Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV (5 page)

Probably the most famous soul-swap in rock and roll lore was committed by Led Zeppelin, who supposedly pulled a Robert Johnson in exchange for musical greatness. (If so, they certainly got a better deal than the Delta bluesman, who died at age twenty-seven, probably poisoned, after making a handful of largely poorly-selling sides.) The Zep rumor was tawdry, teen-mag stuff, but its cheesy ubiquity attests to the band’s power to make mass mythology with teeth. Just compare Zep to the Stones, darkside dabblers widely embraced as Bad Boys by the press. Yes, the Stones doffed Papa Ghede top hats and expressed sympathy for the devil. But who really holds more satanic majesty? Eurotrash Mick with the MBA or the priapic Pan from Birmingham? Charming
Charlie Watts or the potentially barbaric John Bonham? Or try running this little thought experiment: You step into an elevator and there’s Keith Richards, leaning against the wall, grinning at you. You murmur something fannish and grateful, awed that this grizzled, fabulously wealthy wraith still walks the earth. Now imagine you’re in the same situation, facing Jimmy Page: silent, feline, ominously puffy. You’d probably just want to get the hell out of there.

Taken literally, Zep’s Satanism is silly, but as a figure for their cultural power, it warrants attention, especially when brought to you by an imaginative if paranoid obsessive like Thomas Friend. One of Friend’s most audacious but intriguing claims concerns the image on the inside of the
gatefold, which was conceived by Page and brought into being, in pencil and gold, by his friend Barrington Colby. Atop a mountain stands another old man, an idealized geezer based on the classic Rider–Waite Tarot image of the Hermit—a symbol of self-reliance and wisdom, according to Page. Though the Hermit is usually read as a figure of solitary illumination, here he waits for a scruffy seeker below to make his way up the mountain. This ascent is mirrored in Page’s “fantasy sequence” during the film
The Song Remains the Same
, which shows the guitarist climbing up a mountain to encounter an old man—also played by Page—whose face goes through various lysergic
morphs before the figure waves his wand, itself a psychedelic echo of Page’s own onstage use of the violin bow. Friend points out that the sequence was shot behind Boleskine House on a full moon night. He also reminds us that Crowley bought the isolated mansion in 1899 in order to attempt the arduous Operation of Abra-Melin the Mage, the successful completion of which results in “the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.” For Thelemites, this close encounter with the HGA—aka, one’s daemon or higher self—signifies the discovery of one’s True Will.

Friend claims that Crowley contacted the HGA at Boleskine, and that Page purchased the place to perform the same operation (Stephen Davis reports that Page also hired “the Satanist Charles Pierce” to restore some of Crowley’s murals). Unfortunately, Crowley’s diaries strongly suggest that he encountered his HGA much later, down in Surrey, where he was hiding from his wife and experimenting with hashish and prayer. Nonetheless, there is a certain crazy charm to Friend’s claim. Friend notes that Zeppelin did not tour during the fall of 1970, a break that ended only when the band gathered in December to begin rehearsing and recording their fourth album. Though the time frame was rather cramped by true Solomonic standards, Friend believes that Page succeeded in contacting the HGA, who of
course is actually Satan, and that this triumph is mirrored in Colby’s gatefold, the later fantasy sequence, and the phenomenally popular music on
. And that’s why the band didn’t put their name on the jacket. They didn’t write the music.
Satan did.

Of course, Jimmy Page probably just spent the fall of 1970 getting stoned, playing guitar, and listening to
Band of Gypsies
and the Trees. But there are certain peculiarities about Colby’s image that should be noted. There is only one significant difference between Colby’s hermit and the Rider–Waite image, a difference Friend notes with an admirable clarity: “
THERE ARE HORNS STICKING THROUGH THE HOOD!!!
”
¹⁶
There is another surprise beside this hint of diabolical iconography: If you hold the gatefold open vertically and place the right side of the image along a mirror, a beast will shape itself out of the mountain rubble and leap into your eyes. Go ahead, try it at home. Is the beast a dragon? A hound of hell? The black dog? Friend does not discuss this simulacrum, although he does claim to find an image of a hawk tucked away in Colby’s mountain. After performing a Lesser Banishing Ritual and meditating with this image for a few hours, however, I believe that this avian totem is actually a penguin.

