San Francisco Oracle - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Oracle of the City of San Francisco, also known as the San Francisco Oracle, was an underground newspaper published in 12 issues from September 20, 1966, to February 1968 in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of that city. Allen Cohen

Allen Cohen (poet)

Allen Cohen was an American poet. Born in 1940 in Brooklyn, New York, he attended Brooklyn College and then moved to San Francisco in 1963. There, he founded and edited the San Francisco Oracle underground newspaper, which was published from 1966 to 1968...

(1940–2004), the editor during the paper's most vibrant period, and Michael Bowen

Michael Bowen (artist)

Michael Bowen was an American fine artist known as one of the co-founders of the late 20th and 21st century Visionary art movements...

, the art director, were among the founders of the publication. The Oracle was an early member of the Underground Press Syndicate

Underground Press Syndicate

The Underground Press Syndicate, commonly known as UPS, and later known as the Alternative Press Syndicate or APS, was a network of countercultural newspapers and magazines formed in mid-1966 by the publishers of five early underground papers: the East Village Other, the Los Angeles Free Press, the...

.

The Oracle combined poetry, spirituality, and multicultural interests with psychedelic

Psychedelic

The term psychedelic is derived from the Greek words ψυχή and δηλοῦν , translating to "soul-manifesting". A psychedelic experience is characterized by the striking perception of aspects of one's mind previously unknown, or by the creative exuberance of the mind liberated from its ostensibly...

design, reflecting and shaping the countercultural

Counterculture

Counterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior...

community as it developed in the Haight-Ashbury. It was arguably the outstanding example of psychedelia within the countercultural "underground" press, noted for experimental multicolored design. Oracle contributors included many significant San Francisco–area artists of the time, including Bruce Conner

Bruce Conner

Bruce Conner was an American artist renowned for his work in assemblage, film, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography, among other disciplines.-Early life:...

and Rick Griffin

Rick Griffin

Richard Alden Griffin was an American artist and one of the leading designers of psychedelic posters in the 1960s. As a contributor to the underground comix movement, his work appeared regularly in Zap Comix. Griffin was closely identified with the Grateful Dead, designing some of their best known...

. It featured such beat

Beat generation

The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...

writers as Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...

, Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder is an American poet , as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist . Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry...

, Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers...

and Michael McClure

Michael McClure

Michael McClure is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955 rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums...

.

The initial impetus for the paper came from Allen Cohen and head shop owners Ron and Jay Thelin, who offered to put up the seed money to found an underground paper. In the summer of 1966 a number of meetings were held in the Haight-Ashbury district to discuss the idea of starting a paper, attracting a varied group of interested people. The result of these meetings was a paper called P.O. Frisco which lasted for a single 12-page tabloid issue dated September 2, 1966, under the editorship of Dan Elliot and Richard Sassoon (a 31-year-old Yale-educated poet who had once been Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer...

's boyfriend), operating out of a storefront on Frederick Street in cooperation with members of the radical Progressive Labor Party. "P.O." stood for "Psychedelphic Oracle", a title suggested by Bruce Conner. P.O. Frisco was a compromise between the various factions involved in founding the paper which wound up satisfying no one, and the Thelin brothers threatened to cut off their financial support if the paper wasn't completely rebooted from scratch.

A second attempt was launched out of new offices behind the Print Mint

Print Mint

The Print Mint was a major publisher of underground comics during the genre's heydey. Starting as retailer of psychedelic posters, it soon evolved into a publisher, printer, and distributor. It was "ground zero" for the psychedelic poster...

on Haight Street, under new editors George Tsongas and John Bronson. The new paper was retitled The San Francisco Oracle with issue numbering restarted with a new #1. This paper did not yet have the dense verbose and graphically rich psychedelic design the Oracle later became famous for, but it was a first step in that direction. Bronson and Tsongas edited the first two issues of the new Oracle and then left after a fight with Cohen and Gabe Katz, who became the paper's new art editor starting with issue #3 while Cohen took over as editor, a role he maintained until the end.

