The Last Alchemist
(Fortean Times, Issue #235, June 2008)

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Mark Berry meets Art Kunkin, self-styled ‘King of the Hippies’, and discovers that, far from having abandoned his Sixties ideals, the legendary creator of The Los Angeles Free Press is gearing up for immortality. Photos supplied by the author.

“I would have shown you Timothy Leary’s ashes, but I think I’ve lost them,” admits metaphysical guru Art Kunkin. “Or maybe they’ve been stolen. I’m sure they’ll turn up.”

The sprightly 79-year-old points in the direction of a huge pile of papers and a three foot-high golden statue of Buddha where the remains of the legendary counterculture figure were last seen. The creator of The Los Angeles Free Press, the broadsheet paper first published in 1964 and considered by many as the original Beatnik Bible, now lives tucked away in a trailer at The Institute of Mentalphysics, a heady retreat in the hippie mecca of Joshua Tree, California. Surrounded by a mountain of literature, folk records, laboratory equipment and spiritual paraphernalia, Art studies alchemical science while continuing to write on social and political concerns.

Known affectionately by its jazz cigarette-smoking coffee house readership as ‘The Freep,”the LA Free Press was one of the most widely distributed underground newspapers of the Sixties (eventually circulating 120,000 copies a week). It broke journalistic ground by rigorously questioning the the actions of the government, promoting personal freedoms such as the legalization of marijuana and being actively involved in all the major left-wing counter-cultural movements, from Civil Rights to Vietnam. The Free Press championed Timothy Leary’s experimentation with psychedelic drugs and boasted the likes of boozy Charles Bukowski as one of its regular columnists. Its 20,000- strong fundraising concerts, complete with clouds of cannabis, featured the Mothers of Invention’s first live performance and the paper was responsible for spawning LA’s Beatnik coffee scene by having its office in the back of a smoky café on Sunset Strip.

The Freep was the kind of paper that published a list of all the narcotic agents in California (complete with home addresses), bot sued both by the State (for $25 million) and the Narcs for invasions of privacy, and took the whole sorry mess to the Supreme Court to somehow emerge as a triumphant victor.

For the last 30 years though, Art has been continuing the Sixties quest for spiritual enlightenment through the use of drugs – not through narcotics but by studying alchemy in the hope of discovering the Philosopher’s Stone, the legendary substance that was reputedly capable of turning base metals into gold and unlocking the door to immortality.

His quest began in 1980, when he traveled on a journalistic assignment to Salt Lake City to interview the alchemist Frater Albertus at the Paracelsus Research Society. So impressed was he with the alchemist’s experiments, Art joined the famed school, which boasted that it provided access to teachings previously available only to members of a secret society or fraternity.

“Frater Albertus – Brother Albert, which comes from the Rosicrucian tradition – was working on how to make herbal medicines in a totally different way,” explains Artt. “His idea was that if you made a separation of a plant and were capable of preserving its life, then at the end of it you would not only wind up with a medicine, you would end up with something alive, an herbal stone. The whole theory of alchemy is that the principles of life is in the mineral kingdom – that minerals are really alive and evolve one into another. If you can extract the life principle from a mineral, then you could change one metal into another through a transmutation, and you could then process it further into a medicine to rejuvenate the human body. This is the Philosopher’s Stone.”

“For thirty years, I collected a library of 1,000 alchemical books and I experimenting, replicating the methods in ancient documents. But nothing was successful. I then worked with mercury, lead and antimony (the latter features heavily in the works of the alchemical monks) and still nothing. The only thing that kept me going was a book I found called Biological Transmutations, and this showed a metallic transmutation using soil bacteria – it wasn’t one of the old alchemical books, which talked of distillations and so forth. I used soil bacteria called Leptothrix that I found in a puddle at UCLA and cultured. After feeding the sample manganese, the manganese turned into iron.”

Although the would-be alchemist has been successful in using soil bacteria to turn manganese into iron (a result he discovered was also achieved by the U.S. Army when it was researching sources for batteries as the process produces surplus energy), Art isn’t interested in getting rich with mountains of precious metals. In his autumn years, he’s more concerned with extending human life and invigorating his body with new energy.

Incredibly, by pulling together the strands of his research, he now believes he has created the mythical Philosopher’s Stone, and for the last year has been preparing and eatinh a special herbal medicine with startling results. Art has just released an e-Book, Alchemy, The Secret of Immortality Finally Revealed, so that whole world can have the chance to live forever. He also maintains that this public disclosure of information means that clandestine powers are less likely to try and bump him off.

“I’m almost 100 per cent sure I’ve succeeded,” he beams, with a youthful glint in his eye. “Two years ago, I got an email from Albert Cau, a French professor of chemistry who wanted to share his work with me. He was working with a mineral that no alchemist had looked at, because it was a radioactive mineral, and there was no basis for the alchemists in the Middle Ages or earlier to even detect radioactivity. Gold and platinum miners would dig this mineral and throw it away. It’s called Pitchblende and consists of uranium oxide. It looks like an ordinary rock with absolutely no value but is giving off low-level radiation. Non-ionizing radiation is all around us, mainly from the Sun, and radiation is probably responsible for how life life developed, from the energy in inorganiz minerals like this.”

