On Oct 11, 2014, at 12:20 PM, Robert Mathiesen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> My sense of the SF Bay Area scene in the 1950s and up to the summer of 1964 is much the same at Pitch's. I would throw Lenore Kandel's erstwhile lover, Lew Welch, into the mix. Though (so far as I know) he never wrote about magic in its own right, he was a profound mystic whose own visions were deeply compatible with a magical world view and with pantheism or (what Catherine Albanese has now called) nature religion. As for nature religion in that part of California, I would also throw in the now forgotten poet Joaquin Miller. See, too, William Everson's insightful book, _Archetype West: The Pacific Coast as a Literary Region_ (1976).
I did know Lew Welch slightly, and he had a a nature-mystic streak,
but he was not an occultist in a formal sense that I know, if that makes sense.
Chas
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