Book Review: The Occult Timothy Leary

The imaginative fire of correspondences

The Occult Timothy Leary: The Tarot, Magical States, and Post-Terrestrial Evolution, Joseph L. Flatley, Destiny Books, 2026, 242 pages.

I recall my first reading in Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminati Papers, when I turned a page and saw a cartoon panel of some math or physics professor at a chalkboard, a calculator in hand with a profusion of equations behind him on the board, and the caption, “Sir, are you using only half your brain?” and the professor looks at us, with a WTF? look on his face. What follows on this one-pager is a short magazine-like advertisement for egghead rational-mathematical types to get out of their computer programming code-writing, vector and flow charts, and differential equations, and take some time to investigate that mysterious human force of intuition, “synergetic apprehension of whole systems,” esthetics, and ESP. RAW saw these things as what the right hemisphere of the brain does, while, of course, logical thought was left-hemisphere stuff. To only rely on the logics of the left hemisphere was like living with one lung or one eye or one testicle. It was a classic Wilson move to call for more generalistic thinking among intellectuals.¹

This rhetoric, which seems like an ad for the intellectual stoner class, was related to a minor riff running through Wilson’s and Timothy Leary’s work: Scientific Illuminism, which sought to open up channels of intuition and creativity among scientifically trained people: you should do more yoga, smoke cannabis, use cannabis in the practice of West Coast “left handed” tantric sex, and have a psychedelic trip or ten, practice tarot or I Ching, get out of the invisible cage of left-brained thinking and activate the “silent” holistic right hemisphere of the brain, which, after all, is where true creative breakthroughs come from.²

This prologue serves to introduce Joseph L. Flatley’s book on an area of Leary that has not really been covered until now: how, as a political prisoner (he served years for basically possessing a small amount of cannabis), Leary read voluminously in prison, and fleshed-out his magnum opus - the theory of eight metaphorical “circuits” in the human nervous system - and found innumerable correspondences for each circuit, from Eastern religion, physics, sociology, history, chemistry, biological evolution, his own field of psychology, and here, the tarot deck. Among many other areas of knowledge. Flatley has honed in on Leary’s use of the Tarot deck, Aleister Crowley’s version of it, and when we do a general survey of Leary’s psychological thought and his work in the Eight Circuit Model, Crowley’s dizzying complexity in all things occult and magickal (implemented with a scientific frame of mind), and the lore of the Tarot, this is heady stuff indeed. Go slow. To say there’s far more than meets the eye with all this is to woefully understate the case!

Flatley’s book is well-written and researched, with citations, and a good index to aid future researchers in Leary’s Eight Circuit Model. There’s a valuable section of the book in which he discusses how other thinkers have already used the Model, and he interviewed many of them.³ For those who are new to Leary and his impossibly romantic and tragic life, he offers a concise biography of the renegade scientist-visionary, and, though I’ve read all the same sources, Flatley still managed to make it thrilling for me. Flatley read the primary sources but also dug down into the “scholarly journals, academic anthologies, and writings smuggled out of prison and published in limited runs.”⁴ He also addressed an increasingly burning question I’ve encountered lately: Leary was a proto-Transhuman, and what about the Tech Bro billionaire fascists that have glommed on to this? What do we make of it? Flatley covers this as well.⁵

Over the years, in talking about Leary with colleagues and strangers, often the disjunction between “Theory Leary” from Berkeley and then getting fired from Harvard and becoming a telegenic “LSD advocate” is acknowledged, but most seem unclear how this transformation took place. Flatley pinpoints it as starting with the Laredo pot bust, and I agree. Flatley goes into details.

Picture Leary in solitary, reading Gravity’s Rainbow, then looking at Crowley’s tarot deck, making mental lists, waiting to be allowed writing utensils. At some point Leary saw himself as Crowley reincarnated: the arc of their lives seems similar enough, but there’s the problem of Leary being born 27 years before Crowley actually died. It was all metaphor. Leary defined reincarnation as something like all the heavy influences in your life: those people have been re-born in you, and you are carrying out their ideas, incarnate.

Flatley cites Helen Farley on the cultural history of the tarot deck, with the Major Arcana cards reflecting “many of the concerns of the Italian Renaissance.”⁶ Sociologist Mike Sosteric links Italy in the 15th century and the tarot deck, which was used first for gaming and gambling, but which quickly morphed in its use to being invested with divine, occult and psychological significance in order to deal with new ideologies of power and industrializing society, and the structural bureaucratic State.⁷

Did certain people in the 1400s in Italy hold a meeting to decide to use the Tarot for ways to navigate social acceleration and tumult? No, these things tend to go those ways for complex, occult, subconscious, and psycho-social “reasons”. When things “work,” they stick because they serve some purpose and fill some human need for knowledge and meaning. Leary and Wilson argued that non-rational systems like the I Ching and Tarot come out of very deep genetic memories and “programs” in the human race. While they are pre-industrial-age systems, they seem to yield information that is pragmatic for their users.

There’s a fascinating history in esoteric studies of how the Jewish kabbalah became co-opted by European Christians around the same time the Tarot took off.⁸ The deep desire for profound and ultimate knowledge drove the seeking of correspondences from one system of life into another. This method of working analogously (some French theorists use the term paralogically) with the building up of ideas has never left us, and, whether they like us saying so or not, hardcore physical scientists use these same psychological methods today, in order to drive new hypotheses for data that needs to “make sense” or make better sense. The content differs for sure - radically so - but when a breakthrough in understanding is sought, any form of logic that works will do.⁹

Carl Jung thought the Tarot deck revealed insights into the collective unconscious and in his 1951 paper “On Synchronicity” he acknowledged that rational, inductive physical science had eclipsed something he had sensed in his work with the quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli. In trying to account for the occurrence of highly improbable yet meaningful events that actually did occur, Jung notes that “No reciprocal causal connection can be shown to obtain between parallel events, which is just what gives them their chance character. The only recognizable and demonstrable link between them is a common meaning, or equivalence. The old theory of correspondence was based on the experience of such connections - a theory that reached its culminating point and also its provisional end in Leibniz’ idea of pre-established harmony, and was then replaced by causality.”¹⁰

That the Tarot works on well-known symbols and metaphors that correspond in interesting ways and require the wits and ingenuity of the reader of the cards, still seems mysterious. Flatley has broken new ground by showing Tarot adepts how they can further their understandings and readings by linking them to Leary’s incredibly capacious Eight Circuit Model of human consciousness. Should a Tarot Adept decide to take on this body of knowledge in order to align it with their present system(s) of correspondences, they will become even more formidable a reader of the deck. the virtuosi become even better…

As for us neophytes in these things - I count myself here - Wilson’s right hemisphere metaphors for a-rational and irrational systems, which may as well come from deep in the human genome, playing with the Tarot deck (or the I Ching) opens up my intuition, my creativity, my imagination. I see these systems as poetic expressions. And these things are limitless. What more value can we ask from these metaphysical systems of art, thought, and interpretation? For the generalist, nothing human is alien to us and all systems that humans discovered or invented in which they found meaning seems well worth investigation, if only for the revealing metaphorical thinking behind them.

Joseph L. Flatley’s invigorating research and lucid style in The Occult Timothy Leary has much to recommend it, beyond my own elaborations and predilections. Its primary audience would seem to be those who are already well-versed in Tarot, but I think general readers will find much to fire their imaginations. The irony here is that Leary and Wilson probably would want those trained in logic, math, chemistry, biology, genetics, and physics to read it, and even try to use it. About which: shall we hold our breaths?

1. The Illuminati Papers, p.83 in my old And/Or Press ed. Foreshadowed by this “ad” is its counterpart on p.39, “Hey, man, are you using only half your brain?” with a cartoon of a hippie sitting lotus, surrounded by swirls (pot smoke?). Sure, this longhair can throw the I Ching and interpret it like a champ, and he knows how to manipulate the body to feel high and has learned to crack social games, but…what about the mysterious left brain functions known by the High Adepts at places like the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies? Equations! (they predict things before they happen!), syllogisms - you can find out if an argument is consistent with itself!, or…don’t you wonder how your beloved stereo works?, etc. This ad concludes by an exhortation to “subscribe to SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN (not a religious organization).”

2. Recently, Iain McGilchrist has emphasized the dire need for more right hemispheric values and thought if humanity is to survive. See his magisterial The Master and His Emissary (2009). Arguments for Scientific Illuminism were peppered throughout the works of Leary and RAW, but it probably begins in 1962 (three years after CP Snow’s The Two Cultures appeared). See RAW’s Lion of Light, pp.169-171; Cosmic Trigger vol 1 (RAW, pp. 208-209; Leary’s Politics Of Ecstasy, pp.252-258 (largely an homage to Aldous Huxley’s psychedelic generalism); Leary’s Info-Psychology, p.127 (“The great penetrations in our understanding of natural events come when the scientist succeeds in experientially empathizing with natural processes. We think of Kekule’s serpent dream which set the stage for organic chemistry. And the use of the billiard-ball model by physicists to experience atomic events.”); Timothy Leary: The Harvard Years (James Penner), pp.225-226 and subjective psychedelic accounts of objective hard sciences; John Lilly’s Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, inter alia; William S. Burroughs’s The Job, pp.125-224, which is a sustained (quasi-serious?) argument for an alternative academy because “research that could be used to free the human spirit is being monopolized by paltry intellects in the name of ‘national security.’” In general, include here any thinker’s call for much more open “system” views and permeable membranes between disciplines, less rigidity, etc. Jeffrey Kripal’s The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge (2019) is a terrific source along these lines. Since RAW and Leary, many scientists have opened up about how psychedelics or cannabis have altered their intellectual orientation. (see: Francis Crick, Carlo Rovelli, Christof Koch, Susan Blackmore, Carl Sagan, Candace Pert, and many others.) As a final plea along these same lines, I urge all readers to understand the role of metaphors in our lives. You will not be drillin’ in a dry hole.

3. The Occult Timothy Leary, Flatley, pp. 204-209.

4. ibid, p.61.

5. ibid, pp. 104-106. About Leary: “He wasn’t a cheerleader for the currently evolving dystopian order that many in Silicon Valley seem to be. He was never that cruel.”

6. ibid, p.117

7. “A Sociology of Tarot“, Mike Sosteric, Canadian Journal of Sociology, vol 39 no.3, 2014, pp. 357-392. J-STOR link HERE

8. With regard to Christians using kabbalah during the Renaissance, “In the attempt to apply midrashic tehniques such as gematria, temurah, and notarikon, which had formerly been restricted to Jewish circles, within a broader symbolic framework based upon new concepts such as the ten sefirot and many divine names, unheard-of new possibilities seemed to open up for scriptural exegesis and metaphysical speculation. Not only did the biblical text reveal hidden levels of meaning never suspected before, but the correspondences that could be established with pagan mythology and philosophy seemed simply stupefying.” - Esotericism and the Academy, Wouter J. Hanegraaff, p.63

9. There’s a fascinating bit to be made about scientists using mental imagery without words in order to grasp the phenomena they’re dealing with on another level. This method of thinking with images has been solidly ensconced in magickal traditions since at least Giordano Bruno’s time. Crowley certainly has very much ado with the use of images, and Einstein said his breakthrough into Relativity happened when he daydreamed about riding on a beam of light and seeing what the world looked like from that POV. A very large aspect of Robert Anton Wilson’s epistemology was drawn from Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics, which advocates a conscious method of abstract thinking that eventually leaves the thinker without words, and only images. For McLuhan, the advent of typography and literacy created a “psychic transformation of the inner life into segmented visual terms…” - Understanding Media, “Radio”, p.262.

10. The Portable Jung, p.518. Jung goes on to argue that his synchronicity must be explained by some as-yet unknown force or dynamic in physical science. Robert Anton Wilson has speculated that the Irish physicist John S. Bell’s 1964 inequality theorem, which fed the research that led to the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022 for Clauser, Zeilinger and Aspect, was (maybe) this science. There are some who look at the uncanny, a-causal weirdness of quantum entanglement and link this back to something like Leibniz’s pre-established harmony, but I for one will not speculate further, being quite out of my depths there. I realize I’ve emphasized 15th century Italy and analogous thinking in correspondences, but the influence of the cult of Pythagoras might be the bedrock for all this: probably since humans invented numbers, counting, and a system of mathematics, we have always invested numbers with larger meanings outside themselves. “Odd numbers were universally considered more godlike, more perfect, and (in magic) more powerful than the even. This was apparently one of the more widely known Pythagorean principles,” writes Vincent Foster Hopper in Medieval Number Symbolism, p. 101, and he links this to a quote from Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor: “Good luck lies in odd numbers…they say there is divinity in odd numbers, either in nativity, chance, or death.” Act V scene 1.)