Another popular path to the occult has been poetry especially with figures like
Lord Byron
or Aleister Crowley
Robert Johnson
Every one knows about the occult trappings of rock and roll, especially those of Jimmy Page and Jim Morisson. Most never go further to wonder why William Burroughs, Edgar Allen Poe, Carl Jung and Aliester Crowley are on the cover of the Beatles's Sgt. Peppers double album. The Beach Boys recorded one of Charles Manson's songs. they called it never learn not to love...
He called it never cease to exist. The Manson "Family" was in fact a song writing collective.
Another less well known aspect of the occult underground are the ties it has always had to espionage and intelligence work. From early on they were intimately intertwined.
Ever since Queen Elizabeth Ist's court sorcerer Dr. John Dee
Took the code number 007 to work in Britain's first organized intelligence agency run by Sir Francis Walsingham. Dee was also the man that coined the term British Empire, was the most advanced mathematician of his age, and created the system of magic that Aliester Crowley practiced over 200 years later.
The big question in the mid sixties was whether or not the new generation was going to be able to wrest the reigns of power from the old paranoid cold warriors who raised them.
I don't think they had much success
according to some sources when the politicoes of the next generation made it on the scene, the psy-ops community deployed their offspring as cultural decoys,
drawing the more vibrant youth of the day into drug addled complacency. the place they were supposed to have launched their assault on the best and brightest was to be Laurel Canyon in the foothills of Hollywood.
One of the biggest and most occult oriented of the Laurel Canyon Sunset strip rock stars was this you man picured here
here he is with his father on the bridge of the USS Bon Homme Richard, January 1964.just a few months later, tthe dad there
would guide his ship into the Tonkin Gulf starting the Vietnamese War, and his son would spend the next few years becoming this:
