One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  Even before the Be-In, Michael Bowen had spoken to Rubin, and anyone else who would listen, about the occult significance of the pentagram, and the five-sided shape that might be inscribed around it, as representing evil forces at work in the world. More than the Capitol, Rubin now agreed, the Pentagon was a natural symbol of the war. As such, it would serve as a far more resonant target. He and his collaborator on the San Francisco Oracle, the editor Allen Cohen, had been particularly taken with a passage from the American philosopher and historian Lewis Mumford’s The City in History (1961). No hippie pamphlet, Mumford’s book was “one of the major works of scholarship of the twentieth century,” according to the Christian Science Monitor. In it, the Pentagon is painted in nearly Manichaean terms. Mumford was no esotericist like Cooke, nor a radical like Hoffman, but he provided historical and intellectual justification to ground Bowen’s occult reasoning.

  “The Pentagon,” Mumford wrote, “across the Potomac from Washington,” is “an effete and worthless baroque conceit, resurrected in the nineteen-thirties by United States military engineers and magnified into an architectural catastrophe. Nuclear power has aggravated this error and turned its huge comic ineptitude into a tragic threat.” It gets better (or worse) from there:

  The Bronze Age fantasies of absolute power, the Bronze Age practice of unlimited human extermination, the uncontrolled obsessions, hatreds, and suspicions of Bronze Age gods and kings, have here taken root again in a fashion that imitates—and seeks to surpass—the Kremlin of Ivan the Terrible and his latterday successors. With this relapse, in less than a decade, have come one-way communication, the priestly monopoly of sacred knowledge, the multiplication of secret agencies, the suppression of open discussion, and even the insulation of error against public criticism and exposure through “bi-partisan” military and foreign policy, which in practice nullifies public reaction and makes rational dissent the equivalent of patriotic disaffection, if not treason. The dismantling of this regressive citadel will prove a far harder task than the demolition of earlier baroque fortifications. But on its performance all more extensive plans for urban and human development must wait.

  Apprised of this understanding of their target, another voice from the original Be-In, the poet Gary Snyder, contributed the idea that what was needed at the Pentagon was not just a protest but an exorcism. Like a mystical arms race, Bowen went one better than Snyder and suggested that the exorcism should include a ritual that would actually lift the Pentagon off American soil and into the air, where it would, as Time magazine later reported the intention of the proposed ritual, “turn orange and vibrate until all evil emissions had fled” and the war came to an immediate end.

  Rubin and Hoffman had acid in common with Bowen (Rubin had first been “turned on” in the artist’s studio the year before, and Hoffman by then was an old hallucinogenic hand), but they were not true believers in the reality of visions one might have while on LSD. They were, however, pragmatic and theatrical activists, open to any idea that might bring attention to their cause. As such, perhaps as much as Bowen and his Cuernavaca guru, they recognized and respected the power of symbols. So when it came time to announce plans for the protest to be held in late October 1967, Rubin declared that they would shut down the Department of Defense because the anti-war movement was “now in the business of wholesale disruption and widespread resistance and dislocation of the American society.” Hoffman elaborated with a description of the exorcism rite they would perform to end the war, declaring, “We’re going to raise the Pentagon three hundred feet in the air”—significantly higher, John Cooke might have been proud to note, than L. Ron Hubbard’s ashtray ever dared to fly.

  As organizer Keith Lampe remembered Bowen’s involvement in the planning: “We didn’t expect the building to actually leave terra firma, but this fellow arrived with ideas on how to make it happen.” Following the artist’s journey to Mexico to consult with Cooke, “he dropped in during one of our preparation meetings in New York,” ready to discuss the logistics and requirements of the ritual. “What a charming moment,” Lampe said. “All of us ‘radicals’ there suddenly became ‘moderates’ because Michael really expected to levitate it whereas the rest of us were into it merely as a witty media project.”

  “You think Abbie believed in a lot of that stuff?” the Central Park Be-In planner Fouratt once asked. “I don’t think so.” However, Hoffman and others were drawn to “anything that would disrupt the mindset of middle Americans, anything that attacked their value system.”

  The ritual conducted on the Pentagon steps on October 21 certainly fit the bill. After a gathering of more than 100,000 before the Lincoln Memorial for anti-war speeches by luminaries including the poet Robert Lowell and the nation’s baby doctor Benjamin Spock, perhaps a third of the crowd began to march across the bridge to Virginia. Norman Mailer was on the scene for the entirety of the protest, and so we know that the air was as thick with marijuana smoke as Cooke’s Tangier had been with kief. “The smell of the drug, sweet as the sweetest leaves of burning tea, floated down to the Mall,” Mailer wrote, “where its sharp bite of sugar and smoldering grass pinched the nose, relaxed the neck.”

  Once they had assembled before the Pentagon, where military police and federal marshals were waiting to keep them in designated protest areas, organizers distributed a leaflet program for the ritual. Mailer reproduced it in his book Armies of the Night; other existing versions are less poetic, so there were either multiple programs available that day or Mailer has added his own literary flair:

  October 21, 1967

  Washington, D.C., U.S.A.

