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

by Peter Bebergal

  The rumors of both magical and sexual excess, as well as his taste for drugs, helped Crowley develop a reputation as a devil worshipper. But the truth is that Satan appears very rarely in any of his writings. What does appear, however, is the idea that God is man, that there is no deity beyond what the individual desires to make manifest. For Crowley, the figure of Lucifer was merely a stand-in for the Miltonian idea of self-determination. Lucifer’s pride is not simply a middle finger to the heavens, but a willful intention to be responsible for one’s own destiny. Magick is the means by which one dives into one’s own self. It’s no wonder, then, that Crowley would become not only an icon to the sixties counterculture, but that he’d also be embraced by those who enjoyed his reputation as Satan’s best human advocate. Over time, Crowley stopped being an actual person, instead becoming a cipher that could be interpreted in whatever way was needed. Timothy Leary once remarked that he believed his own attempt to make the exploration of consciousness via drugs an inalienable right was an extension of Crowley’s “Do what thou wilt.” The Beatles included him in the roster of characters on the cover of Sgt. Pepper, while occultists, Wiccans, and magicians of every stripe would borrow liberally from his ideas for their own thoughts and practices.

  Today, Page tends to dismiss his interest in Crowley as just one of many novel curiosities he’s explored in his life. In a 2012 interview with Rolling Stone, he even seemed a bit annoyed to have to keep answering questions about it all these years later: “What attracted me to [the Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter] Dante Gabriel Rossetti? You won’t be asking me questions on that. But you would ask me about Crowley. And everyone is going to prick up their ears and wait for great revelations. . . . It’s taken out of all proportion. There was a balance to it. I wouldn’t be here now if there hadn’t been.” But no matter the force of his protestations, in the accepted history of Led Zeppelin, the story of Page’s magical dabblings is indispensable.

  In Hammer of the Gods, one of the earliest and most popular biographies of the band, author Stephen Davis quotes a much younger Page saying something a bit less “balanced”: “Magic is very important if people can go through it. . . . I think Aleister Crowley’s completely relevant today. We are still seeking for truth—the search goes on.” No source is provided for the quote, but it certainly echoes the thoughts of a typical young man in the early 1970s for whom taboo and dark things held a special appeal. Let’s chalk it up to his age and the context of his life as a rock star. In a 1976 Rolling Stone interview, he talked candidly about his interest in Crowley, but was wary of coming across as proselytizing. He notes Pete Townshend’s name-checking of the Indian spiritual leader Meher Baba in the title of the song “Baba O’Riley” as something he never wanted to do with Crowley. But he was not shy in proclaiming that he incorporated Crowley’s ideas into his “day-to-day life.” Here, Page is more mature, less gushing, likely feeling he no longer has to convince anyone of anything. His 2012 interview, where he almost seems exasperated with the question, is just as indicative of a long life where one’s ideas have mellowed.

  Page’s willingness to discuss his fascination with Crowley and magick ebbed and flowed. But over many years of interviewing Page, Guitar World editor Brad Tolinski was able to gain confidence with the reticent guitarist, and in their conversations a clearer picture emerged. With Tolinski, Page admits that his esoteric inquisitiveness was not limited to Crowley, but took in the whole spectrum of “Eastern and Western traditions of magick and tantra.” But the media found Crowley an easy mark for referencing a sinister figure par excellence, and he made for more interesting interview questions than, say, an obscure grimoire. Nevertheless, Crowley did represent for Page the very best example of “personal liberation.” As a young man with unlimited money and access to drugs, Page took it literally: “By the time we hit New York in 1973 for the filming of The Song Remains the Same, I didn’t sleep for five days!”

  But the cultural truth is much more important than even how Page talks about the occult at different stages in his life. Culture is where the story of the occult and rock is created, not in coy interviews with musicians. Along the trajectory of a band’s life, the facts are akin to mythology, a grand narrative that is as much about how the myth gets transmitted as it is about how the myth gets made. But for Led Zeppelin, their mystique was grounded in something intentional, something that was as much a part of what they conceived and gave birth to as it was the frenzied media and fan speculation. Page tells Tolinski, “I was living it. That’s all there is to it. It was my life—that fusion of music and magick.”

  Page first encountered the writings of Aleister Crowley when he was eleven years old and, while intrigued, he couldn’t really penetrate Crowley’s often impenetrable and assertive prose. When he returned to the magician’s writings as an adult he was taken by Crowley’s philosophy of self-liberation. In the late 1960s, Page began collecting rare Crowley works and in 1970 purchased the home once owned by the magician, known as the Boleskine House, on the southeastern shore of Loch Ness in Scotland, a place that would continue to attract legends of mystery and monsters. Crowley purchased the house in 1899, as it was, according to the magician, situated in a place that was particularly conducive to magical experiments. Crowley was, at the time, attempting a ritual by which a magician meets his or her Holy Guardian Angel, a yearlong operation that requires chastity, intense prayer, and the conjuration of spirits both good and evil.

  The ritual is found in a medieval grimoire known as The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, a text filled with complex and decidedly religious invocations (“In the name of the blessed and holy Trinity . . .”), list after list of infernal and heavenly names (“Akanef. Omages. Agrax. Sagares . . .”), and byzantine rules (“Take of myrrh in tears, one part; of fine cinnamon, two parts; of galangal . . .”). Nevertheless, the practical purpose of the grimoire is disappointingly prosaic: becoming invisible, discovering treasure, and even locating a misplaced book. Crowley believed, however, that the Holy Guardian Angel was not, in fact, an external divine presence, but a stand-in for the “higher self.” He never completed the ritual at the Boleskine House. But the attempt was enough to charge the grounds with a current of ominous radiance.

  Prior to Crowley, the house was already considered a place of ill repute. A church once situated there is said to have burned down, killing all the people inside. Crowley’s reputation for black magic made the place twice haunted. It’s uncertain what Page actually did there except hold lavish parties. The guitarist eventually sold the house and opened a bookstore in London called Equinox, named after Crowley’s book series (an attempt at a literary journal for the occult set). Page worked hard, and spent a lot of money, to keep the store from looking like a typical musty bookstore or a head shop, an establishment just then beginning to line store shelves with quartz crystals. Page, ever the romantic dandy, had an architect design the shop in the style of a nineteenth-century occult lodge, replete with Egyptian motifs and Art Deco trappings.

  Page’s burgeoning curiosity with Crowley coincided nicely with Robert Plant’s own love of Celtic folklore and fantasy, particularly by way of J. R. R. Tolkien. References to Tolkien’s hobbit-populated Middle-earth in Led Zeppelin’s lyrics were fairly explicit, with Plant name-dropping Tolkien’s delightfully grim locations, such as Mordor and the Misty Mountains, as well as the nefarious Gollum and the black riders called Ringwraiths. Plant also wanted his lyrics to hold mythological meaning, and he once described Celtic mysticism as the vital source for the spirit of Led Zeppelin. “[Those are] the lyrics I’m proud of,” he told a reporter for New Musical Express in 1973. “Somebody pushed my pen for me, I think.”
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  Plant grew up in West Bromwich, an area of England rich with folklore and legends. Pre-Christian mythology was at his doorstep. And Page’s magick guitar work was the perfect vehicle to hitch to folk fantasy lyrics. “Immigrant Song” offers a powerful example. The song is a dragon’s fiery breath unsealing the new decade of the 1970s, a period that would fuse mythology, fantasy, and the occult in exactly the same way the band would with their music. Lester Bangs, the frenetic genius of rock criticism, prophesized this union of imagined worlds carved out of ancient myths and the spiritual rebellion at the heart of rock and roll in his review of Led Zeppelin III for Rolling Stone in 1970.

  Bangs makes special note of Page’s opening cry with its “infernal light of a savage fertility rite.” Even more so in “Immigrant Song,” Bangs identifies the future of rock: “You could play it, as I did, while watching a pagan priestess performing the ritual dance of Ka before the flaming sacrificial altar in Fire Maidens of Outer Space with the TV sound turned off. And believe me, the Zep made my blood throb to those jungle rhythms even more frenziedly.” Led Zeppelin rapidly became the touchstone for all the weird and occult permutations of the 1970s. From Tolkien to Crowley, from pulp fantasy to pop magick, the darker edge of the 1970s occult leanings was found everywhere.

