The Underworld

The Underworld

“Ima­gin­a­tion thrives in dark­ness”

We talk about The Undergound often at the Bureau - not London’s subterranean rail sytem, but the countercultural alternative society of the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s.

But that is just one of the undergrounds - the underworlds - that are the subject of this episode Dizzying ossuaries, freakish creatures of the deep sea, astounding colors of agates, lava and crystals, mind bending organic structures of mycorrhizal fungi, caverns, crevices, burrows, bunkers, burial chambers, ghistly shipwrecks, religous hellscapes and surrealist dreamscapes, natural and constructed subterranean realms and the imagined and unconscious worlds of dreams and the human psyche.

Image Alchemist Stephen Ellcock came to take us on a deep dive journey down under with his truly astonishing, visually stunning guide book Underworlds, a volume in five sections covering both the real and the imaginary, moving between continents and time periods and disciplines such as philosophy, biology, art history and literature. We talk of how the actual physical world beneath us has fed our fears, visions and imagination – and conversely, provoked us to imagine a mythic, esoteric, mysterious underground - the afterworld of the dead, of the fairies and of the psychogical unconscious. For more on Stephen and his amazing work

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If you can contribute to this crazy endeavour, join our Patreon HERE

Thank you to everyone who’s signed up to support the show —that means a lot. We have chosen not to carry ads here; it simply wouldn’t sit right with the spirit of the Bureau. But that does mean we can benefit from your support, in whatever form that takes, not just financial.

Stephen

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Episoder(169)

A Countercultural History of the Universe

A Countercultural History of the Universe

Has 20th-and 21st-century physics moved away from the brute materialism of the nineteenth century toward ideas that resemble the world’s ancient mystical traditions? Might many of the discipline’s gre...

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Levitating the Pentagon and other Stories

Levitating the Pentagon and other Stories

She's 82 but is firing on all cylinders, still crazy after all these years, as Paul Simon sang, well, still crazy enough to believe the world can be changed for the better, that it's her duty to try t...

2 Aug 1h

Peace is a Fire: The Monk Who Set Himself Alight

Peace is a Fire: The Monk Who Set Himself Alight

There are some images that don’t simply record history—they change it. On the morning of 11 June 1963, at a busy crossroads in Saigon, Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk, calmly sat down in the lotus po...

19 Jul 59min

The Road to Rebellion - Part 1

The Road to Rebellion - Part 1

Roc Sanford is a British writer, artist and climate activist whose life has been a countercultural journey from an alternative childhood through academia to a remarkable experiment in off-grid living ...

3 Jul 50min

Free Radicals - Tripping in the 18th Century.

Free Radicals - Tripping in the 18th Century.

In the company of historian of drugs, MIKE JAY, we journey back to the first psychedelic age - not the 1960s, but the 1790s, when Britain was at the forefront, at the frontier, of gonzo psychedelic sc...

10 Jun 55min

The Shadow of the Counterculture

The Shadow of the Counterculture

Ever thought the so-called ‘golden decade’ of the 1960s was only about peace and love? Think again. Beneath the surface, it was riddled with violence, paranoia, and chaos, even in its most iconic mome...

24 Mai 1h

21st Century Mutoid Man: Joe Rush - Part 2

21st Century Mutoid Man: Joe Rush - Part 2

This is the second part of our conversation with Joe Rush, the initiator, mentor, and driving force behind The Mutoid Waste Company, that extraordinary countercultural endeavour to turn the waste of o...

19 Mai 1h 2min

The Revolutionsts: How The Counterculture Turned to Terror

The Revolutionsts: How The Counterculture Turned to Terror

The Weather Underground, The Baader-Meinhof Group, The Red Brigade, Carlos the Jackal, The Japanese Red Army. The counterculture has always had a shadow side. There have been bad actors, casualties, t...

6 Mai 53min

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