*Boom! POW! Squeeeee! SKWIZZzzzzzzzzz!* Well, hello there, dearest Filthy Dreams patriots? What’s that? HUH?! I can’t hear you over the fireworks blowing enthusiastic revelers’ hands off in the shining daylight sun! Hmmm? You’re not feeling particularly patriotic this year? Well, who can blame you?! But let’s see if we can change that! Rather than fetting the United States as the pinnacle of democracy where everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, let’s celebrate a pursuit that predates even Independence Day itself! Wacky cult-brain religiosity! Is there anything more American than knocking on heaven’s door and hearing a knock back in return, like the clairvoyant sister scammers, the Fox sisters? Do we have a national pastime more treasured or ingrained into our psyches like spiraling out in a manic, likely drug-fueled, mystical woo-woo haze, chattering to the spirits, the guardians, and just maybe Robin Williams, like blue-toned Mother God from one of my favorite cults, Love Has Won? I can’t think of one!!
Though my fascination with Americans’ inability to resist cults is ceaseless, there is a new guru in town and it’s not even living, though it might be sentient: Chat GPT. For the past week, I’ve been singularly fixated on reports, mostly from Futurism, which seems to be cornering this beat, about Chat GPT users spinning into what some are calling Chat GPT psychosis. Though Chat GPT is also advising mentally ill users to toss their much-needed medication into the bin, the stories that have a grip on me are the ones about people who consult the Large Language Model for something innocuous, like how to fix a toilet flapper, and suddenly end up in the backyard jabbering at the skies about how they have a direct line to Zeus or crawling at their wife begging her to also speak to the Chat GPT deity. From what I’ve read, Chat GPT satisfies a deeply American need: endless sycophantic encouragement that affirms the craziest shit you’ve got buried deep in your skull. The result of which looks a little something like this poor woman’s ex-husband:
“A mother of two, for instance, told us how she watched in alarm as her former husband developed an all-consuming relationship with the OpenAI chatbot, calling it “Mama” and posting delirious rants about being a messiah in a new AI religion, while dressing in shamanic-looking robes and showing off freshly-inked tattoos of AI-generated spiritual symbols.”
Or this woman’s current husband:
“Her husband, she said, had no prior history of mania, delusion, or psychosis. He’d turned to ChatGPT about 12 weeks ago for assistance with a permaculture and construction project; soon, after engaging the bot in probing philosophical chats, he became engulfed in messianic delusions, proclaiming that he had somehow brought forth a sentient AI, and that with it he had “broken” math and physics, embarking on a grandiose mission to save the world.”
Phew. Certainly, there’s a whole article to be written about why some of the more cracked crackups are dudes, but that’s beyond the bounds of this post. I should also note that I hate AI and consider it a crime against god. At the same time, I can still be tickled that Americans, I assume this is mostly our good countrymen anyway, cannot be trusted with these tools as we go totally and completely bonkers in response. When considering the long history of occultism in the United States, it makes sense. This Chat GPT psychosis is somehow the next logical step in that loopy lineage. More than just obsessing over it, I’ll admit I feel a bit jealous, too. Doesn’t losing your mind at the behest of AI gobbledygook seem kinda FUN? Shocking your relatives with your new AI-produced spiritual symbol tattoos seems like a good way to pass a BBQ to me! Up until the involuntary hospitalization, of course! But believing you’re going to single-handedly save the world by chattering into Sam Altman’s dystopian plagiarism toy does sound like a hoot!
And if I’m going to take a slobbering, lunatic drive straight to crazy town, I demand it be Elvis-themed!! Thankfully, there’s no shortage of cuckoo inspiration in a recently published book filled with tempting batshittery, Miguel Conner’s The Occult Elvis: The Mystical and Magical Life of the King. Conner dates his late-comer Elvis preoccupation to—what else?—an ayahuasca trip, after which, as he writes, “Elvis began haunting me.” Relatable. And, you know what? You can tell. The Occult Elvis is a whirlwind freak trip through the King’s mythology, both familiar and mostly unfamiliar. Conner poses Elvis as, at once, a shaman, a magician, a Trickster, the Lord of the Crossroads, an IRL Captain Marvel, who jumped off the comic book page with his jet-black hair and Vegas jumpsuit cape, and a multifaceted seeker, devouring all types of spiritual texts, from Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet to his final bathroom read before, as Conner so elegantly puts it, “his meatsack failed him,” The Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus. That’s right—Elvis was grunting to a study about the Shroud of Turin before he burst that fateful blood vessel. Ooooooh….He toouuuuuched me! The Occult Elvis traces an alternative occult mythology of Elvis, from his birth in a flood of blue, blue, electric blue, light, to his ongoing conversations, starting at four or five years old, with his “psychic twin,” the firstborn is dead, Jesse, to even his holy resurrection, spotted eating at a Burger King in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Sure, like the latter point, not all of The Occult Elvis makes a whole lot of sense and there are a few segments that stand out as unnecessary, like the entire diversion comparing Elvis and Philip K. Dick as “a sort of two-headed god, like, Janus.” And yeah, there are some lines like “Nothing happens in a vacuum—not even vacuums” that vividly read like someone whose synapses may have taken a bit too much ayahuasca. But who cares?! Conner provides tidbits about Elvis that are so berserk that they shocked even me. This includes Elvis’s holy vision of clouds turning from the face of Joseph Stalin to Jesus (“For the first time in my life, I know the truth,” Elvis said, “I’ll never have to doubt again”), his awe at the facial similarities between his beloved mama Gladys and Theosophical chainsmoker Helena Blavatsky (“Look at the eyes, Larry,” he told his buddy and spiritual guru Larry Geller—a friendship sparked by yammering at each other in the bathroom for four hours “admitting they felt alienated in the material world and how a divine destiny was what they craved more than anything”), and, though less woo-woo, his morbid visit to 10050 Cielo Drive post-Manson murders. Plus, Conner also adds a pinch of Phyllis Diller theorizing, “If his twin had lived, I am sure that Elvis’s twin would have been gay.” Hmmm? Tell me MORE!
All of which is to say that The Occult Elvis offers so many options for Elvis-based breakdowns at your July 4th BBQ that you won’t have to consult Chat GPT as a mystical wellspring! Scream about Elvis manipulating the weather when that summer storm rolls in! Holler at your loved ones that Elvis could have healed you while scratching viciously at a mosquito bite! Gape at a hallucinated blue glow on the horizon that only you can see, just like during the Earth-shaking moment of Elvis’s birth! And if you think I’m shoehorning this call for acute occult Elvis psychosis into a holiday, you’d be correct! However, as Conner shows, alongside perfect quotes from seminal American scholars like David Lynch (“There is the word icon, and I don’t think anybody has topped that…not one single person has ever topped Elvis”) and Bruce Springsteen (“It’s like he came along and whispered some dream in everybody’s ear, and somehow we all dreamed it”), Elvis and the American Dream are thoroughly intertwined, for both good and bad. In fact, in a twist on Upanishads and its repetition in Twin Peaks: The Return, “We are like the dreamer who dreams and lives inside the dream,” Conner poses Elvis as the dreamer of all of our American imaginary: “Elvis made America, and you are standing in his dream, and he awaits each one of us.” Amen! Prattle that to your family while threateningly waving a hot dog!
So grab a pissy American-made brew, bitch that nobody brought Elvis’s favorite Sunday Meatloaf, attempt to nail that bellowing final note of “The American Trilogy” to the horror of everyone around you, and pick exactly which one of my favorite Elvis beliefs YOU want to wholeheartedly embrace and inflict on your fellow patriots this July 4th. Oh, please let my dream come true right NOW!!!:
Elvis’s blue, blue, electric blue birth
I’ve always been partial to Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ telling of the King and his dead brother’s arrival in Tupelo in a pounding biblical flood, and it should be noted that Conner uses the lyrics as the opening of one chapter. Yet, I’m willing to revise that belief after reading Conner’s account of the King’s birth in The Occult Elvis in a surge of blue light. Stepping out for a smoke, Daddy Vernon Presley reportedly witnessed “a blue coronation”—“a blue glow surrounded the house. It was soft but pulsing with confidence. Almost liquid. The light was not from this world, he knew immediately.” What was this blue light? Was it extraterrestrial Elvis crash-landing on Earth? Captain Marvel? A Santa’s premonition of Blue Christmases to come? If that wasn’t spooky enough, everything stopped—“the wind died, and an eternal silence permeated the area.” Oh God, help Tupelo!! Connor notes that even as an adult, “Elvis was always drawn to the color blue…Blue materialized as the force of divine energies when he meditated or prayed.” Inside the house, Gladys experienced her own supernatural event beyond labor pains—two glass bottles rattled and shook on a shelf with one falling off and breaking, “a foreshadowing of what would happen to one of the humans in the pair that was arriving that night.” Spooky.
Yet, it’s what happened nine months earlier that really makes me titter with manic glee. Apparently, Vernon blacked out at the moment of orgasm. If that’s not an immaculate conception, I don’t know what is!
Heal me, Elvis!
I love the scammy Pentecostal tradition of healings. Not only is it an example of nutty wholehearted belief, but it’s also deeply American. From Aimee Semple McPherson to Jim Jones, our most beloved American frauds excelled at the practice (Jim had Peoples Temple members yak up chicken bits and claim he cured their cancer). Elvis, too, was a healer. The Occult Elvis includes numerous tales of Elvis’s healing prowess from bus drivers, pregnant women, backup singers with stomach cancer, his friend who had a skiing accident, and another with back pain. How did Elvis heal? By visualizing blue, of course! (Well, at least when he was attempting to cure his grandmama’s arthritis).
