Ocean Beach is a cigarette length away, dead straight and due west from the Kaaba. It is a place where you might just walk on up into the sunset, or see a UFO. That happened a lot in the San Francisco of 1969.
In the late April afternoon light two men pad down to the sands in their hippy uniform of suede moccasins and faded Levi’s. The younger has erratic starburst eyes and makes angular kinetic movements. He is communicating final instructions. The older man is in his fifties, has a straggly moustache and a focused demeanour. His family line is part Scotch, part Cherokee, part bankrobber, part whore. His name, Grady, means ‘noble’ in Gaelic, and at this stage in his life he looks anything but. Regardless, he is on the way to what will be the most important ritual of his life, the near summit of his spiritual career. The preparation required weeks of being unpeeled on acid and he has that aura about him, of skin too thin, of eyes too wide. Those who pass him on the sidewalk are unaware of the burden he carries: all hope for the American future, and with it all of mankind. It was his task to ensure that the law of liberty would reign in the land of the free.
A year earlier, the gangly younger man was initiated into the Minerval degree of the Ordo Templi Orientis. It was a momentous occasion, and Charles Apel, known amongst men as Chuck, had prepared by greedily sucking on the red coal of a reefer with fellow neophyte, the bearded gay activist Llee Helfin. On July 21 1968, at a bend on the Russian River at Duncan Mills, they were ushered into the tent of the older man, who wore a turban and sash as he stumbled through the unfamiliar script, muttered the password and gave the handshake. Thus Chuck, with a rash of other unfortunates, was brought into the newly pitched tent of OTO; an order which had ceased to exist for twenty long years since Crowley’s death. It would perhaps have been better if it died with the master. The remnants of Agape Lodge had been marshalled, and the drunk, narcoleptic and washed-up Grady McMurtry was finally taking his shot. He used his authority as Caliph, a provisional designation bestowed on him by the ailing Great Beast, to put California back on its feet. But even the most speculative Mason should know what happens if you try to build on poor foundations.
Chuck was first hit up to see if his drug dealer contacts would bankroll the production of Crowley’s Thoth Tarot and generate some ready cash to properly kickstart the cult. A deal was struck and Grady moved to San Francisco. The building on Balboa Street was renamed the Kaaba Clerk House and a printing press and meeting room set up to promote the order. In actuality, the majority of footfall were street kids from the Haight looking to score. Chuck, who lived in the back room, quickly became the teacher through his superior knowledge of the electric realms of lysergic acid diethylamide that he dripped into the cracked veteran. The reversal of roles did not bode well. Everyone could see the older man, Grady, was making a fool of himself.
Grady had resolved himself to swear the Oath of the Abyss as the Sun was quenched on the long Pacific horizon, and that was the purpose of his walk to Ocean Beach. He had good reason for throwing himself at heaven. A month previously he had taken his vows as a probationer in Aleister Crowley’s mystical A∴A∴. It was a ruse used by his then wife, the exasperated Phyllis Seckler,1 to exert spiritual control over the drunken and dishevelled Grady. It proved to be another terrible mistake. Crowley had written in a clause that you can opt to skip over the intervening grades and take the Abyss trip to become a Magister Templi. That clause pulled the ripcord on all the brightest students; and Grady, by his own admission, was not one of those.
Grady knew that if he was to restart OTO properly he needed higher authority for the task – a vision, a revelation, a word. All that remained was to step into the holy machinery of the heavens. But our acolyte hadn’t given up drinking, he couldn’t put down the bottle, especially when someone else was paying. He layered acid over the booze which he drank to counteract the amphetamines, which he needed for the narcolepsy. The condition nodded him out (even when he was presiding over initiations) for the rest of his life.
Chuck kept up his patter as they walked, ‘You go into the Sun centre, that golden Tiphareth where the angel lives. And then you are a child in the womb of Nuit, among the stars, and then you learn your Will and the purpose of your incarnation and you get reborn.’ Chuck had apparently followed this protocol up the coast at Big Sur with Llee Heflin, and crazily Grady took that seriously.2 In essence, he set a tripping Minerval grade hippy as an authority over himself, Crowley’s battlefield-blooded heir. Grady mumbled some kind of assent, but already the paving slabs were traced with precise shivering neon designs. Basic functions needed more focus to perform.
