ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
June 23
Alice Cooper's Toy Box of Horrors
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On
this day in 1975, during the opening number of a tour stop in Vancouver, Alice
Cooper got tangled in a stage prop—a toy box, of all things—and went flipping
headfirst into the security barriers. He broke six ribs and suffered a
concussion. He was carried backstage, examined, and discovered he could barely
catch his breath to sing. He came back out anyway and finished the set. “Such a
silly thing,” he later told reporters, almost sheepishly, before adding that
his ribs hurt every time he tried to breathe. The show, as the old superstition
insists, must go on—and for Alice Cooper, an artist whose entire career has
been built on staged death, fake executions, and theatrical resurrection, there
is something almost too perfect about a real injury arriving via a prop built for
play rather than peril.
It
would not be his last brush with real danger disguised as theater. Decades
later, during the London leg of his “Raise Your Fist and Yell” tour, Cooper
nearly died for real when the hanging execution sequence that closes his stage
show malfunctioned during rehearsal; in 1988, a safety rope snapped during
another rehearsal of the same hanging stunt, and he came close to actual
asphyxiation. The man has simulated his own death by guillotine, electric
chair, and gallows so many times across five decades that the line between
performance and genuine risk has worn dangerously thin on more than one
occasion. A toy box and six broken ribs, in this light, reads almost as a
warning shot—the universe’s gentle reminder that theatrical death, rehearsed
enough times, eventually demands its due in real currency.
The Theology of Shock Rock
Cooper
was born Vincent Furnier (a name uncannily shared with the actor who would
later narrate his most famous concept album) was raised in a household
saturated with apocalyptic Christian theology. His father was an evangelist in
the Bickertonite Church of Jesus Christ, and his paternal grandfather led the
same organization. Cooper has been candid throughout his career that this
upbringing never fully left him, even at the height of his most transgressive
theatrics, and that his eventual sobriety and recovery were explicitly framed
by him as the direct intervention of Jesus Christ rather than a clinical
process he managed alone.
What this means is that the entire architecture of Alice Cooper’s stage persona—the executions, the guillotine, the gallows, the boa constrictor, the decapitated baby dolls and Billion Dollar Bills, the eight-foot furry Cyclops he ritually slew nightly during the "Welcome to My Nightmare" tour—functions less as nihilistic provocation and more as a kind of inverted morality play, performed by a man who never stopped believing in the cosmic stakes underneath the greasepaint. Producer Bob Ezrin, who shaped Cooper’s sound and stagecraft more than anyone besides Cooper himself, put it with unusual precision: “He is the psycho killer in all of us. He’s the axe murderer, he’s the spoiled child, he’s the abuser, he’s the abused; he’s the perpetrator, he’s the victim.” Alice, in other words, was never meant to be admired. He was built to be executed, repeatedly, ritually, as a kind of nightly scapegoat—a theatrical Tyburn for the audience’s own darker impulses, dispatched so the crowd could go home lighter than they arrived.
This
is, when you strip away the makeup and the snakes, a genuinely ancient
theatrical and religious function. The scapegoat ritual, the sacrificial king,
the carnival figure crowned and then ritually destroyed so the community can be
purified and renewed—these are mechanisms with roots running through Greek
tragedy, medieval mystery plays, and pre-Christian fertility rites alike.
Cooper, the son and grandson of evangelists, built a multimillion-dollar arena
spectacle on precisely this scaffolding, whether he ever named it in those
terms or not.
Welcome to My Nightmare, and the Vincent Price
Connection
By
the time of the Vancouver fall in June 1975, Cooper had just released Welcome
to My Nightmare, his first solo album following the dissolution of the
original Alice Cooper band, and the project that cemented horror cinema as the
explicit, rather than merely implicit, foundation of his art. The album told
the story of a child named Steven trapped in a nightmare, and its narration was
provided by Vincent Price—by
then the reigning king of American horror cinema, his voice already inseparable
from House of Wax, The Pit and the Pendulum, and a decade of
Roger Corman’s Poe adaptations.
