When the devil appears, he of course looks exactly like the god Pan in his classical representations. The movie is based on the book of the same name by Dennis Wheatley, the popular British author who the writer Phil Baker describes as the man responsible for creating the image of the devil worshipper: “[Wheatley] virtually invented the popular image of Satanism in 20th-century Britain, and he made it seem strangely seductive.â€
Sex, occultism, and Satan would become synonymous in various pockets of pop culture, and more films would follow, the most sensational being The Wicker Man (1973), directed by Robin Hardy and also starring Christopher Lee in a role diametrically opposed to the Christian occult expert in The Devil Rides Out. Here he plays Lord Summerisle, the leader of a pagan cult that benefits economically from their fruit crops. But a successful harvest requires a sacrifice to the gods. The devout and celibate Sergeant Neil Howie, played by Edward Woodward, is lured to the island under the pretense of a missing girl. Unlike many films in the genre, Howie’s Christian entreaties do not save him from immolation inside the giant construct of a wicker man. Rather than upper-class Satanists, the people of the island are free-love hippies. Even the father figure Christopher Lee sports long hair and a bright yellow turtleneck, looking not unlike an older Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones, a dandy come to worship the old gods and serve you your doom.
While the “heathens†of Summerisle do not venerate Satan or the devil, their religion is decidedly hedonistic and, when necessary, murderous. Pagan religion is cast as a dreadful and malevolent force. While it makes for a fine horror movie, it deepens the line in the sand between the supposed mature rationality of the Judeo-Christian tradition and the irrational, youthful, and oversexed traditions of any alternative religious practice. And while this might have not been good for a nuanced understanding of the occult, it was great for rock and roll. These kinds of representations would inspire both the performance and presentation of rock music and elevate it to a mythical status.
Colloquial associations of the word occult with Satan and devil worship in film would fuel the rebellious whims of teenagers as well as the obsessions of certain Christian groups. But movies were not that easy of a target. Being fictional, films were less likely to be taken—or taken seriously—as personal attacks on the general public. Rock and roll, on the other hand, involved real-life, flesh-and-blood musicians making music that was being sold by the millions to impressionable kids.
Rock stars’ lives were seen as pure debauchery, their music a mix of anger, sex, and defiance. These often coded, sometimes explicit occult messages would be the ruin of a civilized (e.g., Christian) world. Certainly, some bands gave over to the devil’s embrace with lyrics and a presentation that were decidedly satanic. But even for those musicians, how much was a put-on—a musical role-playing of Hammer horror films—or an earnest spiritual path was not always clear.
Firmly entrenched in the rock and art scene of the late 1960s—a time of heavy barbiturate use and high fashion—the Rolling Stones met the avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger, who had an idea to push the boundaries of cinema. He would make a movie that would be a magic ritual, filled with pagan gods, incantations, and his first serious attempt to channel his hero, Aleister Crowley. In 1963, Anger had completed his film Scorpio Rising. The thirty-minute movie—a hostile series of biker culture, homoerotic, Nazi, and occult images—was to be Anger’s first real counterculture success. Over the next few years he firmly planted himself in the underground arts culture and became a darling of the hippies.
Anger’s fame gave him the confidence he needed to put down on celluloid the film he had wanted to make since he was a teenager. And he had the money he needed from the lucrative publication of Hollywood Babylon, a scandalous account of Hollywood debauchery he first published in France in 1959, and then in the States in 1965. (The book was quickly banned and not rereleased in the United States until 1975.) To make the film, Anger first cast a musician by the name of Bobby Beausoleil, a handsome goateed fellow with a boyish face and devilish eyes.
