Lucifer Fallen

Arise, O Man, in thy strength! the kingdom is thine to

inherit,

Till the high gods witness at length that Man is the Lord

of his spirit.

--Aleister Crowley

Pioneering avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger has died. He was ninety-six, a combination of numbers that seems principally perfect considering the deep occult and diabolic roots he submerged in the psychic soil. His films were paens to the power of mystic, surreal, violent, and homoerotic imagery, with a subtext of subversion for what were then the "decent Americans" of post-War Baby Boom opulence.

Anger tore the lid off Hollywood and its secret storehouse of Babylonian abuses. The author of Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon 2 revealed the sordid, secret sex lives of the rich, glamorous and, frequently, tragically morally and psychologically bankrupt, from silent film debauchees to the all-American boyhood rebelliousness of a young and doomed James Dean, who was into a heavy gay bondage scene. Anger documented, for instance, in late comedian Paul McCullough (the straight man for the desperately creepy forgotten 1930s Vaudeville comedian Bobbie Clark, who had greasepaint glasses creepily painted around his eyes) the only instance I have ever heard of of "suicide by barbershop." Anger was the chronicler of the lost and forgotten glitterati: from Rappe to Thelma Todd, Lizzie Short to Lita Gray--Anger knew his stuff. or so he represented, as the collector of Tinseltown ghosts.

But what is tragedy without triumph? Anger directed classic, small films, obscure avant-garde pieces that have passed over into heavy celluloid chalices of occult wonder. "Fireworks," "Invocation of My Demon Brother," "Rabbit's Moon," and "Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome." (The last with Marjorie Cameron, the putative "Whore of Babylon" by which Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard hoped to have conceived the "Moonchild" after their "Babylon Working" in the California desert in 1947, a ritualization of which the Great Beast himself, Aleister Crowley, said: "I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these two louts.")

He was perhaps the lover of young musician and actor cum murderer Bobby Beausoleil, a hanger-on in the Manson Family who, along with "Vampire Girl" Susan Atkins (who later helped perpetrate the Tate/Labianca murders) was responsible for the torture-slaying of musician Gary Hinman, purportedly at Manson's behest. Beausoleil lived with Anger, and acted in 'Invocation," and also in the original film "Lucifer Rising," which Beausoleil stole and buried somewhere in the desert, out of personal spite.

Beausoleil is still incarcerated for the Hinman slaying, and will most likely never see the outside of prison again as long as his heart still beats. No matter. He still managed to record the haunting, inimitable, and arcane soundtrack to "Lucifer Rising," amid what, one reviewer in Apocalypse Culture Two said, was "while being buried in the bowels of Tracy Prison, amid stabbings and lockdowns." Yes indeed, so he did. The results of this incarcerated symphonic experimentation are yours to judge for yourself.

Anger's oeuvre, looking back on it, the "Magick Lantern Cycle," is an exploration of the inner life of an occult mage, a man working an alchemical spell, using the much-beloved apparatus of Hollywood film to journey along a path of Becoming. He delved deeply in his life into the Satanic, into the forbidden, into the dark and troubling potent feminine and mystical imagery that is evocation as well as invocation, because cinema is simply dreaming awake. He was reportedly one of seven people living at the old Church of Satan "Black House" when Anton LaVey died in 1997. (He was also, along with fellows such as the late science fiction guru Forrest J. Ackerman, a member of their "Council of Nine." Or the "Order of the Trapezoid." I can't, off-hand, remember which.)

He was at the nexus of a time period of social upheaval, of obscenity trials, gay rights, Vietnam, peace protests, Manson, Hippies, Yippies, Heads, and "tune-in, turn on, and drop out."He knew or had connections with everyone and anyone and all that were significant and some that were "Day of the Locust" losers. And he chronicled their lives, and tragic, forgotten deaths. And all the while, his camera and its menacing power, its volcanic fury, and its ritualization of the Dream, heralded the Coming Forth spoken of in the Liber AL vel Legis. He invoked and celebrated, heralded the New Dawn. Shemhamforash.

Years ago, my late friend and co-author Jon Titchenal, during a surprise online visit I had no way of guessing would be our last, spoke continually of "liminal spaces," suggesting that I, myself, occupied such a space. I understand the term or concept to mean only a "place that is neither conception or birth, but somewhere in between--a space where one is becoming." A YouTube video gives an indecipherable answer as to my wrestling with this strange suggestion from my dead friend, whose ghost I can assure you, I still live with.

It's a little like the concept of the "Twilight Zone." (A term Rod Serling borrowed from aviators, a term that pilots use when they can't discern whether or not they're flying "right side up or upside down "; a dangerous "in-between" state in which one has not yet morphed but is in the process and has the potential of "Becoming.")

I would suggest that Kenneth Anger has done that today. Perhaps though, as in the YouTube video on "liminal spaces", he is wandering a vast, empty complex, wondering, waiting, testing every door. Behind one of which, perhaps, he may enter again into earthly life. I would wish him to rest in peace, but, for such a soul as his, it seems meaningless.

Such a spirit must journey ever, on and on.

Goodbye, Kenneth.