Originally self-published in the mid-Eighties as THE LONG WATCH, this is a revised, updated, and expanded edition of a book that's become a hugely sought-after rarity among students of entheogenic spirituality.
From 1972 to 1978, Jack Call was the effective second-in-command at The Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church. Founded in 1965 by ex-school psychologist Art Kleps, the Church maintained that the psychedelic substances -- LSD, psilocybin, peyote, cannabis, and others -- were "sacraments" that allowed partakers to experience the Divine, and deserved to be legalized under First Amendment protections for freedom of religion. During the mid- and late-Sixties, Kleps worked alongside far better-known hallucinogenic gurus Timothy Leary and Richard (Ram Dass) Alpert at the infamous Millbrook estate/commune near Poughkeepsie, New York, and eventually wrote MILLBROOK, his own memoir of the time and place when it seemed that the entheogens would usher in a new era of peace and enlightenment.
LIFE IN A PSYCHEDELIC CHURCH begins several years later, in 1972. By that time "consciousness expansion" had fallen out of fashion, and Kleps' once-considerable following of spiritual trippers had dwindled to a few dozen hardcore adherents. Intrigued by Kleps' philosophy of "solipsistic nihilism" that he expressed in the book THE BOO HOO BIBLE (1971), Southern Californian college graduates Jack and Mary Call joined his Church, and moved to Vermont to work directly with the self-styled "Chief Boo Hoo".
Much of the book is dedicated to accounts of life with Kleps -- a brilliant, erratic, colorful, and wholly unorthodox spiritual leader who could issue both gems of insight about existence and reality, and cruel personal insults, in the same sentence. No punches are pulled about his irascible nature, or his many post-Millbrook problems -- self-imposed poverty, broken marriages, arrests, and stints in rehab for alcoholism and tranquilizer addiction all vexed the Chief Boo Hoo during this era. Yet he and the Calls still doggedly persisted in spreading the Church's lysergic doctrine to a world that was increasingly disinterested in non-recreational psychedelics use, and slowly gearing up for the disastrous and wholly-ineffective "War on Drugs".
Eventually Kleps, the Calls, and their Church associates attempted to set up a psychedelic commune called Mandalit in Northern California's "Emerald Triangle". They financed the operation with money won during an LSD-drenched gambling session at a racing track, as well as the sale of high-octane sinsemilla cannabis they grew on the land. The crew's misadventures during this era are the most entertaining part of the book, as well as a valuable account of Humboldt County's cannabis-growing underground in its earliest days.
This 2020 edition of the book includes an extensive epilogue, where Call discusses the post-1978 doings of himself and the Church, as well as his own philosophical and theological evolution. Call became a professor of philosophy after his Church days, and examines how he came to reject Kleps' solipsistic-nihilist philosophy, and first embrace a cautious agnosticism, and then a form of psychedelics-friendly Christianity. This section of the book should be of particular interest to both psychedelic-spirituality advocates and Christians in search of parallels and common ground between the two paths.
With cannabis now fully-legalized in many states, and careful psilocybin use increasingly being advocated for psychological healing and spiritual growth, LIFE IN A PSYCHEDELIC CHURCH is a timely look at the fascinating but little-examined world of hallucinogenic religious groups, and how they tended the fire of entheogenic enlightenment between the Sixties and our own era. The book is a must-own for anyone interested in the psychedelic substances, alternative religion or spirituality, or unusual memoirs of counterculture or small-sect life.
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