Ocean Beach was pristine that day, even the empties and roach ends cleaned up by protestors who had just celebrated the first Earth Day. Grady was set up a little way out from the crouching stepped sea wall that supported the esplanade. Chuck slunk back to the Kaaba, leaving Grady in his asana out on the sand. By evening more hippies would filter in with their blankets and reefers, and Grady would be just another pyramid in the desert. Despite electing for the Taurus stellium of Sun/ Mercury/ Venus/ Saturn, he was feeling far from grounded. The Sun remained stubbornly high, hanging motionless, refusing to lessen its glare. His eyes hurt behind the black thick rimmed glasses, and his temples throbbed. The light sea breeze cut through him like a knife. Something felt terribly, terribly wrong.
His young friend has brought heavy artillery to bear, prescribing a staggering 2000 mg of liquid LSD – the equivalent of twenty times the effective psychedelic dose – and an unstated amount of STP, a substance Grady had not taken before.
There is a hard ceiling for the effect of LSD at 500mg. The wave only gets so high, the ocean behind it just gets heavier. The magnification of intensity and duration overwhelms the user, plunging them into an unavoidably abyssal experience. In that sense we could call it an initiation, using what the cognoscenti often call an ‘heroic dose.’ Magical work is better performed at the liminal threshold, whereas this carried a significant risk of lasting psychological damage. And that was just the acid.
STP remains lesser known, and rarely sampled. It was synthesised from the recipe Alexander Shulgin had laid down for the observant chemist in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. Shulgin named it DOM, 2,5-Dimethoxy-4-Methylamphetamine. It was the dealers who dubbed it ‘Serenity, Tranquility and Peace’ when, fresh from the labs, it hit the streets of San Francisco in ’67. STP was meant to offer a longer, deeper trip than acid; one for those who wanted to travel far, to break through to the next level. Initially dosed in the 20mg range, the psych wards and free clinics became war zones within hours of its debut. Shulgin, the great woodshed alchemist, called the amount ‘insane.’ The free scene performed triage on the wreckage, the dealers adjusted accordingly and stamped it out on their pill presses in 10mg doses. 3mg was probably enough. If you left it on your tongue there was a bitter, metallic taste. God knows how much Chuck thought was appropriate, but judging from how he dosed the acid, we are looking at the upper bracket.
Grady was combining unknown materials in an uncontrolled setting. The STP takes two hours to shade in behind the acid, and sustains for the next eighteen. A trip of that duration is a significant psychedelic undertaking. Quite simply, there is no way to sustain those inputs even with the best trained body and mind. Grady was significantly diminished at 51. Behind his tatty moustache and receding hairline he looked like the impotent drunk he was. No longer the whirlwind, an officer who blew in on Crowley at 93 Jermyn Street on his confident way to wage the global American war.
He shivers in his asana, and tries to focus on the Sun. But his eyes hurt as he cranes up and lifts the lock on his throat chakra. He swallows hard, and tries again. Suddenly the Sun, high, pulsing, relentless, transforms into a nuclear explosion. It sucks all the sand from the beach into a great vertical column and rising annulus ring, then flowers into a great ash cloud that dwarfs San Francisco. Grady remains transfixed on the cherry red ball of fire. His thoughts are dancing spectres, torn from him, the mantra lost. Will cannot persist here. All is war, all the wars. He is by a pillbox in Normandy when the short fuse ordinance blows and rings him like a bell. He comes to in Belgium, armour sunk to the tracks in freezing mud, men weeping in the trenches. In a flash he is back in Korea in a cramped latrine, and tears off a sheet of newsprint to see Jack Parsons, so young, and now so suddenly dead. Another explosion. He feeds a steady stream of artillery shells into the endless waves of Chinese boys who scream in his sleep. Then Jermyn Street, and Crowley isn’t there, just the lingering smell of Perique and an abandoned chess match. The pieces keep morphing and he can’t see his next move. A German bomb has blown out the windows. There is a great churning of bodies and despair. No Angel, no Word, no bosom of Nuit. He sees himself lifted in the emerald belly of a wave, but he is an old man now with white beard and a turban, his magical ring glinting at the fishes. The vision is dashed bedraggled onto the sand. And with a start, the ring has passed from him into unknown hands. A heavy tonnage landing craft surges up out of the Normandy fog. Bombers drone overhead. Before him, not the Haight, but a bloody slog through Europe. He claws through tar balls, hafts of bull kelp torn from their forests, crab shells like the detritus of an interstellar war, and back up to the first established beachhead.
