(1) ARISE the SubGenius – YouTube
NEOPAGANISM
Because the focus of much conspiracy research has been dirverted to the Federal Reserve, UFOs, “the Jews” and even the Jesuits, it has failed to apprehend the most important development of occultism in modern times and the source of transhumanism.
Until recently, occultism was dominated by societies like the Golden Dawn, or Aleister Crowley’s OTO. While the influences of these societies are still central, they have proliferated in entirely new ways. While once associated with solemn candlelit rituals and dark incantations performed by robed mystics, occultism has a new face, and it’s the pranksterism of a bizarre parody religion called Discordianism, founded by a close friend of Lee Harvey Oswald, Kerry Thornley.
The principles of Discordianism are mockery. But it’s jocularity hides a more sinister agenda, which is the prejudice that nothign is sacred, underlying their bigroty towards “traditional religions.”
The principles of Discordianism were in part developed in The Illuminatus! Trilogy, speculative fiction novels co-authored by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. But Discordianism began with Greg Hill (aka Malaclypse the Younger or Mal-2) and Kerry Thornley (aka Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst or Lord Omar), who were drawn together by their common interest in humanism, atheism, black magic, hypnotism and their own deranged sense of humor. The Discordian Society was founded after the 1965 publication of its first holy book, the Principia Discordia.
According to historian Carole Cusack, the modern pagan revival is largely understood to be the result of the influence of Gerald Gardner, the founder of Wicca, whose rituals were developed with Aleister Crowley.[1] Whenever something goes wrong, pagans will typically pronounce, “Hail Discordia!” in reverence of the goddess of chaos of Discordianism. Margot Adler in Drawing Down the Moon, which provided the first comprehensive look at modern nature-based religions in the US, credits Thornley for being the first to coin the word “pagan” to refer to the various occult movements who paraded themselves as “nature” religions.
The modern popularization of the terms “pagan” and “neopagan,” as they are currently understood, is largely traced to Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, co-founder of the Church of All Worlds (CAW), which was heavily influenced by Discordianism. CAW was influenced by OTO member Robert Heinlein’s science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. In the science-fiction novel, a Martian-raised human named Michael Valentine Smith founded The Church of All Worlds, preached sexual freedom and the truth of all religions, and is martyred by narrow-minded people who are not ready for his teachings.”[2]
KILLING THE KING
Thornley was deeply implicated in the strange and murky world of the assassination of JFK, which has often been suspected by conspiracy theorists as representing the ancient pagan right of killing the “sacred king.” Like Oswald, Kerry later served at Atsugi Air Base in Japan, the CIA’s headquarters in the Far East, as a radar technician, though they were not stationed at the same time. Kerry’s experience with the consequent mayhem and insubordination that predominated at the base was recounted in The Idle Warriors. While he seemed unaware of it, the rambunctious atmosphere was obviously the result of the unwitting use of LSD. Since the early 1950s, Atsugi served as one of two overseas field stations where the CIA conducted extensive MK-Ultra testing with LSD.[3]
After he moved to New Orleans in 1961, Thornley had also met a mutual friend of Oswald, the strange David Ferrie, at one of his “parties,” as well as Clay Shaw and Guy Banister. These men formed the hotbed of the anti-Kennedy conspiracy uncovered by Garrison, which involved the Mafia, anti-Castro activists, writers, artists, bohemians, Nazis and a homosexual subculture.
Garrison suspected that the Discordian Society itself was a CIA front. What especially incriminated Thornley was his public celebration on the announcement of JFK’s murder, and the fact that he would introduce himself as follows: “I’m Kerry Thornley. I masterminded the assassination—how do you do?”[4] Garrison finally charged Thornley with perjury after he denied he had been in contact with Oswald since 1959. The perjury charge was eventually dropped by Garrison’s successor Harry Connick, Sr., father of the successful singer and movie actor Harry Connick, Jr.
