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“The devil has moved the heretics to resist the Christian doctrine,” Augustine wrote,

as if they could be kept in the city of God indifferently without correction. Those in the Church of Christ who savor anything morbid and depraved and will not amend their pestiferous and deadly dogmas are to be reckoned enemies who serve for her discipline. (The City of God, Book XVIII)

More than a philosopher, Augustine was a leading bishop who actively worked with the State to compel this Christian obedience. Since God was All-Good, evil resulted from human free will, giving in to self-indulgence at the devil’s behest. Weak and easily persuaded to sin, people required the ironclad discipline enforced by Church-sanctioned State authority to help control sinful chaos.

The worst aspect of that chaos is unbridled lust: To Augustine, sex is evil—an irrational, animalistic outburst that must be restrained. Preying upon the weakness of the flesh, he believed, Satan uses sex as a weapon to seize the soul. Like Satan, Adam and Eve disobeyed God. They then became Satan’s tools, bringing evil into the world through Original Sin, a concept Augustine invented. The genitals serve as the instruments for the transmission of Original Sin, corrupting human nature, infecting the body, and making us more susceptible to the evil of demonic contagion. This is one of Augustine’s most significant contributions to the theory of evil because it justified moral authorities doing whatever they wish to control lustful behavior and the human search for “satisfaction.”

To put it bluntly, Augustine comes off as an unhappy, authoritarian prude who despised life, sexuality, humanity, and even himself—pretty much everything except God. In Augustine’s view, humanity must defeat the dark, corrupt physical world and embrace the light spiritual world by obeying God and His Earthly representatives—the Church, its priests, and the State. Only then can we save ourselves from the serpent’s curse, the original sin inherited from Adam and Eve.

While a snake evoked sex as bestial and disgusting, it was not the only symbol of evil for Augustine. The pagan male deity Pan—the so-called goat-god—provided the required physical and symbolic model for Satan: cloven hooves, beasts’ ears, glowering face, lascivious eyes, enlarged penis, and phallic horns. The Satyr Pan played hypnotic music and symbolized anarchic freedom, animalistic impulses, unrestrained lust, emotional seduction, and irrational chaos. Visually reflecting the characteristics of Augustinian evil, Pan was gradually incorporated into Christianity’s image of Satan—and the Sixties’ press image of The Rolling Stones.

The press tried to enforce conformity by mocking and ostracizing The Stones; the state, through the police, persecuted them through drugs busts and other harassment, even hauling almost invisible Rolling Stone Bill Wyman into court for profanity and insulting behavior, calling him a “shaggy monster.” From the viewpoint of their youthful audience, The Stones became martyrs. Possibly in reaction to the denigrating attacks, Jagger and The Stones in 1966 started to consciously remake themselves into the “Lucifers of Rock,” as Newsweek labeled them in 1971.

Their single “Paint It, Black” signaled this shift and suggested an embrace of the dark side. A throbbing hypnotic song with an Arabic melody played by Brian Jones on sitar, Jagger sings, “I look inside myself and see my heart is black, it’s not easy facing up when your whole world is black.” Fueling black magic rumors, Jagger appeared on the cover of a magazine published by a so-called satanic cult known as The Process Church of the Final Judgment, while his girlfriend Marianne Faithfull articulated her occult perspective in an issue dedicated to death. Flirting with this darker image, The Stones pictured themselves as wizards in the elaborate 3-D cover photo of their weak psychedelic album Their Satanic Majesties Request. Calling the album a “first-rate oddity,” critic Jim Miller said, “The title alone was the single