Harry Everett Smith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Everett_SmithThroughout his life Smith was an inveterate collector. In addition to records, artifacts he collected included string figures, paper airplanes, Seminole textiles, and Ukrainian Easter eggs.
"We were considered some kind of 'low' family", Smith once said, "despite my mother's feeling that she was [an incarnation of] the Czarina of Russia".
In 1950 Smith received a Guggenheim grant to complete an abstract film, which enabled him first to visit and later move to New York City. He arranged for his collections, including his records, to be shipped to the East Coast. He said that "one reason he moved to New York was to study the Cabala. And, 'I wanted to hear Thelonious Monk play'." When his grant money ran out, he brought what he termed "the cream of the crop" of his record collection to Moe Asch, president of Folkways Records, with the idea of selling it. Instead, Asch proposed that the 27-year-old Smith use the material to edit a multi-volume anthology of American folk music in long playing format
The resultant Folkways anthology, issued in 1952 under the title American Folk Music, was a compilation of recordings of folk music issued on hillbilly and race records that had previously been released commercially on 78 rpm. The Anthology was packaged as a set of three, boxed albums with a total of 6 LPs. Each box front a different color: red, blue, and green – in Smith's schema, representing the alchemical elements.
Smith was also unique in associating folk music with the occult: the design he chose to be printed on the box covers, for example, was taken from an engraving by Theodore de Bry of a great hand tuning the Celestial Monochord (the one-stringed instrument symbolizing the music of the spheres), that had illustrated a sixteenth-century treatise on music by the Elizabethan magus Robert Fludd.
Smith said he had become acquainted with the Lummi Indians through his mother's teaching work and claimed to have participated in shamanic initiation at a young age. He recorded Lummi songs and rituals using homemade equipment and notation of his own devising and developed an important collection of Native American religious objects.
Tarot cards were another of Smith's interests. A set of "irregularly-shaped Tarot cards" he designed was apparently used for the degree certificates for a branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis founded by occult "magus" Aleister Crowley. In the late 1940s in California Smith is said to have worked with the reputed occult "magus" Aleister Crowley's one-time acolyte Charles Stansfeld Jones, a convert to Roman Catholicism, and later with Jones's "trusted student", Albert Handel in New York.
Smith frequented the Samuel Weiser Antiquarian Bookstore, a used book store on New York's "Book Row" that specialized in works on comparative religion, hermeticism, and the occult. The store also had a publishing house, Weiser Books, which used Smith's designs for its paperback edition of Aleister Crowley's Holy Books of Thelema.
Smith also studied the Enochian system in depth and as it was recounted by Edward Kelley and John Dee, and as later elaborated upon by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Ordo Templi Orientis. He also compiled a concordance of the Enochian language with the aid of Khem Caigan, his assistant throughout much of the 1970s and early 1980s.
In 1986 Smith was consecrated a bishop in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica. Smith had long been a familiar figure in the New York branch of Ordo Templi Orientis. After his death, Smith's branch of the sect performed a Gnostic Mass in his honor at St. Mark's Church in the East Village.