Elvis Has Left the Building ... and Reality

A new "occult" biography of Elvis attempts to reimagine the singer as a supernatural conduit and embodiment of divine forces.

Apr 11, 2025

Elvis Presley deeply admired James Dean to the point that he modeled much of his persona as a singer and an actor on Dean’s, especially in the early years of his career. The two men had much in common, and it is unsurprising that Elvis (I’ll use the mononym here, in deference to the subject) and Dean also shared both voluntary and involuntary associations with the occult. As I discuss in my book, Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean, Dean came out of a somewhat mystical Christian background (encouraged by his friend, the Rev. James DeWeerd) and believed himself supernaturally destined for greatness, despite believing himself to be cursed with an inner evil. He studied books of ancient wisdom and Eastern mysticism and developed a rather Gnostic view that reality was itself an illusion. After his untimely death, he became a cult idol, spiritual guide, and psychopomp—and the subject of countless conspiracy theories. Many claimed to see his ghost, or that he had never died, or would return in glory, and one young woman even claimed his angelic form had supernaturally impregnated her virgin womb. Such stories presaged suspiciously similar anecdotes that swirled around Elvis decades later.

Therefore, I read with interest The Occult Elvis: The Mystical and Magical Life of the King, a new examination of the occult aspects of Elvis from podcaster Miguel Connor. The subject is clearly of deep personal interest to Connor, who claims to have had a 2022 conversion into an Elvis fan and to see in him a “projection” of his hopes and his fears, including, according a late chapter, their shared battles with addiction. Unfortunately, what Connor has delivered is a flimsy secondhand summary of better books, filtered through an unexamined New Age worldview that presupposes the reader’s belief in Gnosticism. Like most Inner Traditions books (this one is from their Destiny imprint), The Occult Elvis is a rambling, unstructured collection of material copied from better books; unsupported opinion; and conspiracy theory. There is no original research in the book, nor even archival material contemporary with Elvis; the entire book is sourced to previously published biographies and memoirs.

The author, in seeking to differentiate his work from Gary Tillery’s more substantive The Seeker King: A Spiritual Biography of Elvis (2013), one of his primary sources, has gone the opposite route, externalizing Elvis into a product of vast, swirling occult forces that never really gel into a coherent account of the singer’s life. To give but one example, an early chapter presents a graph of accelerating technological advancement from 1400 to 2025, with no label to explain what the y-axis increase is supposed to represent, with several pages of accompanying body text discussing Philip J. Corso’s suggestion that technological progress is due to crashed UFOs. “How can we explain this exponential growth of technological advancement?” Connor writes, ignorant of geometric progression and its accelerating accumulation. What any of this has to do with Elvis is anyone’s guess. Connor adds many such pointless asides to the intellectual fringe (especially ufology) and its fantastical worldview throughout the book, with little connection to his subject. One gets the sense he was trying to fill space.

Connor’s early chapters are particularly slipshod. He purposely reads more into a handful of facts than the evidence will bear. He claims, for instance, that because Elvis claimed to be guided by the spirit of his deceased twin Jesse that Jesse was therefore a daimon and engaged in interdimensional communication with Elvis, whose humble roots were not simply the result of generational poverty but the intervention of the Gnostic Archon of Poverty. Similarly, since Robert Johnson had claimed to make a deal with the devil, Connor suggests that a similar supernatural occurrence caused Elvis to suddenly break out in an astonishing rendition of “That’s All Right Mama” at the end of an otherwise uninspired audition from Sam Phillips, launching Elvis’s career. No one ever made that claim, but Connor invents it anyway.

Connor rejects the notion that Elvis was inspired by Christianity in its evangelical form and instead attempts to make a rather absurd case that Gospel music is in fact a secret catechism of “Egyptian Christian Gnosticism” rooted in “shamanism.” You see, Elvis combined Gospel and rock music, so he was himself a “crossroads” and he lived in Memphis, which is named for an Egyptian city, so it’s all part of a grand Egyptian-Christian-shamanic spiritual plan.

In Connor’s telling, everything changed when Elvis needed a new hairdresser in April 1964. His new stylist, Larry Geller, was into what we would today term New Age literature, and the two men bonded over their shared interest in the big questions about life, death, and the occult. Connor reviews some rather well-trod ground about the various books of spirituality and esoterica that Elvis read, including his favorite, Manly Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages, which Elvis owned in an autographed copy, as well as various forays into Eastern spirituality, including via the martial arts. Connor neglects some important details, though, such as Priscilla Presley convincing Elvis in 1967 to burn his occult, religious, and spiritual tomes to focus on fixing his life and career, an event later deemed “The Burning of the Books.”

Connor, though, goes farther than the evidence warrants. Geller certainly introduced Elvis to various books and practices, but Connor attributes this to the workings of a divine Trickster. His account is heavily dependent on Tillery’s Seeker King, though Connor tries to use language and allusion to make Elvis’s growing interest in New Age books something foreordained by the gods. For instance, Geller had claimed in his memoir that Elvis believed Theosophy founder Helena Blavatsky bore an uncanny resemblance to his mother, Gladys Love. Connor, therefore, suggests that Blavatsky reincarnated as Love, but it is wholly typical of his gonzo writing style that it is impossible to determine whether he means it seriously.

But you aren’t really reading this review to hear about Elvis’s reading list, which is hardly much different from your average spiritually interested teenager’s or bored wine mom’s. You’re here to read about Elvis’s magical powers.

Almost halfway through the book, Connor switches gears and begins discussing Elvis as a magician and an occult presence. Here, Connor’s uncritical reliance on his sources, notably Geller’s memoir, leads him to accept hagiographic stories about Elvis at face value. It is undoubtedly true that Elvis engaged in the kind of prayers for healing common in evangelical Christian circles, but there is likely little reason to take literally stories his various friends and family told about his touch spontaneously healing everything from arthritis to nausea to broken legs. Priscilla Presley did indeed claim Elvis’s hands could cure her headaches, though of course we have only her word. But Connor isn’t always honest in his dealings with these memoirs. He accurately reports the supposed healings, but omits some of the context. For instance, he correctly reports that Jerry Schilling claimed to have crippling back pain disappear after Elvis laid his hands on him. But he carefully omits Schilling’s conclusions, which Schilling gave in his 2006 memoir Me and a Guy Named Elvis: “I don’t think Elvis was harnessing any supernatural powers to take my pain away. […] I think what made my back feel better wasn’t any more mystical than the concern of a good friend.”

Nor are Connor’s sources unimpeachable. In addition to biased memoirs whose accuracy he never evaluates or questions, and Steve Dunleavy’s sensational and not always accurate 1977 Elvis biography, he sources his anecdotes to various tabloids, including The Daily Express, and stories aging fans, groupies, and colleagues suddenly remembered decades after Elvis died. When using such material, a biographer needs to cross check not just with other Elvis-themed literature but with independent records, contemporary documents, and disinterested observers in order to evaluate their accuracy. Connor simply repeats stories with minimal citations and no critical analysis. For instance, he cites a Daily Express story unsubtly titled “Elvis Presley—MIRACLE?”, which reports on an interview from a YouTube channel called Spa Guy, in which Sweet Inspirations backup singer Estelle Brown claimed in 2020 that half a century earlier she saw Elvis cure the newly diagnosed stomach cancer of fellow backup singer Sylvia Shemwell, who died in 2010. Neither Spa Guy, nor the Daily Express, nor Connor provided any evidence that Shemwell had been diagnosed with cancer, and I could find no evidence or record of anyone making such a claim before 2020.

Connor provides a fig-leaf of objectivity, asking whether the supposed healings could be down to a placebo effect, but because he assumes that every anecdote is literally true, no matter how poorly documented or absurd, he therefore concludes Elvis possessed supernatural powers. Here, Connor fails to separate three competing threads: that an increasingly drug-addled Elvis really did believe he possessed supernatural powers, that his sycophants spread stories about his supposed powers to elevate him, and over time fading memories and nostalgia caused stories to become grander and more impressive in the retelling. One can’t draw serious conclusions without considering these confounding factors, and Connor is either unwilling or unable to apply even the smallest bit of critical analysis to his sources.

At this point, more than halfway through the book, I was bored by the undigested collection of anecdotes and New Age blather masquerading as a book. The remaining six chapters turned out to be more of the same.

A chapter on Elvis’s interest in UFOs describes his belief that Ezekiel’s vision was a flying saucer. Connor cites Geller, who claims the idea was Elvis’s own original conclusion, though it’s almost certainly from either Chariots of the Gods or Ezekiel’s Spaceship. Connor claims Elvis studied the Book of Enoch, but the underlying source texts do not state this (Geller mistakenly named Enoch as a book of the Old Testament but never says Elvis read it). Elvis allegedly claimed to be from Jupiter (presumably a joke) and saw flying saucers. Connor believes aliens controlled Elvis’s destiny through the color blue (don’t ask). Connor devotes much of the chapter to discussing ufology that postdates Elvis, and he cites Nazi-adjacent Aryan nationalist Jason Reza Jorjani for some reason.
A nonsensical chapter compares the lives of Elvis and Philip K. Dick, presumably to suggest that both men embodied the supernatural spirit of their age—literally, not figuratively. It was a disjointed waste of space.
The following chapter attempts to use Jungian psychology to explain the “fall” of Elvis, and this has nothing to do with the stated topic of the book until Connor starts to claim that Elvis and his circle somehow supernaturally embodied Jungian archetypes (who are somehow also extraterrestrials, according to Connor) and mythological beings. “It doesn’t take an Ascended Master to see that Elvis and Parker were earthly avatars of Lucifer and Ahriman,” Connor writes, as though the idea that humans embody mythological beings from other dimensions is self-evident.
The next chapter claims that Elvis’s sex life proves he was a shaman. Connor begins by arguing that Elvis’s father blacked out during the orgasm that conceived Elvis because he had been possessed by an alien, and he proceeds to discuss the cleaning of Elvis’s jumpsuit during his 1968 comeback special because he had accidentally orgasmed in it while performing. (The source for that claim, incidentally, was director Steve Binder, as told to Whitmer for his 1996 book.) Although Elvis did not attribute magical powers to his penis, Connor devotes the chapter to an attempt to parallel Elvis’s various orgasms to Jungian archetypes and shamanic rituals, and his performances to a Dionysian mystery—again, literally, not figuratively. He concludes that Elvis was an “egregore” of America.
Following this, Connor discusses apparitions of Elvis following his death, which carry all the weight of any ghost story, which is to say, none. He also discusses various conspiracies about Elvis faking his death.

The book ends with a lament that Elvis is no longer around to lead spiritual seekers to gnosis, followed by a fantasy conversation Connor invents in which Elvis and his father discuss the unreality of the physical world.

Overall, the secondhand nature of the book’s research means that the reader will gain nothing from The Occult Elvis that could not be gleaned from other, better books. It is an inferior version of The Seeker King, which is itself only the last in a line of at least a dozen books about Elvis’s spiritual quest.

I am not terribly interested in Elvis Presley and have only a general knowledge of his life, so I admit to finding it interesting that so many aspects of Elvis’s spiritual journey paralleled those of James Dean. Some of the Elvis quotations Connor gleans from his sources surprised me in how similar they were to Dean’s own words about life, death, the unreality of this world, and the desire to find a larger truth. Out of context, you would be hard pressed to tell who said which. They also both shared a certain immaturity, a teenager’s paperback idea of sophistication; and they both moved beyond traditional Christianity toward something closer to universalism.

But the differences are equally important. Dean never claimed to have magical powers, and he felt destiny imposed sometimes unwanted obligations on him, not that he had become an avatar of divine forces. Elvis, by contrast, lived longer than Dean. The money, the fame, and the drugs inflated his sense of self-importance and cosmic destiny. If James Dean’s spiritual journey was defined by his conviction that he was cursed and evil, Elvis’s was the opposite, too certain of his own greatness.

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