Doom metal, heavy metal’s slow, gloomy, and sharply down-tuned brand of gut rock, began as a revolt against not so much the mainstream, but the metal underground. The roots of doom metal actually lie in the 1970s, the era of heavy metal’s creation. In Birmingham, a dreary, wrecked crater of a city, wherein young boys such as those chronicled in Graham Greene’s “The Destructors” (1954) could be found playing in the ruins of the Lutwaffe’s air campaign against Great Britain and her bulldog-like inhabitants, a band formed “from beyond the perimeters of popular opinion.”
From the start Black Sabbath voiced powerful passion from beyond the perimeters of popular opinion. They were prophets bred from the downside of English society, the unemployed—people regarded as morally suspect and of negligible social worth. The four members were all born in 1948 and 1949 in Birmingham, England, a crumbling factory town surviving an age when Europe no longer prided itself on industry (Christie 1).
The four men of Black Sabbath—singer John Michael Osbourne (aka Ozzy), guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Terry Butler (aka Geezer), and drummer Bill Ward—channeled their dreary surroundings in their music—a dark, atmospheric soundscape that both embraced the blues and turned it on its head. Originally called Polka Tulk (after a Birmingham rug merchant), then Earth, Black Sabbath took their name from Mario Bava’s 1963 horror film I tre volti della paura, (which was billed in the U.K. under the title of Black Sabbath) in an attempt to make music that recreated the same sense foreboding as any Gothic or, in this case, giallo horror film.
A pivotal moment in the band’s career came as the group gathered outside its recording studio. Across the street, a movie theater was playing a 1963 horror film starring Boris Karloff, the famous actor known for his role as Frankenstein’s monster. The name of the movie was Black Sabbath. A poster advertising the film featured young people running in fear from a headless horseman holding a severed head. At that moment, Osbourne said the band thought to itself out loud, “[I]sn’t funny that people like to go and pay money to be scared, to see a horror film? Why don’t we try and put that to some of this heavy stuff we’re playing” (Aberback).
Black Sabbath certainly put the scare into many listeners when their first album, entitled Black Sabbath, was released in February of 1970. No song was more menacing than the band’s title opus, a six minute-long tune that recounted one man’s meeting with the Devil. The song “Black Sabbath” is “based on only three tones, two of them D notes” (Christie 2), and this harmonic progression, which is called the tritone, was once known as diabolus in musica, or “the devil in music.” During more superstitious ages, the tritone was banned because it was believed to be capable of culling forth the Devil or one of his minions. Since the song “Black Sabbath” is widely recognized as the first true heavy metal song, that it is not much of a stretch to say that the Devil was in the details long before heavy metal coalesced as a recognizable genre and subculture.
Besides its demonic musicology, “Black Sabbath” had a similarly wicked origin story. According to bassist Geezer Butler, the song “Black Sabbath” was inspired by his interest in the occult. While the band was still known as Earth, Butler had painted his apartment black and decorated it with inverted crosses and pictures of Satan. Then, after someone had given Osbourne a sixteenth century tome on black magic (which Osbourne then brought to Butler’s apartment), Butler was plagued one night by a mysterious black figure at the foot of his bed. During his terrifying night, Butler went to retrieve the book but could not do so; the book, it seems, had magically disappeared.
This ordeal, which is clearly the inspiration for the lyrics of “Black Sabbath:” “What is this, that stands before me? Figure in black, which points at me…” (Christie 2), also has roots in Butler’s favorite reading material at the time—Dennis Wheatley. Wheatley, an author little read now outside of specific circles, was immensely popular in his day as both an adventure novelist and as an expert on the occult. His most famous work—1934’s The Devil Rides Out—was hailed by author James Hilton as “the best thing of its kind since Dracula” in a 1935 edition of The Daily Telegraph.
The original endpaper illustrations for The Devil Rides Out. Note the figure s of Osiris and Isis.
The Devil Rides Out, which was set in 1930s England, tells the story of three friends—the Duke De Richleau, Rex van Ryn, and Simon Aron. In Wheatley’s earlier novel The Forbidden Territory (1933), these three adventurers had escaped the Soviet OGPU while on a mission to rescue the American van Ryn from a Soviet gulag. Now, a year later, they have decided to reconnect. Unfortunately for the exiled French aristocrat and the dashing American, Aron has fallen under the spell of Mocata, a sinister black wizard. The whole of The Devil Rides Out involves De Richleau and van Ryn’s attempt to rescue Aron’s soul from the clutches of Mocata and his coven of wealthy and debauched occultists. In one famous scene, De Richleau and van Ryn, in attempt to rescue Aron, witness a satanic ceremony near Stonehenge that proves to be terrifyingly successful.