Garrison argued that Thornley had impersonated Oswald between the years 1961 and 1963. Thornley lived only a few blocks away from Oswald, in New Orleans, and they were seen together on repeated occasions according to several witnesses. One of these was Barbara Reid, a voodoo priestess who was a member of Thornley’s Discordian Society, and “up to her ass” in the Process Church.[5]
Thornley’s additional CIA connections included Gordon Novel whom he met in 1957 when Thornley pledged Delta Sigma Phi at USC. Novel came to the attention of Garrison after allegedly making claims that he was an employee of the CIA in 1963 and knew both Oswald and Jack Ruby.[6] Novel later worked as investigator for automobile industry executive John DeLorean and US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who provided legal counsel for some of the surviving members of Branch Davidians, in the aftermath of the Waco Siege of 1993. As a private investigator, Novel also provided strategic advice to various celebrities including Michael Jackson and Jean-Claude Van Damme.
An early prototype of the Principia Discordia was copied using a mimeograph machine in Garrison’s office, by Greg Hill and his friend Lane Caplinger, who worked as a typist in the office. Lane Caplinger’s sister was Grace (Caplinger) Zabriskie, who became one of Thornley’s lovers. There were rumors that she was the subject of Bob Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone. She later became a successful Hollywood actress, appearing in many popular films, including Norma Rae, Fried Green Tomatoes, Twin Peaks (as the eerily psychic mother of the doomed Laura Palmer), Seinfeld, Big Love and Charmed, which follows three sisters, known as “The Charmed Ones,” and the most powerful good witches of all time.
In 1992, in an interview with the tabloid magazine show A Current Affair, Thornley confessed that prior to the assassination, “I wanted to shoot him. I wanted to assassinate him very much…I wanted him dead I would have shot him myself. I would have stood there with a rifle and pulled the trigger if I would have had the chance.”
The interview was arranged with the assistance of Thornley’s friend Sondra London, who has since come to be known as the “Serial Killer Groupie,” for her relationship with death row serial killer inmates G.J. Schaefer and Danny Rolling. Between 1992 and 1998, Thornley had participated in a series of interviews with London about what he would recollect of his knowledge of the JFK assassination, which are now available on YouTube.[7]
Thornley supposedly became convinced that he and Oswald were products of a, and that his parents were undercover Nazis. He further believed that he was a product of a Nazi breeding experiment that used both him and Oswald, who he suspected might have been his brother, as guinea pigs. Kerry even came to suspect his own parents were Nazis spies who had made a deal with occult Nazis to conduct these eugenics experiments, the ultimate purpose of which was to create a Manchurian candidate. In fact, Thornley viewed the whole psychoanalytical establishment as a product of Nazism and an outgrowth of the eugenics movement.[8]
Thornley ultimately came to believe that Robert Anton Wilson was his MK-Ultra handler. Famed JFK assassination researcher Mae Brussell also asserted that Robert Anton Wilson was a CIA agent. When asked about the claim, Wilson retorted, “Ahh, if I were, I would deny it.”[9] Wilson, who was working as associate editor of Playboy magazine at the time, met Hill and Thornley in 1967, and helped develop many of the Discordian Society’s creeds and dogmas.[10] Wilson and Thornley developed “Operation Mindfuck” (OM) in 1968, and Adam Gorightly argues that Thornley deliberately issued statements during the investigation claiming he was an agent of the Bavarian Illuminati, simply to “mindfuck” Garrison.[11]
CHURCH OF THE SUBGENIUS
There is some question as to whether Discordianism should be regarded merely as a parody of religion. According to Robert Anton Wilson, however, “Many people consider Discordianism a complicated joke disguised as a new religion. I prefer to consider it a new religion disguised as a complicated joke.”[12] Discordians use irreverent humor to promote their philosophy and to prevent their beliefs from becoming “dogmatic.”
The tom-foolery of Discordianism has a sacred purpose, according to Ian Bear, who referred to it in the neopagan journal Green Egg, as “Divine irreverence”:
The trickster is able to bring up in a humorous way issues that may still be too controversial to begin serious debates over. Willingness to parody ourselves protects us from becoming truly ridiculous, and renders parodies of us by our enemies utterly useless. If the New Agers were more willing to parody themselves, their culture might have filtered out some of its more absurd notions, and spared itself much vicious lampooning from without. It is the job of the Discordian to disrupt unhealthy patterns, including one’s own. It should be noted that making pointless wisecracks just as the energy is peaking in a ritual is not a positive use of irreverence.
