Season of the Witch : How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (9780698143722) (15 page)

From the beginning, Sabbath would swing wildly from admission to denial when it came to their interest in the occult. In an early interview with
Rolling Stone
, Geezer Butler appears annoyed when asked about the name of the band, citing, as he often would, the name of the Boris Karloff movie he saw was playing at a local cinema. Almost forty years later, in a documentary about the making of their album
Paranoid
, Butler is asked the very same question. This time he explains that he was deeply interested in the occult when they were first forming the band. And then in 2013, Tony Iommi told the
Guardian
that the band “dabbled in the occult,” but this could have meant merely playing with a deck of tarot cards while drunkenly bored on a tour plane.

Retroactive memory is an important aspect of rock's relationship to occultism. For a band like Black Sabbath, running
triage against every manner of rumor and accusation, the members often had to claim ignorance about any occult influence. But once the mythos of the band was set in stone, it was safer to come clean. Or maybe the truth is the other way around. It is just as likely the band really wasn't interested in the occult at all and only later, when the association had helped make them rich, did it make sense to embrace it. It's more probable, however, that the truth is somewhere in between.

In
Louder Than Hell
,
the remarkable narrative history of heavy metal by Jon Wiederhorn and Katherine Turman
,
Butler describes a book on witchcraft Osbourne had given him as a gift, which he claimed was “at least three hundred years old.” That night, Butler decided to keep the book in the bathroom, worried about having it too close to him. But its magic was powerful. “I woke up and there was this black shape looming over the bottom of the bed,” he said, and he knew then the occult was not something to take lightly. The incident must have inspired the rest of the band, however, because Ozzy describes reading occult books and realizing it was very different from the horror-movie affect they had decided on for themselves. And despite the lyrics in the band's songs suggesting the listener be wary of playing with dark magic, they attracted all manner of people who were looking for both kindred spirits and occult gurus. Black Sabbath represents the most perfect example of how occult manifests in rock and roll culture. Sabbath members were young men when they started out. Music was a way to reach beyond their English working-class neighborhoods. Rock was a kind of rebellion against fate, a way for them to say there was more to the world than jobs as carpenters and plumbers. And as youths looking for
something more, the occult by way of Aleister Crowley and books on witchcraft offered another means to explore defying convention. The darker spectrum of occultism was a perfect fit. Social and spiritual rebellion are the touchstones of rock, and infusing their music with a sensibility challenging and critiquing what is normal was exactly what made Black Sabbath so powerful, and would influence so many bands to come.

On the other side of the curtain were the media, the public, and the fans, all of whom needed the band to represent for them whatever they most wanted or were most afraid of. Black Sabbath took up the gauntlet willingly. They could honestly deny any real satanic fealty, while churning up enough abysmal vapors to satisfy their fans and scare fundamentalist Christians, both of whom were equally obsessed with the band's supposed evil intentions. This was rock's supposed original bargain after all, a pact made with the devil in order to seduce teenagers away from clean family values by giving them music that stoked a sexual fire in their loins and a blaze of rebellion in their hearts. From the very beginning, rock urged teens to turn their backs on their parents and priests, their teachers and ministers, clothing Satan's message in songs about dancing and young love. Black Sabbath was simply more forthright about who was really in charge of rock's governing principles. Fundamentalist Christians, defenders of morality, and conspiracy theorists had proof. Devil worship was just fodder for scary movies and gory comic books. Satanists could be living right next door, driving their children to school, mowing their lawns, doing all the things normal people did. They even had a church.

In 1966, the same year that the world looked up in awe as
Russia landed the first man-made object on the moon with the spacecraft
Luna 9
, an ex–circus performer named Anton LaVey was staring into the underworld where he heard “a call” to start the Church of Satan. In the beginning, the church saw itself as a place for the over-thirty set to feel naughty, and the media enjoyed the spectacle—for instance, in 1967 when LaVey performed the first satanic wedding. LaVey wore a devil costume and a woman lay naked on the altar while LaVey chanted a black mass that beseeched the devil to bless the (un)holy matrimony. Later that year, he had his then three-year-old daughter baptized in what he said was a ritual in opposition to the Christian belief in original sin.

