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You'd never believe the Church of Satan considered this guy a heretic!

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After the most month-shaped week in history, we return to game with a great new episode of SittingNowish delights. This weeks guest, the fantastic Rodney Orpheus, gives us a great interview about the infamous Aleister Crowley. Discussed: Magick, The Abbey of the Thelema, The Ordo Templi Orientis, The A∴A∴, why Crowley is still so revered, Doing thou will, and our plot for a strange Victorian porn film.

Hyde to Kim’s Jekyll, Daddytank, returns with a nostalgic, but great MySpace Heroes. This weeks Musikal weapons:

Twiggy and the K-Mesons : Preset Love
Yellow Then Blue : The Black Rose
Raleigh St Clair : Alphabet

Books recomended by Rodney:

Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley & The Eye in the Triangle: Interpretation of Aleister Crowley

Rodney’s own fantastic book:

Abrahadabra: Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thelemic Magick

Don’t forget to give us a review on iTunes when you have a spare 2 minutes, we’d really appreciate it.

Enjoy!

Rodney Orpheus’ (impressive) Biography:

Rodney Orpheus was born in Northern Ireland, and in the past years has lived in Hamburg, Germany and Los Angeles, California. He currently lives in The Cotswolds in England.

For the past twenty years Rodney has been well-known as a musician, record producer, and author. He lectures frequently at colleges and music business events, where his ability to present highly technical matters in an entertaining, understandable style has made him very much in demand.

Rodney has acted as a consultant with many of the top companies in the music instrument industry in the past years, most notably with Steinberg and DTS, as well as writing a regular monthly column for Computer Music magazine and running the ground-breaking musicians community at mi7.com

After the release of his seminal band, The Cassandra Complex’s first records Orpheus spent several years touring Europe, originally basing himself in Aachen, Germany, where he joined Ordo Templi Orientis. Orpheus had been studying the works of Aleister Crowleyand other occult authors since his teenage years, and previously had been founder and editor of the UK occult newspaper Pagan News along with Phil Hine. While in Aachen he began work on the book Abrahadabra, published originally by Looking Glass Press in Sweden, later republished by Weiser Books. The book has been described as “a significant contribution to the field of thelemic, or Crowleyan if you will, magick.” and “one of the very few competent and readable introductory texts to Thelemic magick.”

He still also occasionally gets time to play with The Cassandra Complex on stage and in the studio. He is currently completing work on his second book.

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bobwilson

Fnord!

HAIL ERIS!!! This week we present you with a BUMPER two hour Robert Anton Wilson tribute spectacular! Joining me, amongst a pleathora of guests, is the host of  the Disinformation Companies Podcast Joe McFall (Mort also joins us for one section). In this weeks episode we jump into the enlightening concepts of Discordianism, Magick, , Conspiracy Theories, Subgenius, General Semantics, The CounterCulture old and new amongst other Wilsonian subjects. Also checkout the chance to win a copy of the amazing Maybe Logic DVD, courtesy of the amazing Deep Leaf Productions.

We are joined in our discussion by returning guests Rev. Ivan Stang from the Church of the Subgenius, Thelemic author and all-round Magickal chap Lon Milo Duquette, co-founder of the Disinformation Company Richard Metzger and Experimental Magician Taylor Ellwood.

Of course, no episode of SittingNow would be complete without the infinite musical wisdom of DaddyTank, who this week presents us with:

Yeknom Susej – Monkey Pickle

Yellow Then Blue – C Mass

Beta Central - Massacre Component

Youngdental - Full and Empty Country

Clips used in the show are used courtesy of Deep Leaf Productions, and Sounds True Audio.

Check out both of these recordings, I would recomend them to anyone!

Annoying little B-list celebrity brat, Peaches Geldof, daughter of scruffy ‘Live-Aid’ organiser Bob Geldof, has apparently taken a shine to ‘The Great Beast 666′ himself, Aleister Crowley.

That pillar of journalism, The Daily Star, reports:

We can reveal Peaches, 19, has become fascinated by Crowley – who filed his teeth into fangs and started his own religion – since picking up his book Magick Without Tears. 