On a larger scale the chaos magician is able to work vast changes unattainable through ordinary, orderly means. Where chaotic systems exist, it is now well known that in the right place, a small flutter can transform the entire system. This is known in chaos science as the butterfly effect. In these fast changing times, at this crossroads of history, in this time of crisis and opportunity, our entire society is a chaotic system. By observing society keenly, and choosing the appropriate moment for the golden apple to be launched, the chaos magician can work great changes in society through the social butterfly effect.
Thornley was also a leading member of the Church of the SubGenius, an American UFO and parody religion and offshoot of Discordianism founded in the 1970s. The Church is inspired by Robert Anton Wilson, who is referred to as “Pope Bob.” Wilson called it “the best of the One True Religions.”[13] According to Eric Davis, despite their “goofy devotion to flying saucers, thrift store kitsch,” the Church, “conceal rather profound explorations of America’s magical mind.” [14]
The Church of the SubGenius was connected to the Moorish Orthodox Church of America, founded in 1964 by Peter Lamborn Wilson.[15] Also known as Hakim Bey, Wilson is an American anarchist author, who spent time at Millbrook with Timothy Leary and later collaborated with Robert Anton Wilson.[16] The Moorish Orthodox Church purports to be an outgrowth of the Moorish Science Temple of America, founded by Noble Drew Ali, where Elijah Mohammed got his start before founding his own Nation of Islam, made famous by Malcolm X and Louis Farakhan.
Notable associates of the Church of the SubGenius in more recent times have included Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo, Paul Reubens (aka Pee Wee Herman), David Byrne of the Talking Heads, and cartoonist R. Crumb, who provided early publicity for the church by reprinting Sub Genius Pamphlet #1 in his comics anthology Weirdo.
References to the Church are present in several works of art, including the comic book The Middleman, the band Sublime’s album 40oz. to Freedom, and the television program Pee-wee’s Playhouse. In 1985 Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, directed by the then-unknown Tim Burton, was a financial success and, despite receiving mixed reviews, it developed into a cult film. The Church’s culture of “Slack,” explains Kembrew McLeod in Pranksters: Making Mischief in the Modern World, “left traces on everything from the open-source operating system Slackware to Slacker, Richard Linklater’s zeitgeist-defining 1991 film.” [17]
TECHNOPAGANISM
Discordianism was one of the sources for the development of what is called chaos magic, the most important recent development in the occultism of Aleister Crowley. By merging with situationism, punk, and MK-Ultra agent Timothy Leary’s theories of technology, chaos magic would produce the subculture of cyberpunk, which shaped the development of subsequent hacker ethic and the emergence of transhumanism. The bridge between these worlds was the work of Robert Anton Wilson.
Leary’s eight-circuit model of consciousness is prominent in chaos magic, having been detailed in Chaotopia! by Dave Lee, a leading member of the Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT), a secret society of chaos magic, to which belonged not only Timothy Leary, but also Robert Anton Wilson as well as William S. Burroughs.[18]
According to Peter Carroll, the word “Illuminates” was used in accordance with the claimed tradition of calling those in such societies who have mastered the secrets of magic “the Illuminati.”[19] The word “Thanateros” is a combination of Thanat, the Greek god of death, and Eros, the god of sex. Their idea is that sex and death represent the positive and negative methods of attaining “magical consciousness,” though it of course appears to be an allusion to sex magic and human sacrifice, or necrophilia. Like Wiccans, the IOT identifies Thanateros with the “horned god” of the Ancient Mysteries, which they believed was falsely maligned as the “Devil” by the monotheistic religions.
In the 1980s, Timothy Leary reemerged as a spokesperson of the “cyberdelic” counterculture, whose adherents called themselves “cyberpunks,” being a confluence of interest in computers and psychedelics. Rebranding his popular commandment, Leary proclaimed, “PC is the LSD of the 1990s” and admonished bohemians to “turn on, boot up, jack in.”[20]
Timothy Leary supported the candidacy of Ron Paul for president in 1988 as leader of the Libertarian Party. A floppy disk was sent out as an invitation to a Ron Paul fundraiser hosted by Timothy Leary at his home in Benedict Canyon, which included the following message from Leary:
Thank you for joining me today in support of Ron Paul and the Libertarian Party. As we enter these closing years of the Roaring Twentieth Century, we’re going to see personal computers enhance our lives in ways we can scarcely imagine. Fellow Cyberpunk Chuck Hammill has helped me assemble a collection of bits and bytes you may enjoy.
