The Island

The man who would become Ra Uru Hu did not choose Ibiza at random, and he was not the first to arrive there with a life to shed. The island he reached around 1983 had been, for two decades already, one of the small number of places in the Western world that organized itself around the people who had walked away from somewhere else. To understand why a Canadian advertising man with a collapsing marriage and a failing business ended his flight on a Balearic island, rather than in a city or a commune or an ashram, it helps to know what the island had become before he got there.

Ibiza sits in the Mediterranean off the eastern coast of Spain, the smallest of the inhabited Balearic Islands after Formentera. For most of its recorded history it was poor, agricultural, and remote, a place of dry-stone terraces, fig and almond and carob, salt pans worked since Phoenician times, and whitewashed farmhouses, the fincas, scattered across a hinterland the islanders called the campo.¹ Its remoteness was the point. Through the late 1950s and the 1960s, as mass tourism began to remake the Spanish coast under Franco, Ibiza drew a different and smaller traffic: artists, writers, draft resisters, deserters, and drifters from northern Europe and North America, for whom the island offered warmth, cheapness, distance from the law, and a population long accustomed to eccentric foreigners who paid in cash and asked for little.² The bohemian colony settled mainly around the town of Santa Eulària and the village of Sant Carles in the north, where an old hippie market grew up at Las Dalias and a ruined finca could be rented, or simply occupied, for almost nothing.³

By the time the founder arrived, this culture was a generation deep. The island had absorbed successive waves: the beatniks and bohemians of the early 1960s, the hippies of the later 1960s and the 1970s, and, by the 1980s, a layer of older survivors of those waves alongside a new traffic of seekers, dealers, and the kind of people for whom Ibiza was less a destination than a terminus. Drugs were part of the texture of the place, hashish and LSD in the campo, and later the cocaine and the chemical nightlife that would make the island’s name as a club destination at the very end of the decade. The same island held, at the same time, a quiet world of small farmers and a loud world of foreigners chasing oblivion or enlightenment or both, and the line between the two was the dirt track from the road to the finca.⁴

It is this island that the testimony of outside witnesses describes. One memoir of the period, written by an Englishman who lived on Ibiza in those years, records the same landscape of ruined houses, free meals, half-wild dogs, and resident madmen that the founder’s own account takes for granted, and remembers the founder himself within it: a gaunt figure living rough above a finca, known to the foreign community as one of the island’s eccentrics, neither the strangest nor the most harmless.⁵ The point of the witness is not the detail but the ordinariness. On Ibiza in the mid-1980s a man could lose his name, his money, his family, and his mind, and live in a roofless house with a dog, and stare at the sun, and this would make him notable but not unique. The island had a place for him, and a word for him, the local madman, and a tolerance for him that almost nowhere else would have extended.

This matters to the documentary record in two ways. First, it sets the founder’s account in its actual physical and social setting, which neither inflates nor diminishes it. The ruina over the dry cistern, the rented house below it taken around 1984, the path worn by his own feet, the rare free meal, the half-wild dog, the poet and herbalist whose room he occupied: every external feature of the eight-day account belongs to a documented way of living that many people shared on that island in that decade. The setting is real and verifiable even where the event within it is not. The Voice cannot be checked; the ruin can.

Second, the island explains the shape of the early system as much as any biographical fact about the man. The first people to hear the new teaching, as a later chapter records, were drawn from the floating population of seekers that Ibiza and its sister islands collected, people already loosened from their origins and already accustomed to following a teacher.⁶ A revelation delivered in Montreal or London in 1987 would have had to make its way against the ordinary skepticism of ordinary life. Delivered on Ibiza, among people who had crossed Europe precisely in search of something to which they could surrender, it found, ready-made, both an audience and a vocabulary. The island did not produce the system, but it produced the conditions in which a man could receive one without being stopped, and in which others could believe him without being thought mad themselves.

The founder left the island repeatedly in the years that followed, teaching across Europe and North America, and returned to it to die. The campo he had lived in as a destitute stranger was, by then, being bought up and built over; the ruin he had occupied did not survive, as the chapters on his last years record. The island that had given a fugitive advertising man a place to fall apart was already vanishing into the same wave of money and development that had been gathering at its edges the whole time he was there. He had arrived at the end of one Ibiza, the refuge, and his life ran out at the beginning of another.