A panel from Josie and the Pussycats “Vengeance From The Crypt” comic, October, 1973, #72

In 1954, The Comics Code Authority was formed by the Comics Magazine Association of America in order to allow publishers to regulate comic book content in the U.S. themselves, without input or governance the government. In 1971, The Authority lightened up a little and allowed comic book writers to include some new angles into their storylines, such as the use of vampires, werewolves and ghouls. This decision may have perhaps paved the way for issue #72 of Josie and the Pussycats, “Vengeance From The Crypt” published in October of 1973. In it, the sweet ginger-haired Josie gets possessed by a satanic spirit. Dear Hollywood, please adapt this storyline into a major motion picture immediately.
 

Josie and the Pussycats, “Vengeance From the Crypt”, October 1973
 
In the weirdness that is issue #72, The Pussycats (along with mean-o-nasty non-Pussycat member, Alexandra) ditch their guitars and amps, and head off to pay their respects to Alexandra’s recently departed grandfather at the local mausoleum. For some reason Josie wanders off to some bizarre lower chamber of the mausoleum and is enveloped by an “invisible malignant presence.” After that, Josie goes on a punk-rock style rampage smashing stuff up. When Josie has a psychotic reaction after coming in contact with a copy of the Bible that the clean-cut gang just happened to have lying around, things get really fucking weird (if they weren’t weird enough already).
 

 
The entire story—and zowie, it’s a doozy—after the jump…

The nice, church-going boys from Black Sabbath, early 70s

Back in 1970 when Black Sabbath was just starting to explode (the band had recently broken an attendance record set at the popular Birmingham venue Henry’s Blues House by Tony Iommi’s former band of about five seconds, Jethro Tull), they were also trying to shake the misconception that they were dabbling in “black magic” after changing their name from Earth.

In an interview with Melody Maker in July of 1970 with Sabbath drummer Bill Ward, journalist Mark Plummer inquired if the band was into the occult. To which Ward replied that not only had Black Sabbath never “practiced black magic” on stage, they were actually “anti-black magic.” In fact, according to Ward, the lyrics to the song “Black Sabbath” specifically denounce the infernal arts and “all its implications.”
 

Black magic? Never heard of it!
 
Ward’s sentiments were echoed by an (allegedly) stone-cold sober Ozzy Osbourne in an interview he gave later that same month to NME journalist Roy Carr. According to Ozz, not only were the occult rumors not true, Sabbath actually wanted to help “stamp out” black magic. The belief that the band was aligned with the dark forces was creating huge headaches for them. Especially, in of all places, Germany:

It’s got so bad that recently a German promoter who had booked us sent along return airfares for the group—and if need be a one-way ticket if we decided on using a sacrificial victim (on stage). The press has blown everything out of proportion. With our name Black Sabbath, people therefore assumed that this (black magic) was our scene. For some unknown reason, people seem to expect something out of the ordinary when we appear. We don’t need to have naked birds leaping all over the stage or try to conjure up the devil.

 

Nothing evil to see here, move along
 
Tony Iommi even went so far to speculate that the band might have to “change up some of their lyrics” to avoid “trouble” especially while they were in the U.S., where rumors of their alleged love of evil were running wild. Thankfully, that never happened and despite Ozzy’s concerns about naked birds and having no plans to conduct a Satanic sacrificial ritual on stage, Sabbath got to keep making records homaging sex, drugs and the supernatural. While Satan sits and smiles of course. Nice.

Keep reading after the jump…

Martin Sharp was an incredibly important figure in the development of the psychedelic aesthetic in the 1960s. He was an artist from Australia and from 1963 to 1965 he was the art director for Richard Neville’s influential underground newspaper, which was called OZ Magazine. In 1966 Sharp moved to London and a year later began working for the London version of OZ, which lasted until 1973.

In addition to his many, many artworks that appeared in OZ, Sharp pursued his own art, and he also designed two extremely influential album covers for Cream (Disraeli Gears and Wheels of Fire) as well as the first Ginger Baker’s Air Force album. He also co-wrote the Cream song “Tales of Brave Ulysses.”

