Aleister Crowley (39 page)

Crowley was taken up by other “experimental” groups, such as Coil, associated with Psychic TV, who blended homosexual motifs with Crowley’s magick and the kind of
musique concrète
inaugurated by the Futurist artist and “noisician” Luigi Russolo in the early twentieth century. Others of a similar bent were Boyd Rice of the group Non. Rice, a priest of LaVey’s Church of Satan and, like Crowley, a Social Darwinist, is also a fan of Charles Manson and a collector of Barbie dolls; like Buffy Sainte-Marie, Rice, another producer of “industrial” music, is also a devotee of the gnostic god Abraxas.
²⁵
But by the ’90s less obscure roccultists were making waves. The adolescent need to be more shocking than your parents led some of ’90s youth to embrace disturbing antiheroes such as Manson. Like Crowley, Manson is a kind of gray eminence lurking in the shadows of the 1960s and is the dark antitype of the flower children: what better role model for ’90s youth rebelling against their hippie parents?

Nine Inch Nails recorded their 1994 album,
The Downward Spiral,
in a studio built at 10500 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, scene of the vicious murders of Sharon Tate and friends by the Manson family. Trent Reznor, the group’s leader, christened the studio Le Pig; infamously, one of the Manson killers had written “PIG” in Sharon Tate’s blood in the front hall. The most obvious Mansonite, though, has to be Marilyn Manson, whose name comes from a mash-up between Marilyn Monroe and Manson. Manson’s performances are replete with the by-now-standard assortment of transgressive ingredients: kitsch fascism, satanic imagery,
thelemic
antinomianism, deviant sexuality, sadomasochism, death, and other dark stuff popular with angst-ridden teens. Like Boyd Rice and Genesis P-Orridge, Manson is a fan of Anton LaVey; in
Satan Speaks!
(1998), a collection of LaVey’s writings, Manson calls him “the most righteous man I ever knew.”
Magick and other assorted occult items inform much of Manson’s act. Crowley is reported to be one of his favorite authors and Crowleyan motifs inform Manson’s albums, such as
Antichrist Superstar
(1996). Manson’s penchant for adopting a stage name based on a convicted killer is shared by some of his band members. Madonna Wayne Gacy, stage name of one of Manson’s keyboardists, is an amalgam of the pop singer Madonna—who herself proclaimed an interest in Kabbalah in the ’90s—and the homosexual serial killer John Wayne Gacy, executed in 1994 for the murder of at least thirty-three victims.

One would think that by the 2000s, the Crowley–pop music franchise would have run its course, but in recent years the Beast has been rediscovered by a new generation eager to earn their antinomian stars. The late 1990s saw a kind of renewed occult revival, or, more accurately, a Gnostic revival. The Gnostics were an early antinomian Christian sect who, as mentioned earlier, believed that the God of the Bible—Jehovah—was a kind of “lieutenant god,” who usurped the true God’s place and created the “false” world in which we live. The neo-Gnostic trend included a reappraisal of the work of the pulp science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, whose many novels and stories deal with the themes of false realities, altered states, and the fragility of personal identity. Starting with
Blade Runner
(1982)—based on his story “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”—many of Dick’s works were made into films.
Total Recall
(1990) deals with the notion that our identity is unstable, and that the person we think we are may not be who we
really
are, and that even the idea of
really
being one person rather than another is iffy. More recently
The Adjustment Bureau
(2011) centers on the idea of powerful people “behind the scenes,” who secretly control our lives, making the necessary “adjustments” to them without our knowing, in order to keep to the
“plan.”
²⁶
In both films the world we live in is not the “real” world. By the late ’90s this Gnostic theme was turning up in several films, ironically, as the film medium is itself an “unreal” world.
The Cube
(1997),
The Truman Show
(1998), and
Dark City
(1998) all deal with the same idea: their protagonists find themselves trapped in a “false” reality, a kind of prison from which they cannot escape. The most successful and influential work of this genre was
The Matrix
(1999), which spawned a franchise including two sequels, comic books, video games, and much else. Again, the central theme is of being trapped in a false reality, an unreal world, in this case a computer simulation being fed into our consciousness by intelligent machines that feed off humans. That the liberators of humanity in the film wore black leather and dark glasses and packed guns made the Gnostic quest for the “true world” even more thrilling.

