by Gary Lachman
But he was not solely responsible. The odd sea change Crowley underwent, transforming him from a scurrilous knave into a spiritual liberator, began, oddly enough, in France. In 1960 a book appeared that almost singlehandedly triggered what’s been called “the occult revival of the 1960s,” the history of which I chart in Turn Off Your Mind. There had been a slow buildup of interest in the occult through the late 1940s and ’50s, with the rise of public interest in flying saucers and other “weird” concerns; Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision (1950), which linked biblical accounts of the flood to the Earth’s close shave with a comet, and T. Lobsang Rampa’s doubtful account of his life as a Tibetan yogi, The Third Eye (1956), had both been big sellers. But it was the appearance of Le Matin Des Magiciens (1960) by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier that really triggered the return of magic. The book is a heady, often mind-numbing jumble of strange, new, and unusual ideas that took the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism by storm. It rambled from alchemy to UFO to Gurdjieff to ancient civilizations to mutants to occult Nazis to higher consciousness and then some—rather like Charles Fort’s books of the 1920s and ’30s, although much better written. It became a huge bestseller and when it was translated into English in 1963 as The Morning of the Magicians (The Dawn of Magic in the UK), it was a bestseller, too. And amid its mysterious thicket of “all things occultly marvelous”—in the historian Theodore Roszak’s words—was Crowley and the Golden Dawn. Never mind that what the authors had to say about Crowley, the Golden Dawn, and much else was often inaccurate. The book is full of mistakes and unsupported assertions—such as that Gurdjieff was responsible for the Nazi use of the swastika. What was important was that they were talking about magic and the occult at all. They knew that the time had come for a change from the black-and-white world of political commitment, la nausée and being engagé, to something much more colorful, dazzling, and exciting. Crowley had spoken about the new age of the “crowned and conquering child.” With The Morning of the Magicians the newborn seemed to be waking up.
In his own lifetime Crowley had been an influence on popular culture. Somerset Maugham, we’ve seen, had used him as a model for a black magician, and Maugham’s novel The Magician (1908) was turned into a film in 1926. Crowley has also been suggested as the model for the cult leader in Edgar G. Ulmer’s occult deco horror film The Black Cat (1934), starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi; it’s unclear if Crowley ever saw it or knew he was being cast in the role of a sadistic Satanist, but most likely he would have approved. Crowley, in fact, served as a model for more than one cinematic mage. In a talk I gave in London and in Trondheim, Norway, I looked at those films already mentioned as well as a few other classic black magic films from the 1950s and ’60s that featured a magician based on Crowley. Night of the Demon (1957), The Devil Rides Out (1968), and The Dunwich Horror (1970)—which is an early entry in the Crowley–H. P. Lovecraft connection mythos—all feature Crowleyan elements, and Crowley’s influence isn’t limited to B-movie shockers. As mentioned, the avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger was profoundly influenced by Crowley—his whole oeuvre, we can say, is thelemic through and through—as was the Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose The Holy Mountain (1973) often shared top billing with Anger’s films at midnight movie offerings.6
Mention of The Devil Rides Out, based on Dennis Wheatley’s novel published in 1934, reminds us that Crowley was also an influence on literature, or at least fiction. We’ve already mentioned Maugham. A list of writers who used Crowley in some way would include, among others, M. R. James (his “Casting the Runes” inspired Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon, mentioned above; the magician Karswell is based on Crowley), Dion Fortune, Colin Wilson, Anthony Powell, James Blish, Robert Heinlein (whose Stranger in a Strange Land [1961] employs large helpings of Crowley’s philosophy), and, perhaps most recently, Jake Arnott, whose The Devil’s Paintbrush (2009) focuses more on Crowley’s homosexuality than his magick. Crowley led such a supersized life that it would be surprising if he hadn’t been taken up by novelists, always on the lookout for striking characters. There are more sightings of the Beast in the pages of fiction, pulp or better, but this should suffice.
