For our premier episode, we welcome the visionary artists Alex and Allyson Grey [7:29]. We discuss Alex and Allyson’s early performance art, the ecstatic experiences behind their paintings, the history of their Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, and the culture-shift around psychedelics in the last twenty years.
For our premier episode, we welcome the visionary artists Alex and Allyson Grey. We discuss Alex and Allyson’s early performance art, the ecstatic experiences behind their paintings, the history of their Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, and the culture-shift around psychedelics in the last twenty years.
* Alex Grey's personal website
* Allyson Grey's personal website
* The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors website
* Music by Secret Chiefs 3
* Artwork by Kristie Welsh
Pop Apocalypse EP 1 mixdown 2
[EERIE MUSIC]
MATTHEW J. DILLON: Greetings, listeners, and welcome to the Pop Apocalypse, a podcast from the Center for the Study of World Religions here at Harvard Divinity School. In the year 2021, Professor Charles Stang launched the Transcendence and Transformation Initiative, which we refer to as T&T. This initiative studies mystical experiences, practices, and philosophies from prehistory all the way to the present and all around the globe.
As an initiative at the CSWR, this will naturally include study of mysticism found in traditional religions. But it's also about understanding how such ecstasies are practiced and philosophized today. And today, traditional religions are just a fraction of that mystical terrain. So this podcast is devoted to the ecstatic and the eerie, the mystical and the monstrous, the weird and the wonderful, as they appear in popular culture.
I'm your host, Matthew J. Dillon, and I'm a postdoctoral fellow here at the CSWR. More importantly, I will be your mystagogue on this audio journey for however many episodes they'll let me get away with. Now, before launching into the interview, a word about the title is in order, specifically the use of the ancient term "apocalypse."
I follow the great scholar of apocalyptic literature, John J. Collins, and identify two primary apocalyptic modes. Apocalypses can be vertical. An author might be transported into the heavens to receive cosmic knowledge, see God, or become transformed. Ultimately, a heavenly messenger descends to grant select humans a message that brings salvation or knowledge.
On the other hand, or the second mode, apocalypses are horizontal, or perhaps the better word is temporal. These are stories of the end times. In this form, the world is the ground for a cataclysmic battle. At the end of the world, we as readers witness reality as it truly is. The world we taste, touch, and live in is just a temporary drama that conceals this ultimate divine reality.
This podcast recognizes that the visions, ascents, and revelations that we see everywhere in ancient apocalypses are still happening to people today. The artists, writers, musicians, and scholars we invite on the show have been transformed by a vision, or perhaps they found themselves zapped by esoteric knowledge.
However it comes about, they encode this knowledge into their paintings, into their comics, music, films, and books. And like apocalypses of old, the myth and art of revelation are not just stories, whatever that means. They are media that open portals in reality. The stories can and often do activate those same revelations in the sensitive reader. So be careful. This podcast is radioactive.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I can think of no two people who embody the mission of Pop Apocalypse better than our first guests, Alex and Allyson Grey. Alex and Allyson are two of the most influential visionary artists of ours, or really, any time. Since the two met in 1975, they have been pioneers in psychedelic culture and visionary art, blazing the trail that so many young artists find themselves on today. Alex Grey's art represents realms of visionary consciousness, interweaving the anatomy of body and soul.
In Grey's paintings, the light of spirit illuminates the core of each being, depicting psychedelic mystical experiences with artwork that has touched and inspired millions. He is the author of five books that feature his artworks and his writings-- Mission of Art, Sacred Mirrors, Art Psalms, Transfigurations, and Net of Being. You should own them all. He is perhaps most widely known for working with the prog metal band Tool. His artwork is featured on the band's last three records. His work appears in their music videos. And massive reproductions of his paintings often hang above the stage in their concerts
Allyson Grey is a painter and social sculptor. Allyson's paintings address in a centralized worldview the artist's interpretation of the realms of chaos, order, and secret writing. Chaos symbolizes the material world, a field of colored light made of particles and waves, cells and systems. Order represents the interconnected realms of pure spirit, mandala of energy and light. Sacred writing scribes the untranslatable realm of creative expression. Educated at Tufts University, Allyson has long been an arts educator, editor, events creator, and muse. And even beyond her incredible art career, Allyson has been an organizational genius behind the institutions that have made visionary art such a force in today's culture.
Together, Alex and Allyson founded the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, or CoSM, as you'll hear us refer to it throughout the interview, a spiritual and creative retreat center that has made its home about an hour north of New York City pending traffic. They are currently remodeling Entheon, a temple dedicated to visionary art.
To get personal for a moment-- and I promise not to do that frequently on this show-- after my own mystical awakening, when I was 18, it was Alex Grey's Sacred Mirrors, Tool's Lateralus, and Alex's artwork for that record that made me realize I was not alone. Others in our time and beyond had seen the world transformed in this kind of spiritual X-ray.
So that's why I geek out at the very beginning of the interview. I wanted to have these two on as the first guests not just because of their influence on me, as the host, but because there are literally millions of people like me who have had their lives transfigured by Alex and Allyson's art. Their work embodies how the mystical begins to circulate through our culture. One person's revelation encoded in art provokes another revelation and another. The chain of transmission spirals out, keeps going, and soon, we find ourselves in a popular culture overflowing with mystical ideas, visions, art, and stories. In other words, we find ourselves in a pop apocalypse.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
It is my profound honor to welcome Alex and Allyson Grey onto the pod. Now I know I'm not the first, and I will be far from the last to say my life would have been entirely different without coming into contact with your work, but it bears mention here because I can say I would never have gotten a PhD in comparative mysticism, hosted this podcast, or helped pioneer Transcendence & Transformation here at HDS without coming into your work 20 plus years ago. So thank you. Thank you so much.