And she ditched musician Faris Rotter, 22, after discovering Chester French singer Drummey, 23, was also a student of Crowley’s dark works. Last night a source close to the couple said: “Peaches is obsessed with Crowley’s books and is completely taken by his teachings. 

“Most of her mates think she’s nuts for getting into it all – they just think it’s too weird – but she found a kindred spirit when she met Max.

“Peaches feels he’s the only one who understands her. He even has the Crowley quote ‘Quo stet olympus’ or ‘Where the gods and angels live’ tattooed below his neck.”

I know that Crowley’s public profile is increasing, and I guess this was an inevitable side-effect of that, but come on!!!….Peaches….Geldof???

In other celebrity news, Jeremy Kyle has been spotted with Israel Regardie’s ‘The Golden Dawn’ and Jade Goody is said to have successfully complete the Abramelin Operation and is now moving onto invoking Goetian spirits.

Best known for his editing role on Monty Python’s ‘The Life of Brian’ and special effects man on Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’, Julian Doyle returns with his B-Movie take on Aleister Crowley in this years ‘Chemical Wedding‘. Deciding not to take the biographical role, and instead envisioning Crowley in a modern setting, the film took a panning by critics, and Crowley fans alike. We sent in our man, Adrian Dobbie, to find out what Doyles motives and reactions were behind the film…

Resurrecting the Beast

I’ve only been in the company of ex-Monty Python collaborator Julian Doyle for half an hour or so but already the conversation has been surprisingly brisk. So far we’ve discussed the Osirian symbolism behind the story of Abelard and Eloise, the influence of early Christian Britain on the Roman Empire before Constantine and the idea that giants built many of the Neolithic stone circles in the British Isles.  Oh and we’ve touched on quantum theory too. Just a little.

I’m at Doyle’s North London home to interview him about the movie Chemical Wedding, which alongside Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson, Doyle co-wrote, directed, edited and produced. To date, Chemical Wedding is by far the most ambitious and commercially successful feature film to have been made about the character of Aleister Crowley. And I do mean the character of Aleister Crowley rather than Aleister Crowley himself because Chemical Wedding, which premiered at the London Science Fiction Film Festival earlier this year, certainly isn’t a straight biopic of the Beast.

The film chooses to eschew the option of a straightforward period retelling of Crowley’s life and works, opting instead to play with a ‘what-if?’ scenario by bringing ‘the Beast 666′ back from the dead in the modern era. In the film, a ‘virtual’ reincarnation of Crowley (artfully realised by British Shakespearian actor Simon Callow) is released on an unsuspecting modern day Cambridge, thanks to an experiment involving a university professor, a virtual reality suit and a supercomputer that has been programmed with the numerical codes contained in the magickal rites of the Master Therion.

When the trial run of the VR suit goes horribly wrong, the brain of stuttering classics professor Oliver Haddo is bombarded by Crowley’s ritual symbolism and in a shocking overnight transformation, he ‘becomes’ the Beast 666. He shaves his head, dons a natty purple suit and fedora hat and proceeds to wreak total havoc around the Cambridge campus, urinating on students, defecating on desks, conducting orgies and generally behaving very badly in his three-day quest for permanent reincarnation. Suffice to say, those hoping for historically accurate tales of Golden Dawn leadership battles, life in the Abbey at Cefalu or lucid expositions of the Law of Thelema will be sorely disappointed.

Instead, Chemical Wedding revels in being a quintessentially British, low-budget romp. Think the bastard child of Blood on Satan’s Claw and Carry On Screaming. The film is possessed of an undeniable charm, bags of humour, a tongue planted firmly in cheek at all times and, as it plays with the ideas of non-linear time, multiple universes and the creation of magickal children, it never forgets to have great fun along the way.

The film polarised opinion among Crowley enthusiasts and the general cinema-going public alike and it’s very easy to see why. While those harbouring a vested interest in Crowley’s positive portrayal baulked at the film’s sensationalist portrait of the Beast ‘at large’ in the 21^st century, others found the lack of serious content a stumbling block too great to overcome. The great cinema going masses largely ignored it, much as they ignore anything to do with Aleister Crowley, so no great surprises there.

Reviews were decidedly mixed on its initial theatre release. The high-brow papers rubbished it, while the tabloids and lad-mags hailed it as a ‘guilty pleasure’. Despite the bad press Doyle is unbowed as he unwraps a brand new DVD of the film. He’s eager to give me a peek at two reinstated deleted scenes that, he says, tie up a few loose ends in the plot; “Reviewers seeing the DVD version have likened the story to a kind of dark Da Vinci Code,” says Doyle, “I wanted to get two new occult theories into the film; one, that the story of Abelard and Eloise actually details the workings of a sex magical ritual which has only been enacted 4 times in history, the other that Joseph of Aramathea may have been the real father of Jesus…”

Hardly top contenders for the dominant themes running through a film about Aleister Crowley one might think, but then it depends very much on what kind of interest you have in the man himself. There are two types of people who get excited about Crowley: first there are the ‘Thelemites’ who are generally so focused on Crowley as the Prophet of the Aeon of Horus, that they forget there are plenty of folk who simply like Crowley because, well, he was a really interesting guy. There’s no shortage of people out there who are turned on by Crowley the iconoclast; the mountaineer; the drug fiend; the ‘black magician’; the ‘man behaving badly’. To my mind there’s nothing wrong with this level of interest. It’s all grist to the mill.

However, it’s worth bearing in mind that when the latter type of person makes a film about Aleister Crowley, the former can’t expect it to be tailored to them alone. This is where a lot of serious students of Crowley have had trouble attempting to understand this film – it’s just not aimed directly at them and they just can’t understand why the hell it isn’t.

Doyle is quite clear about his motives for making the movie; “To me it’s all about making a film that’s entertaining. I think the film is very watchable and that’s what I was after. It’s one thing to make an interesting film, but I like stuff with hidden meaning. The story of Chemical Wedding has meaning behind it and it’s got this very interesting character centre stage, someone we can reignite interest in. That’s a really nice thing to be able to do”.

Doyle isn’t too concerned about a duty to portray Crowley in a particularly positive light. Given the premise of the story the audience is never asked to believe that the character on screen is the ‘real’ thing and this allows for a considerable amount of artistic leeway; “We were attempting to make a film that was populist. I already had enough trouble with the financiers when I was trying to get anything of any interest into the film,” he laughs, “…y’know – they just wanted a horror film with black cats and people drinking blood, but I didn’t want to make it that simple. The film doesn’t have a genre. It’s impossible to classify.”

You can say that again. Although plenty of people I know have used certain four-letter words in attempts to categorise the film, Chemical Wedding does avoid the pitfalls of simplistic shlock on the one hand and preaching to a converted audience on the other. Instead it goes unashamedly for the bigger, popular vote. Whether it succeeds is another matter but either way you have to admire the sheer determination involved in managing to get a film about Aleister Crowley financed, made and distributed to mainstream cinemas. It’s nothing short of a miracle.

Doyle’s first contact with co-conspirator Bruce Dickinson came while shooting the video for Iron Maiden’s 1988 classic ‘Can I Play with Madness?’, which featured the late ex-Python Graham Chapman. Dickinson first approached Doyle with the idea of making a film about Crowley in the early 90s; “Bruce had wanted to do a film about Crowley for years. He came to me with a number of scripts and eventually we decided we couldn’t do a period piece, partly because of budget restrictions and partly because the story of Crowley doesn’t have the right kind of drama to make a successful film…” argues Doyle, “…then Bruce sent me a script featuring a virtual reality suit, and this was when VR was very new. I took that script, restructured it, gave it some shape and colour and all the time I was adding the occult stuff that I wanted to get in there. About 80% of the final story is mine.”

