(2003-06-16) Cabal Occult Nyc

Alan Cabal gives a short profile of the NYC Occult/Magick crowd from the 70s to the 90s. Herman Slater had vigorously encouraged and supported the creation of the Schlangekraft Necronomicon, edited by "Simon." No doubt he'd grown weary of explaining to customers that H P Lovecraft's fabled forbidden tome was a fiction, a plot device for great horror stories and nothing more. He was savvy enough to sell leftover chicken bones as human finger bones to wannabe necromancers, so he surely knew that the market for a "genuine" Necronomicon could be huge-with the right packaging. In 1977, the book made its debut in the window of Herman's little shop of horrors in Chelsea. It generated a scene of its own, a scene bursting with mad, unfocused creativity and slapstick mayhem. Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea had just published their Illuminatus Trilogy, and interest in secret societies and occult lore was sweeping through counterculture circuits. Grady Mc Murtry was attempting to jumpstart the long-dormant OTO in California and had just succeeded in having Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot deck published.