Did John Lennon sell his soul to the devil?

The Lennon Prophecy, by Joseph Niezgoda (New Chapter Press, 2008) says he did exactly that, to achieve international fame and fortune, and subsequently paid the ultimate price for those achievements: his violent death in 1980 at the hands of a “demon-possessed” former fan, Mark David Chapman.

This isn’t the first reinterpretation of Lennon’s legacy; Albert Goldman’s The Lives Of John Lennon claims John had a relapse after famously kicking heroin and releasing "Cold Turkey" and was a junkie until he died, also that the original Beatles bassist Stu Sutcliffe died of a tumor caused by John losing his temper one night drunk in Hamburg and kicking Stu in the head (both of which allegations are plausible, if horrifying). But Niezgoda never mentions heroin or the thing about Sutcliffe, and Goldman’s book doesn’t mention a pact with the devil. Neither author mentions the notion that Lennon’s murder resulted from a project by the secret government to eliminate political agitators, a popular theory expressed by John’s son Sean, among others. History is written by the victors (or survivors), thus part of fame’s cost is the sacrifice of objective consideration by historians after death.

The Lennon Prophecy is unlikely to find a sympathetic audience among most atheists or qualified agnostics like myself. Even those who believe in a literal devil may dismiss Niezgoda's sometimes far-fetched attempts to prove his thesis (as when he probes Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, written four years before Lennon’s birth, for clues to his murder forty-four years later). Offering a new interpretation of the hidden messages and symbols in Beatles songs and album cover art, his book proposes it was Lennon's murder that was foretold, not Paul McCartney’s (fictional) death by car crash memorialized, as per the usual theory. It’s extremely well-written, and on the main, it avoids insulting any of the principals.

The group’s effect on the 20th century zeitgeist ranges far beyond their musical influence. The Western popularity of transcendental meditation was given a boost by the Beatles’ trip to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in Rishikesh, India, and the `60s generation's experimentation with hallucinogens was given a considerable promotional boost through Paul’s public admission of LSD usage and John’s reaction to and, arguably, promotion of same in some of his songs. Besides which, who among us can explain the ecstatic frenzy with which teenagers greeted the Beatles’ first visit to America? And why did John live in New York’s Dakota Building, where Rosemary’s Baby (a film about Satan incarnating on earth directed by Roman Polanski) was shot? While the Rolling Stones sang of having "Sympathy for the Devil," it was the Beatles’ music that inspired, however indirectly, the 1969 massacre of Sharon Tate (Polanski’s wife at the time) and others at the hands of Charles Manson's followers.

Niezgoda gives all this puzzling evidence and more (like Mark Chapman’s background and George Harrison’s near-fatal knife attack in 1999 by a former fan who believed the Beatles were “witches”) a good going-over, but he misses a few points. For example, the Rolling Stones produced an album in December of 1967 titled Their Satanic Majesties’ Request, purportedly in response to the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely hearts Club Band, which had been released that summer. Why’d they choose that title? This may or may not be examined on Niezgoda’s website, which offers “clues that aren’t in the book”.