Over time, the rules governing classic role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons changed and took on a weight of their own. Role-playing elements sank into a mire of charts and tables and special abilities. This rules-heavy play really took hold when, in the late 1990s, publisher TSR was suffering financially. Wizards of the Coast, coasting on the sales of card game Magic: The Gathering, bought them out.

Not surprisingly, D&D—the way it was packaged and the way it was played—started to look a lot like Magic. The emphasis was heavy on combat, skills, and special feats. For many people D&D became more about creating quasi-Medieval superheroes than adventurers looking for the simple things like treasure, or a little boost in their archery ability.

What Wizards of the Coast did was take an experience so open as to allow group improvisation, and turn it into a tabletop game where the players merely pretend that they are the miniature figurines pushed around on a combat grid. Playing D&D began to mean buying all kinds of other stuff. Where figurines were once optional, the new rules made them essential, along with cardboard tiles and an enormous number of supplements. (The newest version of D&D has three different Players Handbooks).¹

To put it another way, Dungeons & Dragons has become a game preferring combat to role-playing. It favors prefab characters acquiring new skills and powers over a character that the player comes to identify with; a character whose development determines the course of the game.

In the wake of this, a small but mighty band of mostly middle-age gamers has tapped into a larger current of nostalgia that (like vinyl records and analog synthesizers) is trying to recapture the interactions with ideas and people that digital media have all but made obsolete.

Sometimes referred to as the Old School Renaissance (OSR), this loose gathering of gamers and designers are bound by a common message: all you really need to play a table-top fantasy role-playing game is notebook paper, pencils, dice and a few charts you can download for free.

OSR is also representative of a current obsession with how open things used to be, and with how much the culture and technology felt more participatory. When they were growing up, we weren’t just consumers, but pioneers. It was about being able to crack things open and look inside, and maybe even come up with your own changes&mash;be it computers, or audio hardware, or game rules. It’s about fighting back a little against a culture of consumption that's become stripped of its sense of participation, where everything is ready made and sealed, where you can’t even be trusted to change your own batteries.

It was copyright law, however, that made the old school renaissance possible. Copyright can be very complicated, especially in the internet age, but one thing remains clear: you cannot copyright game rules. You can copyright their presentation, the associated artwork, and the accompanying text, but not the rules themselves: that a dwarf gets a constitution bonus +1 cannot be copyrighted.

The earliest iterations of OSR games, like the Old School Reference and Index Compilation, are simply various editions of the early D&D rules with new art and accompanying text offered as PDFs (often free) or print-on-demand at cost. While many felt the original D&D had a kind of biblical authority, others realized that since the rules were not protected by copyright, they could be modified. Creators started to offer their own brand of old-school RPGs such as Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Dungeon Crawl Classics, not only fixing what they thought was broken, but re-instilling the game with all that was gloriously weird and pulpy about the early years.

Wizards of the Coast finally got around to acknowledging that some people like to play the earlier versions of the game and, seeing a small but flourishing market, tried to capture the spirit of OSR with a number of publishing initiatives. The first started in 2012, with the reprints of the three core books of the first edition of AD&D; The Monster Manual, The Players Handbook, and The Dungeon Masters Guide. This year Wizards published Unearthed Arcana—the much-maligned collection of Gygax’s Dragon Magazine writing—and Dungeons of Dread, an anthology of the four original TSR AD&D adventures.

The books are lovingly bound, detailing on the cover one small aspect of the original art. The books include a "red ribbon" bookmark: the universal publishing shorthand for “collector’s edition.” The paper stock used is high gloss and heavy weight, but feels kind of cheap, as if photocopied. To preserve some of the lighter drawings, the printing tends to be too dark, giving and almost-wet look to much of the art. The book most undermined by this is Dungeons of Dread: none of the colors in the art are preserved, and the lack of removable maps and other supplemental material makes it a difficult book to use.

The bigger news earlier this year is the online PDF store Dungeons and Dragons Classics where for a few bucks you can download the “classic” D&D material, including the Basic and Expert guides, as well as versions 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5. The site is not actually run by Wizards, but piggybacked onto the terrific DriveThru RPG, a stellar resource for role-playing. There are missed opportunities here, including not making these available as print-on-demand, an option that has become central to OSR culture.