  Book publishers such as Ace and Ballantine were putting out cheap paperbacks of old sword-and-sorcery stories, many of these in anthologies, including the popular Swords Against Darkness, published by Zebra Books in 1977. While much of the literature and comics of the genre were consumed by a dedicated group of fans, by the mid-1970s, images of magic and fantasy, often with a dark tinge, would come to dominate the pop culture landscape. Chain bookstores began carrying inexpensive art books showcasing the talents of artists such as Boris Vallejo and Frank Frazetta, whose paintings featured Viking-like warriors battling giant serpents, with scantily clad maidens at the heroes’ feet. In the same mall as the bookstore, gift shops sold small pewter statues of wizards and dragons.

  The filmmaker Ralph Bakshi released two major animated motion pictures—Wizards and The Lord of the Rings—and the company Rankin/Bass produced a widely popular made-for-TV feature-length cartoon of The Hobbit. Led Zeppelin gave these shadowy fantasies an aura of the real. Sure, role-playing a wizard in D&D is just a game, but Page talks about the magick of Crowley in interviews the way the Beatles talked about the benefits of Transcendental Meditation as taught by the maharishi. Tolkien wrote fiction, but the same song that mentions the Misty Mountains also describes real-life hippies getting stoned in a park. Was there some hidden magic peak that Plant knew about, a retreat where he communed with the spirits, away from pretense and fame?

  All of this was solidified by the vaguely sinister vibe the band gave to their music and lyrics. The ghost of the supposed crossroads bargain made by Robert Johnson became attached to the band by way of their appropriation and celebration of the blues. Their essential sound is the driving twelve-bar blues found in some of the most important blues and early rock songs, including Muddy Waters’s “Train Fare Blues,” Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” and Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog.”

  Led Zeppelin’s oeuvre includes luminous interpretive covers of songs by Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, and Memphis Minnie. In a 2012 interview by Tolinski with Jimmy Page and guitarist Jack White, White describes Led Zeppelin’s ability to express the power of the blues: “When you have a vision like Jimmy’s, I think that’s the aim. To make everything as powerful as you can make it.” Page agreed, but took it one step further: “But it wasn’t just power—atmosphere was very important for us as well. We wanted to create an atmosphere that was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Our goal was to make music that was spine-tingling.” It was precisely this atmosphere that gave the band its dark mystique, and it’s why Led Zeppelin so perfectly embodies the uncanny synergy between rock and the occult. Led Zeppelin contains all the elements unearthed so far.

  We see the medieval bard as if through a scrying mirror, a crystal used by the Elizabethan astrologer and magus John Dee to try and communicate with the spirit world. The figure stops to eat a mushroom he finds at the base of a tree, where he sits and then begins to dream. He is now on a horse, a sword at his side, riding along a landscape of beaches, hills, and valleys. The dashing hero rides through a forest until he comes upon a castle. A falcon flies from his wrist and into a window where it scares a group of guards. Our hero then battles a dark knight and vanquishes the villain into a moat.

  This is, of course, a scene from The Song Remains the Same, the Led Zeppelin concert movie interspersed with fantasy sequences, one for each member of the band. The brave adventurer is Robert Plant, and he eventually finds what he was looking for, a princess held in the castle against her will. Plant fights the guards and saves her from whatever terrible fate was about to befall her.

  The Song Remains the Same, released in 1976, mixes sword and sorcery, Tolkien, Arthurian lore, and Celtic mythology in a snapshot of the 1970s: a fantasy-imbued mysticism that is darker than the hippies’ pastoralism, a place where great battles and romance, not vegetarianism and yoga, characterize the spiritual quest. Plant’s sequence also further refines the Led Zeppelin mythos as a grand epic, where each member functions as an archetype. Plant as romantic hero might seem in opposition to the almost androgynous and steamy Dionysian sexuality he exhibited in his stage performances, but this kind of image is the glamour of rock, and precisely how rock managed to so effectively combine spiritual ecstasy and danger with a rich phantasmagorical aesthetic.