The film took the best part of 2 decades to reach full realisation, much of that time was spent in attempting to gain funding for what was and still is a risky project. In the time between the writing of the script and the making of the film, interest in the possibilities of VR has dissipated to such a degree that when one watches the film, one gets the distinct feeling that it was made 15 years too late. Chemical Wedding is undeniably flawed; a large proportion of the cast’s youthful inexperience is brought into sharp focus when contrasted with the commanding presence of the lead and the low budget means a few corners were cut in production. Doyle admits as much but defends the film’s homespun sensibilities; “I’m certainly not embarrassed by the end result. The film has that Hammer Horror look because we didn’t have the time or the budget for much sophisticated camera work, so it has that kind of feel and think that’s perfectly fine.”

Whatever criticisms we may lay at the door of Chemical Wedding, all are agreed that the film comes alive whenever the character of Oliver Haddo, the Cambridge don possessed by the spirit of Crowley, arrives on screen. Simon Callow who plays Haddo/Crowley was not the first choice to play the lead role, but he quite simply saves the film single-handedly with his boisterous portrayal of the Beast; “…I was very unsure of Simon at first, but as soon as we heard him read the script we knew – it was him.” says Doyle, “Simon hits the right note between the heaviness and high camp the role requires.” He’s right. Callow plays a convincing Crowley, albeit as a conscious pastiche. In one memorable scene the Crowley figure is hauled before a panel of university bigwigs to explain his errant behaviour; Callow gives an incredibly strong performance, with ‘Crowley’ quoting freely from the more lurid passages in the Bible as he successfully attempts to undermine his peers’ faith in the ‘good book’. It’s a great scene and genuinely funny.

The film attempts to draw parallels between science and magick, referencing the real Crowley’s own interest in the then burgeoning science of Quantum Physics. This is a very strong thread throughout the film and one that Doyle is keen to emphasise; “Along with the two new occult theories, I wanted one new piece of scientific information to come through and that was about the nature of time.” Says Doyle “I have this theory that time doesn’t actually exist, its only the degradation of matter, the slowing down of matter. If you speed up matter to the speed of light, time ceases to exist. How long ago was the big bang? For light, the big bang is still happening.”

It’s evident that Doyle is enthusiastic about his subject matter. What is also evident to the serious student of Crowley’s work is that maybe a little more research ought to have been done before committing such a parody of Crowley to film for general consumption. While the film is littered with Crowley in-jokes; the female lead is called Leah; Oliver Haddo is the name of W. Somerset Maugham’s magician from the book of the same name, himself based on Crowley; the Z93 supercomputer; all this suggests a cursory level of research and it’s all good fun spotting the references in the film. However, beyond that we get very little of the ‘true’ message of Crowley. The concept of Thelema is conspicuous by its absence throughout and Liber Al, the Holy Book which is central to any understanding of Crowley’s life never once gets a mention. Doyle defends his decision to leave Thelema out of the equation; “I couldn’t see how we could successfully work that into a commercial film. I was more interested in making Crowley a shocking character, updating the shock value.”

And that, really, is the bottom line with Chemical Wedding. It’s ultimately much more concerned with exploring the shocking, controversial aspect of Crowley and imagining what might happen if he were alive in a modern setting than it is with bringing the real message of Crowley to the popular world. Yet before leaping to criticise, it is worth remembering that if the script had attempted to do that, the film would never have been made as it would never have secured financial backing.

So, the film’s got a bit of science, a bit of magick, a bit of controversy and some laughs, but it’s not a film about the real Crowley. It’s fun if you forgive the rather patchy production and below-par acting of the majority of the cast, but if you are expecting a film that’s a good advert for Crowley or his doctrine of Thelema, this certainly isn’t it. In a way, I hope there never will be. Perhaps Crowley is best left where he is – in the shadows.

Adrian Dobbie

Fantastic new addition to the SittingNow writing-crew, Adrian Dobbie, gets down and dirty with the recent Julian Doyle (Monty Python)/Bruce Dickinson (Iron Maiden) written, Chemical Wedding. Is this release finally what acolytes of Aleister Crowley have been waiting for? or another Magickly-huge disapointment?…

Carry-On Crowley?

