Song Beneath the Song Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven as Tarot Card ReadingGreg Olear Monday, March 3, 2014

 http://www.theweeklings.com/golear/2014/03/03/song-beneath-the-song-stairway-to-heaven-by-led-zeppelin/

PLENTY OF PEOPLE, and most music critics, regard “Stairway to Heaven” as a childish indiscretion, a song we enjoyed in our shameful adolescence because we didn’t yet know how to change the road we were on. Lester Bangs is one of those people. Erik Davis, who wrote the (superb) 33 1/3 book on Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album 1 , is one of those people. Heck, Robert Plant is one of those people. In interviews with him on the subject, he comes off a bit like William Shatner in that great SNL sketch where he addresses the gathering of Vulcan-eared Trekkies: “You turned an enjoyable job I did as a lark for a few years into a colossal waste of time!”

I do not hold with the haters. I think “Stairway to Heaven” is an unequivocal masterpiece, and I love it without irony or qualification. I love the hauntingly beautiful opening guitar part; that it was supposedly lifted from Spirit’s “Taurus” doesn’t bother me any more than the plot of Romeo and Juliet being appropriated from a cheesy Arthur Brooke play.2 I love the way the song builds and doesn’t hew to the usual verse-chorus-verse-chorus formula. I love the way Bonzo’s drums come in when they do. I love the bustle in the hedgerow. And I love that it conjures up memories of high school dances and Battles of the Bands and adolescent wanting and the glory of teenage night.

The song, and Led Zeppelin in general, represents, along with Charlie Chaplin, Michael Jordan, Breaking Bad, and beignets from Café du Monde, one of those rare instances where larger-than-life hype is completely and totally deserved. Like the beignets, “Stairway” is a guilty, decadent pleasure. Like Chaplin, it’s universally popular—but more so in America than in Britain, where it was born. Like Jordan, it never loses. Whenever classic rock stations trot out their “Most Requested Songs” gimmick, “Stairway” is always, always, always number one. The only suspense, once the top five is breached, is whether the second track will be “Satisfaction” or “Hey Jude.” As Davis argues in his book:

“Stairway to Heaven” isn’t the greatest rock song of the 1970s; it is the greatest spell of the 1970s. Think about it: we are all sick of the thing, but in some primordial way it is still number one. Everyone knows it… Even our dislike and mockery is ritualistic. The dumb parodies; the Wayne’s World-inspired folklore about guitar shops demanding customers not play it; even Robert Plant’s public disavowal of the song—all of these just prove the rule. “Stairway to Heaven” is not just number one. It is the One, the quintessence, the closest [album-oriented rock] will ever get you to the absolute.

And like Breaking Bad, it presents both the very best and the very worst of the human condition. If there is light in “Stairway,” there is also darkness. Specifically, the Prince of Darkness, my sweet Satan. For we cannot write about “Stairway to Heaven” without discussing its alleged diabolical undertones. While the Devil rumors are silly, they are also sticky, so we may as well address them up front.

Ozzy Osbourne played in Black Sabbath, a band named for the Satanic mass. He allegedly bit the head off a live bat, and otherwise behaved as though he was in fact possessed by daemons. As a solo artist, he wrote a song called “Mr. Crowley,” as in Aleister Crowley, the notorious occultist and black magician. Later, he starred in a reality show with his family, elevating his talentless daughter Kelly to the status of C-list celebrity—which could only have happened in some sort of soul swap with Our Dark Lord. The dude’s basically spent the last 40 years jumping up and down shouting, “Hey, guys! I worship Lucifer! Look! See how I’m making devil horns with my hands?!” And yet no one seems to object, probably because Ozzy is not, and should not be, taken seriously. Jimmy Page, meanwhile, evinces a scholarly interest in the occult, buys Crowley’s lakeside estate, maybe sneaks in some vague Satanic messages on an album, but otherwise keeps whatever sinister religious beliefs he may have to himself…and he’s somehow the antichrist. How does that compute?

Certainly Page cultivated an air of mystery, which his alleged devil worship served to enhance, but his allegiance to Lucifer is overblown. That’s not just my opinion. Pamela des Barres, his companion around the time the fourth album came out, had this to say about the Zeppelin-as-Satanists rumor: “Absolutely not true. The only band member into anything occult was Jimmy, and he was intrigued with Aleister Crowley and his ‘do what thou wilt’ message….Jimmy definitely tiptoed along the edge of darkness and danger, but never once did I hear any mention of Satan!” If Page was into the devil, he certainly wasn’t proselytizing.

