Season of the Witch : How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (9780698143722)

by Peter Bebergal

  The music of the 1960s would prove to be a grove in which to worship Pan. The hippies had much in common with the first real revival of the horned deity by way of the Romantic poets and writers, not only in their use of pagan and natural imagery, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Hymn of Pan,” wherein the god “sang of the dancing stars,” but also in the suggestion that drugs could offer a window into Pan’s ancient realm, as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s opium-infused poem “Kubla Khan.” Even more significantly, the 1960s counterculture revived the Romantic belief that reason and the age of industry were anathema to the natural world and the spirit of myth and poetry. This is the experience many young seekers in the 1960s were looking for, a direct, immediate communion with nature and by extension the universe. Art and music were the vessels for both the Romantics and the hippies. The piper at the gates of dawn was playing his panpipe for those who needed to hear. And the youth of the 1960s were pulled toward it like a siren song. There was no turning back. Rock culture was now inhabited by a Romantic soul that looked to the gods of the past. And like the Romantic poets who were their forebears, rock musicians crafted music that did more than tug at the heartstrings of teenagers. It was music that urged them toward transcendence, toward creating their own inner landscapes and exploring the antipodes of their minds.

  The Piper at the Gates of Dawn shines forth from Syd Barrett’s psyche as if he’s a prism of the collective unconscious of the generation. The album opens with “Astronomy Domine,” sometimes subtitled “An Astral Chant,” referencing both cosmic awareness and Gregorian chants. The song is a stream-of-consciousness vision relating the tension between getting as far out as you can, all the while terrified of leaving the “blue” of the earth. Other songs make reference to a cat named Lucifer (“Lucifer Sam”), a gnome named Grimble Crumble (“The Gnome”), and a paganlike idyll echoing “Hymn of Pan” in its celebration of the joyful mystery of nature (“Flaming”). Then there is the literal “Chapter 24,” taken almost word for word from the popular I Ching translation by Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes, first published in 1950. The twenty-fourth hexagram, fu, is eerily prescient as it “counsels turning away from the confusion of external things, turning back to one’s inner light. There, in the depths of the soul, one sees the Divine, the One.” Whether it was intentional or not, in “Chapter 24” Barrett expressed not only his own spiritual desires, but the yearning of an entire generation that was coming of age listening to Pink Floyd.

  The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is filled with its own internal spiritual anxiety, mixing pagan folk images with Eastern mysticism. This would characterize much of the 1960s’ otherworldly desire, which borrowed from everything that was even vaguely non-Christian and out of tune with mainstream religious mores. Nevertheless, there is a single spark in both pagan magic and Eastern theology with which the counterculture could build a fire that would burn for generations and would feed the New Age movement and almost every subsequent contemporary alternative religious community. Barrett’s writing of “Chapter 24” was even more prophetic than he could have imagined. The twenty-fourth hexagram of the I Ching, fu, which inspired his song, is the hexagram of self-knowledge and individuality, of not giving in to the temptation of the crowd, but recognizing the unity of all things: “To know this One means to know oneself in relation to the cosmic forces.” The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is the dream of one man, made audible through a group consciousness. And for much of the counterculture that identified with this dream, LSD was the method to attain it.

  Barrett’s own intense turn toward LSD as a path was congruent with the times. The table had been set for a mystical communion to be given on the tongue as a hit of acid. By 1967, mystical consciousness and psychedelic drugs had become synonymous. LSD and other hallucinogenic drug experiences seamlessly aligned with occult and Eastern religious imagery and ideas. The feeling of ego dissolution, for example, corresponds nicely to the Buddhist notion of ego transcendence. A sense of unity or “becoming one with the universe”—a common phenomenon for those who have had a psychedelic experience—is akin to pantheism, where God is believed to be in all things, and all things are in God. None of this is to suggest that the LSD trip somehow communicates special spiritual knowledge. But the acid experience can be overwhelming, and Eastern mysticism and occultism are well suited to make sense of an otherwise inexplicable occurrence.