Beausoleil would also write and perform the soundtrack. Anger was feeling on top of the world and decided to stage a public ritual in Haight-Ashbury he billed “The Equinox of the Gods.†The event took place at the Straight Theater on September 21, 1967 (the date of the autumnal equinox). Beausoleil and his band, the Magick Powerhouse of Oz, headlined. Much of the ritual was filmed, and Anger wanted to include the footage in the film he would call Lucifer Rising. After the show, Anger and some friends went to get ice cream. Returning to the theater, they found the box office receipts and the footage stolen, taken by Beausoleil. Anger was distraught and the next day took out an ad in the Village Voice announcing the “death of Kenneth Anger.†Beausoleil disappeared, only to show up later on charges that he murdered his music teacher, Gary Hinman, on orders from Charles Manson.
With the loss of Beausoleil, Anger immediately saw Mick Jagger as the perfect acolyte for his lead in Lucifer Rising. Jagger and company were intrigued by Anger and the allure of the dark arts, and Anger believed the Stones capable of producing powerful magic through their music. Anger became particularly close with Anita Pallenberg, Keith Richards’s girlfriend. Theirs was a scandalous arrangement since she had been with Brian Jones before. Anger wanted to perform a pagan marriage ceremony for Richards and Pallenberg, but it seemed that Anger wore out his welcome in their lives when he set up their room for the ritual while Richards and Pallenberg were sleeping.
According to Tony Sanchez, the band’s assistant (and rumored dealer) who was in the apartment at the time, they awoke to find their door painted completely gold on both sides, suggesting that Anger had been able to come and go in the dead of night without anyone the wiser. Sanchez recounts that this just made everyone uneasy, and from then on Richards was starting to feel less enamored with the occult in general, and Anger specifically. Eventually Jagger also felt pressured by Anger regarding Lucifer Rising and decided not to play the titular role after all.
Anger was taking it too seriously, and while Jagger was interested in the charm of the devil as a metaphor, he was really interested in what he felt that metaphor referred to. As Tony Sanchez tells it: “It was power that fascinated [Jagger], the ability to control individuals, audiences, even societies—and he knew Satan wasn’t to thank for his strength in that direction.â€
Even their 1967 album Their Satanic Majesties Request came about not as an attempt to musically unlock any infernal doors as much as it was a (and some say a cynical and ill-advised) response to the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper. The bands had been continually and good-naturedly competing for the top spot in the public eye, but Sgt. Pepper changed the game completely. Art and rock finally converged in a way not thought possible and the pressure was on for the Stones to produce something as good. So they abandoned their tried-and-true blues-based rock and produced a psychedelic grab bag replete with string arrangements, sitars, and horns.
The album title suggested something dark and malevolent inside, but the cover was almost a parody of the whole endeavor. The Stones are outfitted in Renaissance clothing, with Jagger in the middle, the grand magus with a pointy wizard cap. They are surrounded by a collage reminiscent of the Sgt. Pepper cover, but without the symbolic palimpsest that gave the Beatles album an aura of hidden meaning and occult associations. The songs are mostly generic psychedelic manifestos, a Candy Land board where “the trees and flowers were blue.†There are a few standouts like “She’s a Rainbow,†but the only decidedly occult song is “The Lantern,†in which Jagger beseeches an unnamed traveler to leave a clear and well-lit path through an impenetrable magical forest, a likely metaphor for the vast and sometimes inexplicable spiritual landscape of the sixties.
When the Aquarian Age ended not with a whimper but a stabbing at the Rolling Stonesâ�
��™ 1969 concert at the Altamont Speedway, Jagger no longer had any use for an image of himself as the Prince of Darkness. The Stones wanted to move away from mystery and magic and return to their deep rock roots as entertainers and chart toppers. In the end, it’s not clear how much influence Anger had on the Stones. Anger has said that the idea for “Sympathy for the Devil†came from him, but Jagger has only ever said that he was influenced by Baudelaire, who once wrote, “The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist,†as well as Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, in which Beelzebub visits Moscow. Christian conspiracy theorists might tell you the Stones’ relationship with Anger is all you need to know about the infernal power behind rock and roll. There is a truth here, but not quite the one they think.
