Season of the Witch is a scattered collection of essays and factoids that fails to come together; it feels like a 5 page term paper that's been expanded to 10 pages, circling around its points again and again.

The first chapter opens with promise, on the link between rhythm and blues as an African-American musical form and the reinterpretation of African religions under slavery. Rumors that talented musicians made a dark pact with Legba, syncretized with Satan, dogged the early blues. When white people took over the music in the 1950s, rock and roll became a new Dionysian rite. Rock and roll was about teenagers having sex, anathema to the conservative culture of the times.

The story than skips a beat between Elvis and the Beatles, those years a wasteland of pop nonsense in Bebergal's read. The Beatles used their status as new-found celebrities to promote transcendental meditation. Meanwhile, Led Zeppelin was off writing songs about hobbits and heroic quests, while getting into Crowley and magick.

If anything can be gleaned from this mess of a book, it's that the 60s counter-culture tried out many alternatives to conventional mainstream Christian/scientific thought, whipping up a blend of Eastern religious traditions, psychedelic exploration via LSD, a Western magical tradition mostly grounded in Theosophy, and speculative literature about both wizards and spaceships to create a show that was part of ecstatic rite, part esoteric community, and part commercial venture.

But the subtitle is "how the occult saved rock and roll", and from my vantage, the occult mostly inspired talented musicians to make long, boring, elaborate prog concept albums. Rock is more than a 3 minute song you can dance to, but a triple album about some D&D campaign is worse than danceable pap about how your baby makes you feel.

This reads like a rehash of other books, and fails to prove its thesis to boot. At least it's short.