Exorcism in Some Beat Poetry
From early on in the Beat movement there was a tendency, along with the irrational and orgiastic, to an ethical and specifically pacifistic religiosity. In his essay “Note on the Religious Tendencies,” published in Liberation magazine in 1959, Gary Snyder identified three distinctively religious strands within the Beat Generation:
1) Vision and illumination-seeking.
2) Love, respect for life, abandon, Whitman, pacifism, anarchism, etc.
3)
Discipline, aesthetics, and tradition.
[1]
In his note on number 2, Snyder elaborated:
“This comes out of various
traditions including Quakers, Shinshu Buddhism, Sufism. And from a loving and open heart. At its best
this state of mind has led people to actively resist war, start communities,
and try to love one another.”
[2]
According to Ann Charters, Kenneth Rexroth’s reading of his 1953 poem “Thou Shalt Not Kill: A Memorial for Dylan Thomas” influenced Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, published in 1956. Rexroth says in his preface that “The poem is directed against the twentieth, the Century of Horror”:
They are murdering all the young men.
For half a century now, every day,
They have hunted them down and killed them.
They are killing them now.
At this minute, all over the world,
They are killing the young men.
They know ten thousand ways to kill them.
Every year they invent new ones.
The rhythm of his long lines and the occasional Biblical imagery prefigure Ginsberg’s chorus on “Moloch”, the pagan god to whom the Palestinians and Hebrews sacrificed their children:
The first born of a century
Slaughtered by Herod.
Three generations of infants
Stuffed down the maw of Moloch.
[3]
From the beginning, the pacifist tradition among the Beats analyzed by Snyder had an apocalyptic flare. It was not simply a “rational” antiwar statement, but was inspired by the perception that demonic forces were at work particularly in the twentieth century, and that the task of the poet was a prophetic and exorcistic one. Poetry was a channel to call up and identify the demons and to curse them; in Rexroth’s words:
You
killed him! You killed him.
In your God damned Brooks Brothers suit,
You son of a bitch!
As the Beat tradition continued into the 1960s and began to morph into the Hippie movement, active political protest in the tradition of the Civil Rights movement disobedience became a theme. Ed Sanders first book of poems, Poem From Jail, (1963), is prefaced:
“
August 8-24, 1961
having attempted to board the
Polaris-missile submarine
the Ethan
Allen, as a witness for peace”
[4]
Sanders went on to form the rock group The Fugs, based in
the hippie stronghold of the
[5]
At the October 1967 March on the Pentagon The Fugs performed
the famous Exorcism of the Pentagon, during which the Pentagon rose three
hundred feet in the air, turned orange, and vibrated. This exorcism was the
culmination of spiritual trends in the
Apparently various exorcistic texts had been circulating in
the hippie communities for some time. The mimeographed text circulating at the
Pentagon march is reproduced in Norman Mailer’s account in The Armies of the
Night:
[6]
OCTOBER 21, 1967
WASHINGTON DCA
USA
PLANET EARTH
We Freemen, of all colors of the spectrum, in the name of God, Ra, Jehovah,
Anubis, Osiris, Tialoc, Quetzalcoatl, Thoth, Ptah, Allah, Krishna, Chango, Chimeke,
Chukwu, Olisa-Bulu-Uwa, Imales, Orisasu, Odudua, Kali, Shiva-Shakra, Great
Spirit, Dionysus, Yahweh, Thor, Bacchus, Isis, Jesus Christ, Maitreya, Buddha,
Rama
Do exorcise and cast out the EVIL which has walled and captured the pentacle of
power and perverted its use to the need of the total machine and its child the
hydrogen bomb and has suffered the people of the planet earth, the American
people and creatures of the mountains, wood, streams, and oceans grievous
mental and physical torture and the constant torment of the imminent threat of
UTTER DESTRUCTION
We are demanding that the pentacle of power once again be used to serve the
interests of GOD manifest in the world as man. We are embarking on a motion
which is millennial in scope. Let this day, October 21, 1967, mark the
beginning of suprapolitics
By act of reading this paper you are engaged in the Holy Ritual of Exorcism. To
further participate focus your thought on the casting out of evil through the
grace of GOD which is all (ours). A billion stars in a billion galaxies of
space and time is the form of your power, and limitless is your name
Norman Mailer
devotes several pages to his observation and analysis of this historic rite of
exorcism:
“Now
while the Indian triangle and the cymbal sounded, while a trumpet offered a
mournful subterranean wail, full of sobs, and mahogany shadows of sorrow, and
all sour groans from hell’s dungeon, while finger bells tinkled and drums beat,
so did a solemn voice speak something approximate to this:
In the name of the amulets of touching,
seeing, groping, hearing and loving, we call upon the powers of the cosmos to
protect our ceremonies in the name of Zeus, in the name of Anubis, god of the
dead, in the name of all those killed because they do not comprehend, in the
name of the lives of the soldiers in Vietnam who were killed because of a bad
karma, in the name of sea-born Aphrodite, in the name of Magna Mater, in the
name of Dionysus, Zagreus, Jesus, Yahweh, the unnamable, the quintessent
finality of the Zoroastrian fire, in the name of Hermes, in the name of the
Beak of Sok, in the name of scarab, in the name, in the name, in the name of
the Tyrone Power Pound Cake Society in the Sky, in the name of Rah, Osiris,
Horus, Nepta, Isis, in the name of the flowing living universe, in the name of
the mouth of the river, we call upon the spirit to raise the Pentagon from its
destiny and preserve it.
….
Then all the musicians
suddenly cried out: “Out, demons, out,
-- back to darkness ye sevants of Satan – out, demons out! Out, demons,
out!” …..
Ed Sanders spoke: “For
the first time in the history of the Pentagon there will be a grope-in within a
hundred feet of this place, within two hundred feet. Seminal culmination in the
spirit of peace and brotherhood, a real grope for peace. All of you who want to
protect this rite of love may form a circle of protection among the lovers.” …
“These are the magic
eyes of victory,” Sanders went on. “Victory, victory, victory for peace. Money
made the Pentagon – melt it. Money made the Pentagon, melt it for love.”
Now came other voices, “Burn the money,
burn the money, burn it, burn it.”
Sanders: “In the name of the generative
power of Priapus, in the name of the totality, we call upon the demons of the
Pentagon to rid themselves of the cancerous tumors of the war generals, all the
secretaries and soldiers who don’t know what they’re doing, all the intrigue
bureaucracy and hatred, all the spewing, coupled with prostate cancer in the
deathbed. Every Pentagon general lying alone at night with a tortured psyche
and an image of death in his brain, every general, every general lying alone,
every general lying alone.”
Wild cries followed, chants: “Out demons,
out! Out demons out! Out! Out! Out! Out demons out!”
Sanders: In the name of the most sacred of
sacred names Xabrax Phresxner.”
He was accompanied now by chants of “hari,
hari, hari, hari, rama, rama, rama, ram, Krishna, hari Krishna, hari, hari,
rama,
“Out demons out!”
They all chanted: “End the fire and war,
and war, end the plague of death. End the fire and war, and war, end the plague
of death.” In the background was the sound of a long sustained Ommmmm.”
Mailer observes in summary:
“Now, here, after
several years of the blandest reports from the religious explorers of LSD,
vague Tibetan lama goody-goodness auras of religiosity being the only publicly
announced or even rumored fruit from all trips back from the buried Atlantis of
LSD, now suddenly an entire generation of acid-heads seemed to have said
goodbye to easy visions of heaven, no, now the witches were here, and rites of
exorcism, and black terrors of the night – hippies being murdered. Yes, the
hippies had gone from
[7]
It should be noted that the rite of exorcism included an orgy, the “grope for peace” conducted by Ed Sanders. The mysterious and primal sexual energy which was such a powerful component of the Beat ethos was here added to the invocation of myriad deities, the critique of the nexus of money and power and warmaking, and the explicit exorcistic chant “Out demons out – back to darkness ye servants of Satan.”
