John Starr Cooke

In later life, Cooke knew Kahuna David “Big Daddy” Bray (1889–1968), a friendship that likely began in Cooke's childhood.

Cooke developed a lifelong interest in the Tarot at the age of nine when he mistakenly bought a Tarot deck instead of regular playing cards.

Cooke was born in 1920 into a wealthy family in Honolulu, Hawaii, the youngest of the eight children of Clarence Hyde Cooke and Lily Love.

He is a nephew of zoologist Charles Montague Cooke Jr, grandson of arts philanthropist Anna Rice Cooke, great-grandson of New England missionaries Amos Starr Cooke and Juliette Montague, and great-great-great grandson of American military officer in the Revolutionary war and politician Joseph Platt Cooke.

According to Brion Gysin, Cooke was in touch with the Kahunas of Hawaii from an early age.

John's sister Alice married Democratic politician and lawyer Roger Kent in 1930.

They lived at Kentfield, California in Marin County of San Francisco, and after their mother's death, Alice took on a surrogate mother role for the Young John.

John continued to travel regularly from Honolulu to San Francisco through the 1930s.

At 19, Cooke employed the Ouija board at Kentfield with his sister, who was also mystically inclined.

He would continue to use the Ouija board for at least the next thirty years.

At this age, Cooke was also a dancer and actor in Hollywood.

John travelled to the mainland (particularly San Francisco) many times with his mother before her death in 1933.

Millen Cooke, as she became known, was a poet, writer, and occultist who had a poem published in 1936 in Weird Tales, but was most active between May 1946 and May 1950, with stories and essays appearing in Amazing Stories, Fantastic Fiction, and Other Worlds Science Stories.

He moved permanently from Hawaii to California after July 1940.

She had written a number of letters to American Theosophist in the early 1940s.

In 1943 on advice from the Ouija board, Cooke married Wilma Dorothy Vermilyea.

In 1944 John's father Clarence Hyde Cooke died, and John and Millen Cooke traveled the world, including a mission to go as far north and as far south as possible.

On these travels, John Cooke met an assortment of gurus, mystics and spiritual figures, including Meher Baba.

Cooke also studied medieval Tarot decks in museums, and spent considerable time living in London.

John Starr Cooke was also published in American Theosophist in August 1945 with a story called "Black Magic Question Mark".

In 1948, John Cooke learned that Meher Baba was seeking to establish an ashram in California, and he assisted the group to purchase Meher Mount in the Ojai Valley.

In 1950 a pregnant Millen Cooke (and with John denying paternity) read Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard, first published in Astounding Science Fiction in May 1950.

Millen Cooke was so enthusiastic about the ideas she encountered that she flew at once and alone to New York.

John was enraged to find his wife had left and drove virtually non-stop for a day and a half to find her.

In New York Cooke quickly became a master of the techniques given in Dianetics, and subsequently met Mary Oser, who had flown to New York from Switzerland seeking a competent practitioner of Dianetics to treat her husband.

Mary Oser (née Wilbur) had attended Reed College in Oregon where she met fellow student Peter Oser, a great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller.

They were married after he had proposed several times and they relocated to the Oser family's home city of Basel, Switzerland.

Soon after John Cooke met Mary Oser he returned with her to Switzerland and lived with the Oser household in Basel, practicing the methods of Dianetics.

Peter Oser became a blind follower of John Cooke.

In December 1950 the Oser family moved suddenly to central Africa, led by Cooke and his communications with the Ouija board.

In 1951 John Cooke and Millen Cooke were divorced, and their daughter Valerie Melza Cooke was born.

Around this time, Peter Oser and Mary Oser were also divorced.

In 1952 John Cooke married Mary.

Cooke and his new wife Mary traveled together throughout northern Africa on vision quests.

Although he never considered himself a Muslim, John became associated with a Sufi sect amongst whom he was regarded as "a great healer and saint".

On their travels the Cookes heard about Brion Gysin and his 1001 Nights Restaurant in Tangier.

His teachings were based on the doctrine of “One Consciousness”, which Cooke believed was communicated to him through a Ouija board in the early 1960s.

He designed three original decks of Tarot cards: T: The New Tarot for the Aquarian Age (1967, 1992), the Atlantean Tarot (1992), and the Medieval Tarot (1992).

John Starr Cooke (March 1920 – August 21, 1976) was an American mystic and spiritual teacher who influenced the development of the counterculture movement that emerged in San Francisco during 1966–1967.

Millen Cooke had a series of visions which John Cooke drew and was later known as the Atlantean Tarot (published 1992).