The collaboration extended beyond the album into the prime-time television special Alice Cooper: The Nightmare, which aired on American network television in April 1975—a genuinely startling thing for a major broadcast network to air, and a clear signal that Cooper’s horror theatrics had crossed over from controversial fringe spectacle into something approaching mainstream acceptance. Price’s presence conferred a kind of legitimacy and lineage: here was the connection, made explicit and official, between Cooper’s arena theatrics and the Gothic horror tradition running back through Corman, through Poe, through the entire apparatus of American horror cinema that had first captivated young Vincent Furnier watching matinees at Detroit’s Eastown Theatre as a boy. Price would go on to a similarly fruitful late-career association with Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” eight years later; Cooper got there first, and arguably with more genuine thematic coherence.
A Sacrifice Worth Six Ribs
Cooper’s
career has continued for half a century past that Vancouver stage collapse,
through addiction and recovery, through electric chairs and gallows and a
guillotine built by a future psychic-debunker, through duets with Marilyn
Manson and cameos in John Carpenter horror films and a memorably blasphemous
turn as Herod in televised broadcasts of Jesus Christ Superstar. Through
all of it, the basic theological architecture has held steady: build the
monster, parade the monster, execute the monster nightly, and let the audience
leave lighter than they came.
The
toy box that put him in the hospital in 1975 was, in the end, just a toy box—no
curse, no genuine supernatural mechanism, nothing more occult than the ordinary
hazards of touring with an elaborate stage show built from props that
occasionally misbehave. But it is worth remembering, when six real ribs break
beneath a costume built for staged death, that the oldest rituals of sacrifice
and scapegoating were never entirely metaphorical either. The blood was real
even when the gods were symbolic. Alice Cooper has spent fifty years making
audiences believe, for two theatrical hours at a time, that something genuinely
dangerous is happening on that stage. Every so often, despite the rehearsed
choreography and the carefully engineered safety mechanisms, something
genuinely is.
OCCULT READS PRESENTS: DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
Modern Occultist is proud to present today's "Daily Occult Review" from our new ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads...
ROBERT ANTON WILSON & ROBERT SHEA:
THE “MAYBE” LOGICIANS
An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson • Eric Wagner • New Falcon Publications • Revised Edition, 2020 • ISBN: 1-56184-165-X
Somewhere
in the archive of human letters there is a category of writer who cannot be
summarized. You can describe their books, chart their influences, document
their controversies, quote their more memorable lines—and still the essential
thing will have slipped away, grinning at you from behind the nearest
conspiracy theory. Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) was that kind of writer. He
was a novelist, a philosopher, a stand-up comedian, a chaos magician by
temperament if not always by practice, and—in the formulation he most favored
for himself in his last years—“a Damned Old Crank.” He was also, by any honest
reckoning, one of the most genuinely liberating thinkers of the twentieth
century, a man who devoted his entire career to the single project of helping
people think more carefully about how little they actually know.
He
called his method guerrilla ontology. He also called it “Maybe Logic.” The idea was simple, though
the execution was a lifetime's work: that every model of reality is a model,
not reality itself; that the map is not the territory; that anyone who tells
you with absolute certainty what is happening—in physics, in politics, in
metaphysics, in the conspiracy that is definitely running things—has stopped
thinking and started worshipping. Wilson's goal, which he stated clearly and
pursued consistently for over forty years of writing, was to induce in his
readers a state of what he called “generalized agnosticism”—not just
uncertainty about God, but uncertainty about everything, held not as paralysis
but as liberation.
The "Escapee"
Wilson was born Robert Edward
Wilson on January 18, 1932, in Brooklyn, New York, to an Irish-Catholic family
who lived in Flatbush and later Gerritsen Beach. The Catholic school education,
the Irish ancestry, the working-class Brooklyn formation—all of it resonated
with a figure Wilson would spend much of his career in conversation with: James
Joyce. Like Joyce, Wilson attended Catholic schools and felt the Church's
intellectual grip acutely. Like Joyce, he escaped by reading voraciously. And
like Joyce, he never quite left—he spent the rest of his life working through
the implications of the cosmology he'd been given as a child, bending it,
inverting it, detonating it from within with laughter.
