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Colin Wilson has also written THE OUTSIDER RELIGION AND THE REBEL THE AGE OF DEFEAT THE STRENGTH TO DREAM ORIGINS OF THE SEXUAL IMPULSE BEYOND THE OUTSIDER INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EXISTENTIALISM RASPUTIN AND THE FALL OF THE ROMANOVS AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MURDER (WITH PAT PITMAN) EAGLE AND EARWIG (ESSAYS ON BOOKS AND AUTHORS) CHORDS AND DISCORDS (ESSAYS ON MUSIC) SEX AND THE INTELLIGENT TEENAGER VOYAGE TO A BEGINNING (AUTOBIOGRAPHY) THE OCCULT and these novels RITUAL IN THE DARK ADRIFT IN SOHO THE WORLD OF VIOLENCE NECESSARY DOUBT THE GLASS CAGE THE SEX DIARY OF GERARD SORME THE BLACK ROOM THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE The Mind Parasites © 1967 by Colin Wilson. New afterword by Colin Wilson © 2005, new preface by Gary Lachman © 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher except in critical articles and reviews. Contact the publisher for information: Monkfish Book Publishing Company 22 Market Street. Rhinebeck, N.Y. 12572 Printed in the United States of America Book and cover design by Georgia Dent Art from Getty Images Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wilson, Colin, 1931- The mind parasites : the supernatural, metaphysical cult thriller / Colin Wilson. p. cm. eISBN 9781939681089 1. Thought and thinking--Fiction. 2. Mind and body--Fiction. 3. Supernatural--Fiction. 4. Parasites--Fiction. I. Title. PR6073.I44M56 2005 823’.914--dc22 2005024097 Bulk purchase discounts for educational or promotional purposes are available. Monkfish Book Publishing Company 22 Market Street Rhinebeck, New York 12572 Table of Contents Colin Wilson has also written Title Page Copyright Page Dedication RETURN OF THE MIND PARASITES ORIGINAL PREFACE BY COLIN WILSON PREFATORY NOTE (THIS SECTION IS TRANSCRIBED FROM A TAPE RECORDING MADE BY DR. AUSTIN A FEW MONTHS BEFORE HIS DISAPPEARANCE. IT HAS BEEN EDITED BY H. F. SPENCER. ) AFTERWORD FOR THE MIND PARASITES ABOUT THE AUTHOR FOR AUGUST DERLETH WHO SUGGESTED IT I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet—a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and the fearful passionless force of non-human things .. . BERTRAND RUSSELL Letter to Constance Malleson, 1918, quoted in My Philosophical Development p. 261 RETURN OF THE MIND PARASITES I FIRST CAME ACROSS The Mind Parasites some time in late 1977, when I was a young New Waver, living in Los Angeles, making a living leading my own ‘power pop’ group, The Know. For the last few years I had been reading a great deal of, well, shall we say, unusual literature: Aleister Crowley, H.P. Lovecraft, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky: practically anything I could find on magic, the occult, mysticism and higher states of consciousness. Part of the inspiration for my fascination (or, as my girlfriend at the time considered it, obsession) with the peculiar canon of books the study of which has since become a lifelong occupation, came from one of the members of the band I had just left. Before breaking out on my own, I had been the bassist with the New York group Blondie. But after writing a couple of hit songs for them, and conquering New York, San Francisco, London and other cities, I decided it was time to start my own group. Aside from a few gold records, one of the things I walked away from Blondie with was an interest in the occult. The guitarist—the lead singer’s boyfriend—was deep into horror films, voodoo, black magic, Satanism, and other kitschy aspects of magic and the supernatural. Although I regarded all that (except for the horror films) with several grains of salt, and had never been interested in the occult before, I did find some of the books in his library interesting. One in particular caught my eye; its torn cover and soiled pages suggested it had already been through the counter-cultural wringer a couple of times, and when I slipped it off the shelf one afternoon, I expected nothing more than a good read. Little did I suspect that it would change my life. The book was Colin Wilson’s The Occult, and after a week transfixed behind its pages in my dilapidated room on the Bowery, I emerged a different person. By the time I moved to Los Angeles a year or so later, I was a dedicated Wilson reader, and since those early days I’ve had the great pleasure of visiting him in his home in Cornwall several times, and of writing about his work (see, for example, my book A Secret History of Consciousness (2003)). Back then I scoured second-hand bookshops for his work, paying high prices for out-of-print copies, and devoured the UK paperback imports that Papa Bach, a legendary but now long-defunct bookshop in Santa Monica, used to stock. Los Angeles in those days was a book fiend’s delight, and if you were, like myself, ravenous for works on magic, the occult, the paranormal, higher consciousness and esotericism, then you could hardly have asked for a better place to live. Although by the late ‘70s the ethos of the love generation had been replaced by the aggressive nihilism of punk, the remnants of an earlier, more magical and mystical time remained. Great bookshops like Gilberts on Hollywood Boulevard and the Bodhi Tree (where, oddly enough, I later worked) specialized in books on Eastern and Western mysticism, the occult and the offbeat in general. But even the mainstream shops had healthy sections on the occult, and often the remainder tables were filled with cheap reprints of occult classics, books by people like A.E. Waite, Sax Rohmer, Algernon Blackwood. What we call the New Age hadn’t yet started—I mark the beginning of that with the publication of Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy in 1980—and the atmosphere was more one of exploration and intellectual adventure—as well as sheer fun—and not so
