St Columba is aligned in the distance, like a pistol sight, with the two barrows standing proud on the cliff edge. You can hear the bells peal, and when they do, the jackdaws flutter about her spire. Bill Pierce was baptised in the cold drawn waters of her font, but the only water today is driven from the sea as horizontal rain. Mr Borlase does not speak to the boy, he measures the mound like a tailor, and then gives orders to the men. They crouch from the rain on the lee side of the seaward eastern barrow, drive their trench deep and open it from crown to apron.

The mound yields to the bite of Cornish spades and mattocks. Iron sparks off fist-sized quartz, and then they are down to brick red burnt earth. The cuffs of Bill Pierce’s smock are soon bloody with it. They will cart away several hundred loads to spread on the fields over the following week.

When they break for bread and cheese, the labourers talk and smoke. There is a piskey ring between the two mounds. One man points at it with his clay pipe. It returns year after year though the cattle trample through it. They say that if anything is placed in the circle after midnight, by morning it will be flung out. There is another over on the Barrowfields, a stain made by the blood of men who fought back to back until all were slain. Bill is very much taken by the tales, and the evidence of his own eyes that there are other truths in the land.1

The gentlemen, Borlase, along with Charles Spence Bate and Richard Worth (who have come down from Plymouth), Captain Oliver, Reverend Iago, and not forgetting Sir John Evans, President of the Royal Society of Antiquaries, stand apart. They are deep in discussion. On the evidence of the red earth, they decide a fire on the barrow must have burned for weeks, perhaps months, undoubtedly fed with furze cut from the clifftop and sustained with hazel logs dragged up from the valley. This effort speaks to the importance of the individual interred.2 The beacon of fire would have lit the fishers from Porth, Towan Blystra and Crantock out harvesting the teeming pilchards, mackerel and the few longnose gar that didn’t slip through the nets. It will have teased the nostrils of the boys climbing nimble down the cliffs for speckled bird eggs. The column of smoke was visible as far north as Dinas Head, as far east as the Goss Moor and perhaps as far west as Bryanick. All would know what the beacon fire signified.

By mid-afternoon the men reach a cairn of long stones concealed in the mound, some twelve feet in diameter and four feet high. These too are marked with fire. Once the cairn is dissembled a great white stone gleams up, flush with the earth. Ten foot by six, this is the vast lid of the sanctum sanctorum.3

Mr Borlase leaps in there. The men are waved off with his hat, the boy cannot get near. Pace slows to patient work. Fingering round the kist, one of the thick slate slab supports is found to be cracked and an entrance made. The stones were expertly set, not a grain of earth had trickled into the void, the sentinel lay undisturbed for as many as 4000 years. His wool clothing and leather fastenings are now a soft brown mould in which thick bone fragments are cushioned. His skull, a broken casket. Evidently he was a strong man from the disarticulated osseous remains, but even here, time has found him out.

Borlase and the men are excited to find an inhumation, so unlike the urn burials in rude red Trevisker Ware of the nearby Newquay Barrowfields. It is a significant, and potentially much older site.4

Work resumes on Monday, March 11th, with attention turned to the second barrow. The first is left wrecked, as there is no material to repair it with, nor it seems, any will to do so. The relentless weather has begun to break, and Bill for one is glad of it. Though accustomed to raw hands and damp musty fustian, when the sky turns thrush egg blue his spirits lift. This time they sink straight down through the crown. Stones, then packed river clay make for hard going, but the lusty men swing and shovel. They strike up a chorus of Sweet Nightingale to accompany their work. At five feet deep they come to a secondary interment, mixed burned bone and ashes. They drive on. Beneath that is a great slate capstone running with quartz lightning. Many tons in weight, this earth fast dolmen cannot be breached from above. They dig around it and access the vault, a crawl space five feet by two. Again, the nimble Borlase is first in the tomb.

At the north-west the sleeper lays his head. He reposes on his left side with his knees drawn up. His gripped hands have felt the ash wood haft of his weapon perish. The skeleton crumbles at a touch, as if a spell has lifted. There on the slate pavement floor is the lone treasure of the barrow, an Elvan axe-hammer.5

Borlase turns it in his wondering hands. When brought out into the light, the fine grained axe head, run through with schorl, glitters with quartz and flashes with feldspar.6 It is perforated, ground and polished. A perfect weighted form, thunder and lightning, the hammer and the splitting blade. At four inches long it seems a fairy weapon, though it could kill a man. He cannot be sure if it is truly ancient, Bronze Age, or even Norse, given the clifftop site.7 Bill Pierce presses forward, catches snatches of what the learned men are saying.

John Evans examines the axe too, remarks that they are common in Germany, sown in the fields and known as thunderstones. Whilst in Scotland, they call them purgatory hammers, with which the dead pagans beat on the heavenly gates for entry. He mimes with the axe. The gentlemen laugh at this, knowing, despite their faith, that the hammer has fallen through a great chasm of time, is no doubt older than the Christian religion. It is a rare and significant find in Cornwall.8 Evans mentions it in his grand grimoire of thunder weapons, The Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons and Ornaments of Great Britain, the first work of its kind.9 Borlase entrusts the find to Reverend Iago who wraps it in a cloth and shows it to the assembled labourers as if it were a child. At day’s end he takes it to be engraved by John Thomas Blight in the Bodmin Asylum, whose fine hand outlasts his mental acuity.

The sun begins to dip and the gentlemen pack up their Gunter’s chain and brass theodolite, close their notebooks. The only ritual left for them to perform is publication; they will not return here. The workers are left to backfill the barrow over the bones, and they rouse the final effort by singing Trelawney. A thin waxing crescent moon rises as Bill walks home to St Columb Minor.

Borlase includes the image, and describes the dig in rare detail, in his Noenia Cornubia. He keeps the find in his personal collection. There is an enigma to these graves he does not explore. Dominant on the cliff, those interred are likely kin, perhaps even father and son, but evidently two different rites have taken place. With no images, texts, songs or ceremonies, we have only the evidence of the fire, the axe, of earth, bones and stone. That, and the testimonies of one man and a boy, William and Bill, are all we have to follow if we wish to know the mysteries of the kings in their clifftop mounds.

When eventually summoned to beat upon the gates of heaven himself, William Copeland Borlase is a poor man. And though not as poor as Bill Pierce, he is bereft of honour, and must greet his Lord with empty penitent hands. Bankrupt and disgraced by scandal, his entire collection was sent to auction in 1887, only fifteen years after the dig. His body is confined beneath a grey granite ledger in Highgate Cemetery. The purgatory hammer rests in a drawer at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge with the other orphaned axes, celts, cores and microliths, dreaming of blood and thunder.

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I guess it had to start in a cocktail bar, in a long lost London. Media had entered its death spiral in 2011, and we were both writing magical texts in the empty hours of corporate collapse. The blog was in its ascendancy and the witty, combative and insightful Rune Soup was where the action was. Both highbrow and pop-savvy, you felt smarter for reading it. There are few magicians in any generation, and fewer still who have a talent for writing; let alone something new to say. This was thrilling stuff. I wrote to the author to introduce myself, sent him a copy of our recently published XVI as I thought it would jive with him. He replied to tell me he had read The Red Goddess, called it ‘revelatory.’ We struck up a conversation, talked about him writing for Scarlet Imprint, arranged to meet. Here was the new voice, hot with knowing, limpid with wisdom, diamond bright.

Gordon was urbane, charming, at the height of his much vaunted media drinking powers. If I remember correctly he had an eye for the talented mixologist. Alkistis wore a cloud of Fracas, intoxicating with notes of tuberose, and wore the best shoes. She was done with one drink, but we all had three on low sofas. It was natural, flowing, and an immediate friendship bloomed between the three of us like perfume on warm skin. We were the only people in the whole opulent place, the theatre entirely ours. He intuited that my next project would be Lucifer, whilst I encouraged him to write a book. We plotted. He had more work drinks to get to, whilst we staggered onto a train, elated that we had connected. We were all living beyond our means, magicians in the lustre and swag of a London only his corporate credit card could cover.

It can be lonely as the brightest person in the room, the one who sees the patterns beneath the surfaces, the one who sees the future. It wasn’t easy being a provincial Aussie growing up liking boys in a coal town with a tarot pack and his mother’s stolen cigarettes. He got out, studied film. And there is a cinematic quality to his life, because he dreamed it, enchanted, made the scenes happen.

