Film Review: Incense for the Damned   DVD re-release

 

Synopsis etc at IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065887/

 

Review by Kate Hoolu

 

Imagine the scene, it is the early 1970s, you are a film company with a script, a great setting (the dreaming spires of Oxford and the Mediterranean beauty of Greece and Cyprus) and, for the time, a quite stellar list of actors at your disposal, including Peter Cushing, Edward Woodward, Patrick MacNee, Patrick Mower and Imogen Hassall. Your task is to make a horror film, with Crowley/ Abbey of Thelema- ish  vibes about dark magical groups, with a sexy, trippy undercurrent....


How you fail to make even an averagely  acceptable movie, and how you fail so goddam miserably is perhaps the most frightening aspect of this horror film. Patrick Mower’s acting is also almost as scary as that, but since he is supposed to be under a spell for most of the flick, that is perhaps excusable (“can you do ‘trance’, for us Patrick luvvie? Lovely, stay like that for a week … roll cameras”). The rest is simply appalling tripe; acting so wooden that whole forests would blush by association, and a brutal editing style that would make Lizzie Borden flinch. The use of the same distinctive interior set for two very disparate scenes also causes some major plot confusion, and a heavy-handed possibly strategic tack-on of some kind of vampire plotline (maybe a cash-in attempt because of Peter Cushing, who was Ven Helsing in s many Dracula films) is just about the last straw. A film you will certainly watch from a place of safety while gibbering behind the sofa, but simply because it is so bad you will want to cringe in private.

 

The film was shot in 1972 but only got a theatrical release in 1976, presumably because the producers realised on completion what a complete and irreconcilable turkey it was. It has also been known in some countries as ‘Bloodsuckers’, ‘Doctors wear Scarlet’, ‘Freedom Seekers’ etc, which scattergun variety and number of titles indicates how hard the marketing team must have tried to get it known - or at least to have it rented out more than once by a careless cinema owner…

 

The only redeeming feature of this film is that it has obviously been so heavily and clumsily cut that a longer (but probably no more coherent) version might exist, but is not shown to the public.

 

Small mercy.

 

Avoid (thus no links to buy it from here; I would rather send you all anthrax spores, since they would be less unpleasant).

 

KH

 

 

Please feel free to link to this review or copy it for your own site, blog, magazine etc, but if you copy it please ensure you keep this tagline and leave the text unedited

 

For more material by Kate see www.occultebooks.com   and http://hiddenpublishing.com/  

thankyou

http://www.scarletimprint.com/xvi.htm

i'm in a new book, with some awesome writers:



diabolical vi
bringing down the house of god
edited by alkistis dimech and peter grey in a strictly limited edition of 700 copies


xvi is bound in natural linen cloth.
280pp comprising sixteen (and one) original and significant essays.
the cover is impressed with a sunken panel holding a striking letterpress rendering of the tower by occult artist kyle fite.
xvi is printed throughout in red and black ink on heavy paper stock.

the babel edition of xvi comes in a strict edition of 700 copies and can be yours for forty four english pounds.

our civilisation is in crisis.
as we confront ecological collapse, political control, wars of terror, and wars on consciousness, we are seeking emergence from this state of emergency.

xvi proposes gnostic strategies for liberation.
some will consider this a dangerous and inflammatory book.
it is.

these provocative essays from the most radical contemporary occult thinkers reveal a creative and passionate engagement with the world.

attacks on our freedoms can lead to freedom, the sudden enlightenment, the lightning path and the initiatory crisis that the tower also represents.

xvi seeks to raise magickal awareness of the unique times we find ourselves in, whilst being open to the resourcefulness and indominatable nature of the human spirit to find solutions and responses to it.
this is magick attuned to the zeitgeist.

sex, drugs, art, initiation rites, calls to arms, ritual actions, aeonic plans, revolutionary witchcraft and apocalypse converge in our new title, xvi.

contents

john michael greer - magic and the end of history
the shape of time, the myth of progress and the fall of civilisation

ramsey dukes - XXXII not one tower but two
the forbidden pleasures of 9/11 and the fight for freedom

carl abrahamsson - everything must go...on!
metaprogramming the future through art

eric k lerner - the tower
shango, santeria, phallic magick and the tarot

raven caldera - being the change
the path of a trans-gender plant shaman, from permaculture to bdsm

michael idehall - the tower of babel
qliphothic initiation on the averse path and the astral realm

peter grey - seeing through apocalypse
john dee, babalon, brain chemistry and apocalypse denial

dr george j sieg - occult war for the aeon
aeonic warfare from, iot, oto, ona, to evola and the church, as civilisations clash

