The Subtle Body

How does the soul relate to the body? Through the ages many religions and intellectual movements have posed answers to this question. Many have gravitated to the notion of the subtle body, positing some kind of subtle entity that is neither soul nor body, but some mixture of the two. This book traces the history of this idea from the late Roman Empire to the present day, touching on how philosophers, wizards, scholars, occultists, psychologists, and mystics have engaged with the idea over the past two thousand years. The book begins in the late Roman Empire, moving chronologically through the Renaissance, the British project of colonial Indology, the development of theosophy and occultism in the nineteenth century, and the Euro-American counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.

Bonnie and Clyde and the Aural Imagination of American Counterculture

Bonnie and Clyde’s soundtrack dramatizes a conflict between historicity and the temporal immediacy of lived experience. The film’s sound design offers a self-reflexive meditation on the photo- and phonographic capturing of human presence through mechanical mediation. This capturing, the author argues, functions as a metaphor for historical narrativity, a confining discourse to which the film seeks alternatives through a stylistic language drawing upon both visceral realism and ephemeral abstraction. Bonnie and Clyde’s unique bluegrass pop score extends the soundtrack’s larger concern with sensory immersion and mechanized, alienating distance, allowing the film to acquire a countercultural cachet suggestive of the “Happening,” a concept from avant-garde art that was broadly appropriated as a way of understanding of the popular zeitgeist.

Profane Illuminations: Robert Anton Wilson’s Hedonic Ascesis

The writer Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) played a significant intellectual role in the American counterculture in the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Drawing from a wide range of discourses, as well as his own occultural fictions and personal experiments in “hedonic engineering,” Wilson presented a pluralistic view of reality that combined a pragmatic skepticism with a creative and esoteric embrace of the “meta-programming” possibilities of altered states of consciousness. In his 1975 Illuminatus! trilogy, written with Robert Shea, Wilson wove anarchist, psychedelic, and occult themes into a prophetic conspiracy fiction written with a satiric and willfully pulp sensibility. Ritually experimenting with psychedelic drugs and sexual magic – experiences related in his 1977 book Cosmic Trigger – Wilson developed a wayward if deeply self-reflexive theory and dialectical method of visionary practice, one that, amidst the paranoia, presented its own deconstructive and libertarian vision of gnosis. This essay contextualizes and unpacks Wilson’s visionary pragmatism in terms of Foucault’s roughly contemporaneous notion of “technologies of self,” later elaborated by Peter Sloterdijk as “anthropotechnics.” It also traces the specific debts that Wilson owed to other esoteric and psychedelic technologists of the self, including Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, and John Lilly.

On the Road

Chapter One explores Robert Crumb’s discovery of Beat literature and the ways the emerging American counterculture became a primary influence on his own artistic and intellectual development. Crumb’s friend Marty Pahls was significant in turning Crumb on to the Beat writers. Crumb created portraits of Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac. Crumb also became fascinated by Buddhism and Hinduism. The Beats’ spiritual quest reflected Crumb’s own desire to find alternatives to Western monotheistic religion. His character Mr. Natural bears several similarities to a Zen teacher, and Zen Buddhist themes will reappear throughout Crumb’s career, for example in his The Zen Teachings of Huang Po. The chapter concludes with a discussion of another author Crumb also greatly admired who is sometimes associated with the Beat movement, Charles Bukowski. Crumb contributed his drawings to several Bukowski books, bringing out themes of alienation which Crumb experienced frequently in his own life.