Robert Anton Wilson was an American author, futurist, psychologist, and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized within Discordianism as an Episkopos, pope and saint, Wilson helped publicize Discordianism through his writings and interviews. In 1999 he described his work as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth". Wilson's goal was "to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything."
A hippie, also spelled hippy, especially in British English, is someone associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during or around 1964 and spread to different countries around the world. The word hippie came from hipster and was used to describe beatniks who moved into New York City's Greenwich Village, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, and Chicago's Old Town community. The term hippie was used in print by San Francisco writer Michael Fallon, helping popularize use of the term in the media, although the tag was seen elsewhere earlier.
Colin Henry Wilson was an English existentialist philosopher-novelist. He also wrote widely on true crime, mysticism and the paranormal, eventually writing more than a hundred books. Wilson called his philosophy "new existentialism" or "phenomenological existentialism", and maintained his life work was "that of a philosopher, and (his) purpose to create a new and optimistic existentialism".
Paul Krassner was an American writer and satirist. He was the founder, editor, and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958. Krassner became a key figure in the counterculture of the 1960s as a member of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and a founding member of the Yippies, a term he is credited with coining.
Flower power was a slogan used during the late 1960s and early 1970s as a symbol of passive resistance and nonviolence. It is rooted in the opposition movement to the Vietnam War. The expression was coined by the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in 1965 as a means to transform war protests into peaceful affirmative spectacles. Hippies embraced the symbolism by dressing in clothing with embroidered flowers and vibrant colors, wearing flowers in their hair, and distributing flowers to the public, becoming known as flower children. The term later became generalized as a modern reference to the hippie movement and the so-called counterculture of drugs, psychedelic music, psychedelic art and social permissiveness.
The Los Angeles Free Press, also called the "Freep", is often cited as the first, and certainly was the largest, of the underground newspapers of the 1960s. The Freep was founded in 1964 by Art Kunkin, who served as its publisher until 1971 and continued on as its editor-in-chief through June 1973. The paper closed in 1978. It was unsuccessfully revived a number of times afterward.
An egregore is a concept in Western esotericism of a non-physical entity or thoughtform that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of a distinct group of individuals.
The Disinformation Company was a privately held, limited American publishing company until 2012 when it was sold to Red Wheel/Weiser/Conari. It also owned Disinformation Books, which focused on current affairs titles and books exposing alleged conspiracy theories, occultism, politics, news oddities, and purported disinformation. It was headquartered in New York City, New York. Arguably, its most visible publications to date are 50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know and the Everything You Know About [subject] Is Wrong series, both by the company's editor-at-large Russ Kick.
The Elgin Theater is a former movie theater on the corner of 19th Street and Eighth Avenue in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. The theater showed films from its opening in 1942 until 1978. Its longtime manager, Ben Barenholtz, invented midnight movie programming for the theater. Following a full renovation, the building reopened in 1982 as a 472-seat dance theater operated by the Joyce Theatre Foundation.
Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion is a 1998 book by journalist Gary Webb. The book is based on "Dark Alliance", Webb's three-part investigative series published in the San Jose Mercury News in August 1996. The original series claimed that, in order to help raise funds for efforts against the Nicaraguan Sandinista government, the CIA supported cocaine trafficking into the US by top members of Nicaraguan Contra Rebel organizations and allowed the subsequent crack epidemic to spread in Los Angeles. The book expands on the series and recounts media reaction to Webb's original newspaper exposé.
Gary Joseph Lachman, also known as Gary Valentine, is an American writer and musician. He came to prominence in the mid-1970s as the bass guitarist for rock band Blondie. Since the 1990s, Lachman has written full-time, often about mysticism and occultism. He has written more than 22 books on consciousness, culture, and the western esoteric tradition, written for journals in the US and UK, and lectured on his work in the US and Europe; his books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
The counterculture of the 1960s was an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon and political movement that developed in the Western world during the mid-20th century. It began in the early 1960s, and continued through the early 1970s. It is often synonymous with cultural liberalism and with the various social changes of the decade. The effects of the movement have been ongoing to the present day. The aggregate movement gained momentum as the civil rights movement in the United States had made significant progress, such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and with the intensification of the Vietnam War that same year, it became revolutionary to some. As the movement progressed, widespread social tensions also developed concerning other issues, and tended to flow along generational lines regarding respect for the individual, human sexuality, women's rights, traditional modes of authority, rights of people of color, end of racial segregation, experimentation with psychoactive drugs, and differing interpretations of the American Dream. Many key movements related to these issues were born or advanced within the counterculture of the 1960s.
The Morning of the Magicians: Introduction to Fantastic Realism is a 1960 book by the journalists Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. As the authors disclaim in their preface, the book is intended to challenge readers' viewpoints on historic events, whether they believe the explanations or not, but with the goal to give readers the opportunity to test their level of cognitive dissonance and critical thinking skills. Although the book presents a collection of "raw material for speculation of the most outlandish order," the same reviewer also noted "it is the instigation of original thought that matters." It covers topics like cryptohistory, ufology, occultism in Nazism, alchemy, spiritual philosophy and Die Glocke, and is thus often referenced by conspiracy-theory enthusiasts.
The hippie subculture began its development as a youth movement in the United States during the early 1960s and then developed around the world.
Mitch Horowitz is an American author, publisher, speaker, and television host specializing in occult and esoteric themes. A frequent writer and speaker on religion and metaphysics in print and on television, radio, and online, Horowitz’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time, and CNN.com, and he has appeared on NPR, CBS News, NBC News, and Vice News. Horowitz hosts the UFO-themed Discovery/HBO Max television series, Alien Encounters: Fact or Fiction, which the network added to its Wednesday night line-up in June 2024. In July 2024, he joined Elijah Wood's podcast network, SpectreVision Radio, and will be hosting a historical podcast, Extraordinary Evidence: ESP Is Real, which explores the background and data of extrasensory perception (ESP) research. Horowitz plays himself as a historian and commentator in V/H/S/Beyond, the seventh entry in the horror anthology series on Shudder, which a reviewer for RogerEbert.com described as "one of the better V/H/S anthologies of late."
Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) is an 11-minute film photographed, directed and edited by Kenneth Anger.
The Tate–LaBianca murders were a series of murders perpetrated by members of the Manson Family during August 9–10, 1969, in Los Angeles, California, United States, under the direction of Tex Watson and Charles Manson. The perpetrators killed five people on the night of August 8–9: pregnant actress Sharon Tate and her companions Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, and Wojciech Frykowski, along with Steven Parent. The following evening, the Family also murdered supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, at their home in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles.
Green Dragon was a mystical Tibetan or Japanese occult order first mentioned at the beginning of the 20th century. The organization was mainly popularized through the book The Morning of the Magicians.
Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump is a 2018 book by the American writer Gary Lachman. It explores the influence of occult figures on the alt-right movement in the United States, and their use of internet memes and chaos magick in the rise of Donald Trump to the presidency. Lachman draws a direct line between occult and far right figures like philosopher Julius Evola, Steve Bannon, and Aleksandr Dugin, while showing how the New Thought religious movement and people like Norman Vincent Peale shaped who Trump became, leaving a post-truth reality in its wake.