But then, it may be that the sneaky way in which Zep’s Satanism (supposedly) reveals itself is what gives the rumors legs. Unlike Sabbath, whose very name announces its daemonic affiliations, Led Zeppelin’s alleged allegiance to the Devil is backmasked on “Stairway to Heaven”—a song that insists that “words have two meanings” but that “if you listen very hard, the tune will come to you at last.” For confirmation, we must play the record backwards, in just the right spot, and all is revealed. Sort of.

What’s interesting about this, to me, is not that backmasked appeals to “my sweet Satan” can be heard—they can—but that this was discovered in the first place. Who the hell was the originator of this allegation, the prime mover who presumably sat around playing rock records backwards, seeking out Satan in his humming head? In 2014, this sort of thing would be tracked back to some blog post on some obscure website, or perhaps a stray tweet, written perhaps by this guy. Before social media, news traveled more slowly—it, ahem, winded on down the road. Like occult secrets, it was distributed solely by word of mouth. Davis traces the backmasking rumors as far back as 1981, to a Michigan minister, Michael Mills, who announced the findings on Christian radio, ten full years after the album’s release. While Mills was certainly the one who brought the infernal brouhaha into the mainstream, I have difficulty believing that he stumbled upon this himself. I asked des Barres about it3, and she confirmed my suspicions. “The rumors started way before ’81,” she said, “when Robert’s son died unexpectedly and Robert was involved in a terrible car accident,” in 1977 and 1975, respectively. This bit of arcanum was known to Zep cognoscenti for years, then, perhaps leaked to a select few by the band’s mad genius manager, Peter Grant, a big believer in Word of Mouth. What better way to compel thousands of people to buy a ten-year-old record than a hidden endorsement from Satan Himself? How many copies did Mills personally buy, only to destroy them by playing them backwards? Did this idea originate with Page? Grant? Producer Andy Johns? Was it a complete coincidence? We’ll never know, and in the end, it doesn’t matter.

“The fact is that, within two minutes of singing, ‘Stairway to Heaven’ contains at least seven reversed phrases of a suggestively devilish nature,” Davis writes, “…buried in a tune about pipers and whispers and listening really hard, a tune that, for a spell, ruled the world. I’m not saying supernatural forces are afoot. I’m just saying it makes you wonder.”

All of which would be more relevant to the task at hand—deciphering the meaning of the song—if the lyrics were written by the guy des Barres says was the only member of the band into the occult.

But Jimmy Page didn’t write the words to “Stairway to Heaven.” Robert Plant did.

 

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Plant was born in August of 1948 in the Black Country of the West Midlands. His father was a civil engineer.

His mother was of Romany descent—the people known popularly as gypsies. He left home at 16, immersed himself in the blues, and four years later had hooked up with Jimmy Page to form Led Zeppelin. He was twenty; Page was almost five full years older—an important fact to remember, when considering the dynamic between the guitarist and the front man.

As a teenager, Plant studied stamp collecting and the history of Roman Britain. His well-documented immersion into the blues meant that he hung around with a lot of guys like Steve Buschemi’s character in Ghost World. He read poetry and mythology and Tolkien.

If Dungeons & Dragons had existed, he would have played it obsessively. Simply put, the guy was a nerd, albeit one packaged in the body of a self-styled “golden god.” Just as he wore low-rise jeans 30 years before they became popular, he was the prototype of the cool geek.

The lyrics for “Stairway” were written at an old stone castle called Headley Grange, Davis reports, a dismal place that Plant did not like but Page thought was boss, late in the year 1970. The two of them were sitting by the fire one night, perhaps high on something perhaps not, and Plant scribbled down the first words to the song. He would later report that they came to him as if written automatically.

So: “Stairway” was composed by a 22-year-old closet geek, a Lord of the Rings fanboy who knew all about Vespasian’s run as governor of Britannia, while his de facto older brother, who may or may not have worshiped the devil but certainly liked to dabble in the occult, was beside him, in a 200-year-old stone building that was once a poorhouse, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night. This sort of information is relevant to our reading of the lyrics.

Few songs have offered such a wide range of interpretations as “Stairway to Heaven.” The comment board at Songfacts contains any number of them, many interesting, many insane. Some find Satanic messages lurking; others read it as a Christian parable. RapGenius is all over the Biblical allusions. Plant himself remarked that his own interpretation changes all the time, and he wrote the freaking thing. As Davis describes the lyrics: “It’s a zoo in there.”

But go back to the fireside, where Plant sat with his pen and paper, Page hovering demonically nearby. Is it possible that there was a deck of Tarot cards on that table? If Page owned rare Crowley manuscripts and first editions, he was certainly familiar with the Oswald Wirth book on Tarot. It’s inconceivable that he did not own a Rider-Waite deck, given that everything about the design of the fourth LP derives from the Tarot.

