Nothing Here Now but the Recordings
Notes on the Shamanism of Bowden, Burroughs & Neville – Part 3

1,604 words

Part 1. Part 2.

I want to pause a bit here, and look at some personal matters, which might be thought irrelevant or even somewhat demeaning (certainly Dutton’s critics think so), but they form a good part of Dutton’s case, so I want to address them before getting into a more substantial area.

Bowden was a serial confabulator, telling lies about almost everything to do with himself: marriage, children, siblings, housing, education. Rather than seeking to inflate his status with others, I think Dutton is correct to say he was deluding himself; but only in the sense that he was practicing a form of Neville’s Method, imagining a successful, fulfilling life and imbuing it with feeling and emotion. Faking it till he would make it, if you will. If so, we can say he was mostly unsuccessful, but after all his life was cut a bit short, so who can say, especially if he had come to recognize what he was trying to do as magick and sought out competent teachers.[1]

No one could be less like Dutton’s “short, portly” Bowden than Neville: tall, handsome, strongly built, he was compared to at first to Valentino and later Cary Grant.[2]

Neville lived a good twenty or so years longer than Bowden, and before reaching middle age was considerably more successful, both personally – marriage, children, comfortable haute bourgeoise lifestyle – and professionally – Broadway acclaim as a young man, later an acclaimed lecturer.

Indeed, Neville, unlike Bowden, is an excellent role model for today’s White youth, really the perfect mid-century American life, exactly what Mad Men’s Don Draper would have had if Matthew Weiner didn’t have an axe to grind. [3]

Like Bowden, he mostly lived on various stipends from his family, as well as, unlike Bowden the high dividends paid out by the family-held corporation, even during the Depression; indeed, he attributes their success to the application of his Method. This enabled him to lecture with minimal admission costs to cover the rental of the hall, self-publish about ten small books, and allow — and encourage — his lectures to be taped without charge.

Something else Bowden and Neville shared was a troublesome accent; or at least, an accent that might charm Americans but proved troublesome among their “fellow” Brits. Dutton, for instance, elsewhere describes Bowden delivering what some called the best speech they ever heard, but can’t help but add “a slightly whining rural accent” to the “short” and “portly” descriptors he has in the book, which also has Nick Griffin sneer at his “strangled imitation upper class vowels.”[4]

Neville, by contrast, had what Horowitz describes as “his clipped Anglican accent [and] Romanesque image”[5] which made him, as I suggested in Magick for Housewives,[6] a hit among the “ladies who lunch set” that I imagine made up the bulk of his lecture audiences.[7]

But it wasn’t always like that; Horowitz tells the tale:

The British-Barbadian youth, who had traveled alone to New York City at age seventeen to study theater, spoke in an Anglo-Caribbean accent, which his instructor deemed a career-killer.

Neville, appropriately enough, turned that into inspiration, in an early adumbration of The Method:

My own disappointments in my world led up to whatever I am doing today. When the teacher in my school, I could ill afford the $500 that my father gave me to go to this small school in New York City, and she made me the goat. She called me out before an audience of about forty students. And she said, “Now listen to him speak. He will never earn a living using his voice.” She should not have done that, but she did it—but she didn’t know the kind of person that she was talking about. Instead of going down into the grave and burying my head in shame, I was determined that I would actually disprove her. It did something to me when she said to me, “you will never earn”—to the class, using me as the guinea pig to show them what not to do—and so, she said, I spoke with a guttural voice and I spoke with this very heavy accent, and I will never use my voice to earn a living.

