Christopher Lee, born on May 27, 1922, was an English actor known for his iconic roles in horror films. He is particularly famous for his portrayal of Count Dracula in the Hammer Horror films of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Christopher Lee had a long and illustrious career in film, with over 250 acting credits to his name. Apart from his successful acting career, Christopher Lee also had a deep interest in the occult and esoteric subjects. He had claimed to have witnessed several paranormal phenomena during his lifetime. In addition, Christopher Lee was a practitioner of black magic.
Satanism and the Occult
As a best-selling author of adventure stories, in 1934 Wheatley turned to a new subject matter: “… so I decided to use the theme of Black Magic”, resulting in his most famous work – The Devil Rides Out.
Aleister Crowley ©DWThe main protagonists in this extremely disturbing novel take on a devil-worshiping cult. After harrowing nocturnal attacks by black-magic forces, including the Angel of Death, they eventually defeat the cult leader in an exciting denouement.
Wheatley was eminently qualified to write such a book, having read extensively concerning ancient and comparative religions. In preparation, he also did copious research on the occult, reading both factual and fictional sources. Further, a friend introduced him to proponents of the occult, Aleister Crowley, Montague Summers and Rollo Ahmed.
Wheatley went on to write further occult novels, some of which were filmed.
Wheatley wrote 65 books but is probably remembered most for his books on the occult. The hallmark of these was an author’s note which first appeared in his ‘Black Magic’ novel The Devil Rides Out:
I desire to state that I, personally, have never assisted at, or participated in, any ceremony connected with Magic – Black or White. (. . .) Should any of my readers incline to a serious study of the subject, and thus come into contact with a man or woman of Power, I feel that it is only right to urge them, most strongly, to refrain from being drawn into the practice of the Secret Art in any way. My own observations have led me to an absolute conviction that to do so would bring them into dangers of a very real and concrete nature.
The gallery below has more information about his occult works.
- The Devil Rides Out published in 1934. The dust jacket was the work of Dennis Wheatley’s step-daughter Diana Younger. The book was serialised in the Daily Mail, starting on 31st October 1934. ©DW
- The illustrated endpapers, which include the New Forest on the pictured map, were part-drawn by Wheatley’s step-daughter. ©DW
- Film poster for the 1968 UK release of The Devil Rides Out. ©DW
- The Devil Rides Out screenshot of Christopher Lee as the Duke de Richleau. ©DW
- Devil Rides Out screenshot of Charles Gray as Mocata. ©DW
- Dennis Wheatley with the actor (Sir) Christopher Lee. ©DW
- To The Devil… A Daughter promotional poster of the 1976 film.
- The book was published in 1953 during the time that Dennis Wheatley Lived at Grove Place, Lymington.
- Poster advertising Dennis Wheatley’s lecture on Black Magic at Pendlebury Town Hall, Greater Manchester. ©DW
- Some of Dennis Wheatley’s Occult novels: Strange Conflict published 1941 The Haunting of Toby Jugg published 1948 The Satanist published 1960 They Used Dark Forces published 1964 The White Witch of the South Seas published 1968 Gateway to Hell published 1970. ©DW
Christopher lee black magic
I can’t think of many leading actors who have died on-screen as often as Christopher Lee. Over his long and successful career, Lee was staked several times as Dracula, destroyed by daylight, eradicated by fresh running water (Dracula Prince of Darkness), staked then set alight by lightning (Scars of Dracula), impaled on a cartwheel (Dracula AD 1972), snared by a hawthorn bush (The Satanic Rites of Dracula), dissolved in an acid bath (The Curse of Frankenstein), killed by James Bond, stabbed by his treacherous servant (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King), and decapitated by Anakin Skywalker (aka Darth Vader) in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, to name but a few of his most memorable exits. If Lee was in a film, you could usually bet he’d be dead by the last reel. Even so, Lee was a major box office draw and his name above a title ensured a couple of hours of thrilling entertainment.
