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

by Peter Bebergal

  Throbbing Gristle was to music what COUM was to art. Pure provocation by way of fascist imagery and songs about serial killers and sexual deviance poured out like avant-garde slurry. Their music was a pastiche of blistering electronics, mechanized dance music, ambient landscapes, and impenetrable experiments in Gysinian cut-ups. The cut-up—an artistic technique of cutting pieces of text and allowing elements of chance and stream of consciousness to re-form them—that William Burroughs and the artist Brion Gysin had developed together—was a powerful means of manipulating both consciousness and culture. It was magic: a willful intent to change reality.

  The members of Throbbing Gristle were each interested in occult subjects in their own way and in Crowleyan ideas of willful intention—as well as Burroughs’s magical ideas—but they eschewed using occult imagery as their primary means of eliciting a reaction from the public. Bands often employed pentagrams and satanic imagery to signal to their audiences or the media their danger or dark spiritual intentions. Throbbing Gristle never felt compelled to use arcane symbols in that way. As Cosey Fanni Tutti explains: “When your work is created from a deep connection with the spiritual, its power is manifest so using symbols is an unnecessary overstatement. I think public gratuitous display tends to reflect a weakness and insecurity, in both the work and the person behind the work.”

  In 1971, P-Orridge had found a kindred spirit in William Burroughs, whose novels such as Naked Lunch set decency on fire. During one of their first conversations, Burroughs related a story kindling P-Orridge’s entire future vision (and changing the course of Western occultism). Burroughs frequented a certain diner, where one evening he was treated very poorly. He had the perfect means at hand for revenge. Burroughs would utilize the idea of the “cut-up” for a form of sympathetic magic: a system of occult practice relying on the idea of “like as to like.” For example, a doll shaped into the likeness of a particular person could be cursed, stuck with pins, thrown under a bus. All you needed was a good enough resemblance and the willingness to see the spell through. With this method in mind, Burroughs took a picture of the block where the restaurant stood. He developed the film and used a razor to cut the restaurant out, taping the two pieces back together. He recorded the ambient sounds of the diner’s neighborhood, and then he cut in recorded sounds of guns firing, sirens, and explosions. A few weeks later, without warning, the diner closed.

  Burroughs told this story to P-Orridge during their first meeting. P-Orridge had sought out Burroughs as a kindred soul intent on subverting what Burroughs called “control,” the powers seeking to contain human consciousness, to limit its freedom. The tools available to undermine control were available all around them: hallucinogenic drugs, art, and magic. Burroughs’s magic shunned grimoires and ceremony, ritual and conjuration, in favor of photographs, recordings, music production, and film. He believed magic had to adapt to the technology at hand, not rely on the same old texts and traditions. Preserving the rituals of the Golden Dawn or other occult orders might be keeping those methods alive, but it wasn’t doing the practice of magic (or art) any good, in his mind.

  Jennie Skerl, one of Burroughs’s many biographers, explains it like this: “The cutup is a way of exposing word and image controls and thus freeing oneself from them, an alteration of consciousness that occurs in both the writer and the reader of the text.”

  Burroughs was introduced to the cut-up as a magical means of subversion by his friend and artistic collaborator Brion Gysin. The two had met when Gysin was the proprietor of the 1001 Nights, a restaurant in Tangier that Gysin co-owned between 1954 and 1958. Burroughs and Gysin reconnected again in Paris and worked on reenergizing a technique used by the Dadaists in the 1920s. The Dadaists are often framed as being against any kind of system, believing in nothing but the pure play of their idea. But as the writer Nadia Choucha explains, their quest for a pure “experience of consciousness” meant that they were indeed sensitive to the occult imagination. Collage and other cut-up techniques used by the Dadaists allowed them to tap into the unconscious and listen in to the “unknown.” Burroughs recognized that what made the cut-up so potent was how easily it could be adapted to any technology, even those not yet realized. Burroughs could not have imagined the MP3, but the cut-up can be applied to 0s and 1s just as easily as to Polaroid pictures. Cut-ups, Gysin believed, were a working of the higher self, making connections that normal waking consciousness is not able to apprehend. Together, along with the filmmaker Antony Balch, they sought to show how the cut-up was the perfect weapon in the war against control.

