Season of the Witch Quotes

“Moorcock believes, like Arthur Brown, that when art takes on the function of myth, it can actually transform consciousness: “I believe that the artist is a shaman, in that you provide your public (tribe) with images, resonances, stories which symbolise their relationship with the physical world and its questions.”
― Peter Bebergal, Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll

“This is the oldest form of religious worship, when magic and religion were inseparable, where myth was communicated through a colorful and often wild blending of costume, song, and dance. This type of yearning for freedom and self-expression is our first and earliest glimmer of the spirit of rock and roll, a primeval and communal method to transmit a truth, to celebrate, to mourn, to sacrifice something to the gods. And to do it together.”
― Peter Bebergal, Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll

“Drawing from the costumed and goth-infused death metal found in the icy Netherlands, doom metal down-tuned all the guitars, drew inspiration from the drones of Tibetan monks and Hindu ragas, and created a new mythology of metal, one that embraced decay and darkness as an essential part of the human condition.”
― Peter Bebergal, Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll

“when do proficiency and sophistication have much of anything to do with good rock ’n’ roll?”
― Peter Bebergal, Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll

“If you make enough noise, no matter your instrument, you can keep the old gods alive forever.”
― Peter Bebergal, Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll

“The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, is a musical “book of shadows,” each song a spell intending to invoke a different entity inhabiting his mind and soul. Brown describes creating and listening to the album as an “inner journey” in which he would call forth “gods and presences” through each song. Brown was interested in dualities, in the tension inherent in the gods of mythology. He saw his own role as trickster, mediating between humans and gods, showing the hazards of breaching the divide. Here again is the story of Dionysus’s birth, where the god’s coming into the world was a result of his mother getting too close to the divine fire. There is also a Christian connotation in the quagmire: Does hellfire burn or cleanse? Is hell a place of eternal suffering, or does redemption await on the other side of punishment?”
― Peter Bebergal, Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll

“Rob Young, in his essential Electric Eden, describes as Barrett being “strangely pushed and pulled between nostalgia for the secret garden of a child’s imagination and the space-age futurism of interstellar overdrive.” Barrett was channeling a spirit that was trying to pierce the veil between these worlds, and while this nostalgia and futurism, as Young puts it, seem opposed, they are actually two ideas at the heart of magic. The practice of magic is one requiring a link to the past and a vision of the future. Barrett added this directly to the lyrics of his songs and his live performances, experimenting with light and sound in an attempt to work the audience into a trance. The method is new, but the intention is ancient.”
― Peter Bebergal, Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll

“When your work is created from a deep connection with the spiritual, its power is manifest so using symbols is an unnecessary overstatement. I think public gratuitous display tends to reflect a weakness and insecurity, in both the work and the person behind the work.”
― Peter Bebergal, Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll

“Punk was the energy of the shout and gospel.”
― Peter Bebergal, Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll

“have been taught to love it and never does it cross their minds that this incessant emphasis upon the Negro with his repulsive love songs and vulgar rhythms is but the psychological preliminary to close body contact between the races.”
― Peter Bebergal, Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll

“Moreover, the occult imagination saved rock and roll from sugary teenybopper purgatory and urged musicians, engineers, and producers to look beyond the conventional toward the possibility of raising the collective spiritual consciousness into the astral planes.”
― Peter Bebergal, Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll