Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV (6 page)

Page claimed that Jones’s glyph represented skill and flair, but Koch tells us that it was used to exorcise evil spells. This fact helped fuel the pervasive lunchroom rumor that, while Jones’s band mates had sold their souls to the Evil One, the keyboardist and bassist refrained—a bit of tabloid lore vaguely “supported” by the fact that Jones bopped along through the band’s tenure while his mates suffered from heroin addiction,
alcoholic asphyxiation, a devastating car accident, and the death of a child. The three circles in Bonham’s sigil can be associated with any triumvirate you care to name. Koch mentions the Christian Trinity, but in Crowley’s Thoth deck, where the glyph appears in the hands of the Hierophant, it symbolizes the Thelemite trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus (or the more esoteric triumvirate of Nuit, Hadit, and Ra-Hoor-Khuit). One suspects that Bonham just liked the round drumhead shapes, or their resemblance to the overlapping rings left by pints on a bar. The latter, “inebrientist” interpretation seems confirmed by the sigil’s appearance on the label of Ballantine’s beer, where it stands for Purity, Body, and Flavor.

Robert Plant, possessed of tremendous body and flavor but perhaps less purity, most likely plucked his phallic feather from Col. James Churchward’s
Lost Continent of Mu
, a classic “lost civilization” potboiler no doubt squirreled away on Plant’s bookshelf. Churchward links the symbol to Egypt, where, in actuality, a single upraised feather represented Ma’at, the goddess of truth and justice. When we die, the ancient Egyptians believed, the black dog Anubis will usher us into the Hall of Two Truths, where our heart will be placed on a scale and weighed against Ma’at’s ostrich plume. If our hearts are weighted with wickedness, we will find ourselves torn apart by the slobbery jaws of
Ammut; if not, we get to pass on to the Fields of Peace. The feather’s implication of
judgment
is, I believe, far more important than the suggestions of quill pens and poesy; final reckoning is all over this record, from “Battle of Evermore” to the apocalyptic flood of “When the Levee Breaks.”

Jimmy Page’s sigil, emblazoned on his amps and sweaters as well as the fourth record, is the Holy Grail of Zep lore. Exegetes have ranged widely, invoking everything from Curious George to the Egyptian pyramid of Zoser to a Nintendo Star Trek videogame. Inevitably, Satan sleuths like Friend have found the dreaded 666 in the figure, and their source—a key in Crowley’s
Equinox
which equates the numeral 6 with a dotted circle—seems solid enough. (The question of why the second 6 is represented by a squiggly “S” remains open; on this matter, I submit to Friend: “Think of how stupid that symbol would look if there were three ‘O’ figures with dots in the middle.”
¹⁹
) The most satisfying conventional solution to
begins on In the Light, a website run by a Kiwi mystic named Duncan Watts.
²⁰
Here Watts posts a scan of a schematically similar sigil inked, he writes, by the mathematician and astrologer Jerome Cardan in 1557. Cardan used the glyph to represent Saturn, the “heaviest” of the planets and the one that rules Capricorn, which also happens to be Jimmy Page’s natal sign. But Page, ever the appropriator, seems to
have lifted the symbol whole from
Le Dragon Rouge
, a particularly nasty French grimoire that appeared in the early nineteenth century but claims much earlier origin. Rumors tying Page’s symbol to this rare book of black magic have been circulating for years; Robert Gordon reports the claim in his chapbook on
, but does not confirm it, and confuses matters by writing that Page’s sigil is supposed to be upside down. In Robert Blanchard’s 1995 translation of the
Red Dragon
, which reproduces the original French, we find the definitive answer: the identical twin of Page’s symbol, right side up, in a group of sigils dedicated to Saturn. Though a clever Zephead could have pulled a
Necronomicon
here and inserted Page’s symbol in the Blanchard text as a hoax, this seems highly unlikely.
is Saturn, the dark lord of planets.

But there is something unsatisfying about all this crypto-analysis.
is both less and more than a code that can be deciphered. The most revealing thing Page ever said about the sigil he told to Ritchie Yorke: “A lot of people mistook it for a word—Zoso—which is a pity, because it wasn’t supposed to be a word at all, but something entirely different.”
²¹
This suggests something more unusual than a tarted up astrological glyph, and I believe the answer lies in another connection noted by Zep kabbalists: the similarity of
to Zos,
the magical name of the British artist and magus Austin Osman Spare.

Spare, who was born a Capricorn in 1886, was the most radical of the prewar occultists, and his sexual and magical obsessions were, if anything, more dank and diabolical than Crowley’s. Though Spare studied briefly with the Beast, he turned his back on esoteric tradition and embraced Freud, Nietzsche, and a psychic automatism that was Surrealist
avant la lettre
. A remarkable draughtsman, Spare placed sigil magic at the core of his work. He called these figures “monograms of thought” for the “government of energy.”
²²
Spare rejected the received iconography of occult tradition; for him, there was no “correct” or “incorrect” sigil, no predetermined mystic attribute such as Koch gives. Instead, sigil magic was a kind of creative autosuggestion. Spare’s method was to write down a particular desire, magical or otherwise, and then obsessively condense and recombine the letters into a figure. This sigil was then communicated to the subconscious through an intense trance state (drugs and sex, solo or otherwise, help here). Spare insisted that, for a sigil to really work, the conscious mind must
forget
about the original intention.
²³

In any case, Spare’s sigil magic moves us away from the question of meaning toward the creative act of inscription
itself. The sigil is not a signifier, but a graven image of energy, a frozen imprint of physical desire that has a material life of its own. In other words, a sigil is a lot like a rock record. Perhaps this explains why the only design element shared by all four sigils in
is the
disc
; Page’s two rings even have holes in their centers. The rock LP was, in the early 1970s anyway, a shrink-wrapped amulet, a plastic pentacle that invoked powers of the air. It cannot help but recall magical seals like the Sigillum Dei Aemeth made by Dr. John Dee, the Elizabethan magus whose Enochian system of magic was much beloved by Crowley. The Sigillum, now on display at the British Museum, is an uncolored disc, nine inches in diameter, inscribed with a complex magical diagram that helped Dee invoke angelic beings. Like the original phonograph cylinders, which Crowley himself used to record some Enochian calls in the 1920s, Dee’s pentacle was made of wax. When Page etched Crowley’s motto onto
Led Zeppelin III
, he was tipping his hat to this legacy of magical inscription.

Like
Led Zeppelin III
, the original pressing of
included messages in the runoff matrix. Side one read “Pecko Duck,” while side two featured the ominous “Porky.” Scholars of esoterica burned the
midnight oil over medieval bestiaries and the darker tomes of sex magick before realizing that these inscriptions simply refer to the man who cut the masters: George Peckham of Porky’s Disc Cutting Service.