Tobias Churton - The Spiritual Meaning of the Sixties: The Magic, Myth, and Music of the Decade That Changed the World

This book is dedicated with love

to the treasured memories of

my brother Victor Churton (19552017)

and Jean-Luke Epstein (19522017)

Merove Sophia Churton

I also dedicate this book to my daughter,

Merove Sophia Churton, who may now, I hope, see

the Sixties she missed, first time round, and to her

millennial generation and subsequent generations

of boys and girls, that they might know the truth of what

passed before them in a decade that is now and shall

be a signal seed of good things still to come, if

we learn the lessons, and practice them.

PRAISE FOR OTHER WORKS BY TOBIAS CHURTON

From Aleister Crowley in America

Magician Tobias Churton has successfully cast a spell, transforming his 750-page comprehensive scholarly tome into a gripping and obsessive page turner, leaving one wishing for more.

JAMES WASSERMAN, AUTHOR OF TEMPLAR HERESY: A STORY OF GNOSTIC ILLUMINATION

From Gnostic Mysteries of Sex

Churtons scholarship seems to be both deep and broad...

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, OCTOBER 2015

From Occult Paris

Tobias is as erudite as he is excited and exciting. His scholarship is alive with passion, imagination, humor, and, most of all, humanity.

STEPHEN J. KING (SHIVA X), GRAND MASTER, ORDO TEMPLI ORIENTIS

No one can evoke the feel of a place and an era like Tobias Churton!

CHRISTOPHER MCINTOSH, PH.D., AUTHOR OF ELIPHAS LVI AND THE FRENCH OCCULT REVIVAL

Any book by Tobias Churton is a special event.... Churton is a world authority on Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and Rosicrucianism. Moreover, he possesses the rare ability to impart his vast knowledge on his chosen subjects in an engaging and accessible fashion.

STEVE EARLES, HELLBOUND.CA, 2017

From Deconstructing Gurdjieff

Churton understands. He has a profound ability to write about complex esoteric subjects in clear, down-to-earth language.... There is great wisdom and a uniquely modern perspective in Churtons meticulous thought and prose.

JOHN ZORN, COMPOSER-PERFORMER

Acknowledgments

This book was first lived, in full, before it was written. In contemporary academic parlance that makes it an emic study, written from internal elements of the culture described, that culture being our own, and what has come before it and created it. However, the book is also the fruit of many years of informed reflection, which makes it an etic study, that is, a perspective from outside, made by the observer. Happily we do not have to live in an academic universe, and there are grand moments when subject and object fuse into one, and we may glimpse a transcending truth and be accordingly enlightened. In order to create this fusion of perspectives I have drawn heavily on my own memories, reflections, and subsequent studies and experience, a great deal of which has lended itself to this narrative as if born to it. I should here like to acknowledge the names of those persons who have in so many different ways helped to make this narrative possible, and taken me out of myself in the process.

When I decided to undertake the grand search for the spiritual meaning of the 1960s I quickly involved myself in long discussions with my dear friend, graphic artist Jean-Luke Epstein. As a designer of album covers, he is perhaps best known for his designs for LPs by the Stranglers (amongst many other top-flight artists), but our discussions focused mainly on the first, now very rare, interview he undertook with members of the Pink Floyd, as they were known in 1967, and his later dealings with designer Storm Thurgerson (19442013), who with Aubrey Powell designed the Floyds second album cover, Saucerful of Secrets (1968), and who together went on to form the famous market leader in album design, Hipgnosis. Discussions moved from analyzing the image of the Sixties, to how the power of images has obscured the real Sixties, as it was lived and felt at the time. Our last discussions graduated to profound discussions about death, immortality, and the destiny of the soul. The last thing he sent me this year was a song of his own hed recorded, The Sound of Your Soul, whose refrain rang Crying for Home, the Waiting is Over, and the Moment is Now. Shortly after, in May 2017, Jean-Luke died suddenly and prematurely. For me, he will always live in the spirit of this book.

Another active contemporary of Londons psychedelic heyday (19661969) whose thoughts inspired this book is artist Vanilla Beer, who today dwells and paints in Languedoc, southwestern France. She had firsthand experience of the London art scene in those proverbially heady times and is also gifted with a spiritual perspective and clear intellect on the question I undertook to unravel. Thank you, Vanilla, for the time you gave to answering my questions, and thereby contributing authentic fresh perspectives to the book.

I traveled through the decade in question with my mother and father, Patricia and Victor Churton, who gave their three boys everything they possibly could have given us. They kept us opened up, alert, optimistic, informed, and clear thinking throughout. Every year that passes since their deaths makes me see so much more of what they gave freely, and how ever harder it is to go on without their vivid presence in the world. The spirit they projected is alive in the pages of this book, and I am ever grateful for it. I owe them everything.

One thing that helps us carry on through the vale of earthly life when sometimes it seems that all we are doing is losing, is the appearance of new and unexpected friends on the way. Among those new friends I have been fortunate to garner in these latter years stands the figure of author James Wasserman. Jim speaks from experience, from hard effort, from his mistakes, and his personal triumphs. Jim is one of those old souls who truly appreciates everything that comes his way, and much of the time can sort out the wheat from the chaff with a wit with an edge. His account of life lived in the full foam of late Sixties drug taking, idealism, and disintegration has made a vital contribution to the comprehensiveness of this investigation into areas gross and subtle. Jims a survivor, and survivors have the best tales to tell. I was lucky to get his.

An old colleague of Jims is the publisher of this book, Ehud Sperling. Ehud told me hed been waiting years for someone to come along and write this book about the Sixties. I was more than happy to oblige, and thereby fulfill a latent dream. Ehud opened my mind to aspects of the story I should surely have missed had he not been there to give his time to explain to me from personal experience his perception of the significance of Hindu god Shiva as animating spirit of the decades creative-destructive inner dynamic.

In 1985 I was co-writer-researcher of a 100-minute BBC TV drama about the spiritual journey of John Lennon,