  In another sequence, the haunting strains of an electric guitar being played with a cello bow leads into the scene of a foggy night. A desperate seeker, Jimmy Page, climbs a dark and lonely mountain, his way treacherous. What he is looking for awaits him at the top. At the summit stands an elderly hermit—almost ancient—who guides the man’s final steps with the light of his lantern. The young man reaches toward the elder and looks into his eyes. Page watches as the hermit’s face transforms into his own, and then to that of a child, and finally to an embryo, a moment reminiscent of the star child in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The vision then begins the movement back again until we gaze upon the face of the wizard, who raises his staff and waves it, producing a trail of prismatic color.

  This image of the hermit first appears in the inner artwork of the gatefold cover of Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album, often referred to as Led Zeppelin IV or Zoso, a creative means to pronounce the unsayable sigils that decorate the album. Taken almost whole from the famous Rider-Waite tarot deck, the hermit stares down into the village, the only light coming from his lantern, his frail body supported by a long walking stick.

  If the band was trying to deepen the occult aura around themselves and their music, they couldn’t have come up with a better, more potent means than the sigils. Indeed, the whole package of Led Zeppelin IV as an album and as an artifact serves as one of the most perfectly magical moments in rock history. While the Beatles’ “Paul is dead” rumors set the stage for the album cover to become an occult emblem and Manson’s homicidal exegesis of the White Album gave song lyrics a sinister weight, Led Zeppelin IV functioned as a kind of grimoire, a magical text, each song a spell, the vinyl disc a kind of magic circle in which to perform the invocations, and the album cover the altar on which to make sacrifice (or de-seed your weed, as the case may be).

  Adding to rock’s reputation as a vehicle for subliminal Mephistophelian control were the persistent rumors that musicians were recording secret messages with a technique called backmasking. When played backwards, songs would reveal their true meaning, such as the clues to McCartney’s death supposedly “masked” in Beatles songs. Led Zeppelin IV’s prime mover, the leviathan of rock and roll, �
�€œStairway to Heaven,” is thought to be the backmasked song extraordinaire, a literal love song to the devil with its infamous line: “. . . to my sweet Satan . . .”

  Subsequent album covers would continue to inspire occult speculations. Houses of the Holy (1973) shows naked children crawling across stones toward some unknown terrible glory. The inner gatefold is more disturbing. Up on a hill of ancient ruins, a naked figure holds a child aloft as if to throw it off. The cover was designed by Aubrey Powell of the design company Hipgnosis, responsible for some of the most iconic record album covers of all time, such as Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Powell claims the idea for the artwork came from the book Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke in which extraterrestrials, who hide their appearance since they resemble human conceptions of the devil, interfere with humanity in a way that helps push earth toward extinction; only a group of children who have evolved and share a single hive mind survive. But truth rarely gets in the way of speculation, especially when it comes to rock. And it’s difficult to image that, whatever Powell’s inspiration for the cover, the band enjoyed the way it continued to ignite rumors of perverse magic. The late music critic Keith Shadwick proposes nothing less in his discussion of Houses of the Holy in his book on the band: “The images gave the strongest suggestion yet that Page and Plant’s interest in legend, mythology, and esoterica was beginning to help form their overall notion of what the band and their music was about.”

  Later in 1970, the same year of the Royal Albert Hall concert, Led Zeppelin pushed the Beatles out of the number-one spot in a British music poll. The Beatles had held that title for eight years, but Led Zeppelin brought with them the spirit of change, an insistent driving rhythm that dethroned the previous monarchs of rock. The reflective and melancholic mysticism of the Beatles—delivered by way of a message of love (it’s all you need), peace (give it a chance), and the giggling spirituality of the maharishi—could no longer speak to the cynicism and disappointment that characterized the end of the 1960s. Rock’s soul would need to be newly forged on Surtur’s anvil. Led Zeppelin was the hammer.