ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
May 11
Hollywood Sorcerer: The Death of Kenneth Anger
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On May 11, 2023, Kenneth Anger died of natural causes
in an assisted living facility in Yucca Valley, California—a sun-bleached
desert town on the edge of Joshua Tree National Park. It was about as far from
the gilded mythology of Hollywood as the geography of Southern California
allows. He was ninety-six years old.
His death was not announced for two weeks while his
estate was settled, which feels appropriate for a man who spent his entire life
insisting that the surface of things concealed something stranger and more
interesting than what was visible.
A Child of the Sun
He was born Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer on February 3,
1927, in Santa Monica, California, the youngest of three children in a
middle-class Presbyterian family.
His father was an electrical engineer at Douglas
Aircraft; his mother was frequently ill. Neither parent appears to have
understood him particularly well, and he returned the favor. His grandmother
Bertha was the decisive early influence—she took him to the cinema for the
first time, to see a double bill of The Singing Fool and Thunder Over
Mexico, and she supported his artistic inclinations through the Depression
years with a combination of financial assistance and genuine encouragement. He
made his first film at the age of ten, using leftover 16-millimeter stock from
a family vacation to Yosemite, dressing himself as a matador while two Boy
Scout friends played the bull.
The family moved to Hollywood in 1944, and Kenneth
enrolled at Beverly Hills High School. It was around this time—through a fellow
filmmaker named Curtis Harrington, whom he’d met at silent film screenings at
Clara Grossman’s art gallery—that he first encountered the work of Aleister
Crowley. The encounter was definitive. He later dropped the surname Anglemyer
entirely, in favor of the single word that suited him better. "I was a
child prodigy who never got smarter," he said once, with the self-deprecating
precision of someone who knew exactly how smart he was.
Fireworks and the Law
In 1947, twenty years old and recently moved out of
his parents’ home, Anger made Fireworks—shooting it in his parents’
Beverly Hills house while they were away for the weekend. The film is a
homoerotic psychodrama in which a young man (Anger himself) is beaten by
sailors, his chest torn open to reveal a lit Roman candle where his heart
should be. It is not subtle. It was also, in 1947 America, an act of
considerable courage: homosexual acts were illegal in the United States, and
underground gay life existed in permanent danger of police entrapment, which
Anger himself had already experienced.
The obscenity charges that followed the film’s
circulation were eventually dismissed—the court ruling that it was a work of
art, not pornography—and Alfred Kinsey, the pioneering sexologist, acquired a
print for his research archives and began a friendship with Anger that would
shape both men’s subsequent work. Anger had found, in a single short film made
in a borrowed house on a weekend, the template he would work from for the rest
of his life: homoerotic imagery, occult symbolism, popular music used as counterpoint
and ironic commentary, the cinema screen as a space where forbidden things
could be shown to an audience that understood they were seeing something real.
The Magick Lantern Cycle
Over the following decades, Anger produced nine films
that he grouped under the collective title the Magick Lantern Cycle—each
one a distinct experiment in the use of cinema as ritual, each one operating
according to the principles of Thelema, the religion founded by Crowley and
organized around the central injunction: Do what thou wilt shall be the
whole of the Law. Anger was a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis and wore a
tattoo of Lucifer’s name on his chest. He was not performing occultism. He was
practicing it, on film, in public, in a medium he described as inherently
magical.
He spent years in Europe in the early 1950s—meeting Jean Cocteau in Paris, Jean Genet, working at the Cinémathèque Française alongside Henri Langlois—before returning to America and producing Scorpio Rising in 1963, the film that made him famous. It runs twenty-eight minutes. It features leather-clad bikers, homoerotic fetishism, swastikas, a collage of pop songs (My Boyfriend's Back, Fools Rush In, He's a Rebel) cut against images of Christ and Hitler and motorcycle chrome, simultaneously a celebration and a death-image of American masculine mythology. Anger called it “a death mirror held up to American culture.” Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, and John Waters all cite it as a foundational influence, and in many ways, invented the grammar of the music video before the advent of MTV.
Anger and his allies also invented the midnight movie
as a distribution strategy—screening Scorpio Rising at hours when the
more conservative audiences would already be in bed, simultaneously creating a
new venue for underground cinema and a new financing model, as wealthy
countercultural sympathizers began investing in the work. One such patron, John
Paul Getty Jr., funded Anger’s relocation to London in the late 1960s, where he
found himself circulating through the demimonde of Robert Fraser’s Indica Gallery,
attending parties with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and eventually living with
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and their respective girlfriends Marianne
Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg, both couples then in the grip of a serious
interest in occultism that Anger’s presence did nothing to discourage.
Lucifer Rising
The decade-long production of Lucifer Rising is
one of the stranger stories in the history of experimental cinema—a film about
the invocation of the Light-Bearer that attracted, in its making, a cast of
characters that reads like a police blotter of the counterculture’s darkest
corners. Anger had conceived the film as the Thelemic counterpart to Scorpio
Rising—where that film was a death-image, this one would be a birth, the
announcement of the new Aeon of Horus, Lucifer summoned in his true role as
bringer of light rather than Christian symbol of fallen evil.