Until the candles had been lit, the pale violet halo which emanated from the figure had been enough to show that it was human and the face undoubtedly black. But, as they watched, it changed to a grayish colour, and something was happening to the formation of the head. “It is the Goat of Mendes, Rex!” whispered the Duke…And even as he spoke, the manifestation took on a clearer shape; the hands, held forward almost in an attitude of prayer but turned downward, became transformed into two great cloven hoofs. Above rose the monstrous bearded head of a gigantic goat, appearing to be at least three times the size of any other which they had ever seen (Wheatley 124-125).
While the Duke and van Ryn argue over what action to take, the Duke, who is described as an occult expert, unveils to van Ryn the blasphemous history of satanic rites: De Richleau shook his head. “The Bloody Sacrifice is the oldest magical rite in the world. The slayings of Osiris and Adonis, the mutilation of Attis and the cults of Mexico and Peru, were all connected with it. Even in the Old Testament you read that the sacrifice which was most acceptable to God the Father was one of blood, and St. Paul tells us that “‘without the shedding of blood there is no remission’” (126).
De Richleau’s assertions concerning the continuity of magical rites were in vogue at the time amongst a certain segment of intellectuals, most of them in Great Britain. In her 1931 text The God of the Witches, famed Egyptologist and anthropologist Margaret A. Murrary argues that “[t]here is…a continuity of belief and ritual which can be traced from the Palaeolithic period down modern times” (Murrary 13). Specifically, The God of the Witches asserts that European pagan beliefs, which were first introduced to the Continent by Palaeolithic, then Neolithic peoples, continued throughout the history of Europe despite the influence of Christianity, which, according to Murrary, was always in competition with folk beliefs, especially among Europe’s rural denizens.
While this argument may not seem terribly radical today (or even acceptable as valid history), in its time, The God of the Witches caused a stir amongst religious experts, and this was in no small part due to its expansion upon the themes that Murray had earlier touched upon in her book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921). The Witch-Cult in Western Europe was Murray’s first text that dealt with her so-called “witch-cult hypothesis,” which, due to Murray’s extensive background in Egyptian antiquity, draws heavily on the mythology of Ancient Egypt. In particular, the Duke’s explanation that rituals surrounding Osiris and Isis can be related to certain occult rites comes straight out of Murray, who envisioned Egypt as one of the earliest arbiters of the cult of the “horned god,” the supposed God of the Witches of Europe.
This transfusion between the Ancient Near East and Europe was also part of the religion of Aleister Crowley, an infamous British occultist and the so-called “wickedest man in the world.” Crowley, a known libertine, poet, and recreational drug user, was widely known (and reviled) for creating Thelema, a religion based around the principals of ceremonial magic and the one law of “Do What Thou Wilt.” Thelema, which embraced a wide assortment of occult principals, as well as a Nietzschaen view of human power systems, originated in Crowley’s 1904 text The Book of the Law, which was written during a vacation in Egypt.
According to Crowley, the true author of The Book of the Law “called himself Aiwass, and claimed to be ‘the minister of Hoor-paar-kraat’” (Crowley 5). “Hoor-paar-kraat” is reference to the Ancient Egyptian god Horus, the ruler of the Æon of Horus—the time in human history that Thelema sought to bring about because it would lead to humanity’s self-actualization. The gnostic heart of Thelema is often overlooked due to the personality of Crowley, which was rarely depicted in a positive light in literature or film.
In 1908, British author W. Somerset Maugham used Crowley as his inspiration for Oliver Haddo, a corpulent magician who seeks to ritually sacrifice Margaret Dauncey, the fiancée of the novel’s protagonist Arthur Burdon, for the purposes of an infernal ritual. The Magician is often regarded as Maugham’s poorest work, due in large part to its potboiler subject matter and the various accusations of plagiarism that were leveled at Maugham at the time. Despite this widespread negative opinion, The Magician was made into a silent film in 1926.
