The Occult

The Occult in Music, Film, and Art

The Occult in Culture · 10 min read

The twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been a particularly rich period for the cultural absorption of occult material, and three fields in particular — popular music, cinema, and the visual arts — have produced a substantial body of work that uses esoteric symbolism, draws on the history of the occult, and has been the subject of serious critical discussion. The work discussed here is well known, but the critical literature around it is often more interesting than the popular lore. The standard reference for the popular side of the question is Colin Wilson’s The Strength to Dream (1962); for the academic side, the relevant reference points are Wouter Hanegraaff’s edited Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (2005) and, for music specifically, the work of the cultural historian Mike Jay on the Spiritualist inheritance. The actual historical content of the work is the more important part of the story, and the gap between the popular understanding and the historical record is the most useful critical lens.

The Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and the Pop Seventies

Two of the most famous examples of occult symbolism in popular music are the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” and the Beatles’ late-period albums. “Sympathy for the Devil” was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in 1968, and the lyrics are delivered in the first person by a narrator who announces, “Pleased to meet you / hope you guess my name.” Jagger has said in interviews that the song is sung by the Devil himself — the song has sometimes been glossed as a Mephistophelean figure, but Jagger’s stated intent is the Christian devil, drawing on the Book of Revelation and on Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita (whose first Russian edition had appeared in 1966-1967 in a censored form). The narrator claims responsibility for the Russian Revolution, the Blitz, the assassination of the Kennedys, and various other catastrophes. The song was performed at the Rock and Roll Circus of 1968, at Altamont in 1969 (a concert marred by the killing of a spectator by a Hells Angel), and at the 1976 concert in Knebworth. The song’s deliberate identification of a pop narrator with the figure of the accuser was a major pop-cultural event, and one of the more interesting things about it is that Jagger and Richards were already well-read enough to be drawing on Bulgakov before the novel was generally available in English.

The Beatles’ late albums, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) and Abbey Road (1969), included substantial occult symbolism. The Sgt. Pepper cover included Aleister Crowley’s image among the dozens of figures on the cover, and the “Paul is dead” rumour — which held that Paul McCartney had died in 1966 and been replaced by a look-alike — was read by many commentators in the late 1960s as a coded occult narrative, and the rumour has remained a permanent feature of Beatles lore. The rumour was probably a typical example of pop-cultural pareidolia, but it drew on a real set of occult resources and on the general disposition of the late-1960s counterculture to find meaning in apparent signals.

The Led Zeppelin IV album of 1971 included four unlabelled symbols, one for each of the four members, and the album’s tracks, particularly “Stairway to Heaven,” have been the subject of extensive critical discussion. The guitarist Jimmy Page acquired Aleister Crowley’s former home, Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness, in 1970, and the symbolism of the album draws on a wide range of Hermetic, Kabbalistic, and theosophical sources. The “Satanic” reading of the album, propagated by conservative Christian writers in the 1980s, is largely a product of the post-Satanic Panic reading of popular music (and in particular of the backmasking literature of the early 1980s, including the 1982 TV special The Power of Rock), and the album’s actual symbolic vocabulary is more accurately described as a high-modernist Hermetic programme. The story of Led Zeppelin and the occult is treated in more detail in the biography of Aleister Crowley: life, works, and legacy.

The Exorcist, the Witch, and the Historical Film

The most discussed occult film of the post-war period is The Exorcist (1973), directed by William Friedkin, adapted from William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel of the same name. The film depicted the demonic possession of a twelve-year-old girl in a quiet Washington suburb, and it was a major popular event. The “Exorcist curse,” the alleged series of deaths and accidents affecting cast and crew during production, has been a continuing feature of the film’s lore. The deaths during and shortly after production included those of the actor Jack MacGowran (who died in January 1973, two days after filming a key scene) and the actor Vasiliki Maliaros (who played Father Karras’s mother); claims that the film’s cast and crew suffered a remarkable run of bad luck have been investigated and found unremarkable by serious folklorists. The “curse” has been investigated by the folklorist Joe Nickell, who in 1993 argued in the Skeptical Inquirer that the deaths are not statistically remarkable and that the “curse” is a typical example of media-driven folklore.

The Kenneth Anger films form a separate, more experimental counter-tradition. Scorpio Rising (1963) used occult and biker imagery in a way that influenced a generation of music-video directors; Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), with a score by Mick Jagger, used Anton LaVey in a ritual scene and is one of the most direct cinematic invocations of the 1960s countercultural Satanic vocabulary. The unfinished Lucifer Over Hollywood (work in progress 1970s-2000s) is the project Anger considered his masterwork and is, in its surviving form, the most ambitious single occult cinematic project of the period.

The prestige occult film of the 2010s has produced several important works. The Witch (2015), directed by Robert Eggers, depicted a family of English settlers in 1630s New England who are afflicted by witchcraft. The film drew on extensive primary-source research, including the writings of the Massachusetts minister Cotton Mather, the court records of the Salem trials, and the extensive body of English folk-magic and folk-religion scholarship. The black goat in the film, called “Black Phillip,” was based on the historical record of animal familiars in the New England witch trials. The film was widely praised for its historical authenticity, and was one of the first major horror films to draw on the work of historians in this way.

Midsommar (2019), directed by Ari Aster, depicted a fictional Swedish pagan festival. The festival in the film is fictional, but the specific rituals depicted — the maypole dance, the cliff-jumping (ättestupa), the ritual sacrifice at the end — are based on attested Scandinavian folk traditions, with appropriate dramatic displacement. The relevant scholarly work includes the studies of Swedish Midsummer by Jan-Öjvind Swahn and Ebbe Schön, the broader Scandinavian folklore literature, and the comparative work of the ethnographer Åke Hultkrantz (although Hultkrantz’s principal work is on the Indigenous religions of North America, he also wrote on Scandinavian and circumpolar traditions). The film was criticised by some reviewers for its historical liberties, but the broader point that Midsummer was a major festival in the Scandinavian calendar, and that pre-Christian ritual persisted in various forms into the modern period, is well supported by the historical record.

The Visual Arts and the Re-evaluation of Hilma af Klint

The visual arts of the twentieth century include several important figures whose work was, for a long time, discussed in the context of the occult and has only recently been re-evaluated in a wider context. The most important is the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), whose abstract paintings, produced from 1906 onward, have been re-evaluated since the 2013 Guggenheim retrospective as a major moment in the development of abstract art, on a par with Kandinsky and Malevich. Af Klint was a member of the Theosophical Society, and her abstract paintings were produced for theosophical reasons: she believed that she was channelling higher intelligences through her brushwork. The paintings were, by her instruction, not shown in public for twenty years after her death. Their re-evaluation in the 2010s and 2020s has been a major event in the history of modern art; the standard academic reference is Iris Müller-Westermann and Jo Widoff, eds., Hilma af Klint: A Pioneer of Abstraction (2013, Stockholm: Moderna Museet).

The British painter Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) is a related figure. Carrington was a member of the Surrealist movement in Paris in the 1930s, was closely associated with Max Ernst, and produced a substantial body of paintings, novels, and stories that draw on Celtic, alchemical, and Hermetic material. Her novel The Hearing Trumpet (written in the 1950s, published in 1976) is a major work of occult-influenced fiction. Her paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, in particular, have been the subject of substantial re-evaluation, including the 2015 Tate Liverpool retrospective. The Mexican artist Remedios Varo (1908-1963), who lived in Mexico after 1941, is a third related figure; her paintings draw on a wide range of occult, alchemical, and Hermetic material. The artist Leonor Fini (1907-1996), the Argentinian artist Xul Solar (1887-1963), and the Italian artist Alberto Martini (1876-1954) are also important figures in this field.

Tool, Cradle of Filth, Ghost, and the Album Art of the Extreme

The contemporary use of the occult in popular music is most visible in the extreme metal and industrial genres. The American band Tool, founded in 1990, has produced album covers and stage designs that draw extensively on Kabbalistic, Hermetic, and alchemical symbolism. The album Lateralus (2001) includes Fibonacci numerology and references to sacred geometry. The cover art of 10,000 Days (2006) is a working diagram of a human figure in the posture of a “Vitruvian” composition. The English band Cradle of Filth, founded in 1991, has produced album art and stage design that draws on the iconography of vampirism, of the late medieval witch trials, and of the late-Victorian Gothic. The band has been the subject of serious critical attention in the metal press, and the band has worked with a number of fine artists, including the British artist Dave McKean, to produce its visual identity. The Swedish band Ghost, founded by Tobias Forge in 2006, has built a continuing occult-themed stage identity around the anti-papal figure of “Papa Emeritus” and a succession of cardinals; the band’s anonymous masks and liturgical stage design have made it one of the most distinctive pop-cultural occult presences of the 2010s and 2020s. The relationship of these bands’ visual identities to the historical materials is a serious subject, and the critical literature on the metal genre — including the work of cultural critics like S. Alexander Reed and Keith Kahn-Harris — is now substantial.

The general point, in all of the cases discussed here, is that the relationship between the popular use of the occult and the historical record is not always a simple one. The popular has, in many cases, drawn on the historical record in a serious and informed way. The popular has, in other cases, drawn on the historical record loosely or inaccurately. The critic’s job is to make the distinction. The relationship of the popular to the historical is a continuing subject of critical discussion, and the work of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has, in this respect, been a rich field. For the broader survey of the field, see the occult in popular culture, and for the larger cultural afterlife of one of the most important figures, see Aleister Crowley: life, works, and legacy. For the visual symbolism that underlies much of the work, see sacred symbolism and geometry.

Sources and Further Reading

  • Colin Wilson, The Strength to Dream: Imagination and the Search for Meaning (London: Gollancz, 1962) — still suggestive for the relationship between occult themes and the modern literary imagination.
  • Mike Jay, The Influencing Machine of Samuel F. B. Morse (New York: Melville House, 2014) — for the longer nineteenth-century background of the Spiritualist inheritance in modern media.
  • Wouter Hanegraaff (ed.), Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2005).
  • Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
  • S. T. Joshi, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2013).
  • Bill Ellis, Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000).
  • Keith Kahn-Harris, Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge (Oxford: Berg, 2007).
  • S. Alexander Reed, Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
  • Daniel Harms and John Wisdom Gonce III, The Necronomicon Source Book (Weston, Ontario: Prometheus, 1998).
  • Kenneth Anger: Hollywood Babylon (Paris: J.J. Pauvert, 1959; reissued San Francisco: Feral House, 1975) — the first and most influential of the modern occult-cinema books.