Gnosis, a well-crafted, quarterly magazine subtitled ``A Journal of
the Western Inner Traditions,'' has been one of the brighter lights
in the alternative publishing firmament for the last decade, with
its paid circulation now reaching 16,000-17,000. Although it emphasizes the exploration of the Western spiritual traditions, Gnosis
has often included self-reflective or critical, at times even
heretical, perspectives usually avoided by the spiritual press--making it a magazine that even atheists can find interesting. Jay
Kinney, widely known for his Young Lust Comics and Anarchy Comics
published by Last Gasp, as well as for his editing stint at Stewart
Brand's Co-Evolution Quarterly/Whole Earth Review, is the founder
and publisher of Gnosis magazine. Subscriptions to Gnosis are
$20/year. Sample copies are available for $7 + $2 postage from:
Gnosis magazine, POB 14217, San Francisco, CA 94114. The Gnosis
email address is: gnosis@well.com. And you can check out the web
page for Jay Kinney's Private Clinic of Cultural Collision at:
http://www.well.com/user/jay. This interview took place in San
Francisco in August, 1995.
Jason McQuinn: Can you tell me what your idea was when you first started Gnosis? How it came to you and what made you decide to go ahead with the project and think it was really going to be feasible? What were the first steps you took to do it?
Jay Kinney: Well, at the time that the idea occurred to me I was working at Whole Earth Review, which at the time was called Co-Evolution Quarterly. That was a similar case where one person, in that instance, Stewart Brand, got an idea for a publication (the Whole Earth Catalog) that he wanted to read and nobody else was doing. So he set out to do it and it really took off. He developed the Point Foundation as a non-profit entity from that, and started doing Co-Evolution Quarterly as a quarterly edition of the catalog.
When I got the idea for Gnosis it was about 1981 actually. I just mulled over the idea for a year, and about the time that I was thinking of proceeding to start the magazine, Stewart suggested I edit CQ. At that point there was one other editor, and the trip with Co-Evolution was to alternate issues. One editor (the other one was Art Kleiner) would take one issue and I'd take the other issue and we'd alternate. Because this was a 140-page magazine with no ads, so it was a really thick book to have to come out with every three months. And that way one editor could be planning out their issue and getting material together, while the other one was doing the present issue. So as it turned out, right at that time, Stewart got the computer bug and sold Doubleday on doing a Whole Earth Software Catalog and got a $1 million advance and pumped all this money through the operation, and as a related venture decided to start the Whole Earth Software Review. Basically all Art Kleiner's and Stewart's attention went over to the software review which was also going to be quarterly. I ended up editing Co-Evolution for four issues out of five, which was a lot of work. By the time that run was over, and I had guest edited part of another issue prior to that. I had done about six issues in a year and a half. I felt ready to start a publication that was more my own vision, instead of just trying to duplicate Stewart's vision which was basically what you had to do if you were editing Co-Evolution. I partly used Whole Earth as a model, which was probably not the best idea since they're always in financial crisis. So it was perhaps the moral thing to do, but financially not the wisest. My wife, Dixie, and I set up a non-profit, public-supported, charitable educational entity, the Lumen Foundation, because basically I didn't want to do the magazine as a business. I figured if I set this up as a non-profit, it would prevent my getting it into my mind that I was going to build this up and sell if off, which is the typical thing that founders of magazines do. They'll build it up and find some corporate publisher, and the original founders will make a killing and the magazine gets sold to Ziff-Davis or something and declines after that.
I had a very clear idea of what the idea of what the magazine would look like, what it would read like, the style, the possible contributors. I had worked that out in my mind for a couple years at least before I got going on it, so it was pretty fleshed out and fully formed.
JM: Did you run your ideas by people to get reactions ahead of time?
JK: I did in some cases. I had a small network of correspondents who I'd float ideas by and they offered advice. Most of them ended up on the masthead as contributing editors to Gnosis.
JM: Did you run the idea of the magazine by other publishers to see what they thought as far as its feasibility or likely success was concerned?
JK: I didn't too much because at that time there wasn't the whole exploding phenomenon of zines and small magazines the way there is now. There was a group of small magazine publishers like the Yoga Journal, Medical Self-Care, Zyzzyva (which was a literary magazine starting up at that time), and Yellow Silk, Shaman's Drum. Yoga Journal is like the old, experienced grandaddy in that group. There were a lot of publishers that were just beginning right around the same time. And the people from Yoga Journal spearheaded some meetings of small publishers and would-be publishers. I think we started meeting prior to our first issue, so I think I did trade some advice with other small publishers, but we were mostly all in the same boat.
