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

by Peter Bebergal

  Even law enforcement officials got into the game. In a 1989 report, “Satanic Beliefs, Criminal Actions,” written for the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Arlington, Virginia, the author named an interest in heavy metal (along with role-playing games) as one of the signs of a possible criminal personality. That same year, the infamous Jack Chick—known for his illustrated religious tracts left in train stations and on bus seats—published “Angels?” in which a struggling rock band learns that the entire popular music industry is secretly managed by the devil and that even “Christian Rock is a powerful demonic force controlled by Satan.” The contradiction here is if Satanists worked best in secret, hidden in the banality of daily life, why would they give themselves away by erecting huge upside-down pentagrams during rock concerts?

  But the devil really was thought to be everywhere. The first edition of Dungeons & Dragons’ Deities & Demigods didn’t help. The book presented a variety of divine pantheons with which to interact and what one Sacramento televangelist in 1981 said was “exactly like witchcraft.” The Monster Manual was even worse. It listed twelve demons and eleven types of devils, including Asmodeus and Baalzebul, the latter of which could cast these spells: “symbol of pain, symbol of insanity, and (un)holy word.” D&D would be seen, along with rock, as one of the primary means through which the devil got a hold of children. The company that published it, TSR, was so concerned about public perceptions that in the second edition the words demon and devil were removed from the rules and replaced with tanar’ri and baatezu. Stories describing troubled youth playing D&D often made sure to mention their obsession with heavy metal. The belief in Satan walking among us would help sell albums, but it would also damage the lives of those who just wanted to listen to those same records and let their imaginations soar beyond the Christian mainstream.

  The devil is not the only source for an alternative path toward unconventional spirituality, though. Just as mysticism would alter rock music in ways unimaginable, fusing rock’s synapses with a drug-induced spirituality continuing to find expression for decades to come, and the devil gave rock its malevolent sneer, magic would dress rock in a fantastic wardrobe, giving musicians the tools to turn the rock performance into ritual and shamanic ceremony.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE TREE OF LIFE

  I

  It was 1968 and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s single “Fire” had reached number one in the UK. Robb Baker, writing for the Chicago Tribune, said Brown was likely to become “a priest of new black cult in pop music.” Brown himself felt like he was on fire, having emerged from the British underground with a hit song and then embarking on a raucous tour of the United States. His stage performance was radical, even for the hippies. Brown would open the set garbed in billowing red robes, face painted white, teeth painted black, head adorned with a brass helmet dowsed in oil and set aflame. The song begins with Brown calling out, “I am the god of hellfire!” Brown believed he was heralding in a new age for rock and roll, one where the musician was a kind of shaman, hypnotizing the audience and shaking their souls anew. Arthur Brown got his start under the colored lights on the stage of the UFO Club in London, but he had a vision for something more than acid-rock transcendence. Brown wasn’t channeling swamis or Satan, but rather became a vessel for the occult’s original expression in ancient magic, performed ceremonially in religious rites and taking other forms throughout history in the medieval magician’s secret room, the Renaissance magus’s workshop, and the nineteenth-century magical order’s temple. Brown would bring magic to rock and roll, elevating it with new sounds, new imagery, and an even headier mystique much different from what came before. Brown would show that, like the early magicians, rock could be cast like a spell, transmuting the consciousness of fans, spellbinding them all with a powerful glamour.

  Later that year, with a bit of swagger from the effects of fame, Brown was walking home with groceries. A few neighborhood kids recognized him. Even out of makeup he cut quite a figure; skinny and sinewy, with a large nose and chiseled face. The boys gathered round him, teasing him at first with taunts.

  “Hey, we hear you are the god of hellfire?” they asked. “That must make things difficult.” Brown felt himself slip immediately into character, the spirit of whatever entity he channeled onstage possessing him right there on the London street corner. “On the contrary. It makes everything easy!” They continued to follow him and Brown kept working the spell. Eventually they got to his front door. Brown didn’t have his key and had to ring to be let in. There was the voice of his wife through the intercom, and Brown responded, “Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot the milk.” The street kids erupted, “This is no fucking god of hellfire!” Brown later said of the moment: “The god of hellfire apologizing for forgetting the milk must have been quite disturbing.”

  While the tremendous cultural and spiritual shift from the 1960s to the 1970s was often characterized in rock mythos by a gloomier visage, Brown might seem at first to be just another musician taking advantage of the devil’s insistent meddling in rock’s aesthetic. But Brown was after something deeper. As a child he had seen a film of African priests and identified with how theater and spectacle are a means to transmit wisdom. He was also inspired by Walter Pater’s idea that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” Brown explains it like this: “[M]usic goes straight into a particular lobe of your brain, which bypasses thought or what we normally call thought.” Brown likens his music to a Zen master using a stick to whack a student needing the sudden jolt back to awareness. Brown’s god of hellfire was not intended to be in opposition to Christianity, but rather a messenger demanding your attention and one that will use any means to get it: “If you think that you can impress something on people’s minds by shocking them, then you should shock them.”