The cover of the album is a stylized version of the ninth major arcana card, The Hermit, while the inside cover—that is, the poster that your roommate had on your wall freshman year in college—is almost identical to the Rider Deck image:

 

Also, the four “runes” that comprise the album’s title represent the four tarot suits…

…Swords, Cups, Pentacles, and Wands/Staves, respectively.

Here’s Davis on the runes:

The first thing that must be said is that there are four of them, and that they appear on the fourth record released by a quartet, a record that features four songs on each side…all these fours suggest the most fundamental of occult quaternities: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, the four elements once believed to make up the whole of material reality…decisively linked to the four suits of the Tarot deck by the French magus Eliphas Levi….Levi expanded magic’s network of correspondences by correlating Earth, Air, Fire, and Water to, respectively, [Pentacles], Swords, Wands, and Cups.

The band famously insisted that there be no writing on the cover at all, no band name or album title. This invites us to read the lyrics as symbols, or rather as interpretations of various symbols. My theory is that “Stairway to Heaven” is a Tarot reading, a draw of the 13 cards that comprise one version of the Celtic Cross. Plant and Page may have laid the cards on the table as they were working out the words…who knows? As in actual Tarot readings, the story of the cards doesn’t cohere exactly, and lends itself to multiple interpretations.

“Stairway” as Tarot card reading would go like this:

 

1. The Empress

There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold, and she’s buying a stairway to heaven.

The Empress rules the empire, holds sceptered sway over all material things. Note the golden orb on her staff. The stars on her tiara suggest an otherwordly quest.

 

2. Five of Pentacles

When she gets there she knows, if the stores are all closed, with a word she can get what she came for.

This card is about lack, about not having. Here, beggars brave the elements outside a warm church, unable to go inside and enjoy the bounty.

In Tarot readings, the first two cards drawn form the querent’s central conflict: in this case, that of having great riches, and having nothing. The reading, and the song, is about resolving the conflict between material and spiritual gain.

 

3. Nine of Swords

There’s a sign on the wall, but she wants to be sure, [be]cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.

The card of despair. The “sign on the wall” are those swords, more swords than anyone could use, nine swords of Damocles ready to fall and cause injury.

The third card in the sequence is the root cause of the problems. In this case, a feeling of dread that likely has deeper meaning than a lack of material resources. All the glittering gold in heaven’s vault cannot buy the cure for the querent’s ailment.

 

4. Nine of Pentacles

In the tree by the brook, there’s a songbird who sings, sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven. And it makes me wonder.

Pentacles are about material things, generally, and this card is one of mastery. The falconer controls the falcon. This is someone at the height of his powers. But the fourth position is the past, an influence that is receding. This loss of control, too, plagues the querent. The falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

 

 5. Three of Wands

There’s a feeling I get when I look to the West, and my spirit is crying for leaving.

This card is pretty much about the spirit crying for leaving. Which happens to be the attitude told by the card in the fifth position. The querent is ready to move on.

 

6. Five of Swords

In my thoughts I have seen rights of smoke through the trees, and the voices of those who stand looking.

The scene on this gloomy card appears to be the aftermath of a battle (“the pain of war cannot exceed / the woe of aftermath”). It indicates hope and learning from negative experiences.

The sixth position indicates the future, the coming influence. So, to recap, the mastery of the past has been lost, the present is all gloom, but the future suggests hope.

 

 7. Judgement [sic]

And it’s whispered that soon, if we all call the tune, then the piper will lead us to reason.

By making the correct choices—and “Stairway” is all about choices—we can enter the Kingdom of Heaven. By stairway, perhaps.

The seventh position concerns self-reflection—how the querent sees herself. Here, she seeks salvation, and hopes, but is not sure, that she is worthy.

 

8. Ten of Cups

And a new day will dawn for those who stand long. And the forests will echo in laughter.

The best card in the deck, perhaps, the Ten of Cups is the wish fulfillment card. All is right with the world. Peace and prosperity are here!

Unfortunately for the querent, this is illusory. The eighth card indicates how others view her, not as she views herself. She does not really have it all, even if she seems to. All that glitters is not gold!

 

9. Queen of Wands

If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now. It’s just a spring clean for the May Queen.

Wands/staves/rods correlate to the earth, to the vernal renewal process. The Queen of Wands rules the spring, which makes her, yes, the May Queen. Her cheerfulness permeates everything. (“Bustle in the hedgerow,” incidentally, means literally that a piece of a Victorian woman’s dress has been discarded in the garden—the remains of last night’s orgy).