Rex Ingram’s film version of The Magician contains “an orgiastic dream sequence concerning Pan” (Harrington 193), which, in of itself, is a reference to Crowley, who claimed that he raised the god Pan one night in Paris. Crowley’s Pan ceremony was later chronicled by Wheatley in a short story entitled “The Black Magician” (1969), and Crowley himself was the inspiration for the evil Mocata in The Devil Rides Out.
Scene of from The Magician (1926).
Crowley, Wheatley, and Thelema all had a hard time surviving the Second World War, a moment in human history so horrific that it made the otherworldly horrors of Pan, Horus, and occult rituals seem anemic in comparison to Dachau and Auschwitz. Most popular films and novels of the 1950s explored the two major art forms that arose in the postwar world: science fiction and noir. Despite this, a small yet still percolating current of occult-based fiction (both written and visual) existed throughout the 1940s and 1950s, before seeing an explosion during the countercultural 1960s. Films such as Mark Robson’s The Seventh Victim (1943), Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon (1957), and Sidney Hayers’ Night of the Eagle (which was released in the U.S. under the title of Burn, Witch, Burn [1962]) kept the spirit of occult horror alive at the box office, whilst authors such as Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, and Robert Bloch expanded upon the traditions of horror fiction to include satanic cults and covens in the groves of suburbia, the sacred space of America’s postwar consumer society. Bloch in particular was attuned to the winds of change, and his 1958 short story “Spawn of the Dark One” not only envisions a new breed of devil worshippers, but it unwittingly helps to establish the aesthetic model of doom metal.
Set in southern Wisconsin, “Spawn of the Dark One” tells of two older friends—Ben Kerry and Ted Hibbard. Kerry, a university professor and anthropologist, is in the process of researching a strange theory—a theory that posits that the postwar upsurge in psychopathy and juvenile delinquency is based on the fact that, during the war, American women were impregnated by incubi intent on delivering a new generation of demons into the world. Think of when it all started—this wave of sudden, unnatural juvenile crime, of psychopathic cruelty. Only a few years ago, wasn’t it? Just about the time when the babies born in the early years of the war started to enter their teens. Because that’s when it happened, during the war, when men were away. And the women had nightmares—the kind of nightmares some women have had throughout the ages. The nightmare of the incubus, the carnal demon who visits them in sleep. It happened before in the history of our culture, during the Crusades. And then followed the rise of the witch-cults all over Europe—the witch-cults presided over and attended by the spawn of the night-fiends; the half-human offspring of a blasphemous union (Bloch 249, emphasis mine).
Despite this in-depth knowledge, Kerry (as well as Hibbard) do not survive the night and are sacrificed to the Dark One of the title during a bonfire festival. Kerry’s reiteration of Murray’s core theory (that of the witch-cult) is not only interesting, but since it is tagged as being still alive amongst the teenage population, it helps to further the popular notion that Satanism and occult practices form a part of all countercultural movements and trends. This view has two realities: 1) it solidifies the “us versus them” mentality in that it views anti-establishment movements as being diabolical in origin, and; 2) it reaffirms the original meaning of “Satan,” which is Hebrew for “adversary.”
Since “Spawn of the Dark One” was written in the late 1950s, the adversaries of the establishment are the first generation of rock and rollers. Kerry’s youthful demons are black leather clad motorcyclists who regularly engage in vandalism and other forms of small-time criminality. “Spawn of the Dark One” essentially disagrees with the romanticism of László Benedek’s The Wild One (1953) and argues a very conservative point about the new breed of American youth:
“In the first place, this isn’t a ‘cyclist gang,’ any more than it’s a ‘hot-rod crowd’ or a ‘sports car mob’ or a congregation of Elvis Presley fans. These youngsters come from all over; the big city, the outlying suburbs, the smaller industrial communities nearby. There’s no outward indication that they belong to any formal group, club, or organisation [sic]. They just congregate, apparently” (238).
These seemingly aimless motorcycle punks and juvenile delinquents do have a cause though, and their reason for existence is the propagation of the age-old witch-cult. “Spawn of the Dark One” reveals that popular culture can act as a screen for nefarious practices, which, considering the history of literature dealing with the occult, is a relatively novel idea. In earlier works on Satanism and occult practices, the initiates of any given coven tend to be the elites—the cosmopolitan wealthy, landed aristocracy, scientists, and academics. With the coming of the rock and roll generation and the counterculture of the 1960s, writers left behind the older notions of the inherent debauchery and ennui of privilege, and instead focused on the supposed waywardness and nihilism of the younger generation.