A more cynical observation, and one I can’t help but make, is that the cost to post these items online is negligible. The operators are able to make a profit on material that it had no hand in producing—content that has long been available in OSR clones. This is not to say that it isn’t terrific to have these items available, as some of them are fairly collectible and Wizards deserves credit for buying TSR when the alternative might have been the end of the game itself. But there is something uninspired in the whole effort. It is as if Wizards does not really see new value in the old D&D material, but merely recognizes the opportunity to make money from those who do.

Nevertheless, reading through these items—particularly the AD&D hardcovers—is a joy. Here is Gygax describing playing a character: “Each of you will become an artful thespian as time goes by—you will acquire gold, magic items, and great renown... This game lets all your fantasies come true... Enjoy, for this game is what dreams are made.” Sure, it’s over the top. But it evoked wonder.

Maybe we don’t need to keep looking back. Is the spirit of OSR really just a bunch of throwback nerds, staring into the abyss? The biggest criticism of OSR, voiced by bloggers such as RPGpundit, is that what Gygax and Arneson were trying to do was create something new that would rattle the cages of the hardcore wargamers and make games something that were more open, less restrictive. Today’s old-school misanthropes are merely holding fast to something without any kind of creative impetus to push roleplaying into new territories. In this respect, OSR is itself a kind of fundamentalism. OSR gamers counter this by arguing innovation in D&D has merely meant more rules. And more rules means less wonder, less imagination.

Child psychologist Donald Winncott describes the pure play of youth, where an unboundedness is the required work of a healthy developing mind, and continues to be an vital part of being an authentic self into adulthood. Is this was role-playing is about? Authenticity? And is someone supposed to find authenticity imagining they are, say, a magic-user in search of arcane lore?

For the last year, once or twice a month if we’re lucky, some friends of mine gather to play AD&D. We’ve ended some sessions without any combat or dice rolling at all, all that precious time we are able to get away from our other responsibilities spent elaborating on a world and its inhabitants that has no other meaning outside of these hours together. I can’t be sure this is how Gygax and Dave Arneson meant the game to be played, but they certainly invented a game that never makes us feel like we are cheating for not adhering to every table and chart. And they also made a game capable of unbounded play, where I don’t have to pretend to be kid to pretend that I am not me.

[1] But one of the more telling changes in the D&D rules is not about the rules at all. The first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons’ Dungeon Masters Guide includes an Appendix N: Inspirational and Educational Reading, in which Gary Gygax reminisces about his father telling him fairy tales, as well as a list of books he names as inspiration behind much of the D&D game’s original inception. Appendix N also includes a remarkable little nugget: that the major influence on D&D’s gameplay is not J.R.R. Tolkien, but Edgar Rice Burroughs and Fritz Leiber, among others. No subsequent edition of D&D included an appendix of this sort.

Illustration courtesy of Shutterstock.]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/05/06/old-school-dungeons-dragons.html/feed 200 http://boingboing.net/2013/03/28/opponents-wanted-forgotten-ga.html http://boingboing.net/2013/03/28/opponents-wanted-forgotten-ga.html#comments Thu, 28 Mar 2013 12:55:32 +0000 Peter Bebergal http://boingboing.net/?p=221539 Ares, to The General, to The Dragon, the original thrill and excitement of pen 'n' paper gaming is there to be experienced at the Internet Archive and other online haunts.]]> The Internet Archive is one of the great treasures of the internet, housing content in every media; texts, video, audio. It’s also the home of the Wayback Machine, an archive of the Internet from 1996. I thought I had explored the site pretty thoroughly—at least according to my own interests—but recently came across runs of some of the great gaming magazines of the 1970s and 80s; The Space Gamer, Ares, Polyhedron, The General, and—temporarily—Dragon Magazine. These magazines represent not only the golden age of gaming, but expose the thrill and excitement of gaming when it was still new, still on the margins. It was a time when gaming still felt a little, dare I say, punk.

Today, finding members of your particular community of interest is a Google search away, but in the 1970s the only way to be in contact with others who shared interests was through magazines. For many gamers, even finding the games could be difficult. Discovering the gaming magazines revealed an active gaming industry that still maintained a sense of being on the vanguard.

