A PART FROM THEIR INTEREST in flying saucers and having both been disastrous students during their adolescence, Raul Seixas and Paulo Coelho appeared to have little in common. Seixas was working as a music producer for a multinational recording company, CBS; his hair was always tidy and he was never seen without a jacket, tie and briefcase. He had never tried drugs, not even a drag on a cannabis joint. Coelho’s hair, meanwhile, was long and unruly, and he wore hipsters, sandals, necklaces, and spectacles with octagonal purple lenses. He also spent much of his time under the influence of drugs. Seixas had a fixed address, and was a real family man, with a daughter, Simone, aged two, while Paulo lived in ‘tribes’ whose members came and went according to the seasons–in recent months his ‘family’ had been Gisa and Stella Paula, a pretty hippie from Ipanema who was as fascinated as he was by the occult and the beyond.
The differences between the two men were even more marked when it came to their cultural baggage. At twenty-five, Paulo had read and given stars to more than five hundred books, and he wrote articulately and fluently. As for Raul, despite having spent his childhood surrounded by his father’s books–his father worked on the railways and was an occasional poet–he didn’t seem particularly keen on reading. However, one date in their lives had different meanings but was equally important to each of them. On 28 June 1967, when Paulo was drugged and taken to the ninth floor of the Dr Eiras clinic for his third admission, Seixas was twenty-two and getting married to the American student Edith Wisner in Salvador, Bahia, where he was born. Both believed in astrology, and if they had studied their respective astrological charts they would have seen that the zodiac predicted one certain thing: the two were destined to make a lot of money, whatever they did.
When Raul Seixas entered his life, Paulo Coelho was immersed in the hermetic and dangerous universe of satanism. He had begun meeting Marcelo Ramos Motta more frequently and, after devouring weighty volumes on pentacles, mystical movements, magical systems and astrology, he could understand a little of the work of the bald man on The Beatles’ LP cover. Born in Leamington Spa, England, on 12 October 1875, Aleister Crowley was twenty-three when he reported that he had encountered in Cairo a being who transmitted to him the Liber AL vel Legis [The Book of the Law], which was his first and most important work on mysticism, the central sacred text of Thelema.
The Law of Thelema proclaimed the beginning of an era in which man would be free to realize all his desires. This was the objective contained in the epigraph ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’, which was considered the basic rule of conduct by Crowley’s followers. Among the instruments recommended to achieve this state were sexual freedom, the use of drugs and the rediscovery of oriental wisdom. In 1912, Crowley entered the sect known as Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), a Masonic, mystical, magical type of organization of which he soon became the head and the principal theorist. He called himself ‘the Beast’, and built a temple in Cefalu, in Sicily, but was expelled from Italy by the Mussolini government in 1923, accused of promoting orgies. During the Second World War, Crowley was summoned by the writer Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond and an officer in British Naval Intelligence, to help the British consider how superstitions and mysticism among the Nazi leaders could be put to good use by the Allies. It was also Aleister Crowley who, through Fleming, suggested to Winston Churchill that he should use the V for Victory sign, which was, in fact, a sign of Apophis-Typhon, a god of destruction capable of overwhelming the energies of the Nazi swastika.
In the world of music it was not only The Beatles who became, in their case only briefly, Thelemites, which was the name given to Crowley’s followers. His satanic theories attracted various rock artists and groups such as Black Sabbath, The Clash, Iron Maiden and Ozzy Osbourne (who wrote the classic ‘Mr Crowley’). The famous Boleskine House, where Crowley lived for several years, later became the property of Jimmy Page, the Led Zeppelin guitarist. But the English Beast’s ideas also inspired terrible tragedies: in August 1969, his American disciple Charles Manson headed the massacre of four people who were shot, stabbed and clubbed to death in a mansion in Malibu. Among the victims was the actress Sharon Tate, aged twenty-six, who was expecting a baby by her husband, the director Roman Polanski.
Paulo appeared to be so influenced by these readings and supernatural practices that not even the atrocities committed by Manson brought him back down to earth. The murderer of Sharon Tate was described as ‘the most evil man on Earth’ by the jury that condemned him to death, although this sentence was subsequently commuted to life imprisonment. When he read the news, Paulo wrote in his diary: ‘The weapons of war nowadays are the strangest you can find. Drugs, religion, fashion…It’s something against which it’s impossible to fight. When looked at like this, Charles Manson is a crucified martyr.’
