Explores the visionary, mystical, and ecstatic traditions that influenced the music from the 1960s

• Examines the visionary, religious, and mystical influences on the Grateful Deceased, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, the Incredible String Band, the Still left Banke, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, and others

• Shows how the British Invasion acted as the “detonator” to explode visionary music in to the mainstream

• Explains how 1960s rock and roll music transformed on the subject of Into the Mystic: The Visionary and Ecstatic Origins of 1960s Stone consciousness on both person and collective levels

The 1960s were a time of huge transformation, sustained and amplified by the music of this era: Stone. Through the 19th and 20th generations visionary and esoteric spiritual traditions influenced first literature, then film. In the 1960s they moved into the realm of popular music, catalyzing the ecstatic encounters that empowered a generation.

Exploring how 1960s stone music became a school of visionary art, Christopher Hill displays how music raised consciousness on both individual and collective amounts to effect a result of a transformation of the earth. The writer traces how stone rose in the sacred music of the African Diaspora, harnessing its ecstatic power for evoking religious encounters through music. He displays how the United kingdom Invasion, you start with the Beatles in the early 1960s, acted as the “detonator” to explode visionary music in to the mainstream. He points out how 60s stone made a direct appeal to the imaginations of teenagers, giving them a larger set of reference factors around which to understand life. Discovering the resources 1960s music artists drew upon to evoke the initiatory knowledge, he reveals the impact of Western european folk traditions, medieval Troubadours, and a lost American history of ecstatic politics and displays how a revival from the ancient usage of psychedelic chemicals was the most powerful agent of modification, causing the ecstatic, mythic, and sacred to enter the consciousness of a era.

The writer examines the mythic narratives that underscored the work of the Grateful Dead, the French symbolist poets who inspired Bob Dylan, the hallucinatory Britain of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, the tale of the Rolling Rocks and the Lord of Misrule, Vehicle Morrison’s astral journeys, and the dark mysticism of Lou Reed as well as the Velvet Underground. Causing the visionary and apocalyptic atmosphere in which the music of the 1960s was received, the author helps each of us to better understand why transformative era and its own mystical roots.