  This sacred marriage between LSD and the East was beautifully, if not artificially, realized in the 1966 book and—as perfectly suited to the time—companion record, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass). The authors had their work cut out for them. They had to make two simultaneous, possibly opposing, claims: first that the psychedelic experience is remarkably similar to the classical mystical experience as described by Eastern traditions, and second that LSD can take the place of rigorous religious discipline to achieve the mystical state of consciousness. This idea was first elevated to the popular consciousness by Aldous Huxley in his 1954 book, The Doors of Perception, a canonical text during the 1960s. Huxley, who had once been a devotee of the Hindu philosophical system known as Vedanta and wrote forcefully against attempts to circumvent rigorous spiritual discipline to attain a union with the divine, took a little less than half a gram of mescaline—the psychoactive substance found in the peyote cactus—and had a change of heart. Huxley came to believe psychedelic drugs could bypass the need for any religious exercises. The notion that a mystical experience could exist independent of any religious community was radical indeed, and for a generation desperately seeking some divine connection without being pinned down to any kind of tradition or hierarchy, it was just the thing the hippies were after.

  Nevertheless, Leary and company recognized that their audience of novice trippers would be well served by having a religious framework for what could be an unpredictable and sometimes terrifying journey, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which according to Leary was essentially a guidebook to the mystical journey, was exotic enough, but also could make sense of the LSD trip. But he would qualify the use of this deeply religious text so as not to scare off those who might be skeptical. Leary writes in the liner notes of the album: “Today psychedelic drugs such as LSD make it possible for anyone to propel himself out of his mind into unknown, uncharted neurological regions. The yogas and spiritual exercises of the past are no longer needed to escape the inertia of the symbolic mind. Exit is guaranteed.”

  This was it, then. The mystical experience could be untethered completely from religion. But despite this freedom given to the new consciousness explorers, occult and Eastern mystical imagery and ideas would still come to dominate the landscape. Not only did occultism and mysticism offer other ways of making sense of a world seemingly spinning out of control by way of war and racism, they put the fate of the individual in their own hands; no experience, no matter how transcendent, happens in a vacuum. There was an urgent need for the counterculture to have a spiritual basis. The Beats of the 1950s had grooved to Zen Buddhism, but it was not oriented toward either bliss or revolution and did not offer a cosmic vision that could contain the acid trip. The wave breaking on the shore of the counterculture was too strong. It was not enough to change the social and political system. One had to change one’s very being and relationship to the universe. Only a direct experience with the divine governed by the individual’s desire would suffice.

  This spiritual rebellion would need a soundtrack, and so two of the editors of the influential London underground magazine International Times (IT), Joe Boyd and John “Hoppy” Hopkins, ran the UFO Club on Tottenham Court Road from December 1966 to October 1967. During that short year, the UFO Club helped shape the
look and feel of the new mysticism and revolutionized the rock concert by turning it into a spectacle through the use of film, lights, and the soon ubiquitous shape-morphing slides that were projected onto the walls. It was the show posters, however, that gave the counterculture an occult-laden aesthetic found even in the rock art poster of today, a potent alchemy of various nineteenth-century art movements, including Romanticism, Art Nouveau, and Symbolism, each of them underscored by a search for esoteric secrets.

  The nineteenth century would, in many respects, be the last of a truly enchanted time for artists and musicians until the 1960s. In the late 1800s there was what is called the Occult Revival, when a number of artists, society people, and intellectuals were joining magical fraternities, and writers and thinkers like Arthur Conan Doyle and William James were interested in psychic research and spiritualism. Even Harry Houdini spent great time and effort in the hopes of finding a medium who could help him correspond with his beloved dead mother, only to become an expert in ferreting out frauds and charlatans. It was the artists, however, who painted the nineteenth century in mystical symbolism, often hidden from plain view unless you knew where to look. For the Symbolists, art was a method to transmit secret meaning in an effort to undermine the realism and naturalism that was coming to dominate modern art. The poet Jean Moréas conceived of the Symbolist manifesto in 1886: “So, in this art, the pictures of nature, the actions of human beings, all concrete phenomena would not themselves know how to manifest themselves; these are presented as the sensitive appearance destined to represent their esoteric affinity with primordial Ideas.” Partly a response to what Moréas saw as the failure of Romanticism to usher in a new age, but more deeply a polemic against a purely scientific worldview that was becoming increasingly in vogue, the Symbolist ideal was easily folded into the occult interests of the time. Many of the artists and musicians who associated with Symbolism were members of various Rosicrucian orders, including Claude Debussy and Erik Satie. Joséphin Péladan, a novelist and esoteric Christian, began a series of art and literary salons presented as a Rosicrucian lodge, the Salon de la Rose + Croix.

