Invocation of My Demon Brother

Kenneth Anger is older than God, but I doubt that he'd appreciate the comparison.

The vanguard filmmaker, whose themes explore the occult, sadomasochistic, and homoerotic, has been linked by various "degrees of separation" (and often directly), to everyone from L. Ron Hubbard to a Manson Family murderer. An early disciple of Anton LaVey, he was and presumably still is a Crowleyite, living out the Law of Thelema. He's been around the block, so to speak, in a skeleton-chauffered hearse with hellfire streaming from its tailpipe.

In 1969, he was living in an abandoned Russian Embassy in San Francisco, with, his current boy toy, the incarcerated Bobby Beausoleil, who is STILL fifty years later, in prison for the murder of musician Gary Hinman (Manson Family murderess the late Susan Atkins was also there), at the behest of the late Mr. Manson, America's unlamented former Official Boogeyman and Psychopathic Mascot of Fallen Times.

It was then he made THIS film, with a noise or musique concrete score by Mick Jagger (who appears via stock footage at the murderous Altamont festival), and plenty of nude young men. This film is deeply disturbing, but not for that reason. Anton LaVey puts in an appearance, along with bikers wearing studded leather jackets and S.S. hats, hippies jamming, smoking a joint out of a skull, tattoos of inscrutable spiders, and other occult symbols, optical effects of mirrored and multiple faces exploding into circles and a horned guy with a hippie beard. It is all great unfun for some reason. A splash of images and colors; a personal evocation, and that is hard to explain.

It begins with an albino, whose eyes twitch mysteriously left and right. A seated man (we can't see the head) uplifts a dagger; inauguration. The camera pans upward across a painting of a demon. Young nude men laze about on couches; the albino may be the Divine Child, Horus being born, or reborn, or the mystic spiritual entity of the ALL contemplating the world of divine male love, music, enchantment, sacrifice, offering, as troops with guns jump and run from a helicopter in Vietnam. Close-ups of the twitching eye, the spider tattoo, and the superimposed images of obscure and inscrutable occult sigils. All suggest something being BORN.

A New Age. The Age of Aquarius. The Aeon of Horus that Aleister Crowley, as the agent of Aiwass, foretold in the Liber Al vel Legis? Hippies writhe at Altamont. Hard faces of ugly young women peer out from beneath headbands. Bobby Beausoleil smiles, smokes grass for the camera, and is bathed in psychedelic images. Prophetically, one of these is a projected splash of red, making him look as if he is covered in blood. Bobby is still in prison for MURDER, to this very day.

(In those days, Bobby, and his band "The Magick Powerhouse of Oz", provided the music for psychedelic happenings, presided over by Anger. We see Anger here, waving his arms about mystically, in fast motion, holding a Nazi flag at one point, playing with fire; his face painted, invoking the Strange New Gods of the Kali Yuga. Or, better, the Aeon of Horus.)

There is no way to really quantify such a film. On the one hand, there clearly is a subtext of birth, celebration, and renewal; that which (witch?) "slouches toward Bethlehem, to be born." But, "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold."

Bobby and his band of beatnik, hippie horn blowers and guitar players, and occult celebrants precede down a staircase. Superimposed images of nude young men appear as if they are multiarmed Hindu deities, almost bringing to mind Arjuna's plea to Lord Krishna in Bhagavd-gita: "Lord, I wish to see you in your four-armed form, with sword, wheel, conch, and lotus." (I believe I've quoted that accurately. I'll have to check.)

That was Lord Krishna in the Universal Form. Here, we have another such form being born, and the film celebrates His birth. Or the birth of tragedy. The birth of CHAOS.

Superimposed nude young men seem to wrestle as a kind of multi-armed spiritual entity trying to free itself and be born from the prison of itself. A weird, animated, desiccated corpse flies down a staircase, trailing smoke, sitting in some sort of wheeled conveyance. It has a cardboard sign that reads: "Zap! You're pregnant! That's witchcraft." (One is faintly reminded of Rosemary's Baby) The film ends abruptly, as it begins, with three glowing orbs on the darkened screen.

What did it mean? It was clearly an occult work, a ritual evocation using the medium of film to build, in the mind of the (presumably stoned) viewer the "intellectual decompression chamber," written of in The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey. And thus, magick would be born. That Anton LaVey had nothing but utter hatred and contempt for the "psychedelic generation" seems somewhat paradoxical and incongruous here. They may be seen here as pawns of the Cthonic Forces, slaves of the "demon brother" being invoked.

On the whole, a dark, backward oddity, a bleak spell of inscrutable ugliness, but marked with those moments one can bite into on a deeply subconscious level.

Yes. Yes, I believe that to be true. Still though:

What did it mean?

What?

NOTE: 'Invocation of My Demon Brother" can be viewed for free on YouTube. However, since it features brief, if obscured frontal nudity, we cannot link it here. Instead, we have elected to post a link to a YouTube video documentary about Kenneth Anger himself.

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