A Gateway to the Satanic Revival: The Human Potential Eranos and Esalen

The following is a chapter from volume 1 one of Revenge of the Mystery Cults (Mystery Babylon and the Age of Aquarius) Co-written with Cynthia Chung. The full three volume series will be available shortly.

“Welcome, this is the first manifestation of the Brave New World”

– spoken at the Human Be-In “A Gathering of Tribes” Jan. 1967 which is credited for launching the “Summer of Love”[1]

At the historical “Gathering of the Tribes,” Lenore Kandel, American poet with the Beat Generation exclaimed “The Buddha will reach us all through love, not through doctrines not through teaching…And as I am looking at all of you, I feel more and more that Matreiya is not this time going to be born out of one physical body, but born out of all of us. It’s happening perhaps today. This is an invocation for Matreiya, may he come.”

The reader should take note, the very clear sharing of philosophy with that of Jiddu Krishnamurti, Alice Bailey and the Theosophists more broadly. That there should be no work for reaching the stage of “enlightenment,” rather it is simply to open oneself as an empty vessel and let the “universe,” or whatever is around, pour in.

This perversion of Indian philosophy was similar to the sleight of hand that had then been occurring in the Christian world guided by Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (a close friend to Aldous’ brother Julian Huxley)- whose concept of a trans-human noetic evolution guided by an oncoming “Christ consciousness” shared many parallels to this eastern variant.

The Human Be-In was organised as an LSD-25 event. It had a turnout of anywhere between 25,000 to 50,000 people. Free sandwiches were distributed laced with LSD and the “Summer of Love,” otherwise known as the first manifestation of the Brave New World, was born.

Human Be-In Poster 1967

The reader should be aware, though it gets much much stranger, that The Grateful Dead were among the bands to play at this “Gathering of Tribes.” The Grateful Dead was and is regarded as the epitome band of the counterculture movement. Interestingly, Alan Trist, the son of Eric Trist (who is the founder of the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, the psychological warfare division of British Intelligence) is the one that put together the band.

In 1962, Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead lyricist, was among the volunteers for the renown anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s Palo Alto experiments using LSD, psilocybin and mescaline, for Stanford University[2]. The research was covertly sponsored by the CIA in its MKULTRA program: other participants included Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg. Ken Kesey would become famous writing the book “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” on the relativity of madness in 1962, and would later form the Merry Pranksters in 1964, spreading bountiful, no questions asked, LSD to campuses across America.

Bateson, husband of renown cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, also played a prominent role in the curriculum of the Esalen Institute which had direct ties to the Tavistock Institute which we will see shortly.

There never was an organic impetus to organise a “Gathering of the Tribes”. Rather, it was micromanaged from the very start by Tavistock and the CIA, using the very techniques that the Frankfurt School, William Sargant and Aldous Huxley et al. very publicly discussed several years before.

Both Aldous and Gerald Heard played central roles in developing the Human Potential Movement (HPM) to which the Esalen Institute is recognised as officially launching.

Mystery Babylon

and the Age of Aquarius

Esalen Institute founder Michael Murphy outlined his debt to Eranos writing:

“Eranos and Esalen belong to the same universe of discourse, one which aims at healing the separation between East and West, religion and science, and body and soul. This constellation of people, ideas and practices represents a dynamic coalescence of fundamental possibilities for human transformation and advance.”[3]

The official biographer for the Esalen Institute, Jeffrey Kripal also identified the roots of the Esalen Institute with the earlier Eranos conferences stating: