by Gary Lachman
One thelemic fatality was the R&B artist Graham Bond, a seminal figure on London’s early ’60s blues scene, who performed with superstars like Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker of Cream. Bond, a keyboardist, became a Crowleyite, made black magic gestures on stage, and met with a tragic end. Under the influence of Crowley’s magick—and also heroin—Bond believed he was one of Crowley’s illegitimate sons, joining the ranks of many who boasted of this dubious celebrity. He named his bands Holy Magick and Initiation and walked through Swinging London in his magical robes—much as Crowley did invisibly on Regent Street. His record company, Mercury—aptly named, as in his Greek form, Hermes, he is the god of magic—allowed him to use their offices for rituals. Through drugs and his obsession with Crowley, Bond’s grip on reality loosened, and he would often be seen wandering the streets in a dazed condition, unwashed and disheveled. In 1974, after years of decline, he threw himself under a train at London’s Finsbury Park Underground station.
By the early 1970s, with its millenarian expectations behind it, the occult boom in popular culture had settled into a stable subgenre—where it remains today—with bands like Black Sabbath and Kiss doing their demonic best to bring a devilish tone to the strains of heavy metal. In February 1970, on Friday 13, Black Sabbath released their first album, Black Sabbath, the title of a 1963 horror film by Mario Bava starring an aged Boris Karloff. The eponymous song from the album was inspired by the work of Dennis Wheatley and incorporates the “Devil’s tritone.” Another track, “N.I.B.,” is supposedly written from Lucifer’s point of view. Critics were not impressed; Lester Bangs, writing for Rolling Stone, complained about the “doggerel tribute to Aleister Crowley,” but fans loved it, and Crowley’s influence continued to inform the band’s singer, Ozzy Osbourne; in 1980 Osbourne released a solo single, “Mr. Crowley,” the lyrics of which—“Mr. Crowley, what went down in your head / Mr. Crowley, did you talk with the dead?”—are emblematic of much of the rock informed by Crowley.
By 1974 the new, darker strain of “occult rock” was given the blessing of an earlier generation, when in Crawdaddy magazine Beat magus William Burroughs Jr. wrote that “rock and roll taps the sources of magical energy, and this can be dangerous.”18 (And, of course, Burroughs knew that this was its appeal.) By then it was common knowledge that Jimmy Page, the guitarist for Led Zeppelin, was a fan of Crowley’s work, his appreciation of it going so far as to purchase Boleskine, Crowley’s house in Scotland, in 1971. He owned it until 1991, and the house and its grounds feature in the group’s concert film The Song Remains the Same (1976); in a fantasy sequence Page climbs a nearby mountain in search of the tarot figure of the Hermit.
Page has earned a bad reputation in thelemic folds for snatching up a great deal of Crowleyana and keeping it in his private collection, unavailable to devotees, rather as if some fervent Christian had his hands on important holy relics. But his sincerity can’t be denied; I mentioned earlier the $1,700 he spent on a Crowley manuscript at Gilbert’s Bookshop in Hollywood. Page met Kenneth Anger at an auction of Crowley memorabilia at Sotheby’s. Both vied for a rare copy of The Scented Garden but the waiflike guitar hero easily outbid the often impecunious cineaste. Anger was not angry that Page had outbid him; by this time the Stones had given Anger a cold shoulder and he was on the lookout for another rock giant. Anger approached Page and asked if he would provide the soundtrack to Lucifer Rising; impressed with Anger’s occult expertise, Page agreed.
Yet Lucifer still didn’t rise. In 1972 Page had bought the eccentric neo-Gothic Tower House near London’s Holland Park. Designed by William Burgess in the late 1800s, it is thought to be haunted. Among other oddities it has an astrology hall, with a painting of the zodiac adorning the ceiling. The house was being sold by the actor Richard Harris—who spoke of its poltergeists—and Page had outbid another Crowley fan, David Bowie, for the place. Page let Anger use the basement to get Lucifer to rise, but Anger didn’t feel at home there and complained that he couldn’t make a cup of tea without setting off an alarm. Oddly, Anger had rented Boleskine just before Page bought it: the two seemed to be following each other. By 1976 they had an irreparable falling-out.
Anger was miffed that after three years, Page had produced only twenty-eight minutes of soundtrack; he also felt that Page was not adhering properly to the thelemic program and was sinking too deeply into heroin. As was his common response to frustration, Anger performed a ritual and turned Page into a toad. Anger had earlier performed the same magick on Bobby Beausoleil, but apparently his transgression was forgotten and, as mentioned, it was Beausoleil’s music one heard when Lucifer finally rose at the film’s premiere in 1980 at New York’s Whitney Museum.
But Page did not need Anger to pursue his magick, and Led Zeppelin albums are thought to be informed with a great deal of magickal symbolism. Although officially titleless, Led Zeppelin IV is perhaps their most obvious occult release, sporting weird, runic-like symbols for each band member instead of a title, and supposedly invested with much magick, such as having “Do what thou wilt” inscribed in the disc’s inner groove. Robert Plant’s symbol of a leaf within a circle is supposed to be based on the symbolism of the ancient lost civilization of Mu, believed to have existed in the Pacific, and to have sunk millennia ago, much as Atlantis. Mu was the subject of a series of books in the 1920s and ’30s by James Churchward. Plant’s other magical interests included J.R.R. Tolkien’s innocuous hobbits. Page’s own symbol, which has come to be known as “ZoSo,” although he denies it is a word or means anything at all, has an appropriately sigil-like character, and reminds me of some of Austin Osman Spare’s work. “Stairway to Heaven,” their most famous track, is also supposed to be rich in thelemic symbolism; in the 1980s, paranoia gripped a certain section of the American Christian community because it believed that subliminal satanic messages, hidden on the album by a technique called “backward masking” and revealed by playing the track backward, urged listeners to embrace Satan and accept the rule of 666. The group, of course, denied these claims. In the early 1970s, Page’s magical interests also included owning an occult bookshop, the Equinox, named after Crowley’s magazine. In 1976, Page told Sounds magazine that “Aleister Crowley is the great misunderstood genius of the twentieth century,” an assessment with which Crowley would no doubt agree.
The other big rock name of the ’70s fascinated with Crowley and the occult was, as mentioned, David Bowie. Bowie’s is perhaps the most introspective and reflective pop adaptation of occult themes, and his lyricism is welcome after the crude assertion of much magical heavy metal. In his plaintive song “Quicksand,” from the album Hunky Dory (1971), Bowie tells us that he is “closer to the Golden Dawn / immersed in Crowley’s uniform of imagery.” Like Crowley, Bowie’s occult contemplation is often wedded to disturbing kitsch-Nietzschean ideas about a super-race: in the same song, notions of the “death of man,” the “superman,” and “the logic of Homo Sapiens” sit uncomfortably close to Nazi henchman Heinrich Himmler’s “sacred realm of dream reality.” (“Oh You Pretty Things” on the same album informs us that we “gotta make way for the Homo Superior.”) Mention of Himmler tells us much about Bowie’s occult reading. His piquant dallying with fascism and Nazi chic in the mid-1970s was born of an acquaintance with The Morning of the Magicians and also with Trevor Ravenscroft’s highly readable but largely fictional account of Hitler’s occult obsessions, The Spear of Destiny (1973). In “Station to Station,” from the 1976 album of the same name, Bowie sings of “one magical movement from Kether to Malkuth,” the first and last sephiroth on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, or Ipsissimus and Zealator in the Golden Dawn system of initiation, and also throws in a reference to Crowley’s “white stains.” As I relate in Turn Off Your Mind, while recording the album in Los Angeles, Bowie went through a series of bizarre experiences that convinced him he was under a magical attack.19 In New York Rocker: My Life in the Blank Generation (2002), written under my stage name Gary Valentine, I also tell the story of being asked
to leave Bowie’s Manhattan loft in 1980, because of a disagreement over the work of Colin Wilson during a late-night discussion about the occult.20
By the ’80s, “roccult and roll” had established itself as a permanent strain in rock, more or less covered under the sobriquet “goth,” i.e., “gothic,” from a genre of literature devoted to the dark and supernatural; a formative gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), by Ann Radcliffe, features a mysterious castle, ghosts, a brooding villain, dark romance, and other items that soon became stock-in-trade of horror fiction and films. Yet not all Crowleyites followed this trend. In 1980 the soft-rock singer Daryl Hall (formerly of Hall & Oates) released a thelemic solo album, Sacred Songs, one track of which, “Without Tears,” is supposedly based on Crowley’s Magick Without Tears. In an interview with the journalist Timothy White, Hall remarked that he “became fascinated with Aleister Crowley . . . because his personality was the equivalent of mine—a person brought up in a conventional religious family who did everything he could to outrage the people around him . . .”21 But most occult rockers were less clean-cut than Hall. More typical was the British heavy metal band Iron Maiden, whose album The Number of the Beast (1982) speaks volumes. Though not directly Crowley influenced, it certainly shared with him a fascination with the Book of Revelations, which did not sit well with Christian fundamentalists. Later tracks such as “Moonchild,” on their 1988 release Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, are more directly Crowley related, and singer and lyricist Bruce Dickinson would later write the screenplay for the film The Chemical Wedding (2008)—released in the United States as Crowley—about a reincarnated Beast getting up to his old tricks.
But the more ponderous rock appropriations of Crowley and magick drew fire from some of Crowley’s more serious devotees. In 1983, David Tibet, of the Crowleyan group Current 93, wrote an article, “The Return of the Beast,” for the underground music magazine Flexipop; appropriately it appeared in the magazine’s issue No. 666. Tibet, a serious student of Crowley’s work, complained about how Crowley was “popular with the uninspired image seekers because he generated much powerful imagery.” Magick, Tibet lamented, provided symbols that are “ready-made and waiting for those with little respect for Crowley and their audiences.”22 Groups lambasted by Tibet were Black Sabbath, Hawkwind, Graham Bond, Led Zeppelin, King Crimson, Toyah, and Blood and Roses, among others. Tibet was not alone in his assessment; the rock journalist Sandy Robertson, for one, agreed. “Groups like Venom, Witchfynde, Iron Maiden and so on,” Robertson wrote, “ramble on incoherently about the occult in their lyrics, while the record covers are littered with inverted crucifixes and rotting zombies.” Goth rockers fare no better: they are “pseudo-‘Gothic’” wannabes, “nasally crooning about ‘doing what thou wilt’.” Both types for Robertson—and one assumes Tibet—“have no real knowledge of Crowley’s ideas and are only interested in sensationalism and selling vinyl.”23
Echt musical Crowleyans then, one assumes, must come from Tibet’s own camp. Tibet, a member of the O.T.O. (at least of Kenneth Grant’s controversial Typhonian branch), emerged from the experimental art-music group Psychic TV, started in England in the early ’80s by the performance artist Genesis P-Orridge. An associated project was Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth, a kind of cult-cum-fan club and loosely knit magical organization, dedicated to exploring the transgressive sides of magical activity. After many transmutations, it still exists today; along with Crowley, some of its influences include the 1960s antinomian Process Church of the Final Judgment, William Burroughs Jr., Brion Gysin, and other practitioners of what has come to be called “occulture,” a portmanteau indicating the amorphous mélange of occultism and counterculture that characterizes much twenty-first-century magic.24
Along with “guiltless sexuality” and “chaos magic,” other transgressive activities of Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth include “deconstructing” “normal” communication, hence the eccentric spelling, a tactic taken up in recent years by many rappers and followed by Crowley himself with “magick.” Orridge’s own magical and antinomian influences include Anton LaVey, founder in 1966 of the Church of Satan, and Charles Manson, as well as Crowley; in a strangely apt act of reversal, the two ’60s antinomian icons to enjoy a renewed celebrity with late-twentieth-century roccultists are a self-professed Satanist and a convicted killer: so much for love and peace. Orridge himself came out of the “industrial” music group Throbbing Gristle, which was known for incorporating hard pornography and images of Nazi concentration camps into their performances.
Orridge in many ways seems to have aimed at fulfilling Crowley’s desire to revolt “every comparatively sane human being on earth”—Crowley’s explanation for his stint as a German propagandist during World War I. Orridge’s outspoken advocacy of deviant culture led, however, to some unfortunate results; as he was following in Crowley’s footsteps, this is not surprising. In 1992 a performance art video made for Orridge by the filmmaker Derek Jarman came to the attention of the UK’s Obscene Publication Squad. Christian activists claimed the film depicted satanic child abuse, sodomy, and forced abortions, among other transgressions. On the strength of these accusations, Orridge’s home was raided by the police. Nothing incriminating was found and the allegations were subsequently dropped, but Orridge, who was in Nepal at the time, decided not to return to the UK and went into self-imposed exile in the United States. In the 1990s, Orridge embarked on an experiment in “body modification” with his second wife, aiming at producing a “pandrogyny,” or single nonmale, nonfemale sex. Among other expedients this included breast implants and the use of non–gender-specific pronouns.
Crowley was taken up by other “experimental” groups, such as Coil, associated with Psychic TV, who blended homosexual motifs with Crowley’s magick and the kind of musique concrète inaugurated by the Futurist artist and “noisician” Luigi Russolo in the early twentieth century. Others of a similar bent were Boyd Rice of the group Non. Rice, a priest of LaVey’s Church of Satan and, like Crowley, a Social Darwinist, is also a fan of Charles Manson and a collector of Barbie dolls; like Buffy Sainte-Marie, Rice, another producer of “industrial” music, is also a devotee of the gnostic god Abraxas.25 But by the ’90s less obscure roccultists were making waves. The adolescent need to be more shocking than your parents led some of ’90s youth to embrace disturbing antiheroes such as Manson. Like Crowley, Manson is a kind of gray eminence lurking in the shadows of the 1960s and is the dark antitype of the flower children: what better role model for ’90s youth rebelling against their hippie parents?
Nine Inch Nails recorded their 1994 album, The Downward Spiral, in a studio built at 10500 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, scene of the vicious murders of Sharon Tate and friends by the Manson family. Trent Reznor, the group’s leader, christened the studio Le Pig; infamously, one of the Manson killers had written “PIG” in Sharon Tate’s blood in the front hall. The most obvious Mansonite, though, has to be Marilyn Manson, whose name comes from a mash-up between Marilyn Monroe and Manson. Manson’s performances are replete with the by-now-standard assortment of transgressive ingredients: kitsch fascism, satanic imagery, thelemic antinomianism, deviant sexuality, sadomasochism, death, and other dark stuff popular with angst-ridden teens. Like Boyd Rice and Genesis P-Orridge, Manson is a fan of Anton LaVey; in Satan Speaks! (1998), a collection of LaVey’s writings, Manson calls him “the most righteous man I ever knew.” Magick and other assorted occult items inform much of Manson’s act. Crowley is reported to be one of his favorite authors and Crowleyan motifs inform Manson’s albums, such as Antichrist Superstar (1996). Manson’s penchant for adopting a stage name based on a convicted killer is shared by some of his band members. Madonna Wayne Gacy, stage name of one of Manson’s keyboardists, is an amalgam of the pop singer Madonna—who herself proclaimed an interest in Kabbalah in the ’90s—and the homosexual serial killer John Wayne Gacy, executed in 1994 for the murder of at least thirty-three victims.
One would think that by the 2000s
, the Crowley–pop music franchise would have run its course, but in recent years the Beast has been rediscovered by a new generation eager to earn their antinomian stars. The late 1990s saw a kind of renewed occult revival, or, more accurately, a Gnostic revival. The Gnostics were an early antinomian Christian sect who, as mentioned earlier, believed that the God of the Bible—Jehovah—was a kind of “lieutenant god,” who usurped the true God’s place and created the “false” world in which we live. The neo-Gnostic trend included a reappraisal of the work of the pulp science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, whose many novels and stories deal with the themes of false realities, altered states, and the fragility of personal identity. Starting with Blade Runner (1982)—based on his story “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”—many of Dick’s works were made into films. Total Recall (1990) deals with the notion that our identity is unstable, and that the person we think we are may not be who we really are, and that even the idea of really being one person rather than another is iffy. More recently The Adjustment Bureau (2011) centers on the idea of powerful people “behind the scenes,” who secretly control our lives, making the necessary “adjustments” to them without our knowing, in order to keep to the “plan.”26 In both films the world we live in is not the “real” world. By the late ’90s this Gnostic theme was turning up in several films, ironically, as the film medium is itself an “unreal” world. The Cube (1997), The Truman Show (1998), and Dark City (1998) all deal with the same idea: their protagonists find themselves trapped in a “false” reality, a kind of prison from which they cannot escape. The most successful and influential work of this genre was The Matrix (1999), which spawned a franchise including two sequels, comic books, video games, and much else. Again, the central theme is of being trapped in a false reality, an unreal world, in this case a computer simulation being fed into our consciousness by intelligent machines that feed off humans. That the liberators of humanity in the film wore black leather and dark glasses and packed guns made the Gnostic quest for the “true world” even more thrilling.