Autobiodyssey by Joseph Kerrick
	Preface   Madness is real; it's normality that doesn't exist.   There are people who are simply insane by any standard.  They believe that their bizarre delusions are factual reality.  They lead dysfunctional lives, and blame their problems on external agencies.  They take medications in order to get by day to day.  And in case you haven't noticed, there are now so many of such people that they have become the majority of the postmodern population, or are rapidly approaching this benchmark.  It's hard to say exactly when or if the line has been crossed, because society, and those who speak for society in the public media, naturally assume that insanity is defined as the norm.  But if "normal" is literally crazy, what more can we say but "Alas, Babylon!" ~ or maybe Bedlam ~ and await the fin de siecle.   I am a member of the old school: I was officially diagnosed as crazy before it became so popular and widespread that it's all a sliding scale of the mass condition.  One of my delusions is that it's possible for humanity to progress to a new aeon of true collective sanity and well-being.  But meanwhile I'm stuck here in postmodern times along with everybody else and his nutty brother; and so I'm forced to admit that my best take on reality is utterly relative, and subject to judgment by a disinformed jury of my deranged peers.   If you don't believe me, just turn on the TV.  That'll settle the issue of your source of perceived reality.  If you believe the TV, or laugh at the hideous sitcoms, then obviously I'm the crazy one.  Ipso facto, de rigeur, and non compos mentis! 1. An Upfront Overview  I started out as a bright, happy, self-affirming kid, who found schoolwork fun and easy.  But then around puberty everything went wrong: inner and outer changes caused me to withdraw into a fearful, alienated, pathological private world.  This was in a boondocks area in the 1950s in an uncultured working-class family; there was no such thing as therapy nor any help whatsoever from the adults around me.  I flunked my college scholarship test, and joined the Army at 18 in a situation where there seemed to be no alternative.  After several hellish months I finally made some friends and went through an inner rite of passage resulting in a rudimentary personality integration.  This quickly dissolved as I faced new challenges in adult civilian life, and now I found myself totally isolated, living in an apartment in a big city, surviving at a low-end job, and going through my days in a state of utter paranoid fear, unable to communicate with anyone beyond the bare essentials.  My soul-rescue came in 1970 when I was befriended by some hippies and got into the counterculture.  Non-judgemental acceptance and participation in a community with a sense of collective, loving kinship ~ this is what enabled me to heal enough to find a more solid and positive base within myself.  Another key ingredient was LSD, which was therapeutic in breaking through my alienation, being specifically administered in a nurturing, guided situation.  I was in the hippie counterculture for about 2½ years and, unlike some of my friends, only tripped a few times.  It wasn't until later that I learned the hazards of overusing and abusing psychoactive drugs.  I felt bereft and marooned when the counterculture wound down.  I had gotten involved in one of the spin-offs, left-wing politics, but this blew out for me in a decisive way, and I found myself alone again.   This time, however, the personality integration proved to be permanent; I had grown and changed in lots of positive ways.  I now had an office job, which was a step up in that area; and by means of a conscious, deliberate plan I found a woman and got married.  I was married for four years, and my main problem during that time was that it all felt so NORMAL.  I didn't like that ~ it seemed boring, cloying, repetitive, constricting.  I longed for the heady days of hippiedom, where we perceived ourselves as a revolutionary vanguard plotting an apocalyptic leap to the next stage of evolution.  My son Jeffrey was born in the second year of the marriage.  I assisted and witnessed his birth, truly a mind-blowing experience!  He had a minor birth defect which was corrected by surgery, but by the time he was six months old it was clear that he was developmentally delayed.  He had a siezure when he was two, and at that tender age he entered the system of government-assisted programs for disabled people.  The whole thing was a humbling experience for someone who dreamed of bringing about a superhuman future.  The truth behind my fantasy was that I had not yet attained a sufficient soul-healing to be a real father to Jeffrey.  Even though I was integrated enough to function outwardly as a "normal" adult, inside I was still a little kid with a lot of peculiar convolutions in my psyche.  The marriage broke up in genuine conflict between me and my wife Donna, but when I actually left I experienced it as a great liberation ~ I was glad to be free of the burden of responsibility.  In the year Jeffrey was born, 1976, I wrote a book called Is There a Way Out?, describing the spiritual experiences I had on acid and later in meditation, and speculating on their metaphysical implications.  I self-published the book and distributed it through the alternative press network.  This brought me into contact with some interesting people, including practitioners of magic ~ the real thing, not stage trickery.  I was excited to discover that there seemed to be a whole new subculture centering around this mystic art, mixed liberally with drugs and rock & roll.  So it was that after several years of abstention I got back into the use of psychedelic substances, mainly acid and pot.  I had been living in Philadelphia for a long time, but now in 1980 I moved to California, and to Berkeley in particular, which is one of the world capitals of magic.  As soon as I arrived I landed a job at St. George Homes, a residential treatment center for severely disturbed children, described in Alt- Psyche, chapter 9 (click on the highlighted name).  I left after a very intense year.  There was a small local community of fellow "alumni", former staff trainees who found an ongoing bond in having shared the unique and often transformative experience of relating to and "babysitting" the "sacred children", as the St. George kids were sometimes called.  This loose-knit group overlapped with the much larger Bay Area magical subculture, and over the course of the next few years I lived in three different collective houses featuring a heady mix of psychology, magic, and psychedelia.            Ever since coming to Berkeley I had enjoyed the presence of the colorful crowd that inhabited the environs of Telegraph Avenue.  It included poets and pranksters, street people and hedonists, and many other freewheeling folks who did their best to live up to the reputation of "Berzerkeley".  The congeries included a large contingent of genuinely mentally ill people, who lived or spent most of their time on the street.  Telegraph Avenue was sometimes referred to as the "open ward" (with a tone of satire or pathos, depending on the person's attitude).  After a couple of years, certain events led me to a deliberate decision to give up my possessions and living place, and to take up a purely magical existence outdoors.  Under the tutelage of a charismatic street sorcerer, I learned to make costumes and artistic power-objects out of articles that were trash- picked or purchased at the flea market.  After finishing my apprenticeship I became a Telegraph Avenue character in my own right.  It was a great adventure ~ I felt as if I had entered a larger universe with a vastly expanded smorgasbord of probabilities.  Living on the street also taught me primal survival skills.  Many people in this community lived day-to-day in a state of precarious balance, and inevitably some of them went over the edge.   It finally happened to me in 1985.  Suddenly the magical universe became more real than the material world.  Magical events unfolded revealing an imminent apocalypse ~ the destruction of the human species, and possibly all life on Earth, within a very short span of time.  I went through all the emotional horror of the end of the world ~ and because it was so utterly real to me, I experienced the saving grace that can come when a human being faces death: I became mortally aware of all my faults and failings, and repented them with the heartbreaking sincerity of a dying man.  I saw that the psychedelic drugs I was using were ineluctably killing me, and so I gave them up, and have been drug- free ever since.   I also saw that the biggest open wound in my soul-body was that I had abandoned my son Jeffrey ~ and so now I resolved that if only I could get a second chance, I would go back to him.  Sure enough, the miracle happened: the world didn't end after all!   That was exactly how I experienced it, and when I told it all to a shrink at the Veterans' Hospital, he adjudged that I had had a psychotic break.  I began receiving a disability pension, and the first payment was enough for plane fare back to Philly.  I found that I now had enough substance and inner resources to be a real father to Jeffrey.  We formed a bond and forged a great relationship.  After a year or so, our relatives and Jeffrey's teachers said that they saw a lot of favorable changes in him as a result.  It was evidence of a positive change in myself as well, confirming that my apocalyptic experience had truly been a spiritual transformation, just as reported by some of the people who went through St. George and Kingsley Hall.  During this time I lived a frugal existence, a virtually ascetic lifestyle to atone for my many years of excess.  It was also expedient for surviving on my small VA pension.  This led to further experiences in collective living, notably when I got driven out of my apartment by yuppification and joined the local squatters' movement out of dire necessity.  For those unfamiliar with the phenomenon of urban squatting, it occurs in cities with a large acreage of decaying, abandoned buildings.  The squatters are often enterprising, well-organized, and have the sympathy of certain sectors of the mainstream population.  As a result, some squat-colonies survive and prosper for years at a stretch, despite the fact that they are, of course, breaking the law by their very existence.  