Read Online Season of the Witch : How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (9780698143722) by Peter Bebergal - Free Book Online Page A

easy. Barrett was saddened by the esoteric order’s rejection of him, but there were distractions to take his mind off it: Pink Floyd and LSD. Instead of a spiritual practice, Barrett tested the limitations of sound and lyrics, crafting songs about the
I Ching
and cosmic consciousness by way of space travel. Pink Floyd’s first album,
The
Piper at the Gates of Dawn
, is a
Wünderkammer
, a cabinet of curiosities containing the relics that littered Barrett’s psychic landscape and a construct mirroring the counterculture’s spiritual yearning.
    The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
is a direct reference to the chapter in Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 book,
The
Wind in the Willows
, where the animals unexpectedly find themselves in the presence of the god Pan. Rat and Mole are traveling in a boatalong the riverbank. It is Rat who hears the piping first. Mole is skeptical. That is, until he comes across the god himself. In a moment not in any way related to the main plot of the book, Mole and Rat undergo a religious epiphany as they are seemingly initiated into the cult of Pan:
    Then suddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror—indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy—but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. . . . Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper. . . .
    The music of the 1960s would prove to be a grove in which to worship Pan. The hippies had much in common with the first real revival of the horned deity by way of the Romantic poets and writers, not only in their use of pagan and natural imagery, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Hymn of Pan,” wherein the god “sang of the dancing stars,” but also in the suggestion that drugs could offer a window into Pan’s ancient realm, as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s opium-infused poem “Kubla Khan.” Even more significantly, the 1960s counterculture revived the Romantic belief that reason and the age of industry were anathema to the natural world and the spirit of myth and poetry. This is the experience many young seekers in the 1960s were looking for, a direct, immediate communion with nature and by extension theuniverse. Art and music were the vessels for both the Romantics and the hippies. The piper at the gates of dawn was playing his panpipe for those who needed to hear. And the youth of the 1960s were pulled toward it like a siren song. There was no turning back. Rock culture was now inhabited by a Romantic soul that looked to the gods of the past. And like the Romantic poets who were their forebears, rock musicians crafted music that did more than tug at the heartstrings of teenagers. It was music that urged them toward transcendence, toward creating their own inner landscapes and exploring the antipodes of their minds.
    The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
shines forth from Syd Barrett’s psyche as if he’s a prism of the collective unconscious of the generation. The album opens with “Astronomy Domine,” sometimes subtitled “An Astral Chant,” referencing both cosmic awareness and Gregorian chants. The song is a stream-of-consciousness vision relating the tension between getting as far out as you can, all the while terrified of leaving the “blue” of the earth. Other songs make reference to a cat named Lucifer (“Lucifer Sam”), a gnome named Grimble Crumble (“The Gnome”), and a paganlike idyll echoing “Hymn of Pan” in its celebration of the joyful mystery of nature (“Flaming”). Then there is the literal