Aleister Crowley on Peyote

Join us for an immersive exploration of the hidden history of the 20th century’s most infamous occultist, Aleister Crowley.
About this Event

Friday, November 20th – 6:30 PM – SMALL THEATER

ALEISTER CROWLEY ON PEYOTE – Illustrated Lecture by artist & scholar Michael Pearce

Join us for an immersive exploration of the hidden history of the 20th century’s most infamous occultist, Aleister Crowley. Art historian Dr. Michael J. Pearce peels back the curtain on Crowley’s dual life as a scandalous bohemian and a pioneering psychological experimenter who utilized altered states of consciousness to unlock the human mind.

We will follow Crowley’s journey through the avant-garde bistros of Paris and the secret rituals of London. Discover how he used early pharmaceutical extractions of hashish and peyote to achieve astral projection and mystical samadhi, decades before the 1960s counterculture movement.

The presentation will highlight:

• The "Oliver Haddo" Persona: How a Gothic horror parody by W. Somerset Maugham was hijacked by Crowley as his own literary pen name.
• Psychedelic Ritualism: A look inside the Rite of Luna, where Crowley dosed audiences with a potent, visionary libation.
• The Artist and the Occult: His late-career pivot into painting and his volatile relationships with contemporary writers, models, and visionaries.
• The Thoth Tarot Legacy: The stormy, five-year collaboration with artist Frieda Harris that produced a masterpiece of esoteric art, hidden for decades before capturing a new generation.

Whether you are interested in art history, the evolution of tarot, or the origins of Western psychedelic culture, this lecture promises a mesmerizing look at a man who lived with an inescapable drive to put his soul on canvas.

Bio:

Michael J. Pearce, Ph.D., MFA, is a British-born figurative painter, art critic, and renegade scholar whose electrifying work has blown open the gates surrounding psychedelic, visionary, and transgressive art. Dr. Pearce isn't interested in safe, predictable institutional art trends; instead, he champions the raw, honest, and explosive visual movements exploding from the counterculture to smash cold, academic modernism. A true champion of the underground, Pearce serves on the board of the vanguard Psychedelic Arts and Culture Trust (PACT). He is presently writing a definitive history of psychedelic art, mapping a law-defying lineage of artists who utilized altered states to bare the deep, unadulterated mechanics of the human consciousness.

His research isn’t confined to archives. Pearce lives on the front lines of art preservation. He played a real-world, detective’s role in tracking down and recovering artist Dion Wright's long-lost 12-foot-tall epic masterpiece, the Taxonomic Mandala from a barn in Washington State - a legendary painting that once stood at the center of the vortex of California's 1960s psychedelic counterculture. Whether he is deconstructing the political machinery of the art establishment in his brilliant columns for MutualArt or exploring neuroaesthetics and the psychedelic sublime in his foundational book Art in the Age of Emergence (2015), Pearce is on an uncompromising mission. He is dragooning visionary art out of the fringes and cementing it where it belongs: at the absolute center of serious global art discourse.

Tickets: $15 advance / $20 at the door.

Doors open at 6:00 PM, event at 6:30 PM at The 418 Project, 155 South River Street, downtown Santa Cruz at the Dragons Gate.

Safety protocols will be in compliance with local guidelines at the time of showing.