Off the Beaten Track: How West African Voodoo became the lifeblood of the blues
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Why were Aleister Crowley and witchcraft so prominent in counterculture?
When KISS rose to prominence in the second half of the 1970s, a rumour came to the fore that Gene Simmons actually had the tongue of a cow. This insane conspiracy theory genuinely gained some real traction at the time. The reason that it wasn’t simply dismissed as madness by even the most irrational-minded meshuga-sufferers is because it represented the gathering storm of a concept: pop culture had a dark side.
We are still very much in the midst of this same jumped-up jamboree with the Illuminati and a cabal of secret celeb cults fervently cited with more vigour than ever before. As ever, no matter how slight, when it comes to conspiracies there is often no smoke without at least the smallest and most obfuscated flicker of a flame.
Obviously, that is not to say Simmons has anything other than a human tongue in his head, but that this bizarre theory has its origins in the fact that rock ‘n’ roll is often tied to occultism. And that, as a holistic assertion, has more than a grain of truth to it. In fact, the tale of rock ‘n’ roll from the get-go is the story of the conservative side of the proletariat pointing pickets at ‘the devil’s music’ and its dangerous propagators.
Thus, when rock ‘n’ roll finally got swinging in the 1960s, it needed a genuine devil to pop on the poster… and there he was, perched between Sri Yukteswar Giri and Mae West on The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s cover: Aleister Crowley. The devil himself had bravely ventured beyond his previous greatest trick of convincing the world that he didn’t exist – a feat he surely failed dismally at – and now the bastard was openly placing his face on the biggest album cover of the day.
When Edward Alexander Crowley was born in 1875, modern music was just about being whipped into shape. From its very inception, there was a secret and hidden undercurrent. However, this was nothing to do with condemnable flirtations with darkness, quite the opposite, in fact—this hidden message was one that sang the strength of the human spirit.
When slaves were shipped over from Africa, their original Vodou tenets were forced out of them. However, their old chanted rhythmic incantations worked their way into western hymns and blues. This notion of roots working their way into songs, beneath the surface, was furthered by the slaves layering coded messages into blues lyrics. In short, when you could speak, you had to learn to sing.
Thusly, there was always a mystic undertone to the music that came from the delta. Then the Great Depression hit and these two things collided in folklore and church halls. Suddenly, blues player’s open guitar cases were competing for the same kindness of strangers as a priest’s collection box. So, pastors decreed blues players as extollers of ‘devil’s music’, and they bought into this outlaw status and wove the lore of their ancestry into the mix.
The story of Robert Johnson meeting the devil at the crossroad is the crystalising moment for the collision of this Great Depression decree and African traditions. You see, in Vodou lore crossroads are where spirits could be met so the notion that Johnson sold his soul to the devil at one ties together what the vindictive priests were now saying with the ancient past.
The result was that from then on, any pop musician moving forward would have an outsider air about them. This doubled down when the radical ‘60s got moving. In some ways, Johnson 30 years earlier heralded the movement. This downtrodden straggler was the perfect picture of a ‘beat’ in more ways than one. Teetering on the brink of destitution, his outlook, like many of the beats to come, was that if he was going to fail, he would fail on his own terms, unlike his forbearers. This singular philosophy formed the central core of the counterculture movement of which he was a distant but key part.
By definition, counterculture was a movement that stationed itself outside of the norm and called for change. And it was far more vital than we often care to remember. “We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of the 1960s,” John F. Kennedy began in his 1960 Presidential election acceptance speech, “The frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, the frontier of unfilled hopes and unfilled threats.” Aside from going a little heavy on the word ‘frontier’ the highs and lows he prognosticated came to fruition and defined a decade.
Amid the race riots, assassinations, wars, massacres and endless tumult, counterculture remained an illuminating force for positive change. “When one of those episodes occurred,” Paul McCartney recalled of the wildly unravelling ‘60s on the Adam Buxton podcast and the fear that came with the flashpoints, “You felt like that, but they didn’t occur every day of the week.”
The musical explosion represented an exultant flipside. “You’d be going along making new music, developing The Beatles, enjoying the development from being a little covers band through to writing simple songs, through to writing complex songs, so that was the main thing that was going on. It genuinely made you feel. The general climate was that this was good—this was a good time, the ‘60s, but there would be spikes,” he concluded.
This spirit of cultural good tidings was something to cling to, and if you were a part of it, it was something to throw yourself into at full force. With wars raging and prejudice aplenty, if you could lend a subversive voice then you had to take that seriously. This gave the side of the ‘good times’ a sense of serious rebellion.
Enter the savvy madman who proclaimed the doctrine: “Do What Thou Wilt”. Sadly, this mantra was often troublesome amid pop culture when rockers took liberation too far. However, it’s easy to see why Crowley and his occultist ways appealed, and boy oh boy did it appeal. The Rolling Stones were into it, as were The Doors, Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath…
Beyond the attraction of being an outsider, there was also a far more benign factor behind it all: Aleister Crowley was undoubtedly interesting. With bourgeoisie taboos being busted like whack-a-moles by the children of the revolution, the free pass to enjoy satanism as a far out kick was there for all who dared to venture. How on earth do you expect a coked-up Bowie not to be enthralled by the concept of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn? In an age where normal was boring, the counterculture quote of Hunter S. Thompson came to the fore: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
When you coupled this with the fact that something genuinely seemed to be happening, there was a sense of change and revolution in the air, and some interests in the occult got rather serious. Thus, even in 1979, you had stories in the New York Post about Anita Pallenberg, the wife of Keith Richards, being linked to a witches coven in South Salem, New York where Richards owned a house.
You can read a lot into these stories (and many do) but you can also conclude that those who got rich by being wild have esoteric fancies. In truth, that may well be the extent of Crowley’s pervasiveness in pop culture. He was a magician and artist who sought out a higher means (a mere outsider artist if you strip away some of the nettlesome libertine extremes). And how many times have you heard rockers talk about the power of music and songs being more than songs?
In this context, you can see why Bowie might identify with Crowley’s work and weird alternative world. As Ronald Hutton said of Crowley, “To [Crowley] the greatest aim of the magician was to merge with a higher power connected to the wellsprings of the universe.” That quote could be said of Bowie and a slew of other musicians too.
Now, his influence has been somewhat overplayed to fit the conspiracies of the day and to add fuel to fire of the satanic panic. However, Crowley wasn’t even a satanist, and not to underplay the fact that a huge sway of major artists were enthralled with Crowley and his work, but its seemingly little more than a captivating outsider artist aligning with the zeitgeist to lure the interest of other cultural outlaws and nothing more.
Pop culture is the cult of individualism, and when you trim off the fat and troublesome additions, that was the crux of Crowley’s mantra. He was the strangest photo-punk of them all and he enamoured an army of musicians, liberated from being judicious by a wild movement, in the process.