ALEX GREY: Profound acknowledgment. Thank you so much, Matt.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: It's very heartfelt. So and second lighter, I understand you guys just returned from the AAR, American Academy of Religion, meeting in Denver. How was that? Was it your first?
ALEX GREY: It was our first, and we were so-- it was a moving kind of event for us because I feel like what we're doing is rarely contextualized within the framework of the evolving state of religion. We may feel that way, but we don't know who's watching. And so to have Christian Greer and Eric Davis and Deepak Sarma give their reflections on what is happening here at CoSM and how our work has been received by the culture was a really deeply affirmative and touching kind of presentations that they all did and kind of questions and things, so.
ALLYSON GREY: It was an honor. That was actually really an honor to be there.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: And I'm sure you guys had quite the crowd, given it being AAR. And I am--
ALEX GREY: Drugs and religion, yeah.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah, oh, it's got a hook. It's definitely got a hook. So, I just kind of wanted to go chronologically here. Obviously, we can bounce around, but I was rereading Mission of Art in advance of this, and I was struck by-- this one's for Alex-- how you've been drawing since basically you could hold a pencil and how your mother kept so many of your drawings from your early days. So I've been reading a lot about the [INAUDIBLE] and calling and character. I'm curious-- did you ever have a thought or an inclination or any intention to do anything else besides make art? Or were you drawn that way from the very get?
ALEX GREY: Well, it seemed like I've never had any other thoughts than that I was an artist. And however that would manifest, that was who I was. It was sort of an inborn identity. Of course, I kind of feel like most of us, as children, imagine or that whether we have a word for it or not, that we're innately creative and filled with wonder. And I think that that's what the artist is as an archetype. But I have other weirder kind of roots in that that I see now that are linked to a past life as an artist.
And so, I've had I don't know whether they're just elaborate fantasies. You can never tell about this kind of thing, but I followed the artist, the symbolist, the Belgian symbolist, Jean Delville, who was a kind of occult adept, but an idealist and a symbolist painter that died within that 49-day bardo period, where you can choose a rebirth. And I think that whether or not it's truly a credible fantasy or not is not something, I think, can be determined.
But I have a profound connection with his work that's always-- and with his mission. He wrote the first Mission of Art. He wrote a book called The New Mission of Art, and that predated Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art. It was all about his own philosophical insights and the insights of neoplatonism and how it affected his imagery and its intentions as an artist. And I at first felt like, well, I should just republish this book by Delville. But then I read it and I felt people weren't going to exactly get it. It's not today's context. It's not the same problems we have. So perhaps every generation, there needs to be a new Mission of Art.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: No, that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. And--
ALLYSON GREY: Now, I was not asked this question, but I do want to jump in and say that Alex was born to a father who was a professional artist. So Alex's father was a professional graphic designer all his life and illustrator and worked for large companies in the in-house art department. So Alex's reference to being an artist and being a professional artist and growing up and being a man and being an artist in a time when that was not as maybe-- I mean, Norman Rockwell's age, that would be Alex's father's age. And he went to school with Roy Lichtenstein. So he was a professional artist as well. So that, I think, would lead Alex to feel that he could be an artist for life.
I have to insert myself and say that I, too, was recognized as an artist in nursery school and was singled out to paint murals of farms and things like that at the age of, like, three, and then won prizes in elementary school. In second grade, I won the prize for the whole school for my [? Revis ?] competition and went to see a program of illustration. And so, yes, we both, I think, identified at a very early age as artists and went to art school directly from high school.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: Which-- thank you. And that was going to actually be my next question.
ALLYSON GREY: Is that right?
MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah, so well, I suppose I should ask, how did you two meet, right? I have to get into the nitty gritty of all that. But I also wanted to ask you, Allyson, I understand you started to become more interested in spirituality and took LSD a few years before Alex.
ALLYSON GREY: Yes, when I started college. I started college in September of 1969, a very important year after the Woodstock Festival. And I took LSD for the first time in October of 1969. So it wasn't long thereafter that my journey with psychedelics began and was rather active, very active in my first few years of college. It was just like that's what's going on. At every college, university campus, you go away from home. You start experimenting. And I did a lot of psychedelics. I didn't really get involved in anything other than like-- never got involved in opiates or things like that. But I did take a lot of psychedelics in my first few years.
And yeah, and I did a lot of interesting things with my friends. I took walks and danced to Led Zeppelin and hiked mountains and ride bicycles. And I evolved myself through psychedelics, even though I had not had a spiritual opening until 1971 when I read Ram Dass's book Here and Now, which came out in 1971. And a lot of people were influenced by it, a lot of people.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: Oh, certainly.
ALLYSON GREY: It's a very popular book. But anyway, that was my-- he recommended to take LSD in a dark room. So I had never done LSD in that way. In 1971, I had my own little room. I was going to school in Cambridge. I mean, I was living in Cambridge at that point. And I had this little room, and I went into the dark. And I took LSD by myself and saw the white light, as he had recommended. And that was really-- I mean, I think we had certain connections to spirituality before that, but were unrecognized or untapped.
