Flower Power

Flower Power names a period of spiritual searching in Britain and America that unsettled the religious inheritance of earlier generations and helped bring occult interests back into wider view. In the book’s account, it is less a single doctrine than a cultural opening: young people turned away from Christianity while seeking other sources of meaning, and occult ideas that had been largely dormant since the early twentieth century began to circulate again. This setting helps explain the changing religious and symbolic vocabulary of rock music and, later, the underground cultures that made transgression part of their identity.

Spiritual Searching and Occult Revival

The period’s turn away from inherited Christianity did not amount to a simple rejection of religion. Young people explored Eastern mysticism as well as numerous cults and sects, looking for forms of belief that seemed closer to their own nature. The book describes this broad search as spiritual desperation, a condition that made occultism newly visible and culturally available. Flower Power therefore supplies a background for the return of esoteric subjects to popular culture, rather than evidence that its participants shared a single belief system.

The occult revival also gave older figures and ideas a new public life. Aleister Crowley, once sensationalized by the press, gained influence after his death through underground films by Kenneth Anger. Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page each contributed soundtracks to Anger’s Crowley-inspired films. Page’s involvement extended beyond musical imagery: he collected Crowley’s books and manuscripts, held a financial share in London’s Equinox occult bookshop, and bought Crowley’s former estate, Boleskine. These details show how the period’s interest could range from artistic reference to sustained personal and material engagement.

From Rock Provocation to Underground Identity

The Rolling Stones’ deliberately diabolical public image offers a nearby example of how occult signs entered rock culture: their promotional imagery and album titles drew on Satanic themes, while their songs treated subjects such as addiction, violence, and predation. At Altamont in 1969, the violence surrounding the concert, filmed for Gimme Shelter, became a stark counterpoint to the peace-and-love ideal associated with the decade. The book places this rupture alongside the wider spiritual disquiet of the period, not as proof that Flower Power caused later musical violence, but as part of the historical setting in which rebellion and darkness acquired public meaning.

Later Black Metal inherited some of rock’s oppositional imagery but developed its own standards and boundaries. In Norway, the scene was defined not by a fixed rulebook but by the beliefs and outlook of influential musicians, whose changing priorities could reshape the genre. Mayhem’s slow release of material helped make its 1987 Deathcrush mini-album a rare object around which serious fans gathered. The band’s later use of corpse paint transformed a visual style into one of Norwegian Black Metal’s recognizable markers. At the Helvete record shop, acceptance depended on trust and whether newcomers were judged serious in their views; the shop thus served as a social environment as well as a meeting place.

The Changing Religious Imagination

The book distinguishes this later scene’s Satanism from the symbolic or archetypal understanding associated with international groups such as the Church of Satan. Early Norwegian Black Metal musicians treated Satan as real and imagined the world as a struggle between good and evil, choosing the side they believed should prevail. This was an inversion of doctrinal Christianity, but the account notes an irony: the musicians’ literal concern with Satan and Hell could resemble the seriousness of fundamentalist religion more than the reticence of the Norwegian State Church, where such subjects had become uncomfortable to discuss.

A different transformation appears in Bathory’s movement away from its early Satanic and horror-inspired material. As the band’s music grew slower and more elaborate, its 1988 album Blood Fire Death replaced earlier B-movie horror imagery with a painting of the Wild Hunt, including Valkyries and Thor. The album paired raw aggression with more orchestrated songs and clearer vocals; its opening instrumental evoked Odin riding across the heavens. The change was not merely visual. Bathory had turned from what the book calls a childish and foreign Satanism toward the heathen mythological inheritance of its own forebears, making ancestral archetypes a durable resource for the Black Metal scene that followed.

Legacy and Limits of the Period

Bathory’s next album, Hammerheart, deepened that turn by imagining the perspective of a Viking Age practitioner of Ásatrú faith. The book describes the modern revival of that faith as an effort to reconstruct pre-Christian Norse and Teutonic beliefs, sometimes accompanied by hostility toward Christianity as a religion imposed on ancestors. This later development should not be collapsed into Flower Power: the evidence establishes a historical contrast, not a direct line of influence. Flower Power widened the cultural space for spiritual alternatives; subsequent musicians selected and reshaped different traditions for their own artistic and ideological purposes.

The period’s longer significance lies in that changing use of rebellion. What began in the account as a broad search beyond inherited Christianity appears in later underground music as a more selective struggle over authenticity, belief, and ancestry. The progression is neither uniform nor inevitable: occult fashion, serious engagement with esoteric material, literal Satanism, and Norse heathen revival are distinct phenomena. Taken together, they show how the opening of the late 1960s and early 1970s could furnish later scenes with a vocabulary of opposition, while those scenes made that vocabulary their own.