The first escape was polio: Wilson
contracted the disease as a child and was treated with the “Sister Kenny
Method,” which the American Medical Association had dismissed as
unscientific—and which, by his account, cured him. The AMA's confident
wrongness on this point stayed with him. He carried it as a template for
official certainty throughout his career: the institutions that know what
they're doing tend to know least of all. The second escape was Brooklyn
Technical High School, where he discovered Ezra Pound and James Joyce, the
Western philosophical tradition, science fiction, and Alfred Korzybski's
general semantics—the theory that the structure of language shapes thought, and
that most human misery could be traced to people confusing their maps of reality
with reality itself. Korzybski's influence on Wilson was as deep as any: the
E-Prime experiments (attempting to write without any form of the verb “to be”—take
that Shakespeare!), the probabilistic thinking, the relentless scrutiny of how
words create the tunnels through which we perceive the world—all of it flows
from that high school encounter with a linguist almost no one else was reading.
The Playboy & Illuminatus!
Wilson spent the 1960s as an
associate editor at Playboy, where he met his long-time collaborator
Robert Shea. Together they edited the Playboy Forum, a letters section
that brought in correspondence from across the counterculture—conspiracy
theorists, libertarians, occultists, peace activists, would-be revolutionaries.
Wilson and Shea began collecting the most paranoid and mutually contradictory
letters they received, noticing that the fears of the far left and the far
right had begun to overlap in fascinating ways. Everyone believed in a
conspiracy. The left's conspiracy and the right's conspiracy were often mirror
images of the same anxiety, both pointing at an invisible hand controlling
events. What would happen, they wondered, if you took all of these conspiracies
seriously—all of them, simultaneously, including the ones that contradicted
each other?
The result, eventually published
in 1975 after five years of rejection and a demand that they cut 500 pages from
the manuscript, was Illuminatus!—a vast, deliberately impossible novel
co-written with Shea that remains the foundational text of a certain strain of
late twentieth-century consciousness. Not only structured on the Kabbalistic
Tree of Life, it also incorporates Discordian philosophy (whose central deity
is Eris, goddess of chaos and discord), Learyite neuroscience, anarchist
political theory, RAW's memory of first smoking cannabis during a Modern Jazz
Quartet performance, the JFK assassination, the founding of the Bavarian
Illuminati by Adam Weishaupt in 1776, a yellow submarine named after Leif
Erikson, and an enormous single-celled organism named Leviathan that
falls in love with a supercomputer. Quite obviously, it became essential
reading for an entire generation of freethinkers and occultists alike.
Wilson had quit Playboy
in 1971, believing he had enough savings to last a year—after which his writing
would carry him. The savings lasted a year. He and his family spent two years
on welfare before the writing began to pay. This period, lived on the edge of
poverty while completing work that would eventually influence millions of
people, is part of the Wilson mythology: the “Damned Old Crank” who put his
money where his mouth was.
Pulling the Cosmic Trigger
The real Wilson—the one
who, perhaps, matters most for the Modern Occultist reader—emerged in
the mid-to-late 1970s in a cascade of books that remain among the most
important in the New Falcon catalog. Cosmic Trigger I: The Final
Secret of the Illuminati (1977) is his strangest and most personal
book, an account of his experiments with consciousness expansion ranging from
Aleister Crowley's ritual techniques to Timothy Leary's neurological
reimprinting methods, interspersed with what appeared to be genuine contact
with intelligences from the Sirius star system. Wilson neither confirms nor
denies; he reports. He “Maybe-Logics” and applies the E-prime filter and
refuses to claim certainty about whether his experiences were encounters with
real extraterrestrial intelligence, products of his own nervous system, or some
category that includes both. That refusal is the book's great gift.