For those genuinely concerned about the souls of the young, the signs of the apocalypse were everywhere in the 1960s. Besides the radical politics of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and the emerging Civil Rights movement in the American South, there were other, more insidious examples of the youth’s rejection of what was then simply called “basic morality.” Arguably the most visible moment in the history of Satanism and the occult in popular culture occurred on Walpurgisnacht, April 30, 1966 in San Francisco. On that day, a former musician, psychic, and carnival worker named Anton LaVey founded the first official Church of Satan.
LaVey’s brand of Satanism was (and is) unique. Rather than a theology based on “shallow blasphemy,” LaVey’s Church of Satan was in “opposition to herd mentality” and dedicated “to a Nietzsschean ethic of the anti-egalitarian development of man as a veritable god on earth, freed from the chains of Christian morality” (Moynihan and Søderlind 8). The Church of Satan not only attracted the more daring members of Hollywood (Jayne Mansfield for one), but it’s sharply individualistic ethos meshed well with the prevailing youth culture of the West at the time, America and Great Britain in particular.
Following the foundation of the Church of Satan, newspapers in both the U.S. and Great Britain began to carry ominous stories about youthful desecrations of churches and graveyards. Tales of animal sacrifices were also numerous, and there were even stories of murders committed in the name of Satan:
Black mass in a park starts police hunt:
A group of people who celebrated a Black Mass with animals’ hearts as sacrifices are being sought by police. The police were called to a shelter at Malvern Park, near the centre of Solihull, Warwickshire, after an attendant found two hearts skewered to an altar improvised from park benches. A crucifix was suspended upside down above it, and the altar was draped in mauve cloth. Burned candles were still there. Police took relics away (The Sun, May 13, 1968).
These reports of youthful Satanism became fodder for the media, particularly Hollywood and the world of popular fiction. Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), which was based on a 1967 novel by Ira Levin, told the story of a coterie of witches and Satanists in New York who are trying to bring the Antichrist into the world, while Jack Starrett’s 1975 action-adventure Race with the Devil tells the tale of a group of friends who are chased by a Satanic cult in the wilds of central Texas. In Great Britain, the stalwart studio of horror—Hammer Films—produced a slew of Satanism-themed horror movies, ranging from The Devil Rides Out (1968) to Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973).
The latter films, which were part of Hammer’s long-running series of Dracula films starring Christopher Lee as the Count, deserve special attention. In Dracula A.D. 1972, “a group of rebellious teens desecrate a disused London church to hold a black mass and thus succeeds in raising a satanic vampire (Christopher Lee) from the graveyard outside” (Ellis 24). The rest of Dracula A.D. 1972 tells a well-worn narrative about the Count’s desire for a certain female so-and-so (who happens to be related to his old nemesis Van Helsing), and the movie ends with, once again, the eradication of the world’s most famous vampire. What makes Dracula A.D. 1972 particularly interesting is not its hackneyed storyline, but its inspiration taken from the real-world popularity of Satanism and the occult. In the late ‘60s and early to mid-1970s, Highgate Cemetery, a Victorian-era graveyard in north London, was the scene of numerous supposed Satanic and occult rituals. A group calling themselves The British Occult Society began using Highgate as a meeting spot for drug deals, parties, and random acts of vandalism.
Then, sometime around 1969, mysterious sightings were reported in and around Highgate, some of them even claiming that a vampire was loose in the cemetery. The British Occult Society, which included two professed occult experts in David Farrant and Sean Manchester, “received two specific reports from people walking in or by Highgate Cemetery who had met a ‘tall dark spectre’ that temporarily hypnotized or paralyzed the bystander” (20). Intrigued, Farrant and Manchester began spending nights in Highgate in order to document the validity of these claims. Once, during the Winter Solstice of 1969, Farrant claimed that he saw a shape that was over seven feet tall and of non-human origin (21). Farrant claimed that this was a psychic attack, and rumors began to circulate in the British press that an extremely powerful ghost was haunting Highgate.
All of this of course led to a media frenzy involving not only news cameras, but documentary filmmakers as well. The British Occult Society began holding ghost hunts and séances in Highgate, thus attracting many of London’s young bohemians. Then, after Farrant and Manchester split, thus creating factions within the British Occult Society, Manchester caused another stir by claiming that a Romanian vampire was the culprit behind the disturbances in Highgate.