In the early days I definitely did with Timothy White at Shaman's Drum. By happenstance his first issue came out like three months before our first issue and they had a very similar look. Shaman's Drum was more narrowly confined to shamanism, but I felt like we were kindred publications. And since he was three months ahead of me, I would always ask him advice because he would have just done something I was about to do and I could see if it worked for him or not. That was really helpful.
But much of it was just my own instinct that Gnosis was a magazine I wanted to read. No one else was doing it. I could imagine it working in the same way as when Bill Griffith and I came up with the idea of Young Lust Comics; it just seemed obvious that there would be an audience for it. The same with Anarchy Comics. It just had that same feeling for me. You know, it was like: This wants to happen. There are people that would be looking for it. I want to do it. You know, let's do it. You can't necessarily say that's logical because it's not necessarily based on market research and all the usual things that large publishers do. But it was my intuition that this was a workable publication and even if we only got one issue out, I'd be happy just to do that.
JM: So when you did start Gnosis did you have any particular intention to publish it forever, publish it for twenty years, or...?
JK: The thing is I did have the intention, if at all possible, to have it work as a life-raft for myself and possibly a few other friends. Because at the time, in the early eighties, when I was thinking about the magazine, underground comics--which I had mainly been doing in the seventies--had reached this nadir. There was no way practically speaking that I could make a living just doing underground comics. Also a lot of the spirit had gone out of the comics for me for a variety of reasons I won't get into.
In any event, I did want to make it work, and I could potentially picture Gnosis ten or twenty years into the future. And I still can. It's been ten years now and it's not hard for me to imagine it going another ten years at this point. The topics that we cover continue to interest me. A lot of it does run on will-power and nervous energy, and the determination of the staff and myself, but I think there's still enthusiasm there and momentum. So I see it continuing.
A lot of decisions I made were based on trying to look farther than just the next issue. I think a lot of people who get into small magazine publishing want to see their magazine happen but they don't think it fully through. You know, it's like, ``Look here, what would be a good price to charge for this?'' Well they look around at other magazines on a newsstand and they pick a price that feels good to them. That's not the way to do it. Because first and foremost you have to figure out what is the printer going to charge me? What is the distributor going to give me? And if this issue only sells 50% of the copies, how much money am I going to get back from the distributor and how much am I going to have to pay the printer? And if you don't estimate those things correctly, chances are you're never going to see a second issue.
JM: So you felt like when you started Gnosis you had a pretty good idea about all the potential problems you were going to be running into and had thought about everything a bit, especially with your experience in comics and from editing Co-Evolution Quarterly?
JK: Yeah. That definitely helped. And there were also printers who had been working with comics. There was one quarterly publication, Weirdo, which Robert Crumb was editing here in town. I knew the printer who was doing the covers for Weirdo and he had done a lot of other underground comics covers as well, and he had color presses. Upstairs in the same building was another printer who did the guts for underground comics. So there were printers in place who knew this format, which was basically 8½x11, because that was what Weirdo had been. And I just took the same grade of paper, same black-and-white insides, same colored cover on the outside, and transferred that over to Gnosis. My thinking was, and I think it still makes sense, that if the grooves are already cut and in place from some other publication or somebody doing something that people are used to, it's much easier for you to just follow suit. Because it's a format that's recognized.
If we had tried to do it all in newsprint with a newsprint cover that would have been cheaper, but it would have been horrible with distributors because all of the covers would have gotten torn and been trashed during shipping. By having a color cover it had credibility with newsstand distributors. So that's what I aimed for. I basically lifted the format from Weirdo, using the same printers. In the case of our first cover, we even ganged up in printing with Last Gasp, who were printing three comics covers at the same time, and we just took the fourth slot. That enabled us to do the covers for the first issue for just $500 for 5,000 copies. Whereas if we had to pay the whole print run it would have run $2,000. I think we ganged up at least another time or two. And that's one possibility for other small publishers to look into: ganging up cover print runs with other publishers.
