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As long as there has been culture, there has been counterculture. At times it moves deep below the surface of things, a stealth mode of being all but invisible to the dominant paradigm; at other times it’s in plain sight, challenging the status quo; and at still other times it erupts in a fiery burst of creative–or destructive–energy to change the world forever.
But until now the countercultural phenomenon has been one of history’s great blind spots. Individual countercultures have been explored, but never before has a book set out to demonstrate the recurring nature of counterculturalism across all times and societies, and to illustrate its dynamic role in the continuous evolution of human values and cultures.
Countercultural pundit and cyberguru R. U. Sirius brilliantly sets the record straight in this colorful, anecdotal, and wide-ranging study based on ideas developed by the late Timothy Leary with Dan Joy. With a distinctive mix of scholarly erudition and gonzo passion, Sirius and Joy identify the distinguishing characteristics of countercultures, delving into history and myth to establish beyond doubt that, for all their surface differences, countercultures share important underlying principles: individualism, anti-authoritarianism, and a belief in the possibility of personal and social transformation.
Ranging from the Socratic counterculture of ancient Athens and the outsider movements of Judaism, which left indelible marks on Western culture, to the Taoist, Sufi, and Zen Buddhist countercultures, which were equally influential in the East, to the famous countercultural moments of the last century–Paris in the twenties, Haight-Ashbury in the sixties, Tropicalismo, women’s liberation, punk rock–to the cutting-edge countercultures of the twenty-first century, which combine science, art, music, technology, politics, and religion in astonishing (and sometimes disturbing) new ways, Counterculture Through the Ages is an indispensable guidebook to where we’ve been . . . and where we’re going.
But until now the countercultural phenomenon has been one of history’s great blind spots. Individual countercultures have been explored, but never before has a book set out to demonstrate the recurring nature of counterculturalism across all times and societies, and to illustrate its dynamic role in the continuous evolution of human values and cultures.
Countercultural pundit and cyberguru R. U. Sirius brilliantly sets the record straight in this colorful, anecdotal, and wide-ranging study based on ideas developed by the late Timothy Leary with Dan Joy. With a distinctive mix of scholarly erudition and gonzo passion, Sirius and Joy identify the distinguishing characteristics of countercultures, delving into history and myth to establish beyond doubt that, for all their surface differences, countercultures share important underlying principles: individualism, anti-authoritarianism, and a belief in the possibility of personal and social transformation.
Ranging from the Socratic counterculture of ancient Athens and the outsider movements of Judaism, which left indelible marks on Western culture, to the Taoist, Sufi, and Zen Buddhist countercultures, which were equally influential in the East, to the famous countercultural moments of the last century–Paris in the twenties, Haight-Ashbury in the sixties, Tropicalismo, women’s liberation, punk rock–to the cutting-edge countercultures of the twenty-first century, which combine science, art, music, technology, politics, and religion in astonishing (and sometimes disturbing) new ways, Counterculture Through the Ages is an indispensable guidebook to where we’ve been . . . and where we’re going.
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About the Author:
Ken Goffman, a.k.a. R. U. Sirius, is a well-known cultural commentator and co-founder of Mondo 2000, the iconoclastic magazine that defined the digital culture of the early nineties. He is author or editor of seven books, including Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge and The Revolution, and co-wrote Timothy Leary's last book, Design for Dying. He was a columnist for Artforum International and the San Francisco Examiner. He lectures internationally on subjects ranging from the implications of new technology to alternative politics. He lives in Mill Valley, California.
Dan Joy is a writer, editor, and inadvertent performance artist from San Francisco.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Dan Joy is a writer, editor, and inadvertent performance artist from San Francisco.
Abraham and Prometheus
Mythic Counterculture Rebels
The Mythic Countercultures
A new mythology is possible in the Space Age, where we will again have heroes . . . as regards intention towards this Planet.
William S. Burroughs, 1978
To hell with facts! We need stories!