Much of the inspiration for
The Matrix
and films like it came from the growing fascination—some might say obsession—with the Internet, “virtual reality,” and the “cyberworld” that has by now become as ubiquitous and indispensable as television, an earlier “false” reality. Today we all live with a sense of reality not being quite what it seems. Rightly or wrongly we have—at least in the West—grown suspicious of every authority; to borrow a phrase from the philosopher Paul Ricouer, we live under the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” and the once firm footing for our beliefs is now little more than thin ice. This sense of ontological disorientation has reached contemporary pop. Innocuous acts like the Jonas Brothers and celebrities like Peaches Geldof (daughter of Bob Geldof of the punk-era Boomtown Rats) sport
thelemic
emblems: a recent photograph revealed that Peaches had an O.T.O. tattoo and she sang the group’s praises on Twitter; while Kevin Jonas irritated some fundamentalists by
wearing a Crowley T-shirt.
²⁷
Crowley’s image has turned up in the fashion world, too; actress and model Taylor Momsen was caught by a paparazzo with the Beast all over her.
²⁸
This does not mean that these celebrities are Satanists, black magicians, or are really “into the occult,” although Geldof has earlier spoken of her interest in Scientology. (Her remark that Crowley’s books are “super interesting” may suggest the depth she has reached in her esoteric exploration.) What it does mean is that we live in a world flooded with images, whose meanings most of us are ignorant of; as David Tibet said, Crowley provided striking images for people with no imagination. But there are somewhat more serious signs that the Beast is still on the prowl.

In an interview about his video “Run This Town” (2009), the rapper Jay-Z wears a hoodie emblazoned with “Do What Thou Wilt.” If this isn’t bad enough, the video itself is said to be rife with
thelemic
, occult, and other esoteric symbolism, mostly of a Masonic, Illuminati bent; that the singer Rihanna holds a torch aloft in the video is supposed to be representative of Lucifer, the fallen angel and “light-bringer.”
²⁹
Along with other biblical baddies, Lucifer is a Gnostic hero, rejecting the authoritarian rule of Jehovah. The video takes place in a postapocalyptic landscape; the atmosphere is threatening, suggesting that order is giving way to chaos, that the old world is crumbling and a new, more violent one is emerging—perhaps Crowley’s era of “force and fire”?—that the elite will dominate. Jay-Z is also making a mark—of the Beast?—in the fashion world, with an esoteric fashion line, Rocawear, that sports a medley of Masonic symbols: pentagrams, pyramids, “All-Seeing Eyes,” which also turn up in his videos and in live performances. The “devil’s horns” sign, made by clenching the thumb and middle fingers and extended the fore and little fingers, has become very popular, and figures like
Rihanna and Eminem have more or less branded it. Jay-Z’s video “On to the Next One” (2010) even contains a brief flash of the Templar deity Baphomet, the androgynous goat-headed idol now associated with Satan and one of Crowley’s pseudonyms—although Eliphas Levi, the nineteenth-century occultist who designed the image, receives no royalties or credit.

The association of Crowleyan motifs with rap may seem far-fetched, but Crowley himself was into bling, spending freely—usually other people’s money—on rings, tie pins, cuff links, and other solid signifiers of power. Does this mean that Jay-Z is really an agent of the Illuminati, a late-eighteenth-century breakaway Masonic group upon whom more conspiracy theories have been hung than I care to relate? More likely he is, as Mick Jagger was in the late 1960s, an astute tactician, cannily addressing a felt appetite for some elite knowledge and vocabulary, available only to those “in the know,” and rediscovering that occult imagery has a strange appeal to rebellious youth, eager to shock anyone they can. Another performer, the R&B singer Ciara, has also added to the occult brew; in her video for “Keep On Lookin’” (2013) she sports a jacket emblazoned with “XIV Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn” on the back and boots to match; other singers, like Kanye West and Ke$ha, apparently share her hermetic interests.
³⁰
Rather than providing evidence of a rap occult conspiracy, more likely these celebs feel the need to keep up with one another.