  P-Orridge met Gysin through Burroughs in 1980 and became even more convinced Gysin’s art and ideas were a form of magic that could be used to break free of the stranglehold “control” had on consciousness and liberty. P-Orridge was not the first musician who wanted to utilize Gysin’s somewhat isolated artistic vision. In 1967, while waiting to return to court to face drug possession charges, the Rolling Stones took off to Morocco in search of a spiritual cleansing. What they found were better drugs and more debauchery. But Brian Jones had a vision quest of his own. At Gysin’s restaurant, Brian witnessed the astonishing trance-inducing music known as the Master Musicians of Joujouka, a group of highly trained Sufi musicians performing as the house band for 1001 Nights. They were a select group of musicians trained from childhood. Their instruments—flute, horn, and drum—caused people to believe their music was channeled from the god Pan and their discipline passed down like an ancient mystery through initiation. Gysin grew to be a true devotee of the musicians, believing their craft to be a type of “psychic hygiene.” Jones returned to Morocco in 1968 and together with Gysin convinced the musicians to allow them to record their music in a ceremonial context. Their collaboration would result in a daring album of the Masters’ music, produced and mixed with rock’s sensibilities, titled Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka. This essential album would inspire generations of musicians to incorporate indigenous music and trance elements into their compositions.

  What P-Orridge understood was how practical Gysin’s magic was; there were actual tools, not just abstract techniques for conjuring demons or meeting with your Holy Guardian Angel. The cut-up had already been applied to literature, to words on a page, particularly in Gysin and Burroughs’s collection and user guide, The Third Mind. Maybe even more potent, however, was Gysin’s invention known as the “dreamachine,” a revolving cylinder cut with holes and fitted with a bulb producing a stroboscopic effect. Gysin conceived of the idea on a bus ride. His eyes were closed, but the sun, flickering along a tree-lined street, put him into a trance state, which for Gysin was a “transcendental storm of colour visions.” His friend, the technical wizard Ian Sommerville, assembled a simple device that could generate the same effect, and Gysin quickly built his own to recapture the experience in order to use it and share it as a tool of transcendence. The dreamachine has since been used by artists and musicians from Iggy Pop to Michael Stipe in their own work. Gysin believed the dreamachine tapped into the alpha waves of the human brain, a locus that “contains the whole human program of vision,” including the entire history of myth and symbol. The cut-ups could destabilize culture, but the dreamachine opened up consciousness, an even more subversive act in a world P-Orridge believes wants us to “fit in with and comply with the overriding culture.”

  When Throbbing Gristle disbanded, P-Orridge and Christopherson went on to form the band Psychic TV. It was first conceived when P-Orridge saw a television documentary about David Bowie, in particular an unremarkable scene showing David’s arrival at a train station and him then stepping into a vintage livery car from the 1930s, a type the Nazis had driven in Berlin during World War II. The ambiguity of Bowie’s persona, along with the image of him in this car, made it s
eem to P-Orridge that Bowie was one step away from appearing like a National Socialist intent on making a power grab. In the scene, the train station was mobbed with teenage fans hoping to catch a glimpse of the musician. The voice-over was commenting on the power Bowie had at that very moment, a power to potentially unify all those kids for a political reason. “So that was the final trigger,” P-Orridge remembers: to start a band that might actually use the music and recording as a “platform for radical ideas.”

