Audience of the Human Be-In

Announced on the cover of the fifth issue of the SanFrancisco Oracle as "A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In," this psychedelic festival was the exemplar of all 1960s counter culture celebrations. The San Francisco Oracle was an underground newspaper—publishing 12 issues from September of 66’ to February 68’—in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. The Oracle had a concentrated audience of students at Stanford and Berkley-- who were considered part of non-political and radical hippie subcultures, respectively. The newspaper was extremely influential in the shaping of the counterculture of Haight-Ashbury, which helped popularize the advertising of the Human Be-In. As noted in the poster, the Human Be-In was to expect mainly local artists and poets but also Michael Bowen, creator of the San Francisco Oracle and initiator for this psychedelic event, had artist Stanley Mouse create a poster, giving him a photograph by Casey Sonnabend. Stanley was considered to be a "godfather of psychedelic art" making him influential to this forming subculture. While many may not have been familiar with the event as there, the psychedelic presentation of this poster certainly has an attraction to the community at the time. The phrasing used "Gathering of the Tribes," truly possesses this idea of a separate culture from mainstream society. It certainly encompasses the focus of the event to bring together those with a common purpose of personal empowerment, cultural and political decentralization, ecological awareness, and other various values of the emerging hippie movement