Until he met Paulo Coelho, Raul Seixas had never heard of Crowley or of the nomenclature used by those people. He knew nothing about Astrum Argentum, OTO or Liber Oz. He liked reading about flying saucers, but the main object of his interest had always been music, and more precisely rock and roll, a musical genre with which Paulo had only a glancing relationship–he liked Elvis Presley, knew the most famous groups and that was it. Seixas’s passion for rock music had meant he had to repeat his second year at São Bento College in Salvador three times, and at eighteen he had had some success in performances in Bahia as leader of the group Os Panteras–The Panthers. However, at the insistence of his future father-in-law, an American Protestant pastor, he abandoned his promising musical career and returned to his studies. He made up for lost time with a revision course, and when he took his entrance exams for the law faculty, he was among the top entrants. ‘I just wanted to prove to people, to my family, how easy it was to study and pass exams,’ he said many years later, ‘when for me it wasn’t important in the least.’ During the first months of his marriage, he supported the family by giving guitar and English lessons. Before he was even three months into his marriage, though, Seixas succumbed to temptation.
In October 1967, the singer Jerry Adriani went to Salvador after being hired for a show at the smart Bahian Tennis Club, where the muse of bossa nova, Nara Leão, was also performing, along with the comedian Chico Anysio. Adriani was, by then, regarded as a national star among the youth music movement, Jovem Guarda, but dismissed by more sophisticated audiences as tacky. On the day of the show, a tennis club employee told the singer that his performance had been cancelled: ‘The group you’ve hired has got several black musicians in it, and no blacks are allowed in the club.’
Although the Afonso Arinos law had been in place since 1951, making racial discrimination a crime, ‘Blacks didn’t enter the Club even through the kitchen door’, in the words of the song ‘Tradição’, by another famous Bahian, Gilberto Gil. This prejudice was even harsher here, since this was a club in Bahia, a state where more than 70 per cent of the population were black and of mixed race. Instead of calling the police, the show’s impresario chose to hire another group. The first he could think of were the defunct Os Panteras, who in the past few months had changed their name to The Panthers. Seixas was thrilled at the idea of reviving the group and went off into the city to look for his old accompanists: the bassist Mariano Lanat, the guitarist Perinho Albuquerque and the drummer Antônio Carlos Castro, or Carleba–all of them white. The show was a great success, and Os Panteras left the stage to loud applause. At the end of the show, Nara Leão whispered in Jerry Adriani’s ear: ‘That group are really good. Why don’t you ask them to play with you?’
When, that evening, he received an invitation from the singer for the group to go with him on a tour of the north and the northeast, due to start the following week, Seixas was thrilled. An invitation to tour with a nationally famous artist such as Jerry Adriani wasn’t one that was likely to come around twice. However, he also knew that accepting the proposal would be the end of his marriage, and that was too high a cost.
He said he was sorry, but he had to refuse: ‘It would be an honour to go on tour with you, but if I leave home now, my marriage will be finished.’
Jerry Adriani doubled the stakes: ‘If that’s the problem, then problem solved: your wife is invited too. Bring her with you.’
As well as giving the couple a rather amusing, unusual honeymoon, the tour was so successful that when it ended, Jerry Adriani convinced Raul and his musicians to move to Rio and turn professional, and at the beginning of 1968 they were all in Copacabana. This adventure did not end happily. Although they managed to record one LP of their own, in the years that followed, the only work that came their way was playing as a backing group to Adriani. There were times when Seixas had to ask his father for a loan to pay the rent on the house where he, Edith and the other members of the group were living. Going back to Bahia because they had run out of money was a very hard thing to do, particularly for Raul, the leader of the group, but there was no other solution. Much against his will, he started giving English lessons again and was beginning to think that his musical career was over when a proposal came from Evandro Ribeiro, the director of CBS, to return to work in Rio, not as a band leader but as a music producer. His name had been suggested to the management of the record company by Jerry Adriani, who was interested in getting his friend back on the Rio–São Paulo circuit, which was the centre of Brazilian music production. Wanting to get even with the city that had defeated him, Seixas did not think twice. He asked Edith to organize the move and, a few days later, he was working, in jacket and tie, in the polluted city centre of Rio, where the CBS offices were. Within a few months, he had become music producer to various well-known artists, starting with Adriani.
