Here's to My Sweet Satan

George Case

Description

A sweeping, interwoven story of how America fell in love with the Occult

Here’s to My Sweet Satan is the first book to fully document the Occult craze of the 1960s and 1970s as a single pop culture phenomenon that continues to influence nearly every aspect of culture today. A masterful cultural history, Here’s to My Sweet Satan tells how the Occult conquered the American imagination, weaving together topics as diverse as the birth of heavy metal, 1970s horror films, the New Age movement, Count Chocula cereal, the serial killer Son of Sam, and more. Cultural critic George Case explores how the Occult craze permanently changed American society, creating the cultural framework for the political power of the religious right, false accusations of Satanic child abuse, and today’s widespread rejection of science and rationality.

An insightful blend of pop culture and social history, Here’s to My Sweet Satan lucidly explains how the most technological society on earth became enthralled by the supernatural.

Sujets

• 20th Century
• Social Science
• Popular Culture
• HISTORY
• Sociologie, société et politique
• General officer
• Anthropology
• Graham Bond
• General
• United States
• Alice Cooper
• Blue Öyster Cult

Informations

• Publié par: Linden Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781610352758
• Langue: English

Extrait

PRAISE FOR H ERE S TO M Y S WEET S ATAN
If you think belief in the occult and supernatural faded in the late seventeenth century after the murderous Salem Witch Trials, think again. America went through a second wave of paranormal beliefs in the late twentieth century, resulting in disastrous moral panics over satanic cults and recovered memories of sexual abuse. Beliefs have consequences and George Case has documented this period in exquisite detail and compelling prose. The best book I ve read all year.
-Michael Shermer , publisher of Skeptic magazine, monthly columnist for Scientific American , and author of Why People Believe Weird Things and The Moral Arc
George Case has assembled, contextualized and made clear more disparate occult references and examples across multiple disciplines than has been proposed in any other book on the subject thus far. What s more, he brings back to the modern world the press reactions of the day, making for a lively read that takes us right back to the sixties and seventies. Here s to My Sweet Satan is a swift-moving read that re-conjures dozens of key story lines linking pop culture to the Satanic, that you thought you knew, but now realize you never knew this richly.
-Martin Popoff , author of Who Invented Heavy Metal? and The Big Book of Hair Metal
Horns in the air! Case takes us to a veritable witches sabbat of obsession with satanic themes in late twentieth century culture. His well researched work encompasses everything from the growth of modern nihilistic philosophy to the horror gimmicks of 1970s toys. Get ready to break out your Black Sabbath albums, rewatch Rosemary s Baby and see contemporary culture in its darkest hues. You re in for a hell of a ride.
-W. Scott Poole , historian and author of Satan in America and Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror
H ERE S TO M Y S WEET S ATAN
How the Occult Haunted Music, Movies and Pop Culture, 1966-1980
George Case
Here s to My Sweet Satan Copyright 2016 by George Case. All rights reserved.
Published by Quill Driver Books An imprint of Linden Publishing 2006 South Mary Street, Fresno, California 93721 [phone] / [phone] QuillDriverBooks.com
Quill Driver Books and Colophon are trademarks of Linden Publishing, Inc.
ISBN 978-1-61035-265-9
135798642
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Case, George, 1967- author.
Title: Here s to my sweet Satan : how the occult haunted music, movies, and pop culture 1966-1980 / George Case.
Description: Fresno : Quill Driver Books, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015042350 | ISBN 9781610352659 (hard cover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Occultism. | Arts. | Popular culture.
Classification: LCC BF1429 .C36 2016 | DDC 130.973--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015042350
Forthwith from every squadron and each band
The heads and leaders thither haste where stood
Their great commander; godlike shapes and forms
Excelling human, princely dignities,
And powers that erst in Heaven sat on thrones;
Though of their names in heav nly records now
Be no memorial, blotted out and razed
By their rebellion, from the Books of Life.
Nor had they yet among the sons of Eve
Got them new names, till wand ring o er the earth
Through God s high sufferance for the trial of man,
By falsities and lies the greatest part
Of mankind they attempted to forsake
God their Creator, and th invisible
Glory of him that made them, to transform
Oft to the image of a brute, adorned
With gay religions full of pomp and gold,
And devils to adore for deities:
Then were they known to men by various names
And various idols through the heathen world.
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Contents
Foreword
Author s Note
Introduction: The Return of the Repressed
Chapter 1: Diabolus in Musica
Chapter 2: Bad Words
Chapter 3: Sin Cinema
Chapter 4: Little Devils
Chapter 5: Stranger Than Science
Chapter 6: Devil in the Flesh
Chapter 7: World of Wonders
Timeline of the Occult Era
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
