Season of the Witch : How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (9780698143722) (13 page)

The ritual is found in a medieval grimoire known as
The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage
, a text filled with complex and decidedly religious invocations (“In the name of the blessed and holy Trinity . . .”), list after list of infernal and heavenly names (“Akanef. Omages. Agrax. Sagares . . .”), and byzantine rules (“Take of myrrh in tears, one part; of fine cinnamon, two parts; of galangal . . .”). Nevertheless, the practical purpose of the grimoire is disappointingly prosaic: becoming invisible, discovering treasure, and even locating a misplaced book. Crowley believed, however, that the Holy Guardian Angel was not, in fact, an external divine presence, but a stand-in for the “higher self.” He never completed the ritual at the Boleskine House. But the attempt was enough to charge the grounds with a current of ominous radiance.

Prior to Crowley, the house was already considered a place of ill repute. A church once situated there is said to have burned down, killing all the people inside. Crowley's reputation for black magic made the place twice haunted. It's uncertain what Page actually did there except hold lavish parties. The guitarist eventually sold the house and opened a bookstore in London called
Equinox
, named after Crowley's book series (an attempt at a literary journal for the occult set). Page worked hard, and spent a lot of money, to keep the store from looking like a typical musty bookstore or a head shop, an establishment just then beginning to line store shelves with quartz crystals. Page, ever the romantic dandy, had an architect design the shop in the
style of a nineteenth-century occult lodge, replete with Egyptian motifs and Art Deco trappings.

Page's burgeoning curiosity with Crowley coincided nicely with Robert Plant's own love of Celtic folklore and fantasy, particularly by way of J. R. R. Tolkien. References to Tolkien's hobbit-populated Middle-earth in Led Zeppelin's lyrics were fairly explicit, with Plant name-dropping Tolkien's delightfully grim locations, such as Mordor and the Misty Mountains, as well as the nefarious Gollum and the black riders called Ringwraiths. Plant also wanted his lyrics to hold mythological meaning, and he once described Celtic mysticism as the vital source for the spirit of Led Zeppelin. “[Those are] the lyrics I'm proud of,” he told a reporter for
New Musical Express
in 1973. “Somebody pushed my pen for me, I think.”

Plant grew up in West Bromwich, an area of England rich with folklore and legends. Pre-Christian mythology was at his doorstep. And Page's magick guitar work was the perfect vehicle to hitch to folk fantasy lyrics. “Immigrant Song” offers a powerful example. The song is a dragon's fiery breath unsealing the new decade of the 1970s, a period that would fuse mythology, fantasy, and the occult in exactly the same way the band would with their music. Lester Bangs, the frenetic genius of rock criticism, prophesized this union of imagined worlds carved out of ancient myths and the spiritual rebellion at the heart of rock and roll in his review of
Led Zeppelin
III
for
Rolling Stone
in 1970.

Bangs makes special note of Page's opening cry with its “infernal light of a savage fertility rite.” Even more so in “Immigrant Song,” Bangs identifies the future of rock: “You could play it, as I did, while watching a pagan priestess performing the
ritual dance of Ka before the flaming sacrificial altar in
Fire Maidens of Outer Space
with the TV sound turned off. And believe me, the Zep made my blood throb to those jungle rhythms even more frenziedly.” Led Zeppelin rapidly became the touchstone for all the weird and occult permutations of the 1970s. From Tolkien to Crowley, from pulp fantasy to pop magick, the darker edge of the 1970s occult leanings was found everywhere.

Book publishers such as Ace and Ballantine were putting out cheap paperbacks of old sword-and-sorcery stories, many of these in anthologies, including the popular
Swords Against Darkness
, published by Zebra Books in 1977. While much of the literature and comics of the genre were consumed by a dedicated group of fans, by the mid-1970s, images of magic and fantasy, often with a dark tinge, would come to dominate the pop culture landscape. Chain bookstores began carrying inexpensive art books showcasing the talents of artists such as Boris Vallejo and Frank Frazetta, whose paintings featured Viking-like warriors battling giant serpents, with scantily clad maidens at the heroes' feet. In the same mall as the bookstore, gift shops sold small pewter statues of wizards and dragons.