At the end of May 1972, Raul had walked the seven blocks between the CBS building and the offices of A Pomba not merely to praise the non-existent Augusto Figueiredo’s writings on extraterrestrials. He had in his briefcase an article that he himself had written on flying saucers and wanted to know if A Pomba might be interested in publishing it. Paulo politely accepted it, said that he would indeed be happy to publish the article, and drew him out on the subject of UFOs and life on other planets. He had an ulterior motive for this. The mention of CBS had sparked a rather more materialistic interest: since Raul enjoyed the magazine and was an executive in a multinational, he might well be persuaded to place advertisements for CBS in A Pomba. The short meeting ended with Raul inviting Paulo to dinner at his house the following night, a Thursday. At the time, Coelho never took any decision without consulting his ‘family’, Gisa and their flatmate, Stella Paula. Even something as banal as whether or not to go to someone’s house was subjected to a vote: ‘We had a truly ideological discussion in that tiny hippie group to decide whether or not we should go and have a drink at Raul’s house.’
Even though he realized that, apart from an interest in UFOs, the two appeared to have nothing in common, Paulo, with one eye on the possibility of getting some advertising revenue from CBS, decided to accept the invitation. Gisa went with him, while Stella Paula, who was outvoted, felt no obligation to go along as well. On that Thursday evening, on his way to supper, Paulo stopped at a record shop and bought an LP of Bach’s Organ Preludes. The bus taking them from Flamengo to Jardim de Alah–a small, elegant district between Ipanema and Leblon, in the south of Rio, where Raul lived–was stopped at a police checkpoint. Since the crackdown by the dictatorship in December 1968, such checks had become part of life for Brazilians in the large cities. However, when Gisa saw the police get on the bus and start asking the passengers to show their papers, she felt it was a bad sign, a warning, and threatened to call off the meeting. Paulo, however, would not be moved, and at eight that evening, as agreed, they rang the bell of Raul’s apartment.
The meeting lasted three hours. When he left, the obsessive Paulo stopped at the first bar they came to and scribbled on the cover of his Bach LP every detail of their visit to the man he still referred to as ‘the guy’. Every blank space on the record cover was taken up with tiny, almost illegible writing:
We were greeted by his wife, Edith, and a little girl who must have been three at most. It was all very respectable, very proper. They brought in little dishes with canapés…It’s years since I’ve eaten in someone’s house where they had little dishes with canapés. Canapés, how ridiculous!
So then the guy comes in: ‘Would you like a whisky?’
Well, of course we wanted a whisky! A rich man’s drink. Dinner was hardly over and Gisa and I were desperate to leave.
Then Raul said: ‘Oh, I wanted to play you some of my music.’
Oh, shit, we were going to have to listen to music as well. All I wanted was to get some advertising out of him. We went into the maid’s room and he picked up his guitar and played some marvellous music. When he finished, the guy said to me: ‘You wrote that stuff on flying saucers, didn’t you? Well, I’m planning on going back to being a singer. Would you like to write some lyrics for me?’
I thought: Write lyrics? Me write lyrics for this guy who’s never touched drugs in his life! Never put a joint in his mouth. Not even an ordinary cigarette. Anyway, we were just leaving and I hadn’t yet mentioned the advertisement. I plucked up courage and asked: ‘Since we’re going to publish your article, do you think you could manage to get an advertisement for CBS in the magazine?’
Imagine my astonishment when he said that he had resigned from CBS that very day: ‘I’m moving to Philips because I’m going to follow my dream. I wasn’t born to be a manager, I want to be a singer.’
At that moment I understood: I’m the conventional one, this guy deserves the greatest respect. A guy who leaves a job that gives him everything, his daughter, his wife, his maid, his family, his canapés! I left feeling really impressed with the guy.
Gisa’s premonitions were not entirely unfounded. She had mistaken the year, but not the date. While it marked Paulo’s first step in the direction of one of his dreams–fame–25 May was, by coincidence, going to be a crucial date, a watershed in his life: the day chosen by destiny, some years later, for his first appointment with the Devil, a ceremony he was preparing for when he met Raul Seixas. Under Marcelo Ramos Motta’s guidance he felt he was a disciple of the Beast’s battalions. He was determined to immerse himself in the malignant forces that had seduced Lennon and Charles Manson, and began the process by being accepted into the OTO as a ‘probationer’, the lowest rank in the sect’s hierarchy. He was fortunate that his guide was not Motta but another militant in the organization, a graduate employee of Petrobras, Euclydes Lacerda de Almeida, whose magical name was Frater Zaratustra, or Frater Z, and who lived in Paraíba do Sul, 150 kilometres from Rio. ‘I received a letter, rude as ever, from Marcelo,’ Paulo wrote to Frater Z when he heard the news. ‘I’m forbidden from contacting him except through you.’ It was a relief to have a well-educated man like Euclydes as his instructor rather than the uncouth Marcelo Motta, who treated all his subordinates appallingly. Extracts from letters sent to militants of the OTO by Parzival XI (as Motta self-importantly called himself) show that Paulo was being quite restrained when describing the leader of the followers of the Devil as ‘rude’:
I’d prefer you not to write to me any more. If you do, send a stamped, addressed envelope for the reply–or you won’t get a reply.
[…] Be aware of just where you are on the vertebrate scale, monkey!
[…] If you’re incapable of getting up on your own two legs and looking for the Way through your own efforts then stay on all fours and howl like the dog you are!
[…] You’re no more than a drop of shit on the end of the monkey’s cock.
[…] If suddenly your favourite son, or you, were to fall ill with a fatal disease that required an expensive operation and you could only use OTO money, then rather let your son die, or die yourself, than touch the money.
[…] You haven’t seen anything yet. Wait until your name is known as a member of the OTO. The Army’s secret service, the CIA, Shin-Beth [Israeli military intelligence], the Russians, the Chinese and innumerable Roman priests disguised as members of the sect will try to get in contact with you.
On at least two occasions Paulo’s name appears in correspondence from Parzival XI to Euclydes. In the first, one gets the impression that Paulo will be working on the publication by Editora Três, in São Paulo, of the book The Equinox of the Gods, by Crowley and translated into Portuguese by Motta: ‘I got in touch with Editora Três through their representative in Rio, and we shall soon see whether or not they’re going to publish Equinox of the Gods. Paulo Coelho is young, enthusiastic and imaginative, but it’s too early for us to assume that they really will publish the book.’ In the second, Euclydes is castigated for having told Paulo too much and too soon about Parzival XI’s power: ‘Paulo Coelho said that you told him I destroyed the Masons in Brazil. You talk too much. Even if it were true, Paulo Coelho doesn’t have the magical maturity to understand how these things are done, which is why he’s confused.’
At the time, Paulo had had his own experiences of being in contact with the Devil. Some months before getting to know Motta and the OTO, during one of his regular anxiety crises, he was full of complaints. The reasons were many, but behind them lay the usual fact: he was nearly twenty-five and still just a nobody, without the remotest chance of becoming a famous writer. The situation seemed hopeless and the pain this time was such that, instead of asking for help from the Virgin Mary or St Joseph as he usually did, he decided to make a pact with the Prince of Darkness. If the Devil gave him the power to realize all his dreams, Paulo would give him his soul in exchange. ‘As an educated man who knows the philosophical principles that govern the world, humanity and the Cosmos,’ Paulo wrote in his diary, ‘I know perfectly well that the Devil does not signify Evil, but just one of the poles in the equilibrium of humanity.’ Using a fountain pen with red ink (‘the colour of this supernatural being’), he began to write out his pact in the form of a letter to the Devil. In the first line he made it clear that he was setting out the conditions and was not willing to deal with intermediaries:
You have wanted this for a long time. I felt that You were beginning to close the circle around me and I know that You are stronger than I am. You are more interested in buying my soul than I am in selling it. Whatever the case, I need to have an idea of the price that You are going to pay me. For this reason, from today, 11 November 1971, until 18 November, I’m going to do an experiment. I will speak directly to You, the King of the Other Pole.
In order to confirm this agreement he took a flower out of a vase and crushed it, at the same time proposing to Satan a kind of spectral test: ‘I’m going to crush this flower and eat it. From now on, for the next seven days, I’m going to do everything I want and I’m going to get what I want, because You will be helping me. If I’m satisfied with the results, I will give You my soul. If a ritual is necessary, I take it upon myself to carry it out.’
As a proof of good faith, Paulo promised the Devil that, during this experimental period, he would reciprocate by not praying to or saying the names of those considered sacred by the Catholic Church. But he did make it clear that this was a test, not a lifelong contract. ‘I retain the right to go back,’ he went on, still in red, ‘and I want to add that I’m only doing this because I find myself in such a state of complete despair.’
The agreement lasted less than an hour. He closed his notebook, and went out to have a cigarette and walk along the beach. When he returned home, he was deathly pale, terrified at the mad thing he had done. He opened his notebook again and wrote in capital letters that took up the whole page:
PACT CANCELLED
I OVERCAME TEMPTATION!
Paulo felt sure that he had tricked the Devil, but this ruse did not work for long. Although he and the Devil did not meet this time, he continued to invoke the spirit of evil in his articles for A Pomba and in a new enterprise in which he had become involved, the storyboards for comic strips. Beings from the Beyond created by him were brought to life in Gisa’s drawings and began to illustrate the pages of the magazine. The positive reaction to the series Os Vampiristas, which told of the troubles and adventures of a small, peaceful solitary vampire, convinced Gisa to send her work to King Features, an American agency that distributed comic strips, but she received no reply. The couple did, though, manage to get some of their work into two of the main daily Rio newspapers, O Jornal and Jornal do Brasil, creating a special cartoon about the little vampire for the latter’s children’s supplement, which came out on Sundays. They also created a highly popular character, Curingão, whose image was used on lottery tickets. From time to time, one of their comic strips even appeared in Pasquim, the magazine favoured by the Rio intelligentsia.
A Pomba was managing to survive with almost no advertising revenue and even achieved sales of 20,000, a real achievement in the tiny counterculture market; however, by the middle of 1972, it was heavily in debt, and looked set to take 2001 down with it. When the publisher, Eduardo Prado, announced that he was thinking of closing both publications, Paulo and Gisa moved to the newspaper Tribuna da Imprensa, where they produced a whole page that was published on Saturdays and given the name of the magazine that had died after only two issues–2001.
This change of medium was another step towards their work emerging from the subworld of flying saucers, elves and sorcerers to reach a wider public. Although in comparison with the other Rio dailies, Tribuna didn’t publish many copies, it had earned respect as a fighter. It had been founded in 1949 by the journalist Carlos Lacerda in order to combat the ideas, the supporters and the future government of President Getúlio Vargas (1951–54) and now, under the editorship of Hélio Fernandes, it was the favourite target for the military dictatorship’s censors. The arrival of Paulo and Gisa in the old building on Rua do Lavradio, near Lapa, coincided with the most repressive period in the entire history of the dictatorship, and this was reflected in the daily life of the paper. For three years, the offices of Tribuna had been visited every night by army officers, who would read everything and then decide what could and could not be published. According to Hélio Fernandes, a fifth of their daily output was thrown in the rubbish bin by the censors. He himself was an example of what happened to those targeted by the regime’s violence, for he had been arrested no fewer than twenty-seven times since 1964 and imprisoned twice. However, since the military were not too concerned about alchemy and the supernatural, the page produced by Paulo and Gisa remained untouched.
The visibility they achieved in the paper encouraged Paulo to go to the advertising department of Petrobras and show them a comic strip he and Gisa had created to be handed out at their petrol stations.
The man they met had approved the idea, but then Paulo, eager to make the project a success, said: ‘Just so that there’s no risk to Petrobras, we can work for free for the first month.’
The man turned round and said: ‘For free? Sorry, but you’re clearly a real amateur. Here no one does anything for free. Go and do a bit more work and try again when you’re a professional.’
In August, while he was still smarting from this rejection, Paulo received an invitation to go with his mother and maternal grandmother, Lilisa, for a three-week trip to Europe. He was heavily into his journalistic work, and hesitated before agreeing, but then it wasn’t every day that one was invited on a trip to Europe with all expenses paid. Added to this, he could leave several cartoons ready, as well as the Tribuna page, for Gisa to illustrate and design while he was away, since his mother’s invitation did not include his girlfriend. During the twenty-one day trip, which started in Nice and ended in Paris, with stops in Rome, Milan, Amsterdam and London, Paulo visited museums, ruins and cathedrals. Apart from two or three occasions in Amsterdam, when he escaped his mother’s vigilance in order to smoke a joint, the trip meant that he went almost a month without his daily intake of drugs.
Having been brought up by a methodical, obsessive mother, Paulo was furious with what he found when he arrived home. He wrote: ‘The house is a complete tip, which really annoyed me. It hasn’t even been swept. The electricity bill hasn’t been paid, nor has the rent. The page for Tribuna hasn’t been handed in, which is utterly irresponsible. I’m so upset by all this that I have nothing else to say.’
However, not everything was bad. While he was away, a tempting invitation had arrived in the post. Professor Glória Albues, who worked for the education department in Mato Grosso, had finally organized a project that the two had thought up when they had met up in Rio. The idea was that Paulo would spend three weeks every two months in three cities in Mato Grosso–Campo Grande, Três Lagoas (now in Mato Grosso do Sul, a state that did not exist at the time) and Cuiabá–teaching a course in theatre and education for teachers and pupils in state schools. The salary was tempting–1,500 cruzeiros a month, which was double what he earned on A Pomba and 2001. There was another reason that led Paulo to exchange the delights of Rio for the inhospitable lands of Mato Grosso. When the idea for the course had first come up, he hadn’t been involved with the OTO, but now, eager to spread Crowley’s ideas, the thought came to him: Why not change the course into a black magic workshop?