Ken Kesey, 1987
Myth is as important to counterculturalists as historical fact, and perhaps more poignant. Avant-garde by nature, most countercultures engage the imaginal and the ideal, as well as the real. In his book Untimely Meditation: On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Human Life (1874), nineteenth-century Promethean philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche even suggested that we should eschew history in favor of myth. For Nietzsche, myth created feelings of spiritual community. History deadened such feelings.
With a few exceptions (possibly including our current historical moment), countercultures have been inspired, optimistic, one might say mythical historical episodes. Whenever people courageously and passionately engage in rule-challenging behaviors that attempt to liberate humans from oppressive limitations (or limitations perceived as being oppressive), excitement, conflict, and scandal—and therefore engaging stories—are sure to follow. And while modernist and postmodern novelists have shown us that stories can be constructed out of the most ordinary lives—indeed out of banality itself—myths emerge from heroism, whether victorious or defeated, whether lived or imagined. Sometimes by design, often by accident, countercultures—even such renunciate, contemplationist countercultures as the Taoists, Zen Buddhists, and Transcendentalists (as we shall later see)—produce legendary heroes who sometimes rise to the level of myth.
In Prometheus and Abraham, we have two of the West’s most resonantly countercultural myths. Prometheus is pure story—part of the pantheon of Greek gods—while the narrative of the Tribe of Abraham probably has at least some basis in historical fact.
Although I briefly discuss the possible historic Abraham, I am primarily viewing these apocryphal tales as myths, fulfilling their function as two different rebel archetypes whose styles and trials we still find manifested in countercultures today.
Prometheus: The Hacker God
Prometheus stole fire from the gods on behalf of mankind. That’s all some youthful hacker outlaws today need know to inspire them to adapt Prometheus as their icon, and to adapt the Greek deity’s name for their online monikers.
The actual Greek myth is a bit more complex. In a reductionist nutshell: Prometheus is a Greek god of Olympus, ruled by Zeus. He initiates animal sacrifices. One day during a sacrifice he sasses Zeus. He cuts up a bull and divides it into two parts: one containing the flesh and intestines wrapped up in the skin; and the other consisting of only bones and fat. Prometheus asks Zeus to choose his share; the rest is to be given to man. Zeus picks the bones and fat, making him bitter against Prometheus and against humankind. Zeus punishes the mortals by withholding from them the gift of fire. Prometheus steals it back. Then Prometheus—who is known to have the gift of foresight—further sasses the great god Zeus by predicting that one of Zeus’ children would one day dethrone him, but refusing to say which one. The enraged Zeus punishes Prometheus by binding him in steel chains to a rock in the Caucasus Mountains. There, every day for eternity, an eagle is sent to tear and eat Prometheus’ liver. Every night, the god Prometheus’ immortal liver renews itself so that he can be tortured again in the next day’s light.
This was no mere story to the ancient Greeks. As Carl Kerényi writes in Prometheus: Archetypal Image of Human Existence, “This was sacred material. . . . Myth as it exists in its . . . primitive form, is not merely a story but a reality lived.” Further, the Greeks did not separate the gods from the humans to the extent that contemporary monotheists separate themselves from their singular deities. As Hesiod wrote, “The gods and mortal men sprang from one source.”
Likewise, our understanding of the Prometheus myth springs almost entirely from a single source, the work of the epic storyteller Aeschylus. (Hesiod has had less influence.) While Aeschylus is believed to have written at least four epics about Prometheus, the one that survives intact is Prometheus Bound. Prometheus Bound tells the story of Prometheus’ great suffering, and his arrogant and insubordinate self-assurance in the face of his tortures, but it does not give us his liberation. That was left to Percy Shelley, who wrote Prometheus Unbound in the 1810s.
