Some readers may remember the “satanic panic” over secular music in the 1980s. On April 27, 1982, at the California Assembly’s Consumer Protection and Toxics Committee meeting in Sacramento, Calif., panel witness William H. Yarroll II claimed that when one played Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” backward, one could hear vocalist Robert Plant talking about “my sweet Satan.” Yarroll claimed that “backmasking,” as the practice was called, had the power to “manipulate our behavior without our knowledge or consent and turn us into disciples of the Antichrist.”

The problem was that Yarroll and others making that claim told the audience the satanic phrases they would hear before they played the songs backward. So people heard what they had been primed to hear, which psychologists call pareidolia. In response to the “Stairway to Heaven” allegations, a spokesman for the group’s record label said, “Our turntables only rotate in one direction.”

However, Led Zeppelin did not need backmasking to honor Satan. Founder and lead guitarist Jimmy Page collected notorious occultist Aleister Crowley’s first-edition manuscripts, owned an occult bookshop, and frequently incorporated Crowley’s philosophy into Led Zeppelin’s artwork.

The lyrics of “Stairway to Heaven” are a call to abandon God and follow the devil. After Plant sings “there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run there’s still time to change the road you’re on,” he pronounces, “Your head is humming, and it won’t go, in case you don’t know.
The piper’s calling you to join him.”...