I was going to Sunday school, and I always did really well. And I kind of loved-- I was kind of called to it. But I don't think it really opened me up until I did that one LSD trip where I saw the white light, and I saw it as writing. So that was it. Secret writing came to me.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: So secret writing begins in '71?
ALLYSON GREY: That's when I saw secret writing and had my first God contact, we say. I remember thinking, this is what people call God. This is what the word "God" is referring to. I was an agnostic Jew. I liked traditions and I enjoyed and did well in Sunday school, interested in the Bible stories and all that, but not really God realized in the sense of realizing that there is a God. There is and there was, and God was basically talking to me through secret writing in an ineffable language and untranslatable language, but in all language.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: So that was your first experience with the secret or ineffable language. Does it unfold over time? Do you start to, through various experiences, see sort of an alphabet there? Or do you get different characters over different experiences? How does your whole-- because it's something you pictorially depict many times.
ALLYSON GREY: Well, in the evolution of my art, the first body of work that I did about secret writing, which was really identified by Alex, it was sort of like a secret body of work that I wasn't really sharing. And then Alex came into my life in 1975, and it was like one of our-- it was maybe our second, third date. I showed him this secret body of work because, well, we met because Alex took his first LSD in my apartment at my party.
I gave this party at the end of the year for school, and he was a classmate who I had not dated or gone out with, but I had seen his performances, and they were astonishing. They were raw and amazing. And I never would miss one. He would put little flyers, handwritten flyers up on the wall, and I would just be there to see him do whatever he was going to do. And they were very interesting.
And anyway, he called me the next day after he had had an opening with God on his first LSD experience in my apartment while there was a party going on. I mean, I had to go into a dark room, right, and not really go inside. He just saw-- well, I should let you talk about that. You go ahead. What did you see your first LSD?
ALEX GREY: Well, I could prelude it by recounting the kind of story maybe I've told often about that fateful day for me. It was May 30, 1975. It was the last day of art school. We had kind of casually met and had conversations during the year. She was really one of the only people who was curious about the strange things I was doing and had shaved half my hair for half a year. And I was working with the theme of polarities.
The truth was I was a really seriously depressed 21-year-old on that last day of art school, and I was considering suicide. I woke up asking basically a God I didn't think existed to show me a sign that I should go on.
And because I'd pretty much become so depressed over the year and was on a street corner for really not more than two minutes after art school, saying goodbye to my professor, and Allyson drives around the corner in her yellow VW and leans out the window and says, hey, I'm having a party later tonight. You guys want to come to the end of the school year party at my place?
And so, yes, on the way over, I had some of this magical glue and LSD. And it turned my life around. It was emergency medicine, I feel like. I gave the other half of the bottle to Allyson, who I guess drank it. But she was giving the party. I sat on a couch the entire time.
And it's unlike any other LSD experience I ever had in that it was a continuous vision. Usually, everything is changing so fast or evolving, or there's cartoon characters, or all manner of archetypes can appear. But this was an experience of going through a tunnel. It was whenever I closed my eyes, I was inside of it. It seemed like this massive tunnel, like a conch shell, you know?
And it had a kind of iridescent mother of pearl, kind of, but it was alive kind of surface. And it curved around in a spiral. And right around the corner was this brilliant light that was certainly God, God's presence, wisdom, love, all the answers to all the questions I ever had and a deeply positive kind of message of hope. And it was really the saving kind of light. And I was in the dark, but I was going toward the light. And so I had a direction. It gave me a direction. And I could see all the different shades of gray brought the opposites together. I'd been working with this theme of polarities, so this was a--
ALLYSON GREY: You had just come back from the North Magnetic Pole. Alex took a trip to the North Magnetic Pole.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: I've never heard this.
ALLYSON GREY: And I was very impressed. You came back to school with your head all shaved. You looked like a Marine, kind of. And you had just come back from the North Pole. And you wanted to show me your Super 8 videos of the North Magnetic Pole.
ALEX GREY: Yeah, that was the adventure that kind of, I spent all my money. And one is the reasons that I was so depressed that I'd just blown my wad on going to the North Magnetic Pole because I was trying to externalize all these internal elements of working with the theme of polarities.
ALLYSON GREY: Well, tell them about polar wandering. Polar wandering was--
ALEX GREY: Well, yeah. Polar wandering was the name of the performance because I would call all these different adventures kind of performances. And polar wandering, of course, is a phenomena that we use our compass that points north. And there is a geomagnetic field that's about 100 miles across. And it's where all the lines of force around the Earth come in to the top of the Earth. And so all of our compass needles point toward a true north, in some sense.
And so I thought it was an interesting phenomena that this thing that we rely on to get our bearings is in constant motion. And it is wandering. And they have geomagnetic observatories to mark the shift in the pole. And so I thought this was a sign that you can never get your bearings truly in the material world.
ALLYSON GREY: I wanted to actually say at that point, too, that your bearings were always in motion, you see? And I feel like that was also the lesson. You were feeling very depressed, but you were finding that the bearings that you were looking for, the rudder, the focus, was always moving and a constant change. And I think when you saw the spiral, it was always in motion and in constant change.
