The Occult Elvis: The Mystical and Magical Life of The King
Miguel Conner
Rochester, Vt.: Destiny, 2025. 276 pp., paperback, $20.
The seeker side of Elvis Presley is practically esoteric knowledge itself, absent from most public understanding of The King. Baz Luhrmann’s bloated 2022 biopic overlooks the subject (though Sofia Coppola’s superior Priscilla does give it some attention despite a much shorter run time). Given his Mississippi upbringing and successful Gospel albums, a casual fan would assume Elvis was a typical Southern Christian. But that fan would be wrong.
As Miguel Conner explores in his new book The Occult Elvis: The Mystical and Magical Life of The King, Presley had a deep interest in spiritual matters from the time he was young, and it did not take long for him to look beyond the tight confines of traditional Christianity. His roots were in Pentecostalism, an evangelical Protestant movement centered on a direct relationship with God through Christ.
To deepen this direct connection, Presley turned to non-Christian texts like Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, which he read while stationed with the Army in Germany shortly after his beloved mother’s death in 1958. Though he had been only a fair student, he was a voracious reader, next turning to the essential texts of Theosophy—he loved H.P. Blavatsky’s Voice of the Silence so much that during his later career, he occasionally read from it on stage to a bemused crowd—and the very challenging works of Alice Bailey.
According to Geller, there was one special reason why Elvis was so taken with HPB: she strongly resembled Elvis’s late mother. On seeing a famous portrait of Blavatsky, Elvis remarked, “Look at the eyes . . . The shape of the face, the cheekbones. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“For Elvis, the Bible was sacred, the blueprint of creation in allegorical and metaphoric form,” said Larry Geller, the hairdresser who, according to Conner, became “Elvis’s Guru.” “But his interest went beyond the orthodox, extending into Gnostic and esoteric literature” Geller added.
Presley met Geller in 1964, and they got to talking about spiritual stuff during a lengthy salon session. Geller was a self-taught student of the occult, and in him, Presley had finally found someone he could discuss these questions with. He gave Elvis books to read and got him into meditation, and with the exception of a brief falling out after Presley’s controlling manager, Colonel Tom Parker, convinced Elvis that Geller was a bad influence, he would remain Presley’s friend and guide until the latter’s death.
There is a great deal to explore here, and Conner clearly has a deep love for the subject. But The Occult Elvis is only partially successful. When Conner sticks to his main topic, he is insightful and pithy. Yet he veers off topic far too often. An early section on young Elvis’s love of the DC comic Captain Marvel notes that the character later became Shazam, and delves into esoteric themes surrounding that version of the character—which Elvis never read. There is an entire chapter on the similarities between the spiritual paths of Presley and seminal science fiction author Philip K. Dick, even though there is no evidence that the two ever met or that Presley ever read any of Dick’s works.
Conner also goes a bit far in a chapter dealing with Elvis and UFOs. Presley reportedly saw unidentified lights in the sky on several occasions and mused about extraterrestrial life in the same way many of us do—“it’s ridiculous to think we’re the only life with millions of planets in the universe,” he told Geller—but Conner takes several pages to consider the notion that Presley himself might have come from another planet (Elvis once confessed to a fan that his true home was the ninth moon of Jupiter).
The Occult Elvis is ultimately a frustrating book. Where it is strong, it is very strong indeed. Where the author strays from his subject, it is close to farcical. It’s a short and breezy text, and worth it for a reader interested in Elvis, but that reader might want to skip around in the text.
Peter Orvetti
Peter Orvetti is a writer and former divinity student residing in Washington, D.C.