Despite the fact Lee had a tendency to be bumped-off in his films, he was the kind of guy you’d want on your team when battling monsters, demons, and Satanic creeps. He was debonair and presented himself as a man of knowledge and experience. He had an impressive war record where he was attached to the SAS and by his own admission had an incredible knowledge of the occult. He was introduced to this esoteric subject by his friend author Dennis Wheatley and it became a bit of an obsession after he read the works of Aleister Crowley.
In 2011, Lee was asked at a Q&A session at the University College in Dublin, if it was true that he had “a huge collection of occultism-related literature that amounted to 20,000 books?” Lee replied:
“If I had such a collection, I’d be living in a bathroom.”
Lee as a Satanic priest in ‘To the Devil a Daughter.’
Maybe not living in the bathroom but certainly at home in the library as Lee did ‘fess up to owning around 12,000 books on the occult in an interview with the Telegraph the same year. Lee took the occult and Satanism very seriously and was wont to warn people of its dangers:
“I have met people who claim to be Satanists, who claim to be involved with black magic, who claimed that they not only knew a lot about it. But as I said, I certainly have not been involved and I warn all of you: never, never, never. You will not only lose your mind: you lose your soul.”
From this, you can take Lee was a believer—an Anglo-Catholic—who was deeply concerned about the possible dangers of devil worship, Satanism, and communing with spirits. Strange that he should make a living out of pretending to do these very things.
In 1975, during the filming of Dennis Wheatley’s classic occult novel To the Devil a Daughter, Lee gave an interview on his thoughts about Satanism (hey kids, it’s real!), Black Magic (yep, people do practice it every day, esp. in Hollywood), and why occult beliefs were so prevalent in the 1970s (boredom and bad fashion probably….). Lee is a fine man to spend some time with. He has the presence of a genial doctor putting his patients at ease and a cocktail host who wants you to have a really good time. Underneath all that menace, Lee was just a big softie.
The extraordinary career of Christopher Lee
To an older generation, he was Dracula — the quintessential monster, a figure of terror and attraction, combining the aristocratic bearing of Bela Lugosi’s Count with a more physically imposing, vigorous presence and overt aura of sexual menace.
To young viewers today, he is a sinister white-haired wizard in two of Hollywood’s greatest fantasy franchises — Count Dooku in the Star Wars prequels and Saruman the White in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films.
Sir Christopher Lee, who died on June 7 at the age of 93, had an extraordinary career and an extraordinary life. To speak only of his film work, while it’s impossible to sum up his incredibly prolific and varied output — IMDb.com credits him with more than 280 acting roles over a nearly 70-year career — Lee’s lean, towering build (he stood five inches over six feet) and sonorous baritone voice were well suited to playing villains and monsters. In addition to Dracula, Saruman and Count Dooku, other villainous roles included Lucifer, Death, Frankenstein’s monster and the title villain in the 007 film The Man with the Golden Gun.
Although he spent much of his later career distancing himself from the horror genre, he worked for 20 years with England’s Hammer Films, starting with his breakout roles in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958, also known in the US as Horror of Dracula). He went on to reprise the latter role in half a dozen Hammer films and two non-Hammer films (including a French language production, French being one of the five languages he spoke fluently).
Both of those early Hammer films were directed by prolific Hammer filmmaker Terence Fisher, who reinvented horror with a blend of full-color bloody violence, sexual overtones and religious themes. Fisher was a high-church Anglican who considered his films “basically morality plays” reflecting his belief in “the ultimate victory of good over evil.”
The 1958 film weaponized the cross, making it like kryptonite to paranormal evil. The cross literally burns vampiric flesh, much like sunlight.
Lee, who identified as Anglo-Catholic, shared this perspective. (Lee’s father, a lieutenant colonel in the British Army, was Anglican; his mother, an Italian countess, was Catholic.) The destruction of evil in Fisher’s films, Lee once noted, was the reason “the Church doesn’t object to these films, and why they are so popular in Ireland, Spain and Italy.”
It was Fisher and Lee’s Dracula that established the cinematic convention of the cross’s supernatural power over evil. Universal’s 1931 Dracula starring Bela Lugosi did briefly depict the vampire’s aversion to crosses described in Bram Stoker’s novel, but in this depiction the cross is merely a deterrent like wolfbane (which plays a bigger role in the film).
The 1958 film weaponized the cross, making it like kryptonite to paranormal evil. The cross literally burns vampiric flesh, much like sunlight. (The destructive power of sunlight over vampires was introduced by Nosferatu, F.W. Murnau’s unauthorized 1922 silent adaptation of Dracula — a film that, despite omitting the role of religious iconography in the vampire mythos, was included in the 1995 Vatican film list.)
In part due to his close identification with the horror genre, Lee was reputed to be obsessed with the occult, and rumors of his massive occult library (12,000 to 20,000 volumes, depending on the source) have been stated as fact in news stories — though Lee himself debunked this notion.
“I don’t have a huge collection … I have maybe four or five [occult books],” he told an audience at University College Dublin in 2011. “And I have met people who claimed to be Satanists, who claimed to be involved with black magic … But as I said, I certainly haven’t been involved.” Concluding with an exhortation against occult involvement, he added, “And I warn all of you — never, never, never. You will not only lose your mind, you’ll lose your soul.”
Lee’s antipathy toward the occult was most dramatically realized in a passion project that he fought for years to get made at Hammer, which wound up becoming Terence Fisher’s best film and the clearest and most explicit expression of his moral and theological vision: The Devil Rides Out (1968, also known in the US as The Devil’s Bride).
It was also one of Lee’s few heroic roles. As Nicolas, the Duc de Richleau, Lee played a Van Helsing-ish protagonist, a man of faith and reason who utilizes crosses, holy water and the sacred name of Jesus to battle a satanic cult for the souls of a number of its members. This film was a passion project for Lee, who was deeply dissatisfied with the increasingly poor Dracula series and wanted to portray the dangers of the occult in a morally serious way.
“It's the story of two beliefs. One is organized religion, and the other is the old belief that we must revere nature and appease it if necessary. Its power lies in the fact that you never expect what eventually happens, because everyone is so nice.”
“After years of urging black-magic themes on Hammer, I had a breakthrough with The Devil Rides Out,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Conservative Hammer had always worried about the church’s reaction to the screening of the Black Mass. But we thought the charge of blasphemy would not stick if we did the thing with due attention to scholarship.”
The Devil Rides Out marked the climax of a cinematic era. Five years later, Lee appeared in a very different sort of horror film, The Wicker Man (1973), one tonally and atmospherically antithetical to the Gothic Christian horror of Lee’s Hammer films, but which put a protagonist who would have felt more at home in a Hammer horror film to a post-Christian test he couldn’t understand or cope with.
Bright and unsettlingly buoyant, suffused with amiable folk music and guiltless eroticism, The Wicker Man depicts a cheerfully carnal Celtic neopagan cult among whom the protagonist, a stodgy Christian policeman, flounders haplessly as he tries to solve a purported murder case, not realizing that he is walking into a trap. Lee plays the cult leader, Lord Summerisle, who informs the protagonist that his God is dead: “He can’t complain. He had His chance, and, in the modern parlance, He blew it.”
“It's the story of two beliefs,” Lee said of The Wicker Man in a 2001 interview. “One is organized religion, and the other is the old belief that we must revere nature and appease it if necessary. Its power lies in the fact that you never expect what eventually happens, because everyone is so nice.” Niceness, then, is no sure mark of decency or goodness; nor does the protagonist’s prickly judgmentalism necessarily discredit his basic religious commitments.
Many years later, when pre-production for The Lord of the Rings was underway, Lee made a bid for the role of Gandalf, sending Peter Jackson a photo of himself in wizard regalia. A huge Tolkien fan who reread the books every year, Lee had even met Tolkien himself once at the Eagle and Child, the Oxford pub where Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and the other “Inklings” met. (He also met T. H. White, whose The Once and Future King was an important influence on Star Wars, along with The Lord of the Rings.)
But Jackson wanted Ian McKellen for Gandalf; in any case, Lee, once an athletic performer and a skilled fencer who would go on to battle Yoda with lightsabers in the second Star Wars prequel, probably wasn’t up to the physicality of the role of Gandalf. So Lee added to his repertoire one more iconic villain (in a story that, like his Fisher films, has Christian roots).
It’s possible that Lee filmed more death scenes than any other film actor who ever lived. In his first iconic role, though, he repeatedly came back from the dead, and a certain aura of immortality clung to him from that role. “It would be pretty awesome if Christopher Lee rose from the grave right about now,” a friend joked sadly on Twitter. Christian faith, of course, tells us that Christopher Lee will rise from the grave, as will we all … and it will be awesome. Until then, Christopher Lee, requiescat in pace.
Most of Christopher Lee’s more notable films are readily available on home video. A glaring exception is “The Devil Rides Out,” currently out of print on Region 1 (North America) DVD. It is available used from various online vendors and may be available at libraries. Tags: RIP
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GIFTSIn addition, Christopher Lee was a practitioner of black magic. Black magic, also known as dark magic, is a form of sorcery that involves the use of supernatural powers to manipulate or harm others. It is often associated with rituals and spells that invoke evil spirits or demons.
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Black magic is considered taboo in many cultures and religions, as it is believed to have negative effects on the individuals involved. Christopher Lee's interest in black magic can be traced back to his early years. He was a close friend of the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley and was known to have studied his works extensively. Lee was also a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, an occult organization founded by Crowley. Despite his involvement in black magic, Christopher Lee always maintained that he used his knowledge for educational and research purposes only. He denied using his powers to cause harm or engage in any malicious activities. Lee believed that black magic was misunderstood and that it could be used for positive purposes if approached with the right intentions. Throughout his career, Christopher Lee often drew inspiration from his knowledge of the occult and black magic to enhance his performances. He had a deep understanding of the dark and mysterious aspects of human nature, which he portrayed convincingly on screen. Lee's portrayal of characters like Dracula and Saruman in "The Lord of the Rings" franchise resonated with audiences worldwide. In conclusion, Christopher Lee was not only a talented actor but also had a deep interest in black magic. While he maintained that his involvement in the occult was purely for educational purposes, his knowledge and understanding of black magic often influenced his performances on screen. Christopher Lee's legacy as a horror icon continues to captivate audiences to this day..
Reviews for "The Esoteric Side of Christopher Lee: Exploring his Beliefs and Practices in Black Magic"
1. John - 1 star - I was highly disappointed with "Christopher Lee Black Magic". The movie lacked a coherent plot and the acting was mediocre at best. The special effects were laughable, and the constant use of jump scares felt cheap and overdone. Overall, it was a waste of time and money. I would not recommend this film to anyone looking for a satisfying horror experience.
2. Emily - 2 stars - "Christopher Lee Black Magic" had a promising premise, but it failed to deliver. The pacing was extremely slow, and I found myself losing interest in the story halfway through. The characters were underdeveloped, and their motivations were unclear. Additionally, the ending felt rushed and unsatisfying. Overall, I was left feeling bored and unengaged throughout the film.
3. Mark - 2 stars - I had high hopes for "Christopher Lee Black Magic" as a fan of supernatural horror, but it fell short of my expectations. The scares were predictable, and the movie relied too heavily on cliches and jump scares. The plot lacked originality, and I found myself feeling uninvested in the characters' fates. While the cinematography was decent, it couldn't save the film from feeling like a generic and forgettable addition to the horror genre.
4. Sarah - 1 star - "Christopher Lee Black Magic" was one of the worst horror movies I have ever seen. The acting was atrocious, with unrealistic dialogue and wooden performances. The plot was convoluted and confusing, with loose ends left untied. The film's attempt at scares felt forced and uninspired. I found no redeeming qualities in this movie and strongly advise against wasting your time on it.