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Invocation of My Demon Brother

The Stones’ demonic dabbling converged with the counter-culture’s fascination with Satanism, witchcraft, and the occult. In 1967, a peace rally drew almost one hundred thousand participants to Washington DC to “Levitate the Pentagon.”64 Popular horror films, such as Italy’s Mask of Satan, America’s Masque of the Red Death, and Britain’s Dracula: Prince of Darkness featured the devil or satanic practices. Rosemary’s Baby, filmed at the Dakota Apartments where John Lennon was later assassinated, tells the story of Rosemary—a lapsed Catholic—who is raped by Satan and conceives the devil’s spawn.

Shaking off their psychedelic pandering, The Stones released, in 1968, a powerful new single “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” with vicious lyrics that created a new mythology, reinventing Jagger as a monstrous abused mutant ripped out of a witch’s womb: “I was born in a cross-fire hurricane, I was raised by a toothless bearded hag, I was drowned, I was washed up and left for dead.” Though Keith Richards said his gardener Jack inspired the name,65 there’s little doubt that the title refers to Spring Heeled Jack, a demonic English folklore character, who could jump across buildings and breathe fire and who sported diabolical traits like claw hands, bat wings, and flaming eyes.

Even before “Jack Flash,” The Stones had acquired a fervent fan and unsettling friend in occult filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Best known for his apocalyptic biker movie Scorpio Rising, Anger gained notoriety when California police banned the film for obscenity (though it eventually got cleared in a court case). An inspiration for Easy Rider, Scorpio Rising depicted the last gasp of the dying Age of Christianity—a church is desecrated when gang leader Scorpio pisses on its altar and Christ is compared to Hitler as the leader of a mindless, death-wish mob.

Anger was a disciple of Britain’s most notorious black magician Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), the so-called “Great Beast 666.” Crowley fascinated several British rock stars, including David Bowie, Ozzie Osbourne, Iron Maiden, and Jimmy Page, who even bought Crowley’s house. He was pictured on the cover of the Beatles Sgt. Pepper album and his novel Moonchild inspired the song “Child of the Moon” on the flip side of the “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” single.

More than a black magician, Aleister Crowley was a free-love advocate, drug addict, and social critic. He revolted against the moral and religious values of his time and espoused a form of anarchism based upon his law “Do What Thou Wilt.” The popular press of the day vilified him as “the wickedest man in the world.” Inspired by nineteenth-century Romantic poets, he believed that Lucifer was the light-bearing god, not the dark devil of conventional Christianity.

To Anger, making a movie was casting a magickal spell. He claimed that “Magick”—using Crowley’s spelling—was his life’s work and the cinema was his magick weapon. He saw Jagger as a latter-day Lucifer, who played devil’s advocate for the disenfranchised youth, and Keith Richards as his attendant demon Beelzebub. Anger wanted to cast Jagger in his intended masterpiece Lucifer Rising. Jagger, who had seriously branched into movies with Performance and Ned Kelly on the horizon, was impressed with Anger’s reputation as a sorcerer and an avant-garde master of film.

The role of Lucifer apparently captivated Jagger, not the least for its intriguing sense of purpose. Maybe he started seeing himself as the incarnation of a metaphysical force that could destroy Christian repression with liberating abandon. In a 1967 interview with the Daily Mail, Jagger is quoted as saying:

When I’m on that stage I sense that teenagers are trying to communicate with me, like by telepathy. Not about me or our music, but about the world and the way they live. I interpret it as a demonstration against society and its sick attitudes. Teenagers are weary of being pushed around by half-witted politicians who attempt to dominate their way of thinking and set