Happy Crowleymass, everyone! Aleister Crowley, thee Great Beast 666 was hatched from a dragon’s egg on October 12, 1875. The eccentric English mage, poet, painter and gourmet rice chef would be 140 years old today if, um, he could like live forever or something…

As somewhat of a noted Crowley buff, I’m often asked “Where is a good place to start reading Aleister Crowley?” and this is a difficult question to answer because, in truth, you have to read, pretty much, all of it to make sense of any of it. Going down the Crowley rabbit hole is comparable, I think, to being a scholar of James Joyce because achieving a proper understanding of the subject takes years of study, decades even (and then what are you going to DO with all that arcane knowledge, anyway, smartass?). But one source that I will point curious folk to is the late Tim Maroney’s excellent “Introduction to Crowley (in Five Voices)” which I published in my Book of Lies anthology back in 2004.

Below, I discuss Uncle AL on the History Channel TV series, How Sex Changed The World. I had fun doing this show and I got to explain a general concept of sex magick to middle America! Good times! The Crowley segments starts around 19:30.
 

 
I know how it is: you read the trilogy of sci-fi novels, saw the play, listened to the audiobook, even picked up the card game, but you still can’t get enough of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s conspiracy epic, Illuminatus! Where is the balm that will soothe your hurt?

Back in 1987, underground comix publishers Rip Off Press—the persons responsible for the fourth edition of the related sacred text Principia Discordia, not to mention The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers—put out Eye-n-Apple Productions’ comic book adaptation of Illuminatus! A few months ago, Eye-n-Apple (which seems to be identical with one Mark Philip Steele) announced plans for a digital reprint on its Facebook page:

Good news, folks, the ILLUMINATUS! comic I published back in 1987 is now in e-comic format, including text commentary. It’s a zip file available for download, and may end up at other sites in other formats. If you’re interested, download the comic and contact me about it. Some of the comments MAY be posted in further editions. There was one self-published issue, then 3 with Rip Off Press, and an unpublished 4th issue. Plans are for us to release one a month from now till we’re done.

No word yet on subsequent numbers, but you can download a free PDF of the first issue here, and it seems this is the space to watch for updates. Below, Robert Anton Wilson and Rev. Ivan Stang of the Church of the Subgenius discuss the consolations of the Discordian faith on Hour of Slack.
 

 
The Orlando Sentinel reported this morning on a Florida candidate for U.S. Senate, Augustus Sol Invictus, who has admitted to killing a goat and drinking its blood in a pagan ritual of thanks after fasting and praying for a week in the Mojave Desert.

The chairman of the Libertarian Party of Florida, Adrian Wyllie, who was the Libertarian candidate for governor last year, has denounced Invictus, saying that the 32-year-old politician wants to lead a civil war, is trying to recruit neo-Nazis to the party, and is a sadistic goat-slaughterer. Apparently this is just a bit too much for some of the Libertarians in Florida.

According to the Orlando Sentinel’s report, Invictus has admitted to at least the accusation of goat sacrifice: “I did sacrifice a goat. I know that’s probably a quibble in the mind of most Americans. I sacrificed an animal to the god of the wilderness ... Yes, I drank the goat’s blood.”

Prior to this Senate run, Augustus Sol Invictus’ claim-to-fame was an unhinged, rambling departure memo renouncing his licenses to practice law, his diplomas, his affiliation with Rollins, DePaul, and the University of South Florida, his United States citizenship, his membership in the Roman Catholic Church, his law firm, his publishing company & poetry journal, and all of his material possessions:

I am of genius intellect & cultured, well-educated & creative, well-mannered & refined. I am God’s gift to humankind where the English language is concerned, and I also happen to have a basic knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, and Italian. I am musical & artistic; I am athletic & possessed of militant self-discipline; and I am many other things… I am everything you ever wanted to be.

I have prophesied for years that I was born for a Great War; that if I did not witness the coming of the Second American Civil War I would begin it myself. Mark well: That day is fast coming upon you. On the New Moon of May, I shall disappear into the Wilderness. I will return bearing Revolution, or I will not return at all.

War Be unto the Ends of the Earth.

If Florida’s track-record of weird is any indication, we suspect that Augustus Sol Invictus will not be the last crypto-fascist, pseudo-Satanist, blood-drinking Libertarian we see come out of Florida in the upcoming elections.

Video of Augustus Sol Invictus “campaigning”:

Via: Orlando Sentinel

 
There is a legion of legends that surround legendary underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger—how he cursed Jimmy Page, for one, and that he threw a gold-painted brick through Mick Jagger’s window in London for another—but the story of how he cursed ill-fated Manson Family associate Bobby Beausoleil and “turned him into a toad” is one of the best-known.

Most Anger fans have probably already heard this story, but have you ever heard it straight from the mouths of Kenneth Anger and Bobby Beausoleil? Here’s an exclusive clip for Dangerous Minds readers that was produced by Ken’s manager, Brian Butler, featuring a rare interview with Beausoleil that was shot inside of a Federal prison in California.

The event described in the piece was advertised with the vintage Haight-Ashbury poster/handbill seen at the top of this post. You can purchase a limited edition reprint of this poster—hand-signed by Kenneth Anger—via the Mage of American Cinema’s website. There’s also a striking Kenneth Anger “signature” tee-shirt for purchase. Both are in strictly limited editions. More at Kenneth Anger.org.
 

 
“Raising Lucifer” from Brian Butler:

 
Black Sabbath shared a manager with an explicitly Satanic band called Black Widow, and some people had a hard time keeping the two straight, or pretended they did. Nick Tosches’ crazed review of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid mixed up Ozzy and Black Widow’s singer Kip Trevor, who does not, in fact, sound like “Keith Relf whining about the tampons stuck up his nostrils.”

I mention this because I’d never heard of Vincent Price’s nearly 90-minute-long occult crash course Witchcraft-Magic: An Adventure In Demonology before I read an interview with Black Widow’s Clive Jones in the book Black Sabbath FAQ. Talking about the popularity of horror movies in the late 60s, Jones went on a tangent about his relationship with Price:

Vincent Price gave me… because he was on CBS, whenever he released an album, he gave me an album, which I still use to this day, of him talking about black magic and the war, and how black magic was used for good causes, as well as worshiping the devil type stuff.

 

 
As soon as I read those words, I made haste to Discogs to track this sucker down. Look, I don’t know what your idea of a good time is, but when it is the witching hour, and the autumnal equinox, and everyone is making ready for the festival of Samhain, and like that, fun for me means settling down with a hot mug of tannis root tea and an hour and a half of Vincent Price talking demonology, accompanied by spooky sounds from a 1969 synthesizer. From the bewitching intro:

Do you believe in witches and magic? [Chuckles] I hope so, because it can be unwise not to. Do you believe in life after death? Do you believe in luck? Do you believe in premonitions—being somewhere where you know you’ve been before, although you know you’ve never been there? Do you believe in dreams and the unseen forces of astrology? Do you believe that there is order and genius in the hundred thousand million galaxies similar to our own? Do you believe that the life of our bodies is the beginning and end, or do you believe in reincarnation? Perhaps in heaven and in hell? Do you believe in prophecy and poltergeists? Heh? Do you?

Yes, you see, the universe is populated with spirits: unseen forces which permeate all things, both tangible and intangible, both visible and invisible. Things we see and things we don’t, things we know or think we know and things we know nothing of: the natural and the supernatural. So come with me into the magic world of the supernatural—the world of witches and demons, warlocks and sorcerers, oracles and seers, alchemists and wizards—into the unfathomable world of the unknown, the world of the spirits and unseen forces that guide our destiny. They are everywhere. Let’s turn down the lights and throw another log on the fire.

Original pressings of Witchcraft-Magic apparently included a booklet called (gulp) “The Hand of Glory,” and one wonders who put so much research and care into this set. The album’s script, which traces the history of witchcraft through the Bible, the Middle Ages, the Spanish Inquisition, and Nazi Germany before turning to practical instruction in the dark arts (see side three, track three, “How to Make a Pact with the Devil”), is the work of a mysterious figure named Terry d’Oberoff, whose only other credit appears on the 1970 debut of an LA soul group called—wait for it—Black Magic.

Below, hear a needle drop of the whole double LP. If you’d like to hear more wailing of damned souls and less surface noise, Amazon has it on MP3 for $4.99.
 

 
We’ve posted here before Captain Beefheart’s 10 Commandments of Guitar Playing, but this list of the eighty-two “commandments” of the great film director Alejandro Jodorowsky makes that look like a fortune cookie.

In the book The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky, the author describes meeting Reyna d’Assia, daughter of the influential spiritual teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, who was quite prominent in the early part of the 20th century and died in 1949, when Jodorowsky was 20 years old. (It is interesting to note that Wikipedia does not list Reyna d’Assia as one of Gurdjieff’s “known natural children,” of which Wikipedia lists seven.) Among Gurdjieff’s fans were such DM faves as Robert Fripp, Kate Bush, Keith Jarrett, and Timothy Leary.

Collin Cleary’s account of this section of the book is well worth reading. He calls this chapter, “Work on the Essence,” the “highpoint” of the book, saying that it simultaneously “comes quite close in many places to being pornographic” and “is also probably the best brief account—and critique—of the ideas of Gurdjieff that I have ever come across.” Based on what I read of this chapter, Jodorowsky’s writing (and possibly Reyna d’Assia’s way of speaking) sounds a lot like the dialogue in a Jodorowsky movie.

Jodorowsky and Reyna d’Assia met in Mexico City after a screening of El Topo, at which, for some reason, Jodorowsky was wearing the outfit of the mole character he plays in the movie. They went back to her hotel, where they had sex, with Jodorowsky still wearing the black leather cowboy outfit.
 

Alejandro Jodorowsky and George Ivanovich Gurdjieff

According to Cleary, Reyna “never stops talking.” In one torrent of verbiage she discloses her father’s maxims of life. Here is the exchange that leads up to her list:

Jodorowsky: Reyna, you are telling me fairy tales! Such goals are 100% utopian—and even if they were true, what is the first step on this path?

Reyna d’Assia: Whoever wishes to attain the supreme goal must first change his habits, conquer laziness, and become a morally sound human being. To be strong in the great things, we must also be strong in the small ones.

Jodorowsky: How?

Reyna d’Assia: We have been badly educated. We live in a world of competition in which honesty is synonymous with naïveté. We must first develop good habits. Some of them may seem simple, but they are very difficult to realize. Believing them to be obvious, we fail to see that they are the key to immortal consciousness. Now I shall offer you a dictation of the commandments that my blessed father taught me….

Then comes her list of commandments. In the way of natural speech, it is (of course) not set up like a list—in fact, it looks like this. The whole thing takes up the better part of three pages.
 

 
In what follows we have formatted it so that it is easier to read.

1. Ground your attention on yourself. Be conscious at every moment of what you are thinking, sensing, feeling, desiring, and doing.
2. Always finish what you have begun.
3. Whatever you are doing, do it as well as possible.
4. Do not become attached to anything that can destroy you in the course of time.
5. Develop your generosity ‒ but secretly.
6. Treat everyone as if he or she was a close relative.
7. Organize what you have disorganized.
8. Learn to receive and give thanks for every gift.
9. Stop defining yourself.
10. Do not lie or steal, for you lie to yourself and steal from yourself.
11. Help your neighbor, but do not make him dependent.
12. Do not encourage others to imitate you.
13. Make work plans and accomplish them.
14. Do not take up too much space.
15. Make no useless movements or sounds.
16. If you lack faith, pretend to have it.
17. Do not allow yourself to be impressed by strong personalities.
18. Do not regard anyone or anything as your possession.
19. Share fairly.
20. Do not seduce.
21. Sleep and eat only as much as necessary.
22. Do not speak of your personal problems.
23. Do not express judgment or criticism when you are ignorant of most of the factors involved.
24. Do not establish useless friendships.
25. Do not follow fashions.
26. Do not sell yourself.
27. Respect contracts you have signed.
28. Be on time.
29. Never envy the luck or success of anyone.
30. Say no more than necessary.
31. Do not think of the profits your work will engender.
32. Never threaten anyone.
33. Keep your promises.
34. In any discussion, put yourself in the other person’s place.
35. Admit that someone else may be superior to you.
36. Do not eliminate, but transmute.
37. Conquer your fears, for each of them represents a camouflaged desire.
38. Help others to help themselves.
39. Conquer your aversions and come closer to those who inspire rejection in you.
40. Do not react to what others say about you, whether praise or blame.
41. Transform your pride into dignity.
42. Transform your anger into creativity.
43. Transform your greed into respect for beauty.
44. Transform your envy into admiration for the values of the other.
45. Transform your hate into charity.
46. Neither praise nor insult yourself.
47. Regard what does not belong to you as if it did belong to you.
48. Do not complain.
49. Develop your imagination.
50. Never give orders to gain the satisfaction of being obeyed.
51. Pay for services performed for you.
52. Do not proselytize your work or ideas.
53. Do not try to make others feel for you emotions such as pity, admiration, sympathy, or complicity.
54. Do not try to distinguish yourself by your appearance.
55. Never contradict; instead, be silent.
56. Do not contract debts; acquire and pay immediately.
57. If you offend someone, ask his or her pardon; if you have offended a person publicly, apologize publicly.
58. When you realize you have said something that is mistaken, do not persist in error through pride; instead, immediately retract it.
59. Never defend your old ideas simply because you are the one who expressed them.
60. Do not keep useless objects.
61. Do not adorn yourself with exotic ideas.
62. Do not have your photograph taken with famous people.
63. Justify yourself to no one, and keep your own counsel.
64. Never define yourself by what you possess.
65. Never speak of yourself without considering that you might change.
66. Accept that nothing belongs to you.
67. When someone asks your opinion about something or someone, speak only of his or her qualities.
68. When you become ill, regard your illness as your teacher, not as something to be hated.
69. Look directly, and do not hide yourself.
70. Do not forget your dead, but accord them a limited place and do not allow them to invade your life.
71. Wherever you live, always find a space that you devote to the sacred.
72. When you perform a service, make your effort inconspicuous.
73. If you decide to work to help others, do it with pleasure.
74. If you are hesitating between doing and not doing, take the risk of doing.
75. Do not try to be everything to your spouse; accept that there are things that you cannot give him or her but which others can.
76. When someone is speaking to an interested audience, do not contradict that person and steal his or her audience.
77. Live on money you have earned.
78. Never brag about amorous adventures.
79. Never glorify your weaknesses.
80. Never visit someone only to pass the time.
81. Obtain things in order to share them.
82. If you are meditating and a devil appears, make the devil meditate too.

via The Arcane Front

Thanks to Lawrence Daniel Caswell!

 
This is a guest post by artist/director Nick Abrahams.

Los Angeles gets the pleasure of being the first city in America to stage a solo show by the London-based artist Cathy Ward. Her forthcoming exhibition at the Good Luck Gallery is opening on September 5th, with the artist talking about her work at the gallery on September 6th.

Cathy Ward is something of an alternative British institution, having exhibited in many medias and forms over the years with everything from large scale sculptures and installations, to tapisteries and work made from corn dollies. But the work she is best known for are the dark psychic landscapes, reminiscent of woven hair, which are both immediately familiar and unlike anything else you will have ever seen. With a technique she has been honing for seventeen years, she scrapes intricate patterns into a layer of ink to reveal fine lines of the white clay that lie underneath, these scratch works suggest many things… cosmic struggles, full of pulsations and explosions…  the dark matter or the ‘dust’ of Philip Pullman’s novels… swirling waterways or weirs, made up of feminine eddies or sprays of water… but most of all they resemble plaited and flowing swathes of hair….  ‘I can’t plan them, I can’t replicate them either,’ Ward says.
 

Albina Incubii Albion

Hair of the recently deceased was carefully bound and arranged in Victorian hair works, an art form and custom which gradually fell out of fashion. These memento mori often took the form of a piece of jewellery (such as a locket), but sometimes in fabulously complicated and contorted “hair wreaths.” The hair that flows through these memorials also flows through the works of the Brothers Grimm, with Rapunzel’s climbable tresses, and later continued to flow through the counterculture of the 60s as a signifier of a rejection of cultural norms, whether by long-haired bikers or drug-addled hippies.
 

Lost Commune

The pulsating lines of Wards works have something of the drawings of Hans Bellmer about them, suggesting female curves and crevices, with the female body as a site of erotic mystery and power.
 

Cathy Ward

At a retrospective of the works of outsider artist Madge Gill in London, Ward was a natural choice for the position as artist in residence, with both artists driven to obsessive drawing styles, Gill with repetitive depiction of angels or ‘spirit guides’ , and Ward with her incredibly detailed abstractions reminiscent of woven hair, both describing very active ‘inner landscapes’ of womens minds, and there is a feeling that the act of line making may, for both women, act as a form of spell casting or be a sacred act.

There is a musicality to the waves in Ward’s work, and she has found a natural connections with certain musicians, such as Sunn O))) who used a triptych of her works on their Monoliths and Dimensions sleeve, and Stephen O’Malley of the band later providing a soundtrack for Ward’s animated work “Sonafeld.”

‘The Order’ is a new set of works which make specific reference to Ward’s early tuition under the Sisters of Mercy in Ashford—not the Goth band, but one of the schools run by notoriously strict nuns whose ghostly outlines people Ward’s new pictures.  Ward says that the nuns all had their hair cut close to their skulls: “As a child I was shocked, appalled, fascinated that nuns sacrificed their hair in this way. Hair in the 1960s was a symbol of liberation and this livery was being wilfully, symbolically removed.”
 

The Order

These works often inhabit ornate frames sourced from flea markets and junk shops, giving them the feel of found objects, rediscovered antiquities from another time and place.

These works form part of the world of Cathy Ward’s artistic vision. Her many projects in collaboration with her husband Eric Wright can be followed here’, while more information about her solo works can be found here.

This is a guest post by artist/director Nick Abrahams.

Below, Ward’s “Sonafeld” with Stephen O’Malley soundtrack:

Satanic Squirrel Ritual taxidermy
 
And since I’m sure that more than a few of you are nodding your heads, “yes, please” then today is your lucky day thanks to Ryan Hanley, a taxidermist based in New Smyrna Beach, Florida.
 

Satanic Squirrel Ritual taxidermy
 

Satanic FTW Squirrel taxidermy (and yes, he is shooting you the bird)
 
Billed as “the most brilliant present ever” by its maker, Satanic FTW Squirrel (above) and his upside down cross stands about 12” tall and was the product of roadkill just like his pal Satanic Squirrel Ritual, in case these images are getting your PETA panties all in a bunch. There are loads of other images on Hanley’s Tumblr, but I don’t suggest looking at them if you don’t want to see things like lamps that used to be armadillos (which are completely amazing by the way), or roadkill raccoons that are now fashionable purses.

If you’re interested in purchasing Satan’s favorite nut job, it’ll run you $150 over at Hanley’s wife’s Etsy shop, The Wild Few. The Satanic Squirrel Ritual piece is $175. There’s also a Suicide Squirrel piece that features a taxidermied squirrel with a gun pointed at its head if that’s more your speed.

ALL HAIL SATANIC SQUIRREL!

Madam Satan movie poster, 1930
 
Cecil B. DeMille was a peculiar, yet lovable, producer of Hollywood balderdash, and Madam Satan just might be his most bizarro film.
 

Actress Kay Johnson as the alluring “Madam Satan”
 
The black and white film came out in 1930 and had originally contained Technicolor scenes that were sadly somehow lost. Despite its occult-sounding title, Madam Satan is a vintage romcom that tells the story of a married couple, Angela and Bob, who are having a relationship crisis. When Angela finds out that her husband is screwing around with a chick named Trixie, she creates an alter-ego of herself called “Madam Satan.”
 

Actor Theodore Kosloff as “Electricity” in Madam Satan
 
After Madam Satan makes her debut at wild masquerade ball, the film just gets weirder and more wonderfully excessive as it goes along. There are elaborate song and dance routines, flirtations with electricity, and actors dressed in boundary-pushing and visually stunning costumery (much of which was created by the head of wardrobe for DeMille’s studio, Adrian Adolph Greenburg) that were far beyond their time. Madam Satan is truly a film that must be seen to be believed. A remastered version of Madam Satan was released on DVD in 2010 and I highly recommend tracking down a copy so you can see it for yourself. You can also take a peek at more stills from Madam Satan, as well as a clip from the movie that will likely induce a good old-fashioned case of the bed-spins. Hail Satan!
 

Madam Satan star Kay Johnson strikes a pose with her masks
 

A strange chorus line of cats from Madam Satan
 
More great stills from the curious classic after the jump…...
 

 
If you’re one of those people who wouldn’t be caught dead listening to new age music, I may have some bad news for you. It just so happens that, in 1989, a scientist working in the psychology department at Plymouth State College in New Hampshire conducted research on people who had undergone near-death experiences. The research seemed to conclude that the musical stylings of the pioneering new age musician Iasos (pronounced “ya’ sos”) scored the highest ratings in a survey of various types of music reported being heard by those who have undergone a near-death experience—most notably Iasos’ piece entitled “The Angels of Comfort.”

So, it might just be that new age music is the ONLY kind of music you’ll be caught dead listening to. Death metal can’t really hold a candle to actual death music, can it?

But then again, if you’ve heard “The Angels of Comfort,” you might conclude that you could very easily duplicate the same results in a survey of people who huff paint on a regular basis. I’m not necessarily suggesting that the heavenly music corporation producing these angelic choirs on high are the result of a lack of oxygen to the brain as vital organs shut down during the near-death experience, but it’s certainly a distinct possibility. For all I know, Iasos’ electronic noodlings sound the closest to an EKG machine or a ventilator. In any event, Iasos may or may not be on to something otherworldly.

Although many would credit Mike Oldfield’s 1973 masterpiece Tubular Bells as the seed that started the popularization of ambient sound, it lacked a genre in which it could be placed. Most just labeled that album as “progressive rock,” for want of a better term. The ambient music that would come to be known as “new age” certainly owed a debt to Oldfield as well as the experimental works of Edgar Froese, Tangerine Dream, Can, Klaus Schulze, and various other musical visionaries. But the phrase “new age” had yet to be coined in 1973. That would take another two years.

Iasos was a major pioneer in the creation of the musical genre of new age. He was born in Greece but moved to America at an early age, migrating to the West Coast in the late ‘60s for the sole purpose of pursuing his musical vision. In 1975 he released his first album, Inter-Dimensional Music. It’s the kind of music to play while riding astrally projected elevators through the space-time continuum.
 

 
1975 was a heady year for “new age” culture; it is often cited as the year that the genre was created and the phrase was coined. That was also the year that Steven Halpern released his seminal and highly influential album Spectrum Suite. Even more important to some is the fact that 1975 was the year that Brian Eno released his first fully ambient record Discreet Music, setting in motion decades of ambient recordings from the famed musician, producer, and all-around genius.

That’s right, kids. Eno’s Discreet Music is 40 years old now. And that’s how long Iasos—who should, by rights, be counted alongside those previously mentioned visionaries—has been churning out his own brand of new age and ambient sound. By my calculations, Iasos is approximately 68 years old. So, he’s still producing new age well into his old age. And he shows no signs of slowing down. His multilayered ambient droning drones as hard today as it did in 1975. 
 

Ambient Bandstand audiences rate Iasos: “Its got no discernible beat, and it’s easy to trance to.”
 
Iasos claims that he composes in collaboration with an inter-dimensional being that he calls “Vista.” According to Iasos, Vista is the true visionary and architect behind these complex soundscapes and compositions. Iasos merely serves as the conduit through which Vista operates and opens new windows on the musical world.

Thank Vista, Iasos has recently posted an incredibly trippy, short documentary to YouTube that was filmed in 1979 (four years after releasing his first album), and it shows him at the height of his creative genius. The documentary, which you can watch below, oscillates between Iasos talking about his musical approach and general philosophy and various musical performances. The documentary appears to show a truly bliss-filled musician talking about receiving the radio signals in his head from his “collaborator.”  He also speaks of a feminine counterpart to Vista that he calls “Crystal.”

According to Iasos, higher beings are interacting with humans to create a greater harmony, a paradise of music on earth. However, these higher beings practice a policy of non-interference and must be invited in. The more people who interact with these higher beings, the faster a paradise on earth will be formed. Convinced?

Pay attention to the fact that in this documentary, Iasos seems to laugh at less-than-appropriate times, like Dr. Julius Hibbert on The Simpsons. It’s also fascinating to see his home studio comprised of state-of-the-art analog equipment… for 1979. Marvel at his incredibly spiritual framing of electronic sounds: “Electrons are pure God beings and are very sensitive to God control.” He’s clearly operating on a much higher plane than the rest of us.
 

 
h/t Iasos’ website