Anarchistic United Mystics at James Street Squat 1979

Posted on February 13, 2008February 18, 2008 by Tony Puppy

Cosmic Trigger cover

From my notes,

The Long Acre/James Lane squat was home to some very radical people, some Chilean refugees, some members of a group called Bitch, some articulate punk/artist types and a fearsome South African brute who legend had it had cleared out all the junkies from the buildings. But the majority of inhabitants were hippy stock. Some of the basements on James Lane had been turned into rehearsal studios, and in one of them was held a weekly meeting by some association calling itself the Anarchist United Mystics. Occasionally they held gigs there. The Anarchist United Mystics group continued their meetings, which had turned into underground- rock jamming gigs. Brett, Bob, Dave, Gordon and I became a solid unit. We started going to the gigs, I remember hearing a wondrous version of ‘I’m A Believer’ sung by a girl from 50 Long Acre and played by the guitarist from Bitch. So where they still around? Gordon once vanished for a few days. Upon his return he said he’d been seduced by a woman at one of these gigs, who had lured him outside then into a car. This car had then taken him to Stonehenge where he was left drugged and in rags (no change there then!) He was never quite the same, and we saw less and less of him. There was an old black gentleman living in the building who was very into Crowley and magick and the Illuminati. He gave me a copy of an ancient edition of The Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson. The fuse had been lit.Notes end.I still have that book. And have scanned it in just now. It’s never been far from my side in the intervening twenty nine years. Looking at it now, it is a first edition imprint from And/Or Press based in Berkeley, published in 1977.

This new thread is inspired by the mention of AUM in a comment elsewhere.

All AUM stuff here please.

7 comments

Tony Puppy • Post Author •
February 13, 2008 at 9:47 pm

Mark M posted in another thread and Alistair replied, thus begat this entry.

The genesis is here:

“Mark M Says:

February 11th, 2008 at 4:57 pm edit

For what its worth Im sure we stole the anarcho tag from Anarcha United Mystics who were some stonehenge regulars 78/79 ish.

alistairliv Says:

February 11th, 2008 at 5:57 pm edit

“Anarcho United Mystics (AUM) started working back in 1977 because the ‘revolutionaries’ kept overlooking the need to change themselves as well well as the world, and the ‘occult/religious’ kept overlooking the need to change the world as well as themselves. These oversights reulted in 2000 years of failed revolutions and millions of people wasting their lives with religious/spiritual illusions and dogmas. After all, what is the motive of revolution? Ultimately, it is love. Love objects to the injustice of the present system, the starving millions, the wars and corruption of the ruling powers. But this love, the essence of revolution, is the easiest part to overlook and the forgetting of it has resulted in hundreds of failed revolutions and useless religions”.
Tim Corber, AUM Newsletter, 1980

http://www.phreak.co.uk/stonehenge/psb/scfestiv.htm

“
Tony Puppy • Post Author •
February 13, 2008 at 10:10 pm

Googling the Anarcho United Mystics I came across this puzzler.

We’re deep into AL territory here; and as we’re all au fait with the Theory of Systematic Ideology I give the title then cut to the main bit of interest:

The Idealist Route through the Eidodynamic Level
A Contribution to the Theory of Systematic Ideology
by John Rowan
——————————————————————————–

THE PARADYNAMIC LEVEL

And if we go on to the next level, we can again see an idealist version, as for example in Buddhist psychotherapy and I would say in the work of Hegel himself.

I think a good case can be made out for saying that mysticism is the idealist version of the Paradynamic level. I did at one time belong to an organization calling itself the Anarcho United Mystics ( AUM) and we did see an important connection between the repudiation of political organizations urged by the anarchists, and the repudiation of religious organizations urged by the mystics. In both cases there is a sense of the flight from the One to the One, which the mystics talk about. In mysticism the individual not only gets in touch with the divine, but actually becomes the divine. Philosophically this can be phrased as making the Absolute the centre of one’s attention, which is precisely what Walsby did.

John Rowan
27 September 1994

——————————————————————————–
Updated: 9 January, 2004
Created: 11 November 1998

!

source: http://www.gwiep.net/index.html
alistairliv
February 14, 2008 at 12:51 am

Ok, this is getting weird even for me…The John Rowan / AUM quote above mentions Hegel. I am re-reading Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition: Glen Alexander Magee: Cornell University press: 2001…on page 56 a little potted history of Adam Weishupt and the Bavarian Illuminati – suggesting Hegel was influenced by them.

In the post is a related book Modernity Without Restraint: “Political Religions”, “New
Science of Politics by Eric Voegelin- see more than you need to know here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Voegelin

Voegelin in this book popularised the phrase ‘immanentize the eschaton’ –

The phrase has been much used by Discordians. It is cited in the Principia Discordia, and is referred to fifteen times in The Illuminatus! Trilogy, the first of which is the first line of the novel, “It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton.”

