Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
1942: The Cerebral Inhibition Meeting, sponsored by the Josiah Macy Foundation, organized by Frank Fremont-Smith. Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, and five others members of the (later) Cybernetics Group attended. Meeting focused on "physiological mechanisms underlying the phenomena of conditioned reflexes and hypnosis as related to the problem of cerebral inhibition."
Long Island Biological Laboratories research project, headed by Harold Abramson, established in part with Macy funds, and with support from the War Department. Abramson was then a Major in the Technical Division, Chemical Warfare service.
1945: Vannever Bush's "memex." Bush directs the work at Los Alamos, where John von Neumann is one of the few scientists with full knowledge of the project's purpose. von Neuman later helps to select the target sites for the bomb-drop in Japan, becomes a critical theorist of the hydrogen bomb, and a principal strategist of MAD, the war-game based cold-war military strategy. He also puts in critical work on the idea of a general-purpose computer, helps to develop ENIAC, and became one of the organizing forces in the Cybernetics Group. A consultant to Standard Oil, IBM, Atomic Energy Commission, Air Force, Los Alamos Labs, and the CIA, among others. Also central to the development of the idea of neural nets, the conceptual forerunner of the internet.
1946: First meeting of the conference on Feedback Mechanisms in Biology and the Social Sciences, later dubbed the Cybernetics group.
1947: Project Chatter--Navy program focused on mescaline and other substances; sparked by reports of amazing results in the Soviet Union with "truth drugs." (Senate Report) This project ended in 1953.
Around this same time, a German researcher named Hoffman synthesizes LSD and experiments with it on himself.
Formation of the RAND corporation by the Air Force, institutionalizing the applications of mathematics to war. John von Neumann becomes a consultant for RAND.
1948: Invention of the first general-purpose computer, in England, by FC Williams (de Landa)
Founding of the World Federation for Mental Health (Mead, Frank, Fremont-Smith, Macy funding, with others): "to some who feared communist world revolution, world mental health seemed a welcome liberal alternative ideology." (Heims)
late 40s: Development of transistor at Bell labs by Shockley
1950: Project Bluebird (later became Project Artichoke): goals were to find out how to condition agency personnel against interrogation, to investigate interrogation techniques, memory enhancement. Office of Scientific Intelligence coordinated with Technical Services division of the CIA; program continued until some time in the late 50s.
1951: Sandoz pharmaceuticals, a Swiss company, agrees to an exclusive contract with the US Government to deliver 100 grams a week of LSD, and not to provide any to communist countries.
1953: Project MKULTRA initiated at the CIA, at the suggestion of Richard Helms, then an assistant director. Project continued at least until 1963; almost all records of the project were destroyed, at the direction of Helms, in 1973, when Senate investigations of the CIA began closing in on this subject. MKULTRA was specifically designed to explore the use of mind- and behavior-altering substances as part of global strategic intelligence warfare. MKULTRA, in its final phase, "involved surreptitious administration [of LSD] to unwitting non-volunteer subjects in normal life settings by undercover officers of the Bureau of Narcotics acting for the CIA." (Senate Report).
Harold Abramson proposes to the CIA an $85,000 study of the effects of LSD on unwitting hospital patients. Funding for this project was funneled through the Macy Foundation.
Scientists working with SOD (CIA) administer LSD to one another; one of these, Dr. Olson, is permanently affected and later jumps out of a window (?) in a Washington DC hotel while under the care of a CIA handler. Harold Abramson is the attending physician. A year later, Abramson publishes the first of several articles dealing with the effects of LSD on Siamese fighting fish. Abramson was an allergist and pediatrician. He was also responsible, during the 1950s, for turning on many of the Cybernetics group to LSD, including Frank Fremont-Smith, head of the Macy foundation and organizer of the LSD conferences (first of these held in 1959).
1954: Lily Pharmaceuticals, with CIA funding, discovers how to synthesize LSD, ending US dependence on foreign supply.
late 50s: Paul Baran at RAND corporation begins to develop a communications system capable of withstanding a nuclear war.
CIA arranges cut-out contracts with The Geschikter Foundation, the Josiah Macy Foundation, and the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, for human-subjects tests on LSD.
The Army Chemical Corps. administers LSD to 1000 American soldiers ("volunteers") who then participated in a series of tests concerning battlefield performance. 95 "volunteers" were subsequently tested to evaluate the potential of LSD as an intelligence weapon. These tests were actually hidden from the CIA.
1959: Gorman annex at Georgetown built with a CIA wing for testing human subjects. Geshickter Foundation is the cutout; Dr. Geshickter's foundation funded LSD experiments on terminally ill patients and on federal prisoners. Geshickter's foundation funneled more than 2 million dollars to other Institutions, many of them universities, from the late 50s until the early 70s.
Macy-funded first international "LSD therapy" conference.
"I see a great deal of danger in the air. Teenagers are not screaming over pop music anymore, they're screaming for much deeper reasons. We're only serving as a means of giving them an outlet. Pop music is just the superficial tissue. When I'm on the stage I sense that the teenagers are trying to communicate to me, like by telepathy, a message of some urgency. Not about me or my music, but about the world and the way they live. I interpret it as their demonstration against society and it's sick attitudes. Teenagers the world over are weary of being pushed around by half-witted politicians who attempt to dominate their way of thinking and set a code for their living. This is a protest against the system. And I see a lot of trouble coming in the dawn."
Mick Jagger
1967
Everything was beautiful until the insanity began.
The CIA got into the business of altering human behavior in 1947.
"Project Paperclip," an arrangement made by CIA Director Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, brought one thousand Nazi specialists and their families to the United States. They were employed for military and civilian institutions.
Some Nazi doctors were brought to our hospitals and colleges to continue further experimentations on the brain.
American and German scientists, working with the CIA, then the military, started developing every possible method of controlling the mind.
Lysergic Acid Diethylmide, LSD, was discovered at the Sandoz Laboratories, Basel, Switzerland, in 1939 by Albert Hoffman. This LSD was pure. No other ingredients were added.
The U.S. Army got interested in LSD for interrogation purposes in 1950. After May, 1956, until 1975, the U.S. Army Intelligence and the U.S. Chemical Corps "experimented with hallucinogenic drugs."
The CIA and Army spent $26,501,446 "testing" LSD, code name EA 1729, and other chemical agents. Contracts went out to forty-eight different institutions for testing. The CIA was part of these projects. They concealed their participation by contracting to various colleges, hospitals, prisons, mental hospitals, and private foundations.
The LSD I will refer to is the same type of LSD that the CIA used because of the similarity of symptoms between their reports and what happened to musicians or hippies after 1967. We shall be speaking of CIA-LSD, not pure LSD.
Government agents and the ability to cause permanent insanity, identical to schizophrenia, without physician or family knowing what happened to the victim.
"No physical examination of the subject is required prior to the administration of LSD. A physician need not be present. Physicians might be called for the hope they would make a diagnosis of mental-breakdown which would be useful in discrediting the individual who was the subject of CIA interest. Richard Helms, CIA Director, argued that administering drugs, including poisonous LSD, might be on individuals who are unwitting as this is the only realistic method of maintaining the capability considering the intended operational use to influence human behavior as the operational targets will certainly be unwitting."
"Senate Report to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities"
Book I, page 401, April 1976.
When the first reports came out that the CIA could administer a tasteless substance into the beverage of one of their most responsible co-workers, and drive that man into a mental institution, or cause him to jump out of a window to his death, all existing CIA records were destroyed.
Hippies and musicians, previously normal and creative, with families and loved ones identical to Dr. Frank Olson, responded in the same manner as Dr. Olson after their introduction to the same drugs.
Valuable documentation of LSD experiments should not have been in the hands of CIA Director Richard Helms. January 31, 1973, one day before he retired from the CIA, he removed some possible answers as to the fate of persons minds the past ten years.
Helms had been behind all the types of experimentations since 1947.
Mind altering projects went under the code names of Operation Chatter, Operation Bluebird/Artichoke, Operation Mknaomi, Mkultra, and Mkdelta.
By 1963, four years before Monterey Pop, the combined efforts of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology, Department of U.S. Army Intelligence, and U.S. Chemical Corps were ready for any covert operations that seemed necessary.
U.S. agents were able to destroy any persons reputation cause by inducing hysteria or excessive emotional responses, temporary or permanent insanity, suggest or encourage suicide, erase memory, invent double or triple personalities inside one mind, prolong lapses of memory, teach and induce racism and hatred against specific groups, cause subjects to obey instructions on the telephone or in person, hypnotically assure no memory remains of the assignments.
The CIA has poison dart guns to kill from far away, tranquilizers for pets so the household or neighborhood is not alerted by entry or exit.
While pure LSD is usually 160 micrograms, the CIA was issuing 1600 micrograms. Some of their LSD was administered to patients at Tulane University who already had wired electrodes in their brain.
Was being crazy an occupational disease of being a musician? Or does this LSD, tested and described in Army documents, explain how a cultural happening that was taking place in 1967-68 could be halted and altered radically?
Janis used to say that her speed experience was induced by a man. He had been the cause of it. He had brought her lower than she had ever been in her life. Her involvement with the young man started in the spring of '65.
He was a very sharp brain and questionable character, engaged in some rather odd activities. Neither his history or his name was his own. He set up a fraudulent international pharmaceutical company in Canada to obtain drugs. He was also a methedrine addict. Janis was an exceptionally vulnerable girl. It had taken Janis about seven months from the time she returned from New York to degenerate into a vegetable, an eighty pound spastic speed-freak.
"Buried Alive, Janis Joplin"
Myra Friedman
Chrissie Shrimpton described how Mick Jagger's mind was affected after he started taking acid. Jagger had a nervous breakdown in the United States, June 1966, some months after he started taking acid. His collapse came just weeks before the start of a new concert tour.
Several friends from America visited Jagger and Chrissie and surreptitiously slipped acid into her drink. She was literally out of her mind. A short while later, Chrissie attempted to kill herself.
"Henry Schneiderman, a sinister American, or Canadian...he had so many passports no one was certain of his origin, brought to Keith Richards home a suitcase...which contained several pounds of heroin, cannabis, pills acid, DMT, every herb and chemical to stab or stroke the mind...along with choice LSD from San Francisco.
Schneiderman had let believe he was really bending the law all over the world. He was on a James Bond thing, the CIA or something."
"Mick Jagger"
Tony Scaduto
Brian Jones had a complete personality change after taking LSD.
Robert Hall, a private detective in Hollywood, was killed by a single bullet on July 22, 1976.
So far, there has been a wire service news blackout on the implications of Hall's murder for obvious reasons. The facts in this case should expose more than the tip of Watergate. What was going on is Los Angeles is part and parcel of the Washington, D.C. scandals.
If one Army report alone exposes that millions of dollars were spent using and testing chemical combinations for operational purposes, then somebody has to be around to distribute the poison.
Managers of seven rock groups, seven different groups, had hired private eye Hall to find out how their stars were getting "stoned."
Turning on or feeling "high" doesn't warrant hiring the professional assistance of a detective. That they were obviously complaining about was that the stars were being altered in such a way that it hampered with their public appearances, credibility, personal lives, and recordings.
Hall's inquiry revealed the drugs were coming from two pharmacies with which he had been employed.
Hall used to own a drug store in Hollywood with co-partner Jack Ginsburg, an admitted pornographer, who was charged with Hall's murder.
Gene LeBell, 44, the other man arrested along with Ginsburg, refereed the Muhammed Ali bout with a Japanese wrestler in July, '76. LeBell, a professional wrestler, is the son of Aileen Eaton, a well known boxing promoter who owns and operates the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles.
The reports that Hall concluded for the managers of the rock musicians included the names of two physicians and one dentist as having supplied false prescriptions. The cause of apparent freaking out was centered in a small area of operation.
This information was turned over to the proper authorities for arrests before Hass was murdered. No actions were taken by the police. No arrests have been made.
The same frustrations plagued Robert Hall that bothered Phoenix, Arizona reporter Don Bolles. The higher-ups get police and law protection. The investigators get killed.
Don Bolles and Robert Hall were investigating some of the same people, an actual who's who of the cold war.
Hall's contacts were important because they touched the prime movers of our politics, movies, electoral processes, entertainment, and also our tastes in music and in sounds.
Within moments of Hall's murder, his name was linked with possible murder for hire, kidnapping plans for millionaire financier Robert Vesco's son, gun running to Vesco in Costa Rica, the unsolved stabbing of actor Sal Mineo, blackmail, the lost safe deposit box of Howard Hughes that could contain his original will, Beverly Hills financier Thomas P. Richardson (recently convicted of a $25 million stock fraud), Hollywood's most famous celebrities in drug and sex scandals, exposures of televisions stars and high Washington officials, drug traffic from Los Angeles to the Malibu community, international sports events, the Los Angeles Police Department (one of their former agents is now retired, heads the Police Science Department at L.A. Valley College and supplied the fatal weapon used to kill Hall), Los Angeles Police Department Chief Ed Davis (because of his links to the FBI and CIA) a possible plot to kidnap Bernard Cornfeld (associate of Robert Vesco), past contacts with Mickey Cohen, the long drug addiction of singer Eddie Fisher, contract employment of Hall by Howard Hughes Summa Corp., the two burglaries of Hughes headquarters in Van Nuys and on Romaine Street. The burglary on Romaine Street set off the Glomar Explorer scandal of Hughes fronting the contract for the CIA.
Hall sent his pals to New York. Dr. Max Jacobson, titled Dr. Feelgood, the source of John F. Kennedy's happy time vitamins. Roy B. Loftin, contractor for NASA, Texan, with a long association and friendship for Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson's protege, knew Hall.
Investigations into the slain Burbank private detective caused Beverly Hills Police Captain Jack Eggers, on the force seventeen years, to resign.
Hall worked as a double agent for the Beverly Hills Police and the Los Angeles Police.
The relationship between law enforcement, drug traffic, and personalities as varied as politicians and musicians makes it sometimes impossible to get an impartial investigation of certain deaths. What appears as suicide can be murder.
At the time of Hall's murder, his possessions included tranquilizer guns, drug loaded darts that fire gas canisters, electronic bugging equipment of all kinds, and a wide variety of chemical formulas.
The chemicals were possibly a combination from the many tested by the U.S. Government from 1953 to 1963.
IV THE BATTLEGROUND
July, 1968, the FBI's counterintelligence operations attacked law abiding American individual's and groups.
The stated purpose of these assaults was to disrupt large gatherings, expose and discredit the enemy, and neutralize their selected targets.
Neutralization included killing the leaders,if necessary. Preferably, turn two opposing segments of society against each other to do the dirty work for them.
Remember that among these dangers to the security of the United States were persons with "different lifestyles" and also "apostles of non-violence and racial harmony."
CIA Director Richard Helms warned National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, Feb. 18, 1969, that their study on "Restless youth" was "extremely sensitive" and "would prove most embarrassing for all concerned if word got out the CIA was involved in domestic matters."
The FBI sent out a list of suggestions on how to achieve their goals. They can all be applied to what happened to musicians, youngsters at folk rock festivals, and hippies along the highway.
Gather information on their immorality. Show them as scurrilous and depraved. Call attention to their habits and living conditions. Explore every possible embarrassment. Send in women and sex, break up marriages. Have members arrested on marijuana charges. Investigate personal conflicts or animosities between them. Send articles to the newspapers showing their depravity. Use narcotics and free sex to entrap. Use misinformation to confuse and disrupt. Get records of their bank accounts. Obtain specimens of handwriting. Provoke target groups into rivalries that may result in death.
"Intelligence Activities and Rights of Americans"
Book II, April 26, 1976
Senate Committee Study with Respect to Intelligence
BETRAYAL BY THE ACID KING
In February 1967, Mick and Keith were arrested for having cannabis and amphetamines at Richards’ Sussex mansion, Redlands. Richards was jailed for a year and Jagger three months, prompting The Times editorial, ‘Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?’ On appeal, they were acquitted.
Richards casts light on the mystery of who ‘sold us out’. He blames an American drug dealer at the party, David Schneiderman, ‘who went by the moniker the Acid King’ and was ‘a police plant’.
