June 22

All Glories to Sri Krsna: George Harrison's Living in the Material World

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On this date in 1973, George Harrison's fourth studio album arrived in Britain wrapped in a gatefold sleeve bearing four words few rock records before or since have dared print on their cover: “All Glories to Sri Krsna.” Inside, a reproduction of a Krishna devotional painting depicted the god alongside the warrior Arjuna in a chariot pulled by a seven-headed horse. The front cover showed Harrison's hand holding a Hindu medallion, photographed using Kirlian photography at UCLA's parapsychology department. Surprising many of Harrison’s longtime fans, this was not an album that hid its devotion; it was an album built, structurally and spiritually, as a true act of worship.

Living in the Material World had already topped the American charts three weeks earlier, on its 30 May release, debuting at number 11 and reaching number 1 within a week—deposing Wings’ Red Rose Speedway, the band Paul McCartney had formed after the Beatles’ acrimonious dissolution. The symbolism would not have been lost on Harrison, who had lived through that dissolution as the chronically underestimated junior songwriter, and who used this very album to settle some of those accounts…

A Beatle in the Material World

Harrison’s very-personal album emerged from a difficult period in both his personal and professional lives. The triumphant 1971 Concert for Bangladesh—rock music’s first large-scale humanitarian benefit, organized at the request of Harrison’s friend and teacher Ravi Shankar—had left Harrison internationally celebrated but exhausted, tangled in tax complications that prevented the raised funds from reaching the refugees they were intended to help. Rather than capitalize immediately on that success, he stepped back from his solo career for over a year. Following that hiatus, the songs that emerged were noticeably more spiritual than those of his 1970 triple album All Things Must Pass. Harrison’s arranger John Barham feared he was having a spiritual crisis, while others pointed to Harrison’s deteriorating marriage to Pattie Boyd. Both were probably true, and both fed directly into the record.

Harrison’s devotion to Krishna consciousness, cultivated through his close friendship with A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada—founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness—reached new intensity: in August 1972, he set off alone on a driving holiday through Europe and reportedly chanted the Hare Krishna mantra continuously for an entire day. (Religious scholar Joshua Greene has described that journey as Harrison’s deliberate spiritual preparation for the album that followed.) Around the same period, Harrison purchased Piggott’s Manor in Hertfordshire for the growing UK Krishna devotee community—renamed Bhaktivedanta Manor, it remains ISKCON’s principal British center to this day.

Harrison’s commitment was not without its contradictions: his wife and her friend, Chris O’Dell, joked that it was hard to tell whether he was reaching for his ever-present japa yoga prayer bag or what they called “the coke bag.” Later biographers noted that same duality: devotees called him “His Lectureship” for his fervent periods of spiritual instruction, while he simultaneously participated in raucous London sessions for considerably less devotional records, and lost his driving license for the second time in a year after crashing his Mercedes into a roundabout at ninety miles an hour. Living in the Material World is, in this sense, an entirely honest title. Harrison was not writing from a position of achieved enlightenment but, rather, from inside his own contradictions—a soul oriented toward Krishna consciousness while still entangled in fame, wealth, and professional drama.

A Devotional Record

The album’s most explicitly spiritual songs—the title track, “The Lord Loves the One (That Loves the Lord),” “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth),” and “Try Some, Buy Some”—draw directly on Prabhupada’s teachings. Greene notes that Harrison adapted a passage from the Bhagavad Gita directly into the lyrics of the title track, and that several of the album’s lines function almost as Vedic sutras: compressed phrases carrying disproportionate spiritual weight. The title track itself alternates between grounded, electric-guitar verses describing the pull of worldly desire and ornamented “spiritual sky” interludes, where Harrison added sitar, flute, and tabla performed by the virtuoso Indian classical musician Zakir Hussain. The contrast between the Western rock sections and the Indian-inflected middle eights was deliberate: Harrison built the struggle between material temptation and spiritual aspiration directly into the song’s sonic architecture, rather than simply describing it in the lyrics.

“Be Here Now”—a phrase borrowed from Ram Dass’s influential 1971 book of the same name, itself a foundational text in introducing Eastern spiritual practice to Western seekers—reflects Harrison’s stated desire to live entirely in the present moment, free of the weight of his Beatle past. Even the album’s ostensibly conventional love songs, “That Is All” and “Don’t Let Me Wait Too Long,” operate on a double register: critics have noted that Harrison seems to address his deity as much as any human partner, blurring devotional and romantic love until the distinction becomes almost beside the point. This is, in its essentials, the same theological move found throughout the bhakti tradition of Hindu devotional practice and in the Sufi poetry of Rumi and Hafiz: erotic language repurposed as the vehicle for divine longing, because human love is often the nearest available metaphor for what divine love is supposed to feel like.

Harrison and Western Spirituality

It is difficult to overstate how significant Harrison’s public, unembarrassed devotion to Krishna consciousness was for the broader Western reception of Eastern spirituality in the early 1970s. The Beatles’ earlier embrace of Transcendental Meditation and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had already cracked the door open in the mid-to-late 1960s, introducing meditation and Eastern philosophy to mainstream Western audiences who would otherwise never have encountered them. But Harrison’s post-Beatles devotional work went considerably further than fashionable interest in meditation technique. “My Sweet Lord,” from All Things Must Pass, had already fused a Hare Krishna mantra directly into a number-one pop single—arguably the most successful piece of devotional Krishna music ever produced for a mainstream Western audience. Living in the Material World extended and deepened that project across an entire album, presented without apology and marketed with full institutional commitment: Harrison donated his copyright on nine of the eleven songs to his newly established Material World Charitable Foundation, ensuring a perpetual stream of royalty income for the causes and spiritual institutions he supported.