  Planet Earth

  We Freemen, of all colors of the spectrum, in the name of God, Ra, Jehovah, Anubis, Osiris, Tlaloc, Quetzalcoatl, Thoth, Ptah, Allah, Krishna, Chango, Chimeke, Chukwu, Olisa-Bulu-Uwa, Imales, Orisasu, Odudua, Kali, Shiva-Shakra, Great Spirit, Dionysus, Yahweh, Thor, Bacchus, Isis, Jesus Christ, Maitreya, Buddha, Rama do exorcise and cast out the EVIL which has walled and captured the pentacle of power and perverted its use to the need of the total machine and its child the hydrogen bomb and has suffered the people of the planet earth, the American people and creatures of the mountains, woods, streams and oceans grievous mental and physical torture and the constant torment of the imminent threat of utter destruction.…

  On the makeshift altar before the Pentagon, meanwhile, a number of competing rituals began simultaneously to unfold. Ed Sanders, of the rock band the Fugs, delivered an impromptu, sexually suggestive invocation punctuated with repeated calls of “Out, demons, out!” Unhappy with what he considered Sanders’s lack of solemnity, filmmaker Kenneth Anger took matters into his own hands and performed a parallel exorcism nearby. “Ed Sanders and the Fugs are a bunch of crap,” Anger later said. In his estimation, the crowd as a whole was not much better: “They were doing their omni hare krishna chant chant, peace peace, whatever.” His ritual, he believed, would be far more effective. Abbie Hoffman, likewise, had his own ideas about the necessary elements of an exorcism. He busied himself pairing up couples to perform public displays of affection that would surround the Pentagon in communal love—and create great photo opportunities for the press in the process.

  Elsewhere, Mayan traditional healers known as curanderos sprinkled cornmeal in circles of power. Ginsberg declaimed his mantras for the cause. Michael Bowen was also on the scene. He had trucked in two hundred pounds of flowers and distributed them to the crowd. When the military police and federal marshals confronted the protesters, images of gun barrels blooming with daisies became the iconic photographs of the day.

  While the building never did get off the ground, the ritual inspired by Bowen and his far-off guru in some ways succeeded. As the actor and Central Park Be-In organizer Jim Fouratt noted, the theater of attempted levitation and exorcism was able to take “the hippie element and weld it together with the hard line political reality.” By focusing on a symbolic target, the Pentagon march “acknowledged where the war was being fought” a
nd “where it had to be stopped.” It succeeded, too, as the “witty media project” most of the organizers believed it mainly to be. Bowen’s ideas about dark metaphysical connotations of five-sided shapes goaded much of the media into the odd position of defending, on religious grounds, the architectural implications of the Department of Defense. “Actually and expectedly, the hippies are wrong,” Time argued. “Most religions, including Judaism, Christian mysticism and occult Oriental sects, find the Pentagon to be a structure connoting good luck, high station and godliness.”

  Most significantly, the ritual contributed to the transformation of public perception. “The levitation of the Pentagon was a happening that demystified the authority of the military,” Ginsberg said. “The Pentagon was symbolically levitated in people’s minds in the sense that it lost its authority which had been unquestioned and unchallenged until then. But once that notion was circulated in the air and once the kid put his flower in the barrel of the kid looking just like himself but tense and nervous, the authority of the Pentagon psychologically was dissolved.”

  In the aftermath of the ritual, when the military response to the chanting hippies turned from cautiously reserved to actively belligerent, this authority took another hit. As Mailer notes, the MPs moved as a wedge through the crowd with “M-14 rifles, bayonets, clubs, and stone faces.” While the protesters sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” he continues, “slowly the wedge began to move in on people. With bayonets and rifle butts, they moved first on the girls in the front line, kicking them, jabbing at them again and again with the guns, busting their heads and arms to break the chain of locked arms.” Hundreds were beaten, and a thousand arrested. For many who had taken part in the ritual, farce turned into tragedy—which historically has been a more reliable inducement of religious experience than even LSD.

  Though his name was not mentioned in connection with the March on the Pentagon, echoes of John Cooke’s magical thinking could be seen in the crosscultural esoteric ramblings of the ritual invocation, in the drug-enhanced optimism that authority could be flouted with flowers, even in the casual acceptance among the pragmatic organizers of the Mobe that many of their fellow Americans genuinely believed that buildings and ashtrays could be willed into the air. After peddling such beliefs around the world for decades, Cooke’s influence came to occupy some of the most well-protected real estate in the nation.

  Glimpses of his shadow could also be seen from time to time in what remained of the era. The 1969 publication of his newly illustrated deck of tarot cards, T: The New Tarot for the Aquarian Age, “caught on like wildfire nationwide,” became what current enthusiasts call the “quintessential hippie tarot,” and even made a brief appearance in Charlton Heston’s iconically campy science fiction thriller Soylent Green. When a character flips through a few tarot cards ten minutes into the film, it is unmistakably the deck Cooke had been inspired to create while channeling the voice of an otherworldly being he called “One.”