During the 1960s antiwar civil disobedience began to take on, in addition to the pagan hippie tradition, a specifically Christian exorcistic dimension. The Jesuit priests and poets Phil and Dan Berrigan initiated such actions as breaking into draft boards and pouring blood on draft records. This Christian tradition has outlived the sixties and continues in such projects as the Plowshares Actions.
The first Plowshares Action occurred on September 9, 1980
when Dan and Philip Berrigan and other, mostly Catholic, activists entered the
the General Electric Nuclear Missile Re-entry Division in King of Prussia, PA
where nose cones for the Mark 12A warheads were made. They hammered on two nose
cones, poured blood on documents and offered prayers for peace. They were
arrested and initially charged with over ten different felony and misdemeanor counts.
[8]
In 1978 there were a series of
actions to block nuclear shipments to and from the Rocky Flats facility in
The Protestant theologian Walter Wink, in his massive
trilogy The Powers (1983-1999) has emphasized the New Testament language
about angels and demons and applied it to entities such as the Pentagon and
modern corporations. Writes Wink: "Perhaps we
are not accustomed to thinking of the Pentagon, or the Chrysler Corporation, or
the Mafia as having a spirituality, but they do.” In his works Wink maps strategies
for “naming, unmasking and engaging the Powers” and incorporates exorcism as a
mainstream Christian strategy.
[9]
Wink’s exorcistic program is not one of exorcising demon-ridden individuals, popularized in the 1973 movie “The Exorcist.” Rather it is an interpretation of corporate entities as potentially demonic. While Wink would not style himself a beatnik, he is here quite clearly in the Beat religious tradition of identifying and casting out evil spirits.
Finally, the Beat poet Anne Waldman continues the tradition. Waldman read the exorcism at the
Counter-Inaugural of the first George W. Bush administration on January 20,
2001. She noted that:
“It became exceptionally clear that we’d be starting off on the wrong foot
with the axing of the Inaugural Poem during the President Select events of the Inaugural Day (Jane 20,
2001). Romantic poet, visionary Percy
Bysche Shelley, has said that poets are the
“unacknowledged legislators of the race”. Every culture in the world has had a place
for its poets (its artists, philosophers)
--often perceived to be the imaginative conscience or psyche of the
people who can articulate the ‘rasa’ -
the Sanskrit word for flavor or taste -
of the times. Well these are bitter times, my friends. And the President Select might have thought
he’d be hearing some bitter poetry so
why risk embarrassment. It is also
telling that poetry will not have a home in this Select Administration. It will
be rallying from greater position of
power and dignity, outside the corruption of corporate & media
stranglehold.”
[10]
Spel Against Specious Ones
by Anne Waldman
that they be doused roiling water
that adamantine speech go against them every time
that glamorous women turn their heads from them
that children run
that if they perpetuate war & famine they rot in hell
that hell be ferociously hot
that they are no longer recognizable or loved
that they get no more votes
that they exude an aura of sickness & scent of doom
that their credit runs out
that they are disbarred from the marketplace
that they are banished from the kingdom of poetry &
music forever
that their seed dries up
that they loll about mindlessly in sad places
OM BANISH HO HUM!
Gone Bone Gone out of Gentle Pathways!
In this poem
there is a play on words – “
In “Wichita
Vortex Sutra”
[11] Allen Ginsberg expounds
at some length on the magic of language, its relation to power and to evil, and
specifically to its role in conducting the Vietnam War:
The war is
language,
language abused,
For
Advertisement,
language used
like magic for power on the planet:
Black Magic language,
formulas for reality –
[12]
Generals
faces flashing on and off screen
mouthing language
State Secretary speaking nothing but
language
MacNamara declining to speak public
language
The President talking
language,
Senators
reinterpreting language
[13]
with
a letter from an aging white haired General
Direction of selection
for service in
Deathwar
all this black
language
writ by machine!
