The Devil Inside

There was another unexpected development that benefited The Exorcist: By the late 1960s, the cultural zeitgeist produced not just rawer depictions of sex and violence in film and literature, but it also generated an occult mania centered on Satanism. Of all the sociological trends associated with the Sixties—ESP, happenings, tie-dyed shirts and paisley, free love, sitars, communes, LSD, psychedelic rock music, hippies, Gestalt therapy, Transcendental Meditation, Hari Krishnas, astrology—none is as puzzling as the ascent of Satan, first as an antihero to the counterculture, then as a national bogeyman to the Silent Majority in the 1970s. As the country began its youthquake post-JFK, it fostered a rebellious pushback against not just establishment ideals but against traditional notions of reality. The Esalen Institute, the New Age movement, and what has been called the Occult Revival combined to challenge the facts as set forth by the “corporate state.” This movement, more diverse and widespread today than ever, could be summed up by the title of a Paul Feyerabend memoir: Farewell to Reason.Part of the occult revival, with its emphasis on paganism and mysticism, included the resurrection of Satan as a figure of reverence. In 1966, a circus veteran with the stage name of Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco, securing overkill publicity and a lucrative new livelihood. LaVey, bald head, goatee, dark turtlenecks and theatrical cape, was nothing more than a charlatan who read the cultural weather with the proficiency of a trained meteorologist. His Church of Satan, located on California Street and painted black for ominous effect, held hokey rituals and even the occasional “baptism,” and while LaVey may have been an opportunist whose ostensible philosophy combined pinches of Nietzsche, Aleister Crowley, and Ayn Rand into a hedonist mixture, his effect on those predisposed to twistedness was incalculable.When Ira Levin published Rosemary’s Baby in 1967, the diabolical floodgates burst open. Aleister Crowley peeped out from the cover of Sgt. Pepper, Kenneth Anger had the word “Lucifer” tattooed on his chest, the Rolling Stones rocked out to “Sympathy for the Devil,” and Arthur Brown, wearing a cult-like robe, demonic face paint, and a burning helmet, had an unlikely number 2 Billboard smash with “Fire,” a song whose roaring opening recitation suited the times: “I am the god of hellfire and I bring you—”.Finally, Roman Polanski set the stage for the country—and for Blatty—with his disturbing adaptation of Rosemary (with LaVey falsely claiming to have been technical advisor), crystallizing the paranoiac notion that satanists had infiltrated America at every level. This outlandish plot point would spur conspiracy theorists for more than fifty years, gradually during the early 1970s, and then, with alarming, almost supernova-like power in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, there is hardly a conspiracy theory that does not involve a satanic network stretching all the way to top government officials and the societal elite.At no other time would Blatty have been able to turn a story of demonic possession into a blockbuster novel and a record-breaking film. He had arrived just as the Age of Aquarius was morphing slowly, inexplicably into the Age of Diabolus.