My new housemates in the Philly squats were a familiar mix of alternative-culture folks, though with a larger dollop of anarchists than I'd encountered in the past.  I got out of the squats after six months of precarious residence, graduating into a slightly higher rung of low-end survival, viz. collective urban households of bohemians, artists, and avant-garde entrepreneurs.  Jeffrey continued to live with his mother in the working-class remnant of their yuppified neighborhood, and we saw each other at least once a week.  In the first couple of years after giving up drugs, it had been painfully difficult for me to adjust to a substance-free condition.  I felt bereft of the magnificent transcendent highs, and even the inevitable lows.  Just as in my '70s interregnum, the worst thing of all was the dead-even keel of ordinary existence, the daily dudgeon of what most people think of as normality.  As Jesus said through John in the Book of Revelation: "Because you are neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of my mouth."  This was my general perspective on normal middle-class life.  Fortunately, "middle class" was not an option for me, as I pursued survival and spiritual evolution on the fringes and margins of postmodern society.  And eventually I began to make progress again in my spiritual development, several years after having given up drugs.  A breakthrough in meditation inspired me to devote lots of time and energy to certain esoteric practices.  My aims were to  stimulate the kundalini to rise up my spine by any means necessary, and to build an immortal "Solar Body" via daily concentration and visualization.  It unfolded in slow but breathtaking fashion ~ I began to have ecstatic experiences rivaling the peaks of past acid trips.  Unfortunately there was a karmic price to be paid for this miracle, just as there was for the substance abuse, or overuse.  In exact inverse proportion to my ascending spiritual experiences, there manifested a nasty descent into a past psychopathology: a hellaceous bane of my religious childhood, which in the ancient Catholic lexicon was called "scruples".  It corresponds to the diagnosis of "obsessive-compulsive disorder" (OCD) in the postmodern catechism, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, 4th Edition (DSM-IV).  I had overcome this scrupulous/OCD tendency decades before, or so I had thought.  But evidently I had not fully purged nor purified myself of the karmic debt (aka mental illness), and so as I now opened the chakras in my spiritual praxis, these residual klinkers got resurrected, and impacted me like never before.  I was so debilitated by a single obsession that stuck in my mind and wouldn't go away, that I felt forced to give up all meditation, visualization, and everything else.  I felt as if I were ruined, and had regressed to less than zero.  Meanwhile, another series of events involving Jeffrey and his mother caused him to become alienated from me. His mental health problems seemed to be worsening in general.  I did what I could, including getting him a new psychiatrist who seemed to be caring and competent; but as he approached age 17, it looked like it might be time for me to depart from his life again.  I got the idea of returning to California, and began to make preparations; this did wonders for my own mental health.  In the spring of 1993 I made the trek by train, and found an affordable niche in Marin County ~ a tricky proposition, but it was made easier because the economy was still recovering from a recession.  I was hoping to pick up where I had left off, and get back into an exciting, hedonistic, magical life ~ except without the drugs, because I had sworn off.  I explored the turf, attended events, and searched for kindred spirits, but somehow it turned up fallow.  It looked like the magic was gone.  Then I got a phone from Philadelphia telling me that my ex-wife Donna, Jeffrey's mother, had died.  It was a classic, gut-wrenching, traumatic disaster.  I flew back East, took care of the funeral, and brought Jeffrey home with me to Marin.  Both of us were clinically depressed together for quite awhile.   There were some compensations: Jeffrey found San Rafael High lots more congenial than the Philly schools, and actually made some friends.  Further challenges followed after he graduated from the special ed program, but that goes beyond the scope of this brief sketch.  As for me, I learned a type of yoga I hadn't tried before, and doing it daily helped to lift me out of the black depths.  Over the next few years I gradually got back into other practices, and halleluyah, my meditational peaks returned.  My main productive activity during all these years since surving the end of the world (a.k.a. the psychotic episode) in 1985 was writing and self-publishing.  Most of the items were booklets ("zines") illustrated with collages, but there were also larger pieces including fiction approaching novel length, and a 100,000-word autobiographical exegesis focusing on the 'Sixties-era counterculture.  The alternative press was a very lively place in that era of photocopy & snail-mail, before the World Wide Web took over; my zines always got stimulating reviews, and I developed a small but enthusiastic fan-base.  