CONTRIBUTORS

Brian Barritt, to the best of his recollection, has been called a genius by at least three different people, but then he has been called many other things as well. Over the years he has been an author, painter, prisoner, dope fiend, comedian, Krautrocker, occultist, raving maniac and Beatnik, and has known many notable figures including William Burroughs, Alexander Trochi, Ash Ra Tempel, H.R. Giger, Sergius Golowin and Timothy Leary. Amazingly, and this defies all logic and reason, he is about the only notable figure from this Beatnik era to survive into the 21 st century. Needless to say, he is still up to no good. His website is www.brianbarritt.com.

Hakim Bey (No information available)

Brian Butler is a writer, producer, and musician living in Los Angeles. He has extensively researched and practiced western magic for 20 years and is considered an expert in occultism. A former member of the Golden Dawn, he now heads his own Magical Order with newly revised rituals based on the teachings of Cameron, C. F. Russell and Charles Stansfeld Jones. Interested aspirants may contact him directly by email: znees@yahoo.com.

Vere Chappell began his study and practice of the occult arts in 1985. In 1989 he joined the Ordo Templi Orientis, and led one of its local bodies in Los Angeles for eight years. In 1997 he was appointed to the post of Grand Treasurer General for the O.T.O. within the United States, in which capacity he continues to serve today. He is also a Bishop of the Gnostic Catholic Church and performs the Gnostic Mass monthly. Mr. Chappell has a Bachelor's Degree in Cognitive Science from UCLA and an MBA from Pepperdine University. He is a senior partner in a technology consulting firm and also owns an Internet production company. His interests include cognitive psychology, photography, occult history and esoteric sexuality. He has travelled extensively throughout Europe and the United States, including recent research trips to Great Britain, France, and Italy. Mr. Chappell lives in Southern California with his lovely wife and priestess, Lita-Luise, and their two feline familiars.

Joe Coleman's paintings are unflinching autopsies of the human condition. Wielding his single-hair brush like a scalpel, Coleman forces us to join him in a brutal project to document the frailties and cruelties of the flesh and the bizarre junctions between saint and sinner, sacred and profane, holy and horrifying. In tortured self-portraits, apocalyptic “humanscapes” and portraits of historical figures from outlaw hero John Dillinger to Gangs of New York-era mercenary Albert Hicks to outsider artist Henry Darger, Joe Coleman packs his images with fascinating information and excruciating, hallucinatory detail. Joe Coleman's paintings have been exhibited at the American Visionary Art Museum, the Hieronymus Bosch Museum, and the Wadsworth Athenaeum.

Erik Davis is a San Franciso-based writer currently working on a cultural history of California spirituality. His book TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information became a cult hit after being released in the fall of 1998, and has been translated into numerous languages. Davis is a contributing editor for Wired and Trip magazines and has contributed essays to a number of recent collections, including Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics, Sound Unbound, Prefiguring Cyberculture, and Radical Spirit. Davis appeared in Craig Baldwin's underground film, Specters of the Spectrum, and has lectured internationally on technoloculture, electronic music, and spiritual weirdness. Some of his work can be accessed at www.techgnosis.com, and he can be reached at erik@techgnosis.com.

Nevill Drury was born in Hastings, England, in 1947 but has lived most of his life in Australia. He has been interested in western magic and consciousness research for over 30 years and has written widely on shamanism and the western esoteric tradition, as well as on contemporary art. He holds a Masters degree in anthropology from Macquarie University in Sydney and is the author of over 40 books, including Exploring the Labyrinth, Sacred Encounters, The Elements of Shamanism, Pan's Daughter and The Dictionary of the Esoteric. His work has been published in fifteen languages.

Stephen Edred Flowers is the world's leading expert on esoteric, or “radical” Runology. He has written or translated nearly 40 books on this and related subjects. In 1980 he founded the Rune-Gild, the world's most influential initiatory organization dedicated to Rune-Work on the Odian path. His work in Runology extends into academic pursuits and in 1984 he received a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin with a dissertation entitled Runes and Magic. He has recently founded the Woodharrow Institute for Germanic and Runic Studies. Edred is also the owner of Runa-Raven Press and lives with his wife, Crystal, at Woodharrow near Austin, Texas. His work is devoted to seeking the principle of RUNA—the Mystery—as understood in the mythic idiom of the Germanic peoples.

Michael Goss, of Irish-Dutch parentage, spent his formative years in the Navy town of Portsmouth in the South of England. He started out as a photographer and occasional journalist before founding Delectus Books, in 1988; a publishing house and bookseller, which he still runs while occasionally editing books for other publishers (www.delectus-books.co.uk). Michael has one of the finest archives of erotica in private hands and is always looking to add new material on his travels. He currently spends his time between his London base and frequent trips to the Amazon in Colombia.

