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

by Peter Bebergal

  By the time Crowe met with him, Bowie was convinced he was cursed, possibly by Jimmy Page, and took to drawing Kabbalistic symbols on the floor of his studio. Crowe listened as Bowie talked lucidly about his music and then suddenly began describing an apocalyptic future where rock’s pretense of evil and darkness would become reality and give Bowie a kind of dictatorial power: “I believe that rock & roll is dangerous. It could well bring about a very evil feeling in the West. I do want to rule the world.” While he didn’t mention it to Crowe at the time, Bowie believed his plans were being thwarted by witches set out to steal his semen (the substance needed to magically create a homunculus).

  A few months later, Bowie and his then wife, Angela, bought a sprawling Art Deco house in L.A. And in a perfect bit of nonfiction plotline, Bowie discovered that the previous owner, the dancer Gypsy Rose Lee, whose life inspired the musical Gypsy, had painted a hexagram on the floor of one of the rooms. Bowie fell apart, and began claiming the devil lived in the home’s pool. The only way to stay in the house would be to perform an exorcism, so Bowie gathered together all the necessary accoutrements, and he and Angela stood in front of the pool and performed their own private ritual. In a later interview, Angela claims that despite her disbelief in such things, she was witness to the water beginning to bubble and a stain appearing at the bottom of the pool. The exorcism wasn’t enough for Bowie; they moved out a few weeks later.

  In a 2009 interview with his biographer Marc Spitz, Bowie revealed what cocaine was doing to his already occult-addled mind: “My psyche went through the roof, it just fractured into pieces. I was hallucinating twenty-four hours a day.” Bowie’s coke-stimulated interest in the occult was mostly concealed in his private life, but an astute listener can find a myriad of clues in his music. Occultism in the 1970s was concerned primarily with ideas of the devil. Culturally, one couldn’t escape his grip, even if it came by way of the family pet (Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell); the strange quiet child next door (The Omen); or the local motorcycle gang (Psychomania). But Bowie was able to bypass the devil for a more authentic and maybe even more dangerous kind of occultism. While Arthur Brown saw his musical performance as a form of shamanism, Bowie saw magic as a form of self-actualization, but guided by a commonly misunderstood notion of magical perfection.

  The occult in the 1970s was also dominated by the resurgence of magic instruction manuals used by magicians to conjure demons and other unlikely allies in their search for knowledge of the divine. The genre became so popular, publishers began printing fictional tomes as if they were recently excavated ancient texts. Other books were intended to actually teach the public something about the art of magic.

  The two most popular books on magic, Israel Regardie’s The Golden Dawn and Psychic Self-Defense by Dion Fortune, provided hands-on application in the context of the magical society, particularly the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, of which both authors were members. Regardie’s book was the first time the Golden Dawn rituals were made public in such a systematic way (he was accused by other members of “breaking his oath”), but the book itself is almost impossible to follow without knowing something firsthand about the order. The Golden Dawn offers both individual and group exercises, but it’s not unlike a book on trying to learn card tricks without knowing the maneuvers first: “Go to the West, make the Pentagram, and vibrate EHEIEH.”

  What it does provide is a glimpse into the practice of magic not bound in the popular notion of Satanism or even witchcraft. The Golden Dawn is a book of nonfiction fantastic realism, igniting the occult imagination of the 1970s and providing the basis for the founding of a number of Golden Dawn–related groups still active. Fortune’s book, on the other hand, is much more pragmatic, offering cookbook wisdom, including how to ward off curses and magical attacks.

  While Crowley certainly had his influence on Bowie, the mercurial singer smartly did not exploit him, or use his name to conjure an image of a black magician, as Ozzy Osbourne would later do in his 1980 song “Mr. Crowley.” Bowie was attracted to Crowley as a figure of Luciferian grace, in the sense described earlier, wherein Lucifer represents a kind of self-realized dandy, a Baudelaire-like poet who is not afraid to explore the more taboo aspects of sex, will, and intoxication. But this notion of a perfected spiritual man, an image Bowie had been playing with since “Oh! You Pretty Things,” was easily conflated with the idea of Aryan perfection. This formulation has long posed a problem in understanding the history of the occult.