Residents should know, Manchester said, that the spirit reported was far worse than expected: he speculated that it was a King Vampire from Wallachia that had been brought to England in a coffin by his supporters at the start of the 18th century. Installed at the fine house…in London’s West End, this site became the traditional focus of England’s vampire plagues. In later times, the spot became the location of Highgate Cemetery (23).
Manchester’s theory was committed to film with Dracula A.D. 1972, and Hammer’s next Dracula installment—The Satanic Rites of Dracula—further perpetuated the popularity of Satanism and satanic themes in popular media. The Satanic Rites of Dracula has Dracula (again played by Lee) presiding over “a coven of intelligent, influential Satanists planning to destroy the world with a genetically engineered disease” (24). The Satanic Rites of Dracula has its feet planted in two worlds: one foot is in the older tradition of Satanism as the province of the elite, while the other foot links Satanism with the type of nihilism that Anton LaVey and his Church of Satan embraced. These two visions of Satanism as both elitist and nihilistic are important in the development of doom metal, arguably heavy metal’s most elitist subgenre.
While the founders of doom metal, Black Sabbath, were not themselves practitioners of the occult (Osbourne calls them “freaks with white make-up and black robes” in his autobiography, I Am Ozzy [2009]), the band was and is still heavily associated with the occult in the popular imagination. Not only were Black Sabbath often invited to black masses at Highgate (Osbourne), but their music—a slow-paced funeral march full of menacing riffs and heavy drumming—is often thought as the embodiment of satanic music. And since Black Sabbath are the acknowledged inventors of heavy metal, the entire genre and its subculture has been frequently labeled as thoroughly satanic. It is true that certain bands in heavy metal have actively courted a satanic image; it is just as true that certain bands have not. This is true for the world of doom metal, although, as a whole, doom metal bands typically sing about the supernatural and the outré more often than many of their non-doom metal contemporaries.
Doom metal, which tries to keep alive the traditions of its two great progenitors—Black Sabbath and Washington, D.C.’s Pentagram, did not begin as a recognizable subgenre until the mid-1980s. At that time, thrash metal ruled the heavy metal underground. Thrash, which was primarily based in the Bay Area and New York, blended heavy metal with hardcore punk in order to create a blitzkrieg of incredibly fast drumming and demonstrations of virtuoso guitar work. Thrash metal helped to perpetuate the increasing brutality and extremeness of underground metal, and it marriage of punk rock and metal directly led to other subgenres such as grindcore, death metal, and black metal.
Doom metal in the mid-1980s was the antithesis of thrash: it can be characterized by extremely slow and often very long songs that contain repetitive riffs that echo from guitars that are often tuned below D (key most used by Iommi). Doom metal bands such as Saint Vitus from Los Angeles and Candlemass from Sweden also revolted against thrash’s emphasis on harsh, shouted vocals in favor of clean, if not operatic singing. Doom metal’s musical primitivism inspired a subculture obsessed with all things throwback, from the use of 1970s instruments and gear (Gibson guitars, Laney amps, etc.) to 1970s fashion. Another favorite amongst doom metal musicians and fans alike are the horror films of the 1960s and 1970s, and no doom metal band is a bigger fan of this era in speculative culture than Dorset, England’s Electric Wizard.
Formed in 1993 by guitarist Jus Oborn, Electric Wizard pioneered a super slow and drone-heavy form of doom metal that relied on walls of distortion and feedback. A prime example of this is the song “Return Trip,” which is on the band’s second album, Come My Fanatics… (1997). Beginning with a few seconds of harsh feedback, “Return Trip” then delves into an overwhelming wave of distorted riffing that, amazingly, comes from only one guitar. Lyrically, “Return Trip” tells of a vituperative occultist who wishes for the world’s demise:
The sun burns in the stranger’s eyes / Just one tear before he dies / Black mass can’t ease the pain / There’s nothing here, there’s nothing sane / I hope this fuckin’ world fuckin’ burns away / And I’d kill you if I had my way / But I’ll live forever, questions curse me why / Oh Lord above, why won’t you let me die…
The misanthropy of “Return Trip” is common in the catalog of Electric Wizard, who, as a band, seem to espouse a philosophy of satanic nihilism akin to both the Church of Satan and the fictional depictions of occultists, past and present. Aesthetically speaking, Electric Wizard seem at pains to present themselves as 1970s-era occultists that are obsessed with drugs and witchcraft.
