Regular Episode
218 – Season of the Witch
Download this episode as MP3 (right-click, save-as)
Also mentioned: Karen’s own new book, 📚 On the Offensive 💵, is available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your local bookseller.
🎸 What Do We Mean by “Rock” and “The Occult”?
Peter resists tidy definitions for both terms. Rock and roll, for his purposes, begins with music that pushes against the mainstream — tracing its roots through gospel, blues, and African-American musical traditions before exploding into the electric era. The occult, meanwhile, is treated as a broad umbrella: ceremonial magic, tarot, astrology, Theosophy, Eastern mysticism, the I Ching, even meditation — anything that, especially in the 1960s counterculture, stood outside normative Judeo-Christian practice. Psychedelic drugs, Peter notes, were the accelerant that fused all of it together.
🪄 The Crossroads Legend and Its African Roots
The story of selling your soul at the crossroads is often pinned to Robert Johnson, but Peter traces it back further — to fellow Delta bluesman Tommy Johnson (no relation), whose extraordinary falsetto, not his guitar playing, was said to be the gift he received. More importantly, Peter argues the crossroads figure isn’t really the Christian Satan at all, but closer to Legba — a West African deity and divine messenger who mediates between humanity and the spirit world, a figure whose attributes were later mapped onto the devil by Christian interpreters. The enslaved people brought from Africa did not simply abandon their religious traditions; those traditions survived, hidden within and beneath the Christianity imposed on them, and eventually surfaced in the music.
🪩 The Beatles, Manson, and the Perils of Occult Pattern-Matching
Peter and Blake discuss how the Beatles became ground zero for the misreading of rock lyrics as secret occult messages. John Lennon responded to this tendency partly by writing deliberately nonsensical lyrics — most famously I Am the Walrus — to frustrate people projecting meaning onto his songs. The conversation turns to Charles Manson, whose “Helter Skelter” reading of The White Album represents the darkest possible outcome of that pattern-matching impulse. The murders happened at the precise moment the Aquarian dream of the 1960s was already collapsing — heroin replacing LSD, the war dragging on, Haight-Ashbury’s “Death of the Hippie” ceremony having already taken place in 1967. Also noted: the genuinely eerie web of connections around Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski‘s Rosemary’s Baby, and the Dakota Building — a lesson in how true connections can still resist meaningful interpretation.
🤘 Black Sabbath, Ozzy, and the Moralist Monsters
Black Sabbath took their name from the 1963 Italian horror film of the same name, and their occult imagery was essentially theatrical — as Peter points out, the actual lyrics of songs like “War Pigs” are moralistic critiques of warmongering, not invocations of Satan. Ozzy’s “Mr. Crowley” is affectionate tribute more than genuine devotion (Blake notes that Ozzy famously mispronounces Aleister Crowley‘s name — it rhymes with “holy”). Jimmy Page, by contrast, had a far more serious and sustained engagement with Crowley’s ideas, including purchasing Boleskine House, Crowley’s former home on the shores of Loch Ness, and having Crowley’s aphorism engraved in the inner groove of Led Zeppelin III.
🌟 Elvis, George Harrison, and the Music as Spiritual Practice
Elvis Presley’s gospel-rooted, hip-swinging performance style — often accused of being sexually deviant or diabolical — came directly from the Assembly of God church he grew up in, where that kind of physical worship was entirely normal. The congregation, as one minister reportedly put it, wasn’t about to “let the devil have all the good music.” George Harrison is discussed as perhaps the most genuinely spiritually engaged rock musician of his era — his relationship with Ravi Shankar and the introduction of the sitar into Western pop, his deep involvement with the Hare Krishna movement, and his song “My Sweet Lord” all pointing toward a sincere rather than performative spiritual seeking.
🔮 Bowie, the Illuminati, and Magic as Transformation
David Bowie emerges in the conversation as what Peter calls “the great rock and roll alchemist” — someone who genuinely incorporated occult symbolism and Thelemic ideas into his persona cycles, though not always from a position of cool mastery: his mid-1970s cocaine period brought genuine paranoid terror of the occult, something he later discussed with some embarrassment. Peter invokes Dion Fortune‘s gloss on Crowley’s definition of magic — “the art and science of causing change to occur in consciousness according to will” — to argue that Bowie’s music really did do exactly that.
The episode closes with a discussion of the Illuminati — the real historical order, which was a short-lived radical Enlightenment fraternity, versus the conspiracy tradition that followed, fed by texts like Proofs of a Conspiracy (1797) and the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The hosts note that musicians from Jay-Z to Madonna have played knowingly with Illuminati imagery — Madonna’s Super Bowl halftime show being a particularly spectacular example — without actually being members of any secret order.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll 💵 by Peter Bebergal
– 📚 Strange Frequencies 💵 by Peter Bebergal (discussed on MonsterTalk episode #180)
– 📚 On the Offensive 💵 by Karen Stollznow
– 📚 Magic in Theory and Practice 💵 by Aleister Crowley
🔗 Related Links
– Crossroads in mythology
– Papa Legba (West African/Vodou deity)
– Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
– Theosophy
– Boleskine House (Jimmy Page / Aleister Crowley)
– UFO Club, London — short-lived but hugely influential hub of psychedelic lights-and-sound culture
– Appendix N — Gary Gygax’s list of literary influences on Dungeons & Dragons, the subject of Peter’s forthcoming anthology
– The Satanic Temple — atheistic, activist organization discussed in the context of performative versus literal Satanism
– Anthology of American Folk Music (Harry Smith, via Archive.org) — referenced in the companion Spotify playlist
– Peter’s original Season of the Witch Spotify playlist
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
Peter Bebergal returns (previously on episode #180 with his book Strange Frequencies) to discuss magic, witchcraft, and the occult and how those things impacted the world of Rock & Roll music. Check the attachment to this episode for a bunch of music links relevant to the show and Peter’s book Season of the Witch.
Speaking of books – Karen has a new one and I made an easy to remember shortcut to it on Amazon: http://bit.ly/OnTheOffensive
(The lettering case in that link does matter.)
Discussed in the episode:
Image of David Bowie in “Diamond Dogs” album (MOMA)
Made for TV Movie: Devil Dog – The Hound of Hell
The George Harrison “documentary” Karen mentions – Paul McCartney Really Is Dead: The Last Testament of George Harrison (There is a lot of mixed messaging out there on whether this is a serious but wacky documentary or a silly but confusing mockumentary. It was originally released as a documentary but the filmmaker has since reclassified it as “mockumentary” – was this for legal reasons?) FYI: The narration is not by George Harrison.
The UFO Club in London was a short-lived hub of early lights & sounds and psychedelic imagery. It only operated over a two-year span but had a tremendous impact on music culture – and on posters for bands.
Peter’s original SOTW Spotify List (link)
| Song/Album | Notes |
| Fire (The Crazy World of Arthur Brown) | Starts with the iconic (and parent-frightening) “I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE…” |
| Sacred Songs (Daryl Hall) | Daryl Hall (!?) album inspired by the work of Aleister Crowley |
| Cross Road Blues (Robert Johnson) | While the legend of the blues musician at the crossroads is often applied to Robert Johnson, it has earlier roots with… |
| Cool Drink of Water Blues (Tommy Johnson) | Tommy Johnson, not related to Robert, was the focus of an earlier version of the crossroads legend |
| Anthology of American Folk Music (via archive.org) | A partial selection of the 6-album (3, 2-record ea) set of American Folk Music curated by Harry Smith. |
| The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (Pink Floyd) | The Syd Barrett-led Pink Floyd would change a lot after Barrett’s descent into mental illness, but there are psychedelic and occult themes in this eclectic early Floyd album. Interstellar Overdrive is a good long instrumental track to read Bebergal’s book to. |
| My Sweet Lord (George Harrison) | Perhaps the most public of the musician seekers, Harrison’s ode to the search for a connection to the numinous was very successful – and also (accidentally?) directly copied He’s So Fine by The Chiffons. |
| Shankar: Dhun (Ravi Shankar) | Sitar would meet Guitar when the Beatles went to India and met gurus and traditional Indian musicians, most famously Ravi Shankar. |
| Lucifer Rising soundtrack (Bobby BeauSoleil) | The soundtrack to occult filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s movie Lucifer Rising was supposed to be done by Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, but things happened. (This complicated story is covered in Bebergal’s book.) |
| War Pigs (Black Sabbath) | The Ozzy Osborne led band would take its name from an Italian horror film, but like Alice Cooper, the “occult” aspects of Sabbath appear to be entirely performative. Consider Ozzy’s paean to Aleister Crowley in which he fails to pronounce the old occultist’s name right. (Crowley rhymes with holy.) |
| Sympathy for the Devil (The Rolling Stones) | The Stones’ “wicked” song – was it inspired by Baudelaire or Kenneth Anger? And how many times do the band sing “who? who?” in this 6-minute treat? |
| Misty Mountain Hop (Led Zeppelin) | Combining elements of Tolkien fantasy and drug-fueled psychedelic experiences, LZ music combined many elements of fictional and authentic occult imagery. Jimmy Page’s interest in Aleister Crowley is legendary with him even buying Crowley’s Loch Ness adjacent home Boleskin. |
| Mephisto Waltz (Misfits) | The punk band Misfits took their imagery and themes from horror movies and the occult as well. |
| Jack Parsons (The Claypool Lennon Delirium) | This came out after Bebergal’s book, but this is an amazing modern throwback to the psychedelic era that also tells a weirdly surprisingly accurate story of Jack Parsons, occultist, and rocketeer. |
| Hotter than Hell (KISS) | KISS aligned itself with wild stage antics and imagery, but in the 1970s even having the word “hell” in your song titles could lead to allegations that your band’s name really stood for “Knights in Satan’s Service.” (Narrator: It didn’t.) |
| Life on Mars? (David Bowie) | Bowie’s role in occult rock history is really quite peculiar and not what I expected. Often in drug-fueled paranoia of the occult, his off-stage behavior stands in stark contrast from the on-stage cool presence. I wanted to include a song from him on this list and this peculiar antithesis to My Way is one I really like. |
| After Cease to Exist (Throbbing Gristle) | I’m not recommending this 20 min weird and disturbing soundscape – but if you’re feeling a bit like Frank in Hellraiser and just wonder what the cenobites probably jam to? Anyway, in Bebergal’s book, there are some interesting tidbits about how Throbbing Gristle’s members became involved with William S. Burroughs and the occult aspects of his life. |
| Bela Lugosi’s Dead (Bauhaus) | The song that kicked off the goth scene. It doesn’t take 9 mins to tell people that Bela Lugosi (the actor who played Dracula in the 1931 Universal horror film) is dead… but it does the Bauhaus way. |
| Hallowed Be Thy Name (Iron Maiden) | Peter doesn’t write about Iron Maiden in the book, but growing up in the 80s, Iron Maiden was one of the many reasons I refused to get a 96 Rock Card. I was so not into heavy metal and it was weird catching up on that stuff in my 40s instead of my teens. |
| In Search Of Space (Hawkwind) | Before Motorhead, Lemmy sang about UFOs. (Well, I think that’s what he’s singing about?) |
| Door of the Cosmos (Sun Ra) | Sun Ra’s jazz music isn’t really rock, but it’s something. And I think magician Penn Jillette mentions Sun Ra about as often as he mentions James Randi. |
| Witch Trial (Black Mass Lucifer) | The pioneering electronic album Black Mass Lucifer – or is it Black Mass by Lucifer? – is an album by electronic music audio explorer Mort Garson. It’s occult-themed but its weird MOOG tonal tapestries, without the context of title or lyrics, would be hard to classify as specifically “magic” themed. |
| The Tales of Topographic Oceans (Yes) | A friend once described to me how that in the 1970s it was common to put on long, trippy albums and just stare at album artwork and go on imaginary journeys. With a cover by Roger Dean and just four songs, each about 20 mins in length, I think this is exactly what he was talking about. I once had an angry Navy training instructor basically spit at Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart” and shout to the class “It ain’t Yes unless it takes 15 minutes to listen to and has a 5-minute guitar solo!” |
| Apes**t (Beyonce and Jay-Z) | Jay-Z has played around with the imagery of the illuminati and occult. Here’s an article about the imagery use in the video for this song. |
| Secular Haze (Ghost B.C.) | Combines ghoulish occult imagery with monk garb and skeletal makeup. Swedish in origin, but not flat-packed. |
Blake Smith
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