When I was in high school in the late 1960s and early 1970s ,a craze swept the nation for playing vinyl records backwards in search of hidden messages allegedly buried within by rockers under the influence of more than just mind-altering substances. On a cheap turntable one could shift the speed switch midway between 33 1/3 and 45 to disengage the motor drive (while the amplifier remained active), then manually turn the record backward in hopes of plucking out of the noise something meaningful.
One of the eeriest comes from the Fab Four s White Album , by which time the lovable mop tops from Liverpool had morphed into darker incarnations of the Beatles, most notably in the nearly nonsensical Revolution No. 9. Forward, an ominously deep voice endlessly repeats number nine . . . number nine . . . number nine . . . . But spin the platter counterclockwise and you get turn me on, dead man . . . turn me on, dead man . . . turn me on, dead man . . . .
To a wide-eyed school kid without an ounce of skepticism, this fueled the rumor then circulating that Paul McCartney was dead. You see, the future Sir Paul was actually killed in an automobile accident in 1966 and subsequently replaced by a look-alike. The clues were there in the albums, if you knew where to look. It didn t take us long. Sgt. Pepper s A Day in the Life, for example, recounts the accident:
He blew his mind out in a car He didn t notice that the lights had changed A crowd of people stood and stared They d seen his face before Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords .
The cover of the Abbey Road album, released late September 1969, shows the one-time Quarry Men walking across a street in what looks like a funeral procession. According to legend, John was dressed in white as the preacher, Ringo in black as the pallbearer, a barefoot and out-of-step Paul as the corpse (appropriately holding a cigarette), and George in work clothes as the gravedigger. In the background one sees a Volkswagen Beetle whose license plate reads 28IF-the age Paul would have been if he had not been killed in the 1966 accident. (Type into a search engine the word string Paul is dead for countless more examples.) As these things go, when legends become fact, it is the legend that gets printed, despite John Lennon s disclaimer to Rolling Stone magazine in 1970: That was all bullshit, the whole thing was made up. But made up by whom?
Darker still were satanic messages purportedly buried in rock songs, most improbably (or was it?) in Led Zeppelin s Stairway to Heaven. The stanza in question, when played forward, reads:
If there s a bustle in your hedgerow Don t be alarmed now It s just a spring clean for the May queen Yes, there are two paths you can go by But in the long run There s still time to change the road you re on .
Frankly, I m not sure what the lyrics mean forward, but when I was in high school this and many other now-classic rock tunes were deeply meaningful. ( What did John mean when he said the walrus was Paul ? ) Play this portion of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant s masterpiece in reverse and you get this:
Oh . . . here s to my sweet Satan The one whose little path will make me sad whose power is Satan He ll give you . . . give you 666 There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer sad Satan .
Interestingly, if you listen to this section backwards without the words on the screen, your brain will only pluck out a few words or fragments, such as Satan and 666 (or sex, sex, sex in some hearings). But bring up the reverse words on the screen and the lyrics are nearly as clear as when played forward (although, tellingly, different interpretations of the words yield equally clear lyrics). It s a striking example of what cognitive psychologists call priming : prime the brain to see or hear something by providing guiding cues (such as lyrics to accompanying vocals) and it will obey. I have long used this particular example in my public talks (see my first TED talk, for example), and there are entire web pages dedicated to finding reverse lyrics and words in songs and speeches, for example, reversespeech.com . (Most amusing is one of President Clinton s speeches that when played in reverse supposedly reveals his peccadillo with a certain White House intern, as if that was the smoking gun needed to convict.)
I hadn t given much thought to the origin of my youthful enthusiasm for such turntable tinkering until I read George Case s marvelous history of the period, Here s to My Sweet Satan . Not only an entertaining return to the most culturally turbulent decades of the century, the book reinforces the necessity of finding purchase on an Archimedean lever to move the world far enough away to see the larger historical forces at work. Case does this with artful brilliance. The resurgence of belief in the occult and supernatural not only led us to search rock records for secreted evidences of the Prince of Darkness, it drove countless films, TV shows, novels, magazine articles, and other products of pop (and even high) culture. Mephistopheles was everywhere, and today s Harry Potter, Twilight , and Walking Dead vogues have their origin in the epoch so elegantly recalled by the author.
Case begins-appropriately enough for those of us who lived through the rise and fall of the evangelical Christian movement (I was once a born-again myself)-with Time magazine s infamous God is Dead cover. From there he tracks pop culture s prox