JM: When you were getting ready to put out your first issue of Gnosis, I'm sure it was a very anxious time trying to take care of all of the details and everything, did you have any vision or ideas on how you were going to promote it to really make a big splash to get people to buy it right away and make it a success immediately.
JK: I was basically winging it. My idea was we'll print 5,000, we'll try to get half of them out on the newsstands, and we'll send the other 2,500 as a promotional first issue to a few mailing lists of people who might be interested in the magazine. You know, ``Please subscribe, here's a free copy of the first issue.'' Actually, in retrospect and in observing other magazines doing that, I think that's a lousy way to promote your magazine. And it didn't really work that well for us. We didn't get scores of subscriptions from free copies we sent out.
The problem is that basically you're satiating their appetite instead of building it up. If I get a free copy of a magazine in the mail, my own psychology is: ``Great, they sent me a free copy; maybe they'll send me a free copy of the next issue.'' So it actually dampens your ardor to subscribe to the magazine. But we tried that. And we started out doing the magazine just twice a year, largely because it was all volunteer. When we began we only had enough money to get the first issue printed. I had a thousand dollars that I'd saved up. And we had a couple of fund-raising parties where we got friends together who were interested in the possibility of the magazine happening and encouraged them to take out advanced subscriptions or donate fifty bucks. We raised I think $2,200 that way, so we had $3,200 to begin with for the first issue, including postage for mailing out half the copies, printer production costs and what-not.
And because we came out twice a year, I was able to get a few of the alternative distributors who had popped up the few years prior to Gnosis coming out, to take the magazine and pay us from sales of the magazine before the second issue came out. Because it was out on the stands long enough that it sold out before six months were over so they could pay us in advance before the second issue. We had that arrangement with a few distributors for the first two years. The first four issues were every six months. And by that time we had built up the print run to more like 8,000. And it just pulled itself up by the bootstraps that way. That was a bit of luck, that was due to that time and place. I don't know that I could go in and start a magazine from scratch in that same way now with those same distributors and have that same fortuitous arrangement with them.
Getting that first issue out was incredibly stressful. I really did not understand what stress was until I started putting Gnosis out. You know, there had always been deadlines at Whole Earth. And, we'd work half through the night to try to meet a deadline, and it had been hard work and stressful. But for that first issue of Gnosis the printer who was doing the cover was way out in Hunter's Point, in the heart of this ghetto, and was amazingly slow. It just took him weeks to get around to doing the cover. Here I was trying to coordinate to have him do the cover while the guts were being done at this other printer, so that the two could be bound together without having the guts sitting around for a few weeks. That was totally nerve-wracking. And meanwhile the cover printer supposedly got his thumb mashed in the press and that's why he couldn't get it printed for another couple weeks. It was sort of like a nightmare. But over time I learned to just let it go. If it's gonna work it's gonna work, and I can't babysit every single detail.
JM: I'm sure, too, with the first issue, like once it's printed, then you're worried about: Is someone going to buy all these copies? Did you go out and monitor the bookstores just to make sure they were going, or do any promotion to get people to notice them in bookstores?
JK: Not really. At the beginning we did do much more with individual bookstores in the Bay Area, and tried to deal with them directly. Shambala over on Telegraph in Berkeley, took a good number and they sold out and took more. I think they were taking a hundred copies and selling them. Minerva Books, which was another metaphysical bookstore down in Palo Alto, also dealt with us directly. So I would sort of monitor them on that level. Our distributor in the Bay Area is Serendipity and they have a puzzling attitude towards distribution, to say the least. It was just hopeless to try to look over their shoulder too much. I simply had to learn that if it's gonna sell it's gonna sell and my fretting over it is not going to be the deciding factor.
JM: Have you had ups and downs in sales of individual issues, depending upon what's been on the cover, or anything like that?
JK: That's really hard to track. Because there are a number of variables. One is the cover art. Another is that each issue is a different theme. So for instance if an issue sells well, is it because of the cover art, or is it because of the theme, or is it both of them, or is it neither of them? Or is it because somebody wanted to read an interview with somebody inside? There's all this lore about which colors sell and which don't, but it's very hard to track that. Generally our sales don't fluctuate that much. There may be a fluctuation of about a thousand copies between our best-sellers and not-so-good-sellers. Ironically, it sometimes seemed like issues we thought would be most commercial and popular, like an issue on ``The Body'' with body-related, health-related stuff, well, that seemed like it should have a wide audience. But it was only so-so for us. Apparently people look to Gnosis for certain things, and if they can find it copiously elsewhere, why do they need it from us? So I think that often when we concentrate on the more esoteric areas where we do best, that's the most popular with the readers.
