by Johnny Satan
there is no truth in him at all;
when he lies
he is drawing on his own store,
because he is a liar, and the father of lies.
Very little seems to be known of the early life of Charles Manson.
Given his casual parentage, however, it is not unreasonable to suppose that he was unlikely to hve been well disposed towards the corrupt establishment which likes to think of itself as representing the forces of law and order. In any case he was sentenced at the age of sixteen for stealing a vehicle after ‘doing time’ in various correctional institutions and reformatories for boys. After a brief period and a move to Los Angeles from his native state of Utah, he was arrested and incarcerated once again on a charge of stealing a car. Until 1966 he had spent most of his life in jail with only brief periods of liberty.
He was already what is known as a hardened criminal and a poor risk for probation. Stealing cars seems to have had a peculiar fascination for him, but he was also found guilty of possessing marijuana (a ‘crime’ of which few young citizens of the United States are innocent nowadays), of forging cheques and driving licences, and of rape.
Prison life is not conducive to sexual purity and it is scarcely surprising that this slight and strangely attractive boy became the object of the sexual interest of the more virile young prisoners who, if we are to believe subsequent accounts, did not stop short of sodomy. Whether, even at this stage, he attached a mystical significance to what one of his ‘Family’ was to describe in court as a ‘total experience’, we do not know. So far as we do know, however, once he had left prison he confined his sexual activity entirely to girls.
This seems odd, but, given Charlie’s philosophy, there does seem to be a reasonable explanation. The ‘total experience’ means total submission to even the most violent onslaughts of your sexual partner in which the passive participant experiences the annihilation of his or her ego. The opposite of total submission is total domination, and Charlie’s switch from the passive to the active role is his own form of sexual magic, which would explain, at least in part, his subsequent will to power and the absolute loyalty and devotion he inspired in his young female ‘children’, who did not hesitate to commit atrociously cruel murders at his behest.
His real hatred of the American establishment was nothing extraordinary. Indeed it was not only natural to a young criminal but also highly fashionable among the educated young, as we all know.
This attitude comes out with all desirable clarity in the written statement he made at the trial. (Whether the statement is genuine or a forgery is immaterial: the contents seem so utterly typical of Manson’s attitude to life.) Let him speak in his own words:
‘I am not allowed to be a man in your society. I am considered inadequate and incompetant [sic] to speak or defend myself in your court. You have created the monster. I am not of you, from you, nor do I condone your wars or your unjust attitudes towards things, animals and people that you won’t try to understand. I haved [sic] Xed myself [sc. cut myself off] from your world. I stand in the opposite to what you do and what you have done in the past. You have never given me the constitution you speak of. The words you have used to trick the people are not mine. I do not accept what you call justice. The lie you live in is faing and I am not part of it. You use the word God to make money.
‘...You make fun of God and have murdered the world in the name of Jesus Christ. I stand with my X [cross? – during the trial his forehead was marked with a St Andrew’s cross], with my love, with my god and by myself. My faith in me is stronger than all your armies, governments, gas chambers or anything you may want to do to me ... Love is my judge. I have my own constitution; its [ sic] inside me.
‘No man or lawyer is speaking for me. I speak for myself. I am not allowed to speak with words so I have spoken with the mark I will be wearing on my forehead [i.e. the cross]. Many US citizens are marked and don’t know it. You won’t let them come from under your foot. But God is moving. Moving, and I am a witness.’
The words are the words of Charles Manson but the tone of stern rebuke directed at a corrupt and self satisfied élite we have heard before:
‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You who shut up the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces, neither going in yourselves nor aowing others to go in who want to.’