ALEX GREY: That's true, but I could see there because it became like an emblem to me, this polar unity spiral. I could see that I had a direction. It wasn't aimless. I was going toward the light. I may be in the dark, but I could see a path--
ALLYSON GREY: So then what happened?
ALEX GREY: --toward the light.
ALLYSON GREY: Then you called me.
ALEX GREY: It was like a spiritual rebirth canal for me. And--
MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah, I was going to say the imagery sounded very graafian.
ALEX GREY: Totally. Totally, and like Raymond Moody's whole thing about going through the tunnel toward the light. And it was very graphic and continuous for hours, the same vision. And it was blissful, truly, and filled with kind of philosophical import. And like any first-time tripper, I guess, who's taken from a suicidal cliff to a, hey, full-on mystic here now.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: Talk about transformative, right?
ALEX GREY: I got the download, and I was so excited. Like the next day, I thought, I gave that rest of that bottle to Allyson. I'm going to call her up.
ALLYSON GREY: We had no contact throughout the party. I was so busy giving a party.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: Well, it sounds like Alex was busy, too.
ALLYSON GREY: Alex was busy, but I was not as focused as he was on the trip itself like I was when I was doing solo in a dark room. You know what I mean? I was like-- I don't know-- grooving. But you called me the next day. And then within a few days, I was saying before, I showed you my work. And we started showing each other everything. And in that period of the secret writing, they were infinite characters. You were asking about that. But they were infinite characters, and I started a body of work just on this automatic writing of infinite characters, 14-hour days of filling space with infinite characters, which was part of my master's thesis on secret writing.
And then I wanted to print them. I wanted to make textbooks, like books of text pages, like illuminated manuscripts, almost. And I had to select an alphabet. I had to create an alphabet from the letters that I had been writing automatically. There were certain recurrences. There were certain things that I noticed about written language that just the basic physicality of letter forms that I was making, they were coming out of me.
And there was no Illustrator files or computers or anything in those days for that. So I had to have stampers made in order to stamper my text and do it by hand. I had 20 staffers made. So I made an alphabet of 20 letters. And I eventually, maybe not immediately, but eventually created an order for those letters, like an alphabet or a mantra.
And none of them had names, and none of them had sound corollaries. And none of them had meanings because I didn't want to express that. I didn't want to be translating or coding. That wasn't my idea. The idea was that the language was of the ineffable. It was untranslatable, unpronounceable, and like real divinity, like the way I really experience divinity being the nameless presence and just all language coming through symbols.
ALEX GREY: It was a mystery language, yeah.
ALLYSON GREY: Symbols, the way we transfer information.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: So I want to ask a follow-up on this because as I understand it, you have a Jewish background, right?
ALLYSON GREY: I do.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: Correct? Yeah. So when I hear you talk about that, the bells are going off because in Kabbalah, the idea that Hebrew is the very language of the world, an ineffable language, one that has tremendous creative power, right, that it's our world is structured, encoded on that. I'm hearing your inevitable language, and I'm like, wait a minute. There's a very strong resonance here.
And then also thinking about how, in your works that I'm familiar with, it's also an iconic, right, where with Alex's work, there's so many anthropic forms. In yours, it's very much this sort of vibrating, pulsing, grid-like kaleidoscope, you know. So I'm curious if you've ever thought on what sort of influence, if any, or resonances you see with Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah in your work at all or none.
ALLYSON GREY: I absolutely feel that when I saw secret writing, it resonated with me as the true God because it read everything that I felt and knew and inherently was taught about God, which was that God was not a being, not a person, not a face, not a gender. I always knew that God was not a he because I was a she, and if God was within, then it couldn't be a he. So it had to be genderless. It had to be the one God. God is one. So, yes. So I felt very much like this did not deny the religion that I came to trust, my tradition, which is that God is really not a person. And so it was faceless.
But I have to say about Kabbalah, when you go to Sunday school, you don't study the mystical tradition of Judaism, which I think is very interesting. And I came upon it later and really more through Alex than anything else because the Jewish that I was, was the Torah. And the Torah is all writing. And God is received through writing.
So I've always felt that Alex and I saw the same God. We've had other experiences together. Like a year later, we had this profound experience of the universal mind lattice, and Alex named it. And I had the same exact vision, really, although I portray it more from the top, more from the funnel, like looking down into the fountain, where Alex chose the single entity, the one node. We were each a node of this fountain. So I feel that our portrayal of it comes from a different perspective and certainly from different styles, but was really about the same matter.
ALEX GREY: Transcendental light, absolutely. Yeah, we have the same subject as artists, but it comes out from abstraction. And I bring it into the sort of multidimensional experience of being human and having a body and grounding that transcendental-like in the subtle and other visionary realms as well.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: So I wanted to ask about the mind lattice vision, just a very sort of particular question. When that was done, what was your experience like talking about that and realizing you had the same experience? There's few things that are as fascinating as transpersonally shared, but introspective experiences. So how did that just alter your perspective on your art, the way you approach your work? I'm so curious.
ALEX GREY: Well, we had started our book of trips. We had journeyed a few times, I believe, that year, our first year together. But it was really kind of one year after our initial getting together on May 30, the 31st. Because it was June 3 in 1976. And we started a journal just to note down when we took it, what we took, and things like that, and thought it might be useful. So we had a notebook there in the bedroom where we were journeying. And we quite often would listen to Bach organ music during these journeys.
ALLYSON GREY: Played by Albert Schweitzer.
