Peter Lamborn Wilson By: Erik Davis | Categories: HiLo Heroes,
Popular   As a public intellectual for the most shadowy of
publics (anarchists, magicians, lovers of heresy), PETER LAMBORN
WILSON (born 1945) has written and lectured on a crazy quilt of
esoteric topics: pirates, angels, alchemists, utopians. The
central thread running through this material is spiritual
anarchy, those nomad zones in history and religion where
authority gives way to vertiginous freedoms that are at once
sacred, political, and, at least in some sublimated sense,
erotic. Blessed with enough family money to have remained
“independently poor,” Wilson has lived the bohemian life since
the 1960s, dodging both academy and the hipster limelight. He
spent a decade abroad, most of it in Tehran, where he sought out
devil-worshippers and hash-smoking Sufis, and studied Islamic
mysticism at the Iranian Academy of Philosophy, which drew
heavy-weights like and Henry Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr.
Current events lend a special urgency to Wilson’