Led Zeppelin: Chapter Nine: So Mote it Be
Part Two: THE CURSE OF KING MIDAS:
“Nay! For I am of the Serpent's party; Knowledge is good,
be the price what it may.” - Aleister Crowley, The
Psychology of Hashish
The thing that dominated the room [was] a
vast double circle on the floor in what appeared to be
whitewash. Between the concentric circles were written
innumerable words. Farthest away from all this, about two feet
outside the circle and three feet over to the north, was a
circle enclosed by a triangle, also much lettered inside and
out. [The magician] entered the circle and closed it with the
point of his sword and proceeded to the centre where he laid
the sword across the toes of his white shoes; then he drew a
wand from his belt and unwrapped it, laying the red silk cloth
across his shoulders. “From now on,” he said, in a
normal, even voice, “no one is to move.”
From somewhere inside his vestments he
produced a small crucible which he set at his feet before the
sword. Small blue flames promptly began to rise from the bowl
and he cast incense into it. “We are to call upon
Marchosias, a great marquis of the Descending Hierarchy,”
he said. “Before he fell, he belonged to the Order of
Dominations among the angels. His virtue is that he gives true
answers. Stand fast all…”
With a sudden motion [the magician] thrust
the end of his rod into the surging flames… at once the
air of the hall rang with a long, frightful chain of woeful
howls. Above the bestial clamour [the magician] shouted:
“I adjure thee, great Marchosias, the agent of the
Emperor Lucifer and of his beloved son Lucifuge Rofocale by the
power of the pact…” The noise rose higher and a
green steam began to come off the brazier. But there was no
other answer. His face white and cruel, [the magician] rasped
over the tumult: “I adjure thee, Marchosias, by the pact
and by the names, appear instanter.” He plunged the rod a
second time into the flames. The room screamed… but still
there was no apparition.
The rod went back into the fire. Instantly
the place rocked as though the earth moved under it.
“Stand fast,” [the magician] said hoarsely.
Something else said, “Hush, I am here. What dost thou
seek of me? Why dost thou disturb my repose?” The
building shuddered again… then from the middle of the
triangle to the northwest, a slow cloud of yellow fumes went up
towards the ceiling, making them all cough, even [the
magician]. As it spread and thinned [they] could see a shape
forming under it… it was something like a she-wolf, grey
and immense, with green glisten¬ing eyes. A wave of
coldness was coming from it… the cloud continued to
dissipate. The she-wolf glared at them, slowly spreading her
griffin's wings. Her serpent's tail lashed gently,
scalily…
The above passage comes from James Blish,
author of Black Easter. Everyone who read it when the book was
first published in 1980 was immediately divided into two camps:
those that believed Blish had actually witnessed a genuine High
Magick ritual, and those that dismissed it as science-fiction.
It's a debate that continues to this day. For in the end, it
comes down to belief, something you either do or do not posses
- or are busy, perhaps, trying to suppress. What can't be
denied is that such rituals do exist and are performed on a
regular basis - the essence of the Abra-melin ritual (one of
the most significant and difficult to achieve) is to
“Invoke Often” - and not just in a few pockmarked
villages in remote, uneducated parts of the world. In fact,
there are hardly any major towns or cities in the UK that
aren't home to at least one secret society whose purpose is the
study, practise and performance of precisely such rituals. The
people involved are not simple peasants, either, but drawn from
some of the brightest, most questioning minds, many of them
from the very upper-echelons of society - as they have been for
centuries.
We are not talking about simple witchcraft
of the type depicted in a make-you-jump Stephen King novel or
the broomstick abracadabra of a Harry Potter movie (though many
books, films and other famous works of art do incorporate
elements of genuine ritual magick). According to the 19th
century writer and magician Eliphas Levi, occult knowledge -
that is, the hidden knowledge of the ages, going back to
pre-Christian times, all the way to the Serpent and the Garden
of Eden - is a product of philosophical and religious equations
as exact as any science. Furthermore, that those who are able
to acquire this knowledge and use it in the correct manner
instantly become masters of those who do not. As an earlier
proponent of the magician's art, Paracelsus, wrote in the 16th
century: “The magical is a great hidden wisdom… no
armour can shield against it because it strikes at the inward
spirit of life. Of this we may rest assured.” Or as
Aleister Crowley - after Merlin, now perhaps the most notorious
occultist of all - put it so succinctly, “Certain actions
produce certain results.”
The idea that rock music might also be
related to occult practises hardly began, or indeed ends, with
the long-held view that Jimmy Page - and, ergo, Led Zeppelin -
were dabblers in black magic and/or holders of so-called
Satanic beliefs. Indeed, the most enduring myth about the band
is that three of its members - the exception being the 'quiet
one', John Paul Jones - entered into a Faustian pact with the
Devil, signing away their immortal souls in exchange for
earthly success. Only someone who knew nothing about the occult
could indulge in such an obvious fantasy, though. That is not
to say that Jimmy Page has never been involved in occult
practises; rather, the opposite. That Page's interest in occult
ritual is so serious and longstanding it would be facile to
suggest anything as feeble-minded as a pact with the Devil. As
for involving anyone else in the band… that would have
been like inviting them to co-produce the Zeppelin albums with
him: a recipe for disaster that would only dilute and distort -
completely ruin, in fact - what this master musician and
would-be magician was attempting to do. Or as he would have put
it back then - to invoke.