While Anger’s occult theology does not actually encompass a belief in the Christian conception of Satan, the overarching dark and ominous edge to his films was seductive to people like Mick Jagger. Jagger had long been cultivating an image of the decadent bad boy, a Baudelaire-like figure who projected a debauched and vaguely Mephistophelian vibe.
But to what end? What did the occult offer that fame, money, and creative freedom didn’t? Much has been made of the Rolling Stones’ association with Anger, but their relationship with him was also a symptom of the endless quest for meaning that characterized the era. Jagger in particular would continually find himself rubbing shoulders with the more bizarre and experimental aspects of spiritual discovery. He even ended up on the cover of the magazine put out by the Process Church of the Final Judgment, a group formed when two high-ranking Scientologists decided that they wanted a bit more personal will on their spiritual path. Robert and Mary Ann DeGrimston developed an apocalyptic vision that promised a time when Satan and Christ would join hands and usher the world into a new era. They drew heavily from the hippie aesthetic, and their magazine, while filled with foreboding and fascist imagery, still looked like a typical underground rag. Jagger was never a member, but his face on the cover of the issue titled “Mindbending,†with the Process logo looking strangely reminiscent of a swastika right below his iconic face, deepened his persona as someone wicked.
Satan would continue to be a spiritual muse for those seeking a symbol of spiritual rebellion, not for his reputation as anti-Christian, but as a representation of sex, power, and ecstasy. This is not the devil whose true face is that of Pan and the other trickster gods that have possessed human beings since the earliest religions. This is the Antichrist, the destroyer, come to seduce your children. Musicians would find the persona and image of the devil to be a mighty force, not only inspiring their fans to feel empowered by the simple act of rebellion that can come with an upside-down pentagram hung on a bedroom wall, but by the fierce sexual and ecstatic energy their music inspired.
This is a prime example of where occultism, by its nature, is indefinable, a tabula rasa that becomes a projection of whatever fears, desires—spiritual or otherwise—that culture needs, and do not fit within a mainstream (read Christian) context. It didn’t matter, for example, that Anger’s Lucifer was not the fallen Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost and Christian mythology. For the Stones, the association was enough to engender an idea that they walked in darkness.
The irony of the Stones in the context of this narrative is that, except for Jagger’s almost faddish interest in the occult and the hobnobbing with people like Anger and the Process Church, the band had no abiding spiritual motivation beyond that of making music, which is no small impulse, to be sure. But their reputation as somehow sowers of the flowers of evil was as much a dandyish and Baudelairian persona that Jagger eagerly cultivated as an agreement between fans and the media to crown them satanic majesties. The culture of psychedelic rock and flower power hippie culture needed its serpent in the garden. Everyone—the band, the public, the media—acknowledged that the devil seemed to have more of a role to play in the history of the world than any colorful LSD-fueled mysticism.
The innocent belief in the cosmic power of love was undermined every day by a continuing war and the gruesome faces of people like Manson staring out from a commune, once the ideal example of a utopian possibility. The Rolling Stones were the soundtrack to the feeling of unease, as well as a reminder that no matter how bad things got, there was still great music to be had. Rock and roll was now becoming a thermometer for every temperature of the culture, bands and performers perfectly representing the associated hope or fear.
II
Terry Manning was hunched awkwardly over the master vinyl disc of the album that would be called Led Zeppelin III, his hand preternaturally steady as he engraved the words on the runoff—the smooth inner ring where no grooves had been cut. A special platter was placed on top of the disc that exposed only the area he was working in, so he was prevented from accidently scratching the vinyl and ruining the master. Guitarist Jimmy Page, excited and stoned, looked on. It was Page who’d implored Manning to carve the message that would end up on every copy in every record store and in the hands of every fan. Unless you looked for it, the words would essentially be invisible, but their very existence on the record would impress a great truth that Page was convinced the world needed: “Do what thou wilt.†This single moment serves as a microcosm of the entirety of the influence the occult would have on rock and roll. It would spread out into rock’s atmosphere in ways neither Manning nor the band could have predicted. The timing was perfect. Music fans were anxiously waiting for the next incarnation of Dionysus to remind them that the god was not dead. He was merely biding his time while the astral trails of psychedelic rock dissolved. Led Zeppelin perfectly encapsulates the power of the occult imagination, how it continues to see expression, and how it was able to completely propel rock and roll into electrifying new directions.