But the area of popular culture in which Crowley has had the most impact surely must be music. It took some time, but by the mid-1960s, the occult revival had reached the burgeoning “youth culture,” which was itself on its way to becoming a serious rival to the mainstream, what became known as the “counterculture.” Popular music has always had some connection to the “dark side.” The myth of the early-twentieth-century bluesman Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil in return for success—a bad bargain, as Johnson didn’t see it—is paradigmatic, and by then the link between music and the devil was already longstanding. The nineteenth-century violinist Niccolo Paganini, like Johnson, was supposed to have sold his soul to the devil, as was also said of the eighteenth-century composer Giuseppe Tartini, famous for his “Devil’s Trill” (1713). The violin itself is considered the “Devil’s instrument,” and Igor Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale” (1918) relates the parable of a soldier who gives his violin to the devil in exchange for worldly success. Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique (1830) is famous for its musical depiction of a witches’ Sabbath. Music has always had an element of danger associated with it because of its ability to subvert the conscious mind and reach directly into the unconscious; Plato, we know, famously banned most music, except for a few bland modes, from his utopian Republic. Thomas Mann’s cautionary novel Doctor Faustus (1947) blends the archetypal tale of the magician who sells his soul to the devil, with the tragic life of a brilliant but unbalanced composer (based on the philosopher Nietzsche). That old black magic, it’s true, has had many in its spell.7
Yet even the long history associating music and the devil can’t account for the strange blend of magic and rock and roll that emerged in the “mystic ’60s,” nor for the threatening, revolutionary character this pairing briefly enjoyed. When the ’60s occult revival met the growing counterculture something strange happened. Each recognized that they had a common enemy in what was called “the establishment.” This term stood for the values, institutions, sensibilities, tastes, political ideals, and morality of the previous generation, and the distance between it and the burgeoning one became known as the “generation gap”—a phrase put to good marketing use when the Gap clothing retailer opened for business in 1969. Fifties teenagers were also unsatisfied with the buttoned-down, conventional life they were expected to inherit from their parents, but they expressed their dissatisfaction by being “crazy mixed-up kids” or “rebels without a cause,” letting off steam through vandalism and surly aggressiveness. Their rebellion had little focus, as can be seen in the early-teenage-exploitation film The Wild One (1953). When Johnny, the leader of a motorcycle gang, played by Marlon Brando, is asked what he is rebelling against, he answers, “Whaddaya got?” The same sense of aimless rejection fuels Jack Kerouac’s Beat classic, On the Road, published in 1957. When Dean Moriarty tells Sal Paradise, “Whee. Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there,” Sal asks, “Where we going, man?” Dean replies, “I don’t know but we gotta go.”8 Dean Moriarty is based on Neal Cassady, an early Beat and later one of Ken Kesey’s LSD-fueled Merry Pranksters. Cassady kept going until the night of February 3/4, 1968. He was found the next morning in a coma on some railway tracks in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and died the next day ostensibly from exposure, but he had also taken a hefty dose of barbiturates. He was just short of forty-two. Kerouac himself kept going until 1969, when, increasingly disgusted with the hippie generation that his books helped spawn—he hated the hippies and famously at a meeting between Kerouac and Kesey’s Pranksters, Jack solemnly folded an American flag that the acid-heads had draped over his shoulders—he succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver, brought on by years of heavy drinking. He was forty-seven. The actual first Beat novel, written by John Clellon Holmes and published in 1952, was en
titled Go. This is not, it seems to me, vastly different from “Just do it,” or “Do what thou wilt.”
In the 1960s, this sense of having “to go” gained more focus, and the aimlessness of simply being on the road turned, in many cases, into a genuine “journey to the East”: a search for something more fulfilling than the American dream of a house, a car, and 2.5 kids. The influx of magical and mystical ideas that came with the ’60s occult revival offered what seemed like a positive alternative to the ’50s negative rebelliousness. It gave a burgeoning “youth culture” a sense of direction. At the same time, “the establishment” was the stronghold of the rationalist, materialist philosophy that denied that magic, mysticism, and spirituality were anything but superstitious nonsense. The official view of reality said that matter was the only real thing. Spirit simply did not exist, and magic was an illusion, belief in it a sign of madness, or childishness: adults didn’t believe in such things. For such a philosophy, material gain was the only value: a bigger TV, a bigger car, a bigger bank balance. The new generation rejected this and the worldview that went with it. So the scientific, modern ideals of the “atomic age” 1950s were jettisoned in favor of the ancient belief in magic, myth, and the mystical. Adult realism gave way to a childish belief in magic. In 1965 the Lovin’ Spoonful had a Top Ten hit with their song “Do You Believe in Magic?” Many did. This cultural atavism was threatening to the adult establishment and for a time the political and the magical currents in the 1960s joined forces. One clear if somewhat ludicrous example of this occurred during the massive anti–Vietnam War march on Washington in October 1967, when the Crowleyan filmmaker Kenneth Anger attempted to exorcize the Pentagon while the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg tried to levitate it.9
