I saw the notice posted onto a storefront window at 300 Henry Street, in Brooklyn Heights. This was a short walk from my apartment on Columbia Heights, and only a block north of the Middle Eastern shops on Atlantic Avenue. At one point, in the 1920s, this entire area was referred to as “Red Hook”, and horror writer Howard Philips Lovecraft – a native of Providence, Rhode Island – lived in this neighborhood for two years, on 169 Clinton Street. Thus, I should not have been too surprised to see a notice advising the public that shortly there would be something called The Warlock Shop on Henry Street.
It was the summer of 1972. I had been working for Stardust since 1970 and was about to leave that company for a short stint with a Belgian metal import firm as a telex operator before finally getting a more long-term position with the Bendix Corporation in 1973. I was finally earning enough to pay rent, take the subway to work, and eat regularly and occasionally buy a book or a magazine.
As the Watergate story unfolded, I began reading multiple newspapers every day. I did not own a television set and did not miss it. Television had been the bane of my existence when I lived at home where the set was on continually day and night. Living alone in a small apartment with only my thoughts, my books, and my writing was a soothing, salutary experience. I had no intention of selling what I wrote, and I wrote a lot: short stories, mostly, as well as poetry and one novella. I wrote “for the drawer” and was happiest that way. Writing was, for me, a kind of necessity like breathing and the idea that I would have to make my work conform to a market’s expectations was anathema. It was not an elitist position, at least not as elitist as it might sound, but simply the mode in which I was happiest and most fulfilled. I wrote for myself; I went to work for other people, to earn money to survive and to continue writing. That seemed like the most natural arrangement of one’s life and the line of least resistance.
At the same time, I was engaged in a kind of ad hoc spiritual enterprise. My study of arcana was ongoing. I haunted Weiser’s bookstore below 14th Street, and Zoltan Mason’s bookstore on the East Side, near Bloomingdale’s. I read alchemy with considerable concentration, erected horoscope charts by hand (no personal computers in those days, so all calculations were done with a calculator and an ephemeris and table of houses), and studied the various methods of ceremonial evocations, already begun in the Bronx and continuing now in Brooklyn.
And then, finally, the Warlock Shop opened.
I like to think I was the first customer, but that was probably not true even though I passed by the storefront every day since the posted announcement. The Shop in those days was a cramped and dusty place, but that somehow seemed appropriate. There were rows of glass jars containing a wide and deep variety of herbs; sets of Tarot cards; a human skull in the window and an articulated skeleton inside. There were robes and instruments such as knives and swords, and various types of pentacles and talismans. And, of course, books.
The proprietor was a strange man that seemed to perfectly fit the interior design. He had a cast eye and a limp. He had a melodramatic air and sported a bemused expression, and somehow we bonded almost immediately. That was my introduction to Herman Slater.
I thought my life had changed when I walked down the center aisle of St. Patrick’s Cathedral for the funeral of Bobby Kennedy. I thought it changed again with the weird political scene at the American Orthodox Catholic Church. That seemed enough for any one life, stories to dine out on forever. That, and the séances in the Bronx. And conjurations in Pelham Bay Park. But it would change once again with the Warlock Shop, the monks and their stolen books, and the notoriety of what would become an occult renaissance in New York City that began that summer in 1972 with “Horrible” Herman Slater and the Wiccan movement.
My early days in Brooklyn Heights involved my eking out a living in various office jobs during the day and writing at night and on weekends. But I did make a few friends in the neighborhood, and these involved people who were part of Spencer Memorial Church or of the Unitarian Universalist Church about a block away. We spent most of our free time at the Piccadeli, which was a warm, two-story restaurant on Montague Street that had outdoor seating. We would meet there, and drink copious amounts of coffee and discuss current events or, at times, local gossip. One of our regular partners in this was the organist at the Unitarian church who was also a music reviewer for several publications. Another was the woman from whom I originally sublet the apartment on Columbia Heights. And another was Judith McNally, who had worked for David Susskind on his television show as a production assistant and, later, for a publishing company in Manhattan, and after that for Filmmakers Newsletter for which she conducted interviews, wrote articles, and met some of the more famous movie directors as well as scored tickets for movie premiers in New York (such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Omen). Judith would later go on to even greater glory, working for Norman Mailer for decades up until the last days of her life.
At the time, however, Judith was going through a lot of changes. She had attended Swarthmore but dropped out due to an unsuccessful relationship there. Her parents were both teachers in New Jersey, and stoutly Roman Catholic. She had rebelled against the Church and at university wrote a play about nuns – A Few Roses – that was considered scandalous.
She felt that women should be ordained into the Catholic priesthood, and her argument was that the Sacrament of Holy Orders left a mark on the soul, and not the body, and that the soul has no gender, thus there was no theological reason why women should not be ordained.
The Warlock Shop, however, inadvertently became the answer to her spiritual dilemma.
I introduced Judith to the Warlock Shop and to Herman Slater. This was during her Filmmakers Newsletter period, while she was interviewing such worthies as Dick Smith who had done the makeup for Linda Blair in her role as Regan in The Exorcist. Judith loved science fiction and had a large library of paperbacks as well as hundreds of science fiction magazines in her studio apartment, piled next to the rejection letters for her poetry and articles and stories that she dutifully tacked up on the walls. I thought introducing her to the world of occultism would be a perfect fit, as occultism is technically non-fiction (at least, in the bookstores and libraries of the world) but borders dangerously onto the type of fiction of which Judith was most enamored.