Issue #4 of the London incarnation of OZ came out in June 1967, and it featured a large spread containing a full tarot deck by Martin Sharp. The spread looked like this (click the picture for a larger view):
 

 
Here are all of the cards followed by the text that goes along with the set, in case you should find the text hard to read.
 

1. The Magician (or Juggler)
 
More after the jump…

 
Underground film legend Kenneth Anger has seen a huge wave of interest in his work since his acclaimed “ Magick Lantern Cycle” films became widely available to a new generation on DVD over a decade ago. The now 88-year-old director and author has made several new films in recent years, venturing into music with the Technicolor Skull project, and even the world of fashion, shooting a campaign for Italian fashion house Missoni and producing a limited edition reproduction of the iconic rainbow “Lucifer” baseball jacket from his film Lucifer Rising. Archival prints made from high resolution frame scans from his movies sell for top dollar in art galleries in New York, Paris and Tokyo.
 

 
And now, Anger is branching out into the world of retail, debuting a hybrid pop-up art gallery/store at the Art Los Angeles Contemporary art fair. Produced in collaboration with Anger’s longtime associate Brian Butler, the Lucifer Brothers pop-up shop will be selling original art, as well as some reasonably-priced signed limited edition prints, Kenneth Anger tee-shirts and the above pictured Lucifer Rising baseball jacket.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
LOS ANGELES, CA 1/28/2016

The Lucifer Brothers pop-up art gallery and store is the culmination of Kenneth Anger’s lifelong obsession with the occult. In 1955 Anger was the first to revisit Aleister Crowley’s former temple in Cefalù, Sicily. With the help of Alfred C. Kinsey, Anger painstakingly restored Crowley’s otherworldly murals which spilled across the inside walls of the villa, removing layers of whitewash to reveal the nightmares underneath. Prior to this Anger connected with Marjorie Cameron, the widow of famed JPL rocket scientist and occultist Jack Parsons, casting her in his classic film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome in 1956. Recently the art world has taken great interest of Cameron’s body of work, with her esoteric art—or what remains of it—included in the popular museum exhibit “Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle” and in recent solo career retrospectives of her work in Los Angeles and Manhattan.

After attending the Cameron exhibit at MOCA and a follow up showing at Jeffrey Deitch’s gallery in New York, Anger lamented that Cameron’s most powerful occult works remained unseen. Through his web of arcane connection’s Anger now unveils Cameron’s monumental life-sized portrait of a demon entitled “Blue Prophet” which was inspired by visions Cameron experienced during her marriage to Jack Parsons and her part in the infamous Babalon Working ritual that included Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.

Other works by Australian artist Rosaleen Norton (aka “The Witch of Kings Cross) whose powerful paintings are seldom encountered in the US, British occultist Aleister Crowley and Anger himself will be made available to the public for the first time.

Kenneth Anger is lauded as an influential experimental filmmaker, actor, and author of the infamous Hollywood Babylon gossip books. His films, which include Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Scorpio Rising (1964) and Lucifer Rising (1980) have inspired filmmakers as disparate as Martin Scorsese, David Lynch and John Waters.

The Art Los Angeles Contemporary event—and the Lucifer Brothers pop-up gallery—opens this evening. On Saturday January 30th at 3:30pm Anger will make a special appearance onstage at the ALAC Theatre, which will be set up at the Barker Hangar at the Santa Monica Airport, where the fair is being held.

I saw Kenneth at the opening of the Marjorie Cameron retrospective at MOCA in the museum’s annex at the Pacific Design Center in 2014. Ken’s normally quite gracious and a lovely guy to converse with, but that night he was PISSED OFF, alleging that the museum was exhibiting something that was stolen from him in the early 1960s, a rare first edition of Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth, which is worth several thousand dollars today. All 200 original copies of that lavishly published Moroccan leather-bound edition of The Book of Thoth were signed and numbered by Crowley’s hand, and although the book was being displayed locked under glass, Anger was positive that he knew exactly what number this particular book was and demanding that the case be unlocked to prove that it was his stolen property. He even brought along an FBI officer as his guest to the event! I don’t know what ultimately became of the situation, but it was an interesting evening to be sure. I’ve always wanted to see Anger get, er, Anger-y and even at his age, his performance didn’t disappoint.

The press release makes mention of “what remains of it” regarding Cameron’s art. Cameron herself destroyed nearly ALL of her paintings and sketchbooks, burning them in an act of “ritualized suicide.” What you can see below, in Curtis Harrington’s extraordinary portrait of the artist, Wormwood Star, is perhaps the sole surviving documentation of that work (outside of the astral plane…). I don’t think more than two of the pieces seen onscreen below still exist. Maybe only one of them.

So very few pieces by Marjorie Cameron have survived—some smaller watercolor paintings and some pencil sketches, one large oil painting that the late Curtis Harrington had owned—and so the one that Anger is unveiling at his Lucifer Brothers pop-up gallery, titled “Blue Prophet” (see above) is a real coup for the Art Los Angeles Contemporary fair. I’ve seen this large watercolor in person, twice, and it’s a truly weird and mind-bending thing to behold. Most of her work is on the small side, but this one is about the size of a door and at least 2x to 3x larger than most of Cameron’s extant work that I’ve ever seen. To my mind, it’s one of the very best ones.
 
Continues after the jump…

 
Charles Dickens suffered from siderodromophobia—a fear of traveling by train—the result of his being involved in a rail crash in 1865. If you suffer from a fear of flying, then you will appreciate the dread Dickens sometimes endured—panic, foreboding, sheer white knuckle terror. His son later claimed that Dickens never quite fully recovered from the crash—and he died exactly five years to the day of the accident.

The Staplehurst train wreck took place at 3:13pm on June 9th, 1865. It happened at a viaduct on the South Eastern Railway linking London to the coastal town of Folkestone. A section of rail track had been removed. The foreman in charge of replacing the missing track misread the train timetable—believing his crew had sufficient time to finish the job before the arrival of the next train. His mistake had fatal consequences.
 

Illustration of the Staplehurst train wreck.
 
Apart from the shock and trauma, the accident had highly personal implications for Dickens. He was accompanying his mistress Ellen Ternan and her mother to Folkestone where they were to catch a boat back to France.

Long before the 50-Mile Rule—which suggests one should never an affair with someone within a 50 mile radius of home—Dickens had been careful to keep the 27-year-old Ellen well out of the public eye in France—in an effort to avoid any possibility of discovery of affair by his wife or by a prying press. The three were sitting in the first carriage when the train jumped the tracks and crashed over the side of a viaduct. Ten passengers were killed, forty were injured.
 

Photograph of the accident.
 
Once he had ensured Ellen and her mother were safe, Dickens busied himself aiding the injured and the dying. He described the accident in a letter to his old schoolfriend Thomas Mitton on June 13th, 1865:

My dear Mitton,

I should have written to you yesterday or the day before, if I had been quite up to writing. I am a little shaken, not by the beating and dragging of the carriage in which I was, but by the hard work afterwards in getting out the dying and dead, which was most horrible.

I was in the only carriage that did not go over into the stream. It was caught upon the turn by some of the ruin of the bridge, and hung suspended and balanced in an apparently impossible manner. Two ladies were my fellow passengers; an old one, and a young one. This is exactly what passed: you may judge from it the precise length of the suspense. Suddenly we were off the rail and beating the ground as the car of a half emptied balloon might. The old lady cried out “My God!” and the young one screamed.

I caught hold of them both (the old lady sat opposite, and the young one on my left) and said: “We can’t help ourselves, but we can be quiet and composed. Pray don’t cry out.” The old lady immediately answered, “Thank you. Rely upon me. Upon my soul, I will be quiet.” The young lady said in a frantic way, “Let us join hands and die friends.” We were then all tilted down together in a corner of the carriage, and stopped. I said to them thereupon: “You may be sure nothing worse can happen. Our danger must be over. Will you remain here without stirring, while I get out of the window?” They both answered quite collectedly, “Yes,” and I got out without the least notion of what had happened.