  When Brown was a teenager, his father introduced him to Transcendental Meditation, which would place a young Arthur on a spiritual quest that found its way into his songs. But he quickly discovered that audiences weren’t paying attention to the lyrics in the way he intended.

  “Devil’s Grip” was the song that made him realize he wasn’t singing about things people were used to hearing. This was not a song about love or a hippie cry for freedom; it was about a precipitous spiritual journey: “Born from wonder / I soon slipped under.” Brown sought a vehicle to turn rock and roll into an occult passion play. Culling from his interest in African shamans, Brown added theatrical elements to his performances to conjure a sense of otherworldliness, thereby giving the music and lyrics a mythic quality. He painted his face and wore robes embroidered with symbols, in an effort to reshape a standard rock performance into something more like the creation of a new world. Multicolored strobe lights, his infamous flaming helmet, and sometimes his stripping naked brought accusations of “degrading public performance.”

  Brown’s first tour of the United States was panned by the critics. After his 1968 show at the Anaheim Convention Center, the Los Angeles Times called him a “poseur whose rites were a tinseled hoax.” Nevertheless, in his hotel room Brown would find half a dozen or so fans waiting for him. They would ask him questions about life, death, and the universe. For weeks during the tour he grooved on the attention and the thrill of keeping the performance going—even offstage. And then one night, Brown said, he couldn’t keep it up. He realized he didn’t actually know anything. Brown started his own spiritual quest in earnest. His experiences would only deepen his commitment to the stage, perfecting what Brown’s biographer, Polly Marshall, called “a truly theatrical paganism.”

  At the UFO Club he had found an audience willing to be initiated into his magical order. Those who f
locked to the club every week in 1967 were already apprentices of the spectacle of rock. This was, of course, the home base of Pink Floyd and Soft Machine, two experts in using projection, lighting, and sound to zap the already LSD-soaked crowd further into the astral plane. Brown’s first album, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, is a musical “book of shadows,” each song a spell intending to invoke a different entity inhabiting his mind and soul. Brown describes creating and listening to the album as an “inner journey” in which he would call forth “gods and presences” through each song. Brown was interested in dualities, in the tension inherent in the gods of mythology. He saw his own role as trickster, mediating between humans and gods, showing the hazards of breaching the divide. Here again is the story of Dionysus’s birth, where the god’s coming into the world was a result of his mother getting too close to the divine fire. There is also a Christian connotation in the quagmire: Does hellfire burn or cleanse? Is hell a place of eternal suffering, or does redemption await on the other side of punishment?

  Incorporating all this into a Saturday night rock show was profoundly original but also part of a lineage; Brown was integrating elements of spiritual questing that the avant-garde had tinkered with almost a century earlier. As noted with regard to composers Claude Debussy and Erik Satie, many artists and musicians in the 1800s were pushing up against the mainstream, innovating in ways that sourced both spiritual and creative sustenance in magical fraternities such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and various Rosicrucian orders.

  Rosicrucians mysteriously appeared in Germany in the early 1600s via a series of pamphlets circulating around the country. The believers eventually made their way through Europe, ultimately inspiring many seventeenth-century thinkers, including astronomer and mathematician Giordano Bruno and physician-turned-mystic Robert Fludd—two men who would go on to have a profound impact on magic and occultism in the West. The first of the Rosicrucian writings, the Fama Fraternitatis, announced a mystical fellowship born out of the exotic travels of someone named Christian Rosenkreutz, who would help usher in a new age for the spiritual health of humanity. Possibly nothing more than an elaborate hoax, the idea of a secret brotherhood fired the imagination, particularly among those for whom Christian teachings had become stale. While the Protestant revolution promised an unmediated salvation free from the interference of priests, it still functioned as a hierarchy with a minister behind a pulpit facing the congregation. The mystical Christianity of the Rosicrucians promised something more like the mystery cults of the ancient world, where initiates were put through a series of trials, each one revealing more and more until at last the great secrets of the universe are revealed.

  By the 1800s, a number of groups claiming to be direct descendants of the original Rosicrucians sprouted up in France and England. Members were often already schooled in the traditions of secret fraternities by way of Freemasonry, known for its complex and elegant series of rituals. Each degree presented the member with new teachings, secret handshakes, and passwords. These secretive elements inspired nefarious and ultimately debunked (but everlasting) conspiracy theories, but others saw Freemasonry as a basis from which to develop esoteric fraternities emphasizing ancient mysteries, occult powers, and magic. The means to teach these divine truths was nothing less than the theatrical.

  It was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, however, that incorporated the occult sensibility of the Rosicrucians into the ritual grandeur of Freemasonry to create an occult belief system that would become the most influential magical organization in the Western world, still seeing an active membership today. The order began in England in 1888, when, it was told, three Freemasons looked out at the horizon of human culture and saw only two possible paths forward for history: a purely materialistic science, with a strong positivist bent giving no quarter to mystery; or a strict religious banality, void of wonder. William Robert Woodman, William Wynn Westcott, and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers had met while members of the same Rosicrucian order, the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (SRIA), but they were not satisfied it could provide what they sought to establish—a path beyond the opposing pillars of science and Christianity.

