AuthorL Gary Lachman

ISBN: 0971394237

The following review was contributed by: Paul Lappen: CLICK TO VIEW Paul Lappen's Reviews 

Amid all the other revolutions that happened in the 1960s - sexual, social and
political - another revolution took place that has been overlooked by
historians. A revival of the occult affected all parts of daily life, from the
Beatles' journey into psychedelia to the movie Rosemary's Baby to the novel
Steppenwolf.

There have always been those interested in the idea of secret knowledge only
available to a select few, including ancient civilizations and lost races. Such
interests became popular through groups like the Theosophical Society of the
1920s founded by Madame Blavatsky. A later manifestation of this interest in
secret things was the near obsession with flying saucers.

All the people and movements one would expect to find in such a book are here:
Charles Manson, astrology, the Tarot, Jim Morrison, Timothy Leary, yogis,
witchcraft, Transcendental Meditation, Brian Wilson, Anton LaVey and Aleister
Crowley.

Another huge influence on the mystical revolution of the 1960s was the written
word. Hermann Hesse was a Nobel laureate whose novels were rediscovered in the
1960s and spread across American college campuses like wildfire. The publication
of a fantasy novel by an obscure British author named Tolkien (The Hobbit) by
two American publishers at the same time, because of copyright problems, caused
another literary firestorm. This helped lead to the rediscovery of 1930s pulp
authors like Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. Who can forget other literary
heavyweights like Jack Kerouac, L. Ron (Scientology) Hubbard, Allan Ginsberg and
Aldous Huxley?

I very much enjoyed reading this book. It is very well researched, and does a
fine job exploring an aspect of "the 60's" that is generally forgotten. This
gets two strong thumbs up.