JM: Has your editorial focus changed and your ideas about the focus changed over the years. Or is it still pretty similar to what you started with?
JK: It's evolved slightly, but it's pretty similar. The original notion was that there's value to these various spiritual traditions, particularly their esoteric and more hidden aspects. These deserve to be discussed and they potentially have value for somebody who wants to pursue them. I didn't particularly differentiate one as being better than another, so we have coverage on neo-paganism, but also of Jewish mysticism, the Sufis, the alchemists and so on. The overriding premise was of covering Western spiritual traditions, mainly because that was where my interests and experience lay. There were already magazines out there like Yoga Journal or East/West whose primary focus was on Eastern spiritual traditions. And I felt like no one was doing for Western spiritual traditions what was out there for the Eastern paths. So that was the premise of the magazine, and that pretty much remains the premise.
We did try to distinguish ourselves and distance ourselves from New Age from the beginning. I felt that most New Age stuff was incredibly sentimental, and mushy and soft-headed. It just didn't appeal to me. Even though that was the niche that the magazine was being put into on the newsstands, next to Body/Mind/Spirit, or New Age Journal, or Sedona Magazine, or whatever. My feeling was that most of the people involved with new age had an uncritical attitude where it was sort of like: ``everything is great; it's bad to criticize or judge anybody else; let's just sort of boost each other.'' It's a back-slapping milieu. I kept Gnosis at a distance from all that, much to the frustration of some PR flacks. I have gotten a little more mellow on that of late, since I've actually run into some ideas and some people involved in the New Age arena that I can see some value in. So we're a little less at a distance from New Age circles--by maybe 5 degrees. We're also writing a bit more about Eastern traditions, especially in terms of parallels between the East and the West. We've run a number of articles in the last couple of years that deal with ideas or practices coming out of Taoism, and so on. But, you know, my general interest has always been to try to dig more deeply into these ideas than just what's on the surface. And sometimes when you do that there are contradictions that arise. I think it's interesting to explore those and see if this is ultimately crazy or is there a way in which this makes sense? We continue to do that.
JM: Obviously it's worked well for you. For other people who are starting magazines, is that something that you'd recommend, picking a really broad but relatively unexplored subject for editorial material and going into different aspects of it with each issue focussing like that? Is that a general type of thing that works?
JK: I think it can. Some of the best zines that have become reasonably successful seem to do that. The most notorious example--and it's sort of a strange one--is Answer Me. They had a very strong editorial stance and personality. And they had theme issues. And I think they've basically dug themselves into a hole. But I picked up the first three issues, because it was like, ``hmmm, these people are really intent on what they're doing, and they've got some good writing in here, and it just registers.'' I think what we don't need are another dozen chaotic zines that have a zillion articles on bands and one-page interviews in eight-point type. I'm glad they're all out there and I enjoy some of them, but I think a lot of them are jumping on the bandwagon, and the editorial concept behind them is driven by that. It's not a field that I would suggest getting into just for the sake of trying to make money, or thinking: ``Oh I want to put out a magazine; I don't know what it is; I'll pick an idea.''
JM: I'm also curious about when you started Gnosis. Obviously you've got some background in comics. You've got a design/visual component to what you wanted to do. And it's turned out fairly strong in Gnosis. How much were you thinking about how the dialectic--the relationship--between the literary content and visual content was going to affect how the magazine was produced and received?
JK: To me they're totally interrelated and integrated. I have a relatively conservative attitude towards magazine design, which is that if you're running an article, you want the reader to read the article. The point of putting out a magazine is to have the reader read the magazine. That's number one. So all of the design of Gnosis has been subordinated to this notion of what is going to be attractive and readable and look good at the same time. I think that a lot of publication design of the last five years in particular has been in the opposite direction, which is what is going to get the art director off. And what is going to win him or her design awards, or establish a reputation for having used Quark or Photoshop in the most bizarre, unexpected way. Well, that's an interesting motivation, but that runs counter to making a magazine readable. Particularly these days with a lot of people not bothering to read anymore at all, it's important to just make something attractive.