The phrase was also used in the debut single (“All You Need Is Love”) by the Illuminatus!-inspired British band The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu: “With this killer virus who needs war? Immanentize the Eschaton, I said shag shag shag some more!”. (The phrase furthermore occurs in the lyrics of The Shamen’s song ‘Destination Eschaton’: “So immanentise thy eschaton unto ragnarok or nemeton, and beyond in the name of Adam Kadmon”.) From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanentize_the_eschaton

I already had a KLF link – Bill Drummond of KLF etc spent childhood in Newtown Stewart (about 23 miles away from my home town) and named his website http://www.penkiln-burn.com/ after local stream -the Penkiln burn, as I found when researching local place names and asked Bill where he got the name from…see http://greengalloway.blogspot.com/2007/03/immanentize-eschaton-like-we-did-last.html
For more…

But then (or rather about 23 minutes ago) trying to track down the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu song mentioned above found that the KLF had reformed in August 1997 for a one off performance – Fuck the Millenium. See this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuck_the_Millennium – also viewable in segments on you tube .

With KLF were a whole group of Liverpool Dockers… by August 1997 I was in Scotland, but earlier that year, myself, Tinsel and our kids had been on two Support the Liverpool Dockers marches.

The first one ended up at the Conway Hall and in/ outside the nearby pub – the Dolphin? – we met Steve Ignorant (well Tinsel did, I didn’t know who he was…) and Ian Bone. I remember cos Ian was genuinely upset to hear that Pinki had died – I think she managed to get him out of trouble once upon a time…

And also met Chris Knight with a dragon. Chris Knight is a Marxist anthropologist who … wrote a Marxist interpretation of menstruation as the origin of culture called Blood Relations- a copy of which he had given to Tony (when Tony was at east London Uni) and which Tony had passed on to me – see my piece ‘Bloody revolutions’ on the Wise Wound/ menstruation as origin of culture etc in KYPP 5.

And of course the pub/ Conway hall was where I met Tony, Val and Brett. And had a conversation with Tony about Kenneth Grant and Robert Anton Wilson ‘s Illuminatus trilogy…

So there we have it – politics, the occult, music and sex all confused in one short comment.

Oh and in 1990, when my friend Maggie / Sr Nema ( who features in KGs Outside the Circles of Time and Nightside of Eden) came to visit – and met up with Kenneth Grant himself ( and Genesis P. Orridge ) the sound track we danced around to was a mix tape made by Mouse of KLF tunes and other acid raves….

You couldn’t make it up, could you? . Well you could, but I haven‘t .

So lets immanentize the eschaton again, like we did last summer…
Charlie
June 18, 2012 at 11:25 pm

Wow, I was beginning to think I had imagined the whole thing. I was telling some one yesterday about how in 1978/79 I hung out with a group of people called the Anarcha United Mystics (AUM). We were scattered around various squats in the Camden area of London aswell as Trenteshoe Mansions, another squat, on the Tottenham Court Road. We had an old, navy blue, ex RAF, Bedford bus in which we would visit throughout the summer, the many free festivels including, of course, Stonehenge. We would quite often transport Nik Turners kindly loaned pyramid stage to some out of the way gathering to help make it more of a ‘happening’. Four of us formed a band, called Anarcha United Mystics, that played a sort of improvised jazz rock. I dont recall us giving any public performances, maybe a party or two.
In September 1979 we set off in that bus to travel across land to Nepal…..yes I know! Names have become hazy over the years but there was a Steve and a Tim and his Korean girlfriend who followed the Bagwhen Rhajneesh ( did I spell that right) Orange Order. We spent two weeks grape picking near Avingnon, picked up a bus load of French Canadian back packers, replaced a burnt out gear box in Milan, ran a gauntlet of corrupt policemen the length of what was then Yugoslavia and arrived at Thesalonika, Greece. By this time we were all about ready to kill each other. The heady, Stohehenge inspired idealism/hedonism that we had brought with us across the Channel had been shattered on the hard rocks of realism. I parted company with the happy crew at this point and some months later travelled back to London on the Magic Bus. Some months after this I met up with Steve again, who informed me that Tim and his girlfriend had made it to India but that Tim had died from a hepatitus infection. Was this true? I never truely believed it. Years after this I was driving through Camden, past the Camden tube station when someone, the spitting image of Tim, crossed the road in front of me and disappeared into the seething masses. Could it be? Maybe. Anyway a happy Ohmmmm(AUM) to you all.
Charlie
June 21, 2012 at 10:08 pm

Postscript:
Come to think of it, Steve, our driver and saxophone player was always going on about The Illuminatus Trilogy. Mind you, we were all into that stuff. I could be frequently found leafing through a copy of The American Book of the Dead, with a forward by Timothy Leary. Ahhh happy days! (No, not really).
Bhagwan Rajneesh (correct spelling).
Sean
August 20, 2012 at 3:57 pm

In Ian Bone’s autobiography he writes that the AUM were the first anarchists he ever met
J.B.
October 24, 2015 at 8:15 pm

I found this page after googling ‘Anarcha United Mystics,’ mentioned in a 1987 copy of ‘A Pinch of Salt’ (a Christian Anarchist zine)