The End of the Beginning
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By necessity, foundation stories require some kind of delimitation. Logically speaking, if the apostolic period, the golden age, is forever, then how can it be perceived as a golden age? Furthermore, life and history being what they are, sooner or later things fall apart in some way for any movement, let alone one that presents radical new understandings about religious matters and hence poses challenges to the established orders of its period. Therefore, the foundation story also needs to make religious sense out of the end of the golden age and to explain how the religious movement is still, or could still be, legitimate.
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In many foundation stories, this is done by presenting the founder as laying down authoritative moral codes, rules of succession, and guidelines during or at the end of the golden age. Mohammed, for example, received the Koran, which was later passed on to his followers; Jesus appeared to and instructed his disciples after the resurrection; Mani codified his teachings into several books; and the Buddha’s sayings were remembered and orally passed on.
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The Grateful Dead and the Acid Tests were different, however, in that the leading figure most qualified to fit into the role of founder—namely, Ken Kesey—had lost a great deal of his prophetic charisma by the time of the last Acid Test. This was the “acid graduation” ceremony, at which even the Grateful Dead deserted him in order to play a different show—as Wolfe brings out quite clearly in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, itself a work of mythologization, of course, but the general details of which are regarded as being historically reliable. By this point, Kesey had lost the respect of—or been superseded by—the San Francisco hippie community whose expression and aesthetics he had influenced so strongly, and even his group of Merry Pranksters had splintered. “The hippies, at the last moment, rejected Kesey,” making the Acid Graduation “one of those pivotal moments that you find in myths, when the hero fails a crucial test because he lacks faith.”
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Although Kesey remained part of the Grateful Dead family, and they did perform to support his family-owned creamery in Oregon, where he retired after the collapse of his charisma, their discussions of him and other presentations of his impact show that his role as a potential mass-movement leader ends with the Acid Tests. His group was fractured; his ideas had been taken up and popularized by others, not least the Grateful Dead; he was not trusted by such power brokers as Bill Graham and Chet Helms; on a popular level, he and the Pranksters seem to have lost the respect of a hippie movement that was considerably younger and less focused than he; and he was embroiled in legal troubles that led to him serving jail time, after which he moved away from San Francisco entirely.
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In short, Kesey and the Pranksters created a new and at least partly religious phenomenon, the Acid Tests, which had a profound influence on the Grateful Dead’s aesthetics, design, and aspirations. And yet, despite this, the collapse of his prophetic charisma did not cause the collapse of the spiritual psychedelic movement that first manifested in the Acid Tests and with which the Grateful Dead identified themselves. This counterintuitive result might well arise from the Grateful Dead’s well-known distrust of authority figures and would-be leaders, but it also supports James R. Lewis’s argument that the importance of prophetic figures is often overstated. As Olsson writes, “Basically, the Acid Tests were initiation rites, separating those who took the Test from the rest of the world. Those inside would form part of the charismatic group, and outsiders were excluded. When the Acid Tests became impossible to uphold, the Grateful Dead took up the mantle of charismatic authority through their performances—although playing down the ‘authority’ aspect as much as they could.”
