July 11

Happy Birthday, Lon Milo DuQuette: The Mark Twain of the Occult

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The Coconut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel, circa 1970….

A young acid-cowboy duo called Charley D. and Milo has been booked, against their better judgment, to back Sammy Davis Jr. for one night, in front of a room that includes John Wayne, Nancy Sinatra, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and a stoned young George Carlin who wanders up afterward to tell them they were “groovy.” Everything is going fine until Sammy starts introducing the next number—“Spinning Wheel”—a song the two guitarists have never learned. Lon Milo DuQuette and his partner quietly slip their guitars off, creep offstage, and leave Sammy Davis Jr. alone with only the drummer to get him through it. They never worked with the William Morris Agency again. Neither, as it turned out, did the agent who’d booked them.

That is Lon Milo DuQuette in microcosm: a man who has spent his entire adult life walking directly toward the most intimidating rooms available—Hollywood stages, Thelemic high office, the interior architecture of Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot—and finding the humanity and humor in it without ever losing the reverence. Today he turns seventy-eight, and this column is delighted to celebrate the occasion, not least because DuQuette is, quite literally, one of us: readers of this magazine encountered him directly in our own interview with him this past Bicycle Day.

Acid Cowboy to Archbishop

DuQuette was born on this day in 1948, in Long Beach, California, and raised in Columbus, Nebraska, and his first serious career was music, not magic. Charley D. and Milo released an album and two singles on Epic Records, opened for Hoyt Axton and Arlo Guthrie, and by DuQuette’s own telling toured under the billing of an “acid cowboy band” that occasionally found itself sharing a bill with Sammy Davis Jr. In 1972, at the height of that career, he walked away from the music business entirely to pursue a much older interest: Eastern philosophy and, ultimately, the ceremonial magic and mysticism of Aleister Crowley, which had captured his attention years earlier.

What followed was a genuinely uncommon depth of commitment and understanding: DuQuette joined Ordo Templi Orientis in 1969, became a governing officer by 1975, and has served as the Order’s United States Deputy Grand Master since 1996—one of its most visible and longest-serving leaders anywhere in the world (and by some accounts, its longest-living member following the death of Phyllis Seckler). He also holds the title of Archbishop within Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, O.T.O.’s ecclesiastical arm, and teaches the Western Magical Tradition on the faculty of the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in Rhinebeck, New York. None of which stopped him from also becoming, by his own cheerful admission, “Baba Lon”—turban, ukulele, and all.

DuQuette began his prolific literary career in 1988, and has since published over twenty books translated into a dozen languages, on subjects ranging from Enochian magic and Goetic evocation to Freemasonry, Tarot, and the Qabalah—many of them serious, yet accessible, gateways into Crowley’s notoriously difficult body of work. But what sets Lon's shelf apart from the rest of the Thelemic literature is the register he insists on writing in: always accurate, and yet with his signature playfulness. And that narrative voice has, more than once, earned DuQuette a most appropriate honorary title as the “Mark Twain of the occult.”

Lon remains a writer capable of taking material that intimidates most newcomers—ceremonial magic, angelic evocation, the darker corners of Crowley’s reputation—and rendering it genuinely funny without any loss to the true meaning of even the densest concepts.

The title of his best-loved book on Qabalah says as much about his method as any review could: The Chicken Qabalah of Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford, built around the line every fan of his can quote from memory—“It’s all in your head. You just have no idea how big your head is.” His autobiography, My Life with the Spirits, is now required reading in two separate courses at DePaul University, which is either a very funny fact or a very serious one depending entirely on whether you’ve read the book, and DuQuette would almost certainly say both are true simultaneously. Or just ask Alan Moore, who considers it one of the best books on modern occultism, and has credited it with inspiring his own emersion into ceremonial magic.

Baba Lon Rides Again

After nearly three decades away from the stage, a gift of a ukulele in 2005 reignited an interest in music that DuQuette had long set aside (well, professionally, at least), and by 2012 he had signed to Ninety Three Records and released I’m Baba Lon, his first solo studio album since the Charley D. and Milo days. Of course, in true DuQuette fashion, he's described it as “songs of sloppy sentiment, offensive blaspheme, and diabolic Americana.” Three more records followed, along with gigs across the U.S., Japan, and Australia, making for a genuine late-career second act that most musicians a third his age would envy, arriving for DuQuette well into his sixties.

Now, at seventy-eight, he shows no sign of slowing down: The Tarot Architect, his latest work of nonfiction, arrived from Red Wheel/Weiser in 2025, and his brand-new novel, Young Aleister Crowley and the Magicians' Revolt, was released this year to glowing reviews (including ours!). And for anyone who hasn't treated themselves to his fun and enlightening ruminations on contemporary occult philosophy, Lon's daily (yep, every day!) videos are a joy for much-needed joy and inspiration in our often chaotic world; the joint offerings with his wife of over forty years, Constance, are sure to bring a smile to anyone's face.

For a man who once quietly abandoned a stage rather than fake his way through a song he didn’t know, DuQuette has spent the last five decades doing precisely the opposite in every other arena of his life: knowing the repertoire like a maestro and then making the music his own.

Happy birthday, Lon! May the big, cool smooth singularity remain ever with you…

And be sure to check out our exclusive interview with Lon here!

OCCULT READS PRESENTS: DAILY OCCULT REVIEW

Modern Occultist is proud to present today’s "Daily Occult Review" from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... In honor of our friend Lon’s seventy-eighth birthday, two of his own books, old and new...

My Life with the Spirits: The Adventures of a Modern Magician

By Lon Milo DuQuette | Red Wheel/Weiser

DuQuette’s 1999 autobiography remains the essential starting point for readers who want the man before the mythology: a memoir that moves from his Nebraska childhood, through his acid-cowboy years, and, finally, into decades of genuine magical attainment inside O.T.O., all told with the same warmth and self-deprecating comic timing that runs through his entire bibliography. As mentioned above, it's serious enough to be assigned coursework at DePaul University, yet funny enough that almost no reader notices they’re being taught anything until well after the fact. For anyone who has only encountered DuQuette through a single Crowley commentary or a Tarot guide, this is the book that explains how he got there, magical initiation by magical initiation, and (perhaps of equal importance) why he never once lost his sense of humor along the way.

An Accidental Christ: The Story of Jesus as Told by His Uncle

By Lon Milo DuQuette | Llewellyn Publications

Proof that DuQuette’s appetite for a controversial premise has never faded, this 2023 novel reimagines the life of Jesus as narrated by his uncle (!), a framing device that lets DuQuette do what he has always done best—approach material most writers would treat with either total reverence or total irreverence, and instead find the humane space in between. It’s a novel rather than a magical textbook, which makes it an easy recommendation for readers in your circle who’ve never picked up an occult book in their life, yet love DuQuette’s voice from his lectures or interviews; it is also, quietly, one of his most theologically serious works, asking real questions about faith and family underneath the humor.

Maybe Scorsese should have filmed this one; I'd kinda love to see Willem Dafoe deliver this dialogue. Hmmm.... think he's age-appropriate now to play the uncle in the Jesus Cinematic Universe?

(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.)

Modern Occultist