Paul Wyld, Jim Morrison, Secret Teacher of the Occult: A Journey to the Other Side. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2024

by Paul Weston

Let’s start with the positive – the reason I’ve given this book a four-star review on Amazon.

I’m going to say clearly that all The Doors fans should read this book and there’s a lot of value in it. The author, who is clearly a fine fellow, went through quite a journey to complete it, with a few impressive synchronicities that include a meeting outside the old Morrison family home, along the way. 

The way he presents the foundational episode of young Jim and the “Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding” and the possibility of some kind of spiritual possession at that point is very well done, with some fascinating context concerning the time and locale. He gives us some great glimpses into Jim just before The Doors. There’s a powerful story of a strange event in a church for example.

It’s great to see details of a foundational text for Jim, the surrealist painter Kurt Seligmann’s superbly illustrated The History of Magic. Morrison never returned this to the library. There’s no doubt that Wyld establishes it as a context for his inspirations that expands beyond straightforward literature. He was living in a place called Alexandria and the dreamlike nature of procuring such material from a Library of Alexandria would help it to land all the more strongly with him.

The main body of the text rests firmly on the foundation of Gary Lachman’s book Secret Teachers of the Western World. There are considerable references to the work of Stanislav Grof, Jean Shinoda Bolen and Jean Gebser. All of this is pertinent to enhancing our understanding of Morrison, although I feel that the term Secret Teacher was used far too many times. I know it’s the book title and needs some emphasis but Kindle search gives 152 matches. I’d also say there were just a few too many quotes from Lachman and Grof. It also establishes the meta-perspective of the book as primarily retrospective. We are being set up to understand Jim on the basis of material that was not really part of his formative influences and it is those influences, the books he actually read, the ideas of the thinkers he was exposed to, that, to me, should constitute the best source of insights into our secret teacher.

A good example of this point concerns Aldous Huxley. He gets a few mentions. The book that gave the band their name likewise but its contents are not discussed, whereas Stanislav Grof is consulted concerning the nature of the psychedelic experience. Grof is indeed a definite authority on the subject but we miss something here. Huxley is a very distinct voice in his account of his mescaline trips. When he wrote the book, he was less than a decade away from the earlier publication of his anthology of the world’s mystical literature, The Perennial Philosophy. Its sensibilities infuse his mescaline experiences and are an important aspect of the appeal the book had, what Jim would have taken from it. 

Jean Shinoda Bolen is a Jungian. I’m a big fan of her work but we are getting Jung at one step removed. This titanic thinker who exerted such an enormous inspirational influence during the sixties upheaval gets a few namechecks. 1965 “Intense conversations and debates over Jung, alchemy, and Nietzsche” is as far as it gets with Jim directly. Wyld looks at some poetry from American Prayer and analyses it from the framework of the work of Jean Gebser.

Let’s reinvent the gods

All the myths of the ages

Celebrate symbols from deep elder forests.

This is so flipping Jungian ffs. I want to know if Jim read the very popular Man and his Symbols? It would have been right up his street. It was first published in 1964! There was a bit of a buzz around it as it was the last work written by Jung and was deliberately pitched at a wider audience. Seligmann has plenty on alchemy. Wyld has a lot to say about it. That Jung fellow was known to have had rather a lot to say about it as well and it seems likely that Jim might have been aware of that.

Wyld does give us one important direct influence. Jim read Colin Wilson’s Outsider and it’s good to firmly establish Morrison as self-consciously in that category. There’s quite a bit from Wilson’s The Occult as well and use is made of Lachman’s biography of him. It’s with Wilson that we can detect signs of this work faltering. Beyond an error that no Wilsonian would make (stating that The New Existentialism dates from 1983), I just don’t think Wyld really has a strong enough sense of what kind of person Wilson was. He says that “In some ways, Wilson is the British counterpart to Jim Morrison. Had the rock music explosion of the 1960s occurred in 1950s England, Wilson might’ve seized upon the opportunity to become a rocker himself.” I’m just going to write “No” once here. I could maybe add half a dozen more.

Wilson was controversial, dynamic, full of a burning critique of consensus culture, but he was never a wildman rabble rouser. A visiting lecturer at various universities, yes. He was very fond of wine but never a drunk. He wrote a lot about sex but was a monogamous family man. A huge lover of classical music, he said he “missed the sixties” whilst pursuing the development of his new existentialism. His one mescaline experience did not particularly impress him.