ALEX GREY: Yeah, some of our favorite and very deep and moving kind of-- a stratum of depth and perhaps religious flavor for me growing up in a Christian church and so a sacred space, basically. And but all of that became a blur. I think we had taken a substantial dose because we wound up in a dimension without bodies. But the body, I suppose, or the identity had become a ball of light. It was like a ball, but like a toroidal field, like an apple is like a torus, really. It kind of puckers in at the top and bottom, and like an electromagnetic field as well that has this same kind of shape.
ALLYSON GREY: We like to say fountains and drainings or sucking and blowing. Blowing out and sucking in.
ALEX GREY: Because these lines of force were both radiating out like a fountain, and they were flowing in at the same time. There were other lines of force that were-- that was the basic form that we were. And it seemed outside of time. Like, this might be like a bubble of the soul or the sphere of the soul that Plato talked about, this kind of form that carried it.
ALLYSON GREY: And the lines of force of the Earth, like you were just saying.
ALEX GREY: Yeah, or resemblance to that. And it seemed like this was the storehouse of all the different lifetimes, and that the body has these temporary adventures. But all the knowledge that's gained is stored in this cell in the body of God because every other being in the universe was also one of these balls of light. And the light was love. So that was what connected everyone, truly, and was shared by everyone was the light that was love.
ALLYSON GREY: Love was God's secret name. But what happened was we came out of the journey or enough to say, how are you doing? And we drew pictures. We started drawing in the notebook of what we saw.
ALEX GREY: It was like I was-- it was so amazing, and it was like-- so I started drawing these toroidal things. And Allyson said, that's where I was. And she showed in her pictures the vistas that she was seeing. And yes, I saw that, too. And it was additionally freaky.
ALLYSON GREY: To you because I thought all along that you were there.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: Oh, interesting.
ALLYSON GREY: Because you're lying there, and the torus was coming. I could just-- just lying like this on the bed and then the energy was flowing out of our feet and into each other and then out of my head into each other. And then it was like extending to all beings. All sentient beings on Earth that were living were part of this great vast vista of fountains and drains.
ALEX GREY: Yeah, and maybe beings from other dimensions as well. It felt like you were waking up from the dream of life, basically. You know how you wake up from a dream and you think, oh, well, it was like fully realized, but now I'm in reality. This was like a bigger reality that waking from the flesh dream.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: So that is wonderful. Thank you, and I really hope you guys kept your sketches.
ALEX GREY: We did.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: Oh, thank god.
ALLYSON GREY: Oh, yeah, we published some.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: Oh, good. Oh, yeah, those are holy.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You started writing about psychedelics when it was-- what was the term I'm looking for-- took a lot of bravery.
ALLYSON GREY: Dangerous.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah, right, I'm going back to 1990. Like, things were very different. I was so curious how you've seen that shift over time because now, I mean, we have Emory, Berkeley, Harvard are doing psychedelic research. John Hopkins, right? It's everywhere in the culture. It's fascinating to watch the shift, but you guys experienced it firsthand.
ALEX GREY: Well, there was always underground experimentation going on. And there was a psychedelic scene, even when it wasn't in the newspapers or in the magazines so much.
ALLYSON GREY: And people would ask that Alex not talk about psychedelics when he was doing talks, but he would talk about it anyway.
ALEX GREY: Well, it just seemed like if you're interested in the work, and you're not interested in how the work came about, because that would be the inevitable question, even if I didn't mention LSD. Someone would ask a question and say, well, what inspired this kind of painting? And so I would inevitably go back to these kind of mystical experiences and the visionary experiences that were catalyzed by psychedelics. And so, yeah, so I talked about it since having them in the '70s. And I, shortly after that time, began giving talks and things.
So it's been part of the pariah aspect of that it doesn't fit well within the mainstream art culture and art talk because not that many critics have actually had psychedelic experiences. And in some ways, I think that it's a state specific kind of work. If you've been there and seen that, then you have an automatic soul connection with the work sometimes, or at least with the meaning behind the work, and that it's pointing to these dimensions of consciousness and spirituality that are definitely contactable by those who have journeyed and seen beyond the veil of things.
And so that's why there was an immense popular kind of connection. And the connection with Tool was a way to expand that audience and the people who saw the work and had that kind of connection visually with it because you can see whether an artist is psychedelic or not in their work, a lot of times.
ALLYSON GREY: Or you can fly under the radar and still be psychedelic, which is what I've been doing for decades.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: Uh-oh, so did we out you in this interview? Oh, no.
[LAUGHTER]
ALLYSON GREY: Not at all. I mean, I'm very open about it. But I remember a time when I sold work to IBM and Chevron and big banks and lots of insurance companies and places that just loved the chaos and order aspects of my work and didn't realize at all or know anything about its psychedelic origin.
ALEX GREY: It's a psychedelic Trojan Horse.
ALLYSON GREY: That's right.
ALEX GREY: Getting into and maybe subtly influencing minds to be open.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: One of the things that struck me rereading your works was that your time as an embalmer and preparator at the morgue was after the universal mind lattice vision, right? It was the late '70s.
ALEX GREY: It was around the same time I was working there. And so I was thinking a lot about the difference between life and death and pondering on-- it's rather a hidden thing as I suppose is good in some ways, but the stillness of death and the mystery of spirit is somehow activated when you're working with the dead.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: Yeah, I wanted to ask, how do you think that has later conditioned your work? The ways in which your experiences within the morgue, with the dead, et cetera, how has that carried forward? Or is it just something you had to leave behind?
ALEX GREY: Oh, no. I think it really laid a foundation for my work, which I still portray the anatomy. I think that I got a chance to view it close up because it was in a medical school. And so the dissection work and things like that was something that I had always respected from the artists that I admired, like Leonardo and Michelangelo. They actually studied and dissected the body, trying to understand the mystery of form and musculature and things like that. And all the different layers of the body under the flesh are equally beautiful to the skin and the exterior.
ALLYSON GREY: Talk about the life energy piece that you studied for, the study of life energy that you were doing at the time as well.
ALEX GREY: Yeah. Well, of course, when one confronts the dead on a daily level, then the mystery of life becomes like what is that and what is life energy, you know? So that became a deep subject for me. And I was interested in all the different folks who had talked about the élan vital and of course, the Odic force or Reich's orgone, the qi. There's a lot of different-- the prana. All of these different notions of the etheric and subtle bodies, the multiple subtle bodies that surround us. And so, yeah, that became the subject of a performance Allyson and I did back in 1978, life energy. And that laid the foundation for The Sacred Mirrors.
ALLYSON GREY: Well, Alex did his first lecture ever. It was on life energy. It was on all the studies that you'd been doing of Becker and Reich and Mesmer and all the people who had studied life energy. And it was a slide talk. That's what you had in 1978, slides. And then you did a-- we did some exercises with the people, communal exercises about experiencing your life energy. But you did these charts of life energy. Do you want to describe that?
ALEX GREY: Well, they were life-sized charts of the body. One of them was of the nervous system because I felt like in the West, we have the idea that life and consciousness is maybe a byproduct of the nervous system in the materialist sense. But then in the Eastern and yogic traditions, you've got the chakras, the auras, the acupuncture meridians and points. And this kind of lays out a different idea of the subtle energies that inform our physical form.
And so I did a drawing, a simple drawing of that. They were both life-sized charts. And we invited the viewers to come up and stand before them. They were in the anatomical position with the hands open, like the Mary or the welcoming kind of mother, but inviting the viewer then to stand before these images and try to get in touch with those systems. So the idea of mirroring these systems by looking at a large chart of it, basically, inspired Allyson to say-- because she thought, well, the best part about that performance were the charts. And what you ought to do is a whole series based on that from the physical body into the subtle body and then to the body, mind, spirit, basically.
ALLYSON GREY: I knew that Alex had gotten an A plus, plus on his anatomy final, which was overlays of the various systems of the body. So I thought you would be the perfect person to do that. And he did them in these life-sized sacred mirrors. He did the anatomical ones first, actually.
And I think that was an incredible education for Alex to really study that deeply, even more deeply than his A plus, plus, like the full body and all the organs in their actual sizes and what they all looked like. I mean, well, that was the beginning of the series, which you couldn't wait to get to the psychic energy system, spiritual [INAUDIBLE] universal mind lattice, which was about our experience of out-of-body experience.
ALEX GREY: Yeah, I wanted to embed this mystical experience that we had had of the universal mind lattice in this very embodied kind of thing. So you could take a viewer from what they know to be real, but is also hidden from us. It's not being without skin as something we don't commonly experience, but seeing all those systems are things that we know exist.
And in a sense, they're easy to universalize. A person can stand before a nervous system, and there's no gender. There's nothing to get in the way of identification with this kind of system. So it's a very handy kind of thing to come in contact with the depths of your physical being. And then hopefully that transfers in some way to your more metaphysical being.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: In both the spiritual energy system and psychic energy system, those were, as I understand it, from different angiogenic experiences that came later after universal mind lattice?
ALEX GREY: Well, actually, yes, yes. But I saw that I was trying to find iconography that would refer to all these systems. And I laid it out basically in the chart. But it seemed like I needed to go into a more X-ray kind of vision of the anatomy to include it all, all the multi-dimensions at once, and suggest both the physical and the subtle energetic and visionary forms, thought forms and such. These things were pretty much laid out by the theosophist, really, in quite early in the 20th century and things. So I was painting the psychic energy system in 1980.
And so it really just seemed like an evolution of the chart things, but it came to me in a vision one day, staring at myself in the mirror, that you could see on all these different levels at once if you use the X-ray vision, and that it also, the X-ray worked because we're familiar with the X-ray. And it suggests also something unseen, but that you know is there. And so by linking it also with these subtle energies, perhaps you could open the viewer to accessing something that's also hidden and less realized, and that that would be the way to then lead up to the universal mind lattice.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: Thank you. That's a great segue into the background on when you guys started CoSM. So, Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. I understand it became an official nonprofit church in 2008. So is that and Entheon where the sacred mirrors are currently located? And how do things stand with CoSM and Entheon now that we're in the middle of a global pandemic?
ALLYSON GREY: Well, to go back a step, I would just say that Alex took 10 years to create the entire series, which is 19 paintings and two etched mirrors. And after doing that, we had an MDMA experience in 1985 that encouraged us. I mean, it just basically spoke to us that we had to care for the sacred barriers, that we had to create an installation so that they could be viewed all together. And they were exhibited all together at the New Museum and in a number of shows across the globe.
But Alex had a vision on this MDMA experience of the frames, which was the context for them in which they would all be unified. And they were sculpted frames. And I like to lovingly call it the cartoon history of the universe was kind of carved on them. And we carved these frames together. We carved one, and then we made a large, a very gigantic-- they're 10 and 1/2 feet tall. So we made this gigantic mold, and we cast 21 of them for the New Museum show in 1986.
And but I mean, he had the vision in 1985. So we went straight to town and went to do this. It was an enormous project that we worked on and making the frames. And so then we had this 21 10 and 1/2 foot by 5 foot gigantic, each one weighing about 100 pounds, and we had to have a place to put them and they had to be shipped. And every time they were shipped, they would be in danger.
So we realized in 1985 on our experience that we needed to build a chapel, that we needed to build a place for them, that this would be a life's work for two people, two artists, separate artists who have separate bodies of work, but this would be like our collaborative social sculpture, that we would create a place where they would be installed and could be experienced by psychedelic people, but just any person could have somewhat of a psychedelic kind of experience from seeing them.
And so we talked about it a lot. We did a lot of slideshows about it all over the world. And then a shaman told us to start full moon ceremonies to pray for this Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, which we had been envisioning. And we started the full moon ceremonies in January of 2003 in our home in Brooklyn. And we had become a non-profit organization in 1996 so that we could receive funds for it because we've been doing a lot of talking about it. And so people wanted to give us money, and they had to give it to an organization. So we became an organization in 1996, but in 2003, we started the full moon ceremonies in our home.
And by 2004, September, we were opening a 12,000 square foot space in Manhattan, which was on 27th Street. And we were opening this rented floor. It was like a raw industrial building, and we built it. We put all our money into building the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in New York City. And for five years, we had many tens of thousands of people come through and never missed a full moon ceremony from then until we're about to celebrate our 249th consecutive in an unbroken chain of almost-- I mean, we're entering our 19th year of full moon ceremonies.
But by 2009, we had to move out. It was a changing neighborhood, a gentrifying neighborhood, and we knew that we wanted to find a place that was more tranquil, like a more-- well, and we became a church. We became a church, like you said, in 2008, an inter spiritual church, really. We didn't call ourselves a psychedelic church because it was so dangerous to do that. But it did attract a lot of psychedelic people, as well as a lot of just introspiritual people, people of all faiths.
ALEX GREY: Right. Anybody who's had a spiritual experience or even during meditation or something seemed to have a resonance with the work. And the work had been published in a variety of books by the time the chapel came around. So people who were curious or had a tattoo of their work or I had started to work with Tool as well, and apparently, you need a tool to build a temple with.
ALLYSON GREY: They have been that. They have so totally been that. But then of course, we purchased a 40-acre old, rundown, fixer-upper retreat center with six buildings and a barn. And we started to renovate every building. This building was like a mansion from 1880-- 1862. And it was very decrepit, and we worked from the ground up. We just recreated this old-- this is where we had 10 beautiful guestrooms, and we have this large space where we held ceremonies before COVID, at least a few hundred every month and sometimes as many as, say, 1,400 in the summer. And we have a bonfire. We're allowed to have a bonfire.
ALEX GREY: Solstices and equinoxes, as well as the full moon.
ALLYSON GREY: We're allowed to have a bonfire because we're a church. You can only have a bonfire if you're a church or a Boy Scout or Girl Scout camp in New York. So we had fire circles. We had a lot of people here, and we had a classroom. But we still didn't have the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. That was sort of the last building. We renovated the office and the great house and the dining hall and all that so that we could have people here. And then we finally got to building Entheon, which is--
ALEX GREY: It takes a community to build a sacred space. That was really what the shaman told us, that you're not going to have this temple until you have your community that wants it to happen. And so that's really the miracle that's appeared over these years because a couple of isolated artists talking about some chapel idea. And we don't come from means. We're still volunteers here, basically. But the world of people who, say, want a poster or a book or something like that has helped to fund this dream of building a temple. And so that's what's been happening.
And during the pandemic, we made a lot of great progress forward and in making things happen, and through the support of the worldwide community, really, and we had to go online and do virtual full moon ceremonies and new moon ceremonies with our members and things like that.
ALLYSON GREY: And over the past, say, almost three years now, you can find probably around 100 programs that we produced online, including all the full moon ceremonies and new moons and interviews and puppet shows. And we started being like a production center because we had to close for COVID. And--
ALEX GREY: It's available on YouTube.
ALLYSON GREY: It's on YouTube.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: Hey.
ALEX GREY: On the CoSM channel.
ALLYSON GREY: CoSM.TV, the CoSM.TV on YouTube. You can see all of our offerings. And yeah, so now we were able to build the temple, which is Entheon, and is almost ready to open.
ALEX GREY: Yeah, we've made tremendous progress on the interior of Entheon. Now, on the exterior, it looks very lightweight.
ALLYSON GREY: Minimalist.
ALEX GREY: It's needing sculpture. Yeah, it's kind of a brutalist minimalist sculpture at this point, a big box. But we intend to hang an assembly of interconnected God heads basically all over the thing, massive 20-foot kind of sculptures of faces that interconnect all the different wisdom paths.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: I highly recommend all listeners go to the website and see the Entheon vision for the building and the video. It's positively stunning, really, as I cannot wait to see that. When do you think CoSM might be open in person again?
