Rock bands incorporated the new popular mystical stylings in a variety of ways. The band Gandalf’s eponymous album cover is an alien feminine face masked by colorful butterflies and other adornments. H. P. Lovecraft opts for more horror-laden cosmic awareness with their song “At the Mountains of Madness.†Ted Nugent’s early band the Amboy Dukes offered the chart-topper “Journey to the Center of the Mind†to a land “Beyond the seas of thought, beyond the realm of what.†These and other acts continued to perpetuate the commercialization of psychedelic spirituality, and eventually it was so above-ground that it made the dwellers of the underground look like they were behind the times. Most of the major magazines had something to say about the new religious consciousness. Even Playboy tried to ensure that the magazine would be seen as hip and had its pulse on the spiritual erogenous zone of the culture: there is the poet and scholar Robert Graves’s article discussing the resurgent belief in reincarnation, a feature on what a woman’s horoscope can tell you about the best way to seduce her, and a photo gallery offering a look at some of the major trumps of the tarot, with naked girls posing as various characters from the deck, including the Magician, the Lovers, and the Devil.
Popular music was utterly transformed from four-piece bands dressed in three-piece suits to experimental and noisy collaborations, expanding three-minute songs into twenty-minute cosmic jams, turning saccharine, radio-friendly ditties into songs awash with feedback and tape loops, carving up songs about love and teenage heartbreak and serving up enigmatic lyrics about a “white knight talking backwards†and a wind that “cried Mary.†Many were trapped in the cycle of doing whatever was popular at the time, such as the Lemon Pipers’ “Green Tambourine†and “Incense and Peppermints†by the Strawberry Alarm Clock. It would reach its peak when the manufactured bubble-gum pop of the cartoon act the Archies would entreat fans to “get on the line with love†as they played on a rainbow-paisley decorated stage and electronic pulses and ever-brightening stars flashed behind them. (Even Sabrina the Teenage Witch makes an appearance and apparently slips the adults a magical Mickey, making them feel groovy.) The result was a parade of paisley-clothed bands churning out songs that sounded like they were made in a candy factory. But many knew how to turn all this into art and make it act as a beacon for a spiritual revolution that might not quite change the world, but would change American culture, and rock and roll, forever.
IV
Sitting at a party, strumming his guitar, the Scottish troubadour Donovan came upon a riff that seemed to hypnotize him. He played it over and over again and was told later he worked on it for seven hours. This riff was to become “Season of the Witch,†a dark and prophetic song suggesting that the new age dawning brings with it darkness. Something about it stuck. (Since then, the song has been covered by dozens of artists, including Robert Plant and Joan Jett.) “Season of the Witch†was a departure from the other songs on Donovan’s 1966 album Sunshine Superman, whose titular opener begins “Sunshine came softly a-through my a-window today.†But “Season of the Witch†was oracular in another way. Something dark was coming for Donovan. The same year, Donovan was arrested for possession of cannabis, and while he wasn’t much of a drug user, the British press used him as the poster child to further exploit the middle-class fear that the counterculture was rife with amoral drug fiends.
