I Remember Jim MorrisonIn his last interview before he left for Paris, Jim told a reporter, “One morning, I woke up and was surrounded by all of these spirits.” I was reading it to Anne when she interjected, “Oh, Yeah ! Jim Beam and Jack Daniels!!”
I believe Jim was descending deep into depression and alcoholic schizophrenia and Anne’s joking remarks were more derisive than funny. The Morrison’, every last one of them, were and are non believers. So to them, talk of ghosts and haunting is, in short, frivolous.
The American Night Vol. 2Jim Morrison, American Night
I am a. Sagittarius The most philosophical of all the signs. But anyway, I don't believe in it. I think it's a bunch of bullshit, myself.
Circus, Salli Stevenson, 1970
Salli: I take it you don’t believe in Karma or reincarnation or the occult beliefs?
Jim: No, not really, but since I don’t have anything else to replace it with, I listen to everything. I don’t say no. What do you believe in then? We evolved from snakes and I used to see the universe as a mammoth peristaltic snake. I used to see all the people and objects and landscapes as little pictures on the facets of their skins. I think the peristaltic motion is the basic life movement and even your basic unicellular structures have this same motion. It’s swallowing, digestion, the rhythms of sexual intercourse.
Above, Jim at the Hollywood Bowl performance. John Densmore wrote about Jim wearing the cross in his book Riders on the Storm
Riders on the Storm
The audience lit matches when we played "Light My Fire", a trend that continues at rock concerts today, but as beautiful as it looked from the Bowl stage, there was little spark coming from the music.
Jimmy Miller and Jagger snuck around to one of the reserved boxes, and we went out onstage to eighteen thousand roaring people. I wanted to show the Stones’ lead singer how good we could be. Not tonight. Damn it! I wished we were better.
Several close friends were right in the front seats and I couldn’t even look at them. Jim wore a cross and smoked a lot of cigarettes, which seemed out of character for him. He wasn’t born again and it was the first time I ever saw him smoke. I detected some self-conscious image-building.
It wasn’t a bad show; it was just off. I couldn’t put my finger on what went wrong. The lights were very bright for the film crew, and I could tell they were affecting Jim’s performance. The mood of the show wasn’t there.
We didn’t have enough power and Jim’s pauses were too long on some songs. Jim’s gold crucifix didn’t even help. I had noticed Roger Daltrey of the Who sporting a cross on TV, so I asked Jim why he had followed suit."I like the symbol visually, plus it will confuse people."
Rolling Stone interview by Jerry Hopkins:
Hopkins: You mentioned religion in passing and I’ve noticed you often wear a cross. Are you a Catholic?
Jim: Religion is like philosophy, what you devote most of your time to. It might be a woman. It might be a drug. It might be alcohol. It might be money. It might be literature. I think religion is what you think about and work at the most. I’m kind of hooked to the game of art and literature. As I told you before, my heroes are artists and writers.
Hopkins: And the cross you wore was…
Jim: Almost an accident, really. I was raised in a Christian culture and the cross is one of its symbols, that’s all.
Set the Night on FirePatricia Kennealy claimed she married Jim in a Wiccan or witch themed wedding. Robbie Krieger had this to say about the plausibility of that in his book, Set the Night on Fire:
I barely saw Jim hanging out with Patricia Kennealy and if he ever married her in some sort of Wiccan blood ritual, he never spoke a word about it to anyone I ever knew. Jim and Lynn once went to some sort of Ouija board seance thing with Alice Cooper, but they left early because Jim thought it was stupid. For a guy who always mocked astrology and spirituality and transcendental meditation, I can't imagine him taking a Wiccan wedding even remotely seriously."