Charles Manson has been described as a paranoiac – a nice blanket word meaning more or less anything that is not mediocre and conformist. He was well aware of this but equated it with ‘total awareness’. Describing the habits of the coyote, he says: ‘He’s always in a state of total paranoia and total paranoia is total awareness.’ Paranoiac or not, there is nothing feigned about his hatred of a violent, clockwork society. Many of the men he knew – and there were plenty of them among the Satan Slaves, Straight Satans, Gypsy Jokers and other ‘bikers’ of his acquaintance – had vivid memories of war in the raw in Vietnam. As someone closely connected with the trial is aeged to have put it (and, if so, he put it well):
‘You take a boy from a middle class family, brought up to respect God and the flag, put him into the army and he's soon sighting down that barrel, pulling the trigger and murdering people without any sense of guilt. A few of them never become accustomed to it, but most do.' This is what the US establishment was responsible for, and Manson must have seen himself as the divinely appointed agent of the wrath of God. One can imagine the familiar words running through his head: ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth', and ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay'. He did, and he did it ruthlessly and without remorse: and he taught others how to do the same. He made them happy. ‘It was fun,' said Tex Watson after the so called Tate murders in which five human beings were stabbed and gunned to death, including the actress Sharon Tate, heavy with child and pleading for the new life within her. What a hope! They left her to the last so that she could see the butchery of her friends and then sliced her up in her turn. ‘It was fun.' Or, in the words of Susan Atkins, the most savage as well as the most devoted of Charlie's Family: ‘It felt so good, the first time I stabbed her.' ‘Charlie was happy.' He had done his duty, in however small a way, to avenge the crimes of a rotten clockwork government that was daily guilty of mass murder in the bombing of North Vietnam. During the trial the President of the United States himself, ‘Tricky Dick' as he was once called, thought fit to prejudge the issue by himself declaring that Charles Manson was guilty. Charlie's riposte must have reflected the thoughts of thousands of young Americans. ‘Here is a man', he is reported to have said, ‘who is accused of hundreds of thousands of murders, accusing me.'
One of the most shocking things about the Manson murders was that they appeared to have been perpetrated at random. So they were, but so too was the bombing of North Vietnam. But the murders organized by Charlie were ‘at random’ only within a given context, and the context was that of what he called ‘rich pigs’, the spoiled, doped, bored, rich set that infects Hollywood, perfectly happy to relish violence on the screen but considerably less than happy when it is practised on themselves. Charlie did not like people rich enough to enjoy the fruitless luxury of having a daily appointment with their psychiatrist, as did Miss Abigail Folger, one of his victims, nor did he like ‘rich young ladies in search of truth’. He is not alone in this respect.
Charles Manson saw himself as pitted against a ruthless mechanical society. What choice had he, then, but to mechanize-dehumanize-himself? A human being is the ‘mean' between the extremes of the machine and the deity, I am sure Aristotle would have said, had he been alive today. But who can tell the difference?
Do the whirling dervishes, for instance, gyrating around their sheikh, really taste divinity, or are they merely reducing themselves to the clockwork regularity of a machine? Whatever the explanation may be, one of the rituals of the Family was the ‘chop stab' dance in which they danced round in a circle flicking their knives or attacking ‘trees, rocks and one another' with them. According to the ancients, includin
g Aristotle, circular motion is the most perfect form of motion-perhaps also the most perfectly mechanical one. Charlie danced, And ‘when Charlie danced, everyone else left the floor', He was ‘like fire, a raw explosion, a mechanical toy that suddenly went crazy.'
I am a mechanical boy,
I am my mother’s boy.
So went one of his songs. Did it mean anything? Almost certainly it did, for by deliberately dehumanizing himself he knew that he must become either a god or a machine, both of which have this in common – they are beyond good and evil.
There are many ways of passing beyond good and evil; the general verdict at the time was that the whole grisly business was due to drugs.
‘This’, a commentator said, ‘will be remembered as the first of the acid murders; our changing social structure is making more people turn on and we’re on the brink of a whole new concept of violence ... violence perpetrated against society by people who have reached a different plateau of reality through LSD.’
‘You know,' he added earnestly, ‘this acid thing has been around for a long time. I've taken acid, back when it was fashionable for so called intellectuals to try it. It really works. It moves you on to another level of awareness ... It really does turn you on.' In other words LSD, plus a burning indignation against an unjust and increasingly mechanized society, produces Manson, who is not just himself but a sign post to the future. His threats were not empty threats, nor was his vision of the world to come in any way absurd, as subsequent LSD cum Eastern mysticism murders in the USA have shown.
