I first learned of Gavin Arthur through his various Beat connections, but in fact his trip through bohemia began much earlier. It could have been when he accompanied his mother to yoga classes taught by America’s first yoga teacher or perhaps when he became an Ivy-League drop-out who traveled to Ireland with his first wife in the 1920s. Here, they associated with backers of the Irish Republic in the Civil War and befriended Ella Young, a poet and author of books on Irish folklore. Young mentions Arthur in her autobiography Flowering Dusk: Things Remembered Accurately and Inaccurately (1945, Longmans, Green and Co). She said of him, “being a poet he is already pledged to the Irish cause. He wants to throw up his whole career and work for Ireland.” (pg. 188) Young introduced him to W.B. Yeats, Æ, and others of their circle who combined an interest in mystical rites and poetry with activities aimed at Irish independence.
After the Arthurs left Ireland (likely due to their revolutionary connections), they spent time in England and here Gavin visited the early sexologist Havelock Ellis. Another visit he made was to the home of Edward Carpenter. Arthur was familiar with both men’s books. In Arthur’s own work, The Circle of Sex (University Press, 1966), in the chapter “About Edward Carpenter” he describes spending the night in bed with Carpenter, who had published a book about his relationship as a young man with Walt Whitman. Carpenter told Arthur, “Dear old Walt… nobody greater. But essentially, he was bisexual—or better, ambigenic—I hate those mixed derivations of Latin and Greek. I am completely homogenic myself, love women as sisters…” Arthur would later use the “-genic” suffixes for each of the twelve sexual types (e.g. “homogenic”, “ambigenic” etc.) he described on the sexual zodiac wheel that illustrated the book cover and theory of attraction he proposed in The Circle of Sex.
During their conversation, Arthur said that his favorite of Carpenter’s poems was “The Secret of Time and Satan,” then asked if Pan, called “Satan” in the poem, looked like Whitman. Carpenter’s response was, “I wrote it after I met my Hindu guru too. My guru’s guru, Ramakrishna, admitted that Walt was the Voice of the West—the Yang side of the Earth’s magnet. Walt knew that Ramakrishna was the Voice of the East—the Yin side. After I had been with Walt a year, he told me to go to India and find me a guru who would express the other side of the Earth’s magnetism, or rather, the magnetism of the Earth’s mind—the Yin side of it. ‘And then go back to England,’ he said, ‘and write a synthesis of the two.’” (The Circle, 138) Across time, an idea of Whitman’s had been transmitted via Carpenter to Arthur and into a book published in 1966.
Back in America, Arthur would again cross paths with Ella Young, who had moved to California after an American lecture tour brought her to the small town of Halcyon near Oceano. She described Arthur’s life there in Flowering Dusk: “Gavin Arthur and Carl Beckstead are living in an Oasis on the Dunes. They have not even a tent. They have a well and something to set on fire—something to boil water in or cook a fish if they catch one.” (pg. 238) She wrote of her first trip to the Dunes soon after Arthur arrived there. She said that a couple who lived in Halcyon
told us (Gavin and myself) of hermits who lived in that sky devastated wilderness. Lived year in and year out, for they had found hidden oases where willow trees grew and water could be had for the digging. Every hermit had an oasis all to himself. It was his territory. He needed to be about two miles away from his nearest neighbor. His little tent or cave-like shack must be securely hidden. The hermits nurtured by providence, could meditate on eternity, write verses, or in beneficent mood ray out blessings to the universe. “Someday” said Gavin, “we must go in search of them!” That day we were content to race along the sands and talk of them. (pg. 236)
On another day, Young recounted, they stopped by the Halcyon home of the poet Hugo Seelig, where he lived when he was not camping at the Dunes, and before they left Seelig showed them to a place in his yard where “…one solitary golden-splendid flower took the light. ‘I sowed many seeds,’ said Hugo ‘but only this one broke ground. It is called the Blazing Star.’” (pg. 237).’” Later they visit the Jansons, “As we came away a blue passionflower drooped pale in the light from the open door. Gavin touched it and said, ‘Today I have seen the Flower of the Sun and the Flower of the Moon—it is good omen, for I hope to make my home in Halcyon.” (pg. 238)
Arthur is one of the people Norm Hammond described in his nonfiction history, The Dunites (1992, The South County Historical Society), about people living in shacks on Pismo Beach near Oceano, California in the 1930s. Hammond describes him as follows:
He believed that each significant era of mankind was linked to a ten-degree segment of the precession of the equinox, which took 720 years, and he made charts to illustrate this. For instance, the height of the Babylonian civilization at the time of Hammurabi, was in 2020 B.C. Seven hundred and twenty years later was the height of the Egyptian civilization, with Ramses II. Another 720 years brought the year 580 B.C. and the golden age of the Greeks. The next 720-year period brought the zenith of the Roman Empire, and another 720 years that of the Christian era. Gavin was fond of explaining this and other theories, using encyclopedias and history books as proof. (pg. 35)
Arthur bought Dunes property near Oceano and had a small cabin built that he often ran as an open house for the artists, writers, social thinkers, and mystic-seekers who enjoyed the freewheeling discussions and socializing that occurred there. He prepared astrology charts for those who were interested, as he would do for the rest of his life wherever he resided or traveled. He published a magazine called the Dune Forum, which sought to establish the West Coast as a literary, political, and philosophical challenger to the East Coast literary orthodoxy of taste and ideas.
