E3P2 Tommy Cowan: The Occult World of William Burroughs-Time, Space, Code Words and...Insect Time?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 ก.พ. 2025
- Part 2 of Tommy's interview continues with an in-depth look at the cut-up method, and why it's relevant to Burroughs's beliefs about the archons (and what these beings are). We also discuss Gnosticism and the links to Burroughs's ideas, how he viewed magic(k) and why Tommy personally finds Burroughs so interesting.
Episode Notes:
Tommy P. Cowan's academia.edu page: amsterdam.acad...
Correspondences Journal: correspondence...
The Exterminator : www.sea-urchin...
The Yage Letters + Junky ( & other works): all-med.net/pd...
And The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, with Jack Kerouac (& other works): newbooksinpoli...
The Soft Machine: miltonthed.weeb...
Naked Lunch: / 7437.naked_lunch
Other authors/ persons of interest mentioned in this episode:
Brion Gysin, The Dreamachine: en.wikipedia.o...
Jeffrey Kripal, author of The Super Natural : www.amazon.com...
Barry Miles, author of Call Me Burroughs: A Life: www.amazon.nl/...
Ted Morgan, author of Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs: / 23949.literary_outlaw
Robert A. Heinlein, sci-fi author: www.fantasticf...
Terrance & Dennis McKenna: www.amazon.com...
Kill Your Darlings (film): www.imdb.com/t...
Naked Lunch (film): www.imdb.com/t...
Episode art credit: photo by Richard Avedon
These two episodes were incredible! As a long time reader of WSB's work, I didn't know if this would tell me anything I didn't already know, but it was full of fascinating information.
I am so happy to read this! Thank you for listening!
Same!
This is a perfect summation of why I am so fascinated by this man, I'm so happy for this conversation for having all of this analysis in one place and perfectly articulated. Thank you!
Thank YOU for listening! Tommy is a great guest, and I'm so pleased you found the discussion worthwhile!
Yeah me too. This interview/conversation sums up my interest in Burroughs! I wish you well my friend so take care out there.
This is the most underated project!
How INTERESTING!....-Thank you for posting. Lookin forward to a listen..
great dialogue!!! finally someone's talking in depth about this side of Old Bill's life & work!!! Good job, folks!
Many thanks!
Many thanks to you for so much great content! I just discovered your channel a couple days back & already listened to quite a few great podcasts, covering topics that have been in my field of interest for the past couple of decades, basically! This is exactely the type of brain food I need right now :) keep on the good work, you have my respect & support 🖤
"The transhistorical penchant to identify processes of the natural world as conscious agents that are blocking your path to psychic transendence". Brilliant, live, on the spot statement.
words our of a hat isn't the cut up method.
the cut up was an accident. Gysin was wiping paint off a puddy knife and the blade cut through the top part of the paper revealed the page beneath. Brian and Burroughs noticed the strange word combination that occurred between the top and second layers. Then they developed it further, especially Burroughs. According to Burroughs, It was fun at first, but then it became serious.
Really fascinating discussion. Gratifyinglyly well informed and articulate guest. I was hooked from beginning of part one. I guess you don't need an English degree.. (although I studied linguistics). Wonderful, glad to see acknowledgement of the humour.. and the magical intention approach to writing.. btw 'hyperstition' sounds awfully like Timothy Murphy's concept of fabulation..
Apologies for the late reply, but thank you for your kind and generous comments! Could you elaborate on the 'fabulation' comment, and specify which Timothy Murphy you're referring to? I'm interested to know more. Thanks!
My toxic trait is that I think certainly, that Burroughs was right about everything.
There's also "Cities of the Red Night," Burroughs' 1981 comeback novel, in which private detective Clem Snide matches wits with a murderous globetrotting cult. Explicit references are made to magical ceremonies--specifically, sex magick--performed by Snide and his assistant to help them uncover additional clues in the case they're investigating (the murder of a young man on the Greek isle of Spetses, apparently based on a real-life incident that was also mentioned by a British travel writer). Names of various gods and demonic entities are mentioned in the book's dedication, including H.P. Lovecraft's fictional Cthulhu (albeit misspelled as "Kutulu")...which is interesting, because it was during this same period that Burroughs contributed a blurb to the hoaxed but consistently popular "Necronomicon" compiled by Simon (aka Peter Levenda). Burroughs also established his long friendship with singer/poet Patti Smith at that time, and was photographed by Smith's ex boyfriend Robert Mapplethorpe for the cover of a spoken word album. All of these represented connections to the NYC occult milieu.
But there may have been an even more direct link, or at least an attempt to forge one: in journal entries reproduced in a book called "The Burroughs File," both his companion/secretary James Grauerholz and Burroughs himself made brief but specific reference to a certain infamous cult--English in origin--that had settled in New York in the early '70s, and whose members evidently had made some sort of overture to the writer shortly after he returned to the United States in 1974. On April 8 of that year, Grauerholz made the following notation: "Long detailed dream of encounter with strange cult..." On August 12 of the following year, Burroughs wrote: "Long process in different forms. Infiltrating some branch of the Process." These are, of course, references to the Process Church, and it appears that Burroughs derived some interesting material from them for "Cities of the Red Night."
Thanks for this wonderful comment! Very interesting stuff here...
@@rejectedreligion My pleasure!
These podcasts seem to be a hidden gem. Really good interesting listen.