And Herman Slater was a priest in a witchcraft coven being run by Eddie Buczynski: a Welsh Traditionalist high priest.
In those days, there were Gardnerians and Alexandrians, mostly, and Welsh Trads with a scattering of other denominations. The Gardnerians hailed from the tradition started by Gerald Gardner (an initiate of Aleister Crowley from whom he adapted some rituals) and they conducted their rites “sky clad”, i.e., nude. The Alexandrians were more oriented towards ceremonial magic. The Welsh Trads, though, were “just right”, at least for someone of Judith’s mental and emotional composition, a kind of clothed version of the Gardnerians. And Eddie was charming and charismatic, and made Judith feel quite welcome.
In the meantime, we had interviewed Raymond Buckland, who had introduced Gardnerian Witchcraft to the United States and who lived close by, on Long Island. Judith had the idea of interviewing Ray for a proposed article for the New Yorker, which we did but the New Yorker never bought the article, alas. The damage, however, had been done. Judith decided that being a witch was the next best thing to being a Catholic priest(ess), so she threw her lot in with Eddie and the Welsh Trads (after some soul searching) and became initiated.
Shortly thereafter, she ran across an ad in the Village Voice for an author’s assistant. I pressured her to apply for the job, and walked her and her resume to the local mailbox to send it in. She got a call back for an interview and met me at the Piccadeli that night with the news that the “author” was none other than Norman Mailer. She took the job, and never looked back.
As for me, Herman had the idea that he could create more revenue if there were classes on the overstock. In other words, if someone could give classes in subjects for which he had books that were not moving, he could generate income for the store and the lecturer could generate income for himself.
The first classes I gave were in a hotel room in the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights. It attracted fewer than half a dozen students, and the subject was ceremonial magic with a focus on the four Platonic elements of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. This was the beginning of what would become an important adjunct to Herman’s marketing plan as we saw the classes grow exponentially in size after that. Once Herman moved his store to Manhattan, to a much larger venue, classes were held in the spacious back room as well as a free Sunday lecture series that attracted fifty to sixty persons at a time, and often – especially near Halloween – double that number, not counting television remotes. From 1972 to about 1980, I conducted a broad series of classes and lectures, some of which were held off-site in rural areas, and which were very popular and well-attended.
The Warlock Shop and, later, Magickal Childe attracted a wide variety of celebrities. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were frequent customers, with John buying books on Egyptology mostly. We had Scientologists and Satanists, and during one rather dark period we seemed to attract members of groups that were not as well-known, and which gave Herman some pause. This included members of the Process Church of the Final Judgment, and – a few years before his murder in California – Roy Radin, the film producer, who approached me to ask if he could film a demonic conjuration. Roy Radin, of course, would be the connective tissue for journalist Maury Terry who believed that Radin’s murder in 1983 was somehow tied to the Son of Sam killings in New York City that took place from July 1976 to July 1977. According to Terry, all of these murders were the work of a single cult that included Charles Manson as well as an assassin Terry called “Manson II”. Terry also included the Process Church as part of this vast satanic underground and while a lot of his journalism on this subject is conjecture and speculation, there were odd bits of synchronicity and coincidence that seemed to point to the activity of some kind of “sinister force.”
This was the era of the Watergate scandals and the revelations concerning CIA, MK-ULTRA, and all sorts of other strange programs and operations. The Watergate break-in had taken place in 1972 and became a national obsession in the years that followed, leading into the Rockefeller Commission on the CIA, and the Senate Sub-Committee investigations into the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. It would eventually come to light that the Process Church – implicated by Maury Terry in the RFK assassination as well as the Manson murders – was incorporated in the United States by one of Jim Garrison’s suspects in the Jack Kennedy assassination, Tommy Jude Baumler who was himself a “bishop” in one of the “front” churches I have written about so extensively.
One thing led to another, and as all this news was breaking out all around me, I began work on a project that would eventually take decades out of my life. When the 18-1/2-minute gap in Nixon’s Oval Office tapes was revealed, his chief of staff Alexander Haig claimed that the erasure was due to “sinister forces.” That seemed like a suitably eerie and bizarre claim and could be applied to any number of unexplained and seemingly inexplicable political and cultural events that were taking place all over the country and the world.
I began collecting newspaper and magazine clippings, like some deranged character in a serial killer movie, and accumulated boxes of data, all of which would be analyzed, organized and applied towards my pet project, a study of American history as seen through the lens of its most unusual yet documented synchronicities, putative conspiracies, and weird religions, to be entitled Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft.
Such a wild American era, Peter. Love reading about your proximity to vortex and your recognition of sinister, synchronous forces abroad in the land, invisibly shaping our image of history. A lot of open threads I hope to hear more about--Steven Brandt’s suicide and his earlier attempt in particular, following the Manson murders. Keep ‘em coming!
Excellent, as always.
Peter, did any tapes of your 70's era lectures and classes survive?