I have such strong opinions on this that it's sometimes been a real challenge for our art directors who have been with us the longest time. One was Becky Wilson who was our original art director for the first eight or so issues and that covered the first three or four years of the magazine. She really set the look for the magazine. She was very good with our totally minimal budget and with the very early versions of Pagemaker which were very rudimentary--getting a good-looking journal out of that. More recently, the art director we've had the last three years, David Gilmore, has also been a whiz at pulling together good design under pressure. In the middle period we had a number of different art directors sometimes only lasting one or two issues, and another who lasted for four issues, where it was more problematic. I have very strong design ideas about what looks good for Gnosis and what reads well, so the art director has to be very interactive with me. And that just encroaches too much on the turf of some art directors, where their design decisions are law. True, we've got a magazine with only four or five people on staff, and it has to be basically cooperative. But at root it ultimately is my vision, and if something just doesn't sit right with me, or if I've slept on it a few nights and it still makes me cringe, then I'm not going to run it.
JM: Even if everybody else wants to?
JK: Sometimes. It's a process of compromise. Most of the compromising probably occurs between Richard Smoley, the editor, and me. And we've basically learned over time just to: ``Okay, I'll give you this one if you give me that one.'' A sort of mutual giving-up at a certain point. One thing I learned from Stewart Brand (and it ran counter to what was politically-correct), was that if you have a strong vision of a publication and you're the upholder of that, you should stick to your guns. A magazine staff is not necessarily a democracy, and it isn't necessarily a collective endeavor at all times in all instances. It should be cooperative as much as possible, and ours is relatively non-hierarchical compared to many. But I just saw too many underground publications in the '70s collapse under their own weight from trying to do collective decision-making that led to endless meetings, and maybe six months down the line then you'd get the issue out.
JM: Do you think a collective editorship is a bad idea, or just only works in certain instances, like only if you've got a good editorial focus first...?
JK: I think it works if you've got a real strong editorial focus that the editors agree on. And even then probably some people are going to be stronger on one thing than another, so informal areas of responsibility arise. I don't reject it out of hand. It's just that I think there was a period in the '70s where it wasn't righteous if it wasn't collective. And I just opted out of that notion. I was involved in a few political activist groups, and one or two graphic design situations where we tried to run it that way.
That wasn't so much the model for Gnosis, since I was the one who got seized by the bright idea, and nobody else. I was able to communicate that to Becky. And for instance the first year or two it was more or less just Becky and me, with some additional assistance from Dixie. And we did, I would say, arrive at a consensus on what we were going to do. Becky was very strong in arguing her viewpoint, and she would ultimately convince me half the time when she thought differently than me that she was right. It was a two-way street.
JM: Mentioning politics, what about politics and Gnosis? Have you learned some things or been surprised by things along the line? I know when you started that you had a fairly strong idea that leftist or anarchist or radical circles were not paying enough attention to some of the contributions that spiritual traditions have made to the political process. Has that changed or do you still feel the same way about that?
JK: Yes and no. As you recall in our correspondence about anarchism and spirituality (circa 1989), by the end of our discussion, my attitude was basically that the anarchist movement could go its own way, thank you very much, and I would go mine. I think in general my attitude was that a lot of anarchists were in fact epistemological fascists in their perspective on religion. This then flowed over into their attitude towards spirituality where they did not grant other people the validity of their own subjective reality. If somebody had a mystical experience which for them meant that the universe had a cosmology that made sense for them and gave a certain unifed meaning to their life--if it didn't meet certain political criteria then anarchists would trash it. So I felt like: later, for this!
Also I came to the conclusion that the anarchist movement, as far as I could see, was not successfully dealing with its own wild cards, which was my term for it. A few people were running amok, but because their politics were more revolutionary than thou, they weren't called on it. There was a lot of self-destructive stuff going on.
So my notion with Gnosis was in a way apolitical. It was not, ``Okay, we're going to have a magazine that has an implicit or under-the-surface radical political intent.'' The notion was, ``Here are these subjects that interest me that I'm exploring, that other people are exploring. There are people involved in this that can be considered left, that can be considered right, that are sort of all over the spectrum.'' I pulled back from making initial value-judgements based on where are the politics of the people involved.