Prometheus Rising (1983)
is where Wilson the teacher fully arrives. Drawing on Timothy Leary's
eight-circuit model of consciousness—which maps human experience across eight
neurological levels from basic survival circuits to post-terrestrial
space-migration consciousness—Wilson provides both the theory and the practical
exercises. The book asks you to notice the Thinker and the Prover: the part of
your mind that forms a belief, and the part that subsequently finds evidence to
support it. Once you see this mechanism clearly, reality tunnels become
visible. Your reality tunnel, your neighbor's reality tunnel, your political
enemies' reality tunnel—all equally real to their occupants, all equally
partial. Prometheus Rising
is one of the few books that genuinely changes how you think, not just what you
think.
The Insider’s Guide to RAW
Eric
Wagner's An Insider's Guide to Robert
Anton Wilson, originally published in 2004 and now available in
a Second Edition from New Falcon, is the ideal companion for anyone beginning
this journey—and a pleasure for those already deep in it. Wagner has been
corresponding with Wilson since 1986, brought him to Arizona in 1988 to lecture
on Finnegans Wake, published a poetry newsletter to which Wilson contributed,
and spent decades working through the books with the seriousness and
irreverence Wilson himself would have demanded. The friendship between the two
is visible on every page, and it keeps the book from tipping into hagiography.
The
structure is characteristic of Wilson's own method—deliberately
non-hierarchical, trusting the reader to find their own path through it. There
is a biographical Infomercial (narrated posthumously, in the book's playful
fiction, by Timothy Leary), an annotated bibliography of Wilson's books, a
substantial Lexicon organized alphabetically from “act on perfect love” through
“Zukofsky,” and a series of appendices covering everything from a kabbalistic
analysis of Illuminatus! to a real interview with Wilson on the occasion
of his mock gubernatorial campaign for California on the “Guns and Dope Party”
platform. There is also a preface attributed to “Mordecai Malignatus, High
Priest, Head Temple, Order of the Illuminati”—who turns out, with
characteristic Wilsonian sleight-of-hand, to be Wilson himself.
The
Lexicon is the book's heart and its most practical feature. Working through it
is like spending a few hours in Wilson's own head: Beethoven's Ninth leads to
Bell's Theorem leads to Blake leads to Bohm leads to the Bermuda Triangle. The
connections are real—Wilson genuinely did think in these lateral leaps—and
Wagner traces them with the care of a scholar and the humor of someone who has
spent twenty years laughing at and with the same material. Entries on Korzybski
and E-prime and Reality Tunnels provide clear explanations of concepts that
Wilson himself sometimes rendered more difficult than necessary. The Crowley
entry situates Wilson's debt to the Great Beast accurately: not as discipleship
but as a method, the application of scientific rigor to the investigation of
interior states.
Final Years and Legacy
Wilson's
later years were complicated by post-polio syndrome, which put him in a
wheelchair for increasing periods from 2000 onward. He faced genuine financial
hardship near the end of his life—his friends and readers organized fundraisers
to help him cover medical expenses—and he met it with the equanimity and dark
humor that had characterized his work throughout. His last published blog post,
written days before his death on January 11, 2007, closed with a sentiment
entirely consistent with everything he had ever written: “I look forward
without dogmatic optimism but without fear.” He was seventy-four years old.
The
legacy is harder to summarize than the life. Wilson's influence runs through
the entire territory that Modern Occultist exists to map: the Chaos
Magic tradition owes him a substantial debt, through the explicit
acknowledgment in Peter Carroll's and Phil Hine's work; the Discordian
tradition he helped publicize with Illuminatus! remains alive in internet
culture in ways he couldn't have predicted but would certainly have recognized;
and the “Maybe Logic” he spent a lifetime teaching has arguably never been more
necessary than in an information environment designed precisely to eliminate
it. His name appears in the acknowledgments of a remarkable number of books
that matter.
Eric
Wagner's Insider Guide to Robert Anton
Wilson doesn't try to replace Wilson's own work. It tries to
make it more accessible—to provide the context, the connections, the
biographical grounding that helps a new reader know where to start and an
established reader find what they missed. It succeeds at both tasks. The ideal
use of this book is alongside a primary Wilson text: read a chapter of Prometheus
Rising, consult the Lexicon, follow a thread or two, return. You will think
differently by the time you're done.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)
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