Aleister Crowley (37 page)

Yet even the long history associating music and the devil can’t account for the strange blend of magic and rock and roll that emerged in the “mystic ’60s,” nor for the threatening, revolutionary character this pairing briefly enjoyed. When the ’60s occult revival met the growing counterculture something strange happened. Each recognized that they had a common enemy in what was called “the establishment.” This term stood for the values, institutions, sensibilities, tastes, political ideals, and morality of the previous generation, and the distance between it and the burgeoning one became known as the “generation gap”—a phrase put to good marketing use when the Gap clothing retailer opened for business in 1969. Fifties teenagers were also unsatisfied with the buttoned-down, conventional life they were expected to inherit from their parents, but they expressed their dissatisfaction by being “crazy mixed-up kids” or “rebels without a
cause,” letting off steam through vandalism and surly aggressiveness. Their rebellion had little focus, as can be seen in the early-teenage-exploitation film
The Wild One
(1953). When Johnny, the leader of a motorcycle gang, played by Marlon Brando, is asked what he is rebelling against, he answers, “Whaddaya got?” The same sense of aimless rejection fuels Jack Kerouac’s Beat classic,
On the Road
, published in 1957. When Dean Moriarty tells Sal Paradise, “Whee. Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there,” Sal asks, “Where we going, man?” Dean replies, “I don’t know but we gotta go.”
⁸
Dean Moriarty is based on Neal Cassady, an early Beat and later one of Ken Kesey’s LSD-fueled Merry Pranksters. Cassady kept going until the night of February 3/4, 1968. He was found the next morning in a coma on some railway tracks in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and died the next day ostensibly from exposure, but he had also taken a hefty dose of barbiturates. He was just short of forty-two. Kerouac himself kept going until 1969, when, increasingly disgusted with the hippie generation that his books helped spawn—he hated the hippies and famously at a meeting between Kerouac and Kesey’s Pranksters, Jack solemnly folded an American flag that the acid-heads had draped over his shoulders—he succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver, brought on by years of heavy drinking. He was forty-seven. The actual first Beat novel, written by John Clellon Holmes and published in 1952, was entitled
Go
. This is not, it seems to me, vastly different from “Just do it,” or “Do what thou wilt.”

In the 1960s, this sense of having “to go” gained more focus, and the aimlessness of simply being on the road turned, in many cases, into a genuine “journey to the East”: a search for something more fulfilling than the American dream of a house, a car, and 2.5 kids. The influx of magical and mystical ideas that came with the ’60s
occult revival offered what seemed like a positive alternative to the ’50s negative rebelliousness. It gave a burgeoning “youth culture” a sense of direction. At the same time, “the establishment” was the stronghold of the rationalist, materialist philosophy that denied that magic, mysticism, and spirituality were anything but superstitious nonsense. The official view of reality said that matter was the only real thing. Spirit simply did not exist, and magic was an illusion, belief in it a sign of madness, or childishness: adults didn’t believe in such things. For such a philosophy, material gain was the only value: a bigger TV, a bigger car, a bigger bank balance. The new generation rejected this and the worldview that went with it. So the scientific, modern ideals of the “atomic age” 1950s were jettisoned in favor of the ancient belief in magic, myth, and the mystical. Adult realism gave way to a childish belief in magic. In 1965 the Lovin’ Spoonful had a Top Ten hit with their song “Do You Believe in Magic?” Many did. This cultural atavism was threatening to the adult establishment and for a time the political and the magical currents in the 1960s joined forces. One clear if somewhat ludicrous example of this occurred during the massive anti–Vietnam War march on Washington in October 1967, when the Crowleyan filmmaker Kenneth Anger attempted to exorcize the Pentagon while the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg tried to levitate it.
⁹

By then Crowley was without a doubt back. Twenty years earlier he had died in obscurity in somewhat squalid circumstances, but by 1967 Crowley was hanging out—posthumously, of course—with some of the most famous people in the world, and was more popular than he had ever been. If any one sign marked that the counterculture had given its imprimatur to the occult revival, it had to be the fact that the Beatles had included Crowley on the cover of their
album
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
, released in the fateful summer of 1967. Designed by the artist Peter Blake, the cover has Crowley’s by-now-familiar shaven head and bulging eyes cropping up between the Indian guru Sri Yukteswar Giri and the actress Mae West: aptly, as mysticism and sex formed the heart of Crowley’s life. Other figures sharing space with Crowley—Aldous Huxley, C. G. Jung, Sri Mahavatar Babaji, and Sri Paramahansa Yogananda—show that by the time the Beatles came to know about the Beast, magic, mysticism, and altered states had become the hottest things in town. A few years earlier such stuff would have been laughed at by the mods, but by the summer of love practically everyone on the Swinging London A-list had their heads into the occult. That the Beatles were fully behind Crowley’s program is clear from a remark John Lennon made in an interview for
Playboy
magazine, some years later and shortly before his death. “The whole Beatle idea was to do what you want . . . do what thou whilst, as long as it doesn’t hurt somebody,” Lennon told the journalist David Sheff, misquoting Crowley.
¹⁰
Earlier, Ringo Starr had told
Hit Parade
magazine that the cover featured “people we like and admire,” a sentiment Paul McCartney echoed when he informed
Musician
magazine that the cover sported “photos of all our heroes.”
¹¹
The Beatles, however, tended more toward Eastern than Western mysticism, as evidenced by their rocky relationship with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

By the autumn of 1967 rank-and-file British hipsters learned of Crowley when the underground newspaper
International Times
—cofounded by Barry Miles, a friend of the Beatles’—ran a full-page article on him, presenting the Great Beast as a proto-hippie whose sex-and-drug-filled life seemed right up the counterculture’s alley.
¹²
Richard Cavendish’s
The Black Arts
had been published that year, and
was part of Mick Jagger’s favorite bedside reading. It featured sections on Crowley and the Golden Dawn, and in
The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia
(1997),
the writer Paul Devereux reminisces about how in the late ’60s he saw a “white-suited Mick Jagger” leave Watkins Bookshop off the Charing Cross Road carrying “a stack of occult books.”
¹³
Back in the Great Beast’s salad days, Watkins Bookshop was home to members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Well and truly, Crowley was back in town.

The Rolling Stones, the second most famous people in the world, got deep into Crowley through the filmmaker Kenneth Anger, who arrived in London in early 1968.
¹⁴
The Stones were already friends with the alchemist Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, author of
Alchemy: The Secret Art
(1974)—he was friends with the Beatles and Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, too—and John Michell, whose
The View over Atlantis
(1969) would inaugurate the next decade’s fascination with ley lines and “earth magic.” (Michell’s
The Flying Saucer Vision
[1967] was already a countercultural “must-read.”) The Stones were friends with the art dealer Robert Fraser, whose gallery on Duke Street, Grosvenor Square, sold stills from Anger’s films. Fraser had worked with Peter Blake and art-directed the
Sgt. Pepper’s
cover. The Stones’s own shot at a psychedelic LP,
Their Satanic Majesties Request
(1967), released a few months after
Sgt. Pepper’s
, speaks for itself, as does what soon became their signature tune, “Sympathy for the Devil,” from
Beggar’s Banquet
(1968). Anger had made his name with such avant-garde
thelemic
films as
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
(1954), mentioned earlier, and
Scorpio Rising
(1963), which in many ways initiates the rock and roll/transgressive sex/leather-jacketed/occult antinomian mélange that now characterizes much of what in
Turn Off Your Mind
I christened “roccult and roll.” Anger was keen for Jagger to star
in his magnum opus,
Lucifer Rising
(1966–1980), a cinematic paean to Crowley’s coming new age, but Jagger demurred. He did, however, provide a synthesizer soundtrack to Anger’s disturbing
Invocation of my Demon Brother
(1969). As we’ll see, Anger also approached Jimmy Page, the guitarist for Led Zeppelin and a Crowley devotee, for help in raising Lucifer, but as frequently happened with Anger, the two had a falling-out. The film eventually appeared, starring pop chanteuse Marianne Faithfull, with a soundtrack by ex–Charles Manson “Family” member Bobby Beausoleil, who composed it while serving a life sentence in Tracy State Prison in California for the murder of Gary Hinman in 1969. Anger and Beausoleil had been friends back in Haight-Ashbury, and there is a lingering legend that after a tiff, Beausoleil stole the reels for
Lucifer Rising
and gave them to his guru, Charlie.
Beausoleil
is French and means “beautiful sun,” and Crowley we know was a sun worshipper. . . .

Keith Richards and his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg came more intimately under Anger’s spell. Richards told
Rolling Stone
that witchcraft, magic, and Satanism were things everyone should explore, and he called himself Kenneth Anger’s “right-hand man” although left-hand would perhaps have been more appropriate. The Stones’ sympathy for the devil, however, did not last long and after their disastrous concert in Altamont, Jagger decidedly backed away.

But by then, the hippie musical
Hair
had told everyone that it was the dawning of the age of Aquarius—a prophecy that in his lifetime Crowley took some argument with—and the Fifth Dimension had a No. 1 hit with “Age of Aquarius / Let the Sunshine In,” a nod, perhaps, to a particular potent batch of LSD popular at the time. The folk rocker Donovan sang about the lost continent of Atlantis, whose resurfacing many had anticipated sometime in 1969, and even
innocuous fare like the folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie expressed antinomian sentiments when she announced that she was dedicated to “Satan and Jehovah—my god is Abraxas, the god of evil and good.”
¹⁵
(Abraxas, a Gnostic deity, made his countercultural debut in Hermann Hesse’s novel
Demian
[1919], a ’60s bestseller, and in 1970 Santana released an album named after him.) Magic was in the air, the Zeitgeist
was suffused with the mystical, and at least one major figure from the fields of flower power based much of his career on that of Crowley.

Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychology professor turned drug guru, made no bones about how much his attempt to turn on the world with lysergic acid diethylamide—better known as LSD—was inspired by Crowley’s own adventures; in a post-’60s interview for the PBS program
Late Night America
, Leary made clear that he had long been an admirer of Crowley’s and that he was “carrying on much of the work” that Crowley had started and that the ’60s themselves were an expression of “Do what thou wilt,” something with which, we’ve seen, John Lennon agreed.
¹⁶
Even Leary’s tag as “the most dangerous man in America,” given him by then President Richard Nixon, was a synchronistic echo of Crowley’s tabloid profile as “the Wickedest Man in the World.”
Confessions of a Hope Fiend
(1973), one of Leary’s several autobiographies—like Crowley, Leary enjoyed talking about himself—is a mash-up of Crowley’s
Confessions
and
Diary of a Drug Fiend
. And at one point, Leary was convinced that he and an acid buddy, Brian Barritt, were somehow reenacting—or reincarnating—Crowley and Neuburg’s adventures with Choronzon in North Africa, a trip recounted in Barritt’s memoir
The Road of Excess
(1998); again, that weird link to a very disturbing episode in Crowley’s career. After discovering the strange parallels between
Crowley and himself, Leary remarked about the “eerie synchronicities” between his life and Crowley’s, “unfolding with such precision as to make us wonder if one can escape the programmed imprinting with which we are born . . .”
¹⁷

One recipient of Leary’s psychedelic wisdom was John Lennon, who in 1966 found a copy of
The Psychedelic Experience
(1964)—by Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert—in London’s Indica Bookshop, an emporium of countercultural literature run by Barry Miles and linked to Robert Fraser’s gallery. Leary’s advice that, “whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax and float downstream,” struck home, and Lennon incorporated the line in his song “Tomorrow Never Knows,” from the album
Revolver
(1966), generally regarded as the Beatles’ first psychedelic track. Lennon spent the next few years turning off his mind by ingesting very large doses of LSD. Another link between the psychedelic milieu, the occult, and rock were the Doors. Their name came from Aldous Huxley’s influential book
The Doors of Perception
(1954), an essay about Huxley’s experiment with mescaline. Huxley, a more judicious advocate of psychedelic exploration than Leary, got the title himself from William Blake’s
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
, and in 1970 the Doors released
Doors 13
, their first “greatest hits” compilation; the back cover featured a photo of the group sitting around a bust of Crowley. The band recorded one more album before their leader, Jim Morrison, died in mysterious circumstance in Paris in 1971. That Morrison was on the antinomian bandwagon is clear from his remark that “I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning,” written for a publicity release for the Doors’ record company Elektra in 1967. Morrison’s lyrics also suggest a familiarity with Crowleyan themes: “Can you picture
what will be, so limitless and free?” (“The End”) and “We want the world and we want it now” (“When the Music’s Over”). These yearnings for the Abyss and for the immediate gratification of the child need not have come to Morrison directly from Crowley, but they were certainly in the atmosphere of the time.