• Morrison cribbed the title, and also the line "Not to see the sun," from Aftermath: A Supplement to the Golden Bough, a supplement to the 1890 book The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Both works were written by the Scottish social anthropologist Sir James George Frazer. Morrison got the lines from the table of contents.
• The lyrics, "Dead presidents corpse in the driver's car" refers to the assassination of US president John F. Kennedy.
• One of Jim Morrison's famous lines appears at the end of this song: "I am the Lizard King, I can do anything." The singer adopted "Lizard King" as one of his nicknames.
• A song called "Go Insane" on The Doors 6-song demo for Aura records in 1965 contains parts of this song and other pieces from "The Celebration Of The Lizard."
• The lyric to this song is an excerpt from The Celebration Of The Lizard, a Jim Morrison poem that was going to take up the first side of Waiting For The Sun. "Not To Touch The Earth" was the only part of the 24-minute song that was compelling enough to put on the album, but the entire 133-line poem was included on the album sleeve. (A complete performance of the poem can be heard on the 1970 album Absolutely Live.)

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CATW