The Doors, Patricia Keneally, and Troubled Times

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 00:41:23 GMT

Since I was a teen, I've been a fan of the Doors. My aunt gave me a few cassette tapes when I got my first boom box, old classic rock tapes she'd bought but didn't really listen to anymore (she told me she didn't respond to music very much, something I still find odd and alien). This was a bit before grunge took off and most pop music at that time left me cold, so I was pretty pleased to get some Jimi Hendrix, Jethro Tull's Aqualung, Iron Butterfly, and most of all the Doors.

As a depressed, brooding kid, I couldn't really relate to a lot of late 80's music (or maybe I just didn't know where to look for the good stuff). Partying and having a good time was pretty alien to my experience, and I was awkward, shy, and terrible at talking to anyone. The Doors had lots of songs about love (mostly gone wrong), but tracks like People are Strange, When the Music's Over, Break on Through, and the End resonated with me as a social outcast and pariah at my school. I played the tapes over and over, entering into a imaginary landscape of haunting imagery to go with the haunting music I was hearing.

A couple years later the movie came out, which I uncritically enjoyed and embraced. I still think the film has a lot of intriguing themes and is quite visually interesting (especially when you're utterly stoned, which came a bit later for me). I hadn't watched it for a long time so, as a bit of a distraction from my constant studies and fretting over the crises shaking society around me, I ordered copies of a few of my favorite films and popped in the Doors with my girlfriend.

It was enjoyable enough that I revisited a few books of interviews I had of Jim's (he seems to have been a colossal jerk, but in his interviews he seemed thoughtful and cogent enough). From there, I picked up a few cheap biographies written about the time the movie came out in the 90's.

Both of them were pretty good reads. The first one was by John Densmore, the Doors' drummer. It was interesting and I don't regret reading it, but I also wouldn't have regretted not reading it. The other was by by Patricia Keneally, who was a witch, occultist, and writer. I say was, because I finished her book today and checked to see what she's been up to, only to discover she died on July 23rd this year. Maybe she's with Jim at last, she never really seemed to get over him.

I was pretty excited when she mentioned they'd conversed about William Butler Yeats and his occult interests, and that Jim had a real interest in magic. I knew he was into the odd brand of psychedelic shamanism he talked about, but the overlap in our interests in traditional occultism pleased me.

Keneally was a thoughtful lady and a good writer. There were a few moments in her book where I thought she might be fooling herself a bit about Jim (especially because of all the lurid stories about him), but to be fair, she acknowledges that herself. She was pretty interesting in her own right.

It was nice to read about the troubles of the fairly recent past through the frames of these rock biographies, events that shaped my youth by shaping the lives of my parents, but at a fair remove from the different tumultuous times that are shaping my life now. I couldn't help wondering what Jim would think of current events, if he would still be revolting against the liberal powers that be as much as he railed against the conservative power structures of his own time. Of course, he probably wouldn't be railing against much of anything if he'd lived, he'd be 78 (same age as our current President, who seems more interested in eating ice cream and rambling incoherently than anything else).

It's been a welcome distraction and a good reminder that the 60's were also incredibly unstable (lots of riots, assassinations, protests, wars, and the threat of nuclear annihilation). No doubt, lots of people thought that they were living in the end times, that the country was hopelessly polarized, that mass deaths were just a heartbeat away. People got through it.

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Unfashionable Influences

Tue, 29 Jun 2021 11:23:44 GMT

In the corners of the Internet where I mostly lurk, there are a few things I've enjoyed or found useful that take a lot of heat. I don't mind; I am an oddball and don't really expect others to share my views and perspectives, but sometimes I chuckle when someone builds up a real head of steam bashing something I think is pretty groovy.

I am an occultist, although I make no claims of being particularly wise or learned. In fact, studying occultism and the ideas of much smarter, more knowledgeable people has liberated me from the belief that my intellect is anything to write home about. That reality check was something I desperately needed and it was actually sort of a relief. For a long time I centered my identity on being smart; it created a lot of self-generated pressure and was incongruous with my everyday existence as a regular working-class person.

I discovered occultism proper through a few different means. Dungeons and Dragons, rock and roll, drugs, and fantasy novels were all things I used to escape the grind of school, then work as a young adult, and they definitely helped lay some of the groundwork for my awakening (looking over that list, all I can say is the fundies were right about those things being a gateway to the occult, so well played, guys).

Later, when I began to look for some kind of spiritual path, I ended up discovering the much-maligned New Age movement. I never delved too deeply into it, but there were a few books that shaped the way I thought about reality in useful ways. The Celestine Prophecy, for one, gave me a perspective on what occultists call the etheric plane that I found quite useful, and the methods Redfield describes people using to basically steal energy from one another in manipulative contests has shaped my understanding of human interactions in a persistent and useful way. In fact, "psychic vampires" can be understood quite well using the information in his book. Not to say that I think the frame story for the teachings is particularly great, but some of the info seems solid.

Gary Zukav also wrote a few books I ended up enjoying that helped me grasp karma and reincarnation in a way that I found similar to the views many occultists share about those topics (not all occultists have similar beliefs on them). His work also gave me something positive to contemplate at a time when I really needed it. I still have fond memories and thoughts about his books. I even got some good use from the much-maligned book The Secret, which I credit for helping me get my first major promotion and achieving my long-term goal of netting a salaried office job (which ended up being a disaster, incidentally, which seems to be common for people using that particular tome, but I digress).

The final example I have in mind is shamanism of the Micheal Harner variety. I picked up his book Way of the Shaman and thought it was pretty intriguing in a "not for me" way. There were a few concepts that I incorporated into my spiritual worldview and overall I had a positive view of his teachings, although I'd never practiced any of them. Later, I met a teacher who I am convinced is a true shaman in the traditional sense who uses Harner's system and teachings in his practice. This man had a terminal illness and was healed by spirits in a way that is often described in traditional shamanistic cultures, so he may be an outlier amongst shamanic practitioners who use Harner's system, but I later discovered Harner has a bad reputation in some circles. To each their own, but the teacher I briefly worked with knew his stuff and seemed to take Harner's framework and use it quite effectively. A lot of what he taught has parallels in the Western Mystery Tradition as well, so maybe he incorporates techniques from different traditions, but I don't discount Harner or his system because of my (admittedly limited) experiences with this teacher.

As unfashionable as some of these teachings and methods are (or have become), they have all been useful to me in various ways, so I thank the authors who opened my mind and heart to what has become my true spiritual path.

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ari_ormstunga

The Doors, Patricia Keneally, and Troubled Times

Unfashionable Influences