Arrival on Ibiza

The record of the working life ends, in every account, with a leaving. The man who had built a career in advertising, publishing, media, and music left it, and left Canada, in 1983. The biographies place the date there without variation, and the date is one of the firmer points in the early chronology.¹ What surrounds the date is softer. The departure is the hinge on which the whole life turns, the moment the businessman begins, by a slow and undocumented route, to become the founder. It is also the moment where the official accounts shift from the language of fact to the language of conversion, and where a documentary biography has to slow down and separate the two.

The departure, as the sources tell it

The founder’s own organizations describe the leaving in the vocabulary of crisis and disappearance. One official account states that in 1983, during a personal crisis, he left that life behind. Another renders it more vividly still: that one morning in 1983 he simply walked away from his family and his fast-paced life as an entrepreneur, and disappeared.² The phrasing is the phrasing of the conversion narrative, the clean break, the sudden renunciation, the man who steps out of his old life in a single morning. It is the kind of account that a system built on the idea of a determined, designed life would find congenial, because it presents the departure as something that happened to him rather than something he reasoned his way into.

The documentary problem with the walked-away-one-morning account is that it cannot be corroborated, and that its source is the very organization with an interest in the conversion frame. It may be accurate. People do leave their lives suddenly. But the only witnesses to the interior state of the man in 1983 are the later accounts that present him as a founder, and those accounts are not neutral. What can be stated with more confidence is the outward fact, stripped of the interior drama: in 1983 Krakower left Canada, and left behind the career and, by the accounts, the family that had defined his life there. The crisis is reported. The departure is documented. This book reports the first and relies on the second.

His own later account, given to his son, matched the conversion frame but in plainer words. He had been running a media company, he said, and “one morning I woke up and that was it.” He called himself “a legitimate disappeared person,” one who “didn’t even know where I had gone… from one day to the next it was time to go,” and he was wary of the reasons people supply after the fact: “people are always making up reasons.” On Ibiza, by his telling, the deconstruction was literal as much as figurative. The upper-middle-class, well-educated man became, in his phrase, “a wild man… living in a tree,” as the cultural furniture of his old life “just fell away”; the steadying thread through those years, he said, was the teaching post at the local country school, which he remembered as one of the better experiences of his early time on the island. He insisted he had arrived a skeptic, “born skeptical,” a self-described nihilist, “neither spiritual nor mystical nor religious,” and bemused by the seekers and guru-followers he found there.³

A fuller version of that morning survives in his own later telling. It was a Thursday in June 1983. By his account he woke in emotional discomfort, took some cash, and left his car parked on a busy Toronto avenue with the engine running and the key inside, ostensibly to buy cigarettes; he walked out of the shop by a different door and kept walking, down to the train station, “realizing to be really nuts.” He boarded a train toward Montreal, the city of his birth, but got off halfway, at Belleville, Ontario, and made his way to an old mill belonging to a friend from the 1960s, where he sat on the dam and wept, he said, without knowing why. From there the journey only widened: a bus that turned out to be bound for New York, a walk straight to the airport, a ninety-eight-dollar flight to Brussels, and then Amsterdam. In a cheap dormitory near the Dam, a teenaged American traveler asked him where he was going. “I don’t know,” he answered, and the young man told him: “You have to go to Ibiza,” by the Magic Bus, to a town called Santa Eulalia and a place called Sandy’s Bar, where “everything will fit into place.”⁴ The journey south carried its own absurd punctuation. The young traveler, asked for a parting favor, left a rolled joint atop the clothes in his bag as a gift; at the Spanish border the Guardia Civil took only him off what he called the last Magic Bus to Spain, the company going bankrupt, by his telling, the day he boarded, found the joint, and were met with his honest, ridiculous protest that the bag was “not mine.” By then, he said, he had been gone five days and no one knew he had left; in time he was, by his own account, “ultimately declared dead,” unheard from “for a very, very long time.”⁵

On Ibiza, by the same account, it did. He was taken in by a painter named Roger Dixon, who let him live on the roof of a house that belonged, in Ra’s telling, to the English actor John Hurt; it was there that he found the longyi he would wear, and, catching sight of himself in a mirror, settled into the name he had begun to give when strangers asked. He later dated the change to the arrival itself. Before 1983, he said, he had introduced himself as Robert; “the Ra just suddenly came into existence when I landed on this island,” and only the strange experiences that followed, “that eventually led up to my encounter,” gave the name the mythic weight he would attach to it.⁶ When the painter tired of his guest and asked what he meant to do, he said he did not know, and was told of a school that needed teachers. The school was the Morna Valley School, an old Phoenician-style finca among sheep and dust and two-thousand-year-old olive trees; its founder, Mary Blakstad, looked up at the man in the Arab headdress, asked “Can you teach?”, and, hearing “anything you want,” hired him on the spot. She sent him to live, rent-free, in a place up a nearby mountain. That mountain, and the spare structure on it, were the “tree” and the ruin of the later accounts.⁷

The island

The destination was Ibiza, the Balearic island off the eastern coast of Spain. By the early 1980s Ibiza had a long-settled reputation as a gathering place for those living at an angle to conventional society, a destination for artists, drifters, and seekers since the 1960s, alongside its older life as a Mediterranean island of farmers and fishermen and its newer life as a tourist economy. A Canadian professional in his middle thirties, having left his career and his country, was not an unusual figure there. The island absorbed such arrivals as a matter of course.

