THE DEVIL’S MUSIC – ROCK 'n' Roll's Romance with the
occult
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Rock n roll has always been the devils music, the antithesis of what good God
fearing, law abiding family folk would want to hear. Those dangerous, blatantly
sexual hoodoo voodoo rhythms were bound to corrupt your soul, lead you into a
dissolute lifestyle fuelled on booze and drugs. Loose women were there around
every corner. While some believe that the road of excess leads to the palace of
wisdom, for many, the road of rock n roll will lead to damnation. And it all
started with a painfully shy young man from Hazlehurst,
Mississippi.
Robert Johnson was probably born on May 8, 1911. His father was a well to do landowner and furniture maker. After a short spell
in Memphis the family relocated and Roberts fate was sealed when he chanced upon
blues musician Son House who had moved to Robinsonville where his musical
partner Willie Brown already lived. According to the legend, Johnson followed
House around, trying to learn as much of his guitar playing style as possible,
but by all accounts, he wasn’t great. Then he suddenly disappeared, only to
return a few months later, blowing everybody's mind with his miraculous guitar
technique. And so the story goes, that Robert Johnson, in some diabolical pact,
sold his soul to the devil at the cross roads in return for his musical talents.
And why not ? If your playing the devils music, might as well ask the gentleman
for a few favours along the way.
Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin is a man very much influenced by the playing of
Robert Johnson. Today, listening to Johnson, the sound he makes is far removed
from what we expect the blues to be. The rhythms and phrasing is complex yet
primitive. He sounds closer to African folk music than the blues, and Eric
Clapton (a huge fan) claims he was scared by Johnson's records when he first
heard them. Page was possibly drawn to Johnson too because of the legend. A
shady character, there are only two known photos of Johnson, both remained
undiscovered until the 1980’s. Only 29 songs of his were ever recorded and his
life story remains clouded in mystery. A hard drinking womanizer, even his death
is like something from a Shakespearian tragedy; poisoned after a gig by a
jealous husband. Page of course himself, is a man with a rather shady past.
Amongst other things, he was and is a student and fan of Aleister Crowley
(1875-1945).
Crowley, AKA The Great Beast 666 was an occultist, drug addict, mountaineer,
poet and painter, and is the grandfather of modern magic, or magick as he liked
to spell it. Without him, the 20th century renaissance in magic /
witchcraft / sorcery would not have been possible. He was the first to live the
rock n roll lifestyle, decades before the liberated 60’s. Sex, drugs and
Magick, were his lot. He was dubbed the wickedest man in the world by the
popular press in his hey day, and even deported from Sicily by Mussolini.
Fiercely anti-Christian, Crowley loved nothing better than shocking the general
public, whom he despised as simple-minded sheep. In The World’s Tragedy
he wrote
"I do not wish to argue the
doctrines of Jesus, they and they alone, have degraded the world to it's present
condition. I take it that Christianity is not only the cause but the symptom of
slavery."
In his Confessions he said
"I simply went over to Satan’s
side; and to this hour I cannot tell why. But I found myself passionately eager
to serve my new master. I was not content to believe in a personal devil and
serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get hold of him
personally and become his chief of staff."
Of course Crowley no more believed in a literal Satan or the Devil than he did
in Santa. To the initiated he was having a laugh, but he certainly took his
magick, and the gods seriously. Likewise, the ‘devil’ that Robert Johnson
may or may not have invoked at the crossroads was most likely Papa Legba, a
trickster god of African origin. Legba is to be found at a spiritual crossroads
and gives
(or denies) permission to speak with the spirits. In Nigeria Legba is viewed as
young and virile and is often horned and ithyphallic. Sounds a lot like Old Nick
himself !
Page not only amassed a vast collection of Crowley memorabilia, but went as far
as buying The Beast’s old house Boleskine, which overlooks Lough Ness in
Scotland.
Crowley had purchased the house in 1899 in order to perform the operation known
as The Knowledge And Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, which is found in The
Book of the Sacred Magick of Abra-Melin the Mage. In order to perform it,
Crowley wrote,
’One must have a house where proper precautions against disturbance can be
taken; this being arranged, there is really nothing to do but to aspire with
increasing fervour and concentration, for six months, towards the obtaining of
the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.’
In his autobiography Confessions (Ch. 22), he continues ‘The first
essential is a house in a more or less secluded situation. There should be a
door opening to the north from the room of which you make your oratory. Outside
this door, you construct a terrace covered with fine river sand. This ends in a
"lodge" where the spirits may congregate.’