Our young hacker friends have not deceived themselves in seeing Prometheus’ theft of fire from the gods as a metaphor for technology. In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Prometheus makes this abundantly clear, saying that he brought humanity architecture—“They knew not how to build brick houses to face the sun, nor work in wood. They lived beneath the earth like swarming ants in sunless caves.” And he brought humanity calendars—“They had no certain mark of winter nor of flowery spring nor summer, with its crops, but did all this without intelligence until it was I that showed them—yes, it was I.” And he gave them mathematics and writing—“And numbering as well, preeminent of subtle devices, and letter combinations that hold all in memory.” And he gave them transportation—“I harnessed to the carriage horses obedient to the rein . . . and carriages that wander on the sea, the ships sail winged, who else but I invented.” And most importantly, he gave them medicine—“Greatest was this: when one of mankind was sick, there was no defense for him—neither healing food nor drink nor unguent; for lack of drugs they wasted, until I showed them blendings of mild simples with which they drive away all kinds of sickness.”
While Aeschylus’ Prometheus is ever the boastful technological and scientific genius, this type was not smiled upon and richly rewarded by the ancient Greeks as it is today. And while Prometheus has been seen as an inspiration to some counterculturalists and artists since the Romantics lionized him in the nineteenth century, for the Greeks this was a cautionary tale. Hubris, or pride, was their greatest sin, and Prometheus was their greatest sinner. As with many followers of Christianity later on, scientific hubris was seen as the overstepping of boundaries that disturbed the divine order. In fact, the Greeks did not fully develop their technical sciences because of their fear of hubris. As R. J. Zwi Werblowski wrote in Lucifer and Prometheus, “for Aeschylos . . . Prometheus is in trespass . . . sinner he is, and not merely the hero of a righteous war of liberation against cruel tyrants, as a certain school would have it.” But in the following line, Werblowski reveals just cause for rejecting the Greeks’ own view of their mythology and adopting the Promethean stance when he writes, “Since Zeus’ order is that of a static cosmos, every human aspiration and effort is a revolt.”
Loving Prometheus
The Greeks’ greatest sinner started getting some modern love when the Romantics embraced him at the start of the nineteenth century. Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound got the ball rolling. Shelley completed the missing parts of Aeschylus’ tale, liberating the Greek god from his eternal suffering and setting him up as a hero for the post-Enlightenment era. As Theodore Roszak writes, “Prometheus Unbound is a song of the heights, a dizzy rhapsody offered to flight and the transcendence of all limits.” Indeed, where the Greeks saw hubris, Shelley saw “the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends.” If Prometheus is the champion of humankind against the cruel Greek god Zeus, Shelley uses the myth to unite mortals with God, defining man in Prometheus Unbound as “one harmonious soul of many a soul, whose nature is its own divine control.”
Soon Shelley’s friend, the revolutionary rascal Lord Byron, offered his own tribute to the Greek techno-god, offering the lines “Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,/To render with thy precepts less/The Sum of human wretchedness/And strengthen Man with his own mind.” Deeper into the nineteenth century, Nietzsche, Keats, and most of all Goethe joined the Promethean ranks. Through the voice of Prometheus, Goethe expresses the Romantics’ exhaltation in human experience, their joie de vivre, their lust for life . . . and their revolution against authoritarian gods: “Look down, O Zeus, Upon my world, It lives. I have shaped it in my image,/A race like unto me,/to suffer, to weep,/to enjoy and be glad,/and like myself to have no regard of you.”
Prometheus and Lucifer
Though we are now some four centuries into the Enlightenment, Goethe’s use of the Promethean voice to scorn God’s authority remains a minority taste. The Promethean view has remained controversial, if not downright unpopular. The archetype that most closely resembles Prometheus in Judeo-Christian mythology is the figure of Lucifer (the angel of light), a.k.a. Satan, and despite the best efforts of Anton LaVey and Marilyn Manson, the Luciferian view is not about to win any elections.
Note the underground, underworld overtones of the Prometheus myth. He suffers his agonies by sunlight. The night heals him. And he is possessed by what Edgar Allan Poe called “the imp of the perverse,” the prankster spirit. When he first plays tricks on Zeus, leaving him with the meatless animal gristle, the scene appears without provocation. As Kerényi says, “he is a cheat and a thief. . . . By undert...
Mythic Counterculture Rebels
The Mythic Countercultures
A new mythology is possible in the Space Age, where we will again have heroes . . . as regards intention towards this Planet.
William S. Burroughs, 1978
To hell with facts! We need stories!