Richards says Schneiderman ‘was the source of that very high-quality acid of the time...and that’s how Schneiderman got in on the crowd, by providing this super-duper acid. In those innocent days, nobody bothered about the cool guy, the dealer in the corner...in fact, the cool guy was the agent of the constabulary’. After the raid Schneiderman, called Mr X in court, disappeared and has never been heard of since.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/ar ... z2d2pcUCpr
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David Sniderman.
The Mail on Sunday can reveal that Sniderman was a Toronto-born failed actor who told his family and friends he was recruited by British and American intelligence as part of a plot to discredit the group.
After the Redlands bust, he slipped out of Britain and moved to the States where he changed his name to David Jove, and lived in Hollywood, later working as a small-time producer and film-maker.
Maggie Abbott, a Sixties talent agent, met him in Los Angeles in 1983 and became his lover. He told her how he infiltrated the group but said he was now ‘on the run’.
She said: ‘David was a heavy drug user but had a quick wit. He was the perfect choice to infiltrate the Stones.
‘He never showed any remorse for what he did. It was all about how he had been “the victim”. He was a totally selfish person.
‘Mick had been my friend as well as a client and I thought about trying to persuade David to come clean publicly.
‘But he was always armed with a handgun and I feared that if I gave him away, he’d shoot me.’
His identity was confirmed by a scion of a family of American philanthropists,
James Weinstock.
Two years after the Redlands raid, ‘Dave Jove’ married Mr Weinstock’s sister, Lotus, in Britain.
‘They’d come up with some new way to make acid and decided to go to the UK and sell it,’ Miss Abbott said.
But David was caught carrying pot by Customs.
‘Some other guys turned up – he implied they were MI5 or MI6 – and they gave him an ultimatum: he’d get out of prison time if he set up the Stones.’
The British agents were in cahoots, he told Miss Abbott, with the FBI’s notorious Counterintelligence division, known as Cointelpro, which specialised in discrediting American groups deemed to be ‘subversive’.
On Christmas Day in 1969, ‘Jove’s’ new wife, Lotus, gave birth to a daughter, Lili. Their marriage lasted 18 years, though they never lived together.
‘I first met David when I returned to California from Bali, where I had gone searching for God,’ said James Weinstock, Lotus’s brother.
‘One New Year’s Eve, he showed me a gun and said he’d just killed a man who was messing with his car.’ Later he was rumoured to have murdered a TV personality, Peter Ivers, the presenter of a TV show that ‘Jove’ produced.
Miss Abbott said: ‘There was talk that Peter had decided to leave the show and David was angry. ‘I discovered “Jove” wasn’t David’s real name when he shot himself through his heel with his gun.
‘When we checked him into hospital, he used a made-up name and later I found out his real name was Sniderman.’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1323236/The-Acid-King-confesses-Rolling-Stones-drug-bust-set-MI5-FBI.html
His first half-hearted admission was to Mr Weinstock: ‘He told me he was tight with the Rolling Stones in England, but had a falling-out with them,’ he said.
‘He was arrested for some serious offence, but managed to extricate himself, and he said it all looked very suspicious when the police busted the Rolling Stones. They froze him out after that.’
In 1985, Miss Abbott and an old friend, Marianne Faithfull, went out for dinner in Los Angeles.
Miss Abbott introduced her to ‘Jove’ – but Ms Faithfull soon told her she wanted to leave.
Miss Abbott says: ‘When we got into my car, she said, “It’s him, the Acid King. He set up the Redlands bust. Don’t ever see him again”. ’
Miss Abbott added: ‘Two months after the evening with Marianne, I finally had it out with him.
‘To my amazement, he told me everything. He said, “It’s a relief to be able to talk about it”. ’
‘Jove’s’ final confession was made to his daughter, Lili Haydn, now a 40-year-old rock violinist. She said: ‘Shortly before his death he said he was the Acid King.
‘He told me he wasn’t a drug dealer. He felt he was expanding the consciousness of some of the greatest minds of his day.’
Later in his life he was ostracised by his glamorous LA set after his drug use became ‘voluminous’.
He died alone in 2004.
