Over the weekend I was stoked to find out that a new biography of Led Zeppelin guitarist, Jimmy Page, had recently hit the book shelves. According to a review in The London Times the book is a no-holds-barred excavation of Page’s debauchery and excess with a particular emphasis on the musician’s associations with the occult and especially with Aleister Crowley. Here’s a bit from the review…

“In 1970, Jimmy Page bought Boleskine House, an 18th-century lodge on the banks of Loch Ness. The monster that drew Led Zeppelin’s guitarist there was not Nessie, but Aleister Crowley, the late ‘great beast’ of British occultism who had bought the house in 1899. Boleskine, built on the site of a 10th-century church that burnt down with its congregation inside, had allegedly been left brimming with demons after Crowley was called away mid-ritual, which was all part of its appeal to the 26-year-old Page, who had been in thrall to Crowley’s ideas since adolescence.

“For a generation of long- haired rock fans, ownership of Boleskine House confirmed Page’s apparently close alignment with supernatural forces. ”

Read the full review here, and check out this great video that traces the connections between the magus and rocker…

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I’ve got a bit of a difficult film writing assignment hanging over my head this week so rather than posting another horror film post, here’s a selection of recordings from the 1920′s and 1930′s featuring Aleister Crowley reciting occult poetry in both English as well as the Enochian language that Queen Elizabeth I’s court wizard claims to have transmitted from actual angels. Here’s the skinny on Aleister Crowley: The Great Beast Speaks…

20 minutes’ worth of devious recitations, transferred off the original wax cylinders. Wonderful piece of spoken wordedness, with the only drawback being that it’s a horribly crackly lo-fi recording (though faithfully bootlegged into the digital medium). It sounds spooky, and it’s definitely the Man, though it’s really hard to hear what he’s saying. Then what do am I supposed to expect, right; it was made in 1920. More poetry than ritual, I’m afraid, but you do get to hear Uncle Crowley sing in the last track.

This playlist seems to lineup pretty well:

1.
The Call of the First Aethyr (Enochian Version)
2.
The Call of the First Aethyr (English Version)
3.
The Call of the Second Aethyr (Enochian Version)
4.
The Call of the Second Aethyr (English Version)
5.
La Gitana
6.
The Pentagram
7.
One Soverign for the Woman
8.
The Poet
9.
At Sea
10.
The Fingernails
11.
The Titanic
12.
Hymn to the American People
13.
Excerpts from the Gnostic Mass
14.
Vive La French Republic

Now here’s the voice of The Beast…

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I spent the morning writing a review of the 1970, psychedelic classic Performance. For me this is one of the few films from America’s mid-century cultural revolution that still lives up to its shocking reputation. Most people associate Performance with its cinematographer and co-director Nicolas Roeg. Even if you are a die-hard fan of outre, countercultural cinema you might not leap to attention at the mention of the name of Roeg’s partner Donald Cammell.

A painting prodigy as a young man, Cammell was making a living with his brushes by the age of 19. Having built the foundations of a lucrative portrait painting career, Cammell moved to Paris in search of a more inspired path in art. This shunning of commercial opportunity for artistic possibility marked Cammell’s pursuits in the years to come. It’s both the reason why he’s not more widely known and why he continues to be re-discovered by lovers of cinema on the fringes.

Returning to Swinging London in the 1960′s, Cammell decided that painting was dead and that he needed to turn his talents towards cinema. He lived a bohemian lifestyle and became the embodiment of the era’s libertine ideals. He befriended the Rolling Stones and teamed up with Nicolas Roeg to co-direct their sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll classic. Although Roeg is usually associated with the film, its troubled production saw Roeg disconnecting from the post-production process and the film’s final cut, with its revolutionary editing style really belongs to Cammell.

After Performance, Cammell maintained an uneasy relationship with the Hollywood studios. Holding his creative integerity in the highest regard, he made ends meet selling treatments and scripts while trying to develop projects and find funding independently. He wrote a script for William Burroughs that found the author playing a Supreme Court Justice who is kidnapped to North Africa. Cammell also starred as Osiris in his friend Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising.

