Season of the Witch : How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (9780698143722) (12 page)

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.

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.”

By the time Manning saw his handiwork raised up 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.

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.