One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  When news began to spread of how popular Fujimura’s sermons had become with the soldiers of the Presidio and Fort Ord, the head chaplain of the base grew concerned that non-Buddhist soldiers were sneaking away from other commitments to hear talk of the dharma.

  “You seem to have altogether too many soldiers here for your Buddhist service,” he said to Reverend Fujimura. “There must be some Christians among them. Could you ask the non-Buddhists not to attend?”

  Given that he had spent many of the preceding years under armed guard, taking orders from soldiers, it was perhaps with both trepidation and delight that Reverend Fujimura told the chaplain that he would like to help but that his temple was open to all.

  “Our custom is to welcome everyone who comes,” he said. “How can I tell anyone not to attend?”

  Poster for the Human Be-In, designed by Michael Bowen, disciple of the guru John Starr Cooke.

  CHAPTER 17

  The Immortality Racket

  1967–1976

  Late in the evening of January 14, 1967, a few of the people responsible for turning the seventh decade of the century into the cultural moment known as “The Sixties” were lounging in a small back room of the artist Michael Bowen’s San Francisco painting studio. Though grandly called the “meditation room,” it was not much bigger than a walk-in closet, and maintained its contemplative aura through an ambient haze of incense, framed pictures of gods and gurus staring down from the walls, and dark tapestries hung over every surface, including the room’s lone window. Allen Ginsberg, the Beatnik writer who had lately emerged as the paterfamilias of the hippie movement (in the estimation of the New Yorker later that year), sat cross-legged on one of the thin mattresses that cushioned the floor, passing a bottle of wine with another Beat turned hippie, the Zen poet Gary Snyder. Timothy Leary, the former professor remade as the nation’s high priest of LSD, was also there, as was the activist Jerry Rubin, who would soon join with Abbie Hoffman to start the rabble-rousing Youth International Party, better known as the Yippies. Had an earthquake toppled 1371 Haight Street that night, many of the pivotal movements and events of the following years—Flower Power, the March on the Pentagon, the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention, the trial of the Chicago Seven that followed—might never have occurred.

  Though full of luminaries, this party was a low-key affair, just a gathering of twenty or so who had come together to celebrate the success of that day’s Human Be-In, the first large-scale summit of various strains of the counterculture, which, until then, had been largely divided between political and nonpolitical communities and forms of dissent. National press coverage helped lure more than one hundred thousand young adults to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco throughout the following months, culminating in 1967’s Summer of Love, which spread across the nation and set the stage for larger gatherings like the Woodstock festival two years later.

  While usually eclipsed by that later event in popular accounts of the era, the Human Be-In was at the time seen as the start of it all. The morning after the event, the San Francisco Chronicle ran the headline “Hippies Run Wild,” but that was not even the half of it. More than twenty thousand flower children, anti-war radicals, anarchist Diggers, Hari Krishna devotees, Hell’s Angels, and assorted other cultural outliers had assembled in the Polo Fields section of Golden Gate Park to watch Ginsberg chant mantras, to dance to the music of the Grateful Dead, to hear Leary preach his acid gospel, and to heed that gospel in the form of doses of a particularly potent mixture of the drug called “white lightning” that were distributed free to all.

  A few days before, the organizers now lounging in Bowen’s meditation room had issued a perfectly trippy press release announcing the event to the world: “For ten years a new nation has grown inside the robot flesh of the old,” it began. “Before your eyes a new free vital soul is reconnecting the living centers of the American body.” As a coming-out party for this new body, the Human Be-In would bring together “Berkeley political activists” and “the love generation of the Haight-Ashbury” as two parts of “the new nation who will be coming from every state in the nation, every tribe of the young (the emerging soul of the nation).”