Decades later, on his final teaching tour, he compressed the arrival into a single image. He had come to the island, he said, as “a disappeared person,” and the first person he met there introduced himself as God; he took it as confirmation that he had come to the right place.⁸ The anecdote is his own, offered from the lecture stage near the end of his life, and it is reported here as he told it, not as evidence of anything but the temper of the place and the man: a destitute newcomer among the island’s drifters and self-proclaimed divinities, at home, by his own account, among them.

The route by which he reached it is not documented in any detail the record can support. The accounts agree that he settled on Ibiza after 1983 and that he was there, on the island, when the events of January 1987 took place. The intervening years, roughly 1983 to 1987, are among the least documented of the adult life, and the temptation to fill them with the texture of a spiritual wilderness, the seeker in his cave, should be resisted exactly because the material that would fill them is so thin.

One documented thread runs through these years and is worth holding onto because it is concrete. The accounts state that on Ibiza he worked as a teacher. The astrological database that supplies the named firm of his Canadian career also supplies a named school for his Ibiza years: that he taught humanities at the Morna Valley school on the island.⁹ The detail is corroborated, loosely, from an unexpected direction. Years later, in the public guestbook attached to his obituary, a former pupil left a note recalling having been taught by him at Morna Valley in 1984, and remembering him as “a great teacher.”¹⁰ A guestbook comment is weak evidence on its own, but it is independent of the official biographies, and it points the same way they do. The man who would describe receiving a complete system of knowledge spent the years before that event teaching humanities to children on a Mediterranean island.

The man who lived outside

Beyond the teaching, the record of the Ibiza years grows unreliable quickly. Secondary accounts describe a man living increasingly outside ordinary society as the 1980s wore on, in poverty, at the margins, by the start of 1987 reportedly living in a ruin.¹¹ Some of these accounts add details that have hardened into community lore: that he lived rough, that there was drug use, that he had a dog. The dog, at least, recurs in his own later telling of the January experience and so has a claim to the record that the rougher details do not.

This book treats the lived-outside material with the caution its sourcing demands. The single thread that can be carried forward with reasonable confidence is that by the start of 1987 the man on Ibiza was living in straitened and marginal circumstances, far from the professional comfort of his Canadian career, and that this poverty is part of his own account of the period as much as it is part of the secondary literature. The picture of the ruined building, the near-destitution, the man with almost nothing, comes in part from his own later descriptions of where he was when the Voice arrived, and it is in that frame, as his account of his own situation, that it is most defensible. The conversion narrative wants a wilderness for its revelation, and the wilderness may have been real, but the evidence for it is largely the testimony of the man it transformed.

San Juan

The place can be located more precisely than the official accounts trouble to. By his own telling he settled, at the end of 1983, in the district of San Juan, the largest and still the most rural in the north of the island, among the old fincas the first Catalan settlers had built. His home was a converted sheep corral he called Cás Cotxu, made into a small courtyard house that, by his account, held two pools modeled on ones found in a Babylonian palace and a mosaic to Tanit, the Phoenician goddess; above it, up the mountain, stood the original house of the same name, by then a ruin, abandoned generations earlier when its water failed and its great cistern ran dry. That ruin, and that dry cistern, were where he said the experience of 1987 took place. In the years before it, by his own account, he was “mad as a hatter,” and the village kept the evidence in his anecdotes: he once told the cafe-keeper’s son, in passing, that he was “the reincarnation of John the Baptist” and should be remembered as such, a claim that fit, by an irony he savored, a village whose church the local legend traced to a farmer’s dream of John the Baptist.¹²

His arrival at that particular ruin was a slow drift. He had given up the small house below; on the winter solstice of 1985 he set out on a long journey across Europe to the Holy Land, returning, by his account, at the spring equinox of 1986, and by that autumn he was homeless on the island again. It was the ruin’s tenant, the English poet, who handed him the key: leaving for some months, he let Ra move into the ruina in September 1986, among the books, herbs, and masks that would furnish the January experience. There Ra lived alone through the autumn, too poor to buy kerosene for the lantern, keeping the hours of the sun, until the Voice came. The room itself no longer exists. Years afterward, by his own telling, the man who had bought the land asked whether he might tear the ruin down to build a guest house, weary of strangers arriving to sleep where the experience had occurred, and Ra told him to go ahead. The birthplace of Human Design, with its founder’s blessing, was demolished.¹³