Even in 1970, the year Page's deepening
interest in the works of the charismatic Crowley became public
for the first time with the abbreviated inscription of his
famous maxim, Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law,
into the various run-out grooves of Led Zeppelin III, rock as
the devil's music was hardly a new idea. Even mama-loving,
god-fearing Elvis stood accused early on of doing the devil's
work with his dangerously gyrating rhythms and head-turning
beats. While other stars of Presley's generation like Little
Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis were so convinced of the intrinsic
ungodliness of their music they would eventually give up years
of their respective careers to wrestling painfully with the
idea that what they'd been doing - inciting young people to
utterly lose themselves in the wilful abandonment of
rock'n'roll - was somehow wrong; not just subversive but
fundamentally perverted; unfit for consumption by decent
church-going folk. A notion compounded by the common-held
belief that the blues - the forefather of rock'n'roll - was
propagated by itinerant black men who, it was claimed, had been
taught to play while sitting atop gravestones at midnight, or,
in the case of Robert Johnson, from the devil himself,
encountered after dark at a certain crossroads. Fanciful ideas
lent unsettling credence by the fact that so many early blues
songs were built on notions of eternal damnation begun here on
Earth, the outsider following his lonely doom-laden path;
itself a perversion of the real roots of the music, which lay
in preaching, the church, gospel, and the praise of God, but
which the blues now delivered unto the jook-joints, roadhouses
and dollar-a-go brothels populated by gun-toting, fatherless
men and evil duplicitous women to whom it was a foregone
conclusion a po' boy would surely lose his soul.
Compared, however, to the more
intentionally subversive ideas being espoused just a decade
later in the music of those flamboyantly attired, long-haired,
album-oriented groups that took their cue from the Beatles and
the Stones, what the original Fifties generation of
rock'n'rollers was up to is now seen as woefully innocent,
quaint almost. The image of Aleister Crowley had already shown
up at the personal request of John Lennon on the cover of Sgt.
Pepper - glaring balefully out from between Mae West and one of
George Harrison's Indian gurus - three years before a
sniggering, stoned Jimmy Page instructed engineer Terry Manning
to scratch Crowley-isms into the run-out grooves of the third
Zeppelin album. While the Stones - influenced as much by Brian
Jones' girlfriend Anita Pallenberg's enthusiastic but
amateurish interest in the occult as by Mick Jagger's passing
fascination with intellectual notions of good and evil and
Keith Richards' more down-to-earth but steadily increasing use
of cocaine, heroin and anything else that could take him to
“a different realm” - had released Their Satanic
Majesties Request while Jimmy was still scrabbling around on
Dick Clark package tours with the Yardbirds.
But the Stones' flirtation with the dark
side had come to an ignominious and bloody end when Meredith
Hunter was murdered at Altamont - just as the band was reaching
the climax of 'Sympathy for the Devil'. After that, whatever
involvement with the occult the Stones had been indulging in -
from Jagger's brilliantly convincing portrayal of a degenerate
rock star in the 1968 movie, Performance (scripted and
co-directed by Donald Cammell, son of Crowley biographer and
friend, Charles R Cammell) to his relationship with Crowley
disciple, Kenneth Anger, whose 1969 underground film Invocation
Of My Demon Brother (Arrangement In Black & Gold)
fea¬tured the singer's specially composed synthesiser
soundtrack - was rapidly curtailed, leaving the field open for
less serious but more determinedly outré rock acts like
Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper to base their entire acts on an
ersatz but clearly signposted association with the occult,
elaborating on the earlier pantomime shtick of self-styled
tremble-tremble merchants like Screaming Lord Sutch (who would
come onstage in a coffin) and Arthur 'God Of Hellfire' Brown.
Even on those occasions when these next-generation rockers
showed a more serious interest in the occult, their basic lack
of knowledge on the subject left them as nonplussed as most of
their easily shocked audience. Terry 'Geezer' Butler, bassist
and chief lyricist of Black Sabbath, insists he had a
“genuine interest in the occult” when the band
first started in 1968, but it was less to do with any serious
reading of Crowley and his ilk and more “an
extension” of his fondness for “science-fiction
stories, horror films, anything that was kind of out
there.” He also flatly denies that he or anyone else in
Sabbath ever took part in any magickal rituals or
spell-casting. “I just had a morbid interest in
it,” he says now. “Everybody was reading up about
it. All the love and peace thing had gone, the Vietnam War
thing was happening and a lot of kids were getting into all
kinds of mysticism and occultism.” His own interest ended
abruptly, however, after an incident which so frightened him,
“I just went off the whole thing.” Living in a
one-bedroom flat which he had painted completely black,
“I had all these inverted crosses around the place and
all these posters of Satan and all that kind of stuff. Then I
was just lying in bed one night and I woke up suddenly, and
there was like this black shape standing at the foot of me bed.
And I wasn't on drugs or anything, but for some reason I
thought it was the Devil himself! It was almost as if this
thing was saying to me, 'It's time to either pledge allegiance
or piss off!'” He was so shaken he immediately repainted
the flat orange. “I took all the posters down, put like
proper crucifixes in there, and that's when I started wearing a
cross. We all did.” continue reading