'You have created the monster,’ he roundly accused them, ‘I am not of you, from you, nor do I condone your wars or your unjust attitudes towards things, animals and people that you won’t try to understand.’
So much for the condemnation. Now for the prophecy:
‘You see, you can send me to the penitentiary; it’s not a big thing. I’ve been there all my life anyway. What about your children, just a few, there is many, many more coming in the same direction; they are running in the streets and they are coming right at you.’
Here Charlie is speaking at the human level of awareness – for him the lowest; and it is at this level that he speaks towards the end of the trial: ‘I am a human being. I am going to fight for my life one way or another.’ And it is on the same level, presumably, that he adds, addressing the judge: ‘In the name of Christian justice ... someone should cut your head off.’
There is an Arabic proverb, attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, which says ‘Die before you die', and there is a similar Zen Buddhist saying: ‘Die while alive, and be completely dead.'
Charles Manson was, at this stage of the trial, obviously very much alive and not dead at all. This seems all wrong since his whole philosophy (which was derived from some very weird and sinister occult sects, influenced directly or indirectly by Aleister Crowley, which were then very active in Los Angeles) was that one had to kill one's ego in order to live the true ego less life in which all things are seen as One. This is his second level of awareness. Charles Manson had claimed to be Jesus Christ, but he was also much influenced by Indian ideas which filtered through to him through such sects as OTO, ‘The Process', and ‘The Fountain of the World'. From these ultimately Indian sources he derived the theory of reincarnation and karma (the inexorable law according to which, that which you sow, that you shall reap) and the practice of vegetarianism and teetotalism (drugs, of course, were quite another thing). But none of these things were essential to the Indian religious tradition. They are the outward signs only: Charles Manson was more deeply involved with the inner core.
The end and goal of both Hinduism and Buddhism is to pass into a form of existence in which time and space and all the opposites that bedevil human existence are totally transcended and in which one is literally ‘dead' to the world but alive in a timeless eternity. This ritual death Charlie had already experienced, and, as a result of the experience, he had taught his disciples that they must kill themselves in this way in order to kill others and be free from remorse. At the trial Linda Kasabian, who had witnessed the ecstatic massacre of Sharon Tate and her four fellow ‘rich pigs' but had not yet managed to reach the state of complete egoless awareness that would have enabled her, if not to participate in the gory ritual, then at least to observe it with Stoic indifference, appeared as the chief witness for the prosecution and told the whole horrible truth as she had seen it with her own eyes. In other words she had ‘snitched', the sin against the Holy Ghost and perhaps the only sin in the code of Charles Manson.
However, ‘snitched' she had, and there she was in the witness box accusing Charlie and his three egoless lady disciples of the most appalling atrocities. Susan Atkins, the most egoless of them all, mouthed the words, ‘You’re killing us.’ To which Linda replied in a whisper quite audible to the jury, and, it may be added, in a language that made perfect sense to Charlie: ‘I’m not killing you. You’ve killed yourselves.’ She had heard it so often before. ‘Yes,’ she said again in that interminable cross examination, ‘he used to say “If you are willing to be killed, then you should be willing to kill.”’ Charles Manson had killed himself, but at the trial he had come to life again not as a superman or a god or even a machine but as the illegitimate son of a teenage whore, despised and rejected by man if not by God.
It had all started when he was very young. Then, according to the Manson Family legend, he suddenly felt that he was as powerful and free as Superman. He acquired a makeshift cloak, climbed up to a roof, spread his arms and sailed through the air. It was a great feeling, they said, comparable to the orgasm, and one that he never forgot. When Sandy (Sandra Good, one of the Family) tells it there is the strong implication that Charlie really did fly. No matter. The point here is that the cloak and Superman and the feeling are part of the Family’s Manson legend. The ability to fly at will, it may be noted in parenthesis, was one of the preternatural powers attributed to the Buddha, and indeed to all who had achieved ‘enlightenment’, by his followers. The disciples of C. G. Jung today would probably say that flying referred to the perfect freedom the enlightened person enjoys in his own ‘inner space’. There is no reason to believe that Charlie did not have this experience. You do not have to be a saint to do that: LSD can do it for you, as I have explained elsewhere.