So, for instance, you get something like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which is this famous magickal group at the turn of the century that Aleister Crowley was part of for a while and that Yeats was a member of, as well as a number of other Edwardian literary types. Yeats had some Irish nationalist politics that had a sort of fascist tinge. Well, does one use that then to criticize the Golden Dawn? Is it relevant in fact? I think those are interesting issues. My approach was to not dismiss out of hand something like the Golden Dawn, just because somebody like Yeats was involved in it and because he falls on the wrong side of somebody's line that they've drawn across the political spectrum.
I think there's been a radical intent to the magazine to the degree that most of the traditions that we're writing about, the esoteric traditions, usually have been in one form or another considered heretical and in opposition to the main institutional expressions of religion. And I think there's a connection there with individual spiritual experiences and standing up for that and defining your own spiritual reality, as opposed to just accepting some dogma that's fed to you. But at the same time, I'll stick up for the Christian mythos, that symbol system and those stories, as potentially meaningful and useful to someone. In my mind I'm able to distinguish that from dealing up lies to support the pope or something.
Whereas I think a lot of leftists, it's all like one monolithic unit to them. It's like, ``Oh well, Christianity oppressed the pagans, the Inquisition was horrible, and the church sold indulgences, and the Spanish conquerors did a number on the Aztecs, therefore Christianity is a bucket of shit.'' To me that can apply to anything across the spectrum including anarchism. I mean, Bakunin was a flaming anti-Semite. How do we deal with that? To me it's possible to pluck the good value out of a tradition or a set of myths and separate that from the obvious abuses that have arisen out of them.
JM: In general, for the people who are interested in Gnosis and those Western traditions, is that readership just totally spread out over the spectrum with no necessary connections that you can see? Or is it polarized between people who congregate on certain traditions on the right and others on the left? Or are a lot of people non-political?
JK: I've rarely gotten a good sense of where the readership can be said to stand politically. I think it's in several different clusters. I think there are people who do identify with more orthodox traditions and expressions of, say, Christianity and Judaism, for instance. And then there are people who identify with more occult, magical, neo-pagan traditions and material. Those two groups often perceive themselves as somewhat in opposition to each other. The point of the magazine, in a sense, is to say there's some interesting ideas and practices here of value, there's some interesting material over here of value, let's look at the whole range. So I try not to identify with only one sector of the readership.
There are a lot of interesting dilemmas that arise. For instance, several years back we did an issue on ``The Dark Side'' which was consciously trying to confront and look at some of the shadowy undercurrents within esoteric and occult circles and traditions. And we ran a couple of different articles on Julius Evola. Well, Evola, when all is said and done, is a fascist Italian who was also an expert in esoteric traditions and European paganism and had a very sophisticated understanding of Tantra, of Hermetic tradition, of a lot of the subject areas that we deal with. So, one of the people who I'd been in contact with was this old gent in his seventies in England who was a former Anglican missionary. He was enthusiastic about Evola and had proposed writing an article about him. So I said, ``Well, okay, go ahead, make your case for him. Make the best case you can.'' Then to balance that I got in touch with an Italian scholar who I hoped could dig more into what was the bad side of Evola. As it turned out what he delivered was damning enough, but it was probably not as balanced in the opposite direction from the English gent as it could have been. But at that time, it was sort of like, well, we've got a deadline in a month and a half. This has to go to the printer. This is the best we've got. We're dealing with both people by airmail where it takes at least two weeks at best to hear back and forth. So we ran what we had, imperfect as it was. And my sense of design was, ``okay, let's have strong graphics that are reminiscent of fascist design.'' And we got Mark Zingarelli who does very strong black-and-white art, who was working for The Rocket in Seattle, to do these pictures based on photos of Evola. It was in the context of--we weren't saying this guy is great--this is the dark side. You ought to look at this. You ought to be aware of it. And this guy is a hero to the neo-fascist youth in Italy today. What can this mean? It was asking questions. We weren't able to answer them all. So then, later Gnosis got accused of lionizing Evola, which to my mind was kneejerk criticism.
In any event I think there's a tendency among the left that if anybody publishes anything that raises some of these questions or attempts to look somewhat objectively at some of these speakers, then that's implicitly supporting the right. And by the same token I think there are a lot of conservative Christians who view the magazine as a tool of the devil or whatever. So my attitude is we're going to do what interests us and let 'em gripe. Because my perspective at this point is there are some good things on the left, there are some good things on the right. I don't particularly identify with one or the other. And to me both of them have really fallen prey to ideological arteriosclerosis. If there's going to be any substantial political change that occurs in the future, it's probably going to be from a new direction altogether. We will see. In any case, I find it amusing and entertaining to sometimes run material that's going to push somebody's button.
