Lucifer played an important part in the life of the avant-garde film director and author Kenneth Anger, who has died aged 96. From his late teens he was attracted by the practices and philosophies of the occultist guru Aleister Crowley, of whom he became a passionate disciple. Like Crowley, Anger, who was one of the first openly gay film-makers in the US, lived by the philosophy of Thelema, a set of beliefs based on the rule “Do what thou wilt”, which included “sex magick”. “Lucifer has appeared in all my films,” Anger once explained. “Sometimes he’s not labelled as such but there’s always a figure or a moment in my films to communicate what I call my ‘Lucifer moment’.”
At least two of his films of what became the Magick Lantern Cycle – nine shorts made between 1947 and 1972 – testify to this: Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) and Lucifer Rising (1972). Anger described the former 11-minute short as “the shadowing forth of our lord Lucifer as the powers of darkness gather at a midnight mass”. A homage to Crowley, it rejects narrative, using dynamic montage to Mick Jagger’s Moog synthesiser soundtrack. Anger himself plays a magus, while the musician Bobby Beausoleil is Lucifer, who appears at the climax. In between are shots of an occult ritual, a Rolling Stones concert and GIs leaping from helicopters in Vietnam.