[14]
Throughout the
long poem, or sutra, written while traveling across the plains of
It’s not
the vast plains mute our mouths
that fill at midnite with
ecstatic language
when our
trembling bodies hold each other
breast to breast on a mattress --
[15]
O
but how many in their solitude weep aloud like me –
On the bridge over
almost in
tears to know
how to speak the right language –
on the frosty broad
road
uphill
between highway embankments
I search for the
language
that is also yours –
almost all our language
has been taxed by war.
[16]
Finally, at the climax of the poem, Ginsberg summons the deities of the cosmos
in the style of the Pentagon exorcisms to proclaim an end to the war:
I call all Powers of imagination
To my side in this auto to make Prophecy,
All Lords
Of human
kingdoms to come
Shambu Bharti Baba naked covered
with ash
Khaki Baba fat-bellied
mad with the dogs
Dehorahava Baba who moans Oh how
wounded, How wounded
Citaram Onkar Das Thakur who
commands
Give up your desire
Satyananda who raises two thumbs
in tranquillity
Kali Pada Guha Roy whose yoga drops
before the void
Shivananda who touches
the breast and says
Srimata Krishnaji of Brindaban
who says take for your guru
William Blake the invisible father
of English visions
Sri Ramakrishna master of ecstasy
eyes
half closed who only
cries for his mother
Chaitanya arms upraised singing
& dancing his own praise
merciful Chango judging our bodies
Durga-Ma covered with
blood
destroyer of battlefield
illusions
million-faced Tathagata
gone past suffering
Preserver Harekrishna returning in the
age of pain
Sacred Heart my Christ acceptable
Allah the Compassionate
One
Jahweh Righteous One
all
Knowledge-Princes of Earth-man, all
ancient Seraphim of heavenly
desire, Devas, yogis
& holymen I
chant to –
Come
to my lone presence
Into this Vortex named
I lift my voice aloud,
Make mantra of American language now,
Pronounce the words beginning my
own millennium,
I here
declare the end of the War!
[17]
The Beat
tradition of exorcism is a revolutionary alchemy, as Mailer termed it, which
seeks to transmute the black magic of language used to construct money, power,
and war into an ecstatic sexual language of prophecy and delight. Words of
exorcism stem from a long tradition of Christian and Buddhist pacifist
religiosity. The poetry is a tool for unmasking the demons, calling them out
and banishing them. The process of poetry rips apart the devilish tools, the
demonic binding word structures of control and domination freaks, and unleashes
the original power of language as ecstasy, glee, enjoyment and enchantment.
--Ross Bender
gate gate paragate parasamgate
bodhi svaha
APPENDIX I
--Allen Ginsberg, Planet
News 1961-1967, City Light Books, 1968
APPENDIX II
I lift my voice aloud,
make
mantra of American language now,
pronounce the words beginning my own millennium,
I
here declare the end of the War!
Ancient days’
Illusion –
Let the States tremble,
let the Nation weep,
let Congress legislate its
own delight
let the
President execute his own desire –
this Act done by my own voice,
nameless Mystery –
published to my own senses,
blissfully
received by my own form
approved with pleasure by my sensations
manifestation of my
very thought
accomplished in my own
imagination
all
realms within my consciousness fulfilled.
--Allen Ginsberg, “
APPENDIX III
Tonite let’s all make
love in
as if it were 2001 the years
of thrilling god –
And be kind to the
poor soul that cries in
a crack of the pavement because he
has no body –
Prayers to the ghosts
and demons, the
lackloves of Capitals & Congresses
who make sadistic noises
on the radio –
Statue destroyers
& tank captains, unhappy
murderers in Mekong & Stanleyville,
That a new kind of
man has come to his bliss
to end the cold war he has borne
against his own kind flesh
since the days of the snake.
--Allen Ginsberg, “Who Be Kind To”, Planet News, City Light Books, 1968, 98-99
