Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History (19 page)

Pamela had called a local French medical examiner — Dr. Max Vasille — to take charge upon finding her husband’s body. Dr. Vasille listed the cause of death as “heart failure”. Several people viewed the sealed coffin, including Doors manager Bill Siddons, who apparently chose not to view the corpse. Siddons’ official statement to the press was that “Jim Morrison died of natural causes” and that “the death was peaceful”.

Although Jim’s death was listed officially as “heart failure,” his personal physician, Dr. Derwin, stated to the press that “Jim Morrison was in excellent health before travelling to Paris”.

This has recently been complicated by “Queen Mu” writing in
Mondo 2000
(Summer, 1991). Apparently
Mondo 2000
surfaced a rare medical file regarding Jim Morrison’s various sexual diseases, and the treatments he was undergoing for them. There was mention of “cancer of the penis…”. Queen Mu reports:“… Hey! No one wants to be expunged from the Book of Life. How many medical workers at UCLA knew that Jim Morrison was being treated for gonorrhea in the Fall of 1970? Knew of the biopsy that confirmed adenoma of the penile urethra — often consequence to repeated gonorrhea? This is a particularly swift form of cancer whose only alternative may have been radical castration…”— Queen Mu, pp. 131.

No autopsy was performed on Jim Morrison’s corpse, as is the usual custom in unusual or suspect deaths in France. Had friends been able to at least see the corpse this might have been done. According to several reports, Morrison confidant Alan Ronay also helped maintain the blackout surrounding the death. Jim Morrison’s body was quickly whisked away to be buried at Pere Lachaise. Pere Lachaise is a national French monument and notables like Balzac, Edith Piaf, Moliere, Oscar Wilde and other French countrymen are buried there. Regarding Pere Lachaise: Jim had handpicked the gravesite on several occasions for his impending “burial.” He had visited the site as late as three days before his ”death.” This is reported in
Break On Through
and other Morrison biographies.

The media at once showed suspicion regarding Morrison’s grave due to the fact that foreigners are rarely buried in a national French monument. Reports like those in the
Baltimore Morning Sun
questioned how he might have cajoled his way into the cemetery to be buried.

Upon viewing the Pere Lachaise grave site, Doors drummer John Densmore stated: “… the grave is too short!” Doors manager Bill Siddons, when asked about Pere Lachaise, stated: “… how it happened is still not clear to me”. He was quoted in
Bam!, a
rock magazine back in 1981 regarding the controversy. At any rate, Morrison’s grave at Pere Lachaise remained unmarked for several months, adding and maintaining a further remained unmarked for several months, adding and maintaining a further cloak around the corpse and the evidence.

Only two people saw Jim Morrison’s dead body — his wife Pamela and Dr. Vasille. Dr. Vasille has repeatedly denied interviews and will not answer questions, and Pamela is dead.

Besides the “facts” as laid out in countless books, films, interviews and press reports, there exists also a wild and surreal assortment of rumors regarding “what really took place”. Many of these rumors center in on the occult, black and white magick, Voodoo, magical Christianity and assorted mystical strangenesses. In J. Prochniky’s biography of Morrison,
Break On Through,
there is this description of Morrison-based occult rumors: “… even more incredible were theories that Morrison had somehow been “murdered” through “supernatural means”. While Jim was fascinated with the occult, it is quite an assumption that a jealous rival or jilted lover could cause his death in a Paris bathtub by stabbing a Voodoo doll or melting down a Doors album while chanting a curse.”

“… Another supernatural-based theory is that Morrison’s body had been driven to great extremes by the spirit of the shaman he believed had entered his body as a child on that New Mexico highway. When this spirit or a demon has used its talents to influence the world, it abandoned Jim and left him a physically wasted and mentally exhausted man who felt betrayed with no desire to go on…” — Riordan and Prochniky, pp. 466

Another occult theory exists in
No One Here Gets Out Alive
by Sugarman and Hopkins. Regarding Jim’s death they state:

“… Other theories abounded in Jim’s close circle of friends. One had him killed when someone plucked out his eyes with a knife (“to free his soul”, as the story had it). Another had a spurned mistress killing him long distance from New York by Witchcraft…” — Sugarman and Hopkins, pp. 372

Anthropologist Alison Bailey Kennedy even went so far as to tie Morrison in with Orphic mystery cults and the initiatory uses of various spider venoms, which release the “
deuende
in Gypsy tradition — the dark soul that burn incandescently like a cicada, immolating itself in fiery passion.”

Jim Morrison many times claimed connections to the occult and specifically Voodoo or Voudun philosophy and magick. It was a part of his “path”. The moniker “Mr. Mojo Risin’” was an anagram — a rearrangement of the letters in Jim Morrison. Mojo is a religious term describing shamanic “power icon” or affiliation. The African root Mo refers to the dark or darkness. Mojo is a specific African/Voodoun/Obeah traditional term.

“I think that there are whole regions of images and feelings that are rarely given outlet in daily life… when they do come out, they can take perverse forms” said Morrison circa 1968. He goes on to say that “the shaman is the healer, like the Witch-doctor.” Morrison reiterates elsewhere that “we must not forget that the snake or the lizard is identified with the unconscious and the forces of evil…” So says the legendary “Lizard King”. “The Lizard King” was one of Jim Morrison’s occult code names. He was also called “The Exterminating Angel” in occult circles, according to film critic Gene Youngblood and others.