In addition to his friendship with Anger, Cammell had deeper links to the occult — is father was a friend of Aleister Crowley’s and he even wrote a book about the Great Beast. Cammell told Anger that he’d sat on Crowley’s lap when he was a little boy. Anger promptly sat on Cammell’s lap in an effort to complete the circle!

While Cammell would never secure a star turn in the Hollywood system, his place among experimental filmmakers is beyond dispute. Find out more about Donald Cammell in this fascinating documentary. Here’s Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance…

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I came across a post on the Lashtal site this weekend — BBC 4 is playing a series about the Summer of Love and the first episode featured two mentions of Aleister Crowley. I found the documentary’s trailer online, but couldn’t manage to find the full episode. I’ll keep and eye open for it, but while I was searching I discovered that Crowley has his own channel on YouTube. I’ve seen lots of documentaries and profiles on Crowley, but there’s plenty of fresh content there including this illuminating video featuring Robert Anton Wilson explaining Crowley’s magick…

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I don’t post a lot about sports on this blog — Insomnia is a counterculture blog and sports are mostly intrinsically mainstream culture in America. That said, certain extreme outliers are so crazy that they create subcultures that are ever bit as weird as any artists’ enclave, musicians’ scene or drug tribe. The men and women who climb the highest peaks in the world are definitely a countercultural class — and let’s not forget that even Aleister Crowley fancied a scamper up a mountainside.

Earlier this week Swiss mountain climber Ueli Steck fell 1000 feet off of a ridge while preparing to summit Mount Everest. Here’s some news from AJ…

A famed Swiss climber has died in Nepal’s Everest region after falling 1,000 metres from a ridge during preparations to scale the world’s highest mountain.

Ueli Steck, 40, died on Sunday after falling to the foot of Mount Nuptse, a smaller peak in the area, officials said.

“He skidded off about 1,000 metres from camp … Other climbers ascending Everest saw him and asked for his rescue,” said Dinesh Bhattarai, director-general at Nepal’s Department of Tourism.

Steck, one of the most renowned mountaineers of his generation, was acclimatising before a bid to ascend Everest through the less-climbed West Ridge route and nearby Mount Lhotse next month – all without the use of oxygen supplies.

Every time I hear about a mountaineering disaster like this I’m reminded of the body count of 1996. Here’s a documentary about the worst season on Everest, and the subculture that risks their lives to top that mountain…

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Earlier this week I came across a cool post on the Confidentials site that featured comic book legend/sorcerer supreme Alan Moore talking about the history of Western esoteric traditions and giving a list of his top five mystics and magicians. Here’s a bit about the poet/artist/gnostic prophet William Blake…

Blake summed up the artistic, anarchic soul of magic with his statement, “I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man’s”, and he certainly lived by that difficult dictum.

Though knowledgeable about subjects such as kabbalah or the transcendent teachings of Immanuel Swedenborg, Blake created his own intricate cosmology and expressed it through his visionary art and writings.

And though his gaze saw eternity in a grain of sand and raised an ethereal, fourfold, eternal city over the reeking slums of 18th century London, he was fiercely grounded in material and political reality. Politically a radical, he’d waved his red cap exultantly while watching Newgate prison burn and suffered sedition trials for repelling an attack by a drunken British soldier. He saw celestial or demonic visions on the stairs of his Lambeth home, sat naked with his wife Catherine in its garden, and was a friend of Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.

He could not tolerate cruelty, to people or animals, and if you read his poem London it could have been written last week. He left a glorious body of work that allows us spiritually anaesthetised moderns to catch a glimpse of the archetypal world that he inhabited.

As an artist, as a mystic and as a human being, it is very, very difficult to improve on William Blake.