  Madame Blavatsky is often cited as the location where this tension first manifested. Her book The Secret Doctrine lays out a taxonomy of “root races,” an evolution of humanity’s spiritual destiny. The first of these is ethereal, without form, and the root races evolved over time. Blavatsky would provide pulp fantasy writers with a deep well to draw from with the next races, the Hyperboreans, Lemurians, and Atlanteans. The fifth root race is the Aryan, which Blavatsky claimed was the peak of humanity at that time. A sixth would rise above the Aryan, and then the seventh would see the final and perfect human being.

  Gary Lachman, in his biography of Blavatsky, explains how race was a deeply important topic during Blavatsky’s time and, while we might find some of her ideas to be troubling, they were part of a larger cultural milieu. More disturbing, Lachman writes, is how racists used her ideas to further their own bigoted occult ideas. The Thule Society, for example, was a group of Germans—including Rudolf Hess—with decidedly anti-Semitic views who believed a racially pure people arose in the mythical land of Hyperborea.

  The Thule Society would become the inspiration for an entire industry of books purporting that the Nazis sought occult power, believing they could create a perfect and deadly Aryan being. Pauwels and Bergier’s The Morning of the Magicians was the first book to bring this to popular awareness, and their occult–Nazi link was replete with strange science and the quest for legendary objects imbued with great power. If not for Morning of the Magicians, it’s unlikely the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark would have sought the biblical ark as a means to wield the power of God as a weapon. And while those villains meet their fate in no small part thanks to Indiana Jones, others would write the Nazis back into history with a romantic idealism.

  Through a reading of Morning of the Magicians it would be easy to connect the dots from Lytton’s occult fantasy of hollow-earth superhumans found on Hunky Dory to the Nazi-inflected ideas of homo superior. Bowie would find himself getting mired in this kind of thinking. The image of Nazi occultism offered a perfect storm of shock and awe for a rock spectacle and a persona both beautiful and deadly. All of these ideas would merge into the apocalyptic fervor, but because Bowie was such a brilliant artist, he could channel it into music.

  In an interview with Arena in 1993, Bowie looked back on this time with regret. He understood that, while made delusional by drugs, a yearning for God was the driving motivation behind all of his occult dabbling. Bowie had become fascinated with the book The Spear of Destiny by Trevor Ravenscroft (you couldn’t make up a name this good), which claimed Hitler was obsessed with finding the spear a Roman soldier used to pierce Jesus during the crucifixion, a supposed artifact of deadly mystical power. This, along with the legend that Hitler was also looking for the Holy Grail (also later popularized by the third Indiana Jones movie, The Last Crusade), so captivated Bowie that he put aside the reality of the Nazis’ deeds to instead imagine them on some great, holy quest. “And naively, politically,” Bowie said, “I didn’t even think about what they had done.”

  Bowie’s self-destruction was in service to the fascist mythology of the palingenesis. In Bowie’s case it was his person, not a nation stripped of its preconceptions, desires, loves, and fears, becoming nothing more than a shell, and resurrected in perfection through a means of rigorous repr
ogramming. Bowie was not looking for a perfected inner self so much as a perfected outer self, his art an expression of his perfected will. There is no better means of carving up a persona than cocaine, and mixed with the Kabbalah and racial occultism, Bowie couldn’t have picked a more effective formula. Fascism, for Bowie, was less about a political accent than it was about fashion.

  All this evocation of various personas was heightened by Bowie’s uncanny sense of fashion that, even beyond his music, would stand out and inspire other musicians. In the press, Bowie would continue the construction and deconstruction of his character, as when he told a reporter for NME that he was not a musician but an artist using music as his means of expression. With statements like this, Bowie intended to keep himself apart from the pure rock persona to better establish himself as the next character he might inhabit. In the same interview, Bowie also wanted to stand clear of being lumped in with someone like Alice Cooper. Bowie admitted to a kind of theatricality, but he eschewed the use of props or sets, claiming he was the “vehicle” for his songs. This also meant that when he was ready to move on to the next thing, he wasn’t saddled by the production itself, as when during the final show of his Ziggy tour with his band the Spiders from Mars, Bowie returned to the stage for his encore and introduced the song “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide” by telling the audience it was the last time the Spiders would play together. His bandmates were just as shocked as the fans.