If you’re wise … digitize![21]
The disk contained software credited by the Libertech Project for those who “like the idea of techno-thwarting government abuse” and was “distributed free to Libertarians, Objectivists, Discordians, Cyberpunks, Survivalists, Soldiers of Fortune, Hackers, Entropists, Deltaphiles and similar types…” The disk contained DOS programs generating fractal graphics and a copy of the paper, “From Crossbows to Cryptography: Thwarting the State via Technology” by Chuck Hammill, given at the Future of Freedom Conference in November 1987.
Kembrew McLeod notes that Discordianism’s “irreverence had a certain appeal for the nascent hacker movement of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as other budding copyfighters,”[22] and “Illuminatus! appealed to those who actively resisted systems—social, technological, legal—that imposed restrictions on the way we can play with, remix, or ‘hack’, computer code, culture, and even so-called reality.”[23]
Robert Anton Wilson’s works have been of particular appeal to the computer subcultures of gamers, programmers and hackers. Wilson, Illuminatus!, Eris and Discordianism all receive prominent entries in the New Hacker’s Dictionary, originally an online glossary of hacker’s slang, and indeed Wilson was regarded as somewhat of a “hero” to hackers.[24] Often used in computer subcultures is the word “Fnord,” which was coined in 1965 by Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill in the Principia Discordia and popularized following its use in The Illuminatus! Trilogy. It is used in newsgroup and hacker culture to indicate that someone is being ironic, humorous or surreal.
Timothy Leary, Albert Hoffmann, Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson were often featured in Mondo 2000 which. According to Leary, Mondo 2000 became “a beautiful merger of the psychedelic, the cybernetic, the cultural, the literary and the artistic.”[25] R.U. Sirius (born Ken Goffman), co-founder and original editor-in-chief of Mondo 2000, became the most prominent promoter of the cyberpunk ideology, whose adherents were pioneers in the IT industry of Silicon Valley and the West Coast of the United States. Mondo 2000 was subtitled A Space Age Newspaper of Psychedelics, Science, Human Potential, Irreverence and Modern Art.
Also contributing to Mondo 2000 was Hakim Bey, founder of the Moorish Orthodox Church of America. Bey, along with Robert Anton Wilson and Rudy Rucker, also edited Semiotext(e) SF, a science fiction anthology released in 1989, which featured the writings of William S. Burroughs, Kerry Thornley, and authors who defined the cyberpunk genre such as William Gibson.
Rucker, an American mathematician, science fiction author, and philosopher, is one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, Rucker is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which (Software and Wetware) won Philip K. Dick Awards. At present he edits the science fiction webzine Flurb. In Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge, in an obvious allusion to Freemasonry, Rucker referred to their efforts as “The Great Work,” which in Freemasonry is equated with rebuilding the Temple of Solomon. Rucker goes so far as to compare their work to the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages, who according to Masonic lore were the Templars.[26]
As Mark Dery notes in Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, Mondo 2000 had “one foot in the Aquarian age and the other in a Brave New World.”[27] Featured in the magazine were the recurring themes of transhumanism, such as smart drugs, virtual reality, cyberpunk, interactive media, aphrodisiacs, artificial life, nanotechnology, brain implants, life extension, as well as designer aphrodisiacs, psychedelics, techno-erotic paganism, etc. Mondo 2000 encompassed a considerable range of subcultures, among them computer hackers, ravers, and New Age technophiles, and technopaganism, a subculture that combines neopaganism, including faiths such as Wicca and Neo-druidry with digital technology.
BURNING MAN FESTIVAL
In issue number five of Mondo 2000, Bey theorizes “temporary autonomous zones” (TAZ) in which the collective libido of repressed moralistic societies might obtain brief release. Bey’s notion of TAZ is derived from his theory of Ontological Anarchism, which borrowed from Situationism, Dada and the occult. “The real genesis” of his theory of TAZ, explained Bey, “was my connection to the communal movement in America, my experiences in the 1960s in places like Timothy Leary’s commune in Millbrook.”[28]
According to Erik Davis in TechGnosis, “Though Bey is critical of cyberhype, his political and poetic vision of the T.A.Z. became a highly influential conceptual fetish for the digital underground.”[29] Because of his TAZ work, Bey has been embraced by rave subculture, which identified the experience of raves as part of the tradition of Bey’s TAZ.
