Entheogens for Good and Evil

Probably most people who have taken MDMA (Ecstasy, Adam) have felt that it can be a very “psychological” entheogen, enabling you to look at your thoughts in a dispassionate and sort of therapeutic way. Now a new study shows that it can be useful in treating war veterans with post-traumatic stress syndrome for that very reason.

“The feeling I got was nothing at all for 45 minutes, then really bad anxiety, and I was fighting it at first,” said Anthony, the Iraq veteran, who patrolled southwest of Baghdad in 2006 and 2007 amid relentless insurgent harassment and attacks with improvised explosive devices. “And then — I don’t know how to put it, exactly — I felt O.K. and messed up at the same time. Clear. It was almost like I could go into any thought I wanted and fix it.”For instance, he could think and talk about an attack that occurred in a town near Baghdad, in which Iraqis posing as allies — and who had been armed by the American military — turned their guns on American troops, killing several. The unit could not quickly evacuate its wounded because of weather conditions. Anthony’s rage and grief were so overwhelming that he had to suppress them and did so for years.

On the other hand, entheogens administered to unsuspecting people can be destructive, something the Central Intelligence Agency learned in 1953. That death, of a government researcher, is news again because his family is suing the CIA for causing it, claiming that it was murder, not drug-induced suicide.

For more on the Cold War use of LSD as a “secret weapon,” read Jay Stevens’ Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream.

When Esotericists Were Really Underground

A 250-year-old ciphered manuscript is deciphered and turns out to have been created by a Masonic-type fraternity.

Hundreds of thousands of Europeans belonged to secret societies in the 18th century, Önnerfors explained to Megyesi; in Sweden alone, there were more than a hundred orders. Though they were clandestine, they were often remarkably inclusive. Many welcomed noblemen and merchants alike—a rare egalitarian practice in an era of strict social hierarchies. That made the orders dangerous to the state. They also frequently didn’t care about their adherents’ Christian denomination, making these orders—especially the biggest of them, Freemasonry—an implicit threat to the authority of the Catholic Church. In 1738 Pope Clement XII forbade all Catholics from joining a Masonic lodge. Others implied that the male-only groups might be hotbeds of sodomy. Not long after, rumors started that members of these orders actually worshipped the devil.

These societies were the incubators of democracy, modern science, and ecumenical religion. They elected their own leaders and drew up constitutions to govern their operations. It wasn’t an accident that Voltaire, George Washington, and Ben Franklin were all active members. And just like today’s networked radicals, much of their power was wrapped up in their ability to stay anonymous and keep their communications secret.

It’s a strange, complex story — were the “outsiders” actually the “insiders” pretending otherwise?

(Hat tip to Grant Cunningham.)

Some Snapshots of the Shifts in Higher Ed

A cluster of related articles on higher education.

1. From Washington Monthly: why states are funding higher ed less.

State support comes out of taxes. When the economy goes bad, states collect less money in taxes. States, however, are legally required to fund certain things. Pension plans, for instance, are usually not things the governor can simply reduce or cut one year. He has to pay for them. To a certain extent this makes sense, but it can be devastating for other items in the state budget.

2. A longer Washington Monthly piece on how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are seeking to make money off higher education, if they can just find the right key.

So the VC guys and the start-ups look at K-12 and higher education, which between them cost over $1 trillion per year in America, and much more around the world. They see businesses that are organized around communication between people and the exchange of information [like Facebook], two things that are increasingly happening over the Internet. Right now, nearly all of that communication and exchange happens on physical platforms—schools and colleges—that were built a long time ago. A huge amount of money is tied up in labor and business arrangements that depend on things staying that way. How likely are they to stay that way, in the long term? Sure, there are a ton of regulatory protections and political complications tied up in the fact that most education is funded by the taxpayer. As always, the timing would be difficult, and there is as much risk in being too early as too late.

Still, $1 trillion, just sitting there. And how much does it cost for a firm like Learn Capital to invest in a few people sitting around a table with their MacBook Airs? That’s a cheap lottery ticket with a huge potential jackpot waiting for whomever backs the winning education platform.

3. Meanwhile, the Community College Dean, of the blog with the same name, thinks about the “Big Sort,” where educated people from top-tier schools marry each other and cluster in certain places, and the “two-body problem” in academia. But mostly he wonders what the future role of community colleges will be.

 Community colleges, by dint of the “community” part, are tied to particular places.  As those places become more polarized, and as instruction becomes more removed from those places, some of the baseline assumptions of the colleges come into question.

A Day and a Night in Occult Chicago

A statue of the goddess Ceres tops the Chicago Board of Trade building, as seen from a classroom building at DePaul University.

For the third time in four years, we had a pre-conference event that tied into Pagan studies somehow. (Previously: Montréal, San Francisco.)

This was the Occult Chicago conference organized by Jason Winslade at DePaul University—his take on “Chicago Quarter,” an urban orientation class that all first-year DePaul students must take.

Imagine a bright new student who, however, does not know a Theosophist from a Chicago Bear. Suddenly she (who maybe just took this section because it fit her schedule) finds herself immersed in a world yogis, magicians, witches, astrologers, hucksters, publishers, and — this being Chicago — architecture.

Jason Winslade (black cap) points out the location of the former Chicago Masonic Temple on State Street, accompanied by “Occult Chicago” blogger Rik Garrett, right.

Those of us who attended the one-day version (see also Jason Pitzl-Waters’ review) heard some of the students’ capstone presentations, learned that the first skyscraper in Chicago was built by the Freemasons, listened to representatives of contemporary magical groups, and visited sites and building associated with occult organizations, hauntings, violent deaths, and publishing houses.

