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'Allen
Ginsburg & Gary Snyder Giving A Purification Mantra' ©
Lisa Law
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The Human Be-In
By
Neville
Powis -22 January 2003-
"In January
1967, a counter-culture event brought the focus of world media to
a small, run-down, area of San Francisco called Haight Ashbury.
Following
on the heels of the Beat Generation of the 1950's, a new social group
was starting to flower.
Early on they were called hipsters and beatniks until they became
known as ‘hippies'.
The intersection of two streets called ‘Haight' and ‘Ashbury'
was at the centre of a run-down Victorian quarter of San Francisco.
The Haight,
as it's called, was a low-rent area first populated by students.
It was soon nicknamed ‘hashbury' since just about every hippy
was ‘a head', as pot smokers were called.
By 1965 it was fast becoming the hippy centre of San Francisco.
Artists,
musicians, writers, poets, painters and fun-loving hippies were drawn
there from all over America.
Lifestyles and morality were changing. Communes and communal living
were contradicting
the taboos of an earlier generation which believed in sex after marriage.
The
small, run down, district of San Francisco had transformed into a
counter-culture haven.
One of its spokesmen was Allen Cohen. He set up a hippy, psychedelic
student magazine called the San Francisco Oracle.
It was filled with new art and writings by the poets and thinkers
of the day.
Allen Cohen and fellow artist Michael Bowen organised an event that
would lead to the famous Human Be-In a few months later.
It was
called the Love Pageant Rally and 3,000 people attended.
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'Janis
with Big Brother-Love Pageant-© Michael Bowen
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It
was organised in response to a new law in California banning the use
of the psychedelic drug, LSD.
The new law would come into effect on October 6th 1966, and this date
was interpreted by Allen Cohen, Michael Bowen and others
as the symbol ‘666' representing the Beast as found in Revelation
in the Bible.
They also saw the growing confrontations between hippy communes and
the police.
Busts were being made for marijuana.
This led too street protests and rioting.
It was becoming clear that a new form of protest was needed.
LSD was introduced to America in 1949. In less than a decade it had
reached a high standing among
psychiatrists as a therapeutic tool in treating severely resistant
psychiatric conditions.
It was also found to ease the physical and psychological distress
of terminal cancer patients.
By the sixties the American Food and Drug Administration classified
it as an experimental drug and therefore a controlled substance.
The primary problem was communication - between San Francisco officials
and the swelling numbers of Hashbury hippies.
"Instead
of protesting the moratorium of LSD," said Cohen,
"instead of protesting the law that was going into effect,
our idea was to make a demonstration which would show the law's falsity.
Without confrontation, we wanted to create a celebration of innocence.
We were not guilty of using illegal substances.
We were celebrating transcendental consciousness.
The beauty of the universe. The beauty of being."
3,000 people gathered in Panhandle Park for the Love Pageant Rally.
Janis
Joplin and the Grateful Dead played from the back of a flatbed truck.
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'
Grateful Dead at the Human Be-In' © Lisa
Law
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Then
it was decided to organise something called the Human Be-In.
The idea was to bring tens of thousands of people together, which
is why it was also called
‘A
Gathering of the Tribes'.
The huge
open-air hippy gathering took place in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco,
January 14th 1967.
More
than 20,000 people turned up.
The
Human Be-In Press Release
‘A union of love and activism previously
separated by categorical dogma and label mongering will finally occur
ecstatically when Berkley political activists and hip community and
San Francisco’s spiritual generation
and contingents from the emerging revolutionary generation all over
California meet for a
Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In at the Polo Fields in Golden
Gate Park.
Twenty to fifty thousand people are expected to gather for a joyful
Pow Wow and Peace Dance
to be celebrated with leaders, guides and heroes of our generation:
Timothy Leary will make the first Bay area public appearance;
Alan Ginsberg will chant
and read with Gary Snyder,
Michael McClure,
and Lenore Kandel; Dick
Alpert, Jerry
Rubin, and Jack Weinberg will speak.
Music will be played by all the Bay area rock bands, including the
Grateful Dead,
Big Brother and the Holding
Company,
Quicksilver Messenger Service, and many others.
Everyone is
invited to bring costumes, blankets, bells, flags, symbols, cymbals,
drums, beads, feathers, flowers.
Now is the evolving generation of American young the humanization
of the American man and woman
can begin in joy and embrace without fear, dogma, suspicion or dialectical
righteousness.
A new concert of human relations being developed within the youthful
underground
must emerge, become conscious, and be shared so that a revolution
of form can be filled with a
Renaisance of compassion, awareness, and love in the revelation of
the unity of all mankind.
The
Human Be-In is the joyful, face-to-face beginning of the new epoch.’
If
you recognize yourself in any of the Be-In photos please contact
us.
Please
Journey On To The
Human
Be-In Part 1
1968
Oceanside Be-In
All photographs and writings on this web
site are © copyrighted and are protected under United States
and International copyright laws.
These
photographs and writings may not be used, reproduced, stored, manipulated
or copied in any way without the written permission of their owner's.
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Whenever
Beauty looks,
Love is also there;
Whenever beauty shows a rosy cheek
Love lights Her fire from that flame.
When beauty dwells in the dark folds of night
Love comes and finds a heart
entangled in tresses.
Beauty and Love are as body and soul.
Beauty is the mine, Love is the diamond.
They have together
since the beginning of time-
Side by side, step by step.
-Rumi-