Boleskine fitted the bill. But Crowley grew restless, and some urgent business
required that he take a break from the ritual to attend to business in Paris.
This was a drastic mistake and many scholars of the occult claim that this was
the beginning of Crowley becoming possessed, or entering into some sort of
untreatable psychosis. Either way, Boleskine would never be the same.
Page talked about Boleskine in a 1970’s interview…..
”There were two or three owners before Crowley moved into it. It was also a
church that was burned to the ground with the congregation in it. And that's the
site of the house. Strange things have happened in that house that had nothing
to do with Crowley. The bad vibes were already there. A man was beheaded there
and sometimes you can hear his head rolling down. I haven't actually heard it,
but a friend of mine, who is extremely straight and doesn't know anything about
anything like that at all, heard it. He thought it was the cats bungling about.
I wasn't there at the time, but he told the help, "Why don't you let the
cats out at night? They make a terrible racket, rolling about in the
halls." And they said, 'The cats are locked in a room every night."
Then they told him the story of the house. So that sort of thing was there
before Crowley got there. Of course, after Crowley there have been suicides,
people carted off to mental hospitals…....”
This quote shows Page in some sort of denial, or more likely trying to play down
Crowley's reputation for the music press. In truth, it
seems that Crowley caused quite a stir while he was there. The locals refused to
walk by the house, even during daylight and wild rumours of black magic and
diabolical goings-on circulated in the village. The malevolent presence in the
house caused all sorts of disturbing phenomena that was to send one of his
housemaids mad, and lead to the house becoming haunted by strange entities. Even
the lodgekeeper, a total abstainer for twenty years, went on a three-day bender
and tried to kill his wife and children.
Crowley’s magick lives on, and he is more popular today than he was when
alive. Thelema, the belief system he synthesized is popular worldwide and the
location of Boleskine House is claimed to be the Omphalos or Centre of Power for
Thelema, and is to continue as such for the duration of the Aeon of Horus, which
is roughly 2000 years ! Crowley-influenced groups such as O.T.O. Lodges and
Gnostic Mass Temples are ideally to be oriented towards Boleskine. Page however
no longer owns the house. Its now a family home, and the owners refuse to be
interviewed. I haven’t heard any reports on how they deal with pilgrims, as
there surely must be a few every now and then.
Crowley of course was one of the famous faces on the cover of The Beatles Sgt.
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
album alongside Mae West, W.C. Fields, Marilyn Monroe, Shirley Temple, Stan
Laurel, Bob Dylan and a bunch of other folks that the fab four “admired.”
The Stone’s also name-dropped The Beast as an inspiration and David Bowie has
written about Uncle Aleister, notably in Quicksand and Station To
Station, as have a myriad of Metal bands, some with tongue in cheek (one
assumes) . And while Jim Morrison may have been married (briefly) to an
initiated witch long before it was fashionable, and Marilyn Manson is rumoured
to be fully paid up member of the Church Of Satan, it has taken the likes of
Coil and Genesis P. Orridges’ outfit, Psychic TV, to move things up a notch.
Genesis P-Orridge always pushed the boundaries with situationist / performance
art ensemble COUM transmissions in the late 60’s and 70’s . Their shows
dealt with subjects such as prostitution, pornography, serial killers, and
occultism. Having invented Industrial music with Throbbing Gristle, he went on
to form Psychic TV, which received wider exposure, including some chart-topping
singles.
On a live Psychic TV album, the introduction to one of the songs sums it all
up.…
“We'd like to dedicate this concert to
Alex Sanders who died today the Full Moon of Beltane who was known as "The
King of the Witches" and who was the man who made witchcraft and magic
legal in Britain after a long struggle. So we'd like you to remember that. But
the war goes on!”
An offshoot of the band was Thee Temple Of Psychick Youth (TOPY), which was
intended to be the philosophical wing of Psychic TV, but also presented an image
of being a cult-like fanclub for the group. Although P-Orridge left it in1991,
Thee Temple continues to this day as an ever-evolving network of loosely
connected people who are both artists and practitioners of chaos magick, which
is a synthesis of modern witchcraft and the techniques of Austin Spare and
Crowley. TOPY focuses on the psychic and magical aspects of the human brain
linked with "guiltless sexuality". Heady stuff indeed. I blame it all
on Robert Johnson.
Eamonn Dowd © 2009
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