quality we intended, we could not be bound to the everydayness of the tabloid format. We would be lucky to publish every six weeks. Even to meet that schedule, we would have to lift our binoculars to the prophetic horizon. From here on all resemblance to an ordinary newspaper were purely coincidental. We would not be co-opted by commercial interests and we would not add to the fear and anxiety in America. TV, newspapers and movies did a fine job on that end of the stick. The Oracle was now a journal of arts and letters for the expanded consciousness -- a tribal messenger from the inner to the outer world.
Oracle Politics
Though the Oracle staff didn't have a political program, we did feel that we were involved in a worldwide process of transformation that was part revolution and part renaissance. There was a mystique of youth that was based on the conception that the powers that ruled the world were decadent, corrupt and calcified. Therefore, the future was perceived as youths' responsibility to create and remold.
There was also a moral revulsion against modern technological civilization for its failure to regenerate the world according to the principles of economic justice and peace. Most of us wanted the conversion of the dying past to come about through a spiritual transformation that fostered the values of love, peace and compassion, and brought us back to simple earth-based tribal groups. The Oracle would be a vehicle for new and ancient models that were needed to guide these changes in consciousness and to reconstruct our world.
Some writers have seen an escapist gap between the Oracle's point of view and the anti-war movement, but the Oracle was as committed to the movement as anyone else. We emphasized the unity of political and transcendental ideals, and we had a preference for non-violence. The mass movement against the war had equal parts of LSD vision, marijuana sensory delight, political ideology and moral rage.
The purple saddhu cover of Oracle #5 was also used as one of the posters for the Human Be-In. The Oracle sponsored, announced and was given away free at the Be-In. We printed about 50,000 copies of this issue and from then on we would print over 100,000 of each issue. The cover was a composite work by Michael Bowen, Casey Sonnabend and Stanley Mouse.
The Transcendental Red Cross
Before the production of the sixth Oracle, we moved our offices to larger quarters in Michael Bowen's former flat on Haight Street just off Masonic. Bowen moved to Stinson Beach in West Marin. The Be-In media blitz had brought the Haight-Ashbury to the center of America's consciousness. The disaffected, the disenchanted, the mafia, the mad, the CIA, the FBI, the sociologists, poets, artists, American Indian shamans, East Indian Gurus, TV and movie crews, magazine and newspaper reporters from all over the world, and tourists riding through and staring at it all descended on the tiny street called Haight. It was a monumental traffic jam on all levels.
The Oracle kept its new offices open 24 hours a day. We had a day crew who were mostly engaged in producing the Oracle, and a night crew who were a multi-purpose transcendental Red Cross. They fed the hungry out of a giant pot of rice and beans, eased down and straightened out the bad trippers, and gave impromptu seminars in cosmic consciousness for the heads, the FBI, and the undercover cops who wandered through.
The night crew was chosen to be guides and nurses to the mind hurricane that blew through our open door. Twenty or thirty people a night were fed by Jim Cook, a Big Sur mountain man and peyote eater. Alan Williams, a painter, sculptor and yogi painted an eight foot high mural of the new Adam and the new Eve, muscular and naked, on the kitchen wall. Alan and Jim and others would spread a non-stop rap of cosmic love and cosmic dust from dusk to dawn. They were healers and tricksters who could help people kick methedrine and heroin, turn bad trips into ecstasy, and give comfort to the confused and lonely.
Hard Drugs
The presence, use and abuse of methedrine and heroin soon became a problem in the Haight. Methedrine caused anxiety and paranoia and severe depression during the comedown. It was known to be a brain cell destroyer in whose wake violence often erupted. We looked upon heroin as an anti-consciousness drug, because its addictive properties and expense would turn a person away from his goodness for the sake of his habit. In the Haight a heroin addict might steal your hi-fi, forge your check, and most frequently steal the drugs or the money in a marijuana or LSD deal.
Most of us felt that there were drugs that were positive, therapeutic, and physically harmless, and drugs that were harmful to the human body and/or mind. Generally, we thought, as shared victims of the legal prohibition against drugs, that all drugs should be decriminalized, and addiction treated as a medical problem.
At the Oracle we decided that we had to get the worst cases of psychotic breaks and drug abuse out of the increasing pressure of urban life. In late spring of 1967 Amelia Newell donated the use of 30 or 40 acres, and what was known as the Stone House near Gorda, a tiny town just south of Big Sur, for an Oracle retreat.
