Aleister Crowley – { feuilleton }

“A Love Vision”: Kenneth Anger in 1967

Art by Rick Griffin with Gustave Doré. San Francisco Oracle, Vol. 1 No. 7, February 1967.

In his later years Kenneth Anger often seemed to spend more time giving interviews than making films, even though he was keeping busy when out of the public eye. Most of the discussions cover familiar ground, recycling anecdotes about the creation of the Magick Lantern Cycle, and the people who contributed to the films. More interesting—and harder to find—are interviews from the time when Anger was still at work on his magnum opus, which is why this radio interview from 1967 is a very welcome discovery:

John Cott, host of the Coconut Grove show on KPFA, and co-hosts Tom Luddy and Juris Svendsen interview Kenneth Anger about his latest film, Lucifer Rising. At the time of the interview, Anger had not yet begun shooting Lucifer Rising; he discusses his vision for the film as a sequel to Scorpio Rising, talks about the film’s magick symbolism. The hosts play a tape of Anger performing an invocation for the film. He is joined in the studio by Gary (?), who is introduced as the star of the film, and Joy (no last name given), who plays music in the background throughout the interview and performs a song from the film. They are also briefly joined by author and critic Susan Sontag, who discusses her love of Anger’s films.

KPFA is a listener-funded radio station serving the San Francisco Bay area which is still active today. The interview, which is really more of a round-table discussion, took place in July 1967, when the “Summer of Love” was in full swing. Susan Sontag’s presence surprised me, I’ve never seen her mention Anger’s films anywhere yet here she is, declaring him to be the greatest living American director. She’s only there for a third of the discussion but during this time Juris Svendsen tries to isolate what it is that makes her regard Anger’s films so highly. Later on the conversation turns to the youthful demographic referred to as “the Love Generation”, a cohort who the participants all discuss as something separate from themselves. Kenneth Anger was 40 in 1967 yet he talks sympathetically about the youth of the day, seeing the hippies as catching up with many of the impulses that drove avant-gardists like himself in the 1950s: the growing interest in occultism, the disregard for the demands of “straight” society, and all forms of psychotropic exploration. When the discussion turns to Lucifer Rising, Anger emphasises the subtitle that appears on the film’s promotional poster by Rick Griffin: “A Love Vision”. It’s tempting to read this as opportunism, especially when the subtitle was missing from the film that was eventually released in 1980, but Anger regarded the original Lucifer Rising as an answer to the “Death Vision” of Scorpio Rising. Here, as elsewhere, he emphasises the positive aspects of Lucifer, the Bringer of Light, while love was an important component of the Thelemic philosophy which Anger followed: “Love is the law, love under will.”

Art by Randy Salas.

Anger sounds relatively positive himself in the radio discussion but the rambling, unofficial biography by Bill Landis describes a not-so-love-filled atmosphere at the Russian Embassy in San Francisco where Bobby Beausoleil was supposed to be playing the part of Lucifer. I tend to be wary of the Landis account, he certainly did his research but isn’t always accurate, and some of the people he talked to (Anger wasn’t among them) would have been pushing their own agendas. A few months after the KPFA interview Anger and Beausoleil staged an occult ceremony/theatrical happening/musical concert at San Francisco’s Straight Theater. I used to think that the name of Beausoleil’s band, The Magickal Powerhouse of Oz, was a reference to Aleister Crowley’s Liber OZ (aka Liber LXXVII), a one-page distillation of the Law of Thelema which Anger happens to read out towards the end of the KPFA discussion. The band used the Crowlean spelling of Magick in their name but the Oz is merely a reference to the books by L. Frank Baum.

Berkeley Barb, Volume 5, Issue 12, Sept. 29–Oct. 5, 1967.