  Utilizing more pop elements in their music than P-Orridge had previously, Psychic TV decided to infect the system from within: “We used the idea of the rock band to prevent as much as we could from the establishment realizing what we were really doing was very urgently saying to people you can change your behavior, you can be as creative as you choose no matter what your original skills if you wished it.” To this end, Psychic TV called upon fans to create a magical collective, a virtual secret society with its own language, passcodes, and rituals. Instead of a traditional fan club, Psychic TV would create what P-Orridge calls “a very laissez-faire libertarian occult network.” They called themselves Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY), a magical youth culture, one part sex, one part drugs, and a huge dose of magical energy borrowed from the nineteenth-century British artist Austin Osman Spare, who had developed a technique known as sigil magic.

  Sigils had been used for centuries, and they were made popular when Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, one of the cofounders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, translated and published The Key of Solomon the King, a medieval grimoire outlining a complicated system of ceremonial magic to conjure angels and bind demons. The grimoire lists the sigils (called seals) of many of the entities, which appear as abstract symbols, not unlike alchemical and astrological signs but more complex, surrounded by a circle. These are essentially the spirits’ signatures, which can be used to control them. Like the story of Rumpelstiltskin taught to every child, once you know someone’s name you have power over them.

  Sigil magic was Spare’s greatest contribution to the occult imagination. He first gained recognition in 1904, at the age of fourteen, when he was invited to participate in the prestigious British art showcase, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Spare’s work was not unlike the other fin-de-siècle illustrators, such as his predecessor Aubrey Beardsley, with lush pen-and-ink works commissioned by book publishers.

  But Spare’s work is more personal, and otherwise more grotesque; his use of occult symbols is much more explicit. His drawings are filled with horned creatures and contorted nudes surrounded by fiery swirls. Spare found much of the art establishment distasteful and by midlife went mostly underground, his artwork becoming a sole practice dedicated to pursuing magical wisdom.

  For a time, Spare become involved with Aleister Crowley’s magical orders, but Spare believed that magic needed to break free of the fraternal grip (and all its attendant handshakes). Spare’s genius was to remove the quasi-religious quality from his own sigils by emphasizing their personal nature. His formula for sigil making involved writing down a word representing a specific desire, often placing the letters on top of one another, and erasing extraneous marks until what was left would be “a simple form which can easily be visualized at will, and has not too much pictorial relation to the desire.” The form can then be conjured up until the desire is manifest.

  In their own investigations of magic, Psychic TV came across this curious British practitioner of magic and urged their fans to create their own sigils. But the band took it one step further, encouraging fans to smear their sigils with blood, semen, and other bodily fluids. Fans then mailed these to the band, who kept a file of them in the hopes that collectively they would energize one another and bring their desires into form and being.

  Magic needed to be demystified, P-Orridge argued, so that new, unfettered spiritual cultures could be created. Anything can become a magical battery, says P-Orridge, “stuffed animals, or Hershey chocolate bars or whatever. You can develop your own language of symbolism, language of magic that for you maximizes the efficiency and effect of the ritual.” When the band opened a piece of mail for the first time to find a sigil smeared with an unknown fluid, P-Orridge knew this could be the start of new occult thinking, the ultimate expression being ten thousand people worldwide creating sigils on the same day at the same time. “Not everybody could coordinate their clocks but a hell of a lot did,” P-Orridge recalls. “Nobody had done that before.”

  Peter Christopherson eventually left Psychic TV to form Coil with John Balance, who also played frequently with Psychic TV. The two men in this new iteration combined heavy electronic sound with cut-ups, percussion, and Balance’s powerful vocals to produce a number of critically notable albums of the 1980s and 1990s, including Scatology, Horse Rotorvator, and Love’s Secret Domain, along with numerous live releases, side projects, seven-inch singles, and cassettes. Coil made no distinction between their art and their spiritual (and sexual) affinities. They used magical techniques such as the I Ching and herculean amounts of psychedelics in order to create states of altered consciousness, for themselves and their music. Balance had come to see the magic associated with Psychic TV and TOPY as cultlike, too dependent on the group energy, and he wanted to follow even more directly in Spare’s footsteps as someone whose occult practice was solitary, as in the path of the shaman. In an interview with Mark Pilkington for Fortean Times, Balance decries the cultlike approach to magic of the Church of Satan. Any accusations that Coil used satanic imagery were just ignorance, he’d say, Coil’s true patron deity being Pan. And for celebrities and musicians like Anton LaVey and Marilyn Manson, Balance had no patience: “That’s showbiz Satanism, I don’t buy into any of that at all. Pan is certainly one of my deities, one that I find solace and power in.”

