However, I do not believe either Page or Crowley were “Devil worshippers”. Also, Led Zeppelin included other members of the band besides Jimmy Page. There is Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and the late John Bonham. None of these guys were satan worshippers to my knowledge.
I will lay my cards up front. I at times thoroughly enjoy Zeppelin. When I was growing up as a teen I thought it was just long-haired rocker music that the guys in the smokers’ corner at my high school listened. More of the new wave thing back then for me. In my 20s, I surprisingly started enjoying their music. (Even modern-day Wolfmother sound like them). As I get older or more sombre, I’m not usually in the mood to get the Led Out as they say on one of my radio stations.
However, having said this: Aleister Crowley was self-described as the Beast, studied assiduously and practiced Satanism (seances, 666 stuff), and practiced the occult voraciously. This is not Christianity by any means - he attempted to put into practice its antithesis -whether through religious orgies or creating an extra-Masonic satanic lodge called the Order of the Golden Dawn with secret black occult ceremonies. It was this side of Crowley that fascinated Jimmy Page. Not just some funny-duddle tabloid rumours of his dalliances with harmless magick. No Crowley practiced the black occult fully in his life. A drug addict, a sexual beast he thought.
In one of Zep’s biographies Hammer of the Gods I believe, some parts of which may be apocryphal, Robert Plant I believe blamed Jimmy Page’s occult fascinations for the death of Plant’s son back in the seventies. There are even rumors to this day, unsubstantiated, that Plant doesn’t rush to tour with Page because he despises Page’s fixations on Crowley and the occult.
Now, has this stopped me from listenting to Zep. No. I mean the Beatles put Crowley on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s. Does one stop listening to the Beatles then. I couldn’t (though, unlike Jimmy Page, the Beatles did not know much about Crowley either and put him up for shock value; the Beatles were into the whole transcendental meditation thing with Maharishi and love and peace). But Jimmy Page followed Crowley’s legacy religiously and the occult.
Does one member of a good band worshiping such a guy mean that the music is to be questioned too? Well, the answers above, and I guess my own suggest no.
However, I have never been able to shake why this fascination of some rockers with Satanism (not the puerile, adolescent “Spinal Tap” variety where it’s done for cool by all those MotorMaidenSabbathPriest groups but by people like Page or hard-core metalists from Scandinavia). Don’t want to sound a prude, but there is just that element in our modern culture, that element that somehow “hey, man that’s cool, all these occult and scary beliefs”. Now how one deals with it is another story. I guess Spinal Tap had a bit of the last laugh when they, after Led Zeppelin had used Stone Henge props in their sold-out concerts, Spinal Tap made brilliant fun of all this high-minded druid-occult significance by writing an ode to Stone Henge)
Anyway, just my two cents. (And I know people get very possessive of their groups, but just my thoughts.) If I’ve erred you guys will tell me.
Parental red flags go up.
When I read about Robert Plant’s son I’m thankful my girls’ tastes currently tend to lean towards The Jonas Brothers & Taylor Swift…