Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius
and expanded UK edition here.
“A really well-researched, well-written book about a moment of destiny from which I for one was glad to escape alive” – Marianne Faithful
“Rips flower-power out by the roots to reveal the demented, psychedelic nightmare seeting below the surface… A fascinating, unputdownable masterpiece of obsesso cultural journalism. Gary Lachman deserves the satanic Pulitzer.” – Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight.
“Depicts the late-Sixties subcultural craze for the occult with graphic precision and without the whiff of Creative Writing Workshops.” – Jonathan Medes in The New Statesman.
“An impressively researched guide to the odder aspects of a weird decade. Lachman reveals the Sixties as a period when the credulous were willingly led by the duplicitous. Spiritual tourists resurrected forgotten gurus like Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Blavatsky and the creepy Crowley. Lachman notes that the fraudulent Carlos Castaneda was published by the University of California. Such was the strange power of the repellent Charles Manson that Rolling Stone almost ran a cover declaring “Manson is innocent”, until the paper interviewed him. The result was more accurately headlined: “Is this the most dangerous man alive?” There is much in Lachman’s book to entertain and inform those who wished they had lived through the Sixties and those who did but can’t remember. If you want to know about, say, beatnik king Brion Gysin, ley-line apostle John Michell, and zen master Alan Watts, this is the place to start.” – Chris Hirst in The Independent’s paperback of the week
“This revisionist anthology of the dark magic of the Sixties is a night-blooming bouquet of the subversive ideas and practices beneath the superficial innocence of an ambiguous decade.”
Gary Lachman 