Blake is one of my great heroes, and his inclusion here is probably what inspired me to post about this. Here is the complete list:

1: Alexander of Abonoteichus (c. 105-c. 170)
2: Dr. John Dee (1527-1609)
3: William Blake (1757-1827)
4: Aleister Crowley (1875-1947)
5: Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956)

Follow the link above to see all the details — it’s a great read. Here’s Moore giving his keynote address at the Trans-State conference last September…

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Charles Stanfeld Jones was two men in one: On one hand Jones was a London accountant born in 1886. On the other, he was a brilliant ceremonial magician whom Aleister Crowley recognized as his “magical child” when Jones shared his brilliant insights into Crowley’s own The Book of the Law. Jones went on to found the first O.T.O. lodge in North America. Here’s the story of the man who took the name Frater Achad, and his pioneering work as one of the 20th century’s most important occultists and authors of the esoteric…

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I suppose it’s just a Halloween hangover, but lately I’ve been a bit obsessed with Kenneth Grant — the British occultist who mixed Aleister Crowley’s Thelemic philosophies with H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos to create his own Typhonian Order. I’m buying presents, and trimming trees, and readying my world for a couple weeks of holiday travel and general celebrating, but I can’t seem to stop listening to YouTube videos about this magical order focused on communication with the kind of extra-dimensional entities Lovecraft created as fiction at the beginning of the 20th century.

Both Lovecraft and Crowley are pop culture figures at this point, and even the average heavy metal fan might know a thing or two about the Typhonian Order. With that in mind here’s an episode of the Living Room Thelema cast for a good little primer on Grant. This episode also puts a spotlight on the kind of political infighting that often disrupts magical orders, and is always so absurd and hilarious.

Here you go…

Stay Awake!

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Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy is a cornerstone book in any esoteric library worthy of the name, and Hall himself was a spiritual prodigy whose publishing and teachings helped to synthesize core ideas of Victorian spiritualism for Americans in the early 20th century. Hall’s ideas would also be revived again in the first New Age stirrings in American 1970′s. Here’s a bit from a recent article about the new book…

Louis Sahagun’s intriguing and well-written biography Master of the Mysteries is a thorough introduction to Manly Palmer Hall’s life and ideas. Master was originally released in 2008; this year is seeing an expanded edition released by Process Media. There’s a new chapter regarding Hall’s relationship with Source Family guru and everyone’s favorite hippie cult leader; Father Yod. Included in this edition is the early correspondence between him and his wife Marie Bauer, whose life consuming obsession with the Bruton Vault drove her slowly insane.

Sahagun takes us through Manly Hall’s childhood and we discover that Hall was a prodigy spiritualist. Raised mostly by his grandmother, he became pastor of a church at 20, around when he published his first books, however a single book pushed him into the limelight. The Secret Teaching or Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy, which was published “before his 28th birthday”. Hall raised $150,000.00 in 1920’s American dollars to publish it according to his vision. The printing of The Secret Teachings was a collaboration between Hall and book designer John Henry Nash at the time known for his work as a printer for the Vatican. Rather than ancient knowledge rotting in musty old libraries, this book was to be a monument to commemorate centuries of esoteric wisdom. At the heart of Hall’s research and work he was a teacher.

Although I’ve never read any of Hall’s books and am coming into him through this biography, one gets the impression that his writing was inspiring to people at the time. Hall was prolific, turning out pamphlets, self-publishing periodicals, authoring many books, and founding the Philosophical Society. A lifelong Rosicrucian and 33rd degree Mason his spiritual authority was legitimate. It was the Philosophical Research Society (PRS) that was his legacy. It still exists today.

Here’s an episode of Bill Cooper’s Hour of the Time radio series “Mystery Babylon” featuring Cooper reading from Hall’s writings about “The Great Work…”

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Today we remember the death of Aleister Crowley on December 1, 1947. There is a handful of documentary films about the man floating about the internet, but these sensationalized accounts don’t do justice to their subject. As far as I know, nobody talks Crowley like Robert Anton Wilson…

Stay Awake!

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