Ozzy Osbourne, My Medieval Alchemist Gothic High Priest, and How He Seduced Me Into the World of Gothic Architecture

By Robin Bennett Stein aka The Good4NothingConnoisseur
 

I was an 11-year old NYC rocker kid when I first got dosed by the epic dungeon rock of Black Sabbath. The very first track on their very first eponymously titled LP, “Black Sabbath,” starts with lush rain, boomy thunder. A cathedral bell tolls like a funeral, a funeral for what must die, what must be laid to rest: my innocence, my virginity, the racist prigs in my 3rd grade class at P.S. 109 in Spanish Harlem. Ozzy became my priest, leading the funeral march for all that sucks and tries to push you around. Thank you, Archbishop Ozzy for wanding away the cobwebs of my American Idiocy, and the mold of malice and menace in the life of conformity packaged as the “American Dream.” Thank you, holy father Wizard of Ozzy for baptizing me in your hard metallic liturgy. Sure, Led Zeppelin were bitchin’ but never deep, never authoritatively spiritual like Black Sabbath, who so deftly repurposed the Eucharist of the holy church. Black Sabbath made notions of church feel potent, healing. Ozzy saves souls, I could feel it. The Bells of Ozzy toll. 

Holy Epiphany, what the holy moly could this be all about? I always knew British Invasion rock was of much sturdier, more studly calibre: Yardbirds, Stones, Cream, Queen, Fab 4, Pretty Things, Bowie, Hendrix. But none of these great bands got near what Ozzy did. Minute :37 of that first track “Black Sabbath,” power chord lick cleared the fog and mist like a Holy Grail Knight on a Samurai stallion – sitting right there in my living room. Ozzy intones on some demon with “eyes of fire,” imploring God to assist in keeping at bay the sulphur-breathed one. I grab the album cover: it’s a monk or nun out front of a "monastery" in the dead of winter, obviously in 1300s Northern England. Inside the album cover, pics of Monseigneur Ozzy and Guitar-Lord Tonyi Iommi, huge brass crosses on chains hung over their dark hearts. Wow.

I grab off the bookshelf my mom’s book on the Gothic Cathedrals of England and France; there are full-page color photographs of Wells and Chartres Cathedrals, Notre Dame--and right there I realize Ozzy is the alchemist who built the Gothic cathedrals. Heck, there are statues of him in every other nook of Notre Dame. Sure, they’re saints and popes and all, but Ozzy was always decked out just like those Gothic statues in priestly robes, draped in crosses, wielding staffs and lances. I kept turning the pages on towering, mystical Gothic architecture and suddenly heard the wicked fast licks of “Wicked World.” Long-haired Ozzy’s songs roll like sermons and blessings or cursings at high mass. 

Forty years later, I’ve visited nearly every Gothic Cathedral in France and half the ones in the UK. The interiors of Gothic Cathedrals are portals to metaphysical wonderment; just stroll one of these 12th/13th century structure’s interior side aisles; look up and behold the quadripartite rib vaults. They fan out like lush, deciduous, forest canopy, dancing elm leaves in breezes that blow you along and transport you to concertos of bird song. Squint a tad and there’s a fair maid on horseback, pulling back her bow, her arrow aimed at your heart. You spy Monarch butterflies, sprites, elves, centaurs, oh, yes, and far in the distance a dragon running fire scales, from cigarette lighter to Roman Candle. 

On the exterior the flying buttresses spin like eternities of Proud Mary’s steamboat wheel, rollin’ on the river by the back roads of your memory that keeps you ever gentle on my mind. These are jazz themes and choruses in carved stone, every arch and pinnacle morphing, gyrating, crunking. The gargoyles, those fright-faced reptilian freaks that spit and hiss and go boo - it turns out they guard the temple and keep the devil on a leash, housetrained, ready to play fetch. I visited France’s Mont-Saint-Michel, the monastery named for a scaly demon-slaying Saint, out in the English Channel. It looks to be floating atop the waves at high tide. As far as I’m concerned, that's Ozzy’s parish right there. 

Thanks to Ozzy, I’ve read most of the High Gothic novels: Frankenstein, Dracula, Picture Of Dorian Gray, works of de Sade, and Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk, where the tormented sex addict Abbot Ambrosio’s love squeeze is, yes, androgynous, but who turns out to be, yes, a woman who is yet disguised as a man who is yet, in fact, the Prince of Darkness himself (herself?). 

So it’s all thanks to Ozzy, my own personal confessor-professor-inquisitor who lured me into the world of all things Gothic: Architecture, Literature, the poets Blake, Coleridge, Baudelaire and, oh, you guessed it, yup, I’m still trying to vaseline out the black coal eye make-up from last Halloween. Thank you, Ozzy, forever the hallucinatory high Goth priest metaphorical drug doser of my heart, my soul and my overactive imagination.

Images, from top: Black Sabbath, first album, designed by Keith Macmillan; Notre Dame (photo by Robin Bennett Stein), Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, features heaven and hell, designed by Ernie Cefalu and illustrator Drew Struzan; Wells Cathedral x 2 (photos by Robin Bennett Stein); Ozzy Osbourne being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, 2024 (Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.)

Author note: Robin Bennett Stein is sometime collaborator and partner-in-life of Frances Anderton. He is a musician-writer-filmaker-DJ-guitar teacher and invaluable support and editor.