Rev. Ivan Stang
2-11-02
This is my testimony.
As much as I hate to admit it, not wanting to glorify drugs to the impressionable or the sensitive, this is the most LSD-drenched image I can imagine. It's also "occultism-drenched," but that only makes it worse.
SOMEWHERE NEAR are the two "roughs" that I drew of this before Paul Mavrides did the final actual drawing. Those will accompany this letter (eventually, if they don't surface soon), and will be vivid proof that what I say here is true.
We had gotten the deal to do THE BOOK OF THE SUBGENIUS for McGraw-Hill. It was 1982. I was 29. The very first things we had to provide were the cover and back cover.
That meant I had to figure out what they would BE. We could have used some of the art we had laying around, but this was our big chance to get HAGEN and MAVRIDES PAID, to do paintings. (As it turned out, they were paid the same as they would have been had they just done stick figure drawings.) John Hagen-Brenner (aka Hellswami Satellite Weavers) of Dallas had seniority and would do the cover; Paul Mavrides would do the back cover.
But I still had to figure out what the covers WERE.
I went though various ideas, from SIMPLE, which were all boring though would have been trendy at the time, to ultra-complex; and I went for the most ultra-complex possible.
But I wasn't sure... I needed a POWERFUL VISUALIZATION TOOL -- I needed to go DEEP WITHIN (a la the recently released movie ALTERED STATES) and find the CORE IMAGE.
So, one weekend when my wife and kids were occupied with something else, I tripped my ass off, spending most of the time lying down with my eyes closed, looking for THE IMAGE.
Well, by Gobbs if that back cover Tree of Knowledge thing didn't instantly present itself, as a fully fleshed out oil painting of incredible detail.
While still tripping my fool ass off, I drew on lined paper with a ball-point pen a rough "tree" featuring the basic Radiation Symbol-Biohazard motif, with the giant snake eating its own tail surrounding the whole thing, and as many of the little symbols as I could remember/draw.
This was definitely influenced by somewhat similar classic occultist imagery, particularly the Tree of Ygdrassil, a great painting of which is shown in Manly P. Hall's classic illustrated occult encyclopedia, THE SECRET WISDOM OF ALL AGES.
When I sent Paul the scribbly drawing I had made in the throes of Acid Vision, he got a bit pissed off and told me to try again when I could see straight.
So, I got me a great big piece of posterboard, drew the basic outline of the tree and big symbols on it, and the ground, and then collected every damn piece of iconic, logo-ish, hieroglyphic-like, or otherwise very symbolic religious art I could find. Much of it was already on hand in the form of the SubGenius Hieroglyphs that Hagen-Brenner had already drawn, from stick-figures by Philo and me, plus several of his own, and we also had certain key clip-art logos that we loved on the pamphlet and wanted to reproduce -- like the saucers and the couple watching the skies, the Cowboy-and-H-Bomb, etc.
I spent a couple of days cutting all these pieces out, sometimes resizing them on a xerox machine, and arranging them into some kind of organized layout. They may look random, but they aren't at all; from left to right they form a kind of "light side to dark side" spread... that is, if the symbols mean the same things to you as they do to me... but they very much have their own internal meanings and "rankings" within my own little world of symbols.
Obviously the design also has elements of various cabalistic diagrams. Actually, like the whole Church, the details are borrowed, stolen or grave-robbed from dozens of otherwise unexciting religions.
Anyway, this large-size mock-up -- which by then wasn't too god-awfully sloppy, but was kind of BARE compared to the finished product -- then went to Paul Mavrides. He took one look at it and laughed. "OIL PAINTING? This would take a YEAR." So, much to my dismay, he started into it as a line drawing.
It still took WEEKS. Maybe MONTHS.
The publishers were breathing down his neck and he had to finish this damn huge complex drawing.
But he also wanted to kill two or ten birds with one stone -- he wanted to draw each part SO WELL that each part could then be used for years afterwards as the SubGenius Hieroglyphs we have come to love, and to replace written English with when possible.
So he REALLY worked hard on drawing each detail well. For one thing, he drew the whole thing HUGE -- like 5 feet high or so. And he added as many symbols of his own as I already had on there, along with re-drawing all of my picks.
Paul was not on acid when he drew this stuff, but he was on enough coffee and whatnot to kill a hundred bull elephants. He went without sleep or food for ... well, long enough for his girlfriend at the time to decide this "Bob" stuff had robbed Paul of his VERY MIND, and split.
And then McGraw Hill redesigned the back cover themselves -- reduced the drawing to a quarter page, and surrounded it with text, and made it black on DARK ORANGE.
Paul was not happy.
The book also flopped.
A few years later, the editor, Tim McGinnis, left McGraw Hill for Simon and Schuster, and he dragged us with him, reprinting the book with an all-new cover by Kenneth Huey (the original cover being thought to look too "sf" and not "religious" enough) and with the Tree of Knowledge reproduced full page on the inside cover. This time the book did okay and is still in print.
The Tree is probably also reproduced in SKIN, in that so many kids have had the symbols from it tattooed on themselves; but to recreate the whole Tree, one would have to stack all those partially tattooed kids in a very awkward pile.
The clock and dagger symbol at the top is a Robert Williams illo from a Coochy Cootie comic. The guitar with the syringe through it is something I drew in high school for my underground movie THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE. The skull-clock-bomb is by Erwin Bergdol.
Original file name: TREE OF KNOWLEDGE or.txt - converted on Friday, 13 June 2003, 22:42
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