Michael Gerber
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Did Harrod’s Food Court have an in-house astrologer, I wonder?

Since the period of late-1967 to late-1968 has come up in several comment threads of late, I wanted to pass along this post from Richard Metzger’s site Dangerous Minds. I’d never heard of The Beatles’ astrologer Caleb Ashburton-Dunning before…I’d just sort of assumed the existence of someone like him. Or a whole bunch of someones.

You really could get anything at the Apple Boutique, couldn’t you?

I personally do not use fortune-telling, seances or any other such stuff as a path towards good life-decisions, but I suspect that they could be, for some people, a useful gateway into their intuition/non-linear thinking. Since John Lennon had an all-consuming trust of intuition, it was natural that he would embrace them the moment they bubbled into Western consciousness. Unfortunately divination can also be used as justification for all manner of silly/hurtful activities, and it certainly seems like John’s moving into these realms did not increase his stability or wisdom. Or his happiness.

Far from shunning authority, Lennon craved it—but for various reasons needed it to be cloaked in esoteric, unconventional garb. For most people, “magic” would be something like The Beatles’ lives; absolute material comfort, endless leisure time, the ability to travel anywhere and meet anyone. It is understandable that Lennon particularly kept seeking magic for the rest of his life; it was his craving for it that began the group, and sustained it for so many years. And so to have achieved his wildest dreams, then still felt the endless pinches of human existence—the parade of gurus and oracles and cures and theories makes perfect sense.