The filmmaker Ralph Bakshi released two major animated motion pictures—
Wizards
and
The Lord of the Rings
—and the company Rankin/Bass produced a widely popular made-for-TV feature-length cartoon of
The Hobbit
. Led Zeppelin gave these shadowy fantasies an aura of the real. Sure, role-playing a wizard in D&D is just a game, but Page talks about the magick of Crowley in interviews the way the Beatles talked about the benefits of Transcendental Meditation as taught by the maharishi. Tolkien wrote fiction, but the same song that mentions the Misty
Mountains also describes real-life hippies getting stoned in a park. Was there some hidden magic peak that Plant knew about, a retreat where he communed with the spirits, away from pretense and fame?

All of this was solidified by the vaguely sinister vibe the band gave to their music and lyrics. The ghost of the supposed crossroads bargain made by Robert Johnson became attached to the band by way of their appropriation and celebration of the blues. Their essential sound is the driving twelve-bar blues found in some of the most important blues and early rock songs, including Muddy Waters's “Train Fare Blues,” Gene Vincent's “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” and Elvis Presley's “Hound Dog.”

Led Zeppelin's oeuvre includes luminous interpretive covers of songs by Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon, and Memphis Minnie. In a 2012 interview by Tolinski with Jimmy Page and guitarist Jack White, White describes Led Zeppelin's ability to express the power of the blues: “When you have a vision like Jimmy's, I think that's the aim. To make everything as powerful as you can make it.” Page agreed, but took it one step further: “But it wasn't just power—atmosphere was very important for us as well. We wanted to create an atmosphere that was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Our goal was to make music that was spine-tingling.” It was precisely this atmosphere that gave the band its dark mystique, and it's why Led Zeppelin so perfectly embodies the uncanny synergy between rock and the occult. Led Zeppelin contains all the elements unearthed so far.

We see the medieval bard as if through a scrying mirror, a crystal used by the Elizabethan astrologer and magus John Dee to try and communicate with the spirit world. The figure stops
to eat a mushroom he finds at the base of a tree, where he sits and then begins to dream. He is now on a horse, a sword at his side, riding along a landscape of beaches, hills, and valleys. The dashing hero rides through a forest until he comes upon a castle. A falcon flies from his wrist and into a window where it scares a group of guards. Our hero then battles a dark knight and vanquishes the villain into a moat.

This is, of course, a scene from
The Song Remains the Same
, the Led Zeppelin concert movie interspersed with fantasy sequences, one for each member of the band. The brave adventurer is Robert Plant, and he eventually finds what he was looking for, a princess held in the castle against her will. Plant fights the guards and saves her from whatever terrible fate was about to befall her.

The Song Remains the Same
, released in 1976, mixes sword and sorcery, Tolkien, Arthurian lore, and Celtic mythology in a snapshot of the 1970s: a fantasy-imbued mysticism that is darker than the hippies' pastoralism, a place where great battles and romance, not vegetarianism and yoga, characterize the spiritual quest. Plant's sequence also further refines the Led Zeppelin mythos as a grand epic, where each member functions as an archetype. Plant as romantic hero might seem in opposition to the almost androgynous and steamy Dionysian sexuality he exhibited in his stage performances, but this kind of image is the glamour of rock, and precisely how rock managed to so effectively combine spiritual ecstasy and danger with a rich phantasmagorical aesthetic.

In another sequence, the haunting strains of an electric guitar being played with a cello bow leads into the scene of a foggy
night. A desperate seeker, Jimmy Page, climbs a dark and lonely mountain, his way treacherous. What he is looking for awaits him at the top. At the summit stands an elderly hermit—almost ancient—who guides the man's final steps with the light of his lantern. The young man reaches toward the elder and looks into his eyes. Page watches as the hermit's face transforms into his own, and then to that of a child, and finally to an embryo, a moment reminiscent of the star child in
2001: A Space Odyssey.
The vision then begins the movement back again until we gaze upon the face of the wizard, who raises his staff and waves it, producing a trail of prismatic color.

This image of the hermit first appears in the inner artwork of the gatefold cover of Led Zeppelin's untitled fourth album, often referred to as
Led Zeppelin IV
or
Zoso
, a creative means to pronounce the unsayable sigils that decorate the album. Taken almost whole from the famous Rider-Waite tarot deck, the hermit stares down into the village, the only light coming from his lantern, his frail body supported by a long walking stick.

If the band was trying to deepen the occult aura around themselves and their music, they couldn't have come up with a better, more potent means than the sigils. Indeed, the whole package of
Led Zeppelin IV
as an album and as an artifact serves as one of the most perfectly magical moments in rock history. While the Beatles' “Paul is dead” rumors set the stage for the album cover to become an occult emblem and Manson's homicidal exegesis of the
White Album
gave song lyrics a sinister weight,
Led Zeppelin IV
functioned as a kind of grimoire, a magical text, each song a spell, the vinyl disc a kind of magic circle in which to perform the invocations, and the album cover
the altar on which to make sacrifice (or de-seed your weed, as the case may be).

Adding to rock's reputation as a vehicle for subliminal Mephistophelian control were the persistent rumors that musicians were recording secret messages with a technique called backmasking. When played backwards, songs would reveal their true meaning, such as the clues to McCartney's death supposedly “masked” in Beatles songs.
Led Zeppelin IV
's prime mover, the leviathan of rock and roll, “Stairway to Heaven,” is thought to be the backmasked song extraordinaire, a literal love song to the devil with its infamous line: “. . . to my sweet Satan . . .”

Subsequent album covers would continue to inspire occult speculations.
Houses of the Holy
(1973) shows naked children crawling across stones toward some unknown terrible glory. The inner gatefold is more disturbing. Up on a hill of ancient ruins, a naked figure holds a child aloft as if to throw it off. The cover was designed by Aubrey Powell of the design company Hipgnosis, responsible for some of the most iconic record album covers of all time, such as Pink Floyd's
The
Dark Side of the Moon
. Powell claims the idea for the artwork came from the book
Childhood's End
by Arthur C. Clarke in which extraterrestrials, who hide their appearance since they resemble human conceptions of the devil, interfere with humanity in a way that helps push earth toward extinction; only a group of children who have evolved and share a single hive mind survive. But truth rarely gets in the way of speculation, especially when it comes to rock. And it's difficult to image that, whatever Powell's inspiration for the cover, the band enjoyed the way it continued to ignite rumors of perverse magic. The late music
critic Keith Shadwick proposes nothing less in his discussion of
Houses of the Holy
in his book on the band: “The images gave the strongest suggestion yet that Page and Plant's interest in legend, mythology, and esoterica was beginning to help form their overall notion of what the band and their music was about.”

Later in 1970, the same year of the Royal Albert Hall concert, Led Zeppelin pushed the Beatles out of the number-one spot in a British music poll. The Beatles had held that title for eight years, but Led Zeppelin brought with them the spirit of change, an insistent driving rhythm that dethroned the previous monarchs of rock. The reflective and melancholic mysticism of the Beatles—delivered by way of a message of love (it's all you need), peace (give it a chance), and the giggling spirituality of the maharishi—could no longer speak to the cynicism and disappointment that characterized the end of the 1960s. Rock's soul would need to be newly forged on Surtur's anvil. Led Zeppelin was the hammer.

For detractors of rock, it didn't take long to diagnose the post–Aquarian Age as a time of excess exemplified by popular music. Religious leaders saw rock and roll as the worst form of hedonism; it contained all the wickedest offenses: intoxication; sex and gender fluidity; loud, aggressive music often drawn from the blues (a troublesome “primitive” form of music); and social rebellion. In 1971, Ezra Taft Benson, a leader of the Mormon community in Salt Lake City, told the
Washington Post
that even the debauchery of ancient Greece and Rome paled in comparison to a rock show. Rock festivals, Benson said, are “Satan's greatest successes.”

Adding to the devilish aura around Zeppelin specifically
was Page's meeting with Kenneth Anger. In 1973, at a Sotheby's auction of Crowley memorabilia, Anger was outbid by Jimmy Page, then twenty-nine years old and exceedingly wealthy. Anger and Page met, and their shared interest in magick led Anger to ask Page to write the neglected soundtrack to
Lucifer Rising
. Page agreed, excited to be working with this famous underground filmmaker. But the next few years would be difficult ones for Page and the rest of the band. By 1976, Page was addicted to heroin, and Anger believed this was the reason for the guitarist failing to deliver on his promise. Page was finally able to produce twenty-three minutes of music, but Anger was not pleased. The two had a falling-out, and Page would eventually call upon an imprisoned Bobby Beausoleil to complete the soundtrack from his cell.