The concept of TAZ was put into practice on a large scale by the Dada and Situationist influenced Cacophony Society, in what they called Trips to the Zone, or Zone Trips. Possibly the most widely known Cacophony member is novelist Chuck Palahniuk, who used the society as the basis for the fictional organization Project Mayhem in his novel Fight Club. Their co-founder, John Law, also helped found Black Rock City, now called the Burning Man Festival.[30]
The Burning Man is an obvious allusion to a similar Celtic ritual that involved human sacrifice. The ancient ritual was the basis of the 1973 celebrated cult film The Wicker Man. The plot centers around Sergeant Howie, a Christian who journeys to a remote Hebridean island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. Howie finds the islanders practicing a pagan Celtic cult involving May Day celebrations. He believes they want to sacrifice the young girl, but is himself sacrificed in the end, burned alive inside a giant wicker man.
The Cacophony Society also has links to the Church of the SubGenius.[31] The Association for Consciousness Exploration (ACE) and pagan groups have occasionally assisted the Church of the SubGenius in its events, such as celebrations of holidays in honor of characters drawn from fiction and popular culture, such as Monty Python, Dracula, and Klaatu.[32] ACE was originally located at The Civic, a former synagogue in Cleveland Heights, OH, and there offered classes and featured appearances of Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, and Wiccan priestess Selena Fox.[33] In 1985 ACE moved its offices to the Masonic Temple Annex Building in the same city, before moving to the Starwood Center in 2014.
ACE is best known for hosting the annual Starwood Festival, a seven-day Neo-Pagan, New Age, multi-cultural and world music festival presented in July, where clothing is “optional.”[34] Some specific groups whose members regularly appear at and attend Starwood include the Church of All Worlds (CAW), the Church of the SubGenius, the Neo-Druidic group Ar nDraiocht Fein (ADF), and various Neopagan Covens and organizations.
ONG’S HAT
After a long period of obscurity, the Moorish Orthodox Church experienced a revival in the mid-1980s due to the involvement of former members of the Beat movement, hippies and the and Radical Faerie movement. The Radical Faeries, a form of contemporary paganism, were founded in 1979 by Harry Hay, a practitioner of Crowley’s sex magick who is considered the founder of the Gay Liberation Movement. Hay was also a supporter of North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), a pedophile advocacy organization in the US that works to abolish age of consent laws criminalizing adult sexual involvement with minors.[35] Hakim Bey has also received criticism for writing for the NAMBLA Bulletin.[36]
In the late 1990s, the Moorish Orthodox Church established its primatial see in the southern village of Ong’s Hat, New Jersey. Ong’s Hat is actually a ghost town, which has become the subject of an urban legend developed by Joseph Matheny, titled The Incunabula Papers: Ong’s Hat and Other Gateways to New Dimensions. The name may have been used in reference to Walter J. Ong, the friend of Teilhard de Chardin who worked closely with Marshal McLuhan.
Ong’s Hat first appeared on The WELL, a pioneering Internet social site in the late 1980, that was a major online meeting place for fans of the Grateful Dead. The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, or simply the WELL, founded in 1985 by MK-Ultra personality Stewart Brand, and Larry Brilliant, is one of the oldest virtual communities in continuous operation. In 2006, Google Inc. appointed Brilliant as the Executive Director of Google.org, their philanthropic arm, a position which he held until 2009, when he joined the Skoll Foundation as its President, the philanthropic organization established by former eBay president Jeff Skoll. As described by Erik Davis in TechGnosis:
The system would be an “open-ended universe,” self-governing and self-designing—a cybernetic ecology of minds. And for the smart, white, and liberal Bay Area denizens who started posting to the WELL’s various conferences, the experiment worked like a charm. By creating a place where the clever exchange of helpful information became what Rheingold calls a source for “social capital,” the WELL played the role of the “superior man” described in the I Ching hexagram called the Well: “the superior man encourages the people at their work, / And exhorts them to help one another.”[37]
An early and very active member was Howard Rheingold, who was inspired to write The Virtual Community from his experience on The WELL. Rheingold, who also worked with Stewart Brand, had a lifelong fascination with mind augmentation and its methods, which led him to the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and Xerox PARC. Rheingold co-authored Higher Creativity: Liberating the Unconscious for Breakthrough Insight with Willis Harman. According to Rheingold’s book, The WELL’s Usenet feed was for years provided by Apple.