In interviews with the press, Donovan was nothing like the rock stars who were his peers. He continually pushed back against making any political statements, scandal couldn’t stick to him, and he preferred to talk about keeping a neighborly fox away from his chickens. “The fox is a friend, too, but I’ll have to have a chat with him,†he told the Los Angeles Times in 1968. Like they did with many rock musicians, the fans and the media were looking to him to say something about the world, about the future of things. By this time, audiences were looking for wisdom, and it seemed rock musicians, by virtue of being incarnations of Bacchic energy, must also have spiritual wisdom. There was obvious power in their music, the way it shaped culture, the way the youth had followed it like a pied piper toward drugs, sex, and other excessive rebellions. But Donovan wasn’t having any of it. Donovan grew up among Gaelic mythology and legend, and his music drew from other influences ranging from Bob Dylan to Eastern ragas with which he crafted whimsical and psychedelic pop. Sunshine Superman is a walk through a fantastical landscape of wizards, Arthurian legend, jewels and gemstones, and princesses. But “Season of the Witch†became an anthem, and in an interview decades later, Donovan described the song as “ritualistic.†Donovan eagerly jumped into the portal the 1960s had opened into Wonderland. There, he had permission to explore musically the idea that divinity was not predisposed to exist only in heaven, but was part of the very fabric of the world. It expressed itself through myth as well as nature. This is pantheism, where God can be found in every tree and flower, every note of every song, every stoned romp in the bed of a lover. It is also pagan, where the world is animated by spirits, where nature is a book that tells the secret story of the world. Of his iconic song, Donovan said, “Maybe it is the first kind of Celtic-rock thing I was doing, a rediscovery of our roots in Britain, which of course became the British sound.â€
The New Forest of southern England is a protected expanse of woods, once used as a source of lumber as early as the seventeenth century, and long before then, a sacred place to ancient people who left behind burial mounds, called barrows. It is here that a supposed horned deity cult of pre-Christian worshippers passed down their rituals and practices since before Christianity came to dominate Western Europe. In 1939, Gerald Gardner, a retired anthropologist with a personal interest in the occult, met and was initiated into a coven that gathered in the thick of the forest. The story of Gardner is fraught with rumor and controversy, but it is likely that at some point around 1936, he did encounter a group of people claiming to be witches. Indeed Gardner was deeply influenced by Margaret Murray and her thesis that claimed before Christianity (and until the witch trials of the Middle Ages) there was a centralized witch cult that worshipped a horned god by way of various rites and observances. Gardner believed that aspects of this cult survived in modern-day England. He wanted to go “public†with what had been for generations secreted away. Fearful of British intolerance, Gardner’s first book was presented as a novel called High Magic’s Aid. In 1951, the Witchcraft Act, which had been in effect since 1542, was repealed, and Gardner wrote two nonfiction books, Witchcraft Today and The Meaning of Witchcraft. Gardner also perpetuated Murray’s idea that had largely been debunked by other scholars. Pockets of pagan worship might have existed all over Western Europe, but the notion that it was ever a centralized religion that transmitted esoteric wisdom through ciphers was not widely accepted. But Gardner had enough to build his own religion. Using what fragments he could find from those who practiced some form of pagan worship, as well as gloss from his friend Aleister Crowley, Gardner cemented the notion of witchcraft as religion into the popular consciousness, while alerting a burgeoning counterculture that pre-Christian spirituality was alive and well.
Witchcraft, known to its followers as Wicca, was, along with Eastern mysticism, the spiritual system de rigueur among the hippies, and offered a means of rebellion that could steer clear of politics. Still, they couldn’t stop the corporate machine from grinding it up and spitting it out as commercialism. The range of 1960s pop culture references to witchcraft was startling in its variety. The fabric maker Collins & Aikman took out a full-page ad in the September 13, 1964, issue of the New York Times, with the headline “WE Practice Witchcraft†and an image of a darkly clad woman spinning about in a field, followed by the ad copy: “Here’s a gown that looks like black magic.†The television sitcom Bewitched presented a smart witch who ran a household and p
resented the worst danger of the witch’s craft as a troublesome mother-in-law. Wanda the Witch magically kept her hair liberated in Hidden Magic hairspray commercials. But all this really did was to keep the ideas of occultism alive in the popular consciousness. For every television show and advertisement, there was a new occult book being published.
