Lachman’s basic thesis is that several elements of the mystic 1960s led not just to the Summer of Love but the murders of Charles Manson and that the strains of thought that produced both go back to the late 1890s.

It’s an interesting story, but most parts of it were familiar to me already, and I’m not going to talk much about them. I am also not sympathetic to mysticism, the Summer of Love, or the spirit of the 1960s.

What I am going to talk about is the surprising amount of material in the book about writers and works of fantastic fiction and how they were connected to the mystic Sixties.

Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier’s not only wrote the very popular The Morning of the Magicians, but Bergier also wrote a letter praising H. P. Lovecraft that appeared in the March 1936 issue of Weird Tales. The Morning of the Magicians, published in 1960, had Fortean material and centered on mysticism, transcendence, mutation and the evolution of consciousness. It was a heady mix that drew from the zeitgeist.

Flying saucers were one of the things connecting mysticism and science fiction. Ray Palmer’s Amazing Stories publicized Kenneth Arnold’s UFO sightings and printed Richard Shaver’s deros/Lemuria works.

Pauwels and Bergier’s themes were the themes of popular science fiction works like John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. X-Men comics with their superhuman mutants started in 1963. Arthur Machen and other weird writers got renewed interest in the 1960s partly because of their connection with the Order of the Golden Dawn mentioned in The Morning of the Magicians.

The feedback cycle between mysticism and fantastic literature strengthened in 1965 with Lin Carter’s seminal paperback resurrection of old fantasy in his Ballantine Adult Fantasy series starting with J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

Among the authors Carter reprinted was Lovecraft whose disdain for the masses and hostility towards other races Lachman says was Nietzschean. (Having never read Nietzsche, I’ll take his word for it.) Robert E. Howard was also reprinted by Carter.

Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos entered occult thought, and Howard’s celebration of barbarism over civilized decadence was in sync with the mystic Sixties’ idea of social and world transformation. Lachman errors a bit in emphasizing the return of the Great Old Ones in “The Call of Cthulhu”, as implying that Lovecraft expressed some wish for a time of license rather than just considering an imaginative premise. Lachman claims it was only the mention of Lovecraft by Lachman’s hero Colin Wilson that made Lovecraft really popular. I would dispute that. Lovecraft had paperback editions as early as 1947. But I haven’t looked at the historical record for Lovecraft’s paperback sales.

Occultist Kenneth Grant could claim that Lovecraft’s stories came from fantastic dreams and that Lovecraft was a member of an occult group and failed his final initiation because he did not want to know ultimate truths.

Besides the above writers, Carter also resurrected writers who seemed in keeping with the times. David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus was seen as a literary drug trip. Sections on California mysticism of the pre-1960s includes tales of Aldous Huxley and his friend and mentor, another science fiction writer, Gerald Heard, a homosexual and prototypical hippie. (Heard published under the name H. F. Heard and is extensively discussed in Brian Stableford’s Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950.)

Of course, several other familiar names pop up in this history: L. Ron Hubbard and Dianetics/Scientology; Jack Parsons – sf fan, rocket scientist, and occultist; and A. E. van Vogt’s General Semantics. Anton LaVey (Satanist and libertarian and devotee of Weird Tales) regarded H. P. Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson as better occult teachers than Aleister Crowley or A. E. Waite. In meetings at LaVey’s house were Forrest Ackerman, Clark Ashton Smith (presumably in his later years when he moved out of Auburn), August Derleth, and Robert Barbour Johnson. ( )

It's a Gary Lachman book. If you know what that means you know enough. The former drummer from Blondie, Gary Lachman is one of the more literate and careful researchers into the occult. He never offers up what you'd expect; he is often surprisingly sympathetic to people you might think he'd mock and bored with traditional angles on his subject. This isn't his best book -- that title Goes to Ouspensky: The Genius in the Shadow of Gurdjief -- but it's not bad. ( )

Amid all the other revolutions that happened in the 1960s - sexual, social and political - another revolution took place that has been overlooked by historians. A revival of the occult affected all parts of daily life, from the Beatles’ journey into psychedelia to the movie Rosemary’s Baby to the novel Steppenwolf.

There have always been those interested in the idea of secret knowledge only available to a select few, including ancient civilizations and lost races. Such interests became popular through groups like the Theosophical Society of the 1920s founded by Madame Blavatsky. A later manifestation of this interest in secret things was the near obsession with flying saucers.

All the people and movements one would expect to find in such a book are here: Charles Manson, astrology, the Tarot, Jim Morrison, Timothy Leary, yogis, witchcraft, Transcendental Meditation, Brian Wilson, Anton LaVey and Aleister Crowley.

Another huge influence on the mystical revolution of the 1960s was the written word. Hermann Hesse was a Nobel laureate whose novels were rediscovered in the 1960s and spread across American college campuses like wildfire. The publication of a fantasy novel by an obscure British author named Tolkien (The Hobbit) by two American publishers at the same time, because of copyright problems, caused another literary firestorm. This helped lead to the rediscovery of 1930s pulp authors like Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. Who can forget other literary heavyweights like Jack Kerouac, L. Ron (Scientology) Hubbard, Allan Ginsberg and Aldous Huxley?

I very much enjoyed reading this book. It is very well researched, and does a fine job exploring an aspect of "the 60’s" that is generally forgotten. This gets two strong thumbs up. ( )