james wasserman - defeating a vile threat
advocating patriotic thelemic resistance to attacks on our liberty

hafiz batin - orgy in matter
the spiritual warfare of an ismaili gnostic in the west

dr dave evans/francis breakspear - twin infinities
chaote on crowley, car crashes and identity crises

stephen grasso - things fall apart
fighting dystopian doomsayers with vodou

kyle fite - falling into fire
an initiates journey through burroughs, blake, hesse, crowley and bertiaux

julian vayne - the ecstatic state
the war against some drugs and the ritual use of ketamine, toad venom and foxy methoxy

orryelle defenestrate bascule - the tower crashes
direct artistic intervention, babble babel, and both theatrical and ecological action

peter j carroll - eschaton
the godfather of chaos magic enchants for the eschaton

alkistis dimech - coup de foudre
revolutionary witchcraft from the black mass to collapse, from michelet to jack parsons to now

a call to arms

 

 

please link to or repost as you wish, thanks

Book review:  This originally appeared in the Journal for the Academic Study of Magic, 5 (2009). This is the pre-press version, so far as I know no major editing of this review took place. Please refer to the printed version if you need a definitive copy.

 
Andy Roberts, Albion Dreaming: a popular history of LSD in Britain, London, Marshall Cavendish, 2008, Hardback, 266pp, index, bibliography, illustrated, photographs. UK£18.99

 

This is a volume that would be unlikely to ever emerge from a British University, due to the  highly contentious subject matter. The author, Andy Roberts is a well-known writer on various aspects of paranormal and otherwise ‘Fortean’ matters- indeed he is a columnist for the Fortean Times in addition to being a more mainstream journalist- and although not a tenured academic he has here produced a work that is as brave as it is well-researched.

 

This book offers the many fruits of much stringent research, using sources as diverse as mining the complexities of governmental archives to unearth arcane internal memos, trawling legal case transcripts, poring over tabloid newspaper sources and conducting interviews with major players in the history of this much disputed substance. The interviews were with those who would actually talk, at least, since some are now either in positions of power or respectability from which they would wish to distance themselves from a supposed disreputable past, or in the cases of some of the medical and military researchers, they have to maintain their silence in adherence to the Official Secrets Act. Faced with this awkward and annoying evidential void in places, Roberts has done well to fill in the gaps to produce a coherent and compelling narrative.

 

It would have been easy to produce a ‘take-the-money-and-run’ slapdash historical overview of the impact of LSD in Britain, and such a work would doubtless have sold well in some circles. What Roberts has instead done is to expend considerable energies (and much time) trailing back the convoluted intertwined threads of research into a story that is far more complex than most readers would suspect. These cover the early psychotherapeutic uses of the drug in Britain, the lengthy (and ultimately abortive) attempts to find a military/battlefield use for the drug, the counter-culture explorations of the internal universes which were made accessible through this substance, the legal-political landscape in which all of these events unfolded, and much more. The voices of psychonauts, medics, lawyers, philosophers, politicians, clinical patients and the unwitting ‘guinea pigs’ used in military experiments are all made audible and coherent here, in a very well-balanced work. That a reputable publisher has taken up the book underlines the value of Roberts’ contribution to modern British cultural history here, and the understanding of the use of entheogenic substances.

 

Each chapter is usefully organised in a vaguely linear timeframe, and the chapters are split by subject. Thus we have a fascinating overview of the discovery of the drug (coincidentally the book emerged at almost the same time as Professor Hofmann, the creator of LSD, died aged over 100), the medical experiments and hope that LSD could be a magic bullet for treating mental illnesses, the military experiments, the counter-cultural uses, the criminal trials and where research scientists and ad-hoc users (or perhaps we should call them freelance researchers…) are now situated.

 

Not a pro-acid evangelical book, in fact there is much content herein to dissuade many folk from experimenting with the drug, but it is certainly a pro-scholarship and a pro-understanding book; for which this reviewer offers enthusiastic applause. Andy appears to have written a very sane and rational book about a contentious subject that is prone to evoke quite the opposite reactions in mixed and supposedly intelligent company. Highly recommended to anyone interested in modern British history, and of significant value in perceiving a broader picture of the free festival and counter-culture movement of the early 1970s (and onwards) from which a great deal of the ‘Green’ ecology movement sprang, and from that a wide swathe of modern paganisms; thus of great interest to many JSM readers. The use of drugs to approach religious states was also of relevance when requesting the review copy of this work, and this area is covered well (the reader is also referred to the review of another Andy; see Andrew Letcher’s Shroom reviewed in a previous JSM, which dealt with some of the same green and pagan issues with regards to hallucinogenic mushroom use in culture).