“I also researched the works of Zechariah Sitchin. He is a scientific researcher who found evidence that 300 or 400,000 years ago there was knowledge of radiation. It’s bizarre, but Sitchin believes that Sumerian documents of 8,000 years ago speak of people coming from another planet in our solar system and needing a workforce to mine gold. The Sumerians talk about them taking a seed from an animal on earth and seed from a woman on the spaceship. Beings that knew about radioactivity could do this genetic experimentation and carried out wars with each other using nuclear weapons. Sitchin discovered in the Middle East, at the site of one of these ancient wars, the vitrified glass characteristic of a nuclear explosion. It’s totally anachronistic, (taking place before humans existed). He also has drawings which show the use of radioactive instruments and radioactive healing.”

“If this is correct, this would be how alchemy first started, that humans observed a master race,” surmises Art. “The alchemical legends do speak of beings that made the Stone and lived for 1,000 years. Evidently, at some point, there was someone traveling around Europe doing demonstrations of metallic transmutations and there are museums that actually contain alchemical gold. It’s metal that hasn’t been mined, gold with a different specific gravity. There are objects made out of this and nobody has been able to explain it. My theory is that if an ancient civilization existed where nuclear energy and genetic work were known, this may eventually have become the property of priests who transmitted it from one generation to another until finally it got lost. That knowledge was passed on through ancient Egypt and various clandestine societies until the secrets of Pitchblende and radiation was lost.”

“In recent years, evidence has arisen which shows that low-level doses of radiation could be beneficial rather than harmful to the human body. An article in National Geographic of January 2004 revealed that a number of purported ‘miracle cures’ were happening in underground mines in Montana. Doctors are even signing medical prescriptions permitting people to sit inside the mine for several hours a day to improve their health by exposure to the low-level radiation produced by the radon gas found there.”

“There is a lot of research that a certain level of radiation is good for you – like homeopathy,” notes Art. “A very small amount seems to be healthy for the human body. For example, researchers have discovered that in Japan there are pockets of people who are super healthy although, obviously, many people died from the atomic explosions there. Evidently, these healthy people received only an increased level of radiation that was healing but not enough to injure or kill them. Then there are the spas in Europe where people have bathing for hundreds of years because of the healing properties of that water. Up until now the healing was thought to occur because of the sulphur in the heated waters. But all those baths are now advertised in Europe as containing radioactivity.”

In his studies, Art found that the U.S. Army’s research into the mechanism by which soil bacteria turned manganese into iron focused on the mitochondria inside the cells of the bacteria. Mitochondria are the organelles in all living cells that turns the ever present low-level radiation in the environment into adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, the substance used by living cells as the energy for metabolism. Art combined this modern scientific insight with his knowledge that the ancient alchemical texts speak of a ‘secret fire’ necessary to create the Philosopher’s Stone and that this Stone was eaten in the form of fruit. So Art began experimenting with adding applies and pears into the Pitchblende concoction.

“It’s a very simple procedure. I have a jug full of Pitchblende rocks and I put a pear in. I’ve been eating the fruit every week for nearly a year now, taking a risk at this point because I really don’t know how strong the radioactivity is. The latest theory of aging has to do with mitochondria, that it is the source of life and energy for the body and that they kill each other off in the process of producing the ATP. What I am assuming is that the radiation is affecting the mitochondria inside the pear, helping the mitochondria to reproduce. When you eat this fruit, you are taking in substances that add to your own energy, directly from the inside.”

The modern-day alchemist says he’s achieved some startling effects. Already sporting a thicker head of hair than the average 20-year-old, he now claims it grows twice as fast. So do his fingernails. He’s admittedly a workaholic, but his everyday energy has now increased to the point where he has been known to sit at his computer for 30 hours straight without eating or sleeping. With one previous purported owner of a Philosopher’s Stone being the infamous Count St Germain (who hinted at being centuries old; see Fortean Times 146:40-44), perhaps this freethinking mover and shaker may now have all the necessary tools to complete the task started by his progressive Flower Power peers back in the Sixties. But in a world of war and injustice, why would a peace-loving hippie want to live indefinitely.

“One of our problems is that people die when they are just getting mature. Our lifetimes are just too short. Hopefully, if we can become more adult then a lot of social problems cans be solved. If I’m right, the Philosopher’s Stone is going to cause a lot of social problems. If people live for 200 years or more, overpopulation may be a result – the system of capitalism is going to have to change.”

It’s commendable that Art continues to pursue the hippie ideals of his Free Press heyday while so many of his peers have exchanged pot for profit, renouncing their peace-and-love dreams for lives of capitalistic excess. Art describes his position as the editor and creator of ‘The Freep’ as being in the center of a spider’s web, feeling the impulses of the underground culture and collecting Beat writers and anti-establishment legends like flies. Firm friends with figureheads like Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, Are and his ‘Freep’ were in the thick of every historical events of the Sixties. It was a paper of record, existing in a time of political demonstrations by students, the growth of the feminist and anti-war movement and experiments with psychedelic drugs like LSD. “I was the King of the Hippies,” he declares. Although Art lost financial control of the LA Free Press in 1980, the radical broadsheet is now back in the hands of its creator, once again tackling the issues of the day and acting as a catalyst for social change.

With a bell jar brimming with herbal medicine that might prolong his life indefinitely, who can say how much more the septuagenarian Art Kunkin might still accomplish.

www.alchemyrevealed.com
www.life-extension-today.com
www.life-extension-info.com
www.losangelesfreepress.com

Author Biography: Mark Berry is an English writer, photographer and graphic designer currently carving an outré niche as the LA Editor for Bizarre and freelancing for SFX, Darkside, and The Guardian. He irregularly produces and edits Naked-Magazine of The Weird and Wonderful, and formerly was film programmer at Bristol’s maverick microplex, The Cube Cinema.