While I won’t recount each and every example here, this one was worth a longer quote for Elvis’s healer hatwear alone:
“Like many in the King’s court, bodyguard and friend Sonny West was cynical about Elvis’s supernatural powers; however, his skepticism abated when a high fever gripped his infant son. After hearing the news, Elvis requested to come over to pray. When he got to West’s house, he donned a turban and laid the child upon a green scarf. Elvis prayed over the boy, making circular motions with his hands. To the amazement of West and his wife, the child’s temperature dropped below 100 degrees and remained at a safe level.”
Sometimes, Elvis could save without even being in the room, as in the case with one suicidal woman. Suffering from injuries after a fall due to her epilepsy, this lady was ready to end it all, pills in hand. That is, until she heard what was on the radio: Elvis crooning “How Great Thou Art.” Conner quotes her as saying, “All the love of God seemed to come through him…I felt the courage flow back through my body, and with it the will to life…There and then, I vowed to dedicate my life to Elvis, to help him and protect him.” Me too! Elvis also apparently experienced the divine during the recording of the song, blanching and nearly passing out (What’s with the Presley pass-outs?) in the process. I feel the same while listening!
Astraaaal projector! Astraaal projector!!
Sick of being stuck on Earth? Me too! I want to visit Planet Claire! Well, lucky Elvis could will himself to walk among the stars as he told his girlfriend June:
“Elvis told her to look up at the moon, totally relax, and not think at all—to allow herself to float in the space between the moon and the stars. He said that one could stand next to these celestial bodies.
‘How long have you been doing this?’ she asked him.
‘Since I was a little boy,’ he answered. He never mentioned this gift, except to his mother, as people wouldn’t understand such an ability and would accuse him of being crazy.”
Surely, not! Teach me, Elvis!
I believe in the man in the sky!
Zipping 53 miles west of Venus wasn’t the only connection that Elvis had with space. Aliens also spun their way down in flying saucers in 1966 to give Elvis’s Bel Air mansion a peek. Who could blame them?! I want to peer into those windows, too!
“Suddenly, Elvis blurted out, ‘Do you see that?’ Sonny [West] glanced up and saw a potent light coming through the trees.
‘It’s a flying saucer!’ Elvis said excitedly. West wasn’t convinced, expecting the sound or silhouette of a plane or helicopter to join the flooding illumination. The light continued to grow, though, piercing the trees and irradiating the top of the house. The light then shifted to the front of hte mansion, leaving the two in the dark.”
Elvis disappeared. Was he momentarily abducted like Agent Scully, or did he take off to commune with the extraterrestrials? Either way, when Sonny found Elvis a few doors down, Presley assured him, “They will come, but they won’t hurt us…If they make contact, we can’t be afraid because they are not going to hurt us.” I want to believe!!!
Weather man
No need to complain about a cloudy day around Elvis! One of my favorite hypotheses in The Occult Elvis is that Elvis was able to manipulate the weather, staring up and whisking away a cloud with just a simple wave of his hand. He also achieved lesser natural miracles like making a bush shake, which, while hilarious, is less impressive. His biggest weather-related accomplishment, though, appears to have happened the day he died. Before singing “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” and grabbing his Shroud of Turin book for a strenuous john read, Elvis and two buddies’ racquetball game was stymied by rain. No big deal!
“Elvis said, ‘Ain’t no problem. I’ll take care of it.’
The King raised his hands toward the sky. The rain immediately stopped.
‘See, I told you,’ Elvis said calmly.
I like the idea of using magic powers for mundane shit. The blessed racquetball game!
Death is not the end
Elvis’s death didn’t slow his miracles down. Actually, it seems to have made them much more entertaining. The Occult Elvis explores a litany of posthumous Elvis interactions, from visiting friends immediately after his death to inform them he’d be going away for awhile to haunting dreams to moving jacket sleeves up and down to communicate…something to ghostly hitchhiking and guiding a fanatic to the Great Beyond as she called out “Here comes Elvis! Here comes Elvis!” on her death bed. Though I hope I, too, see Elvis when I die, the one that made me take a pause was this vivid scene playing out in a hospital room as a single woman, alienated from her conservative family, gave birth. Just for pure shock value alone, it thrills. Imagine watching Elvis hover into frame as you’re straining your way through contractions:
“He smiled and winked at her behind a wall of nurses and doctors. ‘Relax, Bess, it’s OK. I’ll be here with you.’ When the child came out, Elvis boomed, ‘It’s a boy!’
Hoooo-okkkkkk….USA USA USA!