Luminist Archives

Dale Robert Gowin was born in 1950 in Palmer, Alaska. His parents were latter-day homesteaders who staked out a claim in the 1940s under Alaska’s Homestead Act and settled on a tract of wilderness land in the virgin forest of the Alaskan Copper River Valley. For the first five years of this incarnation, he lived in a hand-made single-room log cabin beside a glacier-fed river, with his father, Richard D. Gowin; his mother, Dorothy Rands Gowin (Sims); an older brother, Forest, who died of mysterious natural causes in 1966; and a younger brother, Alan. In 1955 a sister, Anola, joined the tribe. Dale was weaned on the flesh of moose, bear, caribou, and salmon. Later, at the age of 15, he became a vegetarian. Dale has been a lifelong student of esoteric philosophy; a bibliophile with a strong interest in the more obscure byways of literature and the arts; a writer and self-publisher; an amateur folk musician and song writer; and an activist in the cause of human liberation and the global  social revolution. During the “psychedelic revolution” of the 1960s he experimented with entheogenic herbs and chemicals in combination with a disciplined pursuit of spiritual goals. This experimentation led to major discoveries in ontological and epistemological realms which formed the basis of his evolving worldview, a central element of which is the integral linking of spiritual and political concerns. During the 1980s he was initiated through the IVº of Ordo Templi Orientis under the hand and seal of Caliph Hymenaeus Alpha. In the 1990s he was arrested in a police sting operation involving the sale of LSD to an undercover agent, and he served six years of a twelve-year prison sentence in the penitentiaries of New York State. He has had six years of formal college education, but was awarded no degrees due to his non-standard selection of course material.