JM: You don't think that there's going to be any radical political change in the future that is necessarily going to be motivated from any significant and largely spiritual direction?
JK: Well, generally--I wrote about this in Gnosis--I think most attempts to wed spirituality and politics are barking up the wrong tree. What usually occurs is that the spiritual aspect becomes subordinated to the political. To me the value of the spiritual is that it is dealing with the deep issues in one's own personal life and in one's own relation to the totality of Creation, of the Universe. So to my mind one's perspective on that, or one's impression of things, or what one considers true or believes to be the case comes prior to political ideologies. Whereas I think a lot of people who are involved in political movements--most of whom put spiritual issues totally on the back burner if they deal with them at all, or basically have a hostile attitude towards spiritual matters--their political ideology has in effect become their religion. They have an attitude of, ``Well, if your spirituality agrees with our ideology, fine, you can work with us. But if it doesn't, get lost.'' To me that's too compromising in terms of one's spirituality. So, I don't know.
I've made an attempt a few times to think it through, and there was a gathering that occurred out here a few years ago that some local pagans and anarchists put together. A number of us gave semi-extemporaneous talks there. I was still trying to make the case basically for people involved in anti-authoritarian politics to stay open to alternative spiritualities. But I've really come to the perspective that they're either going to or not, and why plead with them to do so? Things like liberation theology strike me as the worst of both worlds. Liberation theology is this really crass Marxism translated into crude Christian terms and....
JM: Are you speaking of liberation theology in South America?
JK: Yeah, primarily, but North American cheerleaders for it also. It takes this simplistic notion of the base and superstructure, transfers it over into biblical terms and identifies Latin American peasants with the Hebrews of the Old Testament and it just becomes this unconvincing mish-mosh. Then what do they do? They end up supporting some Marxist-Leninist liberation group or something. I fail to get enthusiastic over it. I think generally I'd be unable to get too enthusiastic over an anarchist variant on that either. Because my thinking is that what's of most value in human attempts to work things out is the good will that someone brings to the effort to tackle the problem. And they may have a set of beliefs that locate them on the left or on the right. Maybe they, for whatever reason, believe that the free market is the best venue for human freedom. There are a lot of these ``libertarians'' out there who have this perspective, that's associated traditionally with the right. And somebody else might feel strongly that some form of social democracy, the welfare state, is the way to go. Now, if they both come together in some, let us say, ritual for honoring the Earth, to my mind that ritual ideally should be able to encompass both those people, because if they're both--out of good will--wanting to have Nature be undamaged, in the context of that ritual, fine, let them come together and voice that desire and express it. Then in other contexts, in political ones or economic ones, let them go at it and contend. But I'm wary of people that have their politics and their spirituality too neatly intermeshed. Because then there's no stopping them. Then they're sure to be certain that they're right.
JM: How about your approach to spirituality yourself? Do you think it's changed over the years in dealing with Gnosis and the things you've explored? Do you have any different values or any different focus on what's potentially important with that now than when you started?
JK: Well, yes and no. When I started I basically had two different circles of friends, both of whom helped support the magazine originally coming out. One I would characterize basically as gnostics who identified primarily with early gnostic Christianity, which is this alternative mythos from traditional Christianity. And then the other set of folks were more oriented towards magic and Western Hermeticism. I'd say as time has gone on I've become less interested in the magic part of the equation. Largely out of my observation that many of the people, I won't say all of them, who are most fascinated with magic can be hard to get along with and their egos become identified with the figure of the grand magician. It just doesn't interest me that much. At the same time I've become a little played out on doctrinaire gnosticism. The perspective that's probably been of most interest me the last three or four years has been Sufism.
In terms of the magazine and in terms of my own perspective, I can view these different perspectives and traditions as simultaneously valid and true. I have this informally worked out in a way that allows space for all of them. Somebody could sit down and say, ``Okay let's methodically go through this. If you believe in this how can you believe in this? Doesn't this contradict this?'' On some level that's true, particularly in terms of the exoteric belief systems. But in terms of experience, the core of those traditions is speaking about the same thing. So many of those contradictions end up being semantic differences, or differences of the language used or the posture taken regarding experiences which are in fact shared across the board. I try not to let my own belief system at any given moment shape the magazine too strongly. Because the magazine is essentially non-sectarian. It's not pushing one tradition over another and other people involved with the magazine have other interests as well. When I started the magazine I didn't view it as a sort of stalking horse for gnosticism. I tried to differentiate it from being a gnostic organ. And I certainly don't view it as being a Sufi magazine at this point.