Another recent antinomian pop manifestation comes from Lady Gaga. Her video “Judas” (2011) is a good example of Gnostic pop. In it, Jesus and his disciples are a motorcycle gang. Lady Gaga as Mary Magdalene dumps Jesus for Judas and rides off with him on his motorcycle; I suspect Kenneth Anger would be well pleased with
seeing his occult-biker imagery making the scene once again. For Gnostics, Judas was a hero, and he is for Lady Gaga, too. In the video Jesus is shown healing the sick, helping the poor, and performing other Christian acts, while Judas drinks and paws women. Some suggest this is a symbol for Crowley’s coming age of Horus, which rejects Christianity and encourages hedonistic thrills. The fact that Lady Gaga’s eyes are made up to look like “eyes of Horus” has convinced some that, like Jay-Z, she is in some way an agent of forces that are out to undermine morality and decency and inaugurate a new age of lust and depravity—at least from their eyes.

If peace-loving hippies, violence-loving punks, death-loving goths, devil-loving heavy metallers, noise-loving performance artists, and bling-loving rappers can all be into Crowley, what does that tell us? That Crowley’s philosophy is ecumenical enough to appeal to practically everyone? Or that at bottom the appeal is very simple: it is the appeal of the forbidden, the shocking, the transgressive? My guess is number 2.

—

A
S
YOU
MIGHT
SUSPECT
,
most of the concern about the dangers of the new pop occultism comes from Christian fundamentalists. But the odd thing is that, while researching this material on the Internet, I was struck by the similarity between the “satanic” Web sites and the fundamentalist ones. Both used striking imagery, both exaggerated the power and importance of “the occult,” and both pandered to a taste for sensationalism, a kind of “spiritual pornography,” aimed at titillating base emotions: fear, greed, egoism, power. Often I had to check to see which one I was looking at. Both cater to the belief that there is something dangerous about the occult, Crowley,
esotericism, and the Gnostic belief in a “false world.” I would agree with this, but not for the reasons fundamentalists give. I don’t think listening to Jay-Z or Lady Gaga is going to lure anyone into Satan’s clutches. The danger, I think, is the very one that David Tibet pointed out decades ago: that Crowley and others like him provide powerful imagery that can be easily taken up and used by people who lack the imagination to create their own imagery or to understand what such imagery means and can do. Earlier I mentioned the philosopher Jean Gebser, who speaks of a “magical structure of consciousness.” This ancient level of the psyche is still active in us; anyone who has ever felt “carried away” at a rock concert or other large group experience feels it. William Burroughs wasn’t joking when he said that rock taps into the sources of magical energy, and that this can be dangerous. The danger is not so much in the energy itself—it is, we can say, neutral—as in our ability to understand it. It is no surprise that magic in some way—Crowley’s variety or otherwise—still appeals to “youth culture” and finds its way into its music. Magic and the music industry make use of much of the same materials—imagery, special effects (light shows), illusion, trance—and both reach down below the conscious mind to the deeper, older, more visceral levels of ourselves. Both also cater to that adolescent appetite to be someone “special,” to stand out, to be noticed, to belong to the elite and to have an effect on the people around you. Crowley often claimed that he could make himself invisible, yet he did everything he could to draw attention to himself. If he were around today, he would no doubt turn up on chat shows, be tweeting regularly, and make guest appearances on YouTube.

That Crowley has been appropriated by today’s celebrities is a pop version of the fact that his portrait hangs in London’s National
Portrait Gallery. In one sense this neutralizes him and his philosophy: if the Jonas Brothers are into Crowley, how dangerous can he be? But in another sense such neutralizing has its own pitfalls. It suggests that we have become inured to the kind of character Crowley was, and accustomed to his lifestyle, his “excess in all directions.” Does this mean that Crowley was right, and that the new age he prophesized has arrived? Not really. What it means, I think, is that Crowley was a kind of pre-echo of our own moral and spiritual vacuum. For better or worse, we do find ourselves in an antinomian world, beyond good and evil, in which practically anything goes and we are urged to give into our impulses and “just do it.” If nothing else, giving in to impulse is good for business. But we all live in a world with constant distractions, constant allurements to have, do, or be “more”—we have so lost touch with life that we have to “capture” it on our cellphones, as if it were a wild creature on the loose, and display our trophies on social networks. We are very far from Pascal’s suggestion that we sit quietly in a room.