  The Decadent movement, closely linked to Symbolism, included an attack on the upper class and often incorporated more explicit sexual and taboo elements into the work. The aquiline illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, whose work belied his own shy and internal moral tension, was most well-known for his drawings of Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé and for publishing an edition of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, the latter of which is replete with grotesquely large phalluses. Other drawings referred to pagan and mythological themes, many that were at the heart of occult ideas at the time. Beardsley’s drawing The Mysterious Rose Garden, found in the literary journal The Yellow Book (edited by Beardsley), shows a nude young woman in a garden, listening to secrets from a wing-footed man, reminiscent of Hermes, the god who would become a core figure in the Hermetic doctrine that would shape nineteenth-century occult thought. The spiritual rebellion inherent in Beardsley’s work would finally give way to Catholicism, and near the end of his short life he wanted most of his work destroyed.

  This turn toward myth and occultism and the reaction against realism inspired artists to look toward their own unconscious, such as dreams, but even more dramatically to the visions of hashish and opium. These drugs would help to expand on the idea of individuality, of the value of inwardness, and the power of mythic archetypes often unfolding during drug intoxication. In Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), the poet writes of the splendid “poison” of opium: “Opium magnifies that which is limitless, / Lengthens the unlimited, /Makes time deeper, hollows out voluptuousness, / And with dark, gloomy pleasures / Fills the soul beyond its capacity.” This is a spiritual encounter not mediated by church or priest, by book or creed, but by the willful seeking of a direct encounter with the divine, and is eerily prophetic of the occult-infused LSD experience in the 1960s.

  The more obvious influence on the UFO Club’s posters comes by way of the Czech artist Alphonse Mucha, whose style would define the Art Nouveau style of the fin de siècle. A Freemason with a penchant for spiritualism, he was true to the spirit of his time. Mucha believed that the aim of art was to communicate hidden spiritual realities. His work Le Pater, a series of drawings related to the Lord’s Prayer spoken by Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, is profoundly esoteric, filled with visionary figures, devils, and heavenly visitation. Mucha used the prayer to reflect on the divine evolution of humanity, and believed, like the hippies of the 1960s, that a new spiritual age was dawning. Even his poster art, often used for advertisements (which is what rock posters are, after all), illuminated this idea of spiritual perfection, most often in the form of a woman, usually surrounded by florally decorated halos, dressed in long, rapturous fabrics, and with a look of deep spiritual peace on her face. These elements would find their way into almost every poster for the UFO Club, and were a revival of the nineteenth-century ideal that art could change the spiritual condition of the world.

  The bands of the UFO Club—the Soft Machine, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Pink Floyd—played against a backdrop of projection created by the art collective known as the Boyle Family (Mark Boyle and Joan Hills). In earlier performances, Boyle and Hills projected bodily fluids, including blood, sperm, and vomit, onto screens. During UFO shows, acid was poured onto zinc slides and the destruction was projected. Colored liquids were also used, and sometimes entire evenings would center around one color, with colored fabric, paint, and confetti thrown around during the performances. The writer David Thompson described Boyle’s work as a kind of mysticism: “[Mysticism] is the only serious word that adequately covers the aim and the activity. The aim is not to ‘create’ something, to communicate, to demonstrate, to define or to discover. It is to isolate for examination.” It is, according to Thompson, a romantic conception of art that is not interested in dividing up the world into categories but rather is seeking unity. Combining these projections with the music, all of it fueled by copious amounts of LSD, pushed at the edges of culture, creating a counterculture that the mainstream would ultimately embrace, if only in a commercial sense.