Thank you so much for such a lovely comment! ❤️
Burroughs developed a unique cosmological and phenomenological vision, one that arose from his direct experiences with consciousness exploration, literary experimentation, and investigations into control systems. His conceptual architecture was highly specific - he wrote of "control," "word viruses," and "reality studios" not as mere metaphors, but as precise technical terms describing his observed mechanics of consciousness and social organization. The application of the term "archons" - which Burroughs never used - emerges from Gnostic traditions - represents a kind of cognitive interpolation that, while perhaps attempting to create useful connections, actually obscures the radical specificity of Burroughs' perceptual framework. This isn't merely a semantic issue, but speaks to deeper questions about how conceptual systems maintain their internal coherence and evolutionary trajectory.
The danger lies in how overlays like "archons" can create false equivalencies, collapsing important distinctions. Burroughs' exploration of control mechanisms operated through precise vectors of language and imagery, reflecting a sophisticated understanding of how consciousness interacts with symbolic systems. While surface similarities to Gnostic concepts may exist, imposing such equivalences diminishes the nuance of his unique insights into the dynamics of control at the intersection of consciousness, language, and social organization.
Great talk! Thanks a lot!
A few minutes in.... so far, so good. 😊❤️👍
Very concise and considered views on and if Burroughs, thank you.
You're very welcome!
This is incredible
Thank you! I’ll pass this along to Tommy Cowan.
@@rejectedreligion this is my main account. My name is Eliott Edge. I'm connected with esoteric scholars Vanessa Sinclair PsyD, Carl Abrahamsson, Peter Valentine, and David Metcalfe, and Becca Tarnas---all of who you'd probably dig. Emailing u now
Looking forward to your email!
20:49 The Essence👽
For anyone wanting to learn more about the Gnostic mythos in general, I would recommend this lecture: th-cam.com/video/RJBn6ZKrQKo/w-d-xo.html
"i would encourage them to go to naked lunch and look at the very first sentence of the book"
um.. ok ..
^^^^ "i can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper i threw away at Washington square station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train ... Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back for me. "
um... this sounds like a junky that was just shooting up and is running from cops..... soooo.....
or do you mean the tittle of the chapter? " and start west"? that doesn't sound like magic.
Cuts ups = *cutting into Control*
I am very surprised that they skipped over the exorcism of the Ugly Spirit.
That’s a discussion for another time, indeed! As this interview was more focused on ‘possession’, we had to make some choices about our topics. I’d love to have Tommy back to talk about it, though!
if you plug keel's MIB trope into the gnostic archon trope you get an interesting contemporary vantage.. on another note, i wonder how many harry potter fans ended up in the middle of naked lunch upon looking up the mugwump😆
" he thought was an ability to sort of disrupt
the future perhaps because you know he believes that he believes that the future is pre-recorded right so the arc the
archons have already written the future well so if you take any language that's written with normal grammar
structures and then you mix it up you're sort of scrambling
uh you're scrambling time itself and therefore by scrambling time
you're you're playing with with what the future can be you're creating a chaotic potential for the future"
sooo what does that mean for the library of babel? is it the cure or the poison?
i searched the catalogue and do not see anything explicitly about mental health ......
23:19
23!
Straws, Tommy...Straws.
I feel like all writing is prophetic in some sense, or at least kind of a sincronicity machine of sorts. That’s been my particular experience…
The "meatsuit" part about 26 minutes in is important context for why he was not only interested in Dianetics, but in Scientology with its goal of being "exterior" from the body
Especially given his background with altered states, that first peak experience during the introductory course would've been very up his alley (actor Jason Beghe goes into very illuminating detail about this effect when talking about his experience with Scientology)
The soft machine is hard to read. I red it years ago now, thankfully I had red some of his other books so that made it easier. I remember reading a part and thinking hold on I red this already but then I went back and realised that some chapters are actually repeated but cut up differently.
These interviews are really interesting and makes me see his work in a totally different way. I need to re read them now .
The simple past tense of the verb “read” is “read” (e.g., “I read a book last week”). While “read” is spelled the same in both its past and present forms, its pronunciation differs depending on the tense: The simple present form is pronounced “reed.” The simple past form is pronounced “red.”
I did feel, when reading Soft Machine that I was reading an incantation, due to the endlessly recursive quality of the text. Also not my favorite Burroughs book
existence is nihilistic, and a person that has stared into the void is a nihilist.
what result each person gets from staring into the void is a different story.
anyone grabbing on to myth & magic is coping from nihilism. "seekers" that weave fictions or accept fictions from others.
IMO
An interesting conversation. Burroughs did magic, him and bryon would do magic tricks at the beat hotel.
Not magic tricks, Magick -closer to Crowley and Gnostic self-awareness, Morrocan Paganism. Mirror gazing meditation at the Beat Hotel. Ego dissolution.
@@maxinemckenzie6076yes . I think that language/ words is magick and Burroughs knew this. Words create reality.
its scary how people can create a solid mental construct to really believe all this craziness, living in a permanent delusion, like an extremist who believes he is going to heaven after suicide... the mind can be a trap
"g a fiction that you're making it real but you have
to have in this case you have to have people reading it so it influences people
and then that changes the future because and it doesn't matter if it
isn't uh real at the at the time of reading it can still be a virtual thing "
yup... lies, when believed, and acted on, can be "real".
this isn't a revelation this is just agents acting.
every fiction is true if we believe , with the same level of evidence, these claims.
Dune, Aliens, Star Wars, Scientology, all the world religions, the Witcher , Frankenstein , Oryx and Crake, His Dark Materials trilogy, the Matrix, The Thing, Killer Clowns from Outerspace.
i jsut dont understand where the line is? the line that rolls these artists into reality?
it might be unique that he got his words into writing.. but unique as a person? nah, i know a handful of people personally that saw this wacky stuff. let alone all the people ranting on the subway....
as fiction.. as pushing the envelope... sure this stuff is great. but as truth... as evidence... nah man.