Mural on the tenth floor of the Fine Arts Building, Michigan Avenue, Chicago.

One highlight was the Fine Arts Building, 410 S. Michigan Ave., where at one time the Thelemite Choronzon Club held its meetings and the Akbar Lodge of Theosophists had its office.

The Pookah (right)  and friends pursue the skeptical German professor in a Terra Mysterium skit.

Finally came a performance by the Terra Mysterium steampunk theatre troupe. You might think that a classroom would not make the best performance space, but the performance was laced with academic parody, so it worked.

What Happened to Ufology?

When people are still talking and writing books about the Roswell Incident more than sixty years after it happened, you have to wonder if the air has leaked out of ufology.
In Britain, the Telegraph reports,

Dozens of groups interested in the flying saucers and other unidentified craft have already closed because of lack of interest and next week one of the country’s foremost organisations involved in UFO research is holding a conference to discuss whether the subject has any future.

Back in the late 1940s–1960s, I think that there was a sense of movement: first the sightings of unknown “spacecraft.” Then visual sightings plus effects, such as burnt spots on the ground. Then sightings of aliens themselves (following J. Allen Hynek’s classification scheme).

Surely the truth would be learned soon, whether the aliens were benevolent or whether they were not and Earthlings had to overcome their political differences and fight for planetary survival.

But no.

Me, I am of the Jacques Vallée school: They have always been here, living “inside the walls.”

Settling Publishing Issues at the AAR

Trudging through McCormick Place

To complete your quest, you need an elf, a dwarf, a hobbit …

I am sleeping a lot these days, recovering from this year’s American Academy of Religion meeting, held in Chicago’s monstrous McCormick Place convention center. Beware of any architect who designates parts of buildings as a “grand concourse.” That translates as “huge useless spaces that you have to walk back and forth through to get to the important stuff.”

This was the most “businesslike” of all AAR meetings that I have attended. I barely even saw the book exhibit—quite a change from years when I examined every publisher’s booth carefully (unless it was something like IVP or Zondervan) because I had no one to talk to. Now I have to write to all sorts of people with whom I should have liked to have a fuller conversation.

Important publishing news in Pagan studies and Western esotericism: the merger (which I had not discussed) here between Equinox Publishing and Acumen.

Now they are de-merged. It feels like a divorce, with the authors and series editors as the minor children who are assigned to the custody of one parent or the other.

As part of the agreement, certain religious-studies books that were already in production, including one that I spent all spring and summer on copyediting and typesetting, have been assigned to Acumen.

But a number of series editors — including Nikki Bado and me for the series originally called Equinox Studies in Historical and Contemporary Paganism — are moving their series back to Equinox as originally contracted. It’s as though the kid said, “No, I want to go live with Mom. And I will.”

As for The Pomegranate, the editorial pipeline is finally moving, and I anticipate another issue coming out soon. That has been on my mind a lot.

After being in editorial limbo for a few weeks, it was good to get these issues straightened out.

D&D in Ptolemaic Egypt

What were they doing with 20-sided dice? Here is one speculation:

The symbols for eta, theta, and epsilon can be clearly seen. Maybe it was used to determine which frat the ancients were going to pledge, but I’d like to think it was used to roll for hit points for warrior and sphinx classes. Now all we need is for someone to 3D-model this so we can print it out and make up our own ancient Egyptian version of D&D.

I suspect some kind of divination tool myself.

Just a Small Town Ghost Story

An old house in a small town in eastern North Dakota.

The house was once a boarding house for railroad workers, so I am told, as well a private home through the second half of the twentieth century and so far in the twenty-first.

When I go grouse and duck-hunting with my friend G., who has lived there for the decade past, I usually sleep in the enclosed front porch, which is about 8 x 12 feet in size. That room contains a single bed, a desk and chair, a lamp, and a disassembled bookcase — nothing more. (I like that room because I can take my dog outside easily.)

In 2011, I left for the 1,000-mile drive home, went about five miles down North Dakota 200, and wondered where my cell phone was. I stopped the truck and looked — no phone. I went back and with G.’s help searched the 8 x 12 room and the lawn between the front door and where I parked.

“Clarence must have taken it,” he said.

Once home, I went through the truck like a drug agent looking for contraband. No telephone. Nor did it ever appear at G.’s house.

This year, my fifth visit to the house, I kept a close watch on my telephone, and it came home with me safely.

But then I walked into my temporary bedroom and smelled cigarette smoke—a strong smell, as though someone had just finished their cigarette in the little room.

I asked G. about it. He was blasé. He had smelled it, his wife had smelled it, his teenage stepkids had smelled it. (No one in the family smoked cigarettes.)

And I smelled it four or five times more, at odd intervals, not connected with time of day or humidity or anything like that.

G. attributes it to one Clarence Bolz, who owned the house a couple of decades ago. Mostly he haunts the workshop attached to the garage, G. said. Small items sometimes disappear, and now and again G. smells Clarence’s cigarettes.

Such a ghost story would be too minor even for Fate magazine’s reader-submissions column. But it was the first smell-linked haunting that I had encountered.

The ‘Occult Chicago’ Event

Looking forward to this event a lot. It should fortify me for the hard business of a confrontation with a certain publisher’s editorial director.

And keep an eye on Rik Garrett’s Occult Chicago blog. Why don’t you start one for your town?

Gandalf Style?


No, you can’t fool me. This is just Oberon Zell on his way to the supermarket in Santa Rosa.