Credit: Far Out / Dina Regine
Sun 9 August 2026 10:00, UK
As any longtime Led Zeppelin fan will know, a fascination with the esoteric has always hovered over their hard rock oeuvre.
It was all there from Led Zeppelin’s fourth LP artwork alone. Lacking even an official title, dubbed Led Zeppelin IV due to the Roman-numeral-titled predecessors, guitarist and producer Jimmy Page reached back into the arcane depths of 16th-century alchemical grimoire for the record’s distinctive ‘ZoSo’ sigils that represent each member on the back cover and inner gatefold, as well as deploying the ‘Hermit’ Tarot archetype on its packaging.
Be it the hidden English folklore that glows on ‘Stairway to Heaven’, ‘The Battle of Evermore’s Celtic and Tolkien-esque landscapes, or the Norse hammers that evocatively thunder ‘Immigrant Song’, Page and frontman Robert Plant’s lyrical pen routinely looked to mythic heritage to shape some of Led Zeppelin’s most loved works.
Yet, it was the latent energy of the occult that cast a mystical hook in Page the deepest. It was while still a schoolboy that the 15-year-old Page first chanced upon the Thelemic theories of Aleister Crowley, specifically his Magick in Theory and Practice collection of essays and ideas on ‘ceremonial magick’, the ‘k’ added to distinguish such ritual from the day’s stage entertainment. Such worlds would stay with Page for years.
“I feel Aleister Crowley is a misunderstood genius of the 20th century,” Page told Sounds in 1978, “It is because his whole thing was liberation of the person, of the entity and that restrictions would foul you up, lead to frustration, which leads to violence, crime, mental breakdown, depending on what sort of makeup you have underneath. The further this age we’re in now gets into technology and alienation, a lot of the points he’s made seem to manifest themselves all down the line.”
Once fame and a lot of cash had entered Page’s life in the early 1970s, the Led Zeppelin guitarist decided to set up shop on London’s Holland Street in the Kensington area, opening The Equinox Booksellers and Publishers store in large part due to being ‘pissed off’ that the city lacked any dedicated occult bookstores.
Page went all out with his new venture, adorning the interior with Egyptian motifs reflecting Thelemic connections with the ancient religious theology, plus emblazoning Crowley’s birth chart across the wall.
Further reading: From The Vault
The Equinox would last until 1979, having directly published a facsimile of Crowley’s 1904 edition of The Goetia as well as new age spiritualist Isabel Hickey’s Astrology, A Cosmic Science, before allowing the lease to expire, followed by his 1992 sale of Crowley’s old Scottish Boleskine House residence that he’d purchased back in 1970. To this day, Page’s dabbling with the occult has since either died down or been kept largely away from the public spotlight.
His most countercultural remark on the esoteric subterranean of the occult was his feature in fellow Crowley admirer Kenneth Anger’s 1972 short Lucifer Rising, playing the role of ‘the man holding the stele of revealing’ and even signing up to score its soundtrack before Manson Family murderer Bobby Beausoleil composed the score while incarcerated at California’s Tracy Prison.
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