In 1947, Luther Whiteman published a novel with Random House that fictionalized the artistic and spiritual seekers of the Dunes entitled The Face of the Clam. It begins with a character named “Frenchy” just released from serving three weeks in jail for taking Pismo Beach clams without a license. He recounts meeting a cellmate whom he informs that “I hold by astrology—take lessons from the Astrology College in Los Angeles.” His cellmate remarks on the limitations of astrology, saying that, “The future is known only by the Masters on Mount Shasta.” Frenchy is interested, as “When living in Los Angeles, he had frequented the temples and meetings of all the cults, one after the other. He had acquired a little library of books and pamphlets expounding the magic of Tibet, the pyramid prophecies, the secrets of numerology, palmistry, theosophy, Rosicrucian lore and all manner of occult phenomena.” (pg. 4) His cellmate tells him of “The Great I Am,” a cult with a radio program coming on that evening, which Frenchy wasn’t aware of; his ignorance he attributed to the fact that “I ain’t been down to Los Angeles for more’n a year. I reckon I am gittin’ behind.” They get the jailer to play the radio show over the jail speaker, with a “message for you from the mighty Ascended Master of the violet light… caves of the Himalayas… seventy million years ago… a mighty civilization existed… Lemuria… here in California… contact the mighty Ascended Masters that still abide on Mount Shasta… The Royal Tetons…” (pg. 5)
From his more esoterically advanced cellmate, Frenchy “learned that California had been chosen by the hidden powers to be the site of a new civilization. Los Angeles was to be the center of the new civilization to be.” Frenchy asks his cellmate to invite the Ascended Masters on Mount Shasta to visit the Dunes. He believes that “if even one of the mighty ones could be persuaded to leave Mount Shasta and to live in the dunes it would—well, no telling what. It would be the beginning of a movement that would at least make the dunes famous all up and down California. Why, he, Frenchy, a nudist and a student of astrology, might become famous as the founder and head of a new movement, a new California Movement. Pilgrims might come from as far away as San Diego, perhaps.” The cellmate agrees to invite the Ascended Masters to visit the Dunes but tells Frenchy, “Don’t forget them Lemurians won’t live in no cabin no more than I do where meat has been cooked.” Frenchy promises “Don’t you worry none about that. The boys will build a cabin—a brand-new one that ain’t never been lived in, and we’ll burn a can of sulfur in it to change the vibrations.” (pg. 7) The Dunites build the cabin with lumber that drifts ashore after a cargo ship runs aground and must jettison the lumber to raise the ship. Summer ends without contact from the Ascended Masters about coming to the Dunes. Tired of waiting, a Dunite named Dunker contacts “Swami Pandarma” from the Himalayas who is in Los Angeles, and he agrees to visit the Dunites. (pg. 52)
The above summary of some of the fictional events in The Face of The Clam is paralleled by events at the Dunes described in The Dunites: “Ella listened to Gavin’s plan to create a utopian society in the dunes. Gavin visualized people coming to enjoy the solitude and using it for self-enrichment. He visualized a collective endeavor in which the combined talent would be the vanguard of an alternative lifestyle for others of like minds. The new society would be a shining example of brotherhood and cooperation, one that would lead the world into the Aquarian Age.” Young dubbed the small compound of shelters “Moy Mell,” which is Gaelic for “pastures of honey.”
Meher Baba, an Indian guru, visited Hollywood in the 1930s and while he was there Arthur met him and invited him to visit Moy Mell and told him to bring his entourage. One of his California followers donated money for the lumber and supplies to build a cabin that Meher Baba could stay in, emphasizing that nobody else should occupy it before he arrived. When Meher Baba came, he chose to stay in Arthur’s cabin instead and some of his followers slept in the newer cabin. When Baba left, some wealthy California women in his entourage paid the fare for a Dunite to go to India. Another guru who visited sometimes was Jiddu Krishnamurti, who lived nearby in the Theosophical community at Ojai, California.
