I’ve been looking forward to Antero Alli’s new film for a while now. His last flick – The Invisble Forest – was an exploration of psychology, surrealism, and the theatric method, filmed on multiple types of camera to throw the viewer into altered states throughout it’s viewing.

Alli’s latest offering – To Dream of Falling Upwards – has a more linear narrative approach than it’s predecessor. Not that it doesn’t take the viewer through a surreal minefield of visuals and expositions, it just happens to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But enough of the comparisons, lets talk about the story.

A sex-magickian – Jack Mason – is the next in line to become the new head magus of  the Temple of Horus, a offshoot of its more official – OTO-like – sister the ‘Thelemic Temple of Anubis’. However, just as he is about to claim his leadership, the current Temple-Master’s son intervenes at his fathers death-bed, and claims the commercial rights to the order. Mason discovers that the son is planning to commercialise the order, and so begins a tale of murder, mysticism, sex, and comedy.

Along the way we meet some intriguing characters: A professor seeking mystical wisdom from a shamanic witch in the Californian desert, a Russian hit-man, lawyers with a fetish for S&M, and Mason’s Scarlet Lady (played by the Invisible Forest’s Clody Cates).

What is interesting about Alli’s approach to making a film about ‘occultists’ is, rather than dwelling too heavily on the ‘scandalous’ elements of the craft, he has instead chosen to highlight the more social aspects of being an occultist, drawing on the comparison of urban ritual, and rural. This is highlighted most clearly in his ‘Neophyte’ characters, two Thelamites of lower grades who are tasked with the ego-corrosive ritual of going into business together as clowns, and the professor seeking wisdom in the desert.

The film itself leaves you feeling somewhat transformed at the end. Ideas, normally communicated in text, are rendered visually to great effect. I don’t want to ruin any plot points, but Mason’s journey is particularly interesting, it’s final outcome both surprising, and impressively told.

Like The Invisible Forest, this film also has great music, provided by the fantastic Sylvia Alli. The compositions’ haunting and ethereal qualities help carry the viewer along the path of the film, whilst perfectly accompanying the narrative flow.

To Dream of Falling Upwards is Antero Alli’s most accessible film to date, both visually, and narratively. If you want to go on a mystical journey tinged with Crowleyana, humour, intrigue, and Carlos Castaneda, but don’t want the usual Kenneth Anger rip-offs, this film will serve you extremely well.

Ken Eakins

If you’re in the San Francisco area tomorrow – Antero Alli will be premiering the film at the A.T.A. – Details here

If you can’t make the screening, or the upcoming tour, then you can buy the DVD here

Click here to view the embedded video.

Kenneth Grant, one of the sole remaining links to occultist Aleister Crowley has died. Like his take on Thelema or not, you cannot deny the influence of the man’s work. From Starfire:

Kenneth Grant died on 15th January 2011 after a period of illness. Our condolences go first and foremost to his family, whose privacy is something which we all wish to respect at this difficult time.

Kenneth Grant had an extraordinary life, and his work has a remarkable depth and breadth of magical and mystical insight. In particular, his monumental series of Typhonian Trilogies is creative, innovatory and inspiring, extending across thirty years from the publication of the opening volume The Magical Revival in 1972, to the appearance of the final volume The Ninth Arch in 2002. This is a substantial body of work, constituting a solid foundation for further development, widening and deepening in the years to come; his work will continue.

Michael Staley,

SittingNow would like to extend our condolences to Grant’s friends and family.

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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.

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

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