In 1969, Andrew Greeley, a Roman Catholic priest who moonlighted as a reporter for the New York Times, had enough material for a full-length piece on the new religions found on college campuses, offering up examples of the student-run occult-guerrilla group WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), a coven of warlocks, courses on astrology and Zen, and the best and brightest at MIT meditating, casting the I Ching, and tripping on chem-lab acid. The students claimed a “return to the sacred,†a heavy suggestion that not only was science failing to provide meaning, but the mainstream religions had all but abandoned their sacred charge to unite people with the divine. The press was rarely sympathetic. A Time magazine article by Greeley bemoans the superstition in the modern age and casts a wide net around the youth who were seeking something beyond the mundane. He writes:
Miniskirted suburban matrons cast the I Ching or shuffle tarot cards before setting dates for dinner parties. Hippies, with their drug-sensitized yen for magic, are perhaps the prime movers behind the phenomenon. Not only do they sport beads and amulets that have supposed magical powers; they also believe firmly and frighteningly in witchcraft. Some of the hippie mysticism is a calculated put-on—as when Abbie Hoffman and his crew attempted to levitate the Pentagon last October—but much of the new concern with the arcane is a genuine attempt to find enrichment for arid lives.
Greeley’s cynicism misses the point and fails to ask the most essential question: Why was the occult in vogue, and why were so many young men and women the disciples of a new age? On the surface, the answer is not at all complex. What had Christianity offered them? Churches appeared to hate rock (in 1966, WAYE, a Christian radio station in Alabama, had organized the burning of Beatles records), hate sex, and love war. Many denominations, including the Catholic Church, supported the American troops in Vietnam. While reactions to organized religion were not always sophisticated, the youth were not wrong to see the mainstream Christian Church as something generally opposed to change and to a kind of self-determination. Freedom had to mean more than democracy, which was also not doing a bang-up job as far as race, class, and war were concerned. Atheism would not do, either. There had to be meaning beyond the mundane, the artificial, and the dogmatic. But it had to be new, even if by way of the very old.
The 1960s’ potent mix of LSD guru sycophancy and occultism opened a door into the popular consciousness that could never be closed. Even more so than the Occult Revival of the fin de siècle, the 1960s performed a powerful conjuration of a spirit that was all but banished when Christianity quieted its song and put it in a cage to stop its rutting. But the spirit of Pan or Eshu or whichever manifestation best represents the archetype at any given moment, could not be locked up. The god Dionysus was often called “the god who comes,†or “the god who arrives,†because he will find a way home no matter how he might be cast out, barred, buried, or even burned. He is on the margins, sometimes just out of sight, but with rock he came to the fore, his power in the rhythms of rebellion and defiance.
While the occult in its broadest sense is a set of spiritual practices that provide direct communion with the divine, often called gnosis, it is also an ancient human drive through which the spirit of the dancing gods, the noisy gods, the trickster gods, and the gods of intoxication, madness, and ecstasy manifest themselves through history. Before the advent of Christianity, the mystery cults of the ancient world promised initiates and acolytes that the gods were ever present, and through certain ritual activities, would share their secret knowledge. The destruction of their temples and their icons might have buried their altars, but what they offered could never be entombed forever. Just as the orisha of Africa made themselves known through the popular and religious music of African Americans, this Dionysian spirit found a perfect vehicle through rock and roll of the 1960s, and from there was enfolded into the whole of popular culture.
Unfortunately, violence, war, heroin, and an overall cultural burnout eventually left little room for the revolutionary and transformative promise of spiritual liberation by way of LSD, yoga, and tarot cards. The spiritual sixties would give way to the excess of the 1970s, characterized by disco and cocaine. But the die had been cast. Mysticism had changed rock and roll, and no matter how far it sometimes got buried, it would continue to manifest, first in the cosmic mythology of progressive rock, and later in the experimental electronic sounds of trance, house, and underground ambient. But before mysticism’s resurgence, rock would undergo another kind of change. Like all great myths, the occult story of rock involved a descent into the underworld, a transformation, and an ascent. But Orpheus’s journey into Hades was not without dangers, and the long walk back to the light required sacrifice. At least he got to play music all along the way. Rock and roll would do no less, even in its darkest moments.