The threads of the story can be traced back as far as the 1980s on BBSs, old Xerox mail art networks and early zines. In “A full color brochure for the Institute of Chaos Studies and the Moorish Science Ashram in Ong’s Hat, New Jersey,” the story begins with Wali Fard (modeled after Wallace Fard, the founder of the Nation of Islam), who travels the world seeking occult knowledge. Fard establishes the Moorish Science Ashram in Brooklyn, for the enhancement of consciousness and consequent enlargement of mental, emotional and psychic activities. There, he is joined by runaway boys from Paramus, New Jersey, an anarchist lesbian couple from Brooklyn, and Frank and Althea Dobbs, the purported children of “Bob” Dobbs, who conduct experiments in cybernetic processes and awareness.
Matheny hints that Ong’s Hat was “perilously close” to South Jersey Nuclear Waste Dump near Fort Dix, which was evacuated due to an “accident.” He then recounts that the Ashram was joined by two more scientists from Ong’s Hat, who founded the Institute of Chaos studies (ICS). They began conducting experiments using sex and drugs through the use of device referred to as “The Egg,” a modified sensory-deprivation chamber in which the subject’s attention was focused on a computer terminal and screen. The Egg was tested on one of the Paramus runaways at the precise moment of the Spring Equinox, when the entire egg vanished from the laboratory. Moments later, it rematerialized and the boy was able to recall having traveled to another dimension: “This was the opening of The Gate.”
The Egg inspired a children’s TV series called Galidor to use an interdimensional travel device of the same name, which aired on YTV in Canada and Fox Kids in the US. The show is centered upon Nick Bluetooth, a 15-year-old boy led (with his friend Allegra Zane) by an extraterrestrial map to a spacecraft nicknamed the Egg, which moves them into an “Outer Dimension” threatened by Gorm, there to protect the story’s eponymous realm.
THE SINGULARITY
R.U. Sirius became a leading figure in the transhumanist movement. He was editor of H+ Magazine, published by Humanity+, after it changed its name from the World Transhumanist Association (WTA), following a rebranding effort. Notable contributors include Michael Moorcock, Woody Evans, John Shirley, James Hughes, Douglas Rushkoff and Rudy Rucker.
The WTA was founded in 1998 by Nick Bostrom and David Pearce. Bostrom is a Swedish philosopher at St. Cross College of Oxford, and holds a PhD from the London School of Economics. Bostrom is the author of over 200 publications, on the theme of transhumanism, and has been listed in Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers list.
Nick Bostrom founded the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET). A fellow of IEET is David Eagleman, an American neuroscientist and writer at Baylor College of Medicine, who worked with James Eagan Holmes, the infamous orange-haired perpetrator of the Aurora Shooting in Colorado.
Bostrom is also on the advisory board of Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI, formerly the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence), where Ray Kurzweil, the modern-day prophet of transhumanism, is one of its directors. A non-profit organization founded in 2000, MIRI advocates ideas initially put forth by I. J. Good and Vernor Vinge regarding an “intelligence explosion,” or Singularity, which MIRI thinks may follow the creation of sufficiently advanced AI.[38]
MIRI’s Director of Research was Ben Goertzel, an American author, mathematician and researcher in the field of artificial intelligence. An advocate of psychedelics, Goertzel is also on the Advisory Board of the Timothy Leary Archive maintained by Michael Horowitz, father of Wynona Ryder. In 1996 Goertzel together with Francis Heylighen founded the Global Brain Group to study the global brain emerging from an increasingly intelligent Internet.
The MIRI’s advisory board includes PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, and Foresight Institute co-founder Christine Peterson. Christine Peterson, who coined the term “Open Source,” is co-founder of Foresight Institute, which focuses on promoting nanotechnology, making technology information available to all, and enabling space settlement. In 2006, the MIRI, along with the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford, the Center for Study of Language and Information, KurzweilAI.net, and Peter Thiel, co-sponsored the Singularity Summit at Stanford. The 2012 Singularity Summit was held at the Nob Hill Masonic Center, in San Francisco.[39]
[1] Carole M. Cusack. “Discordian Magic: Paganism, the Chaos Paradigm and the Power of Imagination.” International Journal for the Study of New Religions 2.1 (2011) p. 132
[2] Ibid. p. 37.