How do we account for these creatures that form themselves from random squiggles? Think back to when you were a kid, and elephants and pirate ships formed
themselves on the fly from floating clouds or weathered stone. Those spontaneous cartoons remind us that our brains are not just passive receivers of data but active projectors of meaning, constantly weaving the information they pick up into holistic perceptions. In certain situations, these projections draw heavily from the dream-store of the imagination, especially when the visual data is shadowy or ambiguous, a liminal condition that makes our projections tend toward the fantastic. Leonardo da Vinci famously suggested that novice painters should spend some time staring at stained walls and mottled rocks until “the likeness of divine landscapes” emerged.
¹⁷
This phantasmagorical response to visual ambiguity also explains why the slanted shades of twilight can lay a faery glamour across the land. It also explains the alternate name of Colby’s drawing: “View in Half or Varying Light.” The word “View” here, which you might take to be a noun, may actually be a command. By viewing the drawing in half (mirrored) or varying light, the drawing’s capacity to invoke your imagination is enhanced. You get it?
The beast is inside you.

Yanking out the inner sleeve from the gatefold, we come across the lyrics to “Stairway to Heaven,” some
recording data, and four peculiar symbols emblazoned on the parchment-colored paper. These notorious symbols, or sigils, concentrate and refract the mystery of the entire record. The first thing that must be said is that there are
four
of them, and that they appear on the fourth record released by a quartet, a record that features four songs on each side. On a talismanic disc like
, all these fours suggest the most fundamental of occult quaternities: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, the four elements once believed to make up the whole of material reality. As Crowley suggested in the quote from the
Equinox
cited above, these elements are also spiritual qualities, and were decisively linked to the four suits of the Tarot deck by the French magus Éliphas Lévi. In his influential 1855 book
Dogme et rituel de la haute magie
, which kick-started the modern occult revival. Lévi expanded magic’s network of correspondences by correlating Earth, Air, Fire, and Water to, respectively, Discs, Swords, Wands, and Cups.

John Bonham’s sigil, later emblazoned on his single bass drum, is made up of three Discs; with only a tad bit more imagination, we can see John Paul Jones’s sign as three stylized Cups knotted together over a central circle. Earth and water are
base
elements; Jones played bass, and Bonzo was base, at least when he was drunk. The wordsmith Plant’s feather clearly belongs to air, the element of speech and thought pictured by the Tarot
as the suit of Swords, one of which Plant wields in his fantasy sequence in
The Song Remains the Same
. And to Page, of course, goes the element of fire, of transformative energies and the magical Will. In Lévi’s scheme, fire and will are associated with the suit of Wands (or violin bows); besides including a number of wand-like shapes, the Zorro slash of
recalls the electrical fire of lightning, the spark of the alchemical process.

When music critics attempt to describe the synergy that great musical combos can generate, they often fall back, rather loosely, on the notion of alchemy. In alchemy, which differs from chemistry in its sensitivity to psychospiritual dynamics, various base materials are combined, sometimes under great tension, in order to transform those substances into things rare and noble. Alchemy is the metallurgy of the spirit, and so makes a fit analogy for music, perhaps the most spiritual of arts. But with Led Zeppelin, we move beyond mere metaphor, or at least to the magical edge of metaphor, for in sound and spirit the band invoked elemental forces to craft their soundscapes and song. Many of the group’s unique characteristics—their drama and dynamics, their range of genres and moods, their imaginative command and tremendous success—speak to their ability to creatively combine and contrast basic musical elements into transforming presences. And
is their Great Work, where they turned lead into gold, then
platinum, and finally diamond, the ultimate fusion of hardness and light.

Page asked the band to choose their sigils from an existing source, Rudolph Koch’s
Book of Signs
, but Plant and Page wound up designing their own. (“Typical, really,” Jones later noted.
¹⁸
) Koch was a German type designer and artist, and his collection of ancient and medieval glyphs was primarily intended as a sourcebook for graphic artists. Though brief explanations are attached to the signs, Koch’s intent reminds us that the band’s sigils have no more necessary “meaning” than most elements of design. Is there a
meaning
to the nifty Arts and Crafts typeface that Page lifted for the “Stairway to Heaven” lyrics on the other side of the sleeve? Or just a vibe? Part of the cleverness of these sigils is that they compel us to decode them. It is not enough to simply watch them whip around the spindle of a turntable, blurring design into op-art phantasmagoria. They must be made to speak.