RU SIRIUS: Yours is a very interior story of psychedelic seeking, despite some cultural referents. My experience – in turning 18 in 1970 – was more like, “Oh yeah. I caught a glimpse of the infinite divine again last night. That’s cool… but on with the revolution!” I wonder if the focus on finding god is peculiar to you or peculiar to the times you found yourself coming of age in.
PETER BEBERGAL: My generation was certainly lacking a cohesive counterculture. Even the punks couldn’t agree on what we were actually fighting for. The only thing we knew for sure was that the hippies failed. Charles Manson and Kent State were the ubiquitous images of the sixties when I was growing up in the late 70s and early 80s. Along with these dark shadows was a restless spiritual need. The aquarian age never materialized and the normative Judeo/Christian teachings felt hypocritical and empty. There were no teachers, no gurus, no grown ups we felt we could really trust. For many, myself included, this resulted in an overreaching for meaning. Looking for spiritual insight, it was impossible not to find yourself browsing through the Occult/New Age section of the bookstore. What was there but more overreaching?… a kind of schizophrenic brew; Carlos Castaneda, The Tao of Physics, the Rider-Waite Tarot Deck, and Chariots of the Gods.
Nevertheless, I also think there is something peculiar to the makeup of the addict/alcoholic, an underlying feeling of disconnection and loneliness; a deep need for divine communion of some kind. Sadly it often results in desperation towards self-destruction. So this combined with my generation’s own lack of social/spiritual authenticity meant I was essentially doomed.
RU: It strikes me that psychedelics are both an enhancer and distorter of pattern recognition. It’s like once the mind becomes too conscious and too obsessive about pattern recognition, it becomes delusional.
PB: This is probably the most succinct way of putting it I have heard. It’s essentially what we see happen with Phillip K. Dick. It’s part of the reason why no matter how non-addicting psychedelics might be from a chemical point-of-view, the capacity for the human mind to compulsively search for the same connection/insight over and over again is boundless. This same phenomena can be seen with a certain kind of occultism. Hermeticism can become an exercise in endless connection making and it’s amazing how even the most thoughtful occultists can become conspiracy theorists overnight. Psychedelics, and other forms of non-ordinary consciousness, can readily show that there is more to the human mind, and possibly the universe, than we can perceive normally, but when we lose the ability to critically distance ourselves from these experiences, the danger for delusion is great.
RU: Could you say something about what your peak experience was with psychedelics… and then… without it?
PB: Sadly, despite my best efforts, I never had what I call a peak experience with psychedelics. They always seemed just out of reach. I would have glimpses, moments where I could literally feel certain doorways open, but they would snap shut if I tried to walk over the threshold. During one trip I felt deeply connected to the woods I was in. It was an autumn day and the leaves rose up and applauded, winking and dancing all around me. I felt a spirit of the world moving around me and I was ready for a true communion, but of course some giggling friend I was with took me out of the reverie. I was trapped in the suburbs. The holy places for me were the copse of trees adjacent to the golf course or a rooftop overlooking the train tracks. But for whatever reason they did not signify deeply enough, and I was always looking around the corner of my experiences for something deeper.
Without psychedelics, I have had what I could call essential peak experiences, but they were more about immanence than transcendence; watching my mother die in the arms of my father as the cancer took her. I felt the spirit of the universe descend into the room that night and I believe I experienced a profound state of non-ordinary consciousness, brought on by the amazing chemistry of deep sadness and wonder. Similarly watching my son being born, and then in even more subtle moments, as when a giant blue heron flew along the window of a train as I looked out.
RU: It always struck me as interesting that psychedelics can be used as a cure for addiction and yet — in a certain percentage of trippers — it seems to bring out the addictive personality. How would you describe that seeming contradiction or odd contrast?
PB: When used a cure, psychedelics are administered in a very specific context by a therapist or within a ritual context as in the Native American Church who use peyote and see a dramatic decrease of alcoholism. I cannot imagine someone getting to the other side of their addiction self-dosing and tripping on their own, but you never know. Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous used LSD after meeting Humphrey Osmond who believed that LSD could induce states akin to delerium tremems and possibly scare alcoholics away from booze. But Wilson saw another potential, a way of bringing about a spiritual experience that he believed was essential for a drunk hoping to get sober. He eventually had to give up the experiments for the overall good of AA, and later was said to have remarked that even though he had deep insights on LSD, that he also discovered there was no escaping from himself. Real recovery was going to have to be a slower, more deliberate process after all.
Quanah Parker & The Comanche Nation
From Wikipedia~Quanah Parker (c. late 1840s - February 23, 1911) was a Native American leader, the son of Comanche chief Peta Nocona and "Anglo-Texan" Cynthia Ann Parker, and the last chief of the Quahadi Comanche Indians.
Quanah Parker's mother, Cynthia Ann Parker, was a member of the large Parker frontier family that settled in east Texas in the 1830s. She was captured in 1836 by Comanches during the raid of Fort Parker near present-day Groesbeck, Texas. She was given the Indian name Nadua ("Someone Found"), and adopted into the Nocona band of Comanches. Cynthia Ann eventually married the Comanche warrior Puhtocnocony (called Peta Nocona by the whites). Quanah was her firstborn son. She also had another son, Pecos ("Peanut") and a daughter, Topsana ("Prairie Flower)" In 1860, Cynthia Ann Parker was recaptured in the battle of Pease River by Texas Rangers under Lawrence Sullivan Ross. Peta Nocona, Quanah, and most of the other men were out hunting when Ross' men attacked. Returning to find the aftermath, they found it difficult to get any information as only a few people were still alive. Meanwhile, Cynthia Ann was reunited with her white family, but years with the Comanches had made her a different person. She frequently demanded to return to her husband, but was never permitted to do so. After Topsana died of an illness, Cynthia Ann starved herself to death.
Soon after the Pease River battle, Peta Nocona was said to be a broken, bitter man. He was later wounded on a raid with Apaches. Already in ill-health, with an older war wound troubling him, he soon died. Before his death, he told Quanah of his mother's capture from the whites. With this revelation came taunts from other tribesmen that Quanah was a half-breed. With Nocona's death, his band split. Quanah joined the Destanyuka band, where Chief Wild Horse took him under his wing. Though he grew to considerable standing as a warrior, he never felt comfortable with the Destanyuka. He left and formed the Quahadi ("Antelope Eaters") band with warriors from another tribe. The Quahadis eventually grew in number, becoming the largest of the Comanche bands, and also the most notorious. Quanah Parker became a leader of the Quahadi, and led them successfully for a number of years.
The Battle of Adobe Walls
In October, 1867, Quanah was among the Comanche chiefs at Medicine Lodge. Though he did not give a speech – his place was as an observer – he did make a statement about not signing the Medicine Lodge Treaty. His band remained free while other Comanches signed...
Founder of The Native American Church Movement
Quanah Parker is credited as the founder of the Native American Church Movement. Parker adopted the peyote religion after reportedly seeing a vision of Jesus Christ while suffering from a near fatal wound following a battle with Federal Troops. Peyote is reported to contain hordenine and tyramine, phenylethylamine alkaloids which act as potent natural antibiotics when taken in a combined form. Parker was given peyote by a Ute medicine man to cure the infections of his wounds. During the peyote experience, Parker claimed he heard the voice of Jesus Christ who then appeared to him, and told him in order to atone for his many killings and misdeeds, he must forsake a life of violence and conflict and take the peyote religion to the Indian Peoples. Parker's words and teachings comprise the core of the Native American Church Doctrine and the "Peyote Road."
Parker taught that the sacred peyote medicine was the sacrament given to the Indian Peoples by the Lord Jesus Christ, and was to be used with water when taking communion in a traditional Native American Church medicine ceremony. Parker created the "half-moon" style of the peyote ceremony. The "cross" ceremony later evolved in Oklahoma due to Kiowa influences introduced by John Wilson, a Kiowa Indian who traveled extensively with Parker during the early days of the Native American Church movement. The Native American Church was the first truly "American" religion based on Christianity outside of the Latter Day Saints.
Parker's most famous teaching regarding the Spirituality of the Native American Church:
The White Man goes into his church and talks about Jesus. The Indian goes into his Tipi and talks with Jesus.
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