Post #32. The Psychedelic Temple: Magic, Drugs, and Rock and Roll in 1960s London

 

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The 1960s were a decade of explosive cultural and spiritual revolution, and London was at its epicentre. "Swinging London" was a vibrant, chaotic, and psychedelic city, a place where the old social order was being challenged and a new, counter-cultural consciousness was being born. This was the age of rock and roll, of sexual liberation, and of a new and widespread interest in all things mystical and magical. The black magic temple of London was not just being rediscovered; it was being rewired, its ancient energies amplified and distorted by the new and powerful technologies of psychedelic drugs and electronic music.

The Psychedelic Revolution: A New Door to Perception

The key to this new magical revival was the discovery and popularisation of psychedelic drugs, particularly LSD. For the latest generation of spiritual seekers, LSD was a chemical key, a sacrament that could unlock the doors of perception and provide direct, personal experience of the divine. The psychedelic trip was a new vision quest, a journey into the inner cosmos, a direct encounter with the archetypes and the energies that Blake had seen in his visions and that Crowley had sought to command through his rituals.

London became a major centre of this new psychedelic culture. The World Psychedelic Centre was founded in London in 1963, and the city became a hub for the distribution of LSD and the dissemination of psychedelic philosophy. The writings of Aldous Huxley, who had chronicled his own experiences with mescaline in The Doors of Perception, became a sacred text for the new generation.

Rock and Roll as Magical Ritual

The soundtrack to this psychedelic revolution was rock and roll. The new rock gods – The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd – were not just musicians; they were shamans, modern-day magicians who used the power of sound and rhythm to create a new kind of collective ecstasy. The rock concert became a new kind of magical ritual. In this place, thousands of people could come together and, through the power of music and drugs, transcend their individual egos and merge into a single, pulsating consciousness.

Many of these musicians were themselves deeply interested in the occult.

• The Beatles, on the cover of their seminal 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band included a picture of Aleister Crowley among a crowd of their heroes.

• The Rolling Stones, particularly their guitarist Brian Jones, were fascinated by the magic of Morocco. Their 1967 album, Their Satanic Majesties Request, was a direct and deliberate nod to the dark, aristocratic magic of the hellfire clubs.

• Jimmy Page, the guitarist of Led Zeppelin, was a serious student of Crowley's work. He bought Crowley's old house on the shores of Loch Ness and opened an occult bookshop in London called The Equinox.

The Occult Underground: A New Generation of Magicians

Beneath the surface of the mainstream counterculture, a new and more serious occult underground was also emerging. A new generation of magicians, inspired by the work of Crowley and the psychedelic pioneers, was beginning to experiment with new and more radical forms of magic.

• The Process Church of the Final Judgment: A strange and controversial new religious group that combined elements of Christianity, Satanism, and psychotherapy. They were a common sight on the streets of London in the late 60s, dressed in black capes and accompanied by their Alsatian dogs.

• The Rise of Chaos Magic: In the 1970s, a new and radically pragmatic form of magic would emerge from the psychedelic and counter-cultural ferment of the 60s. Chaos magic, as it came to be known, would strip magic of all its traditional symbolism and dogma, reducing it to a single, core principle: belief is a tool, and reality is negotiable.

The Legacy of the 60s: A Magical Renaissance

The 1960s were a brief but brilliant period of magical renaissance. It was a time when the boundaries between art, music, spirituality, and politics seemed to dissolve, when a new and powerful wave of creative and spiritual energy swept through the city of London. The psychedelic revolution, for all its excesses and its casualties, had a profound and lasting impact on the city's occult landscape.

It democratised the mystical experience, taking it out of the hands of the secret societies and the initiated elite and making it accessible to anyone with a sugar cube and a sense of adventure. It re-energised the city's magical grid, flooding it with a new, chaotic, and often unpredictable energy. And it planted the seeds for a new and more experimental kind of magic that would flower in the decades to come.

The temple had been stormed by a new generation of long-haired, brightly-coloured barbarians, and it would never be the same again.

In our next post, we will delve deeper into the strange and often disturbing world of The Process Church of the Final Judgment, a group that sought to reconcile Christ and Satan in the heart of swinging London.

Turn on, tune in, drop out. But be careful what you find when you get there. Follow the Secret City series.