This Saturday, on Radio 4...
Black Aquarius
Matthew Sweet explores the dawning of the age of Black Aquarius - the rise (and sudden end) of the weirdly great wave of occultism in British popular culture in the 1960s-70s.
From underground journals like the Aquarian Arrow and specialist bookshops appearing in cities all over Britain to the bestselling novels of Dennis Wheatley, moral panics about upper-crust Satanic cults in the tabloid press and the glut of illustrated books, magazines and TV drama. It was a wildly exuberant seam of British pop culture, but where did it come from, and why did it all take off then?
Flowering from the more arcane parts of the hippy movement perhaps, but mutating into something quite different - why was there such a huge mainstream, crossover appeal for the British public? At one point, Dennis Wheatley had five books in the bestseller list simultaneously. Was this a continuation of the Sixties cultural battleground of restrictive morality being secretly titillated, or was it something darker?
This era matched the first, late Victorian craze for the occult in its intensity and popularity, and certainly drew from some of that era's obsessions - astral planes, dark dimensions, unearthly energies - but the second wave was filtered through 'the permissive society', through a hugely eclectic counterculture, swinging sexual liberation and (for this was all about Chelsea mansions, exotica and sports cars too) new kinds of consumption and lifestyle.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05qvr63