Gordon was smart about finances, having blagged and performed his way up the ladder, able as a player, but never believing the lie. He was not some underachiever in a basement, the tired occult stereotype, he was a pro. He confidently knew his own value, shone in every crowded room.

Yes, there was the stress of shared housing, but there was doing magic on the sly, making offerings to the river and having pub lunches in charmed and leafy Chiswick. He could haunt the places that Spare and Crowley once did. He really loved London.

I know that a high point for him was the launch of Star.Ships at the storied Atlantis Bookshop. He just glowed that night. And you know, when people talk about Atlantis in the future, they will say in hushed tones, that Gordon White was once there. We toasted him, and so did a hubbub of London’s finest occultists. Those were his books in the window display, making history.

The early RuneSoupers began to tentatively meet. Look, here he is with Jay in a packed Treadwell’s basement. Probably disagreeing about Enya, probably insisting that Nikki Minaj is the new Bowie. Maybe you came to see, exchanged a few words, saw who he was in action.

Gordon was there for the magical revival, and central to it. His reputation steadily grew, he sought out his equals, and they embraced him. In particular he and Jake would regularly and (mostly!) constructively spar. We felt the urgency and excitement of a revolution taking place. It was ‘chaos’ in that there was no need to impose an orthodoxy or line up behind an idea. The future of magic was a pirate ship and we ran the skull and crossbones up the mast. We did not have to agree on every detail, we just had to do what was each ours to do.

What did we have?
What was missing?

And the answer to both was spirit.

It was Gordon White who put the animism back into modern magic, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. After the triumph of Star.Ships, Ani.Mystic went deeper. The book, a living animate thing.

He would hang onto his career and cash out, his money buying a permaculture farm in Tasmania with James, and we mourned a friend lost to another timezone.

Our last meeting in London was deserted, post-apocalyptic, the streets cleared by the lie of a virus that never was. A group of friends met in a London pub for the Avenging Angels event, and Gordon was at his charming best in the narrow aperture before global incarceration.

The world closed, and for having the wrong opinions in the face of great evil he was attacked by the conformists and the jealous. If you misread him, his generous heart, his humanity, you are still living in darkness. A great shame rests on those who sided with the mob, the cowed podcasters and influencers, the craven bookshops. In an era of compliance, it costs to speak the truth. The magician has no choice, they must be impeccable. The prophet has no choice, they must speak the truth others cannot speak. And, oh my days, he was a sex realist, and none of our (mutual) trans friends ever burst into spontaneous flames as a result. If you want to call him controversial, as some no doubt will, you only demonstrate that you are still afraid. Instead, choose to become invincible, as he did.

We always stood by him, and defended his right to say whatever he chose.
No apologies, no fucks given.

You should carry a bright spear for your friends.

Australia had it bad, with the additional stress of wildfires that threatened to destroy his haven, a tragedy averted only through group magic. As a result of it all, he was admitted to hospital with a broken heart. They threatened immediate surgery, and he bravely refused the triple bypass and sought another path to healing. That journey was long and painful, and through all of which he showed great resolve. He made another adventure of it. We messaged him in his New Zealand hospital bed as the tides of fate swung in his favour once again.

The final stage of the healing journey was in the Amazon, and so we travelled deep into the jungle to be with him and James. We sat with him through night after night of ceremony. He purged with purpose, and we drank chamomile tea in the aftermath. How beautiful it was by the river, how calm beneath the stars. A jaguar coughs, a butterfly drifts by, and we are just friends together at the dawn of all creation. These were precious days spent in Eden, kept forever in our hearts.

Friend, we are looking back at you through the dappled light, see you standing there.

So he returned regularly to his beloved South America, and I always liked it when he was there because we could talk more. And he messaged me excitedly about triggering a prophecy in the Santa Muerte Temple, and I wrote back to share a hoard of bronze socket axes and a picture of cunning woman Tammy Blee. I thanked him for the PJC obituary and told him sincerely that he was indeed the successor to that current; by which I meant modern magic. He replied knowingly, able to graciously accept it with a gif of Leo raising a martini glass. I wanted him to have that recognition, not have to wait for some fucking obituary. Then the messages stopped. I guessed he was travelling, and in a sense, he was.

Gordon was a bridge between the Old and New. We often discussed how he was making the journeys that Jake was never able to make. The project is one that is shared, but Gordon played his part to perfection. He was the best of us. If there is a viable tradition in the West in a hundred years time, it will in no small part be the result of the work of this man who walked between worlds.

We watched him grow over fifteen years of friendship. His octopus mind always sought out the new and the curious, but his ability to teach and communicate with true generosity of spirit was what made Rune Soup a true community of spirits. It went from the best blog to the best podcast, to the best place in which to find and master magic. He never took advantage of his students, never stopped improving and learning. In terms of connecting up the global community it was Gordon that hosted the conversations, drove the discourse. There are hundreds of hours of him you can watch. There are his books to read, and rediscover how fine he was with words. There are his courses on Rune Soup to work through. And I think you should. It is a mighty legacy.

What hurts for me is that he had solved the problem of that difficult third book in what he always called the dot trilogy, a global survey of cunning folk coming out of a series of fresh initiations, adventures and fully living life. We teased each other about it, because I had taken so long to finish Praxis ( I was so glad he liked it), but there was never any rush, we both knew that books take their own time. He was accepted by the traditions and practitioners, not as another gringo passing through, but as a shaman in his own right. I do not use that word frivolously. He had the key to what it is that needed to be said, what was essential to say. I thought there were more years ahead, but I knew that he was on borrowed time. He made use of every single moment. Attentive, present, open.

Alkistis would have made him another deservedly beautiful book, we would have thrown another party together, invited you all. Instead she performed a quiet dance for him last night as candles burned for him, and at dawn we cut a white rose wet with morning dew for the altar. How lucky we are to have known him.

I can imagine him being present in that last moment and asking his quizzical, really? really? And then, smiling into acceptance at the great cosmic joke of it all, moving into ceremony, being greeted on the other side. He was still young, called away to the spirit world whilst in full flower. Twenty-seven, as he often joked. Every time we spoke I told him how good he was looking, and meant it. And we, his friends left behind just have to get through the crying part and proclaim what a man we have lost, and what has been gained by so many.

We remember our brilliant and treasured friend, an adventurer, a magician, a man with a great mind and a yet greater heart.

What is it that is ours to do now?

Gordon showed the way.

Be fearless. Become invincible.

My presentation, Fallen Albion, recorded at the Occulture Conference 2025. My thanks to the Occulture team, for their vision and dedicated work in gathering the community together for such an event, and making the lectures freely available.

The foundational myth of magic and witchcraft is that of the fallen angels, primarily transmitted to us in the account of Genesis and the Book of Watchers. How can we encounter, understand and work with these maligned powers which have inhabited our world and captured our imagination since before the flood? The Enochian tradition lays bare the fault lines between monotheism and the terrain of ancient magic, and the concealed world of angels, epiphanies and omens becomes an open book once more.

Drawing on personal encounters in the land, beneath the ever watchful stars, the talk gives an account of living practice and a glimpse of a distinctly English Enochian current. Peter describes this world as Fallen Albion, for the esoteric project to make these isles the seat of prophecy reveals that the throne of vision rests upon the dwelling places of the mighty dead.

Porth seems derelict, cash box apartments snake up the hill on the way to Watergate Bay. Builders pursue futile renovations before the season crashes in on us all, but this place is always going to be tatty with weather and the vagaries of life on the fringe of Newquay. Skater graffiti swarms broken concrete wormed with rebars. The precipitous steps down to Whipsiderry beach and the mermaid pools are resolutely closed.1 We pass by a pitch and putt as town planners unanimously agreed this ancient place deserved to be fringed by the idiocy of tourist golfers. At least it wasn’t sold to the hotels. Today it is barren, left to the play of the winds. The sinuous plunging drama of the headland calls us on.

In the rough tussocky ground we locate the eastern barrow, now cut close to the cliff edge by the relentless waves. Here Borlase found bones beneath a flat rock in a cup-shaped hollow with some evidence of the cremation fire. An early Bronze Age barrow, barely a footnote, it seems resigned to slide down onto Whipsy and be washed forgotten into its great failing caves.

As we proceed towards the cleft that separates the head from the land we see the first flowers left in their crackling cellophane on the cliff edge. Evidently the dead still flock here, like gulls after the plough.

The water pours savagely beneath a wooden footbridge. Clamped along its length are locks, these hearts are forever stopped. The rails are screwed with plaques bearing names and dates, messages and simple rhymes. The war dead stand guard alongside lovers, dog walkers and visitors who found their final special place. It is an artery stripped of ore, become magnetic to memories of the departed.

Trevelgue Head is heavily entrenched and described as a cliff castle, but its history dates back to Mesolithic hunters, whose presence is evidenced by a scatter of flints. Folk tradition says that the large burial mound held a Danish chieftain, and that when the longboats passed they would dip their ensigns, a black raven on a blood red ground, in his honour. Borlase correctly refutes the claim. The monuments are 2000 years older than any Viking, and those interred are good Cornish men from the age of bronze. The Iron Age Celts strengthened the defences, worked the seams, roasted ore and smelted metals beneath the watch of their own ancient dead whom they let lay undisturbed.

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For those not familiar with Alan Chapman’s work, he has been a substantial contributor to the magical world, both in his post-Chaos workings with co-conspirator Duncan Barford as catalogued in their massive The Baptist's Head Compendium: Magick as a Path to Enlightenment, and the Magia project which followed. He is a sterling example of what can be achieved through discipline, work and practical experimentation – doing his Will. His emphasis on meditation and awakening is unique, with his retreats clearly benefitting those drawn to exploring that approach. His website can be found here. Unsurprisingly, he has put some noses out of joint.

I read with great interest his long introduction to a proposed new edition of Magick Without Tears, one of Crowley’s final texts, which collects the aging Master’s letters to a student into a comprehensive overview of the practice of Thelema. I believe that this is something that Alan as a teacher is temperamentally well suited to, and his reorganisation of the letters into a sensible order is a necessary corrective to the official version. He has clearly done his reading, and demonstrates a comprehensive grasp of Crowley’s oeuvre. The text was to spearhead a mammoth reissuing of Crowley’ texts from Aion Books with Alan’s introductions, annotations and corrections. Despite the lapsing of the Crowley copyrights, which has spawned new editions of his corpus, for good and ill, Alan’s project ran headlong into the litigious threshing machine of the OTO.1 It is therefore a lost book, a path not taken.

Alan’s essay, ‘Is God to Live in a Dog?’, runs in the background of our discussion with Gordon. You can download it here, or watch his presentation of the key points at the 2024 Thelemic Symposium in Oxford.

Alan strikes a different note to the more academic voices that dominate Crowley studies, whom I also find valuable, and I found both his essay and presentation stimulating. Judging by the comments, many others have too. However, I fundamentally disagree with several of his points, I hope that our conversation showed that such differences can be productive rather than destructive.

Through a close reading of Crowley, Alan argues for a fundamental unity in the life of the prophet, with particular attention paid to his quest for samadhi and the importance of The Cloud upon the Sanctuary, Abramelin and the Bornless/Headless Rite.

The question he asks is: Do the ancient gods speak through Aiwass, the dark angel standing at Crowley’s shoulder? An incursion provoked by his recitation of the Bornless Rite in the King’s Chamber, cemented by Rose’s identification of the Stele of Ankh-af-na-Khonsu in the Boulak Museum, and spooled out in three days of channeled writing in a rented room.2

It is a good question, and one that magicians should ask. We differ in that I believe that the Egyptian elements in The Book of the Law are Egyptoid rather than Egyptian, and that the deep abyssal waters that overwhelm Crowley’s fashionable Buddhism are from his childhood reading of Revelation. For example, Nuit is described in terms more appropriate for Babylon/Babalon; and Aiwass, the dictating angel, is described elsewhere as Satan. Crowley is, of course, To Mega Therion, the Great Beast 666. My position is that if the Egyptian gods were resurgent then they would provide evidence of that in the text, which they categorically do not. Crowley insists that his is an entirely new revelation, and one which he frames in Aeonic terms, with the Aeon of Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child, superseding the Aeon of Osiris, the dying and rising god. His message is therefore antithetical to the whole death and rebirth formula upon which Egyptian religion was based.

Alan introduces another text, remarkable in its own right, The Book of the Solar-Osirian Unity, in which the Headless One is the central divinity, whose missing head is the sun disc itself. He uses it to propose that the Bornless Rite, which Crowley worked extensively, and the deity it describes unbeknownst to Crowley or his progenitors in the Golden Dawn, is Re-Harakhty, the Sun god Re on the Eastern horizon.3 In Liber AL vel Legis, the third book is dedicated to this deity with the new spelling of Ra Hoor Khuit. Therefore Crowley is the tool of an ancient magic, and a specific deity, which has haunted him since his first dalliances with the esoteric. Alan reads Liber AL from this perspective, as an underworld journey, which would be congruent with the funeral stele. Aleister, by identifying with the dead priest Ankh-af-na-Khonsu, is undergoing judgment and journeying through an Egyptian underworld. Alan treats Book 2 in particular as demonstrating this, citing the dead and the dying of AL 2:17 as proof. As a thought experiment, I applaud it. As an exegesis, I think it is an example of compounding errors.

First of all, the timeline is difficult. Crowley begins his ritual in the Old Kingdom setting of the great pyramid, 2600 BCE, the text Alan cites The Book of the Solar-Osirian Unity is from the New Kingdom 1330 BCE, and the stele is Late Period 680 BCE. As for the Headless Rite, that’s fourth century. Over this timespan religious conceptions changed markedly.

Secondly, Crowley’s vision of the underworld is fundamentally not Egyptian. The Egyptian funerary cult treated the body of the deceased as sacred, preserved to prevent decay, whereas Liber AL 2:21 states: ‘ […] Now let it be understood: if the body of the King dissolve, he shall remain in ecstasy forever …’

That would make the Pharoahs shudder!

Nor is there judgment in Crowley, no Maat, no weighing of the heart.4 The vices are celebrated as virtues, a truly Satanic conception. Our nature is unchanging, 2:58: ‘Yea! deem not of change: ye shall be as ye are, & not other. Therefore the kings of the earth shall be Kings for ever: the slaves shall serve. There is none that shall be cast down or lifted up: all is ever as it was.’

He rejects the Christian afterlife too, 2:44: ‘[…] Aye! Feast! Rejoice! There is no dread hereafter. There is the dissolution and eternal ecstasy in the kisses of Nu.’

To conclude, Alan’s thesis, in my understanding of it, reflects his excitement over a cryptic Egyptian text and the fascinating vision it provides of the (late) Egyptian underworld. By reading Liber AL through that lens he has overwritten the New Aeon conceptions that Crowley insists upon. But I love this as a heresy. Rather than using the oft quoted ‘as brothers fight ye’ as an excuse to act like idiots, I think we had a great conversation, and hope that it adds fresh fire to people’s reading of the text over the three holy days and to draw your own conclusions.

2

This was not his first visit. Crowley had previously stayed at the glamorous Sheapherd’s Hotel in 1902 and indulged himself in the fleshpots of Egypt.

The swell had gone ugly with the energy and wind. My timing was off, sucked out too deep, never able to find space, never in the right place. Then, on a wasted day of cutting little squalls and precious else, I find myself at the exact antisolar point and a great beam weight of rainbow warps into being and brightness. From the murk a flame bursts in every aqueous suspended gem.

And there she stands. One foot in the petrol blue waters, she strides landward with the other. The engine of the heavens stoops down and disgorges its rain of ions. The terminus is two bays over, it exactly strikes the last great bowl barrow in the line of broken earthworks mantling over Tolcarne.

I see the gods crash down to earth.

The rainbow stands defiant over the scene, before she gradually crosses the road and mills through the dead Narrowcliff Hotel where junkies are consumed in their own squalid pyres.

I finish my surf, cold but grateful, and plan to return and pay my respects to the dead.

I had forgotten this place. Rushed past it unseeing.

Forgive me.

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He raps briskly, three times on the red door and waits with clipboard and briefcase. A long-faced fellow, a little haunted in the eye. The years have taken their toll. He is dressed as an anonymous raincoat working for th…

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For those not up to speed on Parsons, I recommend the documentary Master of the Temple produced by Atrocity Guide, who kindly included my perspective alongside those of David Shoemaker and NASA historian Roger Launius.

If that piques your interest, my study of Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard, The Two Antichrists will take that to the next level.

Having explored the work of Jack Parsons, I have followed the adventures of Cameron and her extraterrestrial encounters here on Substack:

Cameron’s story intersects with underground film maker Kenneth Anger and his own UFO epiphanies, and that requires introducing Bobby Beausoleil:

Anger then flirts with the new aristocracy of the Stones and Zeppelin to bring through his vision of Lucifer for a New Age of light:

As Anger pursued his quest, so too did a survivor from Agape Lodge, the warrior poet Grady McMurtry. The tragedy of Grady and his psychedelic misadventures made the modern American OTO:

Returning to Anger and Crowley’s abandoned Abbey of Thelema, the sexologist Alfred Kinsey enters the frame:

The next three stories deal with Kenneth Grant and Crowley:

This next one is a personal favourite, with Crowley, McMurtry and Grant all meeting at the crossroads of the Bell Inn:

The last of these connects my ‘Cult of Tanat’ series to the sequence with the founding of a witchcraft museum by Cecil Williamson.

Between Operation Capricorn and Keepers of the New Seed is the period of Crowley’s last days in Netherwood, and his death. I will fill that lacuna once my friends at Starfire publish Kenneth Grant’s letters which cover the period.

I am currently working on a piece on Frater Achad, and assessing what other threads I should follow. Certainly there will be more to say about Kenneth Grant. Comments and suggestions are welcome!

The texts I have written on the subject will ultimately be collected in a book and will soon begin to slip behind the paywall. Read them while you can, or consider becoming a paid subscriber for ongoing access.

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I’ve also written a few works on Cornwall (a couple behind the paywall) and will continue to do so, as this land is where my magic is done.

In 2026 I will publish The Cult of Tanat which is serialised here on my Substack. That will necessitate more research at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, and local archives.

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All this has run parallel to the production and publication of Lucifer: Praxis. Reviews have been strong.

“it’s an extraordinary achievement and will mark a BC/AD point in 21st century magic. I consider it the first coherent articulation of a fully British practice post-revival.” – Richard

“a foundational book for today’s Luciferian” – Andrew Hanson via Amazon

“a definitive contemporary articulation of the Luciferian tradition from both a theoretical and an operative perspective, and a defining work in the evolutionary unfolding of the Western esoteric tradition.” – Peter Mark Adams, from his review for Paralibrum

“Like Princeps did back in the day, Lucifer Praxis has torn open the floorboards of my thinking again. Their Lucifer is not a symbol you contemplate – it’s a current you step into. A force pointed toward what’s coming. There’s a sense here that the future isn’t something we wait for – it’s something that hunts us. The writing is razor-sharp, the scholarship fierce, but what stands out is the pulse behind it. This is a channeled working, a transmission of revolution – not the polite kind, but the raw, disruptive, blood-and-fire kind.” – Sirius White, An Antidote to Magical Thinking

The culmination of eight years of process, this work marks a significant moment in my personal and magical life. My recent silence on Substack has been due to the impact of that, and the time-consuming work of shipping orders. Thanks for bearing with me.

You can buy Praxis direct from Scarlet Imprint in hardback, paperback or digital editions, or via Amazon in Europe, the US and worldwide. (Penance for the second option is leaving a review.)

The stirrings of a return to in-person events were a welcome sign that the hold of the digital realm is waning. In late September I gave a workshop with Alkistis at the Thelemic Symposium in Oxford. In October I presented at the Occulture Conference, a landmark event where 500 people gathered in Berlin to attest to the living current of modern magic. The lectures will be uploaded sequentially from December 17 on their YouTube channel. A biennial event, professionally run, beautifully staged and phenomenally rich in ideas, artistry, ritual and performance; I cannot recommend it highly enough. You have time to plan before the next one, I’ll see you there.

Lights rise from it at night. So the miners said, dragging their weary way across Ballowall Common, candle hats streaked with wax. After ten hours labouring in the dark, following the seams of tin out under the treacherous sea they had to pass by Carn Gluze to get back to town. Strong beer awaited, and a cot in their cramped terraced cottages. Fairies was what they said, dancing in the old grey karn.1 Ill luck. Didn’t want anything to do with them.

Works had sprawled out from St Just since the 1800s, but it was only in 1862 that the Common raised an engine house high above the great fetch of raw Atlantic. Steam powered the Stamps that smashed the black ore, winding gear whined and spun to bring the men up from their service in hell. The miners heard knocking down in the dark, and left a pasty crust below. Topside, the dancing lights were another species of supernatural threat.

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The land was flensed by industry, each valley a suppurating wound, each cliff top sentineled with belching stacks, even out onto Cape Cornwall where the waters meet. The furze was cut and fed into the flames, bright yellow blossom gone in a flash. Near 3,000 tons of tin were torn out of the ground, and at great cost to both land and men. The hissing sea drowned the submarine shafts, props collapsed, ladders broke, charges misfired. Death was a capricious yet constant presence.

In 1878 the thirty year old William Copeland Borlase strode across the despoiled land; a gentleman, a dreamer, the scion of an illustrious family, drawn by the miners’ tales. By now the site was buried under spoils, and he had grand plans to salvage it. William was the great great grandson of the folklorist Reverend William Borlase, and was raised in ‘The Iron Castle’, the Borlase family seat where antiquarians would meet to discuss the drolls and dolmen.

In West Cornwall it was commonly said that Borlases were in Cornwall before the birth of Christ, but the family were not originally of Cornish stock. As landed gentry, serving under James I and Elizabeth, their bloodline is charted back to 1066 and the Norman Taileffer family.2 They took their new surname from the Cornish Manor they were first granted, up near St Columb Major. Borlase is from the Cornish bor, the word used for a tumulus or burial mound, and glas for green or grey. The land there is speckled with them, from Winnard’s Perch up to St Breock Down, along with a rare stone row and the crowning quartz-crazed monoliths.

As the Borlase family moved west it was the ancient houses of the dead that became an obsession for them, spanning three generations. The Reverend grew to be one of the three great Cornish antiquarians, standing alongside Bottrell and Hunt.

As a teenager, precocious William Copeland had overseen the excavation of Carn Euny and its remarkable fogou. After finishing his stint at Trinity College, Oxford, he published the lavish Nænia Cornubiæ, in which he lamented the ‘heavy hand of ruin’ that turned the land inside out like a jacket. In the study he gave his motivation,

to preserve from oblivion, those records of a ‘speechless past’ which are daily falling prey to the pickaxe and the plough.

It is an exhaustive and important work, carefully recording sites across the county and reproducing elegant engravings. My copy, an hundred and fifty years old, library stamped by Dartington Hall, resold in Penzance, and though foxed still tight, accompanies my own journeys into the land. It is good to walk in company.

Under William’s direction the stone cockpit emerged, the dead cradled in their sockets, as packed black ash in rough red ribbon-handled pottery jars. His men rebuilt the walls at his instruction to better show the stone box kists of the great necropolis.3 Later archaeologists damn him for the work, but without Borlase and his ambition, the karn would have surely been lost forever to the wreckage of industry.4

The excavation revealed a chimeric structure, spanning thousands of years. Once it was a cairn towering fifteen feet high and sixty-five feet wide. The wheel-shaped barrow engulfs a late Neolithic entrance grave and an additional cluster of up to five middle Bronze Age kists. An entirely different people had moved onto a land littered with stone enigmas, and joined their own dead to a site already a thousand years old. And what of the treasures? A stone spindle whorl, some human and animal bones, pottery shards. A worn Roman coin slipped into one of the outer kists suggests even later use, or a gift to the dead and their waltzing lights. If there was more it had been long robbed.

For Borlase, things ultimately unravelled, bankrupting himself with lavish books, foreign travel and a Portuguese mistress who exposed his affairs and forced him to resign from Parliament in disgrace. His lifestyle and scandal destroyed the family fortune, with the Iron Castle sold to become a youth hostel.5 William died at fifty in London, estranged by his relatives, but part of him lives on as a ghost, walking the rounds of barrows and stones in far West Penwith. I am not sure we should consider that a curse, but his life of wandering suggests he was piskey led from young.

In 1883 the mine closed on Ballowall Common, five years after the barrow was excavated. The engine house was pullled down, the fine stone scavenged. The finger of the chimney was left to stand as a daymark for passing ships. Brambles and bracken roamed over the piles of broken stone.6 The work of Borlase and ancient man now basks by a ribbon of singletrack asphalt going nowhere, and is indicated by a heritage sign. On the seaward side the coast path reels oblivious pilgrims past on their way to Sennen, their eyes drawn by the sparkling water.