  Bowie once commented that Marc Bolan was “Glam 1.0,” and without Bolan’s all-too-brief tenure leading the band called T. Rex (Bolan died in 1977, weeks before his thirtieth birthday), Bowie would not have known which stage door to walk through. Bolan had transformed himself from hippie troubadour—a minstrel with a vibrato voice who sang about fairy tales and magic spells—into a glamorous and decadent rock star, trading in his paisley for high-heeled boots and sequined jackets. But he retained a mystic aura, particularly in the steamy androgyny he brought to his performances.

  Fans of his earlier band Tyrannosaurus Rex called him a sellout, and music critics saw his glam pretensions as just that, a cynical showmanship devoid of any real artistic merit. But Bolan found a generation ready to embrace glam’s mix of old and new, simple pop stripped of psychedelic extravagance but dressed up in cosmic finery. Glam would provide a template for a new kind of occult imagining, one where the rock star was merely a cover-up for a secret identity—alien or monster.

  Brian De Palma found glam, as well as the entire culture of rock, to be ripe for a horror parody in his film Phantom of the Paradise, a movie that could only have been made in 1974. Swan, a record executive played by Paul Williams (who also wrote the film’s music), sells his soul for eternal life and acts as the devil’s agent, soliciting others to sign away their own souls in return for record contracts. Swan discovers the musician Winslow Leach and believes his music will be the perfect backdrop for his new rock club. Swan frames him, and Leach is put through all terrible manner of tortures, including having his teeth pulled and replaced with metal, and having his face burned by a record-pressing machine. He takes to wearing a mask and black cape, haunting the nightclub, enacting his revenge on those who destroyed him.

  Rock culture would continue to utilize the concept of secret identities hidden behind masks and makeup. Mercyful Fate would make its mark on the 1980s with occult and satanic imagery buoyed by a fairly generic metal sound. Their lead singer, King Diamond, gave the band its power. King Diamond was said to be a devotee of Anton LaVey’s brand of Satanism, and he took to painting his face white like the bastard love child of Alice Cooper and Kiss. He often wore a top hat and a funereal morning suit, and would perform holding some bones; sometimes these were tied together to form a cross attached to his microphone. These elements signaled to rock audiences that the musician was a messenger for arcane secrets, delivered in the language of rock.

  Marilyn Manson followed Bowie’s template, as each one of his albums presented a new persona, but he maintained the overall Alice Cooper School of Makeup program. In 1998, Manson told Kerrang! that Bowie was a crucial influence, particularly on his album Mechanical Animals, whose cover, the article’s author notes, looks uncannily like Aladdin Sane. Bowie had a clearly traceable effect on popular music, but his overarching influence was more subtle. So many of his constructed personalities paralleled his real life in the 1970s, each of them depicting desperate spiritual seekers, looking toward both inner space and outer space for spiritual sustenance. But as much as Bowie was a conduit for the decade’s excess, he was also a mirror.

  The last song on Diamond Dogs is “Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family,” and it mimics a locked groove on an album, when the needle gets stuck and repeats the same groove over and over. It’s a frightening bit of macabre whimsy but musically is the perfect metaphor for the risky nature of occult pursuits. More so than exaggerated and often false rumors of devil worship, the true dark side of the occult is the ever-circling loop of meaning.