[3] Martin A. Lee, Robert Ranftel, and Jeff Cohen “Did Lee Harvey Oswald Drop Acid?” Rolling Stone Magazine (March 1983).
[4] Adam Gorightly. The Prankster and the Conspiracy.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Dick J. Reavis. “Conspiracy dreams are an FBI nightmare.” San Antonio Express News (January 23, 2000).
[7] “Kerry Thornley Talks to Sondra London – 1 of 7” [https://youtu.be/ky7O9COM13o]
[8] Adam Gorightly. The Prankster and the Conspiracy.
[9] “Nardwuar vs Robert Anton Wilson,” Dedroidify (Saturday, August 1, 2009) [http://dedroidify.blogspot.ca/2009/08/nardwuar-vs-robert-anton-wilson.html]
[10] Carole M. Cusack, “Discordian Magic: Paganism, the Chaos Paradigm and the Power of Imagination,” International Journal for the Study of New Religions 2.1 (2011), p. 130.
[11] Adam Gorightly. The Prankster and the Conspiracy. p. 136.
[12] Adam Gorightly. The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How he Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture. (New York: ParaView Press, 2003) p. 136.
[13] Kembrew McLeod. Pranksters: Making Mischief in the Modern World (New York University Press: 2014) p. 245.
[14] Erik Davis. TechGnosis. p. 182.
[15] Michael Muhammad Knight, William S. Burroughs vs. The Qur’an, (Soft Skull Press, 2012) p. 96
[16] Ibid. p. 96
[17] Kembrew McLeod. Pranksters: Making Mischief in the Modern World (New York University Press: 2014) p. 245.
[18] Frater Fäustchen. “Für und wider Magie und Liber MMM” in Shekinah no. 1. I; Douglas Grant. Magick and Photography, Ashé Journal, Vol 2, Issue 3, (2003).
[19] Peter J. Carroll Liber Null & Psychonaut, (York Beach, Maine: 1987)
[20] Timothy Leary, Michael Horowitz & Vicky Marshall. Chaos and Cyber Culture. (Ronin Publishing, 1994)
[21] Jennifer Ulrich. “Transmissions from the Timothy Leary Papers: Ron Paul for President.” New York Public Library (October 22, 2012)
[22] Kembrew McLeod, “Crashing the Spectacle: A Forgotten History of Digital Sampling, Infringement, Copyright Liberation and the End of Recorded Music.” Culture Machine. (2009), 10, p. 117.
[23] Ibid, p. 116-117.
[24] Ibid. p. 177-8.
[25] Fred Turner. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network. p. 164.
[26] Rudy Rucker, R.U. Sirius, Queen Mu. Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge.
[27] Mark Dery. Escape Velocity.
[28] Hans Ulrich Obrist, “In Conversation with Hakim Bey,” E-flux (2010) [http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-conversation-with-hakim-bey/]
[29] Erik Davis. TechGnosis. p. 114.
[30] “Burning Man” Wikipedia (accessed June 14, 2015).
[31] “Burning ‘Bob’: Cacophony, Burning Man, and the Church of the SubGenius.” 2013 interview with Church founders Drummond and Stang. Burning News (January 3, 2014)
[32] Carole M. Cusack, “The Church of the SubGenius: Science Fiction Mythos, Culture Jamming and the Sacredness of Slack”, Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith, (Ashgate Publishing, 2010) p. 90.
[33] Local Group Hosts Dr. Timothy Leary by Will Allison (article about Timothy Leary & Robert Anton Wilson appearance at The Civic) The Observer (CWRU Campus Newspaper) Cleveland, OH (Friday Sept. 29th, 1989 Pg. 4)
[34] Paul Krassner, “Life Among the Neopagans.” The Nation, (August 24, 2005)
[35] Jeffrey Lord. “When Nancy Met Harry.” The American Spectator. (October 5, 2006).
[36] Michael Muhammad Knight. William S. Burroughs Vs. the Qur’an. (Soft Skull Press, 2012). pp. 76–79.
[37] Ibid. p. 167.
[38] Eliezer Yudkowsky. “Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics.” Machine Intelligence Research Institute.
[39] “Singularity Summit: Logistics.” SingularitySummit.com.