Finally in the mid-'Nineties I got a computer, and soon made contact with webmeisters who liked my writing enough to put it onto their websites.  Later I learned to do it myself, and it continues to foliate in cyberspace unto this very day.  By 2004 Jeffrey and I were both doing pretty well in our ongoing recovery, and I decided it was time to see if I could make a greater contribution to what I still tended to think of as the outside world.  I got involved in the local mental health community, and became an activist.  Here's a website I created devoted to this effort: www.alt-psyche.com 2. The Mad God  The preceding chapter is my "cover story", the version that can be told to normal people and hopefully accepted as a reasonably sane accounting of events that included experiences of madness.   Now I'll tear off a veil or two, and relate the experiences from the inside out.  I'll describe the alternate realties as I truly saw them and lived in them, and I'll frame it in the context of how I still understand them.  In this rendering, it may be more difficult to draw clean lines between sane and insane, real and unreal.  But if in the end there are elements that you find problematic, distasteful, outrageous, etc., I invite you to consider them to be aspects of mental illness from which I have not yet fully recovered.   Thus you could make a choice to engage me in dialogue about them, and perhaps contribute to healing all around.  On my first acid trip I was able to let go of my pathologically impacted ego, and underwent an ecstatic experience of dissolving in white light and realizing the unity of all human beings, the divine love and oneness that underlies all creation.  So many people have undergone this and similar experiences on LSD and similar drugs, that it has become a matter of accepted, conventional knowledge amongst a sizable part of the population.  None of these people will find my experience the least bit crazy, and many of them will affirm it.  The same may not be true, however, for a trip I had a few months later.  I ascended to a headier peak with the help of a guide who had been there before.  He disappeared at the penultimate summit, and I found myself all alone and terrified in an infinite black void outside space and time, before the universe had even been created. I thought I must've been God, because I held life and death in my hands, literally. They were tangible archetypal objects: a bright spark that was the Star of Life, and a skull that was death itself. The skull morphed into a dagger, which I wanted to plunge into my heart to escape from the horror of being stuck in the void all alone forever. But I held back from doing that because I thought it would cause the total and final end of everything.  I was pretty crazy for a month or so after that trip, regressing to pathological patterns from which I thought I had escaped on the first trip.  But gradually I stabilized with the help of my friends in our hippie community ~ and in the next couple of years I made further progress, acquiring social skills I had never had before, and a solid personality integration.  And the most amazing thing of all was that a few months after the trip I was able to successfully make love with a woman for the first time in my life.  Naturally new challenges arose, but despite all the ups and downs in the following decade of my life, the peak of that trip stayed with me.  Down in the deepest part of me I was still trapped as a mad God in that lonely black hole which I took to calling the “Ultrasphere”.  I was still convinced that this was the ultimate reality: that the entire world and all creation is a shadow-show enacted by the Godself to make him forget the awful truth of his solitary existence.  He split himself up into the illusion of billions of separate humans, and who knows how many zillions of sentient beings on the planets of all the stars.  And behind it all is that Godawful me-creature in agony in the void.  I finally found a key to the mystery in the magical subculture.  I had already studied systems of numenal science like the kaballah and the chakras.  Then some friends who were initiates of a magical order explained the vital connection between my own subjective experience and these ancient maps of alt-reality.  Thus I came to know that for all its terrifying affect and bizarre imagery, the Ultrasphere trip was in fact an experience of the Self.  This explained why it resulted in a powerful long-term healing, despite the temporary crazy "side effects" immediately afterwards.  Of even greater importance was that, according to the traditional framework provided by the maps, the Ultra-experience is not the highest nor final peak ~ there are further realms beyond.  This offered me a more hopeful prognosis for the final outcome of existence and ultimate meaning of life.  Another esoteric interpretation of Ultra is that it's what Christ went through on the cross ~ and that every individual who attains the Ultrasphere literally re-experiences the crucifixion, suffering for the sake of all humanity.  This aspect hadn't stood out in my Ultra acid trip in 1970, except perhaps as an archetypal echo.  Later, though, it came to the fore.  In 1975 I was in a hiatus between subcultures, and had (temporarily) given up drugs.  I was doing meditation, and there came a day when I peaked up into the Ultrasphere.  It wasn't as intense as it had been on acid, and didn't last as long, but there was no doubt that I was there.  And this time it was all about Jesus ~ in fact, I experienced myself AS Jesus.  When I came down from the peak a little bit, I felt like I was back in Palestine in the first century.  When I got up from the meditation I came back to myself again ~ but then when I looked in the mirror I saw Jesus Christ looking back.  I decided not to tell anybody because they might think I was crazy.  In the year that followed I discovered that Gnostic literature was very relevant to my mystical experience as Christ, and all this became fodder for my book, Is There a Way Out?  I was able to express my strange experience and my beliefs about it in a way that other people (at least a select few) found interesting and stimulating instead of nutty. 3. Mickey Messiah Several years later, however, in Berkeley, it escalated beyond the bounds of any reality agreed upon by a consensus of the normal population.  This time I met Jesus Christ in the flesh ~ or rather a man who made that claim, and seemed to have some credentials to back it up.  This was the street sorcerer mentioned in chapter 1; I was so impressed with his powers that I petitioned to become his apprentice.  His terms were strict: I had to sell all my possessions, give up my source of income, jilt my girlfriend, and move out onto the street with him.  It was exactly what he had said in his earlier incarnation, as quoted in the Gospel: "Leave all, and come follow me".  And I took him up on it.  The sorcerer's real name was Sydney, and his impersonation of Jesus had a strong demonic edge to it.  He also claimed to be the Magical Child of Aleister Crowley, the most infamous magician of the 20th century, who had identified himself as the Beast 666.  My apprenticeship was like a primal boot camp, as I acquired street survival skills and learned to do without most of the things I had always taken for granted.  It was also a great adventure, as we gadded about in costumes festooned with shamanic power objects.  Using some elegant items purchased at the flea market, Syd crafted a costume for himself in the image of another one of his magical heroes, none other than Mickey Mouse.  It wasn't a cute, kiddie version; rather, a long black cape and similar accoutrements made it definitely more Draculous than Disneyesque.  There was method to the madness: it was all part of a magical operation called "Assumption of the Godform", in which you invoke the presence and power of metaphysical entities by assuming their appearance.  Syd explained that there was a certain archetypal identity between Mickey Mouse and Jesus Christ.  Clearly he was more interested in the shadow of Christ than the substance, and was wiley enough to realize that in the collective unconscious of postmodern times, media stars and fantasy figures are as powerful as the Gods of old.  And sure enough, this power manifested as we began to attract the attention and interest of lots of people in the environs of Telegraph Avenue; after a few months our "club" was booming.  Many of the individuals who flocked around Sydney J. Christ (as I later denominated him) were edified by his high energy or fascinated by his neverending spiels on magical lore and related foofarrah; some even claimed that he guided them to a unique kind of enlightenment.  But in the hardscrabble intimacy of the several months of my street apprenticeship, I had experienced his darkside all too lucidly.  He didn't make any secret of his diabolic inclinations ~ for instance, he openly bragged that he had eaten my soul and that I'd never escape his clutches.  He often played sadistic tricks on me under the guise of spiritual discipline, a proclivity that manifested more cruelly in other relationships.  He had a predatory attitude to women, and left a trail of used, abused, and abandoned lovers.  Ultimately I concluded that in his basic nature he was a psychic vampire.  I decided in my own mind that I would split with Syd and leave the scene.  Then, before I had a chance to do anything about it or even to tell him, a strange thing happened: I got taken over body and soul by the numenal entity we called the Magical Child.  His actual name was Ra Hoor Khuit, the most demonic of three deities who speak in The Book of the Law, a darkly poetic work channeled by Crowley in 1903 and held sacred by his followers, who are called "Thelemites".  And though they might deny it, in Christian terms Ra Hoor Khuit is surely the Devil.  As soon as I got possessed by this Devil, I discovered that he (and hence I) was very angry at Jesus Christ.  I figured that he must have become resentful about sharing Syd's body with his ancient nemesis, and so had come over to me at this golden moment.  As a matter of fact, the Devil wanted me to KILL Jesus Christ ~ who was conveniently incarnating as Syd at this very moment.  Even though I had never killed nor even seriously harmed anyone before in my life, I was up for it.  If you're just a spectator, you can of course write it off as insanity, but from the inside it's easy to understand.  It was ecstatic to surrender myself unto this supraterrestrial being, very dark but very powerful.  Years later I read a poignant quote about idealistic seekers of God who find the Devil instead, and are happy to settle for this flipside fulfillment of their quest.  The result was that I acted out the Judas bit on Syd, upstaging him at a big event before a large crowd of his admirers.  Since I was so unskilled in martial arts, the best I could do was try to kill him with magic, which fortunately failed.  But it was a magical triumph nevertheless, and I felt that the people were acclaiming me as King of the World, or at least of Berkeley.  But alas, my victory was short-lived because, true to the archetypal scenario, Jesus returned three days later and got revenge by physically kicking my butt.  Even this ignominy, though, was a spiritual breakthrough.  Many Christians find redemption in surrendering to Jesus, but in my case the opposite response was what I needed for the next stage of the unfoldment of the Self.  I knew that Jesus wanted me to surrender to him, because he had me on the ground in a choke hold, and was shouting at me: "Surrender!  Surrender!"  In this moment of truth, with the life being choked out of me by a homicidal soul-eating maniac, I refused to surrender ~ I was willing to die instead.  He backed off and let me go, and the outcome of my death-defying choice was that I permanently consolidated my individuation.  When life on Earth ends and the Sun goes nova, when the universe as a whole is sucked back into the Night of Brahman, when the last spark of light is extinguished in the void, I will still be here, and will endure as myself, forever.
	4. Magic Wars   The magic war between me and Syd (the Magical Child or Devil vs. Jesus Christ) lasted for a whole year.  Now here's the question: were we just a couple of Berkeley crazies playing out our games on a small parochial stage, or did our magicks actually tap in to some kind of larger reality?   The event where I launched my first strike against Syd took place on May 18, 1984 ~ and strange as it may seem, something eerily similar was going on in the grand arena of world politics.  The country had undertaken a massive military build-up under Ronald Reagan, and the born-again Christian President was rattling the sabres against what he characterized as the diabolic evil empire of the Soviet Union.  As I had learned from an inside source a few years before, the U.S. was preparing  to challenge the Soviet Union over the control of Mideast oil, and was willing to wage nuclear war for it if necessary.   It all came to a head right at this time, and in mid-June the President of the United States went on the radio and said (and this is an exact quote): "My fellow Americans, I have just passed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever.  We start bombing in five minutes."    The cover story was that it was only a joke ~ Reagan didn't know the microphone was turned on, and was having a little fun.  The truth is that this was the actual declaration of war, and the Russians knew it.  Publicly they were outraged and demanded an apology, which the White House gave; but they were painfully aware that the American military build-up had attained its goal: the U.S. now had the clear-cut ability to kick the Soviets' ass.  So behind the scenes the Russians surrendered ~ they agreed to withdraw their military backing of OPEC, the Arab oil cartel.  Only this unexpected capitulation averted a nuclear war which could have fulfilled the bloodiest Biblical prophecies of Armageddon.  And in fact this event was the watershed that began the unraveling of Soviet Communism which climaxed a few years later.    Furthermore, it was no accident that George Orwell picked *1984* as the title of his famous novel; this caused the year to become etched into the public mind as a looming apocalyptic crossroads.  In the years leading up to it, thousands of psychics and legions of otherwise ordinary people had visions and dreams of doomsday in 1984.  When the year finally ended, there was a collective sense of relief that: "Hey, it didn't happen!"  But very few people are aware of the fact that IT ALMOST DID.    In the meantime, though, I did my best as the Magical Child to promote the end of the world.  I did this via actual magical rituals, and also proclaimed it in street spiels and in a booklet I produced titled This Is the Magical Child Speaking by Robin Hoor Khuit, the name I had adopted as the avatar of the entity.  I wasn't afraid of the looming nuclear blowout ~ in fact I welcomed it with open arms and did my best to call it down from a vengeful heaven.  In a conscious parody of Christian doctrine, I prophesied that all the Magical Children ~ i.e., my own followers ~ would survive and flourish, but all the worshippers of my adversary Jesus and the other old Gods would perish in the conflagration.    Using various aspects of occult symbolism, I saw the ages of human history passing under the dominion of a series of deities of alternating gender, in the general pattern of God the Father, God the Mother, God the Son, and God the Daughter.  The first two are given in the Book of the Law under their Egyptian names, Osiris and Isis.  I had become the incarnation of their son Horus, a.k.a. Ra Hoor Khuit ~ and following the archetypal pattern and my own holy will, I decided that as the divine Prince my mission was to find the Princess and give her my fiat to preside over the world in the New Aeon.  In Thelemic theology this female being is named after the Egyptian Goddess Maat.    Thelma (Crowleyanism) is a doctrine of free will, hedonism, and sexual indulgence.  My hope was that when I found a beautiful, scintillating incarnation of the Princess, we would perform a momentous act of sex magic, perhaps right out in the open on the world stage.  This Great Working would instantly transform the planet into Arcadia, and everyone would live happily and heedlessly ever after in the erotic paradise.  This scenario was not seamlessly intercalated with my prophecy of nuclear apocalypse, but, as any shrink can tell you, magical thinking is not always rationally consistent.  It all made perfect sense to me, as I did my best to think with the mind of the mighty Magical Child who was overshadowing my mere mortal self. 5. The Berkeley Public Lunatic   The whole adventure reached a peak in 1985.  More and more it seemed that my magic was interfacing in curious ways with large-scale events and the actions of public figures.  The costumes I wore on Telegraph Avenue became gradually more elaborate, and occasionally I did stand-up performances at local clubs.  Here follows a little piece that I recited dramatically on one such occasion.   The latter stanzas contain topical references which I'll explain afterwards: Hey, my friend, you've been possessed! But you're far away from the cuckoo's nest; They've emptied out the loony bins ~ Randle McMurphy died for your sins. And psychiatry is now a science: It teaches us about drug reliance. Don't ask questions about your ills, Just watch TV and take your pills. We interrupt this poem for a news bulletin:    Today the President of the United States forgot to take his medication and accidentally bombed Switzerland back to the stone age.  The President later expressed extreme regret.  "Gee, my Swiss watch always kept perfect time," he was heard to say. All across this junky nation People take their medication; The Chelsey Drugstore, state-supplied, Uncle Sam is on your side! He's very glad to make you numb And bring you down and make you dumb; Just imagine the terrible stink If cannon fodder learned to think. (Two other characters come along, both played by me using different voices.) (Little girl:) "Hey, Daddy-Daddy, what's the name of that man? He looks like he's from Afghanistan." (Father:) "Don't pay him no mind, he makes me sick. He's just a Berkeley Public Lunatic." (Me again in my own voice:) But if you ever get off your feed There are different ways to fill that need There's lots of cults outsiders shun Rajneeshpuram is ruled by guns; And if you don't wear orange or red, Why gee, they're liable to shoot you dead. Krishna devotees dressed in robes They've sacrificed their frontal lobes. Zombies for Jesus stalk the land Mickey's Moony Mouseclub band. As for me, I'm on my own I only live in the Twilight Zone I can't escape, I'm stuck with the shtick Of a Berkeley Public Lunatic. ---------------------------------------------    The lines about "Rajneeshpuram" refer to the group led by Baghwan Shri Rajneesh, which was at the peak of its popularity at the time.  Rajneesh had a large following among high-end New Agers who showered him with largesse.  He flaunted it in outrageous style, maintaining a fleet of Rolls Royces strictly for his personal use.  Rajneeshpuram was a large, well-appointed ashram in Oregon.  I had seen a news photo taken there, showing Rajneesh on his throne surrounded by devotees and guarded by a man with an upraised rifle; in my rhyme, I exaggerated the implications for dramatic effect.    The magical intent behind my performance was that I was the upstart God of the dawning New Aeon, pugnaciously challenging all the old deities and their followers.  I actually held little animosity for the Hare Krishnas, and had friends among the local members; but the main intended target of my attack was Mickey J. Christ, a.k.a. Sydney.   So I was astonished by a magical counterattack the very next day, not from Syd on the street but from Rajneesh on the tube.  Of course he had plenty of other adversaries, but the timing was incredible: there he was on a nationally-televised news conference, rebutting his critics and making boastful proclamations, notably the shameless admission that he was indeed "the rich man's guru".   This performance galvanized public sentiment against him, and in the coming months he found himself in jail on immigration charges, and was then deported back to India.  But after seeing the event on TV that day, I concluded that I had tapped into some sort of global telepathy network.  Ronald Reagan's magic war had happened in sync with my own, and now this!  I took it as a powerful confirmation that my acts of magic could influence world events.