Ken Kesey, 1987
Myth is as important to counterculturalists as historical fact, and perhaps more poignant. Avant-garde by nature, most countercultures engage the imaginal and the ideal, as well as the real. In his book Untimely Meditation: On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Human Life (1874), nineteenth-century Promethean philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche even suggested that we should eschew history in favor of myth. For Nietzsche, myth created feelings of spiritual community. History deadened such feelings.
With a few exceptions (possibly including our current historical moment), countercultures have been inspired, optimistic, one might say mythical historical episodes. Whenever people courageously and passionately engage in rule-challenging behaviors that attempt to liberate humans from oppressive limitations (or limitations perceived as being oppressive), excitement, conflict, and scandal—and therefore engaging stories—are sure to follow. And while modernist and postmodern novelists have shown us that stories can be constructed out of the most ordinary lives—indeed out of banality itself—myths emerge from heroism, whether victorious or defeated, whether lived or imagined. Sometimes by design, often by accident, countercultures—even such renunciate, contemplationist countercultures as the Taoists, Zen Buddhists, and Transcendentalists (as we shall later see)—produce legendary heroes who sometimes rise to the level of myth.
In Prometheus and Abraham, we have two of the West’s most resonantly countercultural myths. Prometheus is pure story—part of the pantheon of Greek gods—while the narrative of the Tribe of Abraham probably has at least some basis in historical fact.
Although I briefly discuss the possible historic Abraham, I am primarily viewing these apocryphal tales as myths, fulfilling their function as two different rebel archetypes whose styles and trials we still find manifested in countercultures today.
Prometheus: The Hacker God
Prometheus stole fire from the gods on behalf of mankind. That’s all some youthful hacker outlaws today need know to inspire them to adapt Prometheus as their icon, and to adapt the Greek deity’s name for their online monikers.
The actual Greek myth is a bit more complex. In a reductionist nutshell: Prometheus is a Greek god of Olympus, ruled by Zeus. He initiates animal sacrifices. One day during a sacrifice he sasses Zeus. He cuts up a bull and divides it into two parts: one containing the flesh and intestines wrapped up in the skin; and the other consisting of only bones and fat. Prometheus asks Zeus to choose his share; the rest is to be given to man. Zeus picks the bones and fat, making him bitter against Prometheus and against humankind. Zeus punishes the mortals by withholding from them the gift of fire. Prometheus steals it back. Then Prometheus—who is known to have the gift of foresight—further sasses the great god Zeus by predicting that one of Zeus’ children would one day dethrone him, but refusing to say which one. The enraged Zeus punishes Prometheus by binding him in steel chains to a rock in the Caucasus Mountains. There, every day for eternity, an eagle is sent to tear and eat Prometheus’ liver. Every night, the god Prometheus’ immortal liver renews itself so that he can be tortured again in the next day’s light.
This was no mere story to the ancient Greeks. As Carl Kerényi writes in Prometheus: Archetypal Image of Human Existence, “This was sacred material. . . . Myth as it exists in its . . . primitive form, is not merely a story but a reality lived.” Further, the Greeks did not separate the gods from the humans to the extent that contemporary monotheists separate themselves from their singular deities. As Hesiod wrote, “The gods and mortal men sprang from one source.”
Likewise, our understanding of the Prometheus myth springs almost entirely from a single source, the work of the epic storyteller Aeschylus. (Hesiod has had less influence.) While Aeschylus is believed to have written at least four epics about Prometheus, the one that survives intact is Prometheus Bound. Prometheus Bound tells the story of Prometheus’ great suffering, and his arrogant and insubordinate self-assurance in the face of his tortures, but it does not give us his liberation. That was left to Percy Shelley, who wrote Prometheus Unbound in the 1810s.
