Matt Henry
Matt Henry
Season of the Witch is a blackly comedic fictional tale that draws on the madcap history of 1960s counterculture. This was a period, after all, that saw a collective of now famous, acid-dropping activists that included Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, and Abbie Hoffman attempt to ‘levitate’ the Pentagon in protest at the Vietnam War. The occult significance of the five-sided design of this U.S Department of Defence building had not been lost on their artist friend Michael Bowen, who insisted that its pentagram-like structure made it representative of all the evil forces at work in the world. They agreed to make it ‘orange and vibrate until all evil emissions had fled’.Read more
The symbolic ritual conducted at the Pentagon on October 21, 1967 may have failed in its attempts to defy the laws of physics but it did form part of a 50,000 strong demonstration they had organised — the March on the Pentagon – that is remembered as one of the most significant anti-war demonstrations of the era. Michael Bowen trucked in 200 pounds of flowers and gave them out to the crowd, resulting in the now iconic photograph of a young protestor placing a carnation into a soldier’s rifle. Season of the Witch is a celebration of the silliness, the playfulness, and the mayhem that the Sixties counterculture wrought in concert with a more serious desire to end a war that ultimately cost up to three million lives.