In
No One Hear Gets Out Alive
authors Hopkins and Sugarman recount Morrison drinking blood with Witch-initiate Ingrid Thompson. In certain occult traditions, the use of blood combined with certain sexual acts is reginmen, part of a hidden technology for spell casting. This is especially so in the Tantric
Varna Marg
(left-handed) rites. It is also a part of Western ritual magic, used in groups like La Couleuvre Noir, the Ordo Templi Orientis, Les Ophitis and others, although it is more uncommon than common in occult work.

This sort of sorcery is also used in Voodoo/Voudun Petro rites to summon different Loas (gods and goddesses). Speaking of the Tantra
Varna Marg
and the Voodoo
Petro,
there is this description of death mythology pertinent to Jim Morrison’s occult beliefs and possibly his practices. At the very least he would have known of these ideas.

“… but the human form is no means just an empty vessel for the Gods… Rather it is a critical locus where a number of sacred forces may converge. The players are the basic components of man: the
z’etiole,
the
gros bon ange
and the
ti bon ange,
as well as the
n’ame
of the corpse cadaver. The latter is the body itself, the flesh and the blood. The
n’ame
is the gift from God and the spirit of the flesh that allows each cell in the body to function. It is the residual presence of the
n’ame
for example, that gives form to the corpse long after the clinical “death” of the body. The n’ame, upon the “death” of the body begins to pass slowly into the organisms of the soil… A process that takes 18 months to complete…”— Davis, pp. 99

Remember, Jim Morrison’s grave at Pere Lachait remained unmarked for several months so that no one might disturb the corpse and the surrounding site.

According to Tibetan tradition, something similar is believed to exist so far as naming the components of the soul and the body. The
Varna Marg
and especially the
Bardo Thodol
(the Tibetan Book of the Dead) relate specific death myths concerning what occurs right after someone dies.

Writing in
Psychedelic Monographs and Essays,
psychiatrist Dr. Rick Strassman shows that:

“… Another model of birth and death, and transformation in which the 49 day interval appears is in the Bardo Thodol… This is the time when the life forces of the deceased — the energetic tendencies accumulated during “life,” “decide on” or gravitate towards or coalesce around the next incarnate form…” — Strassman, pp. 182

Rock writer Greg Shaw, writing in
Bam!
and
Mojo Navigator
interpreted Morrison’s song “The End” along these lines also, stating that each line in the song is a direct quote from the
Bardo Thodol.
It all “makes perfect sense, if one is familiar with the mystical background,” said Shaw.

What are the implications for these ideas in light of the supposed “death” of Jim Morrison? At clinical death, according to the above, the person actually splits up into his or her true parts, formerly connected into a whole being.

According to occult lore, it is possible to ensnare or trap parts of the personality or spirit during this transition. Wade Davis, author of The
Serpent and the Rainbow and Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie,
has this to say:

“During initiation, for example the
ti bon ange
may be extracted from the body and housed in a clay jar called a
canari.
A
canari
is a clay jar that has been placed at the inner sanctuary of the
hounfour
(ritual house).”

“… During the stages directly following the physical death and the first stages of after-death the
ti bon ange
is extremely vulnerable… Only when it is liberated from the flesh… is it relatively safe…” — Davis, pp. 102

Is it Jim Morrison’s
ti bon ange
that is at the root of all these occult rumors? Was it his
ti bon ange
that was bought, sold and then collected on that fateful day in Paris when he “died?”

That
canari
has a name. It is called Zeppelin Publishing Company. And the
bokor,
or Voodoo high priest who cajoled Morrison’s
ti bon ange
into the
canari?
He runs a company called the B of A Company (or B of A Communications), formerly of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and now of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He owns an active passport and IDs under the name of James Douglas Morrison and claims to actually be the not-so-dead rock star!

In the first two years after Jim Morrison’s “death” in Paris, many sightings of the rock star were reported. These sightings range from the totally spurious and ridiculous to the reliable and very hard to shake. The
LA Free Press
and several wire service reports described someone in 1973 appearing on several occasions in San Francisco. There Morrison was involved with business and banking transactions with the Bank of America of San Francisco. The employee that handled the transactions, Walt Fleischer, confirmed that someone resembling Morrison and using that name was indeed doing business at the Bank of America. He did add that he “was far from sure that this was the ‘dead’ artist” as Morrison showed no identification. Could this be because a photo ID was already on file at the bank, with the name James Douglas Morrison? Yes, it is still on file.

According to authors Riordan and Prochniky, Morrison was also seen on several occasions hanging out in “unpleasant places” in Los Angeles and wearing Morrison’s leather garb, all in black. This was over a period of two years right after the Paris “death.” I researched this a bit further and found out that the “unpleasant places” meant notorious gay leather bars, and the underground gay community in Los Angeles.

There were also many rumors that Morrison was also appearing regularly in Louisiana and had made several radio interviews. Again, Prochniky and Riordan reveal that: “… At an obscure radio station in the Midwest Jim supposedly showed up in the dead of night and did a lengthy interview that explained it all… After the interview he vanished into the darkness again. As you might guess, no recordings of the interview exist and no reliable source remembers hearing the broadcast…”