The earliest issues show off their newsletter origins. The Space Gamer and The Generalstarted off on plain paper in black and white. Even the first issues of Dragon look like a teenager’s fanzine, but the enthusiasm and energy are infectious. Who couldn’t love the introduction of new monsters for your campaign such as the Gem Var, a creature composed entirely of gemstone and that cannot take damage from bladed weapons. The artists, editors and letter writers were the best friends you had never met. Gaming in the 1970 and 80s felt a little like being into punk rock. You knew it was offbeat, knew that outsiders didn’t get it, but you also knew that this was cool. Even the advertisements and listings of conventions expanded the universe of gaming a thousandfold. Not unlike ordering 45s of unknown bands from punk zines, was sending away for microgames, miniatures and supplements from tiny game publishers.

Browsing through them now using Internet Archive’s terrific “read online” feature, it’s clear how important these magazines were to a fledgling hobby (and how wonderfully awful some of the artwork was). The amount of new gaming content these magazines offered is astonishing, and it was this very malleability of the rules that created a sense within the community of gamers that it was perpetually new, always reaching out towards the next idea. The first issue of Dragon Magazine from 1976 (then called The Dragon) admitted in its editor’s note that it was entering new territory, but managed to fill that pioneering issue with a story by Fritz Leiber, new spells, a discussion of science and magic in D&D, and introduced a regular section called “Mapping the Dungeons,” which was a list of the names and addresses of gamemasters looking for players (David Mumper of Henniker, New Hampshire, where are you now?).

Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) put out Ares Magazine, and each issue offered a complete game including a map and a rack of punch-out counters. The PDFs currently at Internet Archive include scans of these elements and it’s painful to not be able to press out those beautiful little counters. The Space Gamer focused mostly on publisher Metagaming’s own properties. By issue #27, the magazine came under the auspices of Steve Jackson Games (SJG) and offered a much greater variety of content, with material for AD&D, Call of Cthulhu and computer games.

The General , published by Avalon Hill (makers of PanzerBlitz and one of the great war games of all time, Starship Troopers, among others), was geared towards the historical with smatterings of science fiction, but later issues had quite a bit of fantasy fare as well. The Generalalso offered articles on strategy and tactics employed during actual wars and a classified section called “Opponents Wanted” where lonely gamers posted messages in the hopes of finding other players: “Adult player looking for opponents (female players welcomed) to play AH non-wargames, especially RB, KREM, DIP, CIV. RB fanatics. Write me!”

Having these magazines up at Internet Archive—or other easily-found online locations—corresponds perfectly with the old-school renaissance taking place in the world of role-playing games, as well as an overall nostalgia for ’70s gaming in general. The recent Kickstarter to republish Steve Jackson’s Ogre netted $923,680 (they were looking for $20,000). Wizards of the Coast recently made PDFs available the original rules and modules for AD&D, as well as a limited edition boxed set reprinting the impossibly rare “White Box.” And Gygax Magazine was just launched this January by Luke Gygax, Gary’s son.

Those of us who gamed in the ’70s and ’80s are hitting middle-age and have kids of our own who couldn’t draw a dungeon map if their life depended on it. We are looking back at our lives, remembering fondly the things we deeply loved.

When I was 12-years old, my older brother drove me down the mostly depressed Sterling Avenue in Hollywood, Florida to a nondescript storefront where there was a small variety store, a dry cleaner, and a shop called The Compleat Strategist. It was 1979 and I was just about done with my Legos and tragically losing interest in my Micronauts. We were there, of course, to check out Dungeons & Dragons. My brother chipped in and I walked out with the D&D Basic Set in the blue box, along with the Dungeon Geomorphs and the Monster and Treasure Assortment. I left with something else: a sense that I was about to be initiated into a secret order. Yet is was those magazines that created an idea of fraternity that would finally bring together so many aspects of my pre-adolescence: a love of fantasy and science fiction, an anxious imagination, and an almost righteous identity as an outsider.

10. Fresh and Onlys: Long Slow Dance

Like a forgotten nugget from 1979, this pop gem with slight garage and psychedelic undertones offers heartbreak you can dance to. Lush, memorable songs are tightened with smart lyrics. Jangly and whimsical in all the right places, it’s music for people who miss the time when pop on the radio actually rocked.

9. Wymond Miles: Earth Has Doors

The guitarist from Fresh and Onlys also released a full length this year -- Under the Pale Moon -- a fine achievement, but this four song EP is like a hermetic secret finally revealed, a beautifully crafted pop ritual. Miles has tapped into the occult consciousness that has grabbed hold of lot of recent underground and experimental rock, but there is something personal here, something that only Miles knows, but that he willing to open the door just a crack. It’s pretty great stuff.