The ninth card indicates a factor that the querent has overlooked. In this case, her buoyancy of spirit.

 

 10. The High Priestess

Yes there are two paths you can go down, but in the long run, there’s still time to change the road you’re on.

The High Priestess stands for mystery, the occult, hidden knowledge—all the stuff Jimmy Page is into. The “B” and “J” on the pillars behind her stand for Beelzebub and Jehovah—Satan or God, the binary choice.

The card in the tenth position indicates the outcome of the conflict, in this case the clash between material wealth and spiritual lack. But the High Priestess is fuzzy. There is no clear outcome. All is vague. Like the song.

 

 11. The Fool

Your head is humming and it won’t go…in case you don’t know, the piper’s calling you to join him.

The Fool is not one in the modern sense of the word, but is more of an innocent, a naïf. He goes where his impulses take him, without a thought to the consequences, or to the dangers.

 

12. The Moon

And as we wind on down the road, our shadows taller than our soul.

The Moon symbolizes things that go bump in the night: our deepest fears, terrifying illusions that turn out, in the light of day, to be nothing but shadows.

 

13. The Hanged Man

When all are one, and One is All. To be a rock, and not to roll.

The Hanged Man is still. He surrenders to his fate, and in his surrender, finds enlightenment.

Cards 11-13 comprise a summary of the reading. Here: the Fool is ready for his journey, encounters his deepest fears which give him pause, and winds up hanging from the tree of knowledge.

The final movement of “Stairway” achieves the same purpose, summarizing the querent’s conflict. The Fool winds on down the road, the “shadows taller than our souls” the fears that paralyze him. But he finds enlightenment. The key phrase is: “the tune will come to you at last.” This is a passive outcome. The querent does not come to the “tune,” but the other way around. Enlightenment is only achieved by stillness, quiet contemplation, and surrendering to the nature of things—”to be a rock and not to roll.”

The reading determines that the solution to the conflict between material abundance and spiritual salvation is the yogic pose of stillness. Or something like that. Like all Tarot readings, the lyrics only cohere to a certain point. Which is, ultimately, what Plant was going for with the words: that they have two (at least) meanings.

 

1. Technically, the title of the album is the four glyphs, which means the title of his book is the four glyphs as well, but italicized. We don’t have the budget for that, so I shall refer to it here as Led Zeppelin IV. ↩

2. Though it does give new meaning to “My Spirit is crying for leaving.” ↩3. Via our Weeklings music editor Joe Daly, who interviewed her on these pages. ↩

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About Greg Olear

Greg Olear (@gregolear) is a founding editor of The Weeklings and the author of the novels Totally Killer and Fathermucker, an L.A. Times bestseller. He lives in New Paltz, N.Y. View all posts by Greg Olear → This entry was posted in Saturday Music, Song Beneath the Song and tagged 666, bustle in your hedgerow, jimmy page, Led Zeppelin, my sweet Satan, Robert Plant, Satan, song meaning Stairway to Heaven, Stairway to Heaven, Tarot. Bookmark the permalink. « Sunday Sermon – Streets and SilhouettesDeath in the Quiet Room »

22 Responses to Song Beneath the Song: Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” as Tarot Card Reading

1. Sean Murphy says:

March 4, 2014 at 3:05 pm

I’ll keep my comments brief and to the point: THE HERMIT.

Game, set, match: Olear.

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o The Editors says:

March 16, 2014 at 10:30 am

Thanks, Sean!

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2. barabas.morpheus says:

March 5, 2014 at 7:54 am

interesting work, but where does the reversed (or “back masked,” if you want to remain ignorant of EVP) lyrical content coalesce here? this is a little piece I’ve been working on, and i’ve taken the exact opposite approach here in the in-progress piece- that of ignoring the lyrics in the “forward” or “temporal regular” mode: http://tha-iconoclast.livejournal.com/109440.html

I respect your probably hopefully pandering to your audience, whoever they are (i haven’t looked over your site yet), but i am assuming you have an actual interest in this in a broader sense and if not, perchance take a gander at the publish dates on both our essays and note the synchronicity. happy ash wednesday. (I’m in nola).

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o The Editors says:

March 10, 2014 at 10:28 pm

Your ability to generate an entire lyrical poem out of listening backwards is remarkable. Thanks for sharing. Although I don’t know that a careful analysis of rock lyrics is “pandering to [my] audience” just because I analyze the lyrics that are actually sung, and also printed on the sleeve of the LP.

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3. Richard Klin says:

March 9, 2014 at 9:07 pm

Led Zeppelin is long, long overdue for a critical reappraisal. One of the more interesting takes on their music–kudos.