The Outsider also leads us into what I consider to be a major stylistic failing of the book. Wilson wrote a lot there about TE Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia. As Jim read The Outsider, we can accept he was familiar with Lawrence. Wyld has plenty to say about the famous 1962 movie, but he begins by stating that there is a strong inference that Jim saw it, someone he knew at the time was certain that he had. There’s no quoting from Morrison himself to make that clear, and that it was inspirational to him. We have memoirs from Ray, Robbie, and John. Do they all say that Jim was really big on Lawrence? Wyld nonetheless has quite a few pages worth of riffing on the topic of the movie, how it might have inspired Jim, details in it that he considers to resonate with Jim and The Doors story and so on. It’s kind of interesting but… it just doesn’t land right me with me, all the more because those pages might have been better used by featuring a few topics that are omitted and seem rather pertinent. Some may be conscious choices by the author and if that is the case, I feel he has made a mistake.

There’s no mention of the movie. Whatever can be said against it, a lot of people encountered Jim for the first time thanks to Oliver Stone. Dionysus and shamanism get notable mentions. The “Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding” serve to introduce a Native American continuity throughout. Most notable of all for our appreciation of a secret teacher of the occult, it depicts Jim’s witchcraft wedding. However much we may feel that Patricia Kennealy might have overplayed the extent of her connection with Jim, this little episode is surely worth a paragraph at least in this book considering how Wyld has shown us the importance of Seligmann’s book to Jim, a work with a whole section on witchcraft featuring excellent illustrations.

The most inexplicable omission is JG Frazer’s Golden Bough. When I was 19, I bought a hefty abridgement of it and read the whole thing because two chapter headings were featured as Doors lyrics; Not to touch the Earth, Not to see the Sun. Considered academically untenable now, the work was still a huge influence on much of the literary culture Morrison absorbed.

The fundamental fact of life to early cultures was the seasons. Good hunting and a good harvest were essential. Without them catastrophe was never far away. The most basic issue any early religious beliefs had to face was how to understand the forces involved and somehow placate them.

According to Frazer, the sun which ensures a good harvest and fertilises the earth became focused in the figure of the king. A kind of vegetation deity lived within him. He and the land were one. If he were healthy and virile the land would thrive. When he waned, the land would suffer, so the simple answer was to ritually kill him when he started to droop a bit and get some young stud instated in his place. The land is the goddess, his consort. The seasonal festivals are the story of the birth of the sun god and his battle with the old sun, his marriage to the land, and his inevitable demise, only to be reborn. The religions of ancient Babylon, Egypt, Greece and Rome, the mystery cults, all tell this story to some degree with dying and reborn gods. Christianity’s early success was helped by its incorporation of some of these themes.  Frazer features material on Dionysus that places him in that context. In terms of Morrison’s understanding of the god, this would have been crucial stuff.  Wyld has a lot from Jean Shinoda Bolen on Dionysus and she is great but Frazer is closer to Jim himself on this. The Golden Bough is included in the bibliography of Seligmann’s History of Magic.

It also resonates through The Doors’ cultural legacy that is expressed with exceptional power in the movie Apocalypse Now, which is also not mentioned by Wyld. In that truly epic movie, the music of The Doors is forever established as the perfect soundtrack for an archaic ritual. We get a glimpse of some of the book collection of Brando’s Kurtz. It includes Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, a book directly inspired by The Golden Bough. Kurtz knows he is a king in decline and his kingdom is failing and he consciously awaits the Martin Sheen character who must kill him. It’s Frazerian to the max.

I would further add that the murder of President Kennedy has been seen as a killing of the divine king scenario. It wouldn’t be until after Jim’s death that the remarkable King Kill 33 appeared but there is a telling Doors lyric: “when the true king’s murderers are allowed to run free, a thousand magicians arise in the land”. This is a very interesting take on the sixties from within. It further surprises me that major Gary Lachman fan Wyld doesn’t even mention Turn off your Mind: the Dark Side of the Mystic Sixties in his bibliography. We see that Wyld can do a good job on historical context-setting when he deals with the native workers car crash. When it comes to the epochal sixties there is very little time given over to the tumult, a modest mention of the political murders, Vietnam. We don’t get a single line of Five to One or The Unknown Soldier quoted. And what about the thousand magicians? There’s a superb chapter waiting to be written there but Wyld is more concerned with tenuous Lawrence of Arabia associations.

I would also suggest there is a definite lacunae in Morrison studies concerning Charles Manson and the Family. There is not the slightest possibility that Jim didn’t know about those lost angels in the city of night. Robbie Krieger told how Jim “picked Charles Manson up hitchhiking one day. Yeah. Him and the Beach Boys drummer Dennis. The two of them were driving down Sunset Boulevard. They picked up Charlie with his guitar and he was going up to see Terry Melcher to play his demo for Terry Melcher, who he later was trying to kill because he didn’t like it.” Jim certainly knew Dennis so couldn’t possibly have not heard plenty about ‘the wizard’ and his girls, a topic that would surely have got his attention. There’s all sort of gossip. A Morrison girlfriend who joined the Family. Nikolas Shreck presents wild tales of Jim visiting Spahn Ranch, even having a profound one-to-one with Charlie. I’m not saying I entirely believe this but it’s worth a mention isn’t it? There’s a definite waft of Dionysus and the maenads there for sure. Victim Jay Sebring gave Jim his Greek god haircut. Lachman begins Turn Off Your Mind with the Manson murders.