  According to the organizers, the purpose of calling these groups together was simply “to powwow, celebrate, and prophesy the epoch of liberation, love, peace, compassion and unity of mankind.” The organizers’ motive, however, was left unsaid: With LSD made illegal in California the month before, they hoped to demonstrate that a whole city dosed on acid would be, as Jerry Rubin once said, “like heaven on earth.” “The night of bruited fear of the American eagle-breast-body is over,” the organizers’ announcement continued. “Hang your fear at the door and join the future. If you do not believe, please wipe your eyes and see.” At a public question-and-answer session held to explain the event’s intentions, a man who called himself Buddha had passed a basket filled with marijuana cookies to members of the press.

  The notices posted around San Francisco had billed it as a “gathering of the tribes,” but the Human Be-In was also a gathering of big and often conflicting personalities. Ginsberg, for example, had made sure that Leary would be given no more than the seven minutes of microphone time allotted to each poet scheduled to speak throughout the day, rather than the thirty minutes that had been offered to “prophets.” Other organizers threatened to cut the power to the amplifiers if Leary or any other speaker rambled on long enough to complicate the packed six-hour schedule. In the end, Leary needed only enough time to utter six words—“Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

  In the afterglow of an event that went off without a hitch (or a single arrest), any lingering tension between these larger-than-life personalities grew slack in the meditation room that night. Outside, sirens announced that police were beginning to crack down on hippies still wandering the streets, but all was hazy quiet on the batik-covered mattresses until the artist whose studio this was burst into the room carrying a telephone.

  A twenty-nine-year-old painter and art director of the local street newspaper, the San Francisco Oracle, Michael Bowen was at the time considered “Mr. Haight-Ashbury” by the writer Michael McClure. He had been the main organizer of the Be-In, which he had envisioned as a New Age version of the ancient Kumbh Mela, the enormous Hindu pilgrimage that draws tens of millions to bathe in the waters of one of India’s sacred rivers every three years. Not overly concerned with making distinctions between various Asian traditions, Bowen was known to say that through events like the Hindu-inspired Be-In, he and his hip fellow travelers were “building an electric Tibet in California.”

  The idea for the Be-In had not been Bowen’s, however, but that of the man he was now trying to reach on the phone. Bowen’s guru, as he called him, was John Starr Cooke, a well-traveled American living in a village near Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he and a group of followers known as the Psychedelic Rangers ingested Olympian amounts of LSD and hallucinogenic mushrooms on a daily basis, using them, like the Taino caciques in the earliest religious rituals of the Caribbean, for what they believed were the drugs’ entheogenic, or God-experience-inducing, qualities. Though located roughly a thousand miles south of the border, Cuernavaca was ground zero for the “better living through chemistry” spirit then spreading through the United States. It was there that Leary and other “turned-on” researchers had had their first trips; at his guru’s request, Bowen had invited many of them there throughout the preceding years. And when the leaders of acid America could not come to Cooke, Cooke sent his emissary to them. Among Bowen’s claims to psychedelic fame was being present when G. Gordon Liddy, then a New York assistant district attorney, raided the Millbrook Estate, the sixty-four-room mansion loaned to Leary for his experiments with LSD.

  A laughing Buddha of forty-seven who chuckled at the notion that his own image shared a wall in the meditation room with various Hindu icons, Cooke found it funny to be considered anyone’s guru. Yet he nonetheless reveled in finally being a
t the top of a spiritual chain of command. He was himself a veteran of a dozen enlightenment schemes stretching back to the 1940s, more often on the giving than the receiving end of devotion. He was known by some as a magician, by others as a snake oil salesman, and by all as the deep-pocketed scion of an old-money former missionary family. A sickly son of wealth intent on giving it all away before he died, Cooke had long since shaken off his Christian roots, but he had often seemed in the market for a messiah, turning up wherever the latest path to enlightenment was being peddled. By 1967, that new path was a chemical compound soaked into tabs of paper and ingested like tiny communion wafers, and Cooke had become one of its most enthusiastic advocates. A few years before, he had entrusted his acolyte Bowen with the mission of bringing influential people like Leary, Rubin, and Ginsberg into his circle of influence.