He is in his body now, but it doesn’t make sense to him. We are at the two hour mark, so the acid is at maximum velocity, and now the rising wave of STP is starting to crest. All it gifts him with is deeper fear. The fear keeps coming. He has to get away. The Sun is too damn bright and he can’t see properly anymore, and he must escape the war and the noise.
The only thing that saves him when he crosses the esplanade and Ocean Drive is that the traffic was accustomed to hippies. The panic crawls him up the hill for an eternity. Chuck, smoking panama red back at the Kaaba, seemed unconcerned. Grady clings to his mattress like the Raft of the Medusa. It doesn’t stop coming at him for hours.
The after effects of the great spiritual adventure were waves of panic, rolling in with terrible frequency over the following weeks, from a storm centre sat somewhere off the horizon of Ocean Beach. Memory loss. Horror. He would never be the same man again. What is more, he had categorically failed to cross. He drank heavily to cope.
The lesson was not learned. On May 4, he elected to do it all over again. Chuck convinced him that the protocol was correct, and that he simply had to overcome the ‘dweller at the threshold’ who came for him clothed in battledress. The only error had been getting to the beach too early. Grady bought darker glasses from a street stall as a precaution, as his eyes still hurt. That day Ohio State Troopers shot 67 rounds into the unarmed student peace protestors at Kent State University. News of the massacre reached the city in hours, fuelling rage in the beleaguered underground; it crackled with it. Despite the omens, Grady went right ahead. As we have no surviving account of the trip, we can be sure that once more he did not pass.
On May 13, Grady and Chuck fell out in paranoia and bitter recriminations. The Abyss protocol was bullshit. A broken Grady left the Kaaba and San Francisco to recuperate with Phyllis, eyes coddled behind the black glasses which hid his photophobia, gained from staring too long at the solar disk. She rescinded his Oath of the Abyss to release him from the obligations of the grade, as if such a thing can be done, but within three days he was hospitalised from sleeping pills, drink and drugs. The abyss was not done with him. It would not be his last suicide attempt. Grady would struggle on until 1985, making the modern Caliphate OTO in his own image. Like Crowley, he failed to appoint a successor.
In 1986, Grady’s ashes were ferried out some three miles beyond Golden Gate Bridge, in sight of Ocean Beach and the terrible sunset. There was a small ritual, some friends. America did not notice the loss of another veteran, nor mourn an apostle. The Caliph was quietly returned, poured into the ocean of stars. His vow would be fulfilled in death, his grade attained over there. Crowley was correct to intuit that Grady as a fool would walk the fool’s path, and had sent him out as a magical son, a sycamore seed, an ever-whirling aleph fated to plunge headlong into the abyss.
Postscript
I will be writing more about the young Grady, as it is important to give the context behind his abyss trip, but this piece demanded to be written. My thanks to those who have maintained Grady archives online, and particularly to Jerry Cornelius (RIP) for his sympathetic biography, a major source for this article, and the work which continues with his wife Erica at www.corneliuspublications.com. My conclusions are more critical, but I respect their honouring of the Caliph.
Thanks also to my loyal subscribers, as I have been busy getting my latest book, Lucifer: Praxis, ready for press. The pre-order is now open, and my writing here will be more regular again.
Seckler was in the Jane Wolfe lineage, see my previous essay ‘A Condensed Star.’
Llee Heflin ultimately produced a channelled text, The Island Dialogues: Liber ALAL. Live Loving, Living Love, Light. A Book from Darkness (in 1971).
A ravishing gut-punch of an essay on the seedy genesis of the Caliphate O.T.O. Worth the wait, for certain. Tapping my foot and looking at my watch waiting to read more; that's how engrossing you've made this story.
McMurtry is an interesting character when viewed against the backdrop of the hippie counterculture.