JM: So, for people who are encountering the magazine, what would you hope would be the most important thing that they'd get out of it, or value that they'd get out of it?
JK: Well, there are a couple things. One would be the premise that ``tradition'' in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Gnosis takes what some people consider a conservative stance, which is that there's value in these traditions. And that, in and of itself is enough to make a lot of people grind their teeth. That was my personal experience. And that was what I wanted to explore with the magazine.
So the first thing is basically saying to people, ``These things that you were brought up with or that seem to come from farther back in your heritage, there is interesting and valuable material hidden away in there that is worth re-exploring.'' It's not necessarily saying that if you were raised Catholic that you have to return to the Catholic Church. To my mind that might be counterproductive. But it's saying if the nuns whacked your knuckles with a ruler when you were nine, and you're now in your forties, get over it! And it might be worth seeing if Thomas Merton had some valuable insights into how to live a meaningful life. That's one thing, it's basically to rediscover the West's own spiritual traditions.
And the second thing would be that it supports people's own experience of spiritual reality and encourages them to think for themselves and not just accept somebody else's word in characterizing what is true. In that sense I think it's still an anti-authoritarian project in some sense.
And I think that the third inherent message is that there is some underlying Unity that all these different traditions are referring to, using different language or being clothed in different symbol systems or myths. And that this underlying Unity or Reality has a palpable experiential dimension that is accessible. And that many of these traditions in fact provide methodologies for accessing that. That's it basically.
And keep an open mind. That's the other thing. Don't jump to conclusions. Think things through and have a critical intelligence at work.
JM: I'm curious if there's any major thing in the whole experience of the magazine from inception to present day that if you could have done differently now, would hindsight have made any big differences? Major mistakes that could have been avoided or....
JK: It's hard for me to come up with any. It seems like at any given juncture we did what had to be done. I'd be happier if certain business aspects had been worked out earlier in more detail, but we learned as we went along, and I'm really hard pressed to point to anything.
JM: Sounds good. So basically it's been a successful experience...on a lot of different levels, as a business as a...?
JK: Yes, for me it's been a much more gratifying experience, than, say, underground comics was. Because with underground comics ultimately, there was never a point in that trajectory where I didn't feel like we weren't being hideously underpaid, and year by year losing whatever audience we had built up. And it just sort of felt like my enthusiasm was leached away step by step.
With this it's been sort of the opposite direction. It's built over time. I have more sense of having appreciative readers. And every now and then, somebody calls up and tells us it's been this incredible influence in their life. Well that to me is gratifying and I never got that kind of feedback from doing comics.
JM: And it sounds like it's been a good experience too on the level of the local community and the support you've gotten, to have friends that have become contributing editors for the magazine.
JK: Yeah, it's been good. You know, I'd say probably if I have one regret and it's one I've continued to struggle with, it's been to what degree it takes up so much of my time and attention. That makes it a sort of ongoing challenge in terms of friendships and relationships. People I used to see regularly before the magazine and in the early years, I hardly see now. And I sort of regret that. Also I'm basically a sort of introverted artist/writer type who prefers hanging out by himself at the keyboard and the magazine forces me every day to go into the office and be a manager, and deal with all these people on the phone and the other people on the staff. That goes a bit counter to my root personality. So it's been good for drawing me out. It's forced me to deal with the real world and solve real-world problems. But at the end of the day, I sort of feel like, ``Put me in an isolation tank or something.'' I would say that's the main vein in which I wish it were a little different.
JM: Just one last question, I guess. Do you have any new directions you want to go in? Or anything else related to the magazine that you want to do?
JK: Well, not too much. In some sense I'm a sort of an idiot-savant. I can put out a good magazine. But that doesn't make me feel like getting into radio or something. I don't think that would be my strong point. Richard Smoley and I are likely to do a book together on Western spiritual traditions. That's sort of in the works. And we'll probably have more presence on the Internet on-line. Stay tuned.
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Updated: 9/4/2000