Autumn equinox is the day of the grasshopper’s last rasp, twinned butterflies orbit each other and the Stone Chats clack. Out in the tidal race wet kelp heads glitter. The moment that the light and dark year mix has drawn us to where the waters meet, Celtic Sea and Atlantic Ocean merging at the Cape. And I believe that the tomb builders witnessed this too, had found this place where the world ended, saw where the dead would go – out on the great golden boat of the sun, rowed by the silver oars of the moon. The entrance grave, long enough for a body to be laid, is oriented to what Borlase called the ‘death-quarter’ where the sun goes down. The flotilla of kists are lined up behind it. On this particular day a spider had spun her web across the entrance. We left her undisturbed.

There are no rites extant. Only the mystery of a stone spool which has seemingly wound back industrial time. The lights suggest the simplest honour is to process about the necropolis, as they do in Ireland, to be those small quiet feet. To dance. At other times it is best to leave it to the denizens of the mound, and on those nights we are not required for their magic. Sometimes you can bring them milk, honey, beer and light. Another offering is to write.

This equinox I am held like a prayerful seed in the cupped hands of the karn. The bees work around me, find the last sip of honey in the heather bells. The wind keens and whispers. The Stone Age sun sings into a procession of empty stone kists. And I am just another skull, jostling with the rest, late to my bed. The stone machine, piloted by the dead, commands the great gate. The seeds sleep, and in their sleeping dream.

The day passes with miracles, the complete flock of choughs in the parish, some seventy individuals, wheels over lilts, drifts and calls, and then a charm of goldfinch, thirty strong. The land, is casting off her coat of flowers and autumn’s bright light is pricked bloody with hawthorns.

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There is a world reflected in the broken glass, a world daubed with crooked crosses and Stars of David. Synagogues burn, cemeteries are smashed, shops looted by the Stürmabteilung and an exhilarated Hitler Youth. Hundreds of Jews are murdered and raped, many others commit suicide. Berliners weep in the streets whilst the churches, for the most pa…

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The film includes significant and previously unseen footage and photos of Jack, Cameron, Caltech and the early Thelemites. Interviewees are David Shoemaker, aerospace historian Roger Launius, and myself.

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The incense is of spikenard, cinnamon and myrrh, and burned at the four quarters.
The priestess contemplates the pole star, salutes the four …

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In the late April afternoon light two men pad down to the sands in their hippy uniform of suede moccasins and faded Levi’s. The younger has errat…

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The dramatic pillar is joined to its twin by a vaulting wooden bridge, installed by SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. Here the Hitler Youth were inducted into their racialised history, in a torchlit paganism of the Nazi imagination. She drifts over the arch, stepping as the Moon steps, to greet her brother and lover the Sun with raised arms.

Before her is a remarkable aspe, hewn out of the stone and with a carefully cut circular aperture to produce the dependable miracle. The solar disc rises in the east. Deep in heroin’s thrall, Lilith cannot withstand the winter solstice Sun, and when it strikes the altar, she falls.

Her anorexic body, dope sick, love sick, subsides as a column of ash. Anger is there to scoop up the remains of the wraith, a twenty-five year old Marianne Faithful he found amongst the meths drinkers and royally disordered Rolling Stones. The blown rose is gathered off to hospital in case of concussion.

It is not the first crisis of the film, but the last act in a delirium. The miscarriage at seven months of her child with Jagger had made her casting as Lilith a raw wound. Whilst in London she cut her wrists, and it was Anger who bandaged them up with the silk scarf she holds up in Lucifer Rising as she mouths the word ‘memories.’ Travelling to Cairo she smuggled heroin in her compact, endangering the whole crew, but Germany was when her body finally broke under the psychic and physical strain.

Marianne has little good to say about Anger, extracting from her haze of memory only the negative stories. She thought he would be happy if she had died on the Externsteine. In her biography she writes,

Inept as Kenneth was, I knew he was dangerous in a way. I knew that simply being in the film I was involving myself in a magic act far more potent than Kenneth’s hocus-pocus Satanism.

An example of Anger’s dangerous cinemagick is when she crawls through the djinn ghosted graves in Cairo. Her brother Chris O’Dell films, but in the edit Anger flashes up a single frame of a green poppy capsule, fat with sap. The implication is clear, but thankfully does not come to pass.1

Whilst the imperious Cameron ruled Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Marianne haunts Lucifer Rising. As Lilith she is the spirit of heroin, a spectre destroyed by the transcendent psychedelic light. After her fall, Marianne became a homeless junkie, and Anger struggled on with the burden of shooting and editing his love-vision until Halloween 1980. The new age of light languished through a decade of delays and arrived as a time capsule, not the vaunted herald of dawn.

Anger had crashed into the London scene in December 67, on the very day Their Satanic Majesties Request was released, the Stones trying to follow the psychedelic mood. A wandering star-maker, dispossessed from the West Coast, Anger remained fêted on the international circuit alongside Warhol.2 John Paul Getty Jr bankrolled Anger for the move, at a time when it was fashionable to be a patron of the underground arts. San Francisco had fallen to methamphetamine but London was still swinging and on the upward trajectory of acid and creativity. Robert ‘Groovy Bob’ Fraser screened arthouse movies at his swank Mayfair gallery and Anger ingratiated himself with a set of beautiful bohemians who were new to his Magus routine. The puckish Anger burst the silver balloons at John and Yoko’s show with a sparkler, met with the Stones and tripped to Pink Floyd at the nearby UFO Club on Tottenham Court Road. His Lucifer would be reborn in London, but, as ever, he needed more cash.

In April 68 he snagged a gig filming Tantra in India with Nik Douglas. Anger suggests the ill-tempered film should instead have been called Tantrum. Tantra is absent from Anger’s filmography, but the mix of tight shots with the hieratic gestures of sky-framed sadhus intimate what he will do with Lucifer Rising. When thunder and lightning storms killed fifty at Khumb Mela he finally had enough and told Nik, ‘I can’t take this, I’m leaving. I’m taking a camera and going off to Egypt.’

But Anger instead returned to London and a scene of princelings, models and vagabonds in search of a western path of liberation whose destructive twin stalked them all. The magic of Egypt could wait.

Anger needed a replacement Lucifer, with Bobby Beausoleil long gone. He considered Brian Jones, whose troubadour looks made him the most popular of the Stones. His supernumerary witch’s nipple was a further enticement for Anger, but everything was on the slide for Brian. The brilliant Anita Pallenberg – witch and great-granddaughter of the Symbolist artist Arnold Böcklin – had left Brian for Keith Richards. The acid she, and others, served up had tipped Brian’s fragile mental balance into vindictive and violent behaviour. The affair with Keith was an inevitability. In July 1968 an unravelling Brian travelled to Jajouka with Brion Gysin to record the Master Musicians music for Pan, the last time the young goat would dance on the mountain.

Anger simultaneously considered the ascendant Jagger for the Lucifer role. He had a significant crush on the young man with the sensuous mouth who, seeing his band lost for direction, was trying his hand at acting.

In September 1968 Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell3 shot Performance, the defining film of the period. Performance remains a heavy film, pregnant with violence, as it charts the decay of a bohemian rockstar. The sex is what most remember, with Anita Pallenberg and Mick Jagger entwined in heroin’s warm embrace, both on and off camera. Absent from the film are Keith Richards, who was Anita’s lover at the time, and Marianne, who was with Mick. It was a cross-matching, and the erotic tensions should have destroyed the Stones. Yet the chaotic libidinal forces drove a distraught Keith to write Gimme Shelter, a stand-out song in arguably the most powerful creative period in musical history.

Sympathy for the Devil was written some months later on the night of December 6 1968, inspired by a copy of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, given to Jagger by Marianne Faithful. Anger claims to have given Marianne the book in the first place. Regardless, the lyrics inevitably drew on Jagger’s conversations with the Magus who knew all about Lucifer. Anita and Marianne sang backing. ‘It was a meeting of minds,’ Anger said, ‘They were typical of a lot of musicians. They wanted to climb on the wavelength.’ For the next year or so Anger lived amongst them, as they took acid, tricked out as the young gods and goddesses of the New Age; which they certainly were.

Anger frames a white-clad4 Jagger engaged in a ritual in Hyde Park. Diesel fumes, dust and pollen thicken the air. Anger surfs above the crush of bodies, resolutely clutching his camera. Quietening the crowd, Jagger stumbles through two stanzas from Shelley’s Adonais, his paean to Keats. Heat and hayfever have taken their toll on the frontman before the gig even begins. As the 16mm camera whirs, his subject releases white butterflies into the crowd, though many have died in the heat. The elegy is performed on July 3, two days after the death of Brian Jones. No-one says murder. The mixed emotions of loss and guilt wash through the band and their inner court. But something is off about the whole thing, it feels haunted. Sympathy closes out the night, with new guitarist Mick Taylor getting into his groove.

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep—
He hath awakened from the dream of life—
’Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit’s knife
Invulnerable nothings.—We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-colour’d glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.—Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled!

It is the only time Anger will have Jagger on film, and it is not wasted, he puts it to work in a spell. Frames are cut into Invocation of My Demon Brother which Jagger hurriedly scores on his new Moog synthesiser. He produces a relentless hypnotic loop that matches the bad vibes of the whole project. Anger is delighted. With a celebrity name attached, he is able to get the ill-starred film out, and sweeps back into San Francisco for the premiere at the Straight Theatre on August 21, the scene of his disastrous Equinox of the Gods show. LaVey, who starred in the film, made his appearance and they end up back at the Black House, mixing zombies into the early hours. Beausoleil could not show; he was arrested a fortnight earlier, asleep in a stolen car belonging to Gary Hinman, the bloody murder weapon languishing in its tyre well. The Tate-LaBianca slayings were still dominating the press, but the police had not yet made the Beausoleil connection, despite the messages written in blood at all the murder scenes. Everyone thought death was abroad and crawling the canyons of LA, but Manson and his snakes were hiding out in Death Valley where Anger’s lost film cans were allegedly buried and spoiling in the heat. Speculation was rife, Samson De Brier told Esquire,

You’ve got to understand the difference between true witches and people who take drugs. For instance, the murder. No serious witch could have done such a thing as that.

But that was not the vibe on the street, even Polanski suspected an occult connection. It would turn out that Susan Atkins, one of the Manson girls, had indeed been part of LaVey’s Topless Witch Revue, rising from a coffin on stage to sate herself on blood. Anger was certainly on the scene when Atkins was having her Satanic dalliance, but it is unclear if they ever met. Whether Atkins was a serious witch is debatable, but the girls had certainly been tasked by Manson in the killings to ‘make it witchy.’ Atkins had also been present at the Hinman killing with Beausoleil, and it was her blabbing to a stool pigeon that eventually lead the police to Manson.

With Jagger away filming Ned Kelly from July to September, and the Stones back in demand and touring, Anger saw less of them. On December 5 1969 they fatefully played Altamont Speedway where Meredith Hunter was killed by a Hell’s Angel, apocryphally, during Sympathy. Life called it ‘The End of Something.’ The love-vision of the sixties was gone for good, swept away by a tide of violence, barbiturates and alcohol; the narrative given weight by the next issue where Manson hypnotically stared out of the cover. Manson was anointed as the final form of the LSD guru, with a mind-controlled harem of child killers. It was not a CHAOS or Cointelpro operation – although they were running at the same time – the seeds of destruction were inherent in the demographic and chemically fuelled youth explosion. They did it to themselves.

Going against the current, Anger began afresh on Lucifer Rising, publishing Crowley’s Hymn to Lucifer with the Dove’s Press as his statement of intent. It was one of the sources he had read over and over to a young Bobby Beausoleil.

It soon became clear that the singer of Sympathy for the Devil was no longer open to playing the titular character. Both Mick and Keith now remember that they were lukewarm about Anger, but that doesn’t quite match the record. Keith at one point had been proposed for the redacted role of Beelzebub, and Anger was, for one druggy moment, meant to officiate at his and Anita’s pagan wedding. Certainly Anita and Marianne were always more interested in witchcraft than the boys, but Mick was not immune to the lure of the occult, that is, until Anger (inevitably) pushed it too far. In early 1970 he threw a brick through the window of Jagger and Marianne’s flat, with a copy of a William Blake book attached to it. Jagger finally had enough and promptly burned all his occult books in the open fire grate.

When Bob Fraser left for India to seek Tantric initiation as an antidote to his heroin addiction, Anger got the run of his Mayfair apartment at 120 Mount Street. This was despite him previously sending Bob a razor blade with a note bearing the legend, ‘the final solution to your stuttering.’ Here Anger would shoot Lucifer scenes over the next two years in a tumult of props, newspaper cuttings, candles, statuary, paint and incense. He put up the homeless Marianne Faithful whose triste with Jagger had ended in disaster that May. Their relationship had been on the slide since July the year before, with her overdose on 150 Tuinals in Australia, and the subsequent six day coma where she met Brian Jones in the bardo – complete with Buddhist lightning bolts tattooed on his palms.5

As with all Anger projects, the cast ebbed and flowed. There was a Guardian Angel, High Priestess, children, and a Black Babalon (Consuelo) who didn’t make the final cut. Though a red haired woman in a garden, who represents Babalon, is seen on screen for a handful of frames, the focus is on the dyad of Lucifer and Lilith; Sun and Moon; acid and heroin.6

Anger found his new Lucifer in Piccadilly, where dilly boys hung off the ‘meat rack,’ the railings that caged the naked aluminium Eros. Mythologising, Anger described first seeing Middlesborough steel worker Leslie Huggins surrounded by glowing furnaces, but it was the illuminated Coca-Cola, Sanyo signs and watch advertisements that lent their encounter an infernal glamour. The two became acquainted in the tube station toilets where the whine and rattle of trains punctuated their shunting.

In California his previous Lucifer, Bobby Beausoleil paces like a tiger on Death Row. He awaits his summons to the airless chamber where hydrogen cyanide will suffocate the oxygen from his blood. He must have dwelt on the fact that his victim (and once friend) though viciously stabbed, was finally suffocated with a pillow by Susan Atkins and Mary Brunner while he watched. Reflecting on it in a confessional poem he writes, like a feral Rimbaud of how ‘at the age of twenty-one, I joined that ignoble fraternity.’

Anger makes a mess of the project once more. There is no shot list, no script, and the ever-morphing cast and crew are subject to the vagaries of his mood, drug use and cash flow. A bewildering number of cuts and versions are trailed out to keep the backers happy. He claims to be making a cinematic epic with a Thelemically correct 93 minute runtime. His big movie.

It seems to have been a rolling drugs party in Groovy Bob’s flat, with people passing constantly through the frame. Cammell, Hopper, Jodorowsky and Anger are memorably photographed together here, the wild spirits of underground cinema. When the shoot ends, Hopper rolls a reefer, while the boys sprawl on sofas and a dragon-headed divan. They each have visions for the future, the world seemingly at their feet. Jodorowsky has completed El Topo and is starting work on Holy Mountain. Hopper, a one time co-star with Cameron, has parlayed the success of Easy Rider into directing the disastrous The Last Movie. Cammell is trying to follow up Performance and shoots The Argument (never released) with Miriam Gibril with whom he stars in Lucifer Rising. It is a truly Luciferian moment, as these artists attempt to integrate the enormity of psychedelic experience into cinema. As Anger insisted, ‘Lucifer is the patron saint of the visual arts. Color, form, all these are the work of Lucifer.’

The cast are ushered by Anger through a pilgrimage, from London to Avebury, Stonehenge, Giza, Luxor and Externsteine. Impossibly, Anger shoots a film of truly epic scope. The majority is in the can by the end of 1972. That same year Beausoleil has his sentence commuted to life, with the abolition of the death penalty in the State of California.

The music is another matter. Twelve minute cuts of Lucifer Rising had been shown using Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother as a placeholder. Anger clearly dug that. From 1972–1976 Jimmy Page was engaged on the project, but became waylaid by his own drug use issues.7 Inevitably, as in all Kenneth Anger stories, they fell out acrimoniously. Page’s version of the soundtrack was completed and majestic, but rejected by the Magus, purportedly for being too short. He rants,

What am I supposed to do, play it twice? I need 40 minutes! I need a climax! Like, [the film] is the end and the beginning of the world – you’ve gotta give me that big music!

Page does appear in a panning shot in the final cut of the film, looking rapt at a picture of the Master Therion in a beautifully stocked library with a complete set of The Equinox. But Anger pettily cuts in an image of antique bestiality to imply that the musician is no better than a goat-fucker.

The whole Lucifer project has dragged on for a decade and remains without a score.

Even in hell, Bobby Beausoleil, now written over with a prison script of tattoos, somehow hears the news of Page’s exit. Convincing Anger by letter, and over the grey prison phone, he insists he can make the music inside a high security jail with a band of murderers. Anger accepts his pledge to ‘deliver a compelling soundtrack for the film come hell or high water.’ The pact is renewed. His Lucifer has magically returned, and builds a new band, the Freedom Orchestra. As Bobby says, ‘Though bodily imprisoned, we would be free in spirit.’ Watching a black and white cut of 21 minutes twice through, he goes about scavenging the instruments, building synths, effects, electronics and a mixing desk under the eyes of the wardens. Time takes on a different meaning for the lifer, and Beausoleil labours at his task for the next four years.

Beausoleil reflects in May 2009,

My interpretation of the Lucifer Rising theme posits a new chapter to ‘Paradise Lost’. Imagining myself in Lucifer’s place where Milton ended his story–not much of a stretch given that I had, so to speak, fallen from grace in my own life–and extrapolating from there, I composed a series of movements to emotively tell a story in which the Fallen One yearns for reconciliation with the Beloved, without whose near presence existence is the worst kind of Hell, and seeks redemption through reflection, self-discovery, and self-realization. For one such as he, self-determined to a fault, finding a path out of the darkest place imaginable would mean rekindling one's own inner torch and using its light to find the way home. It is for this reason that at various times in my life I have found resonance in the Luciferian archetype: A bringer of light is never truly abandoned in darkness.

This is the same Lucifer that he and Kenneth dreamed together back in the other world of the Summer of Love. It all seems fated. The film is a time capsule, released on video cassette by Mystic Fire in 1980, soon after Beausoleil provides him with the completed soundtrack. As Anger says,

It is a film about the love generation, – the birthday party of the Aquarian Age showing actual ceremonies to make Lucifer rise. Lucifer is the light god, not the devil – the Rebel Angel behind what is happening in the world today. His message is that the key of life is disobedience. Isis (Nature) wakes up. Osiris (Death) answers. Lilith (Destroyer) climbs to the place of Sacrifice. The Magus activates the circle and Lucifer – bringer of light – breaks through.’

It is a Blakean and Hermetic vision, and though he slightly misquotes the final line of Crowley’s Hymn to Lucifer here, it gives a clear sense of what for many is a confusing story arc. Here is the secret, simple and in plain sight, as Anger understands it, and as far as he is able to capture it on film. What his summary elides is the Luciferian apotheosis, the appearance of amber UFOs over Egypt.8 We know the ships reference Lucifer himself because earlier in the film he is given a UFO birthday cake, with Mark VI piped onto it in icing – a nod to the number of the Beast. The bomb in the cake then explodes. Anger, like Cameron knows that the UFO and the bomb are profoundly connected to the 93 current, as was the revelation of light that cascaded out of California and lit up the bohemians of London. We all live in that new world, dreamed into being by the magical artists of the counterculture.

What Anger had called ‘My film of the future’ and ‘a love vision’ was not so much out of date, as outside of time, an immortal jewel. Anger will not complete another significant project in his lifetime. But Beausoleil is the element that makes the film sublime, outshining the music of the greatest bands of the sixties. Anger allows Beausoleil to seek his redemption, and even in our benighted times their art and example preserves that vision. It is for us to remember, as Beausoleil does, that a bringer of light is never truly abandoned in darkness.

Hotel guest claimed she worshiped…

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The storied building has become a rabbit warren of apartments, peopled with jazz musicians, artists and luminaries of the counterculture. The imposing white door is detailed with red paint, and the legend is writ, ‘Do What Thou Wilt.’ For those who know their Rabelais, the phrase proclaims it an Abbey of Thelema. However, in the year of Sgt Pepper it is his reincarnation, the thelemite Aleister Crowley, whose ethos is in the ascendant.

Looking for signs in the sky are a forty year old Kenneth Anger and his nineteen year old leading man Bobby Beausoleil. The two have separate apartments, as Bobby is below the legal age of consent and Anger fears the cops, even though, despite the impresario’s desires, Bobby remains resolutely heterosexual. Anger has the entire first floor which was once Dark Eyes, a nightclub cum bordello named after a Russian folk song. His lead actor is bedded down in the parlour beneath flaking frescoes of cherubs, still blushing with memories, who sail above the newly painted purple walls and orange mouldings. It seems apposite, as Cupid is what they called Bobby on the scene. Tonight they sit in the leaky tower, spangle-eyed into the dawn. Tonight would not be the night, though the Slavic ghosts carouse in the house below through the early hours:

Dark eyes, passionate eyes,
Searing and beautiful eyes
How I love you, how I fear you!
I must have seen you at an evil hour!

Oh, it is not for nothing that you are darker than the depths!
I see longing in you for my soul,
I see a victorious flame in you:
My poor heart is burned by it.

But I am not sad, I am not sorrowful,
My fate comforts me:
All the best God has given us in life,
I have sacrificed to your fiery eyes!

But Beausoleil’s eyes are ocean blue beneath the top hat he customarily wore. They were perhaps what captured Anger when he first cruised him at The Invisible Circus in February ’67, a three day happening thrown by the Diggers at the radically liberal Glide Memorial Church. The talented Beausoleil was playing guitar in his latest band, the Orkustra, on this occasion accompanying a troop of gyrating belly dancers. The result was lush, cinematic, erotic, immersive. As was the Owsley acid drenching the synapses of the audience and performers alike.

In a flash Anger knew that here was his Lucifer, the lead for the latest film in his Magick Lantern Cycle, standing in the body of a vagabond dandy. Just as he had reacted to Cameron, feeling the sudden touch of fate; he was captured. He emphatically told him,

You will become the beloved, and through me you will rise to be feared and held in reverence.

Lucifer Rising? That must have resonated with the runaway, who had nurtured fantasies of power and violence growing up on the streets of Los Angeles. A pact was immediately struck. Beausoleil, barely knowing who Anger was, but hip to his status in the underground, assented to the Magus on one condition: that he would provide the music for the film. Both sides of the pact were blissfully unaware of the decade of work and eternity of infamy that process would extract from them.

Anger always cast actors in this way, and Bobby was properly Lucifer mark three. A brief encounter in Golden Gate Park was number one, some sort of boy with green-eyes and red hair who went by the name of Joey Lucifer. Like lightning, he just wouldn’t hang around. The child Godot Paulekas was the second; tragically, he fell to his death through a skylight in the Laurel Canyon home of his hippie-artist parents.1 Anger would get through (at least) six Lucifers by the end of the project.2

With Lucifer mark three, Beausoleil – the Beautiful Sun – he stood on the cusp of the momentous Summer of Love in the Hashbury. It was 1967, the year that Bobby called ‘that great hoax of freedom unfettered.’ He was right. Anger too knew the difference between liberty and license, it was his Lebensphilosophie. Freedom was promised to those who could walk that perilous edge. But their relationship would follow the current of the year, soaring, only to experience a jagged crash.

With the city that summer overflowing with starry-eyed youths, Bobby sequestered himself away to study Lucifer in the Russian Embassy. Availing himself of Kenneth’s conversation, library and direction, it became clear to him that Lucifer was not a figure of evil, but synonymous with color and light. Like all romantics, he found inspiration in Paradise Lost rather than the Bible. He put together a band, The Magical Powerhouse of Oz, and with no run-time, script or shot-list to turn to, instead made music as if to soundtrack Milton’s sublime epic. Anger expected serendipity to occur spontaneously between film and music, and Bobby was too cocksure with youth and dripping with musical inspiration to not take that step into the unknown.

Writing in 2019, Beausoleil recalled what Lucifer meant to both him and Anger that fateful Summer.

Lucifer, as conceived by Kenneth for the film, is an archetype representing the rebellious spirit of the artist, whose role it is to shine light into culture to promote the evolution of consciousness. It is the artist’s job to vandalize mindless obedience to the status quo, to defy the tyranny of social stagnation that contributes to cultural dystrophy; failing that, there would never be anything new in the world, never a fresh perspective. In this, the thematic intention, both visual and aural parts of the film project are conceptually united.

