Abstract
Rick Griffin was arguably the greatest artist to emerge from the maelstrom of psychedelic visual culture in California in the late 1960s. An early and influential underground comix creator, contributing to R. Crumb’s legendary Zap, Griffin was also known for his rock poster art and album covers, including the Grateful Dead’s Aoxomoxoa album. Griffin was also a genuine seeker, drawing concepts as well as images from esoteric sources like Manly P. Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages, and fusing these with psychedelic metaphysics and an ambiance of humor and dread typified by his legendary “flying eyeballs” vision. Taking Griffin’s esotericism seriously, this chapter will show how Griffin’s art intertwined with his concerns with the occult, carnality, judgment, and the soul, and how tensions visible in his work led to his conversion to Christianity in the early 1970s, at the peak of the counter-cultural Jesus Movement.
An earlier version of this essay appeared under the title, “Rick Griffin, Superstar,” in HiLobrow (July 24-25, 2012). Consult that piece for additional images: https://www.hilobrow.com/2012/07/24/pop-arcana-6/.
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Notes
- 1.
Doug Harvey, Heart and Torch: Rick Griffin’s Transcendence. (Laguna Beach, Ca.: Laguna Art Museum, 2007), 10.
- 2.
Patrick Rosenkranz, ed., “The Rick Griffin Interviews,” The Comics Journal, 257 (December 2003): 82.
- 3.
Ted Owen, High Art: A History of the Psychedelic Poster (London: Sanctuary Publishing, 1999), 76.
- 4.
Harvey, Heart and Torch, 126.
- 5.
Ibid, 33.
- 6.
Eric King, “Some words on BG-105, Rick Griffin’s ‘Eyeball,’” 1996, http://www.therose7.com/eyeball.htm.
- 7.
Again, you can think of this usage as appropriation or appreciation or both; like many Haight Street heads, Griffin had great respect for Native American cosmology as well as the peyote religion. For more on the complex and sometimes mutually beneficial relationship between hippies and Indians, see Sherry L. Smith, Hippies, Indians and the Fight for Red Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
- 8.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 237.
- 9.
Brad Barrett, “Motorskill Tripping with Brad Barrett: ‘Griffin Gave us an Evil-eye Fleegle, and it Scared the Shit Out of Me,” Encyclopedia of Surfing, July 15 2018, https://eos.surf/2018/07/15/motorskill-tripping-with-brad-barrett-griffin-gave-us-an-evil-eye-fleegle-and-it-scared-the-shit-out-of-me/.
- 10.
Rosenkranz, “The Rick Griffin Interviews,” 65.
- 11.
See Alexander van der Haven, “God as Hypothesis: Daniel Paul Schreber and the Study of Religion,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion: Working Papers from Hanover, ed. Steffen Führding (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2017), 176-198.
- 12.
Nicholas Graham Platt, “How did the lightbulb become associated with a new idea?”, Medium.com, February 13, 2016, https://medium.com/navigo/how-did-the-lightbulb-become-associated-with-a-new-idea-1dce1b6d648.
- 13.
The Euphrates, “The Checkered Flooring,” Freemason Information, March 7, 2009, https://freemasoninformation.com/banks-of-the-euphrates/the-checkered-flooring/.
- 14.
Rosenkranz, “The Rick Griffin Interviews,” 70.
- 15.
Rosenkranz, “The Rick Griffin Interviews,” 63.
- 16.
For more on this, see Tanya Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (New York: Vintage, 2012).
- 17.
Robert S. Ellwood, One Way: The Jesus Movement and Its Meaning (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 31-32.
- 18.
Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (New York: Penguin, 2009), 99.
- 19.
Rosenkranz, “The Rick Griffin Interviews,” 71.
- 20.
Rosenkranz, “The Rick Griffin Interviews,” 84.
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Davis, E. (2023). The Flying Eyeball: The Mythopoetics of Rick Griffin. In: Odorisio, D.M. (eds) A New Gnosis. Contemporary Religion and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20127-1_5
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