John Grigsby Geiger was born in Ithaca, New York, and graduated in history from the University of Alberta. He is the author of Chapel of Extreme Experience, the true story of how the discovery of flicker potentials, and scientific observations about strange patterns, organized hallucinations, and even the displacement of time derived from stroboscopic light, very nearly resulted in a Dream Machine in every suburban living room. It is published in the US by Soft Skull. His other books include the international bestseller Frozen In Time, about the role lead poisoning played in the destruction of the 1845 Franklin Expedition. His work has been translated into seven languages.

T Allen Greenfield is 56, married, father of three, native of Augusta, Georgia. A world traveler and writer since his middle teen years, he has taken a decidedly unconventional approach to already highly unconventional subjects. The author of half a dozen books on offbeat, controversial and esoteric topics, Greenfield has been a UFO field investigator, radical political activist, professional psychic, science fiction buff, occultist and theologian. He professes only two fundamentals: Scientific Illuminism, or the method of science employed in pursuit of the aims of religion, and that the world as-it-is is sufficiently unsatisfactory that exploration of almost any ethical out-of-the-box alternative, however outré, is worth the effort. He would like it known that he had no influence, or say, on the title of this anthology and his opinions are his own and do not reflect or represent the opinions of any organization.

Phil Hine became widely-known as a proponent of Chaos Magic, a (post)modern magical current based on the idea that beliefs are tools, not ends in themselves. In keeping with this spirit, Phil no longer has much to do with Chaos Magic. Gravitating to Chaos groups in Yorkshire in the '80s, Phil published a series of booklets on “Urban Shamanism,” and a magic primer that recently became Condensed Chaos (New Falcon, 1995)—described by William Burroughs as “the most concise statement of the logic of modern magic.” He has also written Prime Chaos (New Falcon, 1999) and The Pseudonomicon (Chaos International, 1998). He spent some time editing the now defunct Chaos International magazine, as well as Pagan News, which he edited intermittently between 1988 and 1992. He has contributed to numerous other publications.

Peter-R. Koenig, a victim of two petit-bourgeois sins, gluttony and anger, is Swiss-born but lives exclusively on http://www.cyberlink.ch/∼koenig where his occult histories are located for your reading pleasure.

Gary Lachman is the author of Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (The Disinformation Company, 2003). A founding member of Blondie, as Gary Valentine he was responsible for some of the group's early hits and is the author of New York Rocker: My Life in The Blank Generation With Blondie, Iggy Pop and Others 1974-1981 (Sidgwick & Jackson). His most recent book is A Secret History of Consciousness (Anthroposophic Press). A frequent contributor to Fortean Times, MOJO, The Guardian and Times Literary Supplement, his new CD, Tomorrow Belongs to You, is available from Overground Records (www.overground.co.uk) and his forthcoming books include A Dark Muse: The Dedalus Book of the Occult (Dedalus) and The Sly Man: The Story of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Quest Books). Born in New Jersey, after lengthy sojourns in New York and Los Angeles, he moved to London in 1996.

Paul Laffoley was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1940. He spoke his first word, “Constantinople,” at six months, then remained silent until the age of four (having been diagnosed as slightly autistic), when he began to draw and paint. He has continued as a self-taught artist to the present. He was dismissed from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, but managed to apprentice with the sculptor Mirko Baseldella, before going to New York to apprentice with the visionary architect Frederick Kiesler. He formed the Boston Visionary Cell, Inc. in 1971. He has participated in over two hundred exhibits, nationally and internationally. In 1990, he became a registered architect.

Tim Maroney is a software architect, occult scholar, spiritual practitioner, and bon vivant living in Berkeley, California. His studies in the sciences bring a unique perspective to his intimate treatment of mysticism and the occult. Tim has been a professional writer for over 20 years, appearing in Gnosis, develop and other magazines and newspapers. He pioneered creative writing on computer networks; some of his published and network essays are collected at www.maroney.org. Tim has studied Western occultism and Eastern religion since childhood, and began yoga, meditation and ritual in 1978. He is an ordained Gnostic Priest and a confirmed skeptic. He practices ritual in the Ordo Templi Orientis, Neo-Pagan Witchcraft, and the Golden Dawn tradition. His biographical introduction to The Book of Dzyan was called “the most insightful and balanced discussion of Blavatsky's writings to date” by leading Theosophical historian K. Paul Johnson. Tim is working on his second book, Scientific Meditations.

Robert S. Mason was born 1948 and resides in Virginia. He has studied Anthroposophy since 1982 with no formal training. Opinions expressed are his own and he represents no organization, Anthroposophical or otherwise.