  More significantly, at the 1969–1970 trial of the Chicago 7, at which Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and others who had been involved with the March on the Pentagon were charged with starting a riot at protests during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Allen Ginsberg, who had spoken to Cooke on the phone after the Be-In from Bowen’s meditation room, was called as a witness to discuss the events that had brought them together.

  After a bit of comedy when the prosecution, the defense, and the judge expressed perplexity as to just what a Be-In could be, Ginsberg explained matter-of-factly that it had been “a gathering-together of younger people aware of the planetary fate that we are all sitting in the middle of, imbued with a new consciousness, a new kind of society involving prayer, music, and spiritual life together rather than competition, acquisition and war.” Warming to his subject, he noted that it was also “what was called a ‘gathering of the tribes’ of all the different affinity groups, spiritual groups, political groups, yoga groups, music groups and poetry groups that all felt the same crisis of identity, crisis of the planet, and political crisis in America, who all came together in the largest assemblage of such younger people that had taken place…”

  Ginsberg could have been describing a snapshot of what is now often remembered of the Vietnam era as whole. It was a portrait of a community that, for better or worse, perhaps would not have come together without the influence of men like Cooke, Leary, and even Hubbard, charismatic seekers who were first concerned with personal experience, and only secondarily with the effects personal experience might have on the wider world.

  By the time of Cooke’s death, in 1976, the man Leary once called “the great crippled wizard” had mostly been forgotten. Yet the spiritual searching of which he was both a symbol and a part had remade the nation in his image. Erratic, naïve, and often dangerous though Cooke’s seeking was, his example had its own kind of power. While it would be easy to dismiss the attempt to levitate the Pentagon as the product of a mind addled by drugs and one too many enlightenment schemes, the numbers who turned out in support of this attempt are less easily explained away. Most of the thousands gathered in the nation’s capital that day had known nothing of the Ouija board–following, tarot card–reading, Scientologist magician whose ideas had helped bring them there, but their presence suggested that the country as a whole had been turned on to an idea John Starr Cooke learned early: In America, even the most far-out beliefs will eventually find their way in.

  El Pocito, the little hole filled with holy dirt in Chimayo, New Mexico. Photo by Richard Rieckenberg. (Santuario de Chimayo)

  CHAPTER 18

  City on a Hill, Revisited

  Barack Obama’s first inaugural address, delivered on January 20, 2009, was notable for a number of reasons. After a decisive victory, the new president gave some Americans hope of a coming post-partisan era, bringing closure to years of party-line rancor in Washington. Gathering more than a million and a half supporters in the nation’s capital on a subfreezing day, the inauguration itself was viewed as a rare moment of widespread optimism during a young century that had already seen the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, natural disasters that showed the fatal weaknesses in the infrastructure of our cities, and the dawn of two wars, which candidate Obama had promised to end. And, of course, the inaugural celebration also marked the ascension of the first African American to the highest office in the land.

  January 20, 2009, was also the first time a newly elected president used the occasion sometimes called a secular sermon to the nation to give voice to the diversity of religious life among its people. “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims,” Obama said, “Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth.”

  Such a high-profile expression of the varieties of American religious experience was unprecedented, even if the reality it described predates the Republic itself. A spectrum of beliefs has shaped our common history since well before the first president, in his 1789 inaugural address, spoke of “that Almighty Being who rules over the universe.” But Obama’s choice of words served as a reminder that only recently did the range of opinions about the nature of that Being begin to receive their due in the ongoing national conversation about the appropriate place of religion in American life.

  Perhaps most noteworthy about the president’s acknowledgment that the United States is a country of many faiths was that it seemed noteworthy at all. His simple declaration of a catalogue of beliefs surprised many, because there persists, among believers and nonbelievers alike, an assumption that the United States is, for better or worse, a Christian nation.

  Nothing has done more to keep this notion alive than the stubborn persistence of words spoken more than a century before the United States was a nation at all: John Winthrop’s designation of the community he would establish in America as a “city upon a hill.” For at least the past fifty years, that single unifying metaphor has dominated presidential rhetoric about the nation’s
self-understanding, causing an image borrowed from the Gospels to become a tenet of faith in America’s civil religion. While not a direct refutation, Obama’s statement of religious diversity presented a challenge to reconsider the meaning, and even the relevance, of this image in the twenty-first century.

  Much as this moment of reevaluation came in an election full of firsts, the earliest effort to make Winthrop’s phrase a widely accepted metaphor for the origins and purpose of the United States came at a time self-consciously declared as the dawn of a new era in American political life, when “a torch had been passed to a new generation.” Ironically, it was the first Catholic president who cited the words of the man who came to Massachusetts in part to build a “bulwark” against Jesuits and their church. Less than two weeks before intoning “ask not what your country can do for you” during his own inaugural address in 1961, John F. Kennedy reminded the legislature in his home state of Winthrop’s words:

  I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arabella three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier. “We must always consider,” he said, “that we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us.”