We all went to this school and this teacher simply singled me out to make some little, well, exhibition of what I should not be doing in class. But I went home and I was so annoyed that I had lost my father’s $500 or $600 that he gave me for the six-months course, but I was determined that she was false, that she was wrong. So, I went to the end. I went to the end and actually felt that I was facing an audience and unembarrassed that I could talk and talk and talk forever without notes, no notes.[8]

Whatever he sounded like that day in class, by the time he took to the lecture circuit he spoke with the kind of deep, posh British accent Americans just love, not unlike his later avatar, Alan Watts. But to the “real” Brits he was still just another colonial on the make: the Limeys hanging out in Los Angeles wanted no part of him, as he discovered when he met Aldous Huxley and dared to try to discuss Blake:

In a certain social world, if you pronounce a certain word differently you are cataloged as one who is not “in,” as it were, and Huxley would not listen to my visions because I did not speak as he thought everyone should . . . Had Aldous only listened to my message, rather than my English, I could have told him things beyond the wildest dreams of D. H. Lawrence. But I am a Colonial in his eyes and, like all Englishmen; the Colonials are looked down upon. If you don’t speak with the Oxford or Cambridge accent, you are a Colonial in their eyes and not one of the boys.

I was amused today when I looked at my baptismal certificate. My father’s occupation was listed as a meat vendor. He had a butcher shop.

Although he doesn’t mention it here, Neville did on other occasions boast of how his father and brother had used methods similar to his own to grow the business until he was no longer merely subsisting on an allowance (like Bowden and, as we’ll soon see, Burroughs) but on a fat dividend which had never been missed, even during the Depression. Unlike Bowden’s stories of his family having “ten interconnected businesses” or that his banker father helped him invest “some money from somewhere” or that he was “independently wealthy” due to buying up whole streets after some riot, [9] Goddard Enterprises was real then and today is the largest conglomerate based in the Caribbean. Some butcher shop.

Notes

[1] It is interesting to note that both Crowley and Evola seem to have wound up as physical wrecks, but Evola had already noted in The Hermetic Tradition: Symbols and Teachings of the Royal Art (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1995) that  one must not judge a mage by normal, bourgeois standards; the condition of the Mage in this phenomenal world is often the inverse of his astral state, the triumphs and struggles in the latter resulting in “karmic boomerangs” (Chapter 51, “The Invisible Masters.”) We might connect this with Dutton’s image of the shaman as a wounded healer: did Bowden suffer for our sins?

[2] Based on his voice and what I would call his “movie star good looks,” Vincent Price as the vaguely Southern aristo in Laura would likely be a good avatar. Clifton Webb snarks about Laura’s preference for Prices’ “long strong body” over his own wit and popular radio talks; Neville combined looks and lectures.

[3] His early first marriage, with a son, and second, lifelong marriage with a daughter, are a social ideal, and compares favorably with many “alt-right” figures. He traveled between furnished, upscale residential hotels in New York City (Washington Square) and Los Angles (Beverly Hills), rather than in a broken-down trailer, and the “success stories” he tells come from the same upper-middle-class milieus of nice houses, restaurants, and vacations. Here’s how it was: “[William Frawley] lived at the Knickerbocker Hotel in a suite, which is what a lot of the vaudeville people and Broadway stars used to do. That was a stylistic thing; you didn’t buy a house or if you did, you bought in the country someplace. But if you lived in the city, you didn’t worry about having an apartment. You lived in a hotel suite with a little kitchenette, living room and bedroom. And you got all the hotel services. That’s how stars lived back in those days.”

[4] Provoking some push-back from commenters, I was glad to see. I was reminded of Cousin Jasper’s “remonstrance” to Charles in Brideshead Revisited, regarding life at Oxford: “And stay away from Anglo-Catholics. They’re all sodomites with atrocious accents.”

[5] Infinite Potential: The Greatest Works of Neville Goddard; Introduced and edited by Mitch Horowitz (New York: St. Martin’s, 2019).

[6] Reprinted in Mysticism After Modernism, op. cit. This was the “title” essay when the book first appeared in 2019.

[7] Of course, your mileage may vary, as Douglas Murray found out: “He sounds like Hannibal Lecter… a British snake… Definitely House Slytherin.” Maybe it’s a generational thing. Dutton quotes Finnish Kai Murros on Bowden’s “thunderous voice” that made him feel “like I was some awkward Eastern European with a funny accent.” (234)

[8] Practical Magick: Ancient Tradition and Modern Practice (G&D Media, 2025), Chapter Seven: “The Lefthand Path.” “Going to the end” was one way he expressed the first step, imagining the desired outcome; to this he adds emotion warmth, and “actually felt it.”

[9] Dutton, p. 135-136.