Satanic Messages in Music?
The strange psychology of backmasking, belief, and auditory illusion
Imagine being told there’s a satanic message hidden in one of the most iconic rock songs of all time. Now imagine hearing that song played backwards and suddenly hearing that message as if it were always there. The words seem to jump out at you. It’s eerie. Uncanny. And yet... it’s a trick of the mind.
Welcome to the fascinating world of top-down processing, auditory illusions, and a psychological perspective on one of the strangest moral panics in music history.
Let’s begin with a brilliant demonstration of auditory top-down processing by psychologist, Professor Chris French.
👉 Before reading any further, watch the following video. Don’t skip ahead, the full impact only works if you go in without knowing what to expect. Trust me, it’s worth it.
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Here’s a recap of what just happened:
You’re told a song contains hidden, satanic phrases, but only if you play it backwards. You listen to the backward clip. It’s nonsense. Then someone tells you what you’re supposed to hear. You play the clip again. Suddenly, it’s all there. The words. The meaning. The message. But only because your brain is now expecting it.
That’s top-down processing at work i.e., your brain using prior knowledge and context to shape what you perceive. The message never changed. You did. It’s initially gibberish, until you’re told the alleged message:
Here’s to my sweet Satan.
The one whose little path would make me sad,
Whose power is Satan.
He’ll give you 666.
There was a little tool-shed where he made us suffer, sad Satan.
Listen again, and now it’s impossible not to hear those words. But the reality? That message was never actually encoded in the song. It’s your brain filling in the gaps. A mind trick, not a malevolent code.
And that’s where the explanatory power of psychology comes in, specifically from a branch of psychology known as anomalistic psychology.
Anomalistic psychology may be defined as the study of extraordinary phenomena of behaviour and experience, including (but not restricted to) those which are often labelled 'paranormal'. It is directed towards understanding bizarre experiences that many people have without assuming a priori that there is anything paranormal involved. It entails attempting to explain paranormal and related beliefs and ostensibly paranormal experiences in terms of known (or knowable) psychological and physical factors."
(Chris French, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Goldsmiths University)
While parapsychology attempts to show that paranormal phenomena are real, in contrast, anomalistic psychology asks: what if they’re not? What if our brains create these spooky experiences under the right conditions? And Satanic backmasking is a classic case in point. The term "backmasking" refers to recording a message that is intended to be played backwards and embedded within music. The concept goes back to avant-garde experiments in the 1950s and gained mainstream exposure through The Beatles, who used reversed audio effects in songs like Rain and Tomorrow Never Knows.
But things took a darker turn in the 1980s, when Christian fundamentalists began claiming that artists were using backmasking to hide satanic, drug-promoting, or subversive messages in rock music. Youth minister Jacob Aranza's 1983 book Backward Masking Unmasked became the Bible of this movement. He claimed artists like The Eagles, Led Zeppelin, and even Hall & Oates were corrupting young minds via hidden messages only the subconscious could detect.
Yet, as any linguist or cognitive scientist will tell you, crafting lyrics that make sense both forwards and backwards is all but impossible. And there’s no scientific evidence that our brains can decode and act on phonetic gibberish played in reverse.
What we can do, however, is search for patterns.
Psychologists call this pareidolia - the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in random stimuli. It’s the same mechanism behind seeing faces in inanimate objects, the Virgin Mary in a toasted cheese sandwich, or hearing a satanic prayer in Stairway to Heaven - once we’ve been told to listen for it.
The real danger? Not backmasked music, but our willingness to believe that hidden messages are steering our behavior without our knowledge. In truth, it's our brain’s own meaning-making machinery that creates these illusions.
So, the next time you hear someone say “Play that backwards, it has a secret message,” remember: the real message is in the psychology, not the soundtrack.
If you would like to learn more about the fascinating world of anomalistic psychology, I highly recommend Chris French’s latest book The Science of Weird Shit: Why Our Minds Conjure the Paranormal.
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