This year we celebrate the 75th birthday of British filmmaker Derek Jarman. Jarman was born on January 31, 1942. I’m always discovering and then keeping tabs on these timely anniversaries of our countercultural forebears, and I’m happy to highlight this one even if I’m getting to it about 7 months too late. The good news is that now we’ve got 4 more months to celebrate the groundbreaking filmmaker and his intense, chromatic, radical cinema. Jarman died of an AIDS-related illness in London in 1994, but not before creating a body of work that has only grown its audience since the filmmaker’s death.

Here are Open Culture’s words on Jarman’s 1978 punk rock film, Jubilee…

Derek Jarman was too old and too accomplished to be a punk. By 1977, the openly gay filmmaker and artist was already 36 and had an impressive CV that included doing set design for Ken Russell’s The Devils and directing Sebastiane, a landmark in gay cinema, notable for not only its frank depiction of the male body but also for its dialogue which was entirely in Latin. Nonetheless, Jarman gathered together notables from London’s burgeoning punk scene, including a young, lithe Adam Ant, to create Jubilee –the first and, arguably best, punk movie ever. You can watch it above.

The plot, as such, centers on Queen Elizabeth I who, with the help of court occultist John Dee (played by Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Richard O’Brien), sees her land 400 years into the future. It’s a Britain filled with garbage and plagued with crime. Queen Elizabeth II, for instance, was killed in a mugging. As Queen Elizabeth I wanders around the wreckage of the British Empire, she encounters a bunch of leather-clad toughs including Amyl Nitrite (played by Malcolm McLaren protégé Jordan), Crabs (Little Nell, also from Rocky Horror) and Mad (Toyah Willcox, who would later go on to delight a generation of toddlers by voicing The Teletubbies). The highpoint of the movie is, without a doubt, is when Jordan performs a risqué dance to a glammed up version of Rule Britannia.

Jarman tapped into the same feelings of anger, disillusionment, and nihilism that the Sex Pistols articulated. As Jarman told The Guardian in 1978, “We have now seen all established authority, all political systems, fail to provide any solution – they no longer ring true.” Jubilee feels like a John Waters movie without the gross-out gags. A Paul Morrissey movie but with a clear sense of political purpose. It’s giddy, uninhibited, violent and occasionally quite disturbing.

Here’s Jarman’s Jubilee…

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The other night I woke up before my alarm and started listening to a podcast on my phone in hopes of getting back to sleep for a little while longer. At some point the conversation on this ‘cast turned to the fact that artist, filmmaker, curator Harry Smith had been working on a movie about John Dee’s Enochian Tablets before he died. I looked all over the internet and couldn’t find much about the project, but I did find a fun section on Wiki that talks all about Smith’s interest in the occult.

BTW I just donated $20 bucks to Wikipedia and if you like this blog I hope you’ll consider supporting them as well. Thanks!

Here’s the lowdown on Smith’s scrying the higher planes…

Smith said he had become acquainted with the Lummi Indians through his mother’s teaching work and claimed to have participated in shamanic initiation at a young age. He recorded Lummi songs and rituals using homemade equipment and notation of his own devising and developed an important collection of Native American religious objects.

Tarot cards were another of Smith’s interests. A set of “irregularly-shaped Tarot cards” he designed was apparently used for the degree certificates for a branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis founded by occult “magus” Aleister Crowley.[34] In the late 1940s in California Smith is said to have worked with the reputed occult “magus” Aleister Crowley’s one-time acolyte Charles Stansfeld Jones,[citation needed] a convert to Roman Catholicism, and later with Jones’s “trusted student”, Albert Handel[35] in New York.

Smith frequented the Samuel Weiser Antiquarian Bookstore, a used book store on New York’s “Book Row” that specialized in works on comparative religion, hermeticism, and the occult. The store also had a publishing house, Weiser Books, which used Smith’s designs for its paperback edition of Aleister Crowley’s Holy Books of Thelema.[34]

Sanders recounts that Smith was the key advisor for Allen Ginsberg and the Fugs’s effort to levitate The Pentagon. “In the fall of 1967,” he wrote:

a bunch of us decided to exorcise the demons from the Pentagon as part of a big demonstration against the Vietnam War. (You can get a flavor of that day from Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night.) I was in charge of coming up with a structure for the Exorcism. I knew Harry would know what to do so I conferred with him. He gave me the basic outline, which was to use the symbols of the four directions, and to use the symbols of earth, air, fire, and water. He also suggested adding a cow, to represent the Goddess Hathor. We did have a cow prepared, painted with mythic symbols, but the police stopped it from getting near the Pentagon. The Exorcism was duly recorded by WBAI’s Bob Fass, and can be found on the Fugs album Tenderness Junction.[34]