ALLYSON GREY: And CoSM, by the way, for everybody, it stands for Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. That's OK. And it's cosm.org that you would go to. And we are about to-- within weeks, I'm hoping, before the end of the year, we'll get a certificate of occupancy on that building. And then we'll be able to invite the public in. We have a few-- we have a one gallery that we didn't want to install until we got the certificate of occupancy.
And that's the gallery of the international visionary artist. That's the all one gallery where we are bringing art from all over that some of the greatest works of contemporary visionary art will be in, in the inaugural show. And it'll be a rotating annual show of visionary art by other people. And Alex and I, all the works that we have are already installed, like the Sacred Mirrors Chapel is installed and the Great Hall with art and many of the hours are installed. And we'll start to do public full moons as soon as we get our certificate of occupancy, won't we, John? He says yes.
ALEX GREY: Yeah, we're aiming at the spring of 2023. And there may be some special events around bicycle day. We'll see.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: Ooh, OK.
ALLYSON GREY: Yeah, bicycle day.
ALEX GREY: We have a psychedelic reliquary that houses some special relics like the glasses that Albert Hofmann had and wore on his bicycle ride and saw when he was making the medicine. And we have also a hair from Heir Hofmann and a number of written things. We tried to collect genetic material and something they wore and then some writing and things like that from many different psychedelic heroes, like Ram Dass and--
ALLYSON GREY: Timothy Leary.
ALEX GREY: Timothy Leary, we have some of his ashes Zach Leary generously gave to us. And we have a shirt that Tim wore.
ALLYSON GREY: And Stan Grof and Ralph Metzner and the Shulgins, and people who have been really influential and instrumental in bringing psychedelic culture to--
MATTHEW J. DILLON: Any Terrence McKenna stuff?
ALLYSON GREY: Yes.
ALEX GREY: Well, we have--
ALLYSON GREY: Yes, we do.
ALEX GREY: --some drawings of Terrence that I did when we attended his events and things. And for right now, we only have things that he signed. He signed a number of books to us because we were friends. And we have the invisible landscape signed by both he and Dennis.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: Ooh.
ALEX GREY: And so that's special.
ALLYSON GREY: And we have an Indigenous area and a cannabis area, various really incredible relics of Indigenous art. We have some ancient, ancient mushroom stones of--
ALEX GREY: Yeah, Mayan mushroom stones from Guatemala that are on loan from both Paul Stamets and Mitchell Gomes. And we have some mushroom eaters that may be over 2,000 years old from the Nayarit and the Mexican kind of sculptures, the ceramic sculptures that are very well preserved.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: Well, if that doesn't make it enticing for you guys to reopen and for us to all make the pilgrimage out there hopefully by April 19-- fingers crossed.
ALEX GREY: Yes, yes, yes.
MATTHEW J. DILLON: Well, thank you so much for being so generous with your time. It's been so lovely to be able to talk with both of you. And there will be links at the bottom to all your websites and everything. So, again, thank you so much for coming on Pop Apocalypse.
ALEX GREY: Aw, thank you.
ALLYSON GREY: Thank you. Thanks for having us.
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MATTHEW J. DILLON: I hope you all enjoyed that talk with the wonderful, amazing, and incredibly brilliant Alex and Allyson Grey. Now, we recorded that talk in late November, so a quick update is in order. As of now, CoSM remains closed. Please keep an eye out on their website, cosm.org, and sign up for their newsletter to learn when in-person events can begin once again. Those interested in learning more about Alex and Allyson's work should head to that website or to alexgrey.com.
All right, so this is the first episode so we don't have a pattern established yet, but the plan is I will normally take this outro to draw attention to some of the works, ideas, and sources that came up in conversation. But seeing as this is the first episode, there are some thank yous and acknowledgments that are in order. First, our heartfelt gratitude to Trey Spruance and Secret Chiefs 3, who allowed us to use the songs, "The End Times" and "The Owl in Daylight."
Our former director at the CSWR studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, and she conducted orchestras for many, many years. On hearing Secret Chiefs 3, she exclaimed that Trey's work will be studied for generations. I can only agree. So it's an unbelievable honor to have Secret Chiefs 3 featured on the pod. There's more of their music coming after I'm done here, so stay tuned.
Kristie Welsh, the senior graphic designer at HDS, worked with me for months to craft the perfect logo for Pop Apocalypse. Kristie has the patience of a saint and the gifts of a master. Thank you so much, Kristie. Robbie Rhodes and Robert Deveau have graciously done the sound editing, which, suffice to say, I don't know how to do.
Charles Stang, director of the CSWR and pioneer of T&T, gave me the green light to do this very fun and very weird podcast. Thank you, Charlie. I'm sorry. Just kidding. But thank you for letting me explore this increasingly vital terrain. Not every religious studies department gives the green light for people to explore popular culture, culture mysticism. And I very much appreciate having the opportunity to do so.
The staff at the CSWR, past and present, helped this podcast through its various phases. Ariella Ruth Goldberg, Corey O'Brien, and Hilary Flores-Hebert, thank you all so much for doing so much lifting and offering so much feedback. Hadi Fakhoury and J. Christian Greer, whose ideas, enthusiasm, and address books really helped get this pod off the ground-- three musketeers forever. And all the weirdos in the academy and beyond that are interested in this sort of material, thank you for listening and giving us an audience. Stay tuned, and keep it weird.
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