One week after the redesigned Oracle #3 hit the streets around November 8, 1966, editor Cohen was busted in the Thelins' Psychedelic Shop

Head shop

A head shop is a retail outlet specializing in drug paraphernalia used for consumption of cannabis, other recreational drugs, legal highs, legal party powders and New Age herbs, as well as counterculture art, magazines, music, clothing, and home decor; some head shops also sell oddities, such as...

for selling a police vice squad officer a copy of Lenore Kandel

Lenore Kandel

Lenore Kandel was an American poet.Kandel was briefly notorious as the author of a short book of poetry, The Love Book...

's book of verse, The Love Book. This case became a free speech cause célèbre around the country.

The Oracle quickly developed a stable core group of staffers which included, among many others, Michael Bowen, Stephen Levine

Stephen Levine (author)

Stephen Levine is an American poet, author and teacher best known for his work on death and dying. He is one of a generation of pioneering teachers who, along with Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg, have made the teachings of Theravada Buddhism more widely available to students...

, Travis Rivers (a Texan friend of Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin

Janis Lyn Joplin was an American singer, songwriter, painter, dancer and music arranger. She rose to prominence in the late 1960s as the lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company and later as a solo artist with her backing groups, The Kozmic Blues Band and The Full Tilt Boogie Band...

, he was at that time the manager of the Haight Street branch of the Print Mint), George Tsongas, who had returned to the paper, staff artists Dangerfield Ashton, Ami McGill, and Hetti McGee, poet Harry Monroe, Gene Grimm, and Steve Lieper.

After issue #5 the paper moved into the premises formerly occupied by Michael Bowen on Haight near Masonic. The new offices were open 24 hours a day.

Starting with issue #6 the paper switched printers from Waller Press (which later served as the printers for the San Francisco Express Times

San Francisco Express Times

San Francisco Express Times was a counterculture tabloid underground newspaper edited by Marvin Garson and published weekly in San Francisco, California from January 24, 1968 to March 25, 1969, for a total of 62 issues, covering and promoting radical politics, rock music, arts and progressive...

) to Howard Quinn Printers. At the Howard Quinn shop the paper's artists were allowed to come in on Sundays when the paper was being printed and experiment with the presses, and it was at this time that the revolutionary split-fountain rainbow inking effect was perfected. This involved placing makeshift wooden dams in the ink fountain and using them to feed different colored inks simultaneously into the fountain, which produced a rainbow effect which was a bit difficult to read but visually arresting.

The more colorful Oracle was an instant success and the paper had to go back to press on successive Sundays to run off more copies. The paper's circulation, which had started with a modest 3,000 copies and gradually grew to about 15,000 copies by issue #4 and 50,000 copies by #5, ran off 60-75,000 copies of #6 and even more of #7. Starting with #6 every issue went back to press for at least a second printing, sometimes with changes in content.

At its peak, the publication's print run was about 125,000, but its editors estimated that ample pass-around readership brought their circulation above half a million.

The influential sprawling thematic pieces that ran in the Oracle include the astrologers' symposium on the Age of Aquarius

Age of Aquarius

The Age of Aquarius is either the current or new age in the cycle of astrological ages. Each astrological age is approximately 2,150 years long, on average, but there are various methods of calculating this length that may yield longer or shorter time spans depending upon the technique used...

in issue #6, with Ambrose Hollingworth, Gayla (Rosalind Sharpe Wall, an associate of John Starr Cooke

John Starr Cooke

John Starr Cooke was an American mystic and spiritual teacher who influenced the development of the counter-culture movement that emerged in San Francisco during 1966 1967. His teachings were based on the doctrine of “One consciousness”, which Cooke believed was communicated to him through a...

), and Gavin Arthur; and the "Houseboat Summit" in issue #7 which brought together Alan Watts

Alan Watts

Alan Wilson Watts was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York...

, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary

Timothy Francis Leary was an American psychologist and writer, known for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. During a time when drugs like LSD and psilocybin were legal, Leary conducted experiments at Harvard University under the Harvard Psilocybin Project, resulting in the Concord Prison...

, and Gary Snyder for a long, free-ranging discussion on the houseboat owned by Watts and Jean Varda

Vallejo (ferry)

The Vallejo, originally known as the O&CRR Ferry No. 2, is a houseboat in Sausalito, California, United States. It previously served as a passenger ferry in Portland, Oregon, in the late 19th century, and in Vallejo, California, for the first half of the 20th century.The Oregon & California...

. It began with Watts posing the question "Whether to drop out or take over?" Issue #5, the "Human Be-In" issue, was the launching pad for the Gathering of the Tribes

Human Be-In

The Human Be-In was a happening in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, the afternoon and evening of January 14, 1967. It was a prelude to San Francisco's Summer of Love, which made the Haight-Ashbury district a symbol as the center of an American counterculture and introduced the word 'psychedelic'...

held in Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967. Issue #12, which was to be the last, featured an uncut transcript of a symposium at Masonic Auditorium entitled "2000 A.D." with Alan Watts, Herman Kahn

Herman Kahn

Herman Kahn was one of the preeminent futurists of the latter third of the twentieth century. In the early 1970s he predicted the rise of Japan as a major world power. He was a founder of the Hudson Institute think tank and originally came to prominence as a military strategist and systems...

and Carl Rogers

Carl Rogers

Carl Ransom Rogers was an influential American psychologist and among the founders of the humanistic approach to psychology...

Successors and imitators

After the paper folded, Oracle staff who had left the city and relocated in Middletown, California put out a single one-shot issue of a 24-page psychedelic tabloid paper called the Harbinger in [July] 1968, with contributions by Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Michael Hollingshead

Michael Hollingshead

Michael Hollingshead was a British-born researcher in psychedelic drugs and hallucinogens including psilocybin and lysergic acid diethylamide, among others, at Harvard University in the mid-twentieth century. He is the father of comedian Vanessa Hollingshead....

, and others.

In November, a new Oracle called the San Francisco Oracle of the Spiritual Revolution was launched, publishing 7 issues between November 1968 and November 1969. Published in Larkspur, CA and edited by Phillip Davenport (1943-2001), a disciple of Murshid Samuel Lewis (Sufi Sam)

Samuel L. Lewis

Samuel Lewis was an American mystic and dance teacher who founded the Dances of Universal Peace movement. He was also known under his Sufi name Sufi Ahmed Murad Chisti and was addressed by his mureeds and others as Murshid...

, it had a more spiritual focus and included material relating to Stephen Gaskin

Stephen Gaskin

Stephen Gaskin is a counterculture hippie icon best known for his presence in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the 1960s and for co-founding "The Farm", a famous spiritual intentional community in Summertown, Tennessee...

, Sufi Sam, Baba Ram Dass, and other gurus of the San Francisco scene, as well as the usual underground fare.

A psychedelic Los Angeles paper called the Oracle of Southern California, existed for a short time. Some members of the SF Oracle collective were involved in starting another paper, San Francisco Express Times

San Francisco Express Times

, which published from January 24, 1968 to March 25, 1969, at which time the paper's name was changed to San Francisco Good Times, appearing under that title from April 1969 to August 1972. In 1967 students at San Francisco State College distributed a one-off 8-page tabloid parody of the Oracle called the Orifice, edited by Ben Fong-Torres

Ben Fong-Torres

Benjamin Fong-Torres is an American rock journalist, author, and broadcaster best known for his association with Rolling Stone magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle .-Biography:Due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Fong-Torres' father, Ricardo Fong-Torres Benjamin Fong-Torres (方振豪; Cantonese:...

External links

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