Smith also studied the Enochian system in depth and as it was recounted by Edward Kelley and John Dee, and as later elaborated upon by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Ordo Templi Orientis. He also compiled a concordance of the Enochian language with the aid of Khem Caigan, his assistant throughout much of the 1970s and early 1980s.[citation needed]

In 1986 Smith was consecrated a bishop in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, which claims William Blake and Giordano Bruno in its pantheon of saints. Smith had long been a familiar figure in the New York branch of Ordo Templi Orientis. After his death, Smith’s branch of the sect performed a Gnostic Mass in his honor at St. Mark’s Church in the East Village.[34]

I just recalled some music from a post from last July. Here’s a bit about the record from the folks at Smithsonian Folkways…

In 1964, Harry Smith (who compiled the Anthology of American Folk Music) was held for a week in the Anadarko, Oklahoma, jail on suspicion of stealing guns, and there he met several Kiowa Indians who introduced him to peyote rituals and songs of the Native American Church. In 1973, Smith returned to Anadarko to record. He decided to set up his equipment in singers’ homes or his hotel room, rather than at an actual ceremony, because the Kiowa often sang the songs in casual settings; he also would be able to record commentary.

Here’s The Kiowa Peyote Meeting…

Stay Awake!

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The doctor is in.

If you’re already confused, this book isn’t for you. This is not a biography of John Dee or an in-depth examination of the events that found the 16th-century mathematician, scientist, occultist, and the astrologer of Queen Elizabeth I seemingly contacting angels and receiving what may be the most important divinely-channeled communication of all time.  If you are interested in finding out more about Enochian Magic, start with Benjamin Woolley’s excellent tome The Queen’s Conjurer: The Science and Magic of Dr. John Dee, Adviser to Queen Elizabeth I. This new volume is no place for newbies.

On the other hand, if you’ve found yourself intrigued with Dee’s accomplishments, there is much to explore here. And if you’re fluent in the Enochian tongue, this volume promises to put a private collection of Dee’s writings in your conjuring little hands.

The book’s strength lies in DeSalvo’s contextualizing of the magical writings that Dee’s efforts with assistant Edward Kelley produced. DeSalvo’s short, sharp chapters at the beginning of the book pull Dee and Kelley’s pursuits out of a vacuum and place them in a Biblical/historical framework that reads like a mystery novel.

DeSalvo goes into detail about the apocryphal Book of Enoch and the titular Biblical character the book is attributed to. While many attracted to DeSalvo’s book are undoubtedly familiar with these controversial Old Testament writings, DeSalvo’s parsing of the book, its author, its legend and lore are a welcome surprise and the fascinating parallels he draws between the Book of Enoch and the transmissions that Dee and Kelley received are the highlight of the volume.

Along the way, DeSalvo also reveals what he claims to be the missing 49th Table of Enoch, and his step-by-step reconstruction of the rows and columns of various tables almost remind us of an episode of C.S.I. However, despite the forensic intrigue of the first half of the book, the centerpiece is something of a disappointment.

While one’s own set of Dee’s complete tables and writings would be a great addition to any occultist’s library, the offerings here come up short. The last section of the book offers digital reproductions of the actual leaves that Dee and Kelley transcribed from the angels. The problem is that they are so small and lacking in sharpness that it’s difficult to know what to do with them. One can’t really appreciate their details and idiosyncrasies as one might with a work of art. The downright hard to read reproductions will also be of little use to the mage who might have hoped to solve the mysteries of the tables on  his/her own.  We would’ve loved to have seen this released in a coffee table edition that would’ve given readers the real sensation of flipping through Dee’s scrawlings and slipping into one of magic’s greatest mysteries.

While the book’s central offering is a letdown, DeSalvo’s commentary and criticism is enjoying near-universal praise and Decoding the Enochian Secrets is an important book for anyone serious about the study of Dee, his angels, and their magic.

Want to find out more? Watch Terence McKenna – The Alchemical Dream Rebirth of the Great Work. McKenna tells the story of alchemy and even takes on the role of John Dee himself. This is a great place to start any exploration of the Enochian realms.

Joe Nolan <3