Jim Cook and Alan Williams went there to keep the action flowing. We sent people there every weekend in a truck along with 100 pound bags of brown rice, beans and vegetables. At times there were 100 people at Gorda recovering and recuperating, taking LSD and peyote, drumming and dancing around nightfires, meditating and hiking in the Big Sur wilderness. It was a free pre-Esalen experience for those who really needed it.
The retreat functioned well for about nine months until early '68 when a young man came through with a rifle, took LSD, and shot a neighbor's cow that in his hallucination was turning into some unruly beast. Then the Highway Patrol with cars, motorcycles, and helicopters descended on this Haight-Ashbury extension, hostel, and dry dock, sending 100 hippies scurrying into the hills in the nick of time. Amelia Newell, who was innocent of everything but a charitable heart, went to court, and had to make restitution for the cow.
The Rainbow Unveiled
In the meantime 100 miles North in San Francisco we were creating Oracle #6. We switched our printer from Waller Press to a multi-web newspaper press at Howard Quinn Printers. Because of the size of the press we could expand our use of color. We would print the paper on Sundays and the printers would allow our staff artists, Hetti McGee and Ami Magill, to use the press like a paintbrush. Our first experiment was to divide the ink fountain of a web into three compartments with metal dividers and wooden blocks, put a different color ink into each compartment, and run a rainbow over eight pages of Oracle #6. Thus the dream I had in the Spring of 1966 envisioning a rainbow newspaper being read all over the world became a reality.
We soon discovered that, where two colors came together in the fountain, the inks would blend to make a third color. When we had blue and yellow in adjacent compartments, they would seep beneath the dividers during the run and produce a strip of green on the image. We devised ways of controlling this fortuitous accident that enabled us to put five colors on a page, but with the drawback of having only stripes of color.
Although the records have disappeared, I think we wanted to produce 60-75 thousand copies of Oracle #6, but we didn't have enough money for such a big printing. We printed as many as we could pay for, sold them, collected our advertising money, and then came back on subsequent Sundays to print more. In the interim we could make changes in colors, and even in content. So Oracle #6 has at least three different printings that I have found, and the next six issues have two or more different printings.
Because there were so many webs, we could also separate parts of the image and run them in different colors. Therefore one image could have both a split fountain and separated colors that were printed in a specific part of the image. This gave us the potential for six or more colors on a page, and more control of where some of the colors would be placed. The manipulation of this palette on a press that was usually used for supermarket advertisements, was the unique signature of the Oracle. There was even a dynamic of change in each colored page as our artists mixed and blended inks in the fountains. To top it off, as a special talisman, we would sometimes spray the papers with Jasmine perfume when they came off the press.
Oracle #6: The Aquarian
Oracle #6 was our first theme issue. In our theme issues we would try to present various aspects of a theme but never all sides of a theme. We weren't interested in a pro or con presentation. We presented a theme because there was a consensus of interest in the community and on the editorial staff. Actually the editorial meetings included everyone -- editorial and art staff, secretaries, circulation and business people, invited guests and anyone who happened in the door. We felt that if the flow brought a person there, they were meant to be there. Therefore they were also allowed to vote on whatever issue was being decided. We thought of these guests and drop-ins as representatives of the rest of the world.
The Aquarian Age Astrologers
The theme of Oracle #6 was an astrological speculation on the Aquarian Age. Three astrologers presented their views on what the Aquarian Age meant, and whether we were in it, or approaching it. A member of our staff quipped that the Aquarian Age had arrived, lasted six months, and we were now in the Age of Capricorn. The cover was the symbol of the Aquarian Age drawn by Rick Griffin, and the back cover was the feminine representation of the Aquarian Age drawn by Ida Griffin.
The three astrologers were Gayla, Ambrose Hollingsworth, and Gavin Arthur.
Gayla was the pen name of Rosalind Sharpe Wall. She was a medium and astrologer, who had received the New Aquarian Tarot Deck through the Ouija Board and automatic writing. The Oracle introduced the New Aquarian Tarot in issue #9.
Rosalind claimed to possess the psychic capability of clairvoyance. When she was a teenager, she saw people's auras and much to their dismay diagnosed their illnesses and their psychological problems. During WWII she worked on America's first rocket project. One day while lunching with admirals who were expressing consternation at having to fight the Japanese on their home islands and in China, she foresaw and told them that a secret weapon being developed would forestall extended combat and end the war quickly. Later she met John Cooke and began working on the Aquarian Tarot Deck.
Ambrose Hollingsworth was a young man in his thirties, who used a wheelchair due to paralysis caused by an auto accident. He had been a writer in Greenwich Village and North Beach, and had participated in many artistic circles during the 50s and 60s. He claimed to be an initiate in an occult group called The Brotherhood of Light and had begun a school of the occult in Marin called the Six Day School. Ambrose had astrologically chosen the date of January 14, 1967 as the most propitious date for the Human Be-In.
Ecstatic Isolation and Incarnation
Methamphetamine was the crack-cocaine of the 60s. When injected it produces a flash high and a long stimulation effect that gives the sense of a godlike mental acuity. It was invented by the Nazis in the 30s, and used by Hitler, his associates, and the SS. It causes brain cell damage and depression. The user can't sleep and wants to use it again. A typical user might have gone without sleep for days. In Oracle #4 we had published an article by Dr. Joel Fort on the possibility of a therapeutic cure for this addiction, "Methedrine Use and Abuse in San Francisco". This article by Kent Chapman was a lyrical confession after three years of methamphetamine abuse. It was originally a letter to Michael Murphy of Esalen Institute:
I have been at a standstill in my flesh as a person incarnated. . . . For me hell was the ecstasy that rots teeth and person. I didn't live in the seasons of the sun but in the changes of my metabolism.
Tom Weir Photo -- Lovers
Although there were many spiritual paths being explored and invented in the Haight, the preponderant view favored an intense sensuousness. Experiences with both LSD and marijuana seemed to unveil a world of sensory splendor and spiritual depth that had been absent from most people's Judeo-Christian expectations. Our religions, philosophies and social conditioning had not prepared us to experience such things as the whole planet being one living and breathing organism with our own beings melting into it, or every atom of our bodies merging with our sexual partners' body and experiencing their thoughts as ours, as if there weren't two different beings, or seeing God or gods and talking to them, or realizing that you and every one else was God. Because of these kinds of visions, there began a search through the literature and religions of the world for guide posts and maps for these ancient journeys.
One of the most generally preferred and admired spiritual paths was Mahayana Buddhism (from which Zen developed). It teaches that the experience of the Void, or God, or the greatest Bliss is a unified field identical with our everyday experience of the material world. When the veil of separateness lifts, and we experience reality without the interference of egotism, desire and its consequent suffering, and without the shadow of concepts, the blending of the material and spiritual fills every instant with wonder. The Mahayana ideal of the Bodhisattva, who achieves enlightenment, but returns to the world to compassionately serve humanity, appealed to the spiritual seekers of the Haight.
Hinduism, also, has a sensuous and sexual school of thought and practice called Tantra that influenced those who felt that the body and the soul, and the material and spiritual worlds could be yoked together in an ecstatic union. The word "LOVE" was a symbol or code for these ideas, mystical experiences, and practices. "LOVE" was the universal principle merging all and everything into an ecstatic unity. Thus the phrase often used by Hippies, "it's all love", had a more precise meaning than was generally understood.
Tom Weir's full page photo-montage of a couple making love with multiple sets of arms and legs in motion, and in issue #7 Paul Kagan's "Yab-Yum" epitomized the Oracle's dedication to this ideal of the unity of body and soul.
Dr. Mota's Medicine Show Bus
John Phillips' drawing of the broken down bus that resembles an old medicine show wagon with signs all over it saying, "Cannabis Cure All, Cactus Therapy, Peyote Practice, Nature's Chemicals, etc." was a representation of the general attitude toward drugs, particularly natural drugs, but including LSD. These drugs were seen as medicines for the sick spirit of western civilization that was suffering from the disease of alienation, and the domination and destruction of nature. Our psyches also were sick with alienation, bound in the nutshell of the Ego, and cut off from the repressed, personal and collective unconscious.
These medicines allowed us to experience the depths of the unconscious, intensified our sensory delight in nature, and aided the integration of the severed psyche. Visions of gods in all their forms and ecstasies were being experienced widely. An awareness that humanity was able to reach a potential fulfillment -- a world at peace, human relations based on love, and communities based on compassion -- drove this whole generation to its mostly non-violent battle against the war in Vietnam.
The Underground Press Syndicate
Many major American cities now had underground papers. Most of them were political, or had originated as a political response to the war in Vietnam, but some, like the Seed in Chicago and EVO in New York, had begun to introduce cultural and aesthetic innovations similar to the Oracle. The papers tended to bind communities in rebellion together using passionate advocacy and direct coverage of movement plans, debates and demonstrations. Through these papers the war against the war progressed and the new world we felt would replace the old world of imperialism, materialism and privilege was being envisioned and defined.
The growth of underground newspapers was mushrooming. Every major city, most universities or university towns, and many high schools would have underground or alternative papers over the next five years. These papers were a training ground for the creative people in each community. Writers, artists, cartoonists, and poets could publish their work in these open fields of opportunity and communicate with their peers. In the spring of 1967 there were about 20 papers through which a vision of a political and cultural rebellion began to focus.
The political rebellion that was radical with an extreme democratic openness, mistrustful and independent of political parties or dogmas, anti-authority and non-hierarchical, generally non-violent, and dedicated to the values of equality, justice and peace, had been forged in the Civil Rights struggle, the S.D.S. Port Huron Statement, the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley and the beginning of the anti-war movement.
The cultural rebellion that was anti-materialist, idealistic, anarchistic, surreal, Dionysian and transcendental had been birthed through the Beat literary explosion, the Leary LSD experiments at Harvard, rock and roll music, the Haight-Ashbury Renaissance and the Human Be-In. This two headed rebellion was now the greatest threat to the American status quo since the Depression.
The Tribal Messenger Service
The Oracle staff, motivated by Ron Thelin's vision of a nationwide "tribal messenger service", decided to host an underground press conference. We invited all the papers that were already loosely allied as the Underground Press Syndicate. We also wanted to show the editors how to adapt the innovations we were making in the Oracle, and expose them to the burgeoning Haight-Ashbury community that was then at its peak of creativity, and spontaneous interactive compassion.
The first UPS conference was held at Michael Bowen's house on Stinson Beach, and the Oracle's offices during Easter, 1967. Some of the participants included Art Kunkin of the L.A. Free Press, Allan Katzman and Walter Bowart of the East Village Other (EVO), Max Scheer of the Berkeley Barb, and representatives of Detroit's Fifth Estate, Chicago's Seed, Mendocino's Illustrated Paper, Austin's Rag and a few other papers.
We had invited Rolling Thunder, a Cherokee medicine man, to talk about the plight of the American Indian in the face of yet another legislative attack on Indian treaty rights. He also affirmed what had become the hippie creation myth -- that hippies were reincarnated Indians returned to bring the American land and peoples back to traditional tribal ways.
Some of the Diggers including Peter and Judy Berg and Chester Anderson barged uninvited into the conference with the intention of exposing our elitism, and to make their case for the underground press to write about feeding and housing the hundreds of thousands of kids, who were about to break loose from home and social expectation in order to adopt the life of rebellion, free love, and LSD visions.
The U.P.S. Mission
Several important and practical decisions were made during the beach walks, tripping, hippie sight-seeing and vegetarian meals. The basic principle of article sharing without copyright infringement was adopted along with the sharing of subscription lists. It was also agreed that EVO in New York should explore the selling of national advertising which, then, would be printed in all participating underground press papers. This was seen as a way of securing much needed advertising revenue for member papers. There was, of course, some argument about the potential of selling out by taking corporate ads, but it was reasoned that ads for products like rock records or books would further undermine the corporate state. Furthermore, each paper would have a choice whether to run an ad or not. It eventually turned out that the advertisers were unreliable or late payers and little was gained from this financial gambit.
The major accomplishment of the conference was the reinforcement of the mission we all shared, whether our emphasis was psychedelic/cultural or political. We were creating, maintaining and informing a new international community which would ultimately replace the crumbling status quo. A UPS statement of purpose was agreed upon:
To warn the "civilized world" of its impending collapse, through communications among aware communities outside the establishment and by attracting the attention of the mass media.
To note and chronicle events leading to the collapse.
To advise intelligently to prevent rapid collapse and make transition possible.
To prepare the American public for the wilderness.
To fight a holding action in the dying cities.
This statement indicates clearly the apocalyptic feeling of the time. Even the war seemed to us to be a symptom or symbol of the general fall of the American civilization.
Notes on the San Francisco Oracle, Part 2