Manning, an old friend of Page and a veteran of the still fairly young rock industry, had been called in to engineer the record. On a July day in 1970, at the Mastercraft studio in Memphis, he and Page did the final mix and then the master. It was going to be a slightly different album, Zeppelin’s hard rock edge softened with British folk influences. But the opener, “Immigrant Song,†was pure Zeppelin, a Viking-inspired revelry about cold Nordic winds and the halls of Valhalla. At the time, Page was obsessed with Aleister Crowley, whose notorious turn-of-the-century magical and sexual escapades were idealized by much of the sixties counterculture as brilliant feats of radicalism. Page believed Crowley was a “misunderstood genius†and thought he had a duty to spread Crowley’s prime directive: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.†While Page’s own passion could be infectious, it was not always easy to know when he was just looking to stir things up. Manning later said he never knew of Zeppelin’s guitarist ever actually trying to cast a spell or perform a ritual. But Page had invested a huge sum on rare Crowley manuscripts, and even went so far as to buy Crowley’s home on the shore of Loch Ness—a mansion rumored to be haunted by the spirits the dark magician had conjured. By agreeing to inscribe the Crowley line on the master pressing of the album, Manning decided to humor his friend even though the risk of damaging the master was great.
Twenty years later—almost to the day, as he remembers it—Manning was flipping channels when he came across a televangelist preaching on the devil’s influence on rock and roll. He held up a vinyl copy of Led Zeppelin III, an album by then considered one of the greatest rock records of all time by critics and fans. As the camera zoomed in on the album, the televangelist’s fingers began to trace the words engraved on the runoff. The TV preacher explained that these were the words of one of the most devilish men who ever lived, the black magician and Satanist Aleister Crowley. Manning sat back, smiled. He said to himself, “I did that.â€
By the time Manning saw his handiwork raised u
p as a symbol of the demonic influence in rock and roll, Led Zeppelin’s reputation as a band that had trucked with Satan was cemented. That idea was provoked by both the band and by the circumstances of their tumultuous rock star lives and would spread across the entire spectrum of popular music. Page’s interest in the occult and Crowley is where this all begins, and it has been widely documented. And Crowley has been written about even more than Led Zeppelin. While the artistic and spiritual merit of his ideas are up for debate, his impact is undeniable and deserving of the word count devoted to trying to get a handle on the man and his legacy. What makes Crowley in equal measures fascinating and frustrating is that he’s impossible to pin down. Was he a serious magician, hoping to transform the world through his work, or was he merely a charlatan, using his gift for crafting baroque rituals to seduce men and women alike?
Crowley was born in 1875 in England, just as the Occult Revival was starting in earnest and Spiritualism and the Theosophical Society (founded the same year as Crowley’s birth) were gaining popular notice. Crowley was a rascal as a child and his mother called him “The Great Beast.†He would later put this phrase on his business card. Crowley wore many hats. He was a formidable mountain climber and chess player, but his greatest talent was that of the libertine. The core of his system of magic, which he related in dozens of books and articles, relied on the notion that norms related to sexuality and other behaviors were keeping mankind from achieving true spiritual liberation. To the dismay of many of his peers in the Golden Dawn and other occult fraternities, Crowley developed a system of “sex magick†(Crowley added the k, he said, to differentiate the “great work†from stage magic) that did not shy from any form of sexual expression.
Season of the Witch : How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (9780698143722) Page 10