Among occultists and Thelemites specifically there has long been a certain desire to see their hero Crowley immortalised on film. The exploits of the Master Therion would seem to offer pre-packaged prime subject matter for an industry that thrives on titillation and sensationalism, but while general interest in Crowley does seem to be on the rise, the definitive Crowley film remains to be made. In the last few years we’ve seen a number of documentaries of varying quality and lately the internet has been awash with teasers and half-baked trailers promising more dramatized takes on the life and times of the Beast 666. Yet none of these have seemed more likely to come to fruition than Bruce Dickinson’s project ‘Chemical Wedding’. For those who may not know who Dickinson is, he is the yodelling, spandex-sporting front man of legendary UK metal band Iron Maiden. I have to admit that when I first heard about the Brit-rock legend touting his screenplay around Hollywood, my heart sank. In my opinion, Dickinson was possibly the worst person to be planning a movie about Crowley; I just couldn’t see how a man so steeped in juvenile horror-movie imagery from his years on the heavy metal circuit could possibly come up with anything other than a hatchet job if let loose on the Crowley story. So when the imminent release of the movie was announced I’ll admit I feared the worst but my curiosity was piqued nonetheless. Upon seeing the trailer online I actually thought it could be a good film after all, if slightly sensationalist. When I heard that the premier was happening last month just a few miles from where I live, I just had to get a ticket. So off I duly went to London’s West End to see what the fuss was all about.

The story opens in 1947 with two young students visiting an ageing Crowley at his lodgings in Hastings, England. We learn that one is a regular caller, while the other is nervous about meeting the Beast for the first time. As they enter Crowley’s dark bedsitting room, they find the prophet of the new aeon ailing but still lewdly vigorous. Crowley however is preoccupied by the exploits of his young acolytes in Pasadena. He has learned that Jack Parsons & L Ron Hubbard have been busying themselves in attempts to produce a Moonchild and Crowley is not best pleased. With this initial portrayal of the Beast in his latter years we get the first hint that the film will be taking more than a few artistic liberties. The man we see before us, although masterfully realised, is the stout, bald Crowley of two decades previous and certainly not the wizened pipe smoker that we know he was during his final years. Nevertheless – we are only treated to a few minutes of Crowley in this incarnation before he is mortally struck down. He dramatically celebrates his greater feast during his young friends’ visit, presumably as a direct result of the dark forces unleashed by his two wards on the other side of the Atlantic.

We now fast forward to turn-of-the-millennium Cambridge where a team of visiting scientists from Cal Tech are preparing to unveil a state-of-the-art virtual reality suit before the assembled academics of the University. The suit is controlled by a supercomputer called – wait for it – the Z93, whose chief programmer, a certain Victor Newman, just happens to be a student of the works of Aleister Crowley. We learn that Newman has distilled the rituals of Crowley’s magick into a numerical code that he has fed directly into the program that runs the VR suit. Eager to test his invention before its official maiden voyage, he manages to lure the bumbling, stuttering, classics tutor, Professor Haddo (Simon Callow), into giving the suit a sneaky whirl. The hapless professor, fresh from an on-campus masonic meeting, agrees to take part and it’s here that the story properly begins.

Haddo dons the suit and is bombarded with the accumulated power of Crowley’s rituals in virtual form. When we next see him, the shy, floppy haired don has disappeared and instead, he has morphed into a strangely familiar, bald, menacing character, wilfully striding down the University’s corridors on his way to deliver a lecture on Shakespeare. In the course of ensuing events it becomes obvious to all, not least the Cambridge don who years ago visited the Beast on the day he died, that Haddo’s body has been taken over by a ‘virtual Crowley’, who has plans to stick around for good. In order to do so, the resurrected occultist must perform a magickal operation called the ‘Chemical Wedding’ whereby, with the help of a Scarlet Woman, he will summon the demon Choronzon and so take permanent possession of his new host.

From here on in the film becomes an example of the kind of high-camp, low-budget British thriller-cum-horror that we haven’t seen much of since the demise of the Hammer marque nearly 30 years ago. As his quest to find the perfect scarlet woman unfolds, the reincarnated Crowley sets out on a rampage round Cambridge leaving a trail of flagellation, sex magick, murder and scatology in his wake. The girl in his sights turns out to be Leah, a plucky young student reporter and it isn’t long before she and a visiting American professor called Mathers team up and set about thwarting Crowley’s plans for permanent reincarnation.

It’s wacky stuff, and in places it’s laugh-out-loud funny. In fact it’s as much Carry-On as it is Hammer Horror. Callow camps it up royally in cartoon Crowley mode and in so doing puts his fellow cast members in the shade. There are a few stand-out scenes: an operation to enlist the help of a hapless aide is hilarious, Crowley’s method of acquiring a rather natty purple suit and fedora hat brought howls from the audience and in an act of sex magick designed to entrap his muse we see Crowley ‘charging’ a talisman and then sending it via fax to Leah.  She discovers a rather sticky mess coming through on the copy at her end…

It’s all good fun when it works, but all too often the clumsy editing, redundant plot twists, below-par acting and the shot-on-digital-media feel let the picture down. Some will undoubtedly enjoy playing ‘spot the Crowley reference’ as the film blunders on. In-jokes abound; half the characters in the film bear names not too dissimilar to associates of the Beast and there’s enough trivia to satisfy the nerd in any of us. However, those looking for a positive or serious take on Crowley’s doctrine of Thelema will be disappointed – it’s just never mentioned. Not once. On the other hand, those fearing misrepresentation can largely breathe a sigh of relief, the Crowley character’s murderous tendencies notwithstanding. The film does attempt to pose some real questions about the nature of the relationship between magick and science (VR as ersatz astral plane, the potential for downloading personalities as digital information) but it ends up trying to cover so much ground that it fails to do any more than scratch the surface of a fascinating subject, while various plot devices such as Crowley’s masonic connections are alluded to but never elaborated. As such it’s as frustrating as it is fun. The definitive film about Crowley this certainly isn’t, but if you have a penchant for oddball British camp-horror, who knows? This film may just be for you.

2/5

Adrian Dobbie

www.chemicalweddingmovie.co.uk

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Our guest this week, Lon Milo DuQuette, has authored numerous magical texts including The Magick of Aleister Crowley, Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, and Gods of the New Millennium, but without question his most popular work is the story of his own life as a practicing ceremonial magician, My Life with the Spirits.

My Life with the Spirits has been optioned for a feature film and is a required text for classes at DePaul University, Chicago. He is often called upon to appear on radio and television to comment authoritatively on matters pertaining to the Western Mystery traditions and matters of the occult. He travels extensively worldwide and speaks on a broad range of esoteric topics including Qabalah and the Tarot. He is on the faculty of the OMEGA INSTITUTE in Rhinebeck, New York where he teaches ‘The Western Magical Tradition.’

Lon has just authored a new book entitled Enochian Vision Magick: An Introduction and practical guide to the Magick of Dr John Dee and Edward Kelley

Background music this week comes in the shape of Plaid.

Featured song is Assassins Blade by R. D. Burman

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Right Where You are Sitting Now – Episode 1 – “Podcasting”

AT LAST!! The pilot episode of RWYASN is here! In this weeks episode I am joined by Paul Banica as we take a look at the crazy world of podcasting. First up we talk to the mighty Raymond Wiley and Joe McFall of Out There Radio, these guys are the kings of the strange in podcasting-land, and provide a really cool interview for your enjoyment! We then point our microphones to Texas and Florida for a really cool chat with John Pavlich and Scott Carrelli from Geek Show.us, and discuss the many and varied projects they are involved in, and talk about how podcasting has changed their lives.

Background music this week comes in the shape of Amon Tobin, Fourtet and John Zorn.

I hope you enjoy the show, Subscribe through iTunes or whichever podcatcher floats your boat… theres a load more to come…stay ‘tuned’

Ken