Freedom of the spirit he had, then, already experienced, but not the complete extinction of the ego, the dying to self of which the mystics of all religions perpetually speak. Since he was thoroughly conversant with the Bible he realized that he must be crucified if he were to rise again reborn into eternal life. That crucifixion meant the death of the ego in order that the true Self or ‘Soul’ might be born, he probably learnt from an occult sect called ‘The Fountain of the World’ founded ‘by a holy man named Krishna Venta’, presumably an Indian or one who had assumed an Indian name, ‘who died by violence’.
For the crucifixion of Charles Manson my only evidence is Ed Sanders’ gripping book, The Family. I leave it to him to describe it in his own words:
‘Not far from the Spahn Ranch [ the Family’s headquarters] the family discovered an almost secret clearing guarded by a natural surrounding wall of large boulders. On one side of the clearing was a hill, The Hill of Martyrdom. For upon this hilly boulder shrouded secret clearing was performed perhaps the world’s first outdoor LSD crucifixion ceremony.
‘There they snuffed Charlie, in role as Jesus, strapping (not nailing) him to an actual rustic cross, while others, acting as tormentors and apostles, leered and weeped. One chosen female was Mother Mary cloaked and weeping at the foot of the cross.
‘Then they fucked, evidently after some form of resurrection service.’
Clearly Mr Sanders has little sympathy for Charlie, but there seems to be no reason to doubt the veracity of his account. He worked for a year and a half to piece together his story, and the story is almost certainly true. And significant.
Manson’s crucifixion symbolized for him the death of his ego.
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br /> It was, however, still only a symbol. He had not experienced what the Zen Buddhists call the ‘Great Death’. This ‘total’ experience, which, according to Mr Sanders, ‘thousands have encountered, say, on psilocybin’, a psychedelic drug which produces effects similar to those produced by LSD, Charlie went through while meditating in the desert.
‘“Once”, he is reported to have said, “I was walking in the desert and I had a revelation. I’d walked about forty five miles and that is a lot of miles to walk in the desert. The sun was beating down on me and I was afraid because I wasn’t willing to accept death. My tongue swoll up and I could hardly breathe. I collapsed in the sand.
‘“I looked at the ground and saw this rock out of the corner of my eye. And I remember thinking in this insane way as I looked at it, Well this is as good a place as any to die. ”
‘Then he started to laugh. “I began laughing like an insane man. I was so happy.” Then he got up “with ease” and walked ten miles forthwith and reached safety.’
Charles Manson had achieved what the Zen Buddhists call enlightenment, the supreme lightning flash of which shatters the time barrier, and through which one is reborn in eternity, where time does not exist and death is an almost laughable impossibility; quite literally a ‘total’ spiritual orgasm. The secret of Charlie Manson is that he knew this, and he knew that this can at least be simulated by LSD and in a ‘total’ and brutal practice of the physical act. Lucidly he drew the obvious conclusion which our modern Zen Buddhists do all they can to hush up. Where he had been all things were One and there was ‘no diversity at all’: he had passed beyond good and evil. At last he was free!
Charles Manson instinctively knew that what he had experienced in the desert after walking forty five miles in the blazing sun could also be experienced under LSD and ultra sex. As he knew, so he acted.
The experience provided by Zen is sometimes called cosmic consciousness. This is the second level of consciousness from which Charles Manson acted. When under the influence of mescalin, Aldous Huxley had spoken of ‘Is ness’. By this he meant the experience of pure being in which ‘time must have a stop’, the title of the first novel he wrote after his conversion to Neo Vedantism.