In particular, the band’s 2007 release, Witchcult Today, clearly displays the band’s deep immersion in the history of the popular representations of Satanism and the occult. From the title (which references Murray’s hypothesis) to the songs themselves, Witchcult Today articulates doom metal’s obsession with ‘60s and ‘70s era of supernatural horror. Witchcult Today is also at pains to present the band as an actual coven of witches, specifically witches who desire to bring about the end of the world. For example, note the lyrics to the song “Witchcult Today:”
Come fanatics, come to the sabbath / Thirteen dressed in black are here / Screaming, naked our altar/ kissed by the whip now Satan’s daughter/ Our witchcult grows…/ Black goat forms from dopesmoke/ Baphomet we bow to thee/ Higher, higher Devil’s disciples/ Nameless chants and sorcery/ Our witchcult grows…
While “Witchcult Today” has Electric Wizard as a pot-smoking coven of Devil worshippers, the song “The Satanic Rites of Drugula” rewrites The Satanic Rites of Dracula as a story about a vampire that craves drug-laced blood: Under Saturn’s rays I rest in eternal sleep/ Dopesmoke violates my tomb and awakens me/ Clawing from the grave my batwings spread/ Their blood filled with drugs, so high, so dead/ Your dope-laced blood shows me new highs/ Bloodlust, druglust, Count Drugula arise…/ Strung out on blood I hunt the streets at night/ Terror from the sky, in batform I strike/ Your naked body dragged to my darkened crypt/ I tie you up, dope you up then your blood I sip.
Finally, the penultimate song on Witchcult Today, entitled “Saturnine,” sums up the thrust of Electric Wizard’s aesthetic occultism, which is brand of Satanism that actively welcomes the end of the world. A black sun rises everyday/ Shadows cross my path as if to say/ “Change your ways, change your life/ Look up to the sky”/ Tomorrow’ll soon be here then time to die/ I hear a death bell tolling our my life/ Every strike another plunging of the knife/ Mistakes I’ve made lead me to an early grave/ I know it’s too late, I can’t be saved/ Saturnine for all my time the only way I’ve ever been/ Saturnine in my mind high I sail the astral sea/ Saturnine for all time I’ll never find a way to be free/ Saturnine in my mind load another hit of weed.
Taken as a whole Witchcult Today, and indeed the entire catalog of Electric Wizard, presents the band and their music as a unique subculture based around drugs and the supernatural, and furthermore, it helps to link Electric Wizard with Murray’s apocalyptic thesis of Europe’s ancient witch-cult and the continuation of ancient rites all throughout the Christian era.
More than just Satan, there is another pervasive influence in both the popular renderings of the occult and doom metal (Electric Wizard included). This influence revolves around one man—H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft, a pulp writer of the 1920s and 1930s, is everywhere in popular culture, from TV and movies to books and comic books. In the case of doom metal, Lovecraft’s fiction, particularly his concept of the Great Old Ones, a race of intergalactic gods who seek the eradication of humanity from the face of Earth, provides much in the way of inspiration, both lyrically speaking and aesthetically speaking. Also, Electric Wizard’s continuance of Murray’s witch-cult hypothesis has connections with Lovecraft, who lifted many of Murray’s ideas while he was in the process of creating his own mythology. Indeed, Robert H. Waugh, writing in Lovecraft Studies, argues that “Lovecraft’s picture of witchcraft was a synthesis drawn from the fiction of Arthur Machen (e.g., “The Novel of the Black Seal”, “The Shinning Pyramid”) and from Margaret Murray” (Price 18). Lovecraft combined Machen’s notion that “witchcraft was the debased pagan legacy of an aboriginal dwarf race of Mongolian or Turanian hill people” with Murray’s hypothesis that “witchcraft was a suppressed pre-Christian fertility religion which received a secondary overlay of Christian diabolism at the hands of church inquisitors who misunderstood and persecuted it” (18).
Another key aspect of Lovecraft’s notion of witchcraft is his own concept of Cosmicism, a philosophical theory that not only sees mankind as insignificant (given the entirety of the cosmos), but also as incapable of fully understanding the supernatural, which, in Lovecraft’s world, is always cosmic. An example of this philosophy in Lovecraft’s fiction can be found in his 1929 short story “The Dunwich Horror:” It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualised [sic] by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common life-forms of this planet, and of the three known dimensions (Lovecraft 114).
