Occult LA

Los Angeles has long been home to one of American''s most powerful occult scenes. The frontier town was alredy packed with Theosophists and Hindu gurus when the mystic Manly P.Hall founded the Philosophical Research Society in 1934 and started compiling the largest occult library west of the Mississippi. Some of Aliester Crowley''s most influental followers also made the Southland a crucial center of Crowley''s magickal religion of Thelema. Tonight''s Esoteric films from Kenneth Anger, Curtis Harrington, Chick Strand, and others, Erik Davis is the author of "The Visionary State:A Journey through California''s Spiritual Landscape", Louis Sahagun is an author of "Master of the Mysteries", Brain Butler was an expert on the life of Cameron, mistress of JPL rocket scientist Jack Parson and LA''s most intriguing enchantress.

Theosophical Library Center
2416 N. Lake Avenue, Altadena, California 91001 USA (Driving Directions)
Phone: (626) 798-8020, 798-3378 (If no answer, 797-7817)
Hours: Daily 2:00 to 4:30 p.m or by appointment.
Email: tslibrary@theosociety.org


Aleister Crowley (1875 - 1947) The most controversial and perhaps least understood magician and occultist of his time, Aliester Crowley has been both vilified and idolized.
He was a man of both excesses and high brilliance. He considered himself to be the reincarnation of other great occultists: Pope Alexabder VI, renowned for his love of physical pleasures; Edward Kelly, the notorious assistant to John Dee in Elizabethan England; Cagliostro; and Eliphas Levi, who died on the day that Aleister Crowley was born

Crowley also believed he had been Ankh-f-n-Khonsu, an Egyptian priest of the XXVIth dynasty. In 1898 he published his first book of poetry, Aceldama, A Place to bury Strangers in. A Philosophocal Poem. By a Gentleman of the Univeristy of Cambridge, 1898. In th epreface, he described how God and Satan had fought for his soul: "God conquered - now I only have one doubt left - which of the twain was God?"
- http://www.satanic-kindred.org/crowley.htm


Kenneth Anger was born in Santa Monica, California as Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer[1] and attended the Maurice Kossloff Dancing School with Shirley Temple. He gained fame and notoriety from the publication of the French version of Hollywood Babylon in Paris in 1959, a tell-all book of the scandals of Hollywood''s rich and famous. A pirated (and incomplete) version was first published in the U.S. in 1965. The official U.S. version was not published until 1974.

He became fascinated with the supernatural and Aleister Crowley, as well as becoming an adherent of Crowley''s religion of Thelema, sometime in his late teens. Many of his films reflect occult themes.

Kenneth Anger had a widely publicized spat with Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page over the Lucifer Rising soundtrack. [3] [4] Anger claimed Page took three years to deliver the music, and the final product was only 25 minutes of droning and was useless. Anger also accused Page of "having an affair with the White Lady" and being too strung out on drugs to complete the project. Page countered claiming he had fulfilled all his obligations, even going so far as to lend Anger his own film editing equipment to help him finish the project. Page''s music was dumped eventually and replaced in 1979 by music written and recorded by Bobby Beausoleil - the only movie soundtrack in history recorded inside a prison.

In the mid-1980s, Anger sold a 16mm print of the incomplete Lucifer Rising, containing the Page soundtrack, to Christopher Dietler, who eventually released the soundtrack taken from film on an album titled Kenneth Anger''s Lucifer Rising Jimmy Page Soundtrack.[5] Anger filed a lawsuit and won an injunction against Dietler who turned over the digitally enhanced master and agreed not to press or sell anymore record albums.[citation needed]

Anger''s lifelong interest in the occult brought him into contact with a variety of groups and individuals. He was a lifelong friend of Anton Szandor LaVey, both before and after the founding of the Church of Satan in the 1960s, and lived with LaVey and his family during the 1980s. In more recent years Anger accepted initiation into the Ordo Templi Orientis in a semi-honorary fashion. For 20 years from the early eighties, Anger released no new material. In the new millennium he has since returned to filmmaking.


Chick Strand: I have no Idea:

La Luz de Jesus Gallery presents the first public exhibition of paintings by Chick Strand, long known as a brilliant experimental filmmaker. Strand met Neon Park in Berkeley in 1964, and shortly thereafter ran off with him and stayed with him until he died almost thirty years later. Over the years, Strand and Park worked side by side, he influencing her films and she his paintings. By 1988, Strand was a well-known, respected filmmaker and professor, and began collaborating on paintings with Park. By 1989, she had developed her own style and began painting on her own. As Park''s illness advanced and he gradually lost the ability to hold a brush, he turned to typing poetry with one finger, and Strand continued to work by his side, painting glorious, vivid postmodern mandalas. Since Park''s death, Strand still lives in their Tujunga home, where she continues both to make films and paint prolifically. She is delighted to be debuting in a show with Neon, and we are proud to introduce Chick Strand the painter.

The Manly Palmer Hall Archive
A Brief Overview of Theosophy
Blavatsky Study Center
Hindu gurus
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