The Manson murders changed everything. Newspapers ran stories linking Manson to devil worship, first by trying to associate him with the Process Church and later by pointing out every instance where Manson may have told someone he was the devil. In the public consciousness, the Church of Satan was one-stop shopping for anything related to the devil, and so LaVey was quickly peppered with questions about the murders.

The stylishly bald and charismatic leader of the church then became much more explicit about what his brand of Satanism actually stood for. The church was not, as some thought, the worship of the actual Antichrist. Satanism, LaVey explained, is an extreme version of spiritual libertarianism with Satan as a perfect symbol for strength of will. All religion favors the weak, LaVey believed, and he looked to the Church of Satan as an island of free thought. LaVey even saw the hippies as nothing more than conformists, their minds addled by drugs and terrible music. As he told the
Los Angeles Times
: “[I]t's just Ayn
Rand's philosophy, with ceremony and ritual added.” LaVey goes on to explain that his church believed in law and order, a strangely Apollonian view in the midst of what he sold as a Dionysian hedonism.

Despite LaVey's insistence, one he would continue to make, that the Satan of his church was not a literal personification of evil, but rather a stand-in for “the spirit of discovery, freethinking and rebelliousness,” he still offered the perfect icon for rock's enduring need to spiritually rebel, an energy that would continue to push the music into new territories. It's important to stress how spiritually bereft young people felt at the end of the 1960s. The New Age movement had not yet offered an abridged but comprehensive spiritual encyclopedia for the mainstream that pulled together the various practices that had been embraced in the 1960s. Many historians and critics cite the violence at the Rolling Stones' Altamont concert because there really is no better metaphor for how the artistic and spiritual revolution that prefigured in festivals like the Human Be-In was completely undermined by the gross machismo and drug-addled aggression that was on display that day in 1969.

People on every step along the cultural spectrum agreed something had utterly changed. In an editorial for the
Boston Globe
, the conservative pundit William F. Buckley called the event the “corpse of Woodstock Nation,” and
Rolling Stone
magazine said that Altamont was “perhaps rock and roll's all-time worst day.” Worse yet, Altamont was also a warning sign of a greater disease.

The bands Coven and Black Widow, who released the first deliberately devilish rock albums in 1969 and 1970 respectively,
are important examples of this malevolent edge that began creeping its way into popular music. They are also instances where even those who professed a belief in black magic were also keying into the exploitive and historical errors regarding magic, paganism, and their relationship to Satan.

Coven's first album,
Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls
, is a pretty terrific rock record, with singer Jinx Dawson's Grace Slick–like delivery on the back of a psychedelic/jazz vehicle swathed in a sinister atmosphere. The album mixes folktales and legends and closes with the song “Satanic Mass,” a thirteen-minute spoken-word ritual that claimed authenticity, but was a mix of popular novels on Satanism, some medieval sources, and even some Crowley for authority (the mass ends with “Do What Thou Wilt, Shall Be the Whole of the Law!” just before the final refrain of “Hail Satan!”). Coven is also credited with being the first band to “throw horns,” the hand sign with upraised index finger and pinkie that would become the staple gesture of heavy metal fans.

Black Widow's debut album,
Sacrifice
, offered some trappings similar to Coven's
Witchcraft Destroys
, but in a 1970 interview with
Beat Instrumental
, Black Widow claimed they were more interested in the theatricality of staging something like a satanic mass than actually being practitioners themselves.
Sacrifice
offers a lineup of songs that read more like Hammer horror films than actual devil worship, with titles like “In Ancient Days,” “Come to the Sabbat,” and “Attack of the Demon.”