  Coil’s first single, the 1984 “How to Destroy Angels” (a title Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails would borrow as the name of his side band), was packaged with a wordy description of the music that begins: “Ritual music for the accumulation of male sexual energy.” The song was an attempt to remind their listeners that music had once been used “as a tool for affecting man’s body and spirit.” “How to Destroy Angels” could be described as ambient pulses, punctuated by gongs and the scratching of metal on metal—sounding both deliberate and “cut-up.”

  It’s an intensely powerful piece of music, but the presentation of “How to Destroy Angels”—with its emphasis on male sexuality—would front-load Coil’s identity and with what Balance called their “solar” aspect, characterized by their use of what is called the Black Sun, a symbol linked to the Nazis. (During World War II, the SS held meetings within the Wewelsburg castle in which the Black Sun symbol had been tiled into the floor. The symbol was later adopted by other neo-Nazi groups, particularly those emphasizing occult motivations.) The symbol’s history is actually quite complex. It can even be found in the writings of Blavatsky. Nevertheless, its association with Nazi occultism is impossible to sever. And later, Coil would allow for a lunar (read feminine) occult influence. While Balance claimed this was a natural progression of their music’s evolution, it might also have been a response to the problems of being associated with any kind of actual fascist ideology.

  Coil collaborated with Boyd Rice, an underground noise musician and acquaintance. Rice later became embroiled in a controversy over a photograph of him with Bob Heick, the leader of the neo-Nazi group American Front, both wearing American Front uniforms. Coil decided it was best to separate themselves from any association with Rice. While fascism had been part of the arsenal of symbols that Throbbing Gristle (and sometimes Psychic TV) used for shock effect, Coil wasn’t interested in moving beyond the use of music to undermine “control,” and i
nstead pushed themselves into untrodden areas of magic and consciousness exploration.

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  One night before a Killing Joke show in Ireland in 1982, the singer and keyboardist Jaz Coleman failed to show up. His bandmates learned later that he had fled to Iceland, believing an apocalypse was imminent. They found out that he had sought out a magical order, corresponding by mail. Coleman was able to convince his friends of a coming doom, and more joined him, only to find they had been duped by a cult looking to increase their membership with rock star personalities. Coleman would later claim that he just needed an extended vacation, to “study classical music, study sacred geometry, and antiquities—just break out of the corny, clichéd rock ’n’ roll lifestyle.” But his leaving seemed intimately tied into his deep interest in the occult and to Killing Joke’s music, which the band had once described as “nature throwing up.”

  Killing Joke had come to believe their group was a magical fellowship. Their interest in magic began as teenagers, after joining the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Later, as Killing Joke, the group staged magical rituals that were helped along by Dwina Murphy Gibb—second wife of Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees—who would draw and bless magical circles on the stage. Killing Joke wanted to be more than a rock band. Like the serpent in the garden, they wanted to be an oppositional force to both mainstream music and Christianity. When a young fanzine editor interviewing the band described them as “punk,” Coleman spat back, “Well, that’s just ignorance, isn’t it? Because we don’t play ‘punk-rock,’ we just reflect what’s happening and endeavor to be honest with ourselves.” Killing Joke believed they couldn’t fit into the definition of rock, or rock culture. During a hostile interview in 1980 with the critic Paul Morley for NME, Coleman accused Morley of being too enamored of “pop” to get what Killing Joke was about. During their heated exchange, Coleman described what he thought the band was about: having the will to survive the future, one that he believed would likely include natural disasters or World War III.