 

Overall this is a striking and powerful exemplar of why independent scholarship is such an important facet of the academic study of anything. A significant, informative and thought-provoking summation of what is obviously a huge amount of stringent research.

 

Dave Evans

please feel free to link to this piece, or repost in full anywhere you think suitable, thankyou

Is it Hailing or Not (Are We Satanists?)

 

This slight annoyance of being regularly asked by ‘fluffy pagans’ if we are Satanists probably goes with the territory of being chaos magicians - at the very least we are supposed to eat a baby a week, it seems. The founder of Satanism the late Anton LaVey made the very pragmatic point that “stories of unbaptized babies being stolen by Satanists… were not only effective propaganda measures, but also provided a constant source of revenue for the Church, in the form of baptism fees. No Christian mother would, upon hearing of these diabolical kidnappings, refrain from getting her child properly baptized, post haste” [1].  It’s all about the money, honey.

 

We have also had dealings with several people who would fall under the stereotypical definition of ‘real nutjobs about Satan’. These include one especially memorable person at an academic conference on alternative religion that we attended a while back.  

 

Picture if you will, a thin and wiry woman aged about 35, who had probably not washed her grisly and lank black hair in maybe 20 years, and who was dressed in some weird and headache-inducing psychedelic 1970s-era polyester outfit, which was all of

 

·        a serious fashion hazard (swirling orange, chocolate brown and purple, eek!)

·        infused with years of fulminating stale body odour and

·        comprised a major fire risk

 

When she spoke it was in a thick Dutch accent, which we have phonetically rendered here as best we can:

"ze vursst taim ai eeenvoked SayytannNN hee kaim tooo mee raight avvey… ennd….. hee hezz nevvar reeeelly lefft meee"  (the first time I invoked Satan he came to me right away and he has never really left me)

Hmmmm, we rather doubt that, as he would have probably given you some fashion tips at the very least, madam.... We didn't say that, but thought it. Several times. If that is any measure, then simply on dress sense alone, we are not Satanists…

 

However, while not being formally Satanic, we are always happy to be ‘the opposition’ in the terms of how as Professor Jean la Fontaine explains “the Hebrew term satanas originally meant adversary or opponent and referred not to a being but to the act or function of opposing” [2].

 

What are we opposing?

 

The dogmatic, the nonsense, the blind and sheeplike servitude of a religion which relies on “the kind of God … who would damn me for not working out a deal with him… I should not care to spend eternity in the company of such a person” [3]

 

We’re also opponents of dogmatic paganisms, for the same kind of reasons, and just for a sense of balance.

 

Equally, God was sometimes seen as an aid in all things, however mundane, trivial and, it seems, remarkably unfair, if so desired. As a young girl the novelist Antonia White was at a Convent school in around 1909, preparing for a hockey match against another convent. She wrote: “we are all going to do penances all day so that we may win” [4]. It seems unlikely that an omnipotent God would be interested in the winner of a school sporting contest, let alone intervene, and especially so in a contest within the Christian religion. The immorality of expecting a God to do so is also something worthy of note.

 

And again, while not being card-carrying Satanists we do have considerable time for the philosophies of LaVey. He anticipated the ‘non-card carrying but interested’ approach of many like us (who are serial non-joiners of a multitude of groups):  “I like to think of the Church of Satan as an organisation for non-joiners. Affiliation need not negate independence” [5].

 

His Satanic Bible has remained continuously in print since it was first published in 1969 [6], demonstrating a feat of appeal and longevity that very few other occult books will ever achieve. LaVey had a considerable understanding of both human motivation  (for example in his criticism of the Catholic Mass, as when performed in Latin) “it is much simpler to obtain an emotional reaction using words and phrases that cannot be understood than it is with statements which even the simplest mind will question when hearing them in an understandable language” [7] and the mechanisms of effective ritual work, for example:  “inasmuch as ritual magic is dependent upon emotional intensity for success, all manner of emotion producing devices must be employed in its practice” [8].

 

We have covertly employed some of LaVey’s methods (and his numinous poetry, and that of Aleister Crowley, too) in numerous Wiccan rituals that we were asked to write and then lead, without any of the numerous ‘fluffies’ present realising, or bursting into flame or turning into goats (in fact some of them told us how much they loved the imagery and the words, go figure…) so we can presume they are safe methods for use with white-lighters…

 

So, we’re not Satanists as such, but like anything, there is material there that is useful to add to the mix. Possibly that is a less newsworthy conclusion than the reader might hope, but most honest.