  Occultism was not altogether unfashionable in England at the time; spiritualism made for spooky and titillating salon and sewing circle activities, and Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society had started to gain followers, as well as skeptical notice by the press. But the three Freemasons were after a more rigorous spiritual system, one that deepened the mystical associations they found in the SRIA. Westcott claimed to have come into possession of a series of papers he referred to as the Cipher Manuscripts, a collection of writings laying out rituals intended to teach a method of occult psychology linking tarot cards, astrology, astral projection, and the Kabbalah. Westcott and company founded the first Golden Dawn lodge and over time attracted a diverse membership, many of whom were women, as the Freemasons and other societies typically excluded them. As the writer Francis King explains, the Golden Dawn’s system of initiatory ritual magic didn’t manifest anything original other than how to “synthesize a coherent logical system,” inspiring occultism to this day, all of it dressed in ritual finery that depends on performance to spellbind the initiates.

  Borrowing heavily from Freemasonry, the Golden Dawn rituals begin with a candidate dressed in simple robes and blindfolded. The blindfold itself is called a “hoodwink,” an idiom denoting being tricked or duped. The initiate is meant to feel disoriented, thereby heightening their other senses. Members of the lodge wear their own ritual garments, often incorporating Egyptian motifs, specific to their level and office, with each one given a prescribed role in the initiation. Over time, as members achieve higher grades (the degrees in Freemasonry), the rituals become more and more complex, and the added use of lights and sounds enhances the experience.

  Similarly, Arthur Brown’s stage shows utilized these elements, including robes, masks, “huge costumes with these geometric patterns,” and a specific dance routine for each song. Brown’s light show was controlled by the mood of the music, an idea originally developed in the nineteenth century by Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. Other composers had played with the idea of controlling light with sound; there was even a U.S. patent filed in 1877 by Bainbridge Bishop in which he described: “The combination, with a musical instrument, of a device arranged to exhibit a series of colors corresponding with the notes played, substantially as specified.”

  For Scriabin, combining music with color was more than a technical problem to be solved. The art scholar James Leggio explains how Scriabin was intrigued by the phenomenon known as synesthesia, in which some people see sounds and hear colors. The notion that colors have a specific corresponding note was in line with Scriabin’s other interest: theosophy. As Leggio points out, theosophy as presented by Madame Blavatsky taught that human beings have both physical and astral bodies, the latter of which can be seen as aura. The person’s mood or level of spiritual wisdom can be understood in the color of the aura.

  For his symphonic piece Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, Scriabin included in the score instructions for the projection of colors controlled by a color organ. The occult themes of the piece are highlighted by Scriabin’s use of what he called the “chord of the pleroma,” a dissonant drone dramatically rising during the opening movement and intended to correspond to the divine totality existing beyond normal human perception. The chord is the bridge to the divine, and the colors are the divine echo.

  Brown describes his own performances in much the same way but from the point of view of a pre-enlightened Gnostic. The darker, spookier aspects of the Crazy World and his next band, Kingdom Come, were an attempt to show how humanity is disconnected from the divine source: “The experience we give is alienation in its modern concept of the human mind being removed from its true central joining point with the
emanations of the divine spirit by entrapment in its own creations of systematic self-deception.”

  The idea of isolation from a divine source is at the heart of the modern Occult Revival of the nineteenth century. The Golden Dawn understood magic to be the way to reintegrate the human with its godlike destiny. Aleister Crowley, an early member of the Golden Dawn, defined magic as “the Science and Art of causing change to occur in conformity with the will.” This definition was amended by a later Golden Dawn member and magician, Dion Fortune, who wrote that “magic is the Science and Art of causing change in consciousness [italics mine] to occur in conformity with the will.” These two additional words are essential, as they put the emphasis on what actually happens, if anything, as a function of the mind. This, of course, is where the real magic takes place. It is the grand illusion that can only happen when the aspirant wants to be hypnotized.

  When Brown’s band broke up in 1970, he continued on with Kingdom Come, a progressive rock outfit producing a trilogy of albums, each one a key to his deepening quest to use music as a means of spiritual initiation. Brown had almost given up on music altogether, now drawn toward spending his time in a Tibetan monastery. But during a mescaline trip, he had a vision of a warrior angel right out of a William Blake drawing, replete with armor and sword, filled with what he described as a “mortal terror.” For Brown, this meant one thing: start a new band. Kingdom Come turned up the theatrics to “11,” performing with a giant pyramid set, flaming crosses, druids dancing in the audience, and each of the band members decked out in robes and makeup, including the guitarist dressed as a clown for good measure. Brown sought spiritual nourishment in multiple ways, from acid binges to all-apple diets. But the music, an innovative but too often flaccid progressive rock, failed to get him to the next commercial level. Kingdom Come did well on the festival circuit, but band members changed often. The last album was recorded without a drummer, and Kingdom Come was forced to become the first band to use a drum machine. It could be that audiences wanting to be entertained via an occult transmission during a concert weren’t ultimately willing to commit wholesale to Brown’s somewhat scattershot shamanistic vision.