8. Tim Hecker and Daniel Lopatin: Instrumental Tourist

Tim Hecker’s 2011 Ravedeath, 1972 was a revelation, the next major step in ambient music. This collaboration with Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin is a meeting of the electronic gods, a fusion of two minds across a knob encrusted landscape. There are many micro-moments here, but the whole is a great experimental, yet fully realized, co-authored book of sound collage.

7. Dirty Projectors: Swing Lo Magellan

2012 was a year of great expectations for the slew of indie bands who had found mainstream success and released new albums -- Sufjan Stevens, Grizzly Bear, Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes -- all of whom I loved their earlier outings but found their 2012 releases... well, boring. Dirty Projectors, a band that deserves the same recognition as any of them, is the sleeper success, a perfect fusion of avant garde and pop. David Longstreth delivers uncanny vocal range buffered by the harmonies of his co-singers. Always pulling apart at the seems, the music and the lyrics are codes to be cracked even as you resign and give into their inscrutable emotional embrace.

6. Sic Alps: Sic Alps

Oh boy, these guys. If you have never heard Sic Alps, this is a great place to start, but be forewarned you will become obsessed with hearing everything from their back catalogue, a seemingly infinite string of albums and EP’s of garage noise goodness. They use rhythm to uncover new noise, and noise to unearth surprising rhythms. They undermine pop just as they make it sound like the newest thing in the world. Their influences are numerous, but you forget all the references once you start to swim in this amazing stone soup of infectious madness.

5. Alexander Tucker: Third Mouth

This is the soundtrack to all those Heavy Metal and Epic Illustrated stories if those stories were really ancient myths. Acoustic metal through the language of folk, Tucker is a magician of song-story. His singing is reminiscent of Brian Eno, an Eno haunted by witch kings and desolate planets. Third Mouth is a quiet masterpiece.

4. Panabrite: The Baroque Atrium

Analog Synth smoothly spread over glitch and natural sounds. Norm Chambers takes the saccharine of new age music and infuses it with a deep, dare I say, spiritual authenticity. Lot of great kraut and kosmiche nods here, but still an original and lovely undertaking. This is the one of the best 70s album of 2012.

3. Pretty Things: S.F. Sorrow

Okay this wasn’t released in 2012, but it is the album I listened to the most this year and an album that deserves much more recognition. Some argue this is the first true rock opera, but who cares. It’s simply one of the great albums of the 60s, a psychedelic overload of heavy weirdness, right/left channel vacillation, and guitars drowning in reverb.

2. Thee Oh Sees: Putrifiers II

The rambunctious soulmates of The Fresh and Onlys, Thee Oh Sees bring a fuzzy swagger to the lo-fi psych rock proceedings with their best album to date. Thee Oh Sees is a little dark at time, but they are more trickster than devil, more like your weird cousin who is always tripping on mushrooms but whose manic chatter is infectious. I keep thinking if I play this one more time I am going to get sick of it, and I never do.

1. Goat: World Music

I don’t think music has made me this happy in a long time, and by that I mean happy like a drunken satyr being torn apart by a group of hallucinating maenads. This mysterious group of loa-possesed musicians have formed a secret society of heavy guitars, feedback, and screaming vocals. It’s like everything you’ve heard before transformed into something you can’t believe you are listening to. The first time you play it don’t be surprised if you just start laughing from the sheer giddy pleasure of this ecstatic religious feast.

The Emigrants, by W.G. Sebald

Word of his death was a blow. Sebald was just starting to get the wider recognition he deserved with the publication of Austerlitz, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. I felt as though something important had been taken from the world, something that was essential to helping us understand what it means to be human beings agents of history, and how history works on us. This is what Sebald’s work is about: None of our lives exist within a vacuum, that we are all part and parcel of historical forces that shape us, batter us about, and in our attempts to fight against them, we often lose.

I had discovered the novel The Emigrants by chance. It was weekday afternoon, browsing the literature section of the bookstore. I often scan by logos on the spines, looking for independent publishers in the hopes of discovering authors or books I have never heard of. I spied the New Directions mark on a book, pulled it from the shelf and read the back. I had never heard of Sebald, but thought it looked interesting enough. I bought it and took it home.

I was not quite prepared for what happened next. Almost like a state of self-hypnosis, I could feel some part of my reader’s consciousness shift. I read books as if I understand books, as if I know about genre and time-periods, know what to expect from science fiction, from crime noir, from Kafka, from Vonnegut, from Roth. Of course I’m surprised at times by language, plot, and a character that comes alive in a way I never thought possible. But I am rarely thrown off course by a book, never have I had to renegotiate the very act of reading. That is, until I read The Emigrants.