Fragments of the Equinox of the Gods performance may be the ones that appear in Invocation of My Demon Brother (Landis isn’t clear) but we do know that Anger’s 1969 film is made up of leftover footage from the original Lucifer Rising. The reporting here is confused by conflicting claims: Anger said that most of the original Lucifer footage was stolen from a car after the Straight Theater show; Beausoleil said that it was mainly equipment that was stolen since Anger hadn’t shot much film in the first place. Whatever the truth of the matter, the theft was reported as a news story in The Berkeley Barb at the end of September, something I was pleased to find while researching all of the above. I doubt that Anger would have gone to the press over a trivial loss but this is all rather academic now. Needless to say, whoever the thieves were they didn’t return Anger’s film which he why he spent the next decade remaking Lucifer Rising from scratch. Before he took off for London, however, he posted an ad in the Village Voice melodramatically announcing the end of his film-making career. I’ve always felt the thieves helped Anger rather than hindered him, even though he obviously wouldn’t have agreed at the time. The loss of the footage forced him to create a shorter film that wouldn’t otherwise have existed, one in which the “Death Vision” of Scorpio Rising is filtered through the hippy era to channel the growing negativity at the end of the decade: Vietnam, the Manson murders (in which Bobby Beausoleil was implicated), and Altamont (in which Mick Jagger was implicated), where the relatively harmless bikers of Scorpio Rising have been replaced by Hells Angels.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kenneth Anger: Film als magisches Ritual
• Kenneth Anger, 1927–2023
• Anger Magick Lantern Cycle, 1966
• Don’t Smoke That Cigarette by Kenneth Anger
• Kenneth Anger’s Maldoror
• Donald Cammell and Kenneth Anger, 1972
• My Surfing Lucifer by Kenneth Anger
• Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome: The Eldorado Edition
• Brush of Baphomet by Kenneth Anger
• Anger Sees Red
• Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon
• Lucifer Rising posters
• Missoni by Kenneth Anger
• Anger in London
• Arabesque for Kenneth Anger by Marie Menken
• Edmund Teske
• Kenneth Anger on DVD again
• Mouse Heaven by Kenneth Anger
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally

Kenneth Anger: Film als magisches Ritual

Writing about Steven Arnold last week I was wondering whether Arnold and Kenneth Anger had ever crossed paths. Anger moved to San Francisco in 1966 in order to channel the counter-cultural ferment into the film that would eventually become Lucifer Rising. I’m sure he must have been aware of Arnold’s midnight movie shows but if so there’s no mention of Arnold in the Bill Landis Anger biography.

When Anger died two years ago I posted links to some of the better online material related to the film-maker and his works. One of these was a German TV profile, Kenneth Anger–Magier des Untergrundfilms, a 53-minute documentary made in 1970 by Reinold E. Thiel for German TV channel WDR. The post included my complaint about the only copy of the film being blighted by an obtrusive graphic fixed to the footage by the person who uploaded it to YouTube a decade ago. The copy was further spoiled by burned-in subtitles but I felt sure that a better version would turn up eventually, and here we are with Kenneth Anger: Film als magisches Ritual, the same film under a different title, and free of obtrusive graphics. (There’s still that “WDR” in the corner but they paid for the damned thing so their proprietorial logo is at least justified.)

As a guide to Anger’s cinema, Thiel’s film only skates over the surface, with Anger being interviewed in piecemeal fashion, and explaining his work and magical philosophy to the camera. He doesn’t seem very happy in any of these sequences but WDR had paid to help with his own film so he was obliged to co-operate. We’re fortunate that they did. Thiel’s film is most valuable for having been made when Anger was shooting new scenes for Lucifer Rising in London. As far as I’m aware, this is the only documentary that shows Anger at work on any of the Magick Lantern films. The discussion of his career includes a mention of Rabbit’s Moon, the lost footage of which had been discovered in Paris but not yet pieced together into its finished form. The shots we see here are more rarities, being raw footage, untinted and unedited. The same goes for some of the shots from Lucifer Rising which include brief moments that didn’t make it to the final cut.

Anger had moved to London following his aborted attempts to make Lucifer Rising in San Francisco, a period which saw his first choice for the role of Lucifer remove himself from the production by means of suicide. His second choice, Bobby Beausoleil, fell out with Anger and stole most of the existing footage before being imprisoned for life as a result of his involvement with the Manson murders. The London phase of the film’s production was much more fruitful. In addition to the WDR funds and assistance from the Rolling Stones’ photographer, Michael Cooper, Anger was given a small grant by the BFI which helped pay for the sequences filmed in Germany and Egypt. Thiel’s footage shows Anger and assistants filming shots of the basement ritual with Aleister Crowley’s magic circle painted on the floor. Anger’s third Lucifer, Leslie Huggins, left the film before it was finished but we get to see him in several sequences, including shots of him wearing his “Lucifer” jacket. Thiel inadvertently clears up one minor mystery by revealing that the white-haired, ermine-robed Francis Cyril Rose is saying “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” to Huggins’ Lucifer during the ritual. In the finished Lucifer Rising we see Rose’s lips moving but the only words you ever hear in Anger’s films are the lyrics in the songs he uses.

Leslie Huggins doesn’t say a word either, even when Anger is directing his actions during the later sequences shot among the standing stones of Avebury, the same stones that would summon Derek Jarman to their circle a year later. Avebury’s megaliths have cultivated a great deal of mystery and legend but their aura is dispersed a little when you can hear an endless procession of motor traffic going by in the background. Anger shoots the stones from a low angle to make them seem more impressive, and also keep a flock of curious sheep out of the frame. Another minor mystery in Lucifer Rising was the shot of Huggins standing by the stones while making conjuring gestures towards a very stormy sky. Was the dark sky a special effect like some of the other shots in the film? Thiel reveals it to be a genuine Wiltshire thunderstorm which Anger hurries to photograph. The inhabitants of Avebury village were no doubt used to the sight of film crews gathered around the stones—a few years later the village became the location for an entire TV series—but even they must have been surprised by the sight of two film crews arriving simultaneously, with one of them filming the other. Thiel ends on a self-reflexive note, with a shot from Anger’s camera showing the camera filming him.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kenneth Anger, 1927–2023
• Anger Magick Lantern Cycle, 1966
• Don’t Smoke That Cigarette by Kenneth Anger
• Kenneth Anger’s Maldoror
• Donald Cammell and Kenneth Anger, 1972
• My Surfing Lucifer by Kenneth Anger
• Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome: The Eldorado Edition
• Brush of Baphomet by Kenneth Anger
• Anger Sees Red
• Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon
• Lucifer Rising posters
• Missoni by Kenneth Anger
• Anger in London
• Arabesque for Kenneth Anger by Marie Menken
• Edmund Teske
• Kenneth Anger on DVD again
• Mouse Heaven by Kenneth Anger
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally

Harry Clarke’s illustrated Swinburne

Aholibah (1928).

You won’t find Harry Clarke’s illustration for Swinburne’s Aholibah in Selected Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne even though it was intended for the book, and was the illustration that Clarke deemed his favourite of the series. The erotic nature of the drawing was too much for the publisher so Clarke had to content himself by pasting a reproduction in his own copy. The copy above has been scanned from Nicola Gordon Bowe’s Harry Clarke: His Graphic Art; everything below is from the published Swinburne collection which turned up recently at the Internet Archive.

Selected Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne was Clarke’s last illustrated book, published in 1928, three years before his untimely death. Of all the major Clarke books that appeared during the artist’s lifetime it’s always been the most difficult to find. Some of the drawings have been reprinted in recent collections but never the book itself. As with Clarke’s Faust, the erotic and morbid qualities of the illustrations generated disquiet outside the publisher’s office, with Humbert Wolfe in the book’s introduction stating that Clarke’s interpretations were completely opposed to his own. Given the erotic and morbid preoccupations of the poet and his work this surprises me; Swinburne’s poetry was admired by Aleister Crowley and HP Lovecraft, among others. They weren’t reading him because he was writing paeans to daffodills.

My earlier mention of this volume included a link to a defunct blog with a collection of the illustrations separated from the text. This was unavoidable at the time, there wasn’t anywhere else that you could see all of them in one place. But seeing the illustrations with the poems benefits the drawings as well as the verse, especially when the poems themselves aren’t so familiar. For my part it’s also good to see all of the illustrations, being the owner of a first edition which I bought many years ago only to discover that a couple of the best pictures had been carefully removed with a razor. This is a common problem with old illustrated books. Caveat emptor as always.

Clarke didn’t do many double-page illustrations. This is one of his best.

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Robert Anning Bell’s Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley

This poetry collection was drawn to my attention a couple of weeks ago when Mr TjZ sent an email containing photos of a copy he’d recently discovered. Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley was published by George Bell and Sons in 1902. The samples shown here are from a 1907 reprint, a “cheaper reissue” according to the print details which may explain why there’s so much print-through on the obverse side of the illustrated pages. I like Shelley’s poetry, and I like Robert Anning Bell’s illustrations; the pair work well together in this volume which looking back I see posted a link to years ago when writing about Bell’s illustrated edition of The Tempest.

The Shelley book may be a cheap reissue but several of the major poems still use red ink to highlight titles or illustrative details. The collection contains a number of Shelley’s longer works, opening with Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, a poem that always makes me think of Aleister Crowley. John Symonds in The Great Beast relates that Shelley was one of Crowley’s favourite poets, and that Crowley often identified himself in a pompously romantic fashion with Alastor, even though for most of his life the Beast was seldom without an attendant “Scarlet Woman” or a company of acolytes. Symonds nevertheless refers to Crowley as “Alastor” throughout his biography.

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Occult rock: The Devil Rides In

The Devil rode in at the weekend on three shiny compact discs crammed with Satanic psychedelia and the pentagram-branded rock music of the early 1970s: 55 tracks in all. I’d been hoping for some time that an enterprising anthologist might put together an officially-sanctioned collection like the series of mixes compiled by The Ghost of the Weed Garden. Cherry Red Records are ideal candidates for the task, having distinguished themselves in recent years with a series of multi-disc compilations that mine specific periods of British music: psychedelia, heavy rock, folk, punk, reggae, post-punk, experimental electronics, electro-pop, and so on. The Devil Rides In bears a subtitle that ties the collection to the prime years of the Occult Revival, “Spellbinding Satanic Magick & The Rockult 1966–1974”, a period when the Aquarian transcendence of the hippy world was jostling with darker trends in the media landscape. 1967 was the year the Beatles put Aleister Crowley on the cover of the Sgt Pepper album; it was also the year that Hammer were filming their first Dennis Wheatley adaptation, The Devil Rides Out. The song of the same name by Icarus appears on the second disc of this compilation, a single intended to capitalise on the publicity generated by the film. For all the serious occult interest that flourished during by this period many of the cultural associations were frivolous or superficial ones, either cash-ins like the Icarus single or exploitations by those who followed in Dennis Wheatley’s wake. Serious occultists no doubt abhorred the exploitation but it helped create a market for Man, Myth and Magic magazine, and for all the reprints of grimoires and other magical texts that were appearing in paperback for the first time. I’ve always enjoyed the frivolous side of the Occult Revival, probably because I grew up surrounded by it. Without Ace of Wands and Catweazle on the TV I might not have been so interested in my mother’s small collection of occult paperbacks, or gravitated eventually to the Religion and Spirituality shelves of the local library.

The Devil Rides In was conceived, designed and annotated by Martin Callomon, working here under the “Cally” pseudonym he uses for many of his activities. The accompanying booklet is evidence of a labour of love, the detailed notes being illustrated throughout with Occult Revival ephemera: film posters and magazines (the inevitable Man, Myth & Magic), also plenty of paperback covers which tend towards the lurid and exploitational end of the magical spectrum (the inevitable Dennis Wheatley). Cherry Red always take care with their sleeve notes but Cally’s booklet design has gone to considerable lengths to track down many obscure book covers, some of which I’d not seen before. The same diligence applies to the music, with the proviso that compilations are often restrained by the hazards of licensing law. There’s a track list on the Cherry Red page but this doesn’t tell you that the collection is divided into eight themed sections:

1) Buried Underground
2) Phantom Sabbaths
3) Popular Satanism
4) She Devils
5) Folk Devils
6) Evil Jazz
7) Beelzefunk
8) Let’s All Chant

Many of the selections on the first disc are the kinds of songs I’d usually avoid outside this collection, the lumbering heavy rock that filled the Vertigo catalogue for the first half of the 1970s. But groups that you wouldn’t want to hear at album length become palatable when placed in a context such as this.

Among the immediate highlights I’d pick Race With The Devil by The Gun, already a favourite of mine by the group that launched Roger Dean’s career as a cover artist; Black Mass by Jason Crest, a psychedelic B-side whose subject matter and high-pitched wailing is a precursor of the heavy-metal future; and the perennially popular Come To The Sabbat by Black Widow. A few of the selections have been chosen more for their name than anything else, something I’m okay with so long as the choices are good ones. Cozy Powell’s Dance With The Devil, for example, is a drum-led instrumental with a musical theme swiped from Jimi Hendrix; it has nothing at all to do with the Devil but it’s still a great piece of music which was also a surprise UK chart hit in 1973. More of a reach is Magic Potion by The Open Mind, a song about psychedelic drugs not witches’ brews. I included this one on one of my psychedelic mixes so I can tolerate its presence here. Less tolerable is Long Black Magic Night by Jacula, an Italian prog band whose contribution features Vittoria Lo Turco as “Fiamma Dallo Spirito” stuck in one channel of the stereo mix where she intones monotonously in very poor English; the cumulative effect is diabolical in the wrong way. And I would have prefered Julie Driscoll’s long, slow version of Season Of The Witch instead of Sandie Shaw squeaking her way through Sympathy For The Devil. But you can’t always get what you want, as Mick Jagger reminds us elsewhere, something which is especially true of compilation albums.

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