Luther Whiteman also wrote a book about the numerous economic and political movements in California in response to the Great Depression. His co-author and researcher was Samuel L. Lewis, a Sufi and Zen Master, who had stayed for a time at the Dunes. Together, they published Glory Roads: The Psychological State of California (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1936). Lewis met Arthur in the 1950s when Lewis attended a debate in which Arthur had argued that Walt Whitman was the “Voice of the West.” Afterwards, Lewis introduced himself, saying that he agreed on the importance of Whitman’s work. Lewis, aware that Arthur had been a Dunite, related that he’d met Hugo Seelig, a poet and kabbalist, when he’d visited the Dunes with Whiteman. It turns out that both men considered Seelig their guru.
Lewis was working on a gardening crew for the city of San Francisco, and Arthur, who had spent an inheritance from his millionaire father Chester Alan Arthur II, was selling newspapers from a stand nearby on Market St. to support himself while he worked on his book, The Circle of Sex. Lewis had been initiated as a Sufi mystic and Zen master in the 1920s after he began studying under the Indian Sufi Hazrat Inayat Khan and simultaneously with Nyogen Senzaki, the first Japanese Zen master to open a Zendo in San Francisco. Lewis continued his spiritual quests throughout his life, writing books many books on Sufism, such as This Is the New Age, In Person (1972, Omen Press) and The Jerusalem Trilogy: Song of the Prophets (1975, Prophecy Pressworks).
Given his lifestyle and beliefs, it is perhaps unsurprising that Gavin would eventually connect with a number of figures from Beat history. One of these was Neal Cassady. This meeting occurred after a lecture Arthur gave on comparative religion at San Quentin prison, where Cassady was incarcerated at the time. Upon his release from San Quentin, Cassady met Arthur for lunch, and they became friends. (Another Beat connection was Gary Snyder, who had told Arthur in advance that he may meet Cassady there. It is possible that they met through Alan Watts, a mutual acquaintance.)
Cassady’s lover at that time was Anne Marie Maxwell (then Ann Murphy) who he introduced to Arthur. In her recently published memoir, Tripping With A Viper (Mystic Boxing Commission, 2024), Maxwell recounts becoming a part-time assistant doing secretarial work for Arthur as well as a sex partner in threesomes with Arthur and men he knew.
At this time in the early 1960s, the Beat poet Charles Plymell, author of Over The Stage of Kansas: New & Selected Poems 1966-2023 (Bottle of Smoke Press, 2024) was living with Neal Cassady, Ann Murphy, Pam Beach (later Plymell), Glen Todd, and Allen Ginsberg as described in The Book of Friends: Scenes from Life on Gough Street by Glenn Todd (Bottle of Smoke Press, 2016). I contacted Plymell for this article, and we spoke on the phone about his meeting Arthur through Cassady. Plymell said he would often give Cassady rides to work on his motorcycle and several times they visited Arthur at his home in nearby Japantown. I asked Plymell if Arthur was part of the San Francisco Beat poets’ scene and if he was a pot-smoker, and he said “no” to both questions; he said that Arthur saw himself as “a seer” and was like a businessman in his manner. As an example of his ability as a “seer” Arthur said his friends were dismayed that he’d voted for Nixon rather than Kennedy for president, but that he’d picked Nixon only after seeing into the future that the winner of that election would die in office.
Another Beat connection: Plymell said he wished he could have introduced Arthur to his friend, William S. Burroughs, perhaps due to the upper-class backgrounds of both men, Arthur (full name Chester Alan Arthur III) being the grandson of Chester Alan Arthur, twenty-first president of the United States. Plymell also remarked that the two men had a shared style, coming from upper-class backgrounds. Burroughs wore suits and Arthur had the manner of a businessman; Arthur had attended elite boarding schools and gone to an Ivy League university until he dropped out to go to Ireland, while Burroughs was a graduate of Harvard.
When I told Plymell that the magazine Dune Forum, published by the Dunites under Arthur’s leadership, was available online, he said he was interested in reading it. He recalled that he and Dave Haselwood, who founded Auerhahn Press in 1958, had gone to Pismo Beach to see where the Dunites had lived, but “there was nothing there.”
But perhaps of most interest is the connection between Arthur, Lewis, and Allen Ginsberg, which came about in the sixties and relates to the Human Be-In: A Gathering of the Tribes. Arthur had been asked to choose the date for this event, held in Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967, where 20,000 hippies gathered. Lewis, well-known as “Sufi Sam,” instructed interested hippies in meditation and in the Dances of Universal Peace.