It’s all part of the cultural climate that made Jim the man he was and may have contributed to his unravelling. “There’s danger on the edge of town” right? Wyld has a whole chapter with that title but it’s given over to accounts of persecution of the secret teachers through the ages leading to Jim and Miami. I think he wasted that quote. 

Wyld appears to struggle with the wilder darker side of Jim, his revelling in the American Night. There’s a quote from Colin Wilson’s The Occult on Dionysus, stating that he “is fundamentally the god, or patron saint, of magic. The spirit of Dionysus pervades all magic, especially the black magic of the later witch cults, with their orgiastic witch’s sabbaths so like the orgies of Dionysus’s female worshippers, even to the use of goats, the animal sacred to Dionysus.”

Wyld follows that by saying that “Jim’s preferred activities related to shadow work and the processing of spiritual awakenings. Shadow work involves exploring the unconscious mind to uncover those parts of us that we repress and hide even from ourselves.” We have Jung to thank for the use of such terminology but it’s been cut adrift here imo, rendered almost New Age. It just doesn’t do justice to Jim’s expression of the dark side of the sixties zeitgeist through an archaic archetype.

I’ll return to Colin Wilson’s The Outsider to further explore this. He features an episode from the young Nietzsche which I find central to his eventual affirmation of Dionysus. I would say that it warrants inclusion in Wyld’s book.

In a letter to a friend written in 1865, when he was 21 years old, the age Jim was in 1964, Nietzsche told how “Yesterday an oppressive storm hung over the sky, and I hurried to a neighbouring hill called Leutch — At the top I found a hut, where a man was killing two kids while his son watched him. The storm broke with a tremendous crash, discharging thunder and hail, and I had an indescribable sense of well-being and zest — Lightning and tempest are different worlds, free powers without morality. Pure Will, without the confusions of intellect – how happy, how free.” I can hear Jim screaming here, throughout the Doors corpus, particularly the exultant “we want the world and we want it NOW!”

Dave McGowan's Weird Scenes inside the Canyon is a book that has had immense influence on how younger people view the sixties. His presentation of Jim in the midst of a supposed massive CIA presence in the American rock-pop scene is full of arresting details concerning just how many of the stars were from military families and we are talking intelligence links here. The Laurel Canyon scene is littered with suspicious murders and madness. The whole book starts with Jim and his father. McGowan hints that The Doors are a psy-op and that maybe Jim didn’t write his songs. I personally don’t think any new book on The Doors can ignore McGowan. It’s surely worth a page or two.

Wyld discusses Giordano Bruno. The complexities of Renaissance intrigues, politics, heresy, persecution, and luminous geniuses, the manner in which the teachers, the traditions, made their way through such minefields, can be profitably placed against the sixties and the kind of machinations McGowan insinuates. There are surely tremendous possibilities for deepening the Morrison narrative here in a manner that expands our sense of secret teacher.

We hear of Jim’s abiding love of Hieronymus Bosch. He wrote a paper at Florida State University in which he presented the artist as a possible member of an heretical group called the Adamites. In the very last months of his life, he visited Madrid with Pamela and saw the famous Garden of Earthly Delights. Wyld links the craziness that erupted in Miami after Jim witnessed the nakedness of the performances of the Living Theatre group with the Adamites. 

Instead of riffing on Lawrence of Arabia, Wyld might have been better served by pursuing this thread. Jim probably got his Bosch ideas from the then-trendy theorist Wilhelm Fraenger. He discussed the medieval heretical movement, the Brethren of the Free Spirit and postulated a further Adamite enclave amongst them with Bosch a member. One of the most remarkable of all works of rock literature is Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus. He started with the Sex Pistols, intuited something strange that was far older at work within them and took it back through the Dadaists and into the Middle Ages and the Brethren of the Free Spirit. It’s really frustrating to see Wyld poised on the edge of tremendous possibilities and failing to proceed. He has Miami, the work of Artaud, and the Adamites lined up. There is so much more he could have done here to tease out Jim’s continuity with an underground tradition.

This amount of what I consider to be constructive criticism came to me within 24hrs of reading the book. If I chose to linger, I have a feeling that more would occur to me. I will conclude with one last highlighting of what I consider to be strange stylistic choices. If I were writing a book on Jim Morrison, I wouldn’t start it (in the Preface) with a quote from Oasis! Maybe “take the highway to the end of the night — take a journey to the bright midnight” might have been more appropriate. Wyld doesn’t use it anywhere else. He could have perhaps let that term “bright midnight” open up some interesting associations. Read the book though. Wyld feels the presence of Jim has guided him and I believe him.