Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century

5. Aleister Crowley and the Hermeneutic of Authority

I ¤rst confronted Aleister Crowley’s face in church as a boy during a revivalist’s slide show. The revivalist was a traveling Christian Evangelical preacher spreading the word of the Devil’s doings in three-day seminars for young Christians. I can remember his coming to town every year since I was about six years old.1 Before I saw my ¤rst “show” I was giddy; I had ¤nally turned nine and was therefore old enough to see the preacher’s slides and movies, many of which were “too graphic” and “too scary” for the younger folks. I cannot remember with any precision what the revivalist did; I recall that he would carefully weave his incendiary sermons with slides of Satanic ritual chambers and movies about Anton LaVey, a Satanic priest (whom I will discuss at some length in chapter 7). He would play creepy music and sometimes would become so impassioned that he would cry. He worked us into a big upset, and then he would have the pianist play “Just as I Am” and make us weep and invite us—young people between the ages of nine to fourteen (maybe sixteen, but once cars were drivable young people tended to stop going to church)—to the altar to kneel and pray for Jesus to come into our hearts. Of course, after the big production, parents were encouraged to donate money to the “ministry.” One night the preacher’s talk was about how Lucifer was in control of the rock music industry. He played Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” backwards and had us focus on the verse that signaled Robert Plant’s “prayer to Satan”: in the lyric when Plant sings, “Yes there are two paths you can go by, but in long run, there’s still time to change the road you’re on,” one hears something that sounds like “Satan, my sweet Satan” when the song is played in reverse. Then the preacher obsessed over the “Satanic” aesthetic of one of Ozzy Osborne ’s records, which Osborne deliberately courted to sell records. He played an “Ozzy” song for us that he characterized as a “hymn”
Interlude Re-membering Crowley to Aleister Crowley, and pointed out that the “white horse” reference in the lyrics symbolized a penis, thus suggestive of Ozzy’s sinful homosexuality.2 As he showed us Crowley’s mug on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album (he is next to Mae West in the top left-hand row of faces), he told us Crowley was a famous Satanist who advocated the killing of babies and saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards. The preacher followed this revelation with—I think, although I admit my memory here is dim—a story of a young Satanist whom he interviewed. He claimed that the young man confessed to sacri¤cing a baby at Satan’s urging. I ¤nd this all quite unbelievable today, although I do not dismiss its grave reality for a large number of people. This reality certainly is not the one that a self-labeled Satanist or occultist would claim, although there is something to be said about modern occultism’s anti-Christian bent. Nevertheless, the revivalist’s presentations scared me a great deal at that time, enough to help me remember them in some detail, at least. I remember I was afraid of Ozzy Osborne’s music for years. My personal introduction to Crowley (see ¤g. 6) re®ects how most people are introduced to the occult today. We come to it through urban legends told around camp¤res or at church, we learn about it through the stories people tell during card games, we get into its meanings pondering the dark ambiguities of album covers or lyrics, 110 / interlude Fig. 6. Aleister Crowley (1875– 1947). This photograph was taken in the 1920s. Courtesy of the Ordo Templi Orientis. and we make meaning of it watching movies and television. In this everyday respect the occult represents the “unknown,” an arena of discourse to which we are necessarily “outsiders.” Everyday tales that claim to illuminate the darkness of its inner circle invite a kind of pleasure—a pleasure akin to that of hearing a ¤ctional horror story or watching a scary movie. The caveat, of course, is that these tales announce themselves to be true. I also wrote about my personal encounter with Crowley because...