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Burroughs had warned the shaman of the challenge before the ceremony: He “had to face the whole of American capitalism, Rockefeller, the CIA… all of those, particularly Hearst.” Afterward he told Ginsberg, “It’s very much related to the American Tycoon. To William Randolph Hearst, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, that whole stratum of American acquisitive evil. Monopolistic, acquisitive evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American. The ugly American at his ugly worst. That’s exactly what it is.”
William Burroughs believed in spirits, in the occult, in demons, curses, and magic. “I do believe in the magical universe, where nothing happens unless one wills it to happen, and what we see is not one god but many gods in power and in conflict.” He felt himself possessed, and had spent much of his life trying to isolate and exorcise this demon. Asked how he would describe his religious position, Burroughs replied, “An Ismailian and Gnostic, or a Manichean. […] The Manichean believe in an actual struggle between good and evil, which is not an eternal struggle since one of them will win in this particular area, sooner or later.”
Throughout his life Burroughs felt engaged in this struggle against the Ugly Spirit. This time he was determined to win. Burroughs had first identified the Ugly Spirit very early on, back in St. Louis: “When I was a young child, a feeling of attack and danger. I remember when I was five years old, I was sitting with my brother in the house that we had on Pershing, and I got such a feeling of hopelessness that I began crying. And my brother said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ and I couldn’t tell him. It was just a feeling of being completely at a hopeless disadvantage. It was a ghost of some sort, a spirit. A spirit that was inimical, completely inimical. After that there were many times the condition persisted and that’s what made me think that I needed analysis to find out what was wrong. […] It’s just I have a little bit, a much more clear insight than most people have, that’s all. No problem like that is peculiar to one person.” He knew already that he had been invaded by the Ugly Spirit. It took him a lifetime to expel it.
Burroughs believed the Ugly Spirit was responsible for the key act that had determined his life since September 6, 1951. That day he had been walking in the street in Mexico City when he found that his face was wet. Tears were streaming from his eyes for no logical reason. He felt a deep-seated depression and when he got home he began throwing down drinks very quickly. It was then, later that day, that Bill killed his wife, Joan Vollmer, fatally wounding her while attempting to shoot a glass from her head in a game of William Tell at a drinks party. Burroughs never really understood what happened that day, except to recognize that what he did was madness.
Near the end of his life he said, “My accidental shooting of my wife in 1951 has been a heavy, painful burden to me for 41 years. It was a horrible thing and it still hurts to realise that some people think it was somehow deliberate. I’ve been honest about the circumstances—we were both very drunk and reckless, she dared me to shoot a glass off her head, and for God knows what reason, I took the dare. All my life I have regretted that day.” It was not until 1959 that the malevolent entity was given a name. Burroughs and his friend Brion Gysin were conducting psychic experiments at the Beat Hotel in Paris when Gysin, in a semitrance state, wrote on a piece of paper, “Ugly Spirit killed Joan because…”
In the much-quoted introduction to Queer, Burroughs explained how writing became his main weapon against possession by the evil spirit: “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.”
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When Ginsberg asked him, “Did you get anything from the shaman’s sweat lodge ceremony?” Burroughs replied, “That was much better than anything psychoanalysts have come up with. […] Something definite there was being touched upon. […] This you see is the same notion, Catholic exorcism, psychotherapy, shamanistic practices—getting to the moment when whatever it was gained access. And also to the name of the spirit. Just to know that it’s the Ugly Spirit. That’s a great step. Because the spirit doesn’t want its name to be known.”
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