“Well,” said Alpert, “it’s a hell of a gathering. It’s just being. Humans being. Being together.”
“Yeah,” said Allen “It’s a Human Be-In.”
Human Be-In Flyer, 1967
The above is a rare piece of cultural ephemera and evocative of a certain era. Designed by Michael Bowen and Stanley Mouse it is a flyer announcing “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In”. This watershed event catapulted the hippie scene to national prominence. Participants were asked to “Bring food to share, bring flowers, beads, costumes, feathers, bells, cymbals and flags.”
As a prelude to the first Summer Of Love which made the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco a symbol of the American counterculture and introduced a suburban generation to the word “psychedelic”, the first Human Be-In in 1967 focused key ideas of liberation against the prevailing social norms of conventional middle-class commonality. Organiser Allen Cohen invited speakers on the day including Timothy Leary who set the tone with his famous phrase – “Turn on, tune in, drop out” and Allen Ginsburg who chanted his poetry. Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead provided the soundtrack to gathered masses who participated in the consumption of “White Lightning LSD” provided by underground chemist Owsley Stanley. Incidentally Stanley designed some of the first high-fidelity sound systems, culminating in the massive and infamous amplification rig used by the Grateful Dead in their live shows.
Ginsburg chanting mantras
It’s estimated that between 20,000 and 30,000 people showed up. The event was seen by many as a meld between philosophically opposed factions of the San Francisco counterculture. One on side were the Berkeley radicals, who were tending towards increased militancy in response the the U.S. government’s Vietnam War. While on the other side were the non-partisan hippies who urged peaceful protest. Although their means were drastically different, they held many of the same goals – personal empowerment, cultural and political decentralisation, communal living, ecological awareness, higher states of consciousness and liberal political consciousness. The happening was more than a war-protest. Authority was questioned on civil rights, women’s rights and spawned it’s own alternative media in the form of newspapers and radio stations as well as new directions in music, art and technology. The dynamic milieu of San Fransisco in the 1970s gave birth to the ultimate gesture of modern personal power – the personal computer, countering the prevailing main frame computer paradigm which implied centralised authority.
Humans being-in
“The predominant feeling among the Hippies from about 1965 through the summer of ’67 was that they were agents and witnesses of a dawning of a new age. An age in which the warrior spirit, that had vaulted western man to the domination and potential destruction of creation, would be dissolved in the spiritual transcendence of the saint. Ghandi and Martin Luther King were our heroes and we had turned to the rich heritage of Asian mysticism and metaphysics for our inspiration and our practice. We leaped across oceans and through time to pre-Christian mythologies like the American Indian, the Egyptian and the occult and pagan philosophies of Europe. We studied with Buddhists and Indian gurus, native shamans, witches and yogis. We turned from Aristotelian and Christian dualism to the four pronged logic of Vedanta philosophy. We studied the Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching, Alan Watt’s books on Zen Buddhism, and Hermann Hesse’s novels, especially Siddhartha. We wouldn’t leave the house without consulting the I Ching, or our Tarot cards or our astrological charts.”
“Were we being naive or superstitious? No, I think this was the most important and long lasting aspect of the 60s despite the backlash of the 80s. It was the beginning of a renaissance in thought and culture similar to the Renaissance that brought Greek and Roman images and ideas back to Europe in the middle ages. Ideas that eventually led to the end of the domination of the Catholic Church, the rise of the nation state, the rebirth of democracy and the development of science.”
– Allen CohenTags: 60s, Civil Rights, Counterculture, History, LSD, Radical, San Francisco, Vietnam War
Great piece and that flyer at the top is just fantastic.
From the little I know about this stuff, I think that there were other elements with the counter-culture who might have shared the odd spliff but didn’t share the hippies’ idealism – the Hell’s Angels for instance, who actually organised counter-demonstrations to anti-war protests. And what was called the Black Power movement at the time had a pretty shakey relationship with what was often a very white and middle class counter-culture.
Either way, it’s a fascinating period of history.
And I’d rather go to a human be-in than some stupid flashmob pillow-fight any day of the week.
Great articles