Shaman's Blues

‘The growth of bureaucracy creates an intricate network of personal relations, puts a premium on social skills, and makes the unbridled egotism of the American Adam untenable. Yet at the same time it erodes all forms of patriarchal authority and thus weakens the social superego, formerly represented by fathers, teachers and preachers. The decline of institutionalised authority in an ostensibly permissive society does not, however, lead to a "decline of the superego" in individuals. It encourages instead the development of a harsh, punitive superego that derives most of its psychic energy, in the absence of authoritative social prohibitions, from the destructive, aggressive impulses of the id.’

Christopher Lasch - "The Culture of Narcissism"

"Why did you throw the Jack Of Hearts away?
It was the only card in the deck
That I had left to play."

- The Doors "Hyacinth House"


The Doors are perhaps the most curious group in the history of popular music, and in my personal opinion probably the greatest. Both a product of their era and very much the antithesis of it, they seemed to both stand apart from the spirit of the times, and yet embody the contradictions that characterised it.

The Doors themselves were children of the military-industrial complex. Jim Morrison’s father was Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison, commander of the United States Navy’s 7th Fleet during the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident that initiated the American military involvement in Vietnam. Guitarist Robby Krieger’s father was a senior executive in the shadowy RAND Corporation, a quasi-private entity that conducts research on behalf of the U.S. military, and is notorious for its use of game theory to produce the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. When Morrison famously declared that his parents were "dead" it was for more pragmatic reasons than the obvious Oedipal symbolism. Just as it would have been awkward for him for it to be known that his father was, perhaps more than any other individual, responsible for starting the Vietnam War, so it would have been equally awkward for his father were it widely known that his son was an avatar of the counter-cultural rebellion against it.

Morrison was a far more complex and sympathetic character than the narcissistic "Lizard King" projected by his record company’s marketing department and the series of lurid, largely fictional biographies that followed his death. Those who were close to him who didn’t feel the need to cash in on his fame generally portray him as a thoughtful individual who was in many ways a reluctant rock star, and who would rather have occupied his time with his poetry or his real love, film-making. His estrangement from his family makes his background biographically sketchy, though it is known that, as is typical for the scion of a military family, his childhood was itinerant, and characterised by his father’s somewhat bizarre disciplinary regime, which eschewed corporal punishment in favour of dressing-downs and bawl-outs, as though the Morrison children were Marine cadets. The one episode in his childhood that Jim Morrison liked to divulge was when his family drove past a car accident that had left a number of Native Americans lying dead by the side of the road. Morrison imagined that he had ingested the soul of one of the dead Indians, granting him shamanic potential.

Although it has been suggested that Morrison greatly exaggerated what he had witnessed at the scene, its importance is that it gave him his first uncanny idea of the possibilities of magic. The enigmatic Freudian psychoanalyst Géza Róheim wrote in "Magic and Schizophrenia" that magic is the counterphobic action, that it gives the weak ego its first opportunity of spontaneous action against the suffocating pressure of the superego. It is this possibility of spontaneity that gives birth to The Individual, within which nests Durkheim’s Homo Duplex - social man and personal man. Fearing the terrible punishment of the social superego for "sticking out" if we say the wrong thing, we all nevertheless possess the magical possibility of using language to bring ourselves to the attention of others, of impressing them or converting them to our cause. With The Doors, Morrison launched perhaps the most spectacular attack on the social superego of the post-war era.



The Doors' self-titled debut album, released in 1967, opens with what was pretty much their manifesto - "Break On Through". The "other side" that Morrison is attempting to break through to is that of the completed shamanic initiation. For all its drama of spiritual possession, what shamanic initiation is really about is the conquering of the superego. The shaman dramatises the social consensus as possessing spirits in order to confront and ultimately control them, doubling his own strength and giving him the power to cure others. The Doors’ sound here is unprecedented - rather than riffing, it pulsates insistently, like the fragile ego declaring its courage to be. The Doors’ sound was spacious but bounded, contained within a periphery, at times almost subterranean. The Doors were not Faustian, but Magian, Spengler’s term for the cultures of the Middle-East, whose primary symbol, the cavern, manifests itself in the domes of the Mosque and the Synagogue, and whose aesthetic was that of magical transmutation, of alchemy - the symbolic conquest of the self.

The follow-up "Strange Days" long player, released the same year, delved into what would be The Doors' ur-theme - loneliness - with songs such as "People Are Strange" and "You’re Lost Little Girl". It’s likely that the continual uprooting of Morrison's childhood was as responsible for his enthrallment to this subject as his father’s disciplinary habits were responsible for his compulsive anti-authoritarianism. Loneliness has long been the essential American experience, and its anguish bore the birth pangs of a rock’n’roll that was so lonely it could die. For Morrison, this endless, anomic vista of loneliness was symptomatic of an America, and by extension a Western civilisation, that was played out, its spiritual fountainheads long since run dry.



Morrison’s uncompromising assault on the superego made The Doors politically and socially indigestible by pretty much all sides. Unlike the rest of the counterculture, they didn’t present a set of demands to be met, whether modest or radical. Their antinomian stance was one of total repudiation. Both this and their generally aloof manner ensured that they would tend to generate trouble even when they weren’t looking for it, and would find few sympathisers when they found it. Their pithily irresistible pop singles would bring them to public attention only for television producers to ban them for minor infringements of etiquette, and for the police to bust Morrison for vague misdemeanors that were permutations of the catch-all euphemism of "lewd behaviour". These fuelled an increasing perception of his general oafishness within a music industry that cared little for him. Indeed Morrison himself had always shown disdain for the music business, always preferring to hang out with bar-flies and street bums than with his fellow musicians. What was clear from his increasing consumption of alcohol, and his decreasing contributions to The Doors records was that his battle against the nomos was one that he was losing. For all this he was still capable of great acuity. After the infamous bust at Dade County, Florida, Morrison, who privately feared the possibility of prison, nevertheless made the observation that the experience had helped him understand the purpose of the U.S. Penal system: to break African-Americans.

In 1970 The Doors somehow emerged from this fiasco with something of a comeback with the "Morrison Hotel", and "L.A. Woman" albums, both of which featured Morrison back at the creative helm, and which returned to a simpler, rocking sound that was both a commercial and critical success. "L.A. Woman" was thematically the most essential Doors record, a heartbreaking document of loneliness and isolation, both felt and observed. It also showcased how subtle and supple the band’s ensemble playing could be, hitting wonderfully tactile grooves without even the barest hint of showiness. The album’s most famous track is undoubtedly "Riders On The Storm", a song, which like Joy Division’s "The Eternal", has an aura of finality that almost suggests precognition.



After "L.A Woman", Morrison’s last studio recording was of his poems, which would be released in the late 70’s as "An American Prayer". Morrison’s poetry was disdained by the critics, although this is largely due to a general misunderstanding of its purpose, which wasn’t an attempt at profundity or beauty, or to create Eng. Lit. Ultimately, it was an attempt to produce a superfluity of meaning. Anthropologists class the shaman phenomenon as a magical medical complex, in that primitive tribes experience disease and illness not as the result of objective biological symptoms, but as a spiritual, which is to say a social, attack. If a tribesman is struck by a mysterious illness then it must be the result of a broken taboo or witchcraft or sorcery. As he cannot know who or what is the origin of the illness, he is defenceless and will quickly succumb. Other members of the tribe are vulnerable to sympathetic symptoms and are also liable to go down. The purpose of the shaman in effecting a cure is to use his surplus symbolism to give the disease a meaning, which gives the tribesman his first foothold in resisting it, and then to draw it out and cast it back on its originator.

Within the confines of a primitive tribe, of course, it is easy for the shaman to identify the source of a social superego attack that initiates disease. In the complex, multi-layered societies of the contemporary West, the sources of superego pressure are as multitudinous as they are nefarious - they leak through society as iatrogenic undercurrents, manifesting themselves in random psychotic acts; as murder, suicide etc. The superego can attack in many ways - through what Ivan Illich called "the irrational consistency of bureaucracy", through the law and security services, via the mass media, or even through the peer-pressure of the hip "alternative media" that claims false fraternity (which is why uncompromising later bands like The Stranglers and Joy Division always had a deep distrust of the music press). Morrison’s poems, which seemed at once both florid and dissociated, were ultimately an attempt to try to give this nebulous force some kind of shape so that it could be handled and resisted.



Ultimately, all transgressive artists who die unnaturally are killed by the superego, whether the mechanism be suicide, drug overdose, or assassination by a deranged fan. Morrison’s death fitted perfectly within this pattern, within Marcel Mauss’s idée de mort suggérée par la collectivité, within voodoo death. Although the ostensible cause of his death was an ingestion of heroin erroneously given to him by his girlfriend Pamela Courson instead of cocaine, the ultimate cause was an ego relentlessly worn down by the pressure of the superego - compare his beaten, exhausted vocals on "L.A. Woman" to the eager yelping on The Doors' debut just four years before. Courson herself would succumb to voodoo death three years later, at the same age of 27 as her famous boyfriend. On the day that Morrison died, on July 3rd 1971, his father, that ultimate superego figure, presided over the decommissioning ceremony for the USS Bon Homme Richard, the aircraft carrier that he had commanded all those years before off the coast of Vietnam.

Bound By Magic

Whether or not one believes in the supernatural or paranormal aspects of magic, there is no doubt that magic is, in the words of Daniel O’Keefe, "real social action". If there is one aspect of magic that has always fascinated the social scientists that study it, it is the phenomenon of voodoo death. In the first half of the twentieth century, it became an object of almost obsessive study by the group of French sociologists of the Durkheim school, and the British anthropologists that were led by Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard. Whereas mana theory showed that human interaction can be deeply nourishing, perhaps even necessary for human health, voodoo death, which is a real phenomenon that has been observed on countless occasions, shows that human interaction can be toxic in and of itself.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of voodoo death is the rapidity with which it takes effect. When a member of a primitive tribe has the smouldering branch or chicken bone pointed at him by the witch doctor, the tribesman will die usually within a fortnight, and often within a couple of days. Ultimately, voodoo death is socially induced death - the man has been found breaking a tribal taboo, and the witch doctor condemns him to death on behalf of the rest of the tribe. Although the actual physical cause of death is still somewhat a mystery, the psychological mechanism of death is an attack by the super-ego, the component of the mind that Freud identified as ideally containing the parental and societal influences needed to compel the ego into controlling the unruly urgings of the id. In reality, the super-ego often works as what Christopher Lasch called "society’s agent in the mind", and this is especially so in modern societies where parental authority has given way to dissipated bureaucratic and corporate structures whose exigencies are disparate and often contradictory. In such circumstances, the super-ego, rather than functioning as the severe but measured moderator we know as "conscience", often takes a harsh and punitive form.

Mostly nowadays we individually experience the super-ego as a minor but persistent nuisance. It’s the voice in our heads that tells us we’re bad if we haven’t done an important task, or done it to a lower standard than we know we’re capable of. It also likes to throw up embarrassing or guilty memories, forcing to us to close our eyes and curse in order to send them away. The phrase "I could die from embarrassment" contains more than a germ of truth - the super-ego that punishes us for social misdemeanors is perfectly capable of killing us (or encouraging us to kill ourselves) under the right circumstances.

The politics of class are probably the area of greatest concentration of magic in modern society. Ultimately it can be said that class is magic. Perhaps the most urgent purpose of any ruling class is to cast binding spells on the lower orders, to force super-ego pressure downwards on those below. I would speculate that one sure definition of class is that the lower down the class structure you are, the more thoroughly you are bound by limiting magic, by the more firmly you have convinced yourself of what you are capable and incapable of doing. Ruling class magic is enhanced in its power by a number of tricks and props, the most important being:

* The symbolism and arcana of authority

* A clear, portentous, priestly manner of speaking, involving the incantatory repetition of key phrases ("there is no alternative", "we’re all in this together" etc.)

* Euphemistic and obfuscatory in-group terminology, expressly designed to preserve the magic of authority from coming under detailed scrutiny.

* Terrifyingly convoluted etiquette intended to focus enormous super-ego pressure on the uninitiated

Margaret Thatcher was particularly masterful at the rites of ruling class magic. Her haughty tones, so redolent of the priest (that modern descendent of the witchdoctor) always make me think that she should have started her speeches with the phrase "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today…". Her mastery of this kind of performance is probably the basis of her reputation for competence, which her short-sighted economic programme would belie.



For all the ramifications of economic relations, it is important to note that the class system is ultimately maintained by magical ritual and symbolism, by what Wittgenstein called an "agreement to agree". Essentially we all agree to agree which class we belong to, and to the social relations that result from membership of that class. Whatever privileges or cultural cringes we inherit from this agreement we accept ontologically, as "natural facts". Ultimately however, for all its pretense of sophistication, this is really an old compact that goes far, far back into the primitive realms of witchdoctor-magic, from which contemporary magic is descended, and which has evolved far less than most of us would like to believe.

Wall Of Voodoo

"Magic persists. Repeatedly driven underground, it repeatedly surfaces to become part of events - in the early modern witch-mania, in the magnetism-spiritualism-theosophy of the 19th century. It is dismissed as superstition, anachronism, survival, subcultural idiosyncrasy, deviance and lag. But today magic flares up so insistently that it commands attention from a surprised intelligentsia which had not noticed that the occult underground has been seething for 150 years….Magic is probably more than cultural lag. It even goes beyond persistence of occult elements in the person category and the ego……Perhaps the occult is the natural expression of a society in which we live surrounded by machines, bureaucracies, technologies and planning systems made by human rationality but unfathomable to us personally."

Daniel O’Keefe "Stolen Lightning"

One of the interesting aspects of that strain of popular music that can be broadly called counter-cultural rock, by which I mean the left-field popular musics that stretched from the beat groups of the mid-60’s to the New Pop of the early-80’s, is that there has never been an attempt to really understand what kind of collective project it really was. Although it is usually seen as a kind of generational relief-valve, or as an attempt at escapism through the formation of subcultures, these explanations don’t really explain its most striking phenomena, which are its depravity and its appalling rates of death and mental illness.

But in what previous historical milieu would we find male-bonding, internecine power struggles, reckless drug-taking, excessive horseplay, ritualistic ecstasies and bouts of madness? Uncomfortably enough, there is only one: the province of magic. However, in the mature magics of well-established contemporary tribal groups, magic is surrounded by numerous taboos to protect the tribal members. Magic is restricted to an appointed shaman or witchdoctor; consciousness-altering drugs are reserved for special, infrequent ceremonies; magical "appeal" structures are created to ensure magical disputes are settled without disrupting tribal harmony. Conversely, counter-cultural rock groups, with their retinues of roadies, dealers, favoured engineers and producers, and assorted hangers-on, recall the earlier, more dangerous stages of experimental magic, especially that of the all-male initiation lodges of the Neolithic period, when ambitious young men rejected the mechanical solidarity of the clan system and withdrew from the tribe in order to expropriate the sacred for themselves and their own self-empowerment.



In addressing the idea of rock music being primarily a magical phenomenon, we must first define the concept of "mana". The term originates in the studies of the Melanesian Islanders of the South Pacific conducted by the anthropologist Robert Codrington in the 19th century. "Mana" was the term the islanders themselves gave to that curious frisson that manifests itself when humans enact with one another socially. Nowadays we have any number of terms for it - "charisma", "spirit", "empathy" etc., but Codrington’s insight was that when it is first noticed, it is given a general term. The French sociologists of the early 20th century used the "mana" concept to construct a theory that posited that the realisation of mana was the origin of religion, in that primitive man realises that mana is increased through ritualised, sacred ceremonies, and these in themselves give birth to both his conception of society, and that the efficacy of that society’s actions are increased by increased codification of the mana rituals. "Magic" is then a secondary phenomenon that appropriates the resulting sacred rituals, objects and texts for personal or group efficacy i.e. it is an expropriation of the sacred.

Life in the late twentieth century western world, with the organic solidarity of its social structures, buttressed with the solid ego protectors of the civic institutions, was frequently bereft of mana. Capitalism, with its obsession with individualism is particularly mana-repellant, but even Socialism with its Marxist distrust of religious opium, sees the mana-affect of collective action as at best merely coincidental. In many ways contemporary western man’s position is unenviable, because if his social structures collapse, he has almost no personal magics with which to combat social super-ego pressures. This is why Emile Durkheim considered that modern "anomic" suicide was closely linked to the group-induced "voodoo death" of primitive man.

We can then see that what truly attracted post-war English musicians to black American musics, was not pre-eminently their rhythmic innovations or "soulful" emotional frankness (although these were important), but rather that they crackled with magical mana. The soul of Sam Cooke or Ray Charles or Motown still radiated the spiritual aura of Gospel. The Blues, with its hellhound-on-my-tail fatalism, still had its spidery roots dug firmly into voodoo. It is easy to understand how such hedonistic depressives as Eric Clapton, John Lennon and Brian Jones could become obsessed with them. The beat groups’ adoption and promulgation of this mana was so successful that their ambitions turned to the most daring project of all - to assault the objective social frame of reality and de-rationalise western society. This change in purpose can be accurately dated - it was the moment that John Lennon pronounced that The Beatles were bigger than Jesus. Jesus Christ was, of course, the greatest magician in history.



As the Sixties progressed, the leading rock groups almost entered into an arms race with each other in adopting ever more exotic and far-flung magics. The Beatles and The Who adopted eastern mysticism and had their own gurus. The Doors adopted Native American shamanism. Hendrix invoked voodoo. The Rolling Stones dabbled with the occultism of Aleister Crowley, whereas Led Zeppelin immersed themselves in it. Drug ingestion became epidemic, with the trend being to harder and harder substances. Even the appearance of the bands became more wizard-like, with ever-longer hair, flowing robes, and even the occasional adoption of face paint. To become the biggest band in the world meant becoming the most magical band in the world.

Another focus of the original initiation lodges’ work was in the crafts, such as pottery, woodwork, and smithing (swordsmithing was the original "black art") which were mired in sacred lore. Similarly, soundsmiths like Page, Hendrix, Townshend, Gilmour and Blackmore spent enormous effort not only on the mastery of their instruments, but also eventually in their mastery of the studio. This was not (as is commonly understood) an attempt at proficiency for proficiency’s sake, but simply an attempt to (literally) cover their tracks, to mystify and obscure how they did it - to amplify the sense that what they did was truly magical.

By the mid-70’s the counter-culture had pretty much burnt itself out through an inevitable wave of death, madness and exhaustion. The original viziers, mostly semi-retired to home counties mansions or extended tax exile, only emerged infrequently for bloated stadium tours with accompanying live albums. The sense of magical insurrection was only kept vaguely alive by the simulacra musics of glam and glitter, until the next generation’s magical wave, intensely jealous of the "achievements" of those who came before them, had their chance to assault the objective social frame.

Punk, or more specifically the "post-punk" that was to follow in its wake, resumed the magical project, resurrecting Crowley-esque occultism (via the Industrial Records stable), Primitivism (The Pop Group, The Slits), Spiritualism (The Fall), death-cult voodoo-ism (Siouxsie, most Goth) and Eastern mysticism (Cabaret Voltaire’s mantras). Post-punk even had its own esoteric/occultist generalists in Killing Joke and Joy Division, very much the equivalents of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. In coining these new musics, post-punk also had the magical new black musics of funk and reggae to plunder. Dub reggae was particularly irresistible for two reasons; firstly it embodied the kind of Spenglerian depth-space effects that are so vital to Western man’s sense of himself. Secondly, being essentially the Rastafarian religious music, it was drenched in mana.



In socio-cultural terms, Joy Division have always been an enigma. Why are they so perplexing? Why are they so compelling? In magical terms, however, they make perfect sense. Ian Curtis was, like Jim Morrison before him, basically a failed shaman. The original shamen of northern Europe and trans-Russia were frequently chosen for their odd appearance, and epilepsy was seen as an advantage for the head start it gave into altered states of consciousness (remarkably Curtis seems to have induced himself into gaining such a condition). The initiation of the shaman was the ritual of death and rebirth. Entering a state of trance-possession, he would ritually "die" before his audience, and then travel to the chthonic underworld and commune with the darkest spirits, then rise to the heavens to meet the angels. Finally, his broken spirit would be put back together and be "reborn" in his physical body, his spiritual immortality a ward against psychic death. What Curtis was attempting was almost unbelievably reckless and dangerous, but it wasn’t suicidal. Quite the opposite in fact - it was an attempt to achieve psychic invulnerability. His mistake was perhaps to attempt it outside a properly constituted order. As a secondary effect, Joy Division left behind perhaps the most magical music of them all, a mesmerising record of the psychic battles that mark the first stage of the shamanic initiate’s journey. Following his death, the re-membering of the cultural body had to be attempted by the bands that were left behind, and hence the inevitable, necessary vitality of New Pop. The likes of "New Gold Dream" are an attempt to create a "wholeness" to fill the void opened by "Closer".

If anything, the punks had been even more reckless than the hippies, and had burnt themselves out even sooner. If the death of Curtis seems like a milestone, it is because there was a subconscious recognition that this kind of behaviour could not go on any more. Certainly there would be excessive behaviour and tragic deaths after post-punk, but these would be outliers, ultra-narcissists too self-absorbed to realise that the game was over, rather than being connected to any musical-historical thread. Mirroring the great ethical religions like Christianity and Islam which marginalise magic, rock music was to enter its managerial, bureaucratic stage, in which innovation was to give way to the patternwork of the endless repetition of approved forms or "genres". What little magic that was still practiced in rock was the coarsest of all - the black magic of Death Metal and its sub-genres, often coming from lands outside the Anglo-American rock mainstream.

In hindsight it is no surprise that the "best" music, the most vital, the most mana-infused, is that made in the crucial periods 1966-1971, and 1977-1981, as these were the most magical periods, the moments when the counter-culture most threatened to tear the objective social frame of reality asunder. However, that threat always appeared more promising to those making the threat than the "threatened", who, witnessing a mainstream culture that had barely changed, largely didn’t even deign to notice the threat at all. For the neolithic magicians, the enormous risks of playing with the fire of raw magic were worth it because the result could be the opportunity to overthrow the tribal order, and remake the world in their own image. Although a few counter-cultural musicians could accumulate enormous personal wealth and prestige, ultimately the strong, defensible egos of modern man ensured that they were to some extent always confined to the margins. Dangerous and reckless, the great project of counter-cultural rock was always destined to end in failure.