Through their manager, the band became associated with the English witch Alex Sanders, having been named by his followers King of the Witches. Sanders had been part of Gerald Gardner's
coven, but eventually formed his own tradition (Alexandrian Wicca as opposed to Gardnerian) and quickly became the public face of witchcraft, even going so far as to release his own album,
A Witch Is Born
. On it, Sanders performs an initiation into his coven. Not only does Satan not make an appearance, but the ritual is exceptionally positive, filled with earthly images. The initiation even includes a prayer known as the Charge of the Goddess, written by the Wiccan Doreen Valiente for Gerald Gardner. Unlike the figure behind supposed satanic masses, this deity is not in need of blood: “Nor does She demand sacrifice, for behold, She is the mother of all living, and Her love is poured out upon the earth.” So while it's surprising that Sanders would associate with Black Widow's darker occult vision, he does so in a way that was largely in keeping with the time, when every flavor of occultism was mixing into an almost tasteless stew, save for its ability to shock and create media scandals.

Instead of tapping into an ancient stream of occult knowledge, Coven and Black Widow used ideas and imagery that arose first in the Middle Ages and were also apparent during the American witch trials conducted by religious authorities. For example, the idea of the witches' sabbath as a rite in which witches meet with Satan to be initiated and to dance ecstatically was a fiction, one that painted fertility rites not only as a non-Christian ritual but as one that was diabolical as well.

This belief persisted, given its most iconic form in a famous 1798 painting by Francisco Goya,
Witches' Sabbath
, in which a magnificently horned goat appears to bless a group of women and infants. Earlier and less well-known, but equally influential, was the illustration from the 1608 witch hunters' manual
Compendium Maleficarum
showing a woman being initiated into a coven of witches by bending down and literally kissing the devil's ass. Coven's song “Pact with Lucifer” offers the same devilish pastoralism: a poor farmer sells his soul to Lucifer only to have the devil return in seven years to take his only son.

While Coven and Black Widow were not presenting what some might say is an accurate depiction of Wiccan practice at the time, their music and performances are still authentically occult along the vast spectrum. Just as occultism is not a single stream from a single ancient source, the varieties of ways the occult is expressed have always pulled together sometimes eerily similar, sometimes completely disparate, elements. For the Renaissance mages, it was the
Corpus Hermeticum
—itself a conglomeration of Egyptian, Gnostic Christian, and Neoplatonic ideas—mixed with Jewish Kabbalah, astrology, and what was called natural magic to create a complex but hugely influential form of esoteric lore. By the 1970s, there was already a rich historical vein to tap, then applied to contemporary cultural media. Ancient and premodern sources were blended with comic books, horror movies, and other more contemporary magical elements such as Wicca to help generate a new occult identity, one that was carved into vinyl records, erected onstage, and chanted by fist-raising fans, all of it feeding the fears of parents, urged on by mass media.

By the late 1970s and into the 1980s, nobody in popular music was immune to accusations of devil worship. One example is Heart, with band members and sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson often seen as oversexed pagan priestesses. A profile of the band in the
Washington Post
noted the absurdity: “More recently, the gypsy motif on the cover of ‘Little Queen' gave rise to rumors
of the band's involvement in Satanism and the occult, which prompts from [Ann] Wilson a somewhat exasperated laugh.” One of the most overplayed songs of all time, “Hotel California” by the Eagles was believed to be a metaphor for hell. Some claim Anton LaVey can be seen on the balcony in the gatefold photograph showing the band and their entourage in a hotel courtyard, but a close inspection merely shows a blurry figure that could be Saint Paul if he is who you're hoping to find.

The idea of the devil would continue to supply the power to rock's electric current, both in terms of marketing aesthetic and as spiritual fodder. Just as occultism had the power to awaken new spiritual ideas, it also had the power to shock, and the early 1980s phenomenon of heavy metal made sure the devil was walking the earth, guitar in hand. Instead of curbing the type of lyrics that prompted warning labels to be put on their albums, many bands were happy for the kind of attention that only making something taboo can create. Many heavy metal bands, already under fire for their own brand of sexual and violent lyrics, ramped it up by giving their music an aura of devilish intensity and a darkly apocalyptic sensibility.