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o The Editors says:

March 10, 2014 at 10:28 pm

Thanks, man. Also overdue: beers. It’s been way too long.

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Richard Klin says:

March 12, 2014 at 8:40 pm

Beers? A social life? How do those things work?

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The Editors says:

March 16, 2014 at 10:31 am

I can’t remember. I’ve spent too much time with my Tarot deck.

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4. jana says:

March 10, 2014 at 9:26 pm

that you put this in the canon with beignets from Cafe du Monde is such a delicious point. But I would argue that those beignets are as much sublime as they are decadent, and as elements of the sublime — in the most classic sense of the word — are somewhat transcendent, and thus, as such, also implying the duality of darkness on the other side of the light. I’d never thought of beignets this way before, but they actually may well be the Stairway to Heaven of fried dough.

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o The Editors says:

March 10, 2014 at 10:31 pm

An excellent point, Jana…and a tasty one. The blue plate special should include beignets for dessert.

And if they are not the “Stairway to Heaven” of fried dough, they are certainly the “Kashmir.”

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5. jackon and boaz pillars says:

March 13, 2014 at 5:05 pm

nice try ,cute but not correct, as you are streching and searching for your own fit , but the fact is the song is about a real woman who once upon atime had a real experience with the man who penned it . truth .

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o Richard Klin says:

March 14, 2014 at 9:49 am

So “Stairway to Heaven” doesn’t lend itself to metaphor? It all really happened? Was there an actual piper?

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The Editors says:

March 16, 2014 at 10:29 am

There was, Rich. And what was in his pipe was some really strong hashish.

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March 14, 2014 at 8:47 am

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7. barabas.morpheus says:

March 15, 2014 at 10:49 pm

you said with a slight (ironic) condescension: “Your ability to generate an entire lyrical poem out of listening backwards is remarkable. Thanks for sharing. Although I don’t know that a careful analysis of rock lyrics is “pandering to [my] audience” just because I analyze the lyrics that are actually sung, and also printed on the sleeve of the LP.”

firstly, the song itself asks you to listen backwards, the lyrics are quite hearable with very small variation from ear-to-ear with a small amount of patience, and the lyrics themselves are logical and straightforward.

This is scary, if you want it to be, but actual and objectively-obtainable with little effort, and verifiable through ALL media and mutual experience of the listener.

Your explication above is speculation, nothing more, however the lyrics themselves are not. The forward “jacket” lyrics are printed, sure, but in them they literally tell you to listen to reversed song too. Ignorance of this should be below your mental ability for skepticism, and that it is not should cause some sort pause in your intellectual ego.

Semiotics: you can ignore a sign; you can be ignorant or unaware of the meaning of a sign- it does not change the meaning; does not lesson or diminish it at all. The sign will always mean what it means.

The beauty of STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN is in the mystery… or lack thereof. You can choose to listen to what is there- or you can make it up as you go (like this essay, as opposed to mine.).

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o The Editors says:

March 16, 2014 at 10:26 am

We are told that words have two meanings, and that if we listen very hard the tune will come to us at last, and that there’s still time to change the road we’re on, but we are never explicitly instructed to listen backwards. Have I missed something? Please show me where in the lyrics it says this.

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8. barabas.morpheus says:

March 16, 2014 at 8:35 pm

it’s quite interesting that you can be so typical and reactionary despite your professed willingness to be open to ideas not expressed originally by yourself. I have gleaned this from reading a few of your articles after finding you STAIRWAY piece via some similar message board thread, and i stand by that notion despite your refusal to take the step forward past belief in this matter here (perhaps and i hope solely because of the public nature of this threading.). If such is the case, i’m not opposed to your contacting me through less public forum where you can be unafraid of dialectic context. Regardless, the reversed lyrics of the song are quite distinguishable to any untrained ear, logical in progression (because, as the song itself intones, it’s all math), and a simple video search never mind any Bing will bring up verification of lunatics and educated alike all “discovering” very very sameness with deliberate muchitude. To answer your question, the lyrics, reversed (and for third party verification:

http://youtu.be/DBkWRAU_p50) literally open with “Play (it) backwards/Hear why ’tis sung here, oppositioner…” so there you go.

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o The Editors says:

March 19, 2014 at 8:40 pm

If the backwards lyric says to play it backwards, doesn’t that mean it should be played forwards?

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9. barabas.morpheus says:

March 19, 2014 at 8:22 pm

hey guy check your security. my 20 year old email address has been accessed, and you are the only new player in my mail town. you have been made vulnerable. fix that before it gets bad.

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o The Editors says:

March 19, 2014 at 8:41 pm

I’m sorry to hear that.

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