You can feel the antinomian energy of the original counterculture, the Diggers and peace freaks. Lucifer, as they envisaged him, was a new god creating a new age. The rites of creative destruction would instigate the future. Freedom was the watchword of their California dreaming. Anger wanted to capture and project the love trip for those beyond the West Coast through the magic of cinema.

Summer came and went, making props and getting shots together, titrated with the slow drip of acid. Anger first dropped LSD in the prestigious company of Aldous Huxley, but now he was leading the sessions. Bobby sprawls shirtless on a bed, screened with blue velvet curtains, tripping hard. Anger reads Crowley at him,

Suddenly a great shaft of light drove down and penetrated my chest. It kept pouring over me. This great shaft of white light. It became everything. I was obsessed, experiencing all there was. All the blood and all the killing. I was being killed. There were a million moving things, all the death and destruction. It was in my mind. It was in the environment. The voice of the magician kept on. Each word he said was the crackling of fire. I had no fear. I was being born into all the events of my life. Everything that had been was dead.

I was being reborn, being baptised by tongues of fire. Great demon eyes were glowing above me. Huge, vacant, no fear in those eyes.

I was complete. All was complete.

There was a great, shattering completeness in the cosmic forces. Born into this Flash Gordon world, there was I, wielding the great golden sword of the Vikings.

In those months Bobby came to believe that he was ‘the angel of disobedience,’ a heady conception for a nineteen year old. With no circle to delineate the boundaries of their rites, he began to live in Anger’s dreamworld and make it his own. The fantasies of power and violence had been with him since his life on the streets of LA. The individualistic and non-dual pronouncements of Crowley, though promising liberation, nurtured fatal seeds in the young man.

The city soured into autumn, and people just didn’t love like they used to. That discontent saw the Diggers proclaim ‘the death of hippy’ and ceremoniously carry a coffin through the Haight. Anger seemed to struggle to drive the film project and Bobby started to drift from the maestro. He had only been allowed to crash, but wasn’t making any cash. Persuaded to hand over an eye-smarting $700 for a guitar, Anger discovered his protégé had bought a brick of weed instead. The argument erupted with the virulence and recriminations that the otherwise urbane and charming Anger specialised in.

It was not his only moment of rage, the older man could barely conceal his sexual jealousy as Bobby continued to troop young girls off the streets and into his lair. But the drug deception was a trigger; lying to Anger, himself an inveterate liar, was the unforgivable sin. It is that consistent sense of being slighted, and the intemperate performative cursing that followed, which sabotaged any hopes of a successful life as an auteur. Anger was his own worst enemy, eternally justified, unable to forgive or accept blame, catastrophising professional relationships and personal friendships alike. In this he exhibited the worst aspects of the philosophy of Thelema, which can relentlessly magnify unexamined aspects of the ego.

At the spring equinox they had played a gig at the Straight Theatre, Bobby accompanying Anger’s ritual performance on a bouzouki, before a screening of the Magus’s films. The duo repeat the cash grab on September 21, in an event grandly entitled ‘The Equinox of the Gods’. This time Bobby has a full band and the ritual is filmed. Everyone is on acid. Anger parades in a robe, burns a copy of Liber OZ, and drapes himself in a swastika flag. It doesn’t go well. Bobby splits the next day.

Now the lies start.

Anger directs the narrative with brilliance. He has studied this art in the celebrity press, and he needs an audience to buy it so he can keep the camera rolling.

Beausoleil leaves the Russian Embassy, stealing Anger’s van. Four aluminium Ektachrome EF film cans shot over the summer with his name scrawled over the yellow labels are tossed into the back. That makes for an hour of footage.

Cursed by Anger, the van breaks down in the San Fernando Valley, and as Cupid surveys his broken chariot, a group of girls troop out of the hills, feral barefoot maenads with sultry eyes. Maybe Bobby would like to come live with them at the old movie ranch, named after its owner, George Spahn? Maybe he would like to meet Charlie? They are sure to get along.

Out of cash, Bobby talks to Manson who suggests that he ransom the film back to Anger. The aluminium cans are transferred into a dune buggy from the chop shop where Bobby’s van languishes, and are moved to Barker Ranch. Manson buries them deep in Death Valley. The precious film cannot survive the heat, melting the emulsion into a muted wash. The desert possesses the secret now.

Bobby becomes a killer. The sixties implode.

And that’s a cut.

The poetry of Anger’s version is true because it is made out of fragments of the light. The whole situation reeks of magic. The failure of Lucifer Rising is the failure of the sixties, and Bobby sets the terrible train of events in motion.

Anger has created a superimposition of lies. A once upon a time in Hollywood story. He has a few frames of Bobby left hung up in his cutting room, smoking reefer, ‘tattooed’ with red light projected on his naked torso. These find their way into Invocation of My Demon Brother, that wreckage of a short. Mick Jagger drones an indistinct synth over the assemblage, and that is all we have of the entire ’67 Lucifer project. He makes Demon Brother to get another round of funding, telling all that will listen that he has been robbed; but the story of the robbery keeps changing. In truth the movie was never made, Anger with his perfectionism, mental health issues, drug use and self-destructive methodology just couldn’t get the vision down. Bobby was right to scram from what had become an abusive situation, and confirms that the shooting just never got going.

Bobby, when he hit LA, lived in a tepee with a pet hawk and four girls. He didn’t break down at Spahn Ranch. Manson was squatting at Spiral Staircase in Topanga Canyon, and the two met when Bobby moved in with music teacher, and Buddhist, Gary Hinman, who lived nearby. It was Hinman who hooked up Manson with the Beach Boys. Manson and Beausoleil had a complex relationship: Charlie wanted to use Bobby to bring in the girls, Bobby needed cash and contacts for his music career, but didn’t need the whole guru schtick.

July 25 1969, Bobby, Susan Atkins and Mary Brunner turn up at gentle Gary Hinman’s house. He knows Bobby, so lets him in. Bobby has a knife and a gun. Hinman sold Manson $1000 of mescaline he cooked up in his basement. Manson sold it on to the Straight Satan biker gang, and having sampled it, they say it is poison. Bobby has come to extort money from Gary, and get him to sign over the pink slips on his cars to repay the angry bikers. Bobby and the girls hold Hinman and torture him for three days to no avail. Manson flickers into shot wielding a katana and almost severs Gary’s ear before fleeing the scene. Bobby finally stabs Gary and smothers him to death with a pillow as he bleeds out. He writes ‘political piggy’ and leaves a Black Panther paw print on the wall in Hinman’s blood; the aim is to misdirect the cops. The whole thing is fucked up. A sordid mess of broken children who have lost all sense of morality and are caught in a spiral of violence vengeance and stupidity.

Bobby gets busted a few weeks later in Hinman’s car with the murder weapon in the spare tire well. His arrest prompts the Manson family, and the girls lovesick for Bobby, into further slayings over two hot August nights. With more messages written in blood, the creepy-crawlers ‘make it witchy’ so that Bobby can get off the hook. The Tate-La Bianca murders are, if we can believe the trial account, instigated by Tex Watson. He proclaims – not that he is Lucifer – but the Devil, and ‘here to do the devil’s business.’ That theological distinction is lost in the justified horror at the slaughter.

The killings achieve nothing. On April 18 1970, Bobby is convicted and sentenced to death. His fall is complete.

America needed to plant a Satan for fear they would reap a Lucifer. Manson was their man: a cell-door Scientologist, a guru gone on a power-trip, an MKUltra asset run out of the Free Clinic, a mad jailhouse dog, an abused kid. Pick your poison. I am not going to waste further words on him. The forces of repression needed a scapegoat and that small man willingly played the part. Anger and Crowley are as guilty in the unfolding of events as Lennon and McCartney and the White Album were. Freedom and Love were the victims, exemplified by the pregnant Sharon Tate.

Anger needed to pursue the current, and with San Francisco’s flower fallen and Los Angeles sealed with blood, he fled to London. The darkness followed.

Epilogue

It was on Ocean Beach in the early morning, when it finally came, out of the sea and low over Seal Rock. The craft sailed above the weight of surf dredging up the damp sand. Over Cliff House it lofted, flashing ruby red and emerald green. The silent flight path would take it directly over the Russian Embassy. Holding up his fingers in a frame, he tracked and captured the shot. No camera to record, just three eye witnesses. Other than Kenneth, their names are lost to history but the image would persist.

To be continued.