CHAPTER 3
THE DEVIL RIDES OUT
I
The event was billed as the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, with a heavyweight lineup, including John Lennon, Eric Clapton, the Who, Jethro Tull, the Rolling Stones, and replete with trapeze artists, fire-eaters, and midgets. The Circus was recorded for BBC Television and would be the first of its kind, a true rock spectacle aimed directly at living rooms. By 1968, Mick Jagger had styled himself as something of a dandy-in-devil’s-clothing, a master seducer out to ruin civilization, or, short of that, at least your daughters. The Stones had just released Beggars Banquet, a return to their roots after the much-maligned Their Satanic Majesties Request. The Beggars opening track, “Sympathy for the Devil,†a strongly political song that at once celebrates and mourns the evil that had befallen the 1960s, is Jagger in full-on swagger. Although there was still hope, Jagger’s performance was a prophetic moment. Woodstock was still a year away and popular culture was decorated in paisley prints and primary colors. The Rolling Stones were not hippies, though. Their music was a conscious attempt to recover rock’s blues-based origins, and in doing so reconjured Legba-turned-Satan, reminding everyone who the real patron saint of rock really was. Jagger’s bold public recognition that the devil was alive and well, not only in the roots of rock and roll but in the stormy clouds darkening the whimsical mysticism of the counterculture, would shift rock and roll once again. The occult imagination would begin its slow turn away from gurus and astrological love charts toward a more sinister horizon, charting rock’s course anew and saving it from what was becoming a neutered psychedelic commercialism.
During his rendition at the Circus, filmed before a live audience, Jagger becomes a man possessed. His Lucifer is all physicality, smoldering sex appeal with a hint of madness. At the peak point in the song, when Jagger screams over and over again “What’s my name?†he begins to writhe on the floor. Back up on his knees, he bends over and slowly pulls his tight red shirt up his back, over his head, and then completely off. The camera zooms in on his arm, revealing a devil tattoo, and then pulls out to show a full devil head on Jagger’s hairless chest. He then prostrates himself, appearing as if to pray to the underworld. The crowd cheers wildly as the tattoos make known exactly who Jagger is personifying in the song: Lucifer-cum-Satan, the prideful—and beautiful—fallen angel who turns hell into a kingdom, casts off his feathered wings, and bends his halo into horns.
The show never aired. The Stones were displeased with the way the footage turned out and kept it in a vault until its release on VHS in 1996. No one but the audience at the time saw Jagger’s temporary tattoos. But it didn’t matter. This was merely the unnecessary spectacle of what had already been decide
d by the media and his fans. In a 1969 concert review in the Washington Post, the writer named Jagger “the closest thing to an incarnation of evil that rock music has.â€
A band could easily become seduced by its own mythology, and trying to parse what had been a passing interest to something that becomes the defining part of a band’s mystique could become difficult. Beyond the music a band makes, part of rock fame includes the rumors that surround their personal lives. In the 1960s, things like LSD use, drunken escapades, and sexual exploits could elevate interest in a musician far beyond what their talent might warrant. But even more controversial was an interest in any kind of alternative religious practice. Fans would feel the exciting flutter of reading lyrics that might hide taboo, esoteric secrets, while parents fretted and Christian groups took to burning albums. Playing up rumors was good for sales, but for a band like the Rolling Stones—who found themselves bumping up against every intellectual, artistic, and spiritual fad—it would become difficult to know where having sympathy for the devil was merely a trendy idea or where having tampered with unseen forces might have actually darkened their lives. In any case, the timing for Jagger’s persona could not have been better. The devil was becoming ascendant in popular culture.
In the 1968 Hammer film The Devil Rides Out, Christopher Lee investigates the disappearance of his nephew and his snooping leads him to stumble upon a cult of devil worshippers who conjure Satan during a sacrificial rite of a naked woman in the woods. One of the better horror films of the time, and one of Christopher Lee’s favorite roles, the plot perpetuated one of the most far-reaching misconceptions about the occult.
Season of the Witch : How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (9780698143722) Page 9