By then Crowley was without a doubt back. Twenty years earlier he had died in obscurity in somewhat squalid circumstances, but by 1967 Crowley was hanging out—posthumously, of course—with some of the most famous people in the world, and was more popular than he had ever been. If any one sign marked that the counterculture had given its imprimatur to the occult revival, it had to be the fact that the Beatles had included Crowley on the cover of their album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released in the fateful summer of 1967. Designed by the artist Peter Blake, the cover has Crowley’s by-now-familiar shaven head and bulging eyes cropping up between the Indian guru Sri Yukteswar Giri and the actress Mae West: aptly, as mysticism and sex formed the heart of Crowley’s life. Other figures sharing space with Crowley—Aldous Huxley, C. G. Jung, Sri Mahavatar Babaji, and Sri Paramahansa Yogananda—show that by the time the Beatles came to know about the Beast, magic, mysticism, and altered states had become the hottest things in town. A few years earlier such stuff would have been laughed at by the mods, but by the summer of love practically everyone on the Swinging London A-list had their heads into the occult. That the Beatles were fully behind Crowley’s program is clear from a remark John Lennon made in an interview for Playboy magazine, some years later and shortly before his death. “The whole Beatle idea was to do what you want . . . do what thou whilst, as long as it doesn’t hurt somebody,” Lennon told the journalist David Sheff, misquoting Crowley.10 Earlier, Ringo Starr had told Hit Parade magazine that the cover featured “people we like and admire,” a sentiment Paul McCartney echoed when he informed Musician magazine that the cover sported “photos of all our heroes.”11 The Beatles, however, tended more toward Eastern than Western mysticism, as evidenced by their rocky relationship with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
By the autumn of 1967 rank-and-file British hipsters learned of Crowley when the underground newspaper International Times—cofounded by Barry Miles, a friend of the Beatles’—ran a full-page article on him, presenting the Great Beast as a proto-hippie whose sex-and-drug-filled life seemed right up the counterculture’s alley.12 Richard Cavendish’s The Black Arts had been published that year, and was part of Mick Jagger’s favorite bedside reading. It featured sections on Crowley and the Golden Dawn, and in The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia (1997), the writer Paul Devereux reminisces about how in the late ’60s he saw a “white-suited Mick Jagger” leave Watkins Bookshop off the Charing Cross Road carrying “a stack of occult books.”13 Back in the Great Beast’s salad days, Watkins Bookshop was home to members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Well and truly, Crowley was back in town.
The Rolling Stones, the second most famous people in the world, got deep into Crowley through the filmmaker Kenneth Anger, who arrived in London in early 1968.14 The Stones were already friends with the alchemist Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, author of Alchemy: The Secret Art (1974)—he was friends with the Beatles and Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, too—and John Michell, whose The View over Atlantis (1969) would inaugurate the next decade’s fascination with ley lines and “earth magic.” (Michell’s The Flying Saucer Vision [1967] was already a countercultural “must-read.”) The Stones were friends with the art dealer Robert Fraser, whose gallery on Duke Street, Grosvenor Square, sold stills from Anger’s films. Fraser had worked with Peter Blake and art-directed the Sgt. Pepper’s cover. The Stones’s own shot at a psychedelic LP, Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967), released a few months after Sgt. Pepper’s, speaks for itself, as does what soon became their signature tune, “Sympathy for the Devil,” from Beggar’s Banquet (1968). Anger had made his name with such avant-garde thelemic films as Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), mentioned earlier, and Scorpio Rising (1963), which in many ways initiates the rock and roll/transgressive sex/leather-jacketed/occult antinomian mélange that now characterizes much of what in Turn Off Your Mind I christened “roccult and roll.” Anger was keen for Jagger to star in his magnum opus, Lucifer Rising (1966–1980), a cinematic paean to Crowley’s coming new age, but Jagger demurred. He did, however, provide a synthesizer soundtrack to Anger’s disturbing Invocation of my Demon Brother (1969). As we’ll see, Anger also approached Jimmy Page, the guitarist for Led Zeppelin and a Crowley devotee, for help in raising Lucifer, but as frequently happened with Anger, the two had a falling-out. The film eventually appeared, starring pop chanteuse Marianne Faithfull, with a soundtrack by ex–Charles Manson “Family” member Bobby Beausoleil, who composed it while serving a life sentence in Tracy State Prison in California for the murder of Gary Hinman in 1969. Anger and Beausoleil had been friends back in Haight-Ashbury, and there is a lingering legend that after a tiff, Beausoleil stole the reels for Lucifer Rising and gave them to his guru, Charlie. Beausoleil is French and means “beautiful sun,” and Crowley we know was a sun worshipper. . . .