 

For the love of god, and for ours

Francis Breakspear and Kate Hoolu

x

 

Francis and Kate are currently working on several projects including a book of practical money magick and a follow-up to Toastar! Further Adventures in Chaos Magic (Hidden, 2009), please see http://hiddenpublishing.com/

Tags: satan
Current Music: something dark and scary

Ten Years of Triumph of the Moon

Please use this as an article in your magazine (and-or on your website) if you see fit, please keep the final contact paragraph with the article at all times. Thankyou.
( Read more... )

Belief, Power, The Written Word and the Magick Sigil

(an extract from Toastar! Further adventures in Chaos Magic) by Francis Breakspear, This has previously appeared in the fabulous magazine SilverStar http://www.horusmaat.com/silverstar/ and is given here as a late Beltane gift

please feel free to repost this anywhere that it will be well received, providing you keep the links and all text intact, including this message, or link to this entry, thanks

( Read more... )

THE BIG ITCH
Thursday 25 March 2010, 6pm for 7pm start
The Little Shoppe of Horrors
11 Mare St
London
E8 4RP

Amoret Whitaker, forensic entomologist at the Natural History Museum, bemoans the nation’s declining flea population and tells us more than we need to know about these  magnificent micro-critters. Meanwhile, entomologist David Cain alerts us to the ongoing bed bug invasion, tells us why we should be afraid and whether there’s anything we can do to stop them. Members of both families will be in attendance. 

You can book tickets here: http://tinyurl.com/ycsbk2y

Our second event, in May, will be a talk by medievalist Dr William Maclehose, looking at the manufacture, trade and beliefs surrounding Christian relics, with special reference to the foreskin of the baby Jesus. After that expect to hear from Richard Barnett, author of Medical London, on the ongoing, vexing philosophical and zoological question of madness in animals. 

Keep an eye on http://www.thelasttuesdaysociety.org and http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk/further for news of events.

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[Journal Four]

I'd optimistically hoped to that Strange Attractor Journal Four would be hitting the shelves round about now, but the Salon, and work on other projects has meant that an early Summer release is now on the cards. A fantastic and varied line up of material is already in place, with more to come and I can assure you that it will have been worth the wait (four years is it?... ahem...). 

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{ More from Strange Attractor Press]

Work is also progressing on Phil Baker's biography Austin Osman Spare, and we're confident that this will be published in October this year. We're very excited about this book, which will initially be published as a hardback and include many rare illustrations and colour plates. We're also thrilled to announce that Alan Moore will be writing an introduction. We also expect to be producing a collectors' edition in very small quantities, more on which nearer the time.

Also in the pipeline from SAP -

* The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology (November 2010)

More details on this soon, at http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/

* Herworld: artworks by Catharyne Ward (Late 2010) 

A collection of Cathy's stunning entangled vistas as seen in SAJ1 and at the SA Salon.

 * London's Lost Rivers: A Surface Dweller's Guide by Tom Bolton (Spring 2011) 

Tom will be giving sporadic tours of the lost rivers during 2010 - the next on Saturday 27 March, so keep an eye on http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk/further for updates

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[SA On Air]

I'm currently in the early stages of  preparing a new series of radio programmes for Resonance 104.4FM, the first since 2006. 

A conversation with German electronic music pioneers Cluster (aka Hans Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius) is already in the bag. Further guests will hopefully include Phil Baker and Gavin Semple on Austin Osman Spare; Mike Jay on his forthcoming book and exhibition High Society; electronic musician and artist Gavin Russom; Cyclobe's Ossian Brown and Stephen Thrower and more to be signed up.

Meanwhile SA pal and Welcome to Mars author Ken Hollings begins a new weekly series, Hollingsville, on 15 April 2010. see http://www.resonancefm.com for more.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

[Mirage Men]

Not strictly an SA project, but the reason for our delayed publishing schedule is that my own book, 'Mirage Men: Adventures in Paranoia, Disinformation and UFOs', is due from Constable Robinson on 29 July 2010, priced £8.99. Detailing the 60-year role of the US military and civilian intelligence agencies in shaping and propagating popular myths about UFOs and extraterrestrial visitation, it's part ripping adventure yarn and part cultural history, with a smattering of conspiracy theory thrown in for good measure.  

Here's what the Constable web site has to say:  

'Seeking the truth about UFOs in America, Mark Pilkington and John Lundberg uncover a 60 year-old story stranger than any conspiracy thriller. Through the fascinating account of their quest Mark Pilkington reveals the long history of UFOria and its parallels in little known tales from the murky worlds of espionage, psychological warfare and advanced military technology. Along the way he discovers that the truth about flying saucers is stranger and more complex than either the ufologists or debunkers would have us believe. As he crossed the US meeting intelligence agents, disinformation specialists and UFO hunters Pilkington was confronted with a dizzying array of ever more outrageous claims and counter claims. