Metal, Hardcore, Indie, Rock
Pick up almost any metal album, and you’ll see it: inverted crosses, pentagrams, robed figures, and songs about pacts and darkness. Record companies didn’t invent any of this, and it didn’t happen by accident.
Over nearly a century, musicians brought these themes into rock in four distinct phases. Each artist had a completely different intention, but they all left a permanent mark on the music. That history explains why a genre built on volume and rhythm still speaks the language of medieval demonology.
The dark visuals in heavy metal work so well because bands never made them up just to sell records. Musicians actually pulled these symbols from very real ancient history:
So when a guitarist finally hung a pentagram on stage, that shape already carried centuries of actual history. The crowd felt that heavy presence right away, even if nobody could put a name to the exact source.
Most rock bands borrowed the visuals and left the belief systems behind (a few, as you’ll see below, went much deeper). That leaves a gap for curious fans. A listener might spot the Tower tarot card on a record cover, and the sleeve won’t say a word about what it means.
In the past, a curious fan had to dig through the back pages of a magazine for an occult shop or a mail-order reader, and most people never bothered. Today the answers are much closer. If an album cover has ever left you wondering what a card or symbol means, an online psychic can talk you through a tarot spread, a horoscope, or a palm reading. Rock borrowed these traditions without inventing new ones, and the original practices are still very much alive.
Rock inherited its original devil straight from the blues. A wild legend grew up around Robert Johnson, the Mississippi bluesman who recorded his songs in 1936 and 1937 and died the following year. The story claimed he met Satan at a crossroads and traded his soul for musical talent.
This myth set the stage for everything that followed. Johnson’s own songs, such as “Me and the Devil Blues” and “Hell Hound on My Trail,” fed the legend. Most listeners didn’t take the bargain literally; the story was a way to explain a talent nobody could account for. It also fit an older idea, since many churchgoers already called the blues “the devil’s music.”
Decades later, when British musicians learned the blues from imported American records, they kept the sinister stories along with the twelve-bar structure. By the time bands such as Led Zeppelin, Cream (whose “Crossroads” was a Robert Johnson song), and the early, blues-era Fleetwood Mac had made careers out of the blues, pacts with the devil were a given.
In short, the devil lived in the bloodline of rock long before any artist deliberately chose the subject.
The second door opened in the late 1960s. Psychedelic musicians had already gone looking for answers in Eastern religion, and some of them kept going, straight into Western occultism. That’s how Aleister Crowley made his comeback. He was an English occultist who liked to call himself the Great Beast, and when he died in 1947, hardly anyone noticed. Twenty years later, he was back in fashion. The Beatles even put him in the crowd on the cover of their studio album so millions of people went home with his face on their record shelf.
Some musicians went much further than a simple sleeve photograph. They pulled real occult history straight into their daily lives and their music:
