The existential manifesto of the Uranian Press, presenting the original basis of Tyler’s integrative vision of art, life, creativity, and journeys through forms of consciousness. Its main text, printed in three pages on a bifolium, is supplemented with two broadside inserts, one of which introduces the manifesto: 

In this paper Creativity is to be understood in the sense of a Self Documented life work toward a more fully integrated individual, able to bridge consciousness between these states, & impart the result in a symbol system seeking to evolve self transcendence to the point of holding in consciousness the knowledge of unity with the universe. 

From his decision to leave Chicago in 1958 to his final years conducting underground tattoo and burial ceremonies under the aegises of the Uranian Phalanstery and the First New York Gnostic Lyceum Temple, Tyler was committed to the vision outlined in this document. He also increasingly came to know the “very real dangers” with which “exploration of this dark & terrible, spaceless primordial realm is fraught.” He warns in both Creativity’s main text and a second broadside insert about these risks: demon possession, “the nihilistic necromancer becom[ing] the False Magician,” the “Yang & Yin balance of Violent, vandalistic, nihilistic, Murderous destruction.” 

Stefan Brecht, who dedicates a chapter of his history of the Bread and Puppet Theater to Tyler, suggests that Tyler ultimately succumbed to those dangers, casting him as both an influence on and a kind of antithesis to Bread and Puppet’s founder, Peter Schumann. In their early acquaintance, the two had both seen “the threat of nuclear war as crucial, contemporary fact, saw it as a symptom of the preponderant form of madness, rational madness, and saw as only salvation a mass transformation of consciousness from the intellectual to the intuitive” (Brecht, p. 68). Whereas Schumann’s “sacrifice of consciousness,” however, called on radical love traditions and archetypes from Christian sources, leading him to become a major, transformative player in the peace movement, Brecht contends that Tyler’s art was stuck in the sacrifice alone – the “mission is reported on, not any achievement of it” (p. 66). 

Peter Schumann’s son, Max Schumann, himself remembers Tyler as “part genius, part madman” and has long been engaged with his art and philosophy, recently curating the first major retrospective of Tyler’s work, The Schizophrenic Bomb, at Printed Matter. He contrasts Tyler’s work not with Bread and Puppet’s but with the commercial gallery culture surrounding Tyler on one hand and insipid New Age movements that emerged around him, using similar symbolic systems, on the other. Tyler defied them all to the end, “not only not being engaged or aspiring to high art or the institutions of arts – just completely not recognizing the values” and remaining fully committed to an integrated “art-life practice” that never yielded its “dark, death current” to facile spiritual formulas (Lynch, 2017). 

A rare and significant document in postwar psychic exploration and American antiestablishment art.

New York: Hand Set & Printed by Michael Martin & David Lewis, apprentices at Uranian Press N.Y.C., 1960. Bifolium, [4] pp., with 2 inserted leaves (printed rectos only), all 12 x 9 inches, printed in red and black on brown paper. Light wear at edges, 1 3/4- inch crease in outer edge of first leaf, else near fine.

W. C. Baker Rare Books & Ephemera is a Brooklyn, New York-based firm specializing in printed and manuscript materials relating to avant-garde literature, social movements, and unusual currents in science, religion, and the performing arts.

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