	6. Victory of the Princess and Rescue by Pan     The revelation that I was now a secret player behind the scenes of the world stage was very heady, but I tried to keep things in perspective.  I realized that I was still a novice, and that obviously there must be people who were much better at this game than I.  For instance, I had known since the Sixties that rock stars, or some of them at least, were members of an inner circle of adepts who shaped the metaphysical currents that determined the fate of humanity.  So what were these characters up to now?  Were they performing world-shaking magical operations on a grand scale?     My questions were answered in July when the god-kings of rock used electronic media magic to pull off the coup, the Great Working.  It was sound and vision on the tube around the planet, as a billion people gaped and gave their energy to the stars who performed at Live Aid, vying with each other to incarnate the imagery and the power of the Magical Child and the Princess.  Clearly it was Mick Jagger and Tina Turner who took the fiat, turning in the best rendition of fucking-while-not-fucking ever performed on the small screen.  Further, in exact fulfillment of the magical formula as I divined it, Mick had acknowledged that the Magical Child concedes supremacy to the Princess when earlier that year he released an album titled *She's the Boss*.     Though I was disappointed that I had failed to fill the Godform as the top incarnation of the Magical Child, it was remarkable to see the portents so exactly fulfilled.  Here was the Great Working; now where was the sexual utopia?  As a witness privy to the inner twinings of the events, I was aghast to observe that not only did the magical masterstroke not bring about the expected result, it apparently triggered an opposite reaction. The big scoop on the media, beginning immediately after Live Aid and continuing for the rest of the year, was the AIDS plague. Live AIDS.  No coincidence.     What was going on?  Other magical events showed me conclusively that the Princess had indeed taken over the world as the supreme deity, even if her rulership was hidden from the eyes of the profane citizens.  I already knew that the Magical Child was the Devil, but if the first act of the Princess in the supposed Aeon of Maat was to afflict the human species with AIDS, then I had to wonder if perhaps her true identity was the Whore of Babylon.     This apocalyptic note keyed the episode mentioned in chapter one.  There I merely scratched the outer surface, but now I can tell you the inner content.  Because the Magical Child was the covert perpetrator of AIDS in league with the Princess, I knew that I had to cast him off, or I myself would be in peril of the plague.  In other words, I would reap my well-deserved damnation for having made a deal with the Devil, and for welcoming the possession.    As soon as I ritually renounced Ra Hoor Khuit, I lost everything I had: my living space, my source of income, and my girlfriend, who was a priestess of the Princess (and also a severely afflicted mental health client, constraining her demons with a huge daily cocktail of psych meds).  It all happened very quickly, and was not suprising, since all my gains had come through the power of the darkling deity that had overshadowed my soul.     In chapter one I told how the emotional reality of facing death put me through a soul-change which gave me the spiritual strength to return to the East and take up my responsibility of fatherhood.  Now I can tell you the full numenal truth of how it happened.  Having become homeless, I scouted out a campsite in the Berkeley Hills, and holed up there in total despair, awaiting the end of the world.  There came a night when I hit the pits, and felt that surely I must die right now, for I had not the heart to go on for another moment.    I cried myself to sleep in that wretched anguish, and had a dream that was realer than real: the Great God Pan came and stood before me.  His presence was electrifying — there was not a shred of doubt that I was experiencing a miracle, a divine visitation.  The old goat radiated energy and was absolutely beatific, though of course with that diabolic cast as well.  It was Pan.     Pan took me to various places in time and space, where I made restitution and hammered out resolutions with people I had known in the past.  Finally he took me to our old family homestead, my grandparents' house in the Appalachians, which was redolent with primal-symbolic value.  Pan took hold of me by the arms from behind and held me in front of him as he pranced along the dirt road that curves around the house.  I could feel the head of his erect cock against the base of my spine, pumping new energy right up into my shushumna.  This was the numenal experience that revitalized me, saved me from death, and enabled me to come down from the hill reborn.  I repented all my bad magic and karmic errors, swore off drugs, and dedicated myself to regeneration ~ my own, and humanity's as well.
	To be continued © Copyright 2005 by Joseph Kerrick This document may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, as long as the Copyright notice is included.