Our young hacker friends have not deceived themselves in seeing Prometheus’ theft of fire from the gods as a metaphor for technology. In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Prometheus makes this abundantly clear, saying that he brought humanity architecture—“They knew not how to build brick houses to face the sun, nor work in wood. They lived beneath the earth like swarming ants in sunless caves.” And he brought humanity calendars—“They had no certain mark of winter nor of flowery spring nor summer, with its crops, but did all this without intelligence until it was I that showed them—yes, it was I.” And he gave them mathematics and writing—“And numbering as well, preeminent of subtle devices, and letter combinations that hold all in memory.” And he gave them transportation—“I harnessed to the carriage horses obedient to the rein . . . and carriages that wander on the sea, the ships sail winged, who else but I invented.” And most importantly, he gave them medicine—“Greatest was this: when one of mankind was sick, there was no defense for him—neither healing food nor drink nor unguent; for lack of drugs they wasted, until I showed them blendings of mild simples with which they drive away all kinds of sickness.”
While Aeschylus’ Prometheus is ever the boastful technological and scientific genius, this type was not smiled upon and richly rewarded by the ancient Greeks as it is today. And while Prometheus has been seen as an inspiration to some counterculturalists and artists since the Romantics lionized him in the nineteenth century, for the Greeks this was a cautionary tale. Hubris, or pride, was their greatest sin, and Prometheus was their greatest sinner. As with many followers of Christianity later on, scientific hubris was seen as the overstepping of boundaries that disturbed the divine order. In fact, the Greeks did not fully develop their technical sciences because of their fear of hubris. As R. J. Zwi Werblowski wrote in Lucifer and Prometheus, “for Aeschylos . . . Prometheus is in trespass . . . sinner he is, and not merely the hero of a righteous war of liberation against cruel tyrants, as a certain school would have it.” But in the following line, Werblowski reveals just cause for rejecting the Greeks’ own view of their mythology and adopting the Promethean stance when he writes, “Since Zeus’ order is that of a static cosmos, every human aspiration and effort is a revolt.”
Loving Prometheus
The Greeks’ greatest sinner started getting some modern love when the Romantics embraced him at the start of the nineteenth century. Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound got the ball rolling. Shelley completed the missing parts of Aeschylus’ tale, liberating the Greek god from his eternal suffering and setting him up as a hero for the post-Enlightenment era. As Theodore Roszak writes, “Prometheus Unbound is a song of the heights, a dizzy rhapsody offered to flight and the transcendence of all limits.” Indeed, where the Greeks saw hubris, Shelley saw “the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends.” If Prometheus is the champion of humankind against the cruel Greek god Zeus, Shelley uses the myth to unite mortals with God, defining man in Prometheus Unbound as “one harmonious soul of many a soul, whose nature is its own divine control.”
Soon Shelley’s friend, the revolutionary rascal Lord Byron, offered his own tribute to the Greek techno-god, offering the lines “Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,/To render with thy precepts less/The Sum of human wretchedness/And strengthen Man with his own mind.” Deeper into the nineteenth century, Nietzsche, Keats, and most of all Goethe joined the Promethean ranks. Through the voice of Prometheus, Goethe expresses the Romantics’ exhaltation in human experience, their joie de vivre, their lust for life . . . and their revolution against authoritarian gods: “Look down, O Zeus, Upon my world, It lives. I have shaped it in my image,/A race like unto me,/to suffer, to weep,/to enjoy and be glad,/and like myself to have no regard of you.”
Prometheus and Lucifer
Though we are now some four centuries into the Enlightenment, Goethe’s use of the Promethean voice to scorn God’s authority remains a minority taste. The Promethean view has remained controversial, if not downright unpopular. The archetype that most closely resembles Prometheus in Judeo-Christian mythology is the figure of Lucifer (the angel of light), a.k.a. Satan, and despite the best efforts of Anton LaVey and Marilyn Manson, the Luciferian view is not about to win any elections.
Note the underground, underworld overtones of the Prometheus myth. He suffers his agonies by sunlight. The night heals him. And he is possessed by what Edgar Allan Poe called “the imp of the perverse,” the prankster spirit. When he first plays tricks on Zeus, leaving him with the meatless animal gristle, the scene appears without provocation. As Kerényi says, “he is a cheat and a thief. . . . By undert...
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- PublisherVillard
- Publication date2004
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