In this passage, the human narrator attempts to describe Wilbur Whateley, the son of one of the Great Old Ones. Since the Great Old Ones cannot be fully articulated by the human mind, rendering a description of one of them is nearly impossible. “The Dunwich Horror” deals with Wilbur Whateley’s attempt to bring his father back into the Earth’s dimension as part of a grand ritual that is set on bringing about Armageddon and the destruction of Earth. Not only does “The Dunwich Horror” provide the source material for the lyrics to Electric Wizard’s song “Dunwich” (“Child of Dunwich rise/ You have your father’s eyes/ Child of Dunwich rise/ End the world that you despise”), but its narrative schema concerning a sorcerer’s attempt to cull forth Armageddon is a common one in Lovecraft’s fiction.
In one of Lovecraft’s most famous stories—“The Call of Cthulhu” (1928)—Lovecraft once again depicts the worshippers of the Great Old Ones as not only debauched and primitive, but also as members of a cultural underground. Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Eskimos whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Eskimos knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient eons before ever the world was made (80).
Professor Webb’s findings are then followed by the testimony of Inspector Legrasse, a New Orleans police officer. In 1907, Legrasse and other members of the New Orleans police had stumbled upon a chilling ceremony in the bayou swamps. This ceremony was performed by racial and social outcasts—“men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type” (84). These “low” figures include sailors, “negroes,” mulattos, and “Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands” (84). Upon questioning, the swamp worshippers unveil their cosmic religious beliefs to Legrasse:
They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. These Great Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first man, who formed a cult which had never died (84).
This passage not only retells the story of the birth of humanity, but it also reinterprets Murray’s witch-cult hypothesis. Instead of being a fertility cult that stretches back to Neolithic times, Lovecraft’s version of witchcraft starts with the dawn of mankind, the time after the expulsion of the Earth’s original inhabitants. This sort of occult unveiling is integral to Lovecraft’s mythos, as well as much of doom metal’s reinterpretations of occult history. In particular, Electric Wizard’s constant discussions of covens and the so-called “Chosen Few” are as much satanic as they are Lovecraftian.
Indeed, in the underground world of post-1960s occultism, Lovecraft and his mythology is as important as any medieval grimoire or Thelema-based dictate. In fact, Peter Levenda, an American scholar of religious studies, argues in his book The Dark Lord: H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant, and the Typhonian Tradition in Magic (2013) that Lovecraft and Thelema, both of which drew inspiration from Murrary’s witch-cult hypothesis, seek a new type of magic that is intended to expand humanity’s self-realization and self-actualization. This type of unveiling is only for initiates, Levenda asserts, and as such it must primarily exist in an underground society.
An underground society based around an elitist knowledge sounds like a fitting description of doom metal and its fans. Doom metal’s interest in and expansion upon the history of the occult in the Western world makes sense given doom metal’s obsession with and exploitation of the motifs of the occult, especially popular culture’s reproductions of the occult (i.e., horror films and novels). Electric Wizard, a doom metal band who have become synonyms with the scene, and Black Sabbath, the forefathers of heavy metal, are two bands that are part of a larger tradition, a tradition that goes as far back as at least the late Victorian age. Both of these bands have drawn upon popular conceptions of the occult, and as such, they have linked themselves with such previous artists as W. Somerset Maugham, Anton LaVey, and H.P. Lovecraft. Furthermore, by linking themselves with the popular representations of the occult, they are also associating themselves with Murray’s witch-cult hypothesis and Crowley’s Thelema philosophy, both of which argue for a secret history of the world. This history, which can only be unveiled to open or chemically-altered minds (hence the proliferation of drug references in Electric Wizard’s music), asserts that witchcraft and the worshipping of non-Christian gods has always been the province of the underground, whether that be medieval peasants or libertine Edwardians. And since doom metal propagates this secret history, it therefore argues for its own inclusion in the long history of the religious underground, or to put it more correctly, the world’s oldest counterculture.
So, knowing this, we can now recognize that all of these disparate ideas and art forms actually conceive of themselves as a resistance—a resistance to Christianity, the religion that popularized and bastardized pagan concepts as mere Satanism. The self-labeled resistance has formed a history in the West as forum for both popular and elitist discussions on the true nature of religion. By extension, the “low-brow” worlds of horror film and fiction and doom metal are as much a part of this resistance as either the organized religions of Crowley or LaVey. Indeed, without these “low-brow” art forms, popular culture would find it harder to adequately conceive of and reproduce this counterargument to Christianity year after year.
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Words:Benjamin Welton