Born in 1946, author and explorer Terence McKenna spent over 25 years in the study of the ontological foundations of shamanism and the ethno-pharmacology of spiritual transformation. McKenna graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a distributed major in Ecology, Resource Conservation and Shamanism. After graduation he traveled extensively in the Asian and New World Tropics, becoming specialized in the shamanism and ethno-medicine of the Amazon Basin. With his brother Dennis, he is the author of The Invisible Landscape and Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Growers' Guide. Other books include a study of the impact of psychotropic plants on human culture and evolution, Food of the Gods, and a book of essays and conversations, The Archaic Revival. His True Hallucinations is a narrative of spiritual adventure set in the jungles of the Colombian Amazon. Terence McKenna died on April 3, 2000.

Richard Metzger is the co-founder of The Disinformation Company and for two seasons hosted and directed the Disinformation TV series that ran on Britain's Channel 4 network. A 2-DVD set and a companion book of the series, Disinformation: The Interviews, are published by The Disinformation Company.

John S. Moore, born 1948, is a freelance scholar and maverick philosopher now living in Islington North London. He studied philosophy at King's College, University of London 1966-69. He has published several papers on Nietzsche, as well as on other figures like Crowley, Bulwer-Lytton, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein. He has also published three volumes of poetry.

Grant Morrison is highly regarded as one of the most original and inventive writers in the comics medium. His revisionist Batman book Arkham Asylum (with artist Dave McKean) has sold over 500,000 copies worldwide and won numerous awards, making it the most successful original graphic novel to be published in America. He has written comics for 25 years and has contributed groundbreaking and best-selling runs of popular stories for the major companies including DC Comics characters JLA, Doom Patrol, Animal Man and Marvel Comics' X-Men and Fantastic Four. In addition he has created a number of revolutionary new series including Zenith, Sebastian O, The Invisibles, Marvel Boy and the cult classics Kill Your Boyfriend and The Mystery Play. In July 1997, he was the first comic book writer to be included as one of Entertainment Weekly's top 100 creative people in America. Current projects include “Sleepless Knights,” an original screenplay for Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks SKG and his first novel, The IF. He has recently finished working with Universal on a “Battlestar Galactica” computer game and others, including original concepts, are in discussion with various developers. He is currently writing the critically acclaimed, best-selling monthly, New X-Men for Marvel Comics and an original 13-part social-surrealist series The Filth for DC/Vertigo. He lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland.

Michael Moynihan was born in 1969 in New England. He is an artist, musician, author, and editor. He has traveled and performed music throughout Western Europe, as well as in Japan. The latest release of his and Annabel Lee's music project Blood Axis is Absinthe: La Folie Verte, a collaboration with the French group Les Joyaux de la Princesse. His record label Storm has recently issued a 2-CD retrospective of the seminal psychedelic Industrial band Factrix, as well as a debut album from Sangre Cavallum, a Northern Portuguese/Galician traditional ensemble. His book Lords of Chaos (Feral House), co-written with Didrik Sderlind, has been an independent bestseller and was recently translated into German. In addition to authoring essays for Apocalypse Culture // (Feral House), and contributing entries to the reference work The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (Continuum), he recently edited two books by the Italian traditionalist Julius Evola, Introduction to Magic and Men among the Ruins (both published by Inner Traditions), as well as a volume of K. M. Wiligut's occult writings entitled The Secret King (translated by Stephen E. Flowers and published by Dominion/Rna-Raven). He is also a co-editor of Rna, an esoteric British periodical which focusses on the ancient culture of Northern Europe, and TYR, an annual book-format journal of “Myth, Culture, and Tradition” published in Atlanta. Email: dominion@pshift.com

Mark Pesce is widely known as the co-inventor of VRML, which brought virtual reality to the World Wide Web nearly a decade ago. The author of five books, he's most proud of The Playful World (www.playfulworld.com), an exploration of the relationship between technology, language, and childhood. Pesce has taken initiation in several magical orders, and can proudly say that he's been thrown out of every one of them.