  It would be impossible to catalogue every instance of the rock poster art influence on British and American advertising, but there are standout examples that either cynically ripped off the most noncommercial art form next to graffiti or simply had to give over to a psychic transformation that was so powerful, the counterculture alone could not contain it. A 7UP television commercial by the artist Peter Max, whose work is reminiscent of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine film, features a flared-panted character walking on clouds, imagining prizes, each presented in a highly colorful quasi-mystical setting. There are even hints of the ubiquitous LSD “trails.” A Brim commercial for its then new decaffeinated coffee suggests the drink contains another special ingredient. Each person who drinks it is shown going wide-eyed as colorful animated thoughts swirl from the top of their heads, as if their crown chakras have been awakened, revealing Mucha-like swirls and flowers, and there’s even a figure vocalizing the word Love as it exits his throat on a rainbow. In the print advertising world, a 1969 Pepsi ad features the iconic bottle surrounded by floral mandalas and haloed by a rainbow-colored sun, as if a divine presence has descended into our midst.

  Change was not only in the air, it was in the very look and sound of the time, but there was often tension about whether the revolution was social, political, or spiritual. Sometimes even other hippies found the effort to change one’s mind, instead of the system, to be a dangerous and often futile effort, especially for the more politically motivated freaks. Even in IT, one nameless editor opens the 1967 issue with an angry stream-of-consciousness rant to not let the mystically inclined acidheads derail the true project of the revolution. American readers had been writing, asking where all the LSD-inspired
mandalas were. The editors responded that they were worried a focus on drugs and other high weirdness would undermine their mission by not only making them more suspect in the eyes of the law, but causing the drug quest to become its own kind of fundamentalism: “This is the drag about LSD: it’s a tease. We must not get hung up on some drug scene. Finally, the only scene is where you are with yourself ‘spiritually.’ The human soul, the inner-vision, call it what [sic] you like, transcends everything, including the psychedelic experience—which is not the only way nor necessarily the best to explore eternal/mystical/Zen/Schizoid states of consciousness.” There was no irony here. Even in 1967 people were witnessing the sometimes dark consequences of mixing acid with occultism.

  As Pink Floyd continued its upward momentum in 1967, Syd was accelerating downhill. The other members of Pink Floyd could no longer rely on Barrett being able to perform. He would detune his guitar, and stare blankly toward some inner vision, and his appearances on TV were unpredictable. While he had some ability to work in the studio, by 1968 the rest of the band agreed he had to be fired and replaced with David Gilmour, who would help usher in an entirely new direction for the band. Syd would soon be out of the music business entirely, but not before recording a few solo records with the production help of Gilmour. Sadly, it’s the song “Opel” that does not appear on his masterful album The Madcap Laughs (it is included on later compilations) and is Barrett’s spiritual confession, the most simple and lucid account of his desperate spiritual journey, as he sings, “I’m trying / I’m trying to find you!”

  Syd would try one more time with the 1970 effort Barrett, an overly produced mess with only a smattering of brilliance. Soon after, he performed his last show in front of an audience, backed by Gilmour, at the Olympia Exhibition Hall, but fifteen minutes into his set Barrett suddenly, but gently, put down his guitar and walked offstage. This was the beginning of Barrett becoming a recluse. Then in 1975, a hollow-eyed, overweight Barrett showed up unexpectedly at the recording studio where the now world-famous Pink Floyd, having produced The Dark Side of the Moon, was working on its follow-up, Wish You Were Here. The band was recording “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” a suite of songs about Barrett, with lyrics prefiguring the man who came to visit them as well as capturing the brilliant musician they had once known: “Now there’s a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky. / Shine on you crazy diamond.” But even more chilling is the remark about Barrett’s esoteric spiritual quest, a warning offered to many people on the same journey: “You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon.”