The story is simple enough. An unnamed narrator encounters through testimony and diaries the lives of four people all of whom are German exiles leading up to or during the Second World War: Dr. Henry Selwyn, the husband of the narrator’s landlady who haunts the gardens and the crumbling tennis court and spends his time counting blades of grass; Paul Bereyter, the narrator’s beloved school teacher whose partially Jewish heritage puts him in close proximity to tragedy; Ambros Adelwarth, the narrator’s great uncle who served as a butler for a wealthy Jewish family in America; and the artist Max Aurach whose family is exterminated.

While the shadow of the Holocaust looms large, The Emigrants is not a Holocaust book. Rather, it’s a book about displacement, identity, and place. All of Sebald’s characters are afloat, untethered from their homeland which as a result of the war is irrevocably changed. How can you go back to an unfamiliar place where you never really belonged but where you sense some part of your true self lies?

Sebald inserts photographs and other ephemera (maps, drawings, diary pages) into the text. A strange enough thing to do in fiction, but something that at first lends a comfortable sense of reality to the narrative. That is until you realize that one of the images corresponds directly to something in the text.

This first happened to me during the section on the schoolteacher Paul Bereyter. Sebald describes him with a group of people, somewhat apart from the rest and looking emaciated and depressed The photograph that follows shows just that, a tall gangly respected and skinny man standing alone amidst a group. At first I was not sure what I was looking at. Was this non-fiction after all? Was I being tricked? The story of Bereyter up to that point had been deeply moving and the character was as real to me as any I had read before, but here he was, a living person in a photograph, not just something spun out of the imagination of the author. It’s one thing to draw from real life in fiction, it’s another to merge the two so completely that one is made dizzy trying to parse them.

And so it goes throughout this strange, sad, and remarkable book that challenges all notions of literature, and of the act of reading. Each photograph and scrap of paper force you to go back to what you just read, to try and see how the text and the image line up. Sometimes the images are generic and only used as an example, but even these remind us that the narrative, however made up, exists in the real world, in “the actual.” There is often a sense of being pulled apart, just as the narrator’s own memories and those of his subjects are strained to the breaking point, where dream and recollection are merged into a single thing. In the end it’s doesn’t matter, Sebald seems to be saying, if what he writes is real or not. What is more important is what is true.

Buy The Emigrants on Amazon

Village of the Giants (1965), by Peter Bebergal

[Video Link] My parents were pretty good about indulging my obsession with monster movies. My father would pick me up Famous Monsters Of Filmland when he saw it at the drugstore. Across the street from his clothing shop in Waltham was Mr. Big's, a toy store that stocked all the Aurora models. Being a business neighbor my father got to know "Mr. Big" pretty well, and a few times he sold us the window display version of one of the models, a perfectly painted and glued version given to him by the distributor. Monsters movies were my life. Every Sunday morning I woke early, got the newspaper from the front stoop, opened it up to the middle and dug through the flyers and other loose inserts to where the television guide was nestled. Then I flipped to end to see what the following Saturday's Creature Feature would run. The mid to late 70s was a golden age when the rights to old monster movies must have been dirt-cheap. In the span of a year or so I saw every great Universal, Toho, and Hammer film. But every so often there was a movie that didn't appear in the index of my movie books, whose stills never showed up in the pages of Famous Monsters.

One of these was Village of the Giants, released in 1965 from the weird imagination of director/producer Bert I. Gordon, and starring a very young Beau Bridges. Gordon had an obsession with normal sized things becoming unnaturally large: The Amazing Colossal Man, War of the Colossal Beast, Earth vs. the Spider, and the weird and creepy Food of the Gods. (To be fair, he did have one movie about normal sized things becoming unnaturally small, Attack of the Puppet People.)

I had become used to monster movies pretty quickly. I was rarely spooked, and often rooted for the shambling undead creation or the giant radioactive lizard. The only storylines that got under my skin were those that involved pre-adolescents or teenagers where the kids were the threat, controlled in some way, or kidnapped. The Star Trek episode "Miri" has the crew beam down to an alternate Earth where the children rule and where a terrible disease strikes the moment you hit puberty would fill me with pre-sexual dread. Even in Gamera vs. Viras, where two boys are kidnapped and their heads are shaved by nefarious female aliens, made me feel anxious, no matter that the cosmic spinning turtle was on his way to save them.

In Village of the Giants, a gaggle of rebellious teenagers eat a strange substance that causes them to grow to a great height. I watched in terrible wonder as their clothes tear, the buttons of sweaters pop, and their arms cover their exposed "parts." They set about tormenting the town, and a group of unaffected teens fight back. There's even a scene where hot rods are used to pull one of the giants down like in a rodeo.

I never picked up that vampires were about sex, but I got right away that when the teenagers tormented the smaller residents of the town, they were lustfully sadistic. And the scene that blew my mind is the giant dance party shot in slow motion to psychedelic surf music. I was completely hypnotized. Everything that moved, even when not shown next to a normal sized person, just seemed bigger. The camera shoots them close up, taking time to focus in on bare bellies, swaying hips, and a tiny resident clings helplessly to the bikini top of one of the giant girls. I felt pity and envy, my poor pre-pubescent mind exploding. The teenagers have a look of ecstasy about them, as if the slime they ate also did something to their minds as well as their bodies.

I was about to become one of those teens bursting out of their childhood but I would never feel quite as empowered as the giants. I was afraid of them, and was pleased when the one kid with glasses is the only smart enough to come up the formula for the antidote to their largeness. But part of me, the part that always rooted for the monster, wanted them to crush that silly little town and walk on towards their next conquest, never afraid.

"My function is to raise the possibility, 'Hey, you know, some of this stuff might be bullshit.'" -- Robert Anton Wilson

I like to think of myself as a believing skeptic, someone who relishes in the ideas, the imagery, the arguments, the theories, and the literature of the occult and the paranormal, but accepts little of it as valid in a phenomenal sense. I love that small publishers such as Ouroboros Press and Fulgar Limited put out beautiful magical texts and that many current underground and avant garde musicians incorporate occult ideas into their work. But beyond its power as a method for art and imaging, I recognize much of the occult as woo. On the other hand, I accept that the human imagination is something magical, and very powerful and that we know little about human consciousness except how malleable it really is. It's a precarious position, however, and I often need to remind myself of smarter, more articulate thinkers who shared these views.

So it is with great respect and admiration that I celebrate the life of Robert Anton Wilson during this memorial week by remembering that he was the great believing skeptic, someone for whom the collection and curating of all that is weird was his life's work, who reminded us always to question everything, while recognizing that we should never stop exploring. I sure wish RAW was alive today, especially at a time when there is something like a real Occult Revival going on, from the psychedelic explorers who see 2012 as a great trans formative event, to the huge increase in the membership of organization like the O.T.O. and Freemasonry, and by extension a whole load of conspiracy theories. RAW warned against any idea, group, or person that claims knowledge of the "Real" Universe, echoing Umberto Eco who wrote in Foucault's Pendulum we should be mindful of turning metaphysics in mechanics.

In an essay for the Journal of Cognitive Liberties, Wilson explained how it is through self-hypnosis that we create these "Real" universes, and because they are so beautifully and perfectly solipsistically rendered, we are, sadly, often incapable of having any critical, or agnostic relationship to these models. Sometimes, through meditation or the use of certain, *ahem*, psychoactive substances, we can get to what Buddhism describes as an observer state. We can see the "Real" as merely a kind of consciousness that we have deeply inherited. Wilson writes, "In the 'Real' Universe we are re-active mechanists; in the experienced world, we are creators, and The "Real" Universe is just another of our creations -- a dangerous one, with a tendency to hypnotize us."

It's troubling when the counterculture, often the only voices that rise against fundamentalism of all stripes, succumbs to the same kind of mechanistic thinking. The apocalyptic tenor that is part of the psychedelic subculture's obsession with 2012, for example, starts to sound like those evangelical Christians who use a convoluted kind of gematria to come up with specific dates and times for the rapture. Things like 2012 have the potential to function as useful metaphors for describing the need for cultural and economic transformations. When these ideas become "Real" they are incapable of producing any real call to change, or any kind of art or expression that really matters. Wilson writes, "Once again, it appears that the materialist model of mechanical consciousness covers some but not all experience, and it excludes precisely that part of experience which makes us human, esthetic, moral and responsible beings."

Agnosticism, even more than atheism or theism, is, for RAW, the authentic ethical position.

Fnord