In the book Gay Sunshine Interviews by Winston Leyland (Gay Sunshine Press, 1979), Allen Ginsberg writes:
The late Gavin Arthur, San Francisco Astrologer & companion of Sufi Sam, died in 1972 after long loving life. I asked him to set account in writing of his memory of encounter with Edward Carpenter, who in turn. G.A. said, had love encounter with Walt Whitman when, as Arthur said as well, he directed Carpenter to Ramakrishna in India where Carpenter was to travel. Thus, this is a document given me by G.A. in 1967 the year of the First Human Be-In in San Francisco.” (Gay Sunshine Interviews, pg. 126)
Ginsberg cherished this account since he’d had sex with Neal Cassady, who’d had sex with Arthur, giving an erotic link from Whitman to Ginsberg. He saw this as a transmission of poetic energy.
Evidence of a meeting between Allen Ginsberg and Samuel L. Lewis occurs in a letter from Lewis to Arthur that is quoted in Sunrise in the West: The Life of American Mystic Samuel L. Lewis by Wali Ali Meyer (Sufi Rahaniat Intl., 2023)in the chapter on “The Berkeley Psychedelic Conference”:
The following year, Sam participated in the Psychedelic Conference that was held June 13-18, 1966, at UC Berkeley. His history and outlook suited him well for work with the youth involved in the ‘60s drug culture. Sam wrote about the Conference in a letter to Gavin Arthur: “Having the knowledge of the Stages of Consciousness both by book and dharma—transmission as well as by conscious experience, one is in much better position to deal with problems (much exaggerated) from the taking of drugs… There were several things which came out of the Psychedelic Conference:
a. The close relation with Allen Ginsberg—this works both ways and I laugh about each”
b. The agreement of all participants to accept Dr. Huston Smith as the wisest.
c. I was not only permitted to speak–something disdained by cultists and metaphysicians, but every point was accepted.” (Wali Ali Meyer, pg. 832 of 1052 in eBook).
The positive response from meeting Ginsberg, and having the points he made in discussions accepted at the conference, suggested that Lewis was becoming an elder mentor in the counterculture, something that was very welcome to him after past experiences that made him feel ignored by Alan Watts’s group at the Asian Studies Institute, which had refused to hire him as an instructor.
When the Sufi Hazrat Inayat Khan had come to San Francisco from India in 1924 and initiated Samuel L. Lewis into the Sufi hierarchy, he’d told Lewis that he’d come to America as it was the place with the greatest spiritual potential because unlike in his native India many Americans had achieved enough material satisfaction to see its emptiness, so the spiritual dimension that Sufism offered them would ultimately interest Americans. In Allen Ginsberg, Sufi Sam saw someone who had come to that realization and was trying to spread it to others. Both men rejected materialism and conformity, and they shared a number of interests: unitive poetry, Eastern religion, and world travel.
Indeed, at the time of their meeting, an interest in viewpoints such as theirs was manifesting across the West on a large scale (partially due to Ginsberg’s efforts). This included interest in non-ordinary states of consciousness, astrology, I-Ching, Eastern mysticism, natural foods diets, dropping out of corporate structures with their pre-assigned roles and goals, and acceptance of sexuality and creativity in all their diversity. All of which had also been the unusual attributes of the Dunite collective in the 1930s, and then were given another form of expression in the nonconforming literature of the Beats of the 1950s and further modes of expression by hippies.
In Sunrise in the West there is a photo of ‘Sufi Sam’ with Gavin Arthur, the only person seated next to him in a place of honor as all other spectators stand watching a group of Sufi dancers at the 1970 Spring Festival. (pg. 916/1052 in eBook) Meyer states that at that festival Samuel L. Lewis was “holding his hand” to comfort Arthur, who had been dosed with LSD some days earlier. He had enjoyed the trip but struggled afterwards, for he felt he had died and could not readjust to regular life. A student had warned Lewis a couple of days before the gathering where Arthur had been dosed that people at the event planned to put LSD in the punch. Lewis, whose interest was in attaining “joy without drugs,” had decided not to attend the gathering.
They were an interesting pair: Arthur the bohemian astrologer, occultist, openly bisexual sexologist, and early Gay rights advocate; and Lewis, whom Arthur said was “the only true virgin” he’d met. So involved was Lewis in teaching students to practice Sufism and traveling throughout the Middle East and Asia as an agricultural consultant and freelance ambassador of the West that he kept putting off romance and marriage until it was too late.
Lewis died in a San Francisco Chinese hospital after a fall down his apartment stairs in 1971 and Arthur died the following year. For a better insight into the vision of Gavin Arthur than I’ve been able to provide, I recommend reading the online copies of the magazine he founded, Dune Forum, which the South County Historical Society has digitized and made available at The South County Historical Society ~ Dune Forum. An extensive collection of the writing of Samuel L. Lewis is available online at Murshid Samuel Lewis Archive (ruhaniat.org).