His initial choice for the role of Lucifer was Bobby Beausoleil—a nineteen-year-old musician of extraordinary physical beauty who was living with Anger at the Westerfeld House in San Francisco, a dilapidated Victorian building the locals called the Russian Embassy. Beausoleil founded a band to record the soundtrack; however, he and Anger eventually fell out, the footage was repurposed into Invocation of My Demon Brother instead, and Beausoleil subsequently fell in with Charles Manson and was convicted of the torture-murder of Gary Hinman in 1969, for which he remained imprisoned for the rest of his life. The soundtrack he wrote for Lucifer Rising was composed and recorded in prison.
Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin—who shared Anger’s passion
for Crowley to the extent of purchasing Crowley’s Boleskine House on the shores
of Loch Ness and amassing one of the world’s great private collections of
Crowleyana—agreed to compose a new soundtrack, delivered only half of what was
needed, and was, by Anger’s account, publicly cursed for his trouble. Marianne
Faithfull, battling addiction severe enough that she was, in Anger’s phrase,
“powdering her face with heroin,” appeared as the goddess Lilith. The film was
shot on location at the Pyramids of Giza, at Stonehenge, at the volcanic
landscapes of Iceland. When it was finally completed and distributed in 1980,
it was a work of genuine, disorienting beauty—twenty-eight minutes of ritual
cinema, Egyptian gods summoning the angel of light, the new age arriving in
slow ceremony against a landscape of ancient stone.
Cinema as Mantra
The intellectual framework Anger brought to filmmaking
was consistent and serious throughout his career. He regarded cinema not as an
art form but as a magical operation—a technology for altering consciousness,
bypassing the rational mind, and invoking forces that existed whether or not
the audience believed in them. “Movies can be the equivalent of mantras,” he
said. “They cause you to lose track of time and become disoriented because
magical things can happen.” He also insisted that cinema was “evil” in the
technical sense he meant by the word: involving the viewer in the glamour of
material existence, “enchantment with the look of things, rather than the soul
of things.” The day cinema was invented, he once declared, was a black day for
mankind—a statement that, from a man who spent eighty years making films, had
the quality of a koan.
Anger was a lifelong friend of Anton LaVey, founder of
the Church of Satan, with whom he shared an interest in the theatrics of
transgression if not an identical philosophy—Anger called himself a pagan and a
Thelemite, not a Satanist, and distinguished carefully between the solar
masculinity of Thelema and what he considered Wicca’s lunar femininity. He
spent years in the 1990s living with LaVey and his family in San Francisco. The
range of his personal associations—Kinsey and Cocteau and Genet and Jagger and Page
and LaVey and Getty—describes the full perimeter of the twentieth century’s
underground, the territory where art and transgression and genuine spiritual
seeking overlapped.
His other great cultural intervention was Hollywood Babylon—the 1965 book that assembled the scandal mythology of early
Hollywood into a compendium of gossip, innuendo, apocryphal anecdote, and
photographs that were often misattributed, misidentified, or simply invented.
It was a bestseller. Many of its claims have been disproved. Some remain in
circulation as urban legends. Anger offered it not as journalism but as
mythology—an alternative history of the Dream Factory that was true in the way
that myths are true, which is to say not literally but essentially. He was, as
always, more interested in the hidden structure than the visible surface.
Death in the Desert
He died in Yucca Valley, in the California high desert, beside Joshua Tree National Park. Jack Parsons—the rocket scientist and Thelemite whose life overlaps with Anger’s in the California occult scene of the 1940s—would have recognized the address. The desert has always been where the serious practitioners end up. His death was announced two weeks after it happened, on May 24, while his estate was settled. He was ninety-six. He had outlived nearly everyone he had ever made films with, corresponded with, cursed, or loved. He had watched the grammar he invented in Scorpio Rising become the grammar of every music video ever made, every cinematic advertisement, every montage sequence in every film since 1963 that cuts popular music against moving images with something other than literal illustration in mind.
Anger was asked once what he expected after death.
“Either it’s just a black curtain,” he said. “Life is interesting enough. You
don’t need something after. It’d be nice if there is—nearly all the cultures
imagine some kind of heaven, but it could just be wishful thinking. Then, to
counter the heaven, they’ve imagined a hell. And often the hell thing is more
interesting.”
It’s a Thelemite’s answer, finally—interested in the
structure of things, amused by the symmetry, unwilling to commit to either pole
of the binary. The man who spent his life making films about Lucifer as a
bringer of light was, at ninety-six, still working out the cosmology, still
looking at the map of the heavens and wondering what it meant.
The lantern was his word for it—the magick lantern that gives light and casts shadows and turns the flat surface of a screen into a space where something real can happen, if the operator knows what they’re doing. Kenneth Anger knew what he was doing.
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