  During the Be-In, the Cuernavaca Psychedelic Rangers had been meditating for six hours straight in solidarity with the San Francisco gathering of the tribes. When Bowen heard this news, he thought it was too good to keep to himself. He pushed the phone into the hands of the hippie paterfamilias, who took it with some surprise.

  “You mean to say you have a telephone in your meditation room?” Ginsberg asked.

  “Electric Tibet, baby!” Bowen replied.

  Ginsberg did not speak long with the guru that day, but he did agree that the Be-In had been “a serious religious occasion.” For Bowen, that was putting it lightly. When he hung up the meditation room telephone, he did so firm in his conviction that he had been part of an epoch-shaping afternoon.

  “Never before had America, or the world, witnessed such an unusual and remarkable event,” he said. “The Human Be-In was designed to reverse the entire thought process of the human race.”

  And it had all happened, he believed, thanks to his mysterious teacher. Even the lovely day itself—uncommonly warm and bright for a January afternoon in San Francisco—was thought to have come as the result of Cooke’s intercession. According to Bowen, the wizard-bearded, wheelchair-bound man whose photograph stared down from his wall of gurus and icons had arranged for the weather of southern Mexico and northern California to switch places for as long as the Psychedelic Rangers were meditating. In semi-tropical Cuernavaca on January 14, Bowen claimed, it had snowed heavily all day.

  “I was on a mission from God [and] from John Cooke to do that Be-In,” Bowen later said. “This extraordinary event produced shock waves of consciousness and cultural change that would reverberate over the entire world.”

  If the various beliefs and practices often identified as “new religious movements” born in the middle of the twentieth century were arranged on a bulletin board and connected with strings—as a police detective might chart the relationships within an organized crime family—one of the pictures in the middle would belong to John Starr Cooke. Even setting aside the obviously biased assessment of his importance made by a true-believing disciple like Bowen, one can safely say that Cooke was a Zelig figure of the alternative spiritual yearnings of the postwar years in the United States. He served as a connection between the chemically enhanced religious eclecticism of the Age of Aquarius and the far older American tradition of tarot-reading, Ouija-board-consulting, consciousness-expanding curiosity seekers that stretches back into the nineteenth century. From his birth in Hawaii in 1920 to his death in Mexico in 1976, Cooke’s life provides a glimpse of the ways in which the spiritual fringe crossed into the mainstream in the twentieth century, remaking both the center and the margins in the process.

  Just as the Human Be-In has become a footnote to Woodstock despite having a claim as an earlier and more influential event, Cooke has been overshadowed in the intervening decades by the likes of Timothy Leary, Leary’s former colleague Richard Alpert (better known as Baba Ram Dass, author of the hippie Bible Be Here Now), and other members of what the religion journalist Don Lattin has called the Harvard Psychedelic Club. Leary and Alpert are usually credited with mainstreaming the idea that hallucinogenic drugs might be used for spiritual purposes, yet more so than in the case of those famous names, it is the career of this mostly forgotten midcentury mystic that best demonstrates the ways in which obscure religious ideas can have broad cultural influence.

  The origins of Cooke’s unlikely role in American history can be traced as far back as his great-grandfather, a Yale-educated missionary called Amos Starr Cooke. Born in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1810, he was sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to the Kingdom of Hawaii at the age of twenty-six to instruct the family of King Kamehameha III in subjects both secular and divine. Fifteen years later, when funding for his school faltered, Reverend Cooke partnered with another missionary, Samuel Northrup Castle, to open a general store, which soon began to prosper by supplying sugar to the American mainland after the Civil War. By the turn of the century, the Cooke family business had grown into one of the “Big Five” companies that unofficially governed the Hawaiian archipelago until statehood was granted in 1959. Following in their progenitor’s footsteps, Amos Cooke’s children and grandchildren built a massive family fortune through banking, politics, and real estate ventures that at one time included owning outright the island of Molokai. By the 1960s, Castle and Cooke had expanded through acquisition of Dole Food and Standard Fruit, making it the largest food-producing company in the world.

  As John Starr Cooke was known to say later in life, his family had gone to Hawaii to bring religion, and they had taken land in return. “While the natives stand confounded and amazed,” his great-grandfather wrote, “the foreigners are creeping in among them, getting their largest and best lands, water privileges, building lots, etc., etc.” Men from the mainland were not just forcing native Hawaiians out of their villages and onto sugar and pineapple plantations, however—they were also forcing them out of their most sacred religious practices. Most conspicuously, Amos Cooke’s generation of missionaries banned the islands’ iconic dance ritual, the hula halau, not only because it was deemed lascivious by buttoned-up New England Protestants but because its performance was traditionally preceded by prayers to the forest goddess Laka, and presented before an altar dedicated to her veneration. Now known mainly as innocuous staples of the state’s tourism industry, the driving drums and grass skirts of the hula fit the definition of demonic in nineteenth-century missionaries’ conception of the word. The taking of land and the transformation of beliefs thus went hand in hand in Hawaii, each serving to consolidate the political power and cultural dominance of those converting the islands to Christianity.

  The eighth child of one of Reverend Cooke’s many grandsons, John was born into a home of such wealth that he never had to work a day in his life. While many of his siblings and cousins used their positions of privilege to expand the island empire of their forebears, John pursued activities others regarded first as childish hobbies and then as adolescent distractions as if they were a religious vocation.

  And in a way, they were. According to family lore, when he was just nine years old, John Cooke came down with a case of the measles. In those prevaccinated days, the boy’s spots would have been treated with only bed rest, fluids, and a strict order to keep him apart from other children until the period of contagion had passed. Any child his age might have become bored in such a situation, and so he was allowed a quick excursion out of his bedroom to buy a pack of playing cards that would let him pass a few of the lonely hours with solitaire. When he returned from a local shop and opened the deck, however, he was in for a shock that changed his life. Inside the cardstock box, he did not find the expected diamonds, clubs, hearts, and spades, but tarot cards: a strange series of images that seemed pulled from another time.

  As the creation myth of John Starr Cooke came to be told, when he first saw the tarot, he threw it aside, fearing he had stumbled upon black magic, a manifestation of malevolent forces that threatened the pious foundations upon which his clan had been built. The truth was perhaps a bit more than a nine-year-old could under
stand: that such tools of fortune-telling had been a part of European Christian culture all along, and even were a part of his family. He had an aunt, it was said, who dabbled in palmistry and soothsaying. There was also a native nursemaid who exposed him to the very rituals that missionaries like his great-grandfather had driven underground. John’s own sister Alice, ten years his senior, felt an affinity for the esotericism of Theosophy. Studying the tarot for signs of what was to come, he soon discovered that despite the Cookes’ missionary past—because of it, perhaps—the mixing of religious traditions was as much a part of the family business as sugarcane.

  The future guru’s next known interaction with new ways of seeing the world came when he was fifteen. To celebrate twenty-five years as president of the Bank of Hawaii, and no doubt to distract himself from the recent loss of his wife, John’s father, Clarence Hyde Cooke, decided to take his youngest son on a 37,000-mile jaunt exploring the Southern Hemisphere aboard a Cunard–White Star ocean liner called the Franconia, which set off from Honolulu for the South Pacific in 1935.

  Perhaps inevitably for a pleasure cruise in the midst of the Great Depression, the Cookes shared passage on this around-the-world journey with a cast of the rich and the famous, including European royalty and well-known American entertainers. As the society pages reported at the time, the composer Cole Porter was also on board, having gone with his writing partner Moss Hart to finish their musical Jubilee. The melody of one of Porter’s most famous songs, “Begin the Beguine,” was inspired by the sights and sounds of native rituals on the islands that now comprise Indonesia, which he and his shipmates were able to see during frequent expeditions led by two lecturers employed by Cunard–White Star to put the cruise’s exotic destinations in historical context.