Keith Richards and his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg came more intimately under Anger’s spell. Richards told Rolling Stone that witchcraft, magic, and Satanism were things everyone should explore, and he called himself Kenneth Anger’s “right-hand man” although left-hand would perhaps have been more appropriate. The Stones’ sympathy for the devil, however, did not last long and after their disastrous concert in Altamont, Jagger decidedly backed away.
But by then, the hippie musical Hair had told everyone that it was the dawning of the age of Aquarius—a prophecy that in his lifetime Crowley took some argument with—and the Fifth Dimension had a No. 1 hit with “Age of Aquarius / Let the Sunshine In,” a nod, perhaps, to a particular potent batch of LSD popular at the time. The folk rocker Donovan sang about the lost continent of Atlantis, whose resurfacing many had anticipated sometime in 1969, and even innocuous fare like the folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie expressed antinomian sentiments when she announced that she was dedicated to “Satan and Jehovah—my god is Abraxas, the god of evil and good.”15 (Abraxas, a Gnostic deity, made his countercultural debut in Hermann Hesse’s novel Demian [1919], a ’60s bestseller, and in 1970 Santana released an album named after him.) Magic was in the air, the Zeitgeist was suffused with the mystical, and at least one major figure from the fields of flower power based much of his career on that of Crowley.
Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychology professor turned drug guru, made no bones about h
ow much his attempt to turn on the world with lysergic acid diethylamide—better known as LSD—was inspired by Crowley’s own adventures; in a post-’60s interview for the PBS program Late Night America, Leary made clear that he had long been an admirer of Crowley’s and that he was “carrying on much of the work” that Crowley had started and that the ’60s themselves were an expression of “Do what thou wilt,” something with which, we’ve seen, John Lennon agreed.16 Even Leary’s tag as “the most dangerous man in America,” given him by then President Richard Nixon, was a synchronistic echo of Crowley’s tabloid profile as “the Wickedest Man in the World.” Confessions of a Hope Fiend (1973), one of Leary’s several autobiographies—like Crowley, Leary enjoyed talking about himself—is a mash-up of Crowley’s Confessions and Diary of a Drug Fiend. And at one point, Leary was convinced that he and an acid buddy, Brian Barritt, were somehow reenacting—or reincarnating—Crowley and Neuburg’s adventures with Choronzon in North Africa, a trip recounted in Barritt’s memoir The Road of Excess (1998); again, that weird link to a very disturbing episode in Crowley’s career. After discovering the strange parallels between Crowley and himself, Leary remarked about the “eerie synchronicities” between his life and Crowley’s, “unfolding with such precision as to make us wonder if one can escape the programmed imprinting with which we are born . . .”17
One recipient of Leary’s psychedelic wisdom was John Lennon, who in 1966 found a copy of The Psychedelic Experience (1964)—by Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert—in London’s Indica Bookshop, an emporium of countercultural literature run by Barry Miles and linked to Robert Fraser’s gallery. Leary’s advice that, “whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax and float downstream,” struck home, and Lennon incorporated the line in his song “Tomorrow Never Knows,” from the album Revolver (1966), generally regarded as the Beatles’ first psychedelic track. Lennon spent the next few years turning off his mind by ingesting very large doses of LSD. Another link between the psychedelic milieu, the occult, and rock were the Doors. Their name came from Aldous Huxley’s influential book The Doors of Perception (1954), an essay about Huxley’s experiment with mescaline. Huxley, a more judicious advocate of psychedelic exploration than Leary, got the title himself from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and in 1970 the Doors released Doors 13, their first “greatest hits” compilation; the back cover featured a photo of the group sitting around a bust of Crowley. The band recorded one more album before their leader, Jim Morrison, died in mysterious circumstance in Paris in 1971. That Morrison was on the antinomian bandwagon is clear from his remark that “I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning,” written for a publicity release for the Doors’ record company Elektra in 1967. Morrison’s lyrics also suggest a familiarity with Crowleyan themes: “Can you picture what will be, so limitless and free?” (“The End”) and “We want the world and we want it now” (“When the Music’s Over”). These yearnings for the Abyss and for the immediate gratification of the child need not have come to Morrison directly from Crowley, but they were certainly in the atmosphere of the time.