Fortunately, I got out with great caution and stood upon the step. Looking down, I saw the bridge gone and nothing below me but the line of the rail. Some people in the two other compartments were madly trying to plunge out of the window, and had no idea there was an open swampy field 15 feet down below them and nothing else! The two guards (one with his face cut) were running up and down on the downside of the bridge (which was not torn up) quite wildly. I called out to them “Look at me. Do stop an instant and look at me, and tell me whether you don’t know me.” One of them answered, “We know you very well, Mr Dickens.” “Then,” I said, “my good fellow for God’s sake give me your key, and send one of those labourers here, and I’ll empty this carriage.”

We did it quite safely, by means of a plank or two and when it was done I saw all the rest of the train except the two baggage cars down in the stream. I got into the carriage again for my brandy flask, took off my travelling hat for a basin, climbed down the brickwork, and filled my hat with water. Suddenly I came upon a staggering man covered with blood (I think he must have been flung clean out of his carriage) with such a frightful cut across the skull that I couldn’t bear to look at him. I poured some water over his face, and gave him some to drink, and gave him some brandy, and laid him down on the grass, and he said, “I am gone”, and died afterwards.

Then I stumbled over a lady lying on her back against a little pollard tree, with the blood streaming over her face (which was lead colour) in a number of distinct little streams from the head. I asked her if she could swallow a little brandy, and she just nodded, and I gave her some and left her for somebody else. The next time I passed her, she was dead.

 

Front cover of ‘London Illustrated’ showing Dickens tending to the injured.
 
The accident caused Dickens to lose his voice for two weeks. From then on he was often visibly panicked on train journeys—on one occasion hurling himself to the floor of the carriage convinced another crash was about to take place. However, he was not a man to waste his personal experience—no matter how painful—and he used the events in his ghost story The Signal-Man—one of literature’s most famous tales of the supernatural.

The Signal-Man describes an encounter between the unnamed narrator and a signalman who recounts his haunting by ghostly premonitions prior to a series of dreadful train accidents. The story formed part of Dickens’ Mugby Junction series of stories. It is a subtle and beautifully told tale, and was adapted by the BBC in 1976 for Ghost Story, starring Denholm Elliott and Bernard Lloyd. Elliott is perfect as the man haunted by a ghostly visitor, whose message he tries to understand.
 
Continues after the jump…

 
Paris 1968: While students riot on the streets and fight pitched battles with the police, journalist, filmmaker and writer Jean-Pierre Bouyxou was making an improvised short film—Satan bouche un coin—in collaboration with Raphael Marongiu and a group of their friends. It was a bit of fun—a surrealist home movie for their own entertainment, to be watched over a bottle of wine and a joint or two.

The pair had filmed in Bordeaux, Paris and Belgium and had even enlisted the involvement of the infamous fetishistic artist Pierre Molinier to perform in front of the camera.

The 68-year-old Molinier was a member of the surrealists, who had gained considered notoriety for his artworks and through the stories of his scandalous personal life—for example he once admitted to masturbating over the corpse of his sister. More recently, Molinier had started a highly personal and explicit photographic investigation into his auto-erotic transvestite and transsexual fantasies.
 

Pierre Molinier.
 
In Satan bouche un coin Molinier appears as Androgyne. Bouyxou filmed one of Molinier’s auto-erotic performance pieces, which he used as the opening sequence to his film. Bouyxou’s intention was to put together a series of short unconnected sequences—or as he called them “stories”—editing them into a series of rhythmic patterns dictated by the music—Camille Saint-Saëns Danse macabre.
 

 
While owing much to the work of Kenneth Anger, Bouyxou does invest Satan bouche un coin with some devilish charm and a little humor.

Bouyxou—who celebrates his 70th birthday this week—went on to become an actor and screenwriter, and making movies with such legendary filmmakers as Jean Rollin and Jesus Franco. 

Satan bouche un coin is a mesmerizing twelve minutes—one to watch before it’s pulled.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
The auto-erotic art of Pierre Molinier
 
Thanks to Brian Beadie!
 

 
Several drawings attributed to The Satanic Bible’s notorious author Anton LaVey, dating from the late ‘60s and early 1970s, have turned up on eBay. As provenance goes, they’re purportedly from the collection of the late iconoclast’s namesake grandson, Stanton LaVey, a controversial figure himself—but none of the works are signed. That, or the perhaps high-ish opening bid requests could be why they’ve not attracted any action thus far—$666 is a fittingly cheeky asking price, but arguably a bit much for a 3.5” doodle, even one by so infamous a figure. And that’s the lowest price point for any of these items.

None of the works offered are what you’d call finished drawings, which is fair enough, art isn’t what the man was known for. Some are simply doodle pages, but the most interesting pieces are the more fully realized:
 

 

 

 

 
The best piece of all, though, is LaVey’s annotated caricature of the typical ‘70s male, a witty sketch that sums up LaVey’s famous contempt for normalcy and trend-obeisance.
 

 

 

 

 
After the jump, incredible footage of LaVey from—I shit you not—an ACTUAL CHILDREN’S TV SHOW in the 1960s…

 
A fire has destroyed much of Boleskine House, the former home of occultist Aleister Crowley and later Led Zepplin guitarist Jimmy Page. Firefighters were called to the house situated on the banks of Loch Ness at 13:40. hours GMT today, after flames were spotted engulfing the historic building.

A member of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Services told BBC News:

“A large part of the property has already been destroyed by fire and crews are concentrating their efforts on the west wing of the building.

“Crews in breathing apparatus are using four main jets to tackle the blaze and the incident is ongoing.”

 

 
Aleister Crowley bought Boleskine House in 1899—then named the Manor of Boleskine and Abertarff—as he considered the building in the ideal location for carrying out the “Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage” from the grimoire The Book of Abramelin. Crowley said the building fitted the necessary requirements for the rite to work:

...the first essential is a house in a more or less secluded situation. There should be a door opening to the north from the room of which you make your oratory. Outside this door, you construct a terrace covered with fine river sand. This ends in a ‘lodge’ where the spirits may congregate.

For Crowley, Boleskine House was a “Thelemic Kiblah,” a “Magical East” where he could do his thing. The intention of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage is to invoke “one’s Guardian Angel.” The rite takes six months of abstinence and celibacy to prepare for. It is claimed that during the ritual Crowley was called away on an emergency to Paris—leaving the rite unfinished and causing a strange, monstrous disruption to the loch.

...the spirits he summoned got out of hand, causing one housemaid to leave, and a workman to go mad. He also insinuates he was indirectly responsible for a local butcher accidentally severing an artery and bleeding to death. Crowley had written the names of some demons on a bill from the butcher’s shop.

Some have said these “demons” are also responsible for the Loch Ness monster.
 

 
In 1970, Jimmy Page bought Boleskine House—which was then in considerable disrepair. Page was fascinated by Crowley’s ideas and had the property renovated—though he rarely stayed at the house. He sold the property in 1992.
 

 

 
In 200, BBC Scotland produced a documentary on Boleskine House Aleister Crowley: The Other Loch Ness Monster, which traced the occult history of the property and the story of the infamous unfinished ritual that unleashed evil forces.
 

 
Via BBC

 
Always with his eye keenly trained to make a quick buck, Salvador Dali noted the sixties zeitgeist for all things astrological and produced a limited edition portfolio of 250 lithographs on woven paper depicting the signs of the zodiac. Though Dali claimed to be interested in science and its investigations into the atom—he was well-known to be superstitious to the point of paranoia. As a young man he kept a talisman to ward off evil spirits; he also had a phobia about showing his feet, which made buying new shoes difficult; plus he believed he was the “reincarnation” of his dead older brother—which was most probably caused by his having to wear his dead sibling’s clothes.

Dali claimed in an interview with Mike Wallace that the Spanish were a superstitious nation which explained his own personal superstitions. His one-time friend and film collaborator Luis Buñuel agreed with Dali about the Spanish, claiming in his autobiography My Last Breath that religious indoctrination had caused many Spaniards to live their lives under the terrible fear of retribution. It has been claimed that towards the end of Dali’s life he became even more superstitious—only agreeing to meet visitors in a darkened room or communicating with people through a closed door.

Dali would return to the zodiac as a money-making source in the late 1960s and again in the 1970s. These works are primarily simple, direct and illustrative—other than a Dalinian lobster replacing a crab for sign of Cancer—though there is little doubt over the skill and talent of the artist who produced them.
 

Aries.
 

Taurus.
 

Gemini.
 
More of Dali’s zodiac, after the jump…

 
The last two days have brought us two absolute must-reads on the idiocy of the typical Trump voter—articles that also clarify why they may be unusually difficult to divert away from their current white knight in shining armor. The first is yesterday’s terrific account by Dave Weigel of the Washington Post of a Frank Luntz focus group gone horribly wrong, in which all the efforts to tear down the candidate that usually prove so effective in this case had the horrifying effect of increasing the group’s adherence to Trump. Among other things you’ll learn that Obama wasn’t born in the United States and took his oath of office on a Koran, while Hillary Clinton has, for sure, “committed crimes.”

Oh yeah, and also, Trump would be a shoo-in if he were the GOP nominee against Hillary.

Today we have Olivia Nuzzi’s essential bit of reportage in The Daily Beast into the Trump voter’s mindset, in which she called up 100 of Trump’s donors to see what was on their mind. Not too surprisingly, as a group they detest Muslims (which is one reason why Trump’s call to ban Muslim immigration into the United States hasn’t hurt him yet), but maybe more surprisingly, there’s a strong strain of 9/11 truther-ism in the mix (logically, if you think that Dick Cheney perpetrated 9/11, you would think that this would make you more tolerant of Muslims, but it doesn’t seem to work that way).

Amusingly, they also wanted to know if Nuzzi herself was a Muslim.

The most unusual of the Trump donors was a fellow from Oregon named John Captain, who claimed to have sent money to the billionaire candidate because he wanted Trump to “look into” the death of his girlfriend, as he suspects she was a Project Monarch mind control sex slave who was assassinated by “her family, part of the Illuminati and the New World Order.”

It’s worth quoting this passage in full:

John Captain, of Portland Tub and Tan, home of “Portland’s premier hot tubbing and tanning specialists with exclusive outdoor hot tubs year round,” was glad that I called because he wanted to talk about his girlfriend, who he believes was a monarch [sic] mind control slave who was murdered by her family, part of the Illuminati and the New World Order.

Captain talks a mile a minute in run-on sentences that jump from one topic to another—an effect of his ADHD, he said. He explained, in record time, that he had been on Trump’s website, trying to contact him to ask for help in his fight against the Illuminati, when he decided to send him $1,000. (He donated in the past to Ross Perot.)

He had recordings to prove that his girlfriend was a robot, he said. He’d been sent tapes of her sessions with a therapist who told her to, “follow the yellow brick road,” but said he would let me ask about Trump before he explained all of that.

Captain liked Trump, he said, “because our government’s out of control in terms of spending and unaccountability and I have no belief in the government that’s currently in power.” Being a small business owner, Captain said, has made him wary of “anybody who gets a check from the government: federal, city, county, state, people who collect leaves. Anything they do is wrong.”

Captain thinks, he said, “on my own,” but he said he agreed with Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. “What I would say is anybody that’s a concurrent threat to our country should be stopped.” Why would we let people in, he said, who are “statistically” more likely “to hate us”?

“If, consistently, we’re having an issue with Muslims that hate Americans…” he trailed off.

“A part of me hoped that Donald Trump would take over and maybe he would help look into my case,” Captain said, his pace slowing down. “I don’t know what to do, you know? I’m at a loss because not only is this over my head, the facts surrounding her murder, but America is ruined as a whole.”

I don’t suppose this is exactly typical of Trump’s voters, but it is suggestive…....
 

 
via Death & Taxes