If the popular conception of Pontius Pilate in the 1970s has any specific moment of origin, it can probably be pinpointed to the December 1968 release of a song by the Rolling Stones.

The first track of their bestselling album Beggar’s Banquet, ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ was an enormous hit for the Stones, certified gold in Germany and the UK, and its recording in a London studio was the subject of an avant-garde film by the noted auteur, Jean-Luc Godard. Taken together with the title of their previous album, the relatively poorly selling Their Satanic Majesties Request, ‘Sympathy’ planted the idea for many in the period that Mick Jagger and company were practicing occultists. This sinister impression was cemented a year later when, during the playing of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ at the unruly Altamont Free Concert for which the Hell’s Angels had been hired as security, a fight broke out in the audience, which ultimately led to the stabbing death of a fan, a moment captured in yet another film about the Stones, Gimme Shelter. But, as understandable as the inference may be, the composition of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ was not in fact based on Satanism at all. As Mick Jagger told an interviewer years later, ‘[t]he “Sympathy” character is much more complicated because my inspiration for that came from Baudelaire and The Master and Margarita, so I had all these things going on. It’s very much of the time. It’s got the violence of the time’. A copy of The Master and Margarita, a novel written by Mikhail Bulgakov in the Stalin-era Soviet Union and newly translated into English in 1967, had been given to Jagger by his then-girlfriend, Marianne Faithful.

The Master and Margarita is discussed more fully in Chapter 9, but it does not require much more than a passing knowledge of the novel or the Stalinist period in which it was written to appreciate the Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ for the masterpiece that it is.