For want of a better word, he was a Libertarian intellectual. When GNOSIS folded, he set out in fresh directions, including more work on the Co-Evolution Quarterly, for which he did some all-time great illustrations, but for which he also edited a special issue, in 2000, on the merger points of political left and right. He was also a notable of sorts in the Gnostic church that seemed, at least to me, historically close, if not in the present, to the traditions of Spiritualism, briefly a major American denomination in the 1840s-60s and one linked closely through its major personalities to free-love, socialistic ideas. Kinney-watchers (including myself) had an inkling that he had returned to the Republicanism of his forebears - like so many other 1960s types, including me, he had shifted left, bypassing liberalism, but unlike me, seemed to have wavered back toward the right. Read closely, especially in later years when he turned over the editorship (while remaining the publisher), the magazine had an oddly conservative quality, as in politically conservative. By Fall '85, he had launched GNOSIS, a magazine devoted to mysticism within the Western religious traditions.

A decade later, Kinney was a sometimes editorial worker on CoEvolution Quarterly and did a special section on politics and religion. Back in 1973, he had already edited a comic with the great title, Occult Laff-Parade. Toward the end of the 1970s, Kinney co-edited Anarchy Comix, a title that remains the best satire around and sometimes about the anarchist worldview.Īnd then something peculiar happened. One long-running satirical series of comic anthologies, Young Lust, outlived the object of its satire, the mainstream comic book Young Love, and was full of laughs, with artists as distinguished later on as Art Spiegelman and Kinney's co-editor Bill Griffith, of 'Zippy the Pinhead' fame. He abandoned the Middle West, first to New York and then westward to join the Bay Area-based Underground Comix movement in 1972, and became, in the next decade or so, one of its most intriguing editor-artists. Jay Kinney has been one of the more remarkably, if not necessarily mysterious, observers and critics of American popular culture for some decades now. Kinney, Jay: The Masonic Myth: Unlocking the Truth about the Symbols, the Secret Rites, and the History of Masonry, New York: Harper One, 222pp, $15.95.

The masonic myth by jay kinney