  Because the occult is not a system, but rather a messy accumulation of bits of tradition, synthetic beliefs, and even pure fictions in the service of commercialism, there is no final word, no final wisdom. And even for some, it becomes the ruthlessness of seeking signs, where everyday things begin to take on occult connotations, each one a reference to some deeper meaning, which again only points to another possible inference. What makes Bowie the great magician is that, even as his psyche fractured under the strain of this self-imposed mission, he was able to cause “change to occur in conformity with the will.” Bowie’s personas were rarely that of a magus. Instead, they were otherworldly characters from beyond space and time: Major Tom, the space oddity whose voyage into outer space reveals an inner loneliness within an opiated dream; Ziggy Stardust, a messianic figure not unlike Valentine Michael Smith from Robert Heinlein’s counterculture science fiction classic Stranger in a Strange Land; the futuristic glam visage of Aladdin Sane; and the grotesque hybrid dog creature prowling an apocalyptic landscape of Diamond Dogs.

  With Station to Station in 1976, Bowie emerged as the Thin White Duke, a character most critics agree was a husk, the burnt-out shell of a man who had tried to touch the sun. Everything but the glamour had been burned away. The song “Station to Station” is a harrowing admission of an occult obsession fueled by drugs. The quest for divine truth turns into a Sisyphean task: “Got to keep searching . . . Oh what will I be believing.” Bowie makes direct references to the Kabbalah, turning over and over the hope that keeps slipping away: “One magical movement from Kether to Malkuth” that he insists is not just “the side-effects of the cocaine.”

  This is an occult image to be sure, the destitute and craven lich-king, a necromancer whose soul was the last thing to be sacrificed in the search for secret knowledge. But there is also something romantic about this image of the decadent magician. He’s a Faust-like character inhabiting a gothic landscape, like those imagined in the German Expressionist motifs depicted in F. W. Murnau’s 1926 film of the fabled scholar who sells his soul to the devil in search of hidden wisdom. Out of this image would come two other rock movements, one that embraced the darkness as a means of psychological and spiritual subversion, another that saw walking in the shadows a kind of authenticity, dressing it up in leather, lace, and beautiful silver crosses.

  III

  Milk and urine enemas, live intercourse, masturbating with chicken heads—all to the soundtrack of Charles Manson’s singing, and interspersed with the roar of trains. This was a typical performance of COUM, the artist and musician Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s London-based performance art collective. Founded with Cosey Fanni Tutti (the name a play on Mozart’s comic opera) in 1969, initially COUM was an avant-garde hippie band making noise with violins and drums. Theatrics during performances gave them the mean
s to directly challenge the mainstream. It was the underground’s turn to show off its magical acuity, using occult techniques as a means of transgression and inspiring other subcultures to do the same. The occult was not just for show, not merely a marketing ploy or a fad made possible by access to unlimited amounts of money and drugs. It was a weapon of the imagination and would illuminate the outer fringes of rock in ways that would cascade toward the middle.

  Public funds were available if, as Simon Reynolds explains in his book on postpunk, Rip It Up and Start Again, “they described what they did as ‘performance art’ rather than rock music.” The band’s peak—and the public interest peaked—happened during a 1976 gallery show at the ICA in London. The installation featured porn magazines, strippers, tampons, and music provided by P-Orridge and Tutti, along with Chris Carter and Peter Christopherson. Carter was a sound and lighting engineer who worked with a number of high-profile bands, including Yes, but was becoming interested in experimental performances using homemade synthesizers. Christopherson was working with the design firm Hipgnosis (his idiosyncratic vision is on display on Peter Gabriel’s first three albums, particularly the iconic image of Gabriel’s face melting). The exhibit was met with outrage. The British parliament called COUM “the wreckers of civilization,” and as a result they were no longer allowed to apply for arts funding in England.

  COUM was an early attempt at cultural transfiguration by way of transgression. As Richard Metzger, the founder of the Dangerous Minds website, explains, the COUM performances were “about freeing themselves (and the spectators) of their own taboos by performing benign exorcisms of a sick society’s malignancies.” This meant having to skirt the edges of whether or not they were celebrating or merely putting a mirror up to what they perceived as these “malignancies.” P-Orridge and company would heighten this tension with the formal creation of Throbbing Gristle, soon the standard-bearer of industrial music—a genre heralding in an underground movement in music without peer, and whose influence would extend into the mainstream by way of acts such as Nine Inch Nails and Godflesh.