For a generation of listeners who first encountered the words “Krishna,” “karma,” or “the spiritual sky” through a former Beatle’s record sleeve rather than through any formal study of Hindu philosophy, this was often a genuine point of entry—however imperfect or commercially mediated—into a tradition that would otherwise have remained entirely foreign. Critics at the time were sharply divided on whether this counted as authentic spiritual transmission or simply rock-star evangelism dressed in unfamiliar robes. NME’s Tony Tyler dismissed the record as “so damn holy I could scream.” Rolling Stone’s Stephen Holden, by contrast, called it “an article of faith, miraculous in its radiance” and credited Harrison with inheriting “the most precious” spiritual legacy of all four former Beatles.

Despite its commercial triumph—five weeks at number one in America, gold certification within two days of release, chart-topping runs in Canada and Australia—Living in the Material World fell into relative obscurity for decades, neglected in reissue campaigns that favored Lennon, McCartney, and even Starr’s solo catalogs. Biographer Simon Leng has called it “a forgotten blockbuster” and named it, notably, his personal favorite among all of Harrison’s solo work: the last record, in Leng’s assessment, to capture the clear-eyed utopian spirit of the 1960s before cynicism fully set in. A 50th-anniversary remixed super deluxe edition arrived in late 2024, prompting a wave of critical reassessment; Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield called it Harrison’s “most profoundly weird” record and a “slept-on masterpiece” finally receiving its due.

Whatever else Living in the Material World accomplished, it opened a door that a great many Western listeners walked through for the first time—toward the Gita, toward Krishna consciousness, toward a spiritual sky considerably larger than the one most of them had been raised to imagine.

OCCULT READS PRESENTS: DAILY OCCULT REVIEW

Modern Occultist is proud to present the first of our new ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads, today marks our inaugural “Daily Occult Review” … And what a wonderful first entry we have….

Young Aleister Crowley and the Magicians’ Revolt: A Novel

By Lon Milo DuQuette & Jim Bratkowsky | Weiser Books

For many comic book fans, Alan’s Moore’s long-gestating The Moon and Serpent’s Bumper Book of Magic—a lavishly-illustrated grimoire of esoteric history and easily-digestible initiatory rituals—was the exact graphic novel they’d been waiting for the author to finally release; in that same way, Young Aleister Crowley and the Magicians’ Revolt is the Aleister Crowley novel that only Lon Milo DuQuette could have penned:

It’s 1900 in London, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn is imploding in on itself. MacGregor Mathers and his wife Moina, claiming authority from mysterious Secret Masters reached through an ancient Arabic grimoire, are losing their grip on the most remarkable gathering of magical talent Victorian England has ever assembled: William Butler Yeats is there, as is Bram Stoker, Charles Bennett, Florence Farr, and Annie Hornimann. Enter young Aleister Crowley—twenty-five years old, already a genius of notorious repute, and convinced he’s destined be initiated into the deepest secrets of the Western tradition. Yet he has no idea of the internal politics involving his fellow magicians.

This is the setup DuQuette’s overtly-cinematic novel (in collaboration with television writer Jim Bratkowsky), only his second work of fiction in career spanning decades, and yielding some of the most critically-praised and bestselling nonfiction works on the subjects of ceremonial magic and Thelema. DuQuette has spent more than fifty years as a working adept in Crowley’s own fraternity, the Ordo Templi Orientis, spending that time patiently (and often playfully) breaking down some of Crowley’s most in-depth philosophies and workings. No one alive is better qualified to write the young Crowley into fiction—and DuQuette knows it, which gives the book its considerable confidence.

Of course, the setting couldn’t be better; the Golden Dawn schism of 1900 is one of the great set pieces of occult history: a genuine magical power struggle among ceremonial magi, conducted through letters, astral projection, and competing claims to lodge authority. (As noted, Richard Kaczynski mapped it with scholarly precision in Perdurabo; here DuQuette and Bratkowsky render it as something closer to tragicomedy—a “wizard war” in which the most dangerous weapon turns out to be Crowley’s own bewildered sincerity.) The young Crowley of this novel is not the Great Beast of later legend but something considerably more interesting: a genuine seeker whose native arrogance makes him uniquely unsuited to the political dimensions of lodge life, yet carries an energy and spirituality destined to surpass those around him.

Co-author Bratkowsky’s television background is evident in the book’s pacing and dialogue—scenes are brisk, allowing realistic conversations to bring the historical figures to vivid life, while the story’s flash-forward framing device makes it clear that this is a story destined for the “big screen” treatment sometime in the future. Of course, DuQuette’s esoteric knowledge provides the marrow, as the magical mechanics depicted in the story are accurate. Most valuable is the fact that the initiatory atmosphere is genuinely felt rather than merely described, an element lacking in nearly all accepted nonfiction manuals on the Golden Dawn system. In many ways, the book’s fictional narrative actually works to better describe the crucial importance of attaining communion with one’s Holy Guardian Angel and the roots of The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage than many such contemporary works. That Richard Kaczynski, author of the definitive Crowley biography, called the novel “an initiation” in his own endorsement is rather on the nose.

A note for the seasoned reader: Young Aleister Crowley is not an attempt to produce the definitive fictional account of Crowley’s life. Rather, it’s a lean, witty, historically grounded entertainment that wears its occult learning lightly and delivers on the suspense. DuQuette has always had the gift of making the esoteric feel alive, and that gift is fully operational here. For readers already familiar with the Golden Dawn history, there’s much to enjoy by the book’s fresh angle; for newcomers, it serves as an ideal entry point to one of the most consequential episodes in Western magical history. Highly recommended—and we at Modern Occultist really hope it becomes a movie…

(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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