An outside witness

Almost all of the Ibiza years reach the record through Ra’s own retellings or the recollections of people who later followed him. One source stands outside that circle entirely. Don C. Andrews, an Englishman who spent time on the island in the 1980s and wrote a memoir of it with no stake in Human Design, met the man and set him down on the page. Asked his name, the figure in the Arab headdress answered “Ra”; Andrews ventured, “as in the Egyptian sun God?” and got back only “That’s right” and a level gaze. The other unusual thing, Andrews noted, was that “he lived in a tree,” which no one else seemed to find strange. He remembered the “sharp blue eyes,” the “ever-ready Fortuna cigarette” stubbed out and at once relit, and a piece of advice delivered one night at the bar Las Dalias, among “a group of his admirers”: “Don, there’s one thing you have to know: this island is the world’s largest voluntary lunatic asylum.” Everything Ra did, Andrews wrote, “seemed to have to be larger than life.”¹⁴

His own account of those teaching years is franker, and darker. He had, he said, been buying LSD from the parents of the children he taught, and “used to come down every Monday morning on LSD and teach,” assuming no one noticed, until a pupil told him, “Ra, blackboards on Monday, they are the best.” He never doubted, he said, that by any ordinary standard he “would be institutionalized somewhere.” What steadied him, by his own telling, was the children, their ease with him and their pleasure in school, and the singing: alone in the tree at night he would sing into the dark, a cappella, the thousands of songs he carried in memory, the wind moving in the branches.¹⁵

To this documented record of drug use, marijuana from his teens, cocaine in his working years, and the LSD of the teaching years, later testimony has added one more substance, and it is reported here with the caution testimony requires. Eleanor Haspel-Portner, the research partner of his later years and a named but estranged witness, has said that before the 1987 experience he had also used ketamine. The claim is hers; it is not corroborated in the public documentary record, and this book does not adopt the further, speculative suggestion, advanced in some secondary commentary rather than by any source close to him, that a drug produced the Voice. What the record will bear is narrower: that by his own account and the accounts of others he was, through the Ibiza years, a heavy and habitual user of drugs, and that what part this played in what followed is a question the documents cannot answer. A line from his own music, the song “Raving on the K-Line,” has been read by some as an allusion to the same; the reading is suggestive but unconfirmed, and the lyric is treated here as his, not as evidence.¹⁶

A precursor, by his account

The official biographies present January 1987 as the single hinge, the unheralded descent of the Voice on a man who until then had only been living roughly on the island. In his own later telling, the 1987 experience had a precursor, and he placed it more than a year earlier. The account belongs to the same register as the transmission itself, reported here as what he said happened and not as a verified event, and it is included because it is his own and because it complicates the clean, singular conversion the institutional accounts prefer.

By his description he was running, in that period, an experimental school, and had stopped eating; the fast had run sixteen days. He was at a renovated finca in the countryside with two companions who had gone to sleep, sitting with his back to a fire, when the door opened on its own, three times across the night, the third time as a cat walked in. He felt, he said, a pressure at the back of his neck, and he heard a sound he could only compare to an airplane except that it had “no Doppler effect,” neither approaching nor receding, seeming to come from everywhere, inside his head and outside it at once. Stepping out under a moonless, star-filled sky to a carob tree and returning, he watched his own hands take up a new jotting pad and a pen and, by his account, lost consciousness; he came to holding pages he did not remember writing, “full of glyphs and writing,” the first page bearing “a very stylized G,” with formulas and notations he did not recognize. He wrapped himself in an oversized black cloak and went out, where, he said, he was physically “turned around” as if by two hands at his midriff; a huge moon had risen, the valley “filled with cries” of horses, dogs, and roosters, and he saw the sun come up with Mercury beside it before his sight dissolved into “pulsing frequencies.” Only weeks later, he said, did he understand what the sunrise had framed: the closest approach of Halley’s Comet, with Mercury and the sun. “This was long before the Voice,” he said. “It was my first taste of real magic.”¹⁷

The documentary value of the account is not that it can be confirmed, because it cannot, but that it is his, and that it revises the shape of his own story. The institutional version begins the mystical life in January 1987. His own version reaches back to a comet and a fast in 1985. The astronomical event is fixed even though the experience attached to it is not: Halley’s Comet made its closest passes by Earth in late 1985 and the spring of 1986. The book records the precursor as it records the Voice, as the founder’s account of his own life, offered without corroboration and held at the same distance.

Thirty-eight years old

By the close of 1986 the outward facts had arranged themselves into the situation from which everything later proceeds. A man born in Montreal, educated there, with a career across advertising, publishing, media, and music behind him, had left Canada in 1983, settled on Ibiza, taught humanities at a local school, and fallen into a marginal and impoverished way of living on the island. He was, by the primary birth date this book follows, thirty-eight years old.¹⁸ He had a dog. He had, by his own later account, very little else.

Nothing in this situation predicts what he would say happened next. That is the point at which the documentary account and the conversion narrative part company most sharply. The conversion narrative reads the poverty and the marginal living as the necessary darkness before the light, the emptying-out that prepared him to receive. The documentary account declines the reading. It records a thirty-eight-year-old former advertising man, living poorly on a Spanish island in the first days of 1987, and it stops there, because the next thing in the record is not an event the record can verify. The next thing is what he said happened over eight days and eight nights, beginning on the evening of January 3, 1987. That account, and the careful distance the rest of this book keeps from it, is the subject of the chapter that follows.