Daniel Pinchbeck is the author of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism (Broadway Books). A founder of Open City Magazine, he has written for the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Wired, and many other publications. He can be contacted through his website, www.breakingopenthehead.com.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, born in Manchester, England, 1950. Member of Kinetic action group Exploding Galaxy/Transmedia Exploration, 1969-70. Conceived and founded seminal British “performance art” group COUM TRANSMISSIONS, 1969; pioneer co-founder (with Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter Christopherson, Chris Carter) of Throbbing Gristle, 1975; co-founder (with Alex Fergusson) of hyperdelic acid house innovators Psychic TV, 1981; founded spoken word/ambient music performance group Thee Majesty 1999. Invented the term/genre Industrial Music (with Monte Cazazza) September 3rd, 1975, releasing more than 200 CDs of experiments in music to date. Has worked and collaborated with Beatnik writers William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin; radical queer filmmaker Derek Jarman; psychedelic guru Dr. Timothy Leary and many other luminaries. Early pioneer/innovator of Acid House/Rave Movement in UK and USA from early 80s-mid-90s. Early champion of Internet and commentator on its media virus cultural implications, often collaborating with Douglas Rushkoff, Richard Metzger and other leading figures in Cyberia. He has published thousands of articles, texts, interviews covering the functional and metaphysical implications and strategies of popular culture. Also explored human behavior, ritual, and personality modification through splintering of expectation in private magical situations to create neo-shamanic collaged paintings called “Sigils.” Currently resides in the New York area as an author, cultural engineer/commentator and fine artist. Has performed his improvised “Expanded Poetry” as THEE MAJESTY (with guitarist Bryin Dall, guitarist Lady J. and tabla player Larry Thrasher) at arts festivals and music venues all over the USA and Europe since 1998. A monograph on his fine art Painful But Fabulous (Soft Skull Press, NYC) has been published and exhibitions, installations and lectures are held across Europe and the USA. Website at: www.genesisporridge.com.

Boyd Rice is a writer, musician and lecturer whose life-long interest in the occult began at an early age. Since the 1980s, his reputation as an esotericist has earned him frequent guest spots on television and talk radio, both in the United States and throughout Europe. His career as an avant-garde musician and recording artist has spanned more than a quarter of a century, and his pioneering work in the field of industrial music has established him as one of the founding fathers of the genre. For the last six years he has devoted his time almost exclusively to researching the bloodline of the Holy Grail, and the attendant myths and folklore associated with it. His frequent travels to Europe have allowed him to investigate personally many sites and monuments connected to the Grail mythos.

Tracy Twyman, the editor and creator of Dagobert's Revenge, is a prolific writer, publisher, and film producer, as well as a recognized expert on ancient and medieval history, secret societies and the occult. Since 1996, she has been the publisher of Dagobert's Revenge magazine, and has written extensively on the subjects of Freemasonry, the Knights Templar, the Priory of Sion, Rosicrucianism, Hermeticism, conspiracies, and esoterica. In addition, she has written for a number of other publications, including Hustler, Seconds, Propaganda, and Paranoia, and has appeared on a number of television and radio programs. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Film and Video, and has produced several short films and videos.

Donald Tyson is a Canadian from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Early in life he was drawn to science by an intense fascination with astronomy, building a telescope by hand when he was eight. He began university seeking a science degree, but became disillusioned with the aridity and futility of a mechanistic view of the universe and shifted his major to English. After graduating with honors he has pursued a writing career. Now he devotes his life to the attainment of a complete gnosis of the art of magic in theory and practice. His purpose is to formulate an accessible system of personal training composed of East and West, past and present, that will help the individual discover the reason for one's existence and a way to fulfill it.

Peter Lamborn Wilson's reputation goes back to as early as the late '60s when he wandered North Africa, India and Asia, spending a long time in Iran for his voluminous reading of Islamic heretical texts and studying the historical and mystical dimensions of Sufism. Wilson has writen on early American spiritual anarchism and published some pseudonymous manifestos and books (Temporary Autonomous Zone). As an underground intellectual he is involved in a range of initiatives, including bi-weekly broadcasting his “Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade” on WBAI, regular lectures at the New York Open Center, being a member of the Autonomedia collective, and author of “high and low” publications from science fiction zines to “Studies in Mystical Literature” and his collection of essays “Sacred Drift.”

Robert Anton Wilson is the co-author, with Robert Shea, of the underground classic The Illuminatus! Trilogy, which won the 1986 Prometheus Hall of Fame Award. His other writings include Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, called “the most scientific of all science fiction novels,” by New Scientist, and several nonfiction works of Futurist psychology and guerilla ontology, such as Prometheus Rising and The New Inquisition. Wilson, who sees himself as a Futurist, author, and stand-up comic, regularly gives seminars at Esalen and other New Age centers. Wilson has made both a comedy record (Secrets of Power) and a punk rock record (The Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy), and his play Wilhelm Reich in Hell was performed at the Edmund Burke Theatre in Dublin, Ireland. His novel Illuminatus! was adapted as a 10-hour science fiction rock epic and performed under the patronage of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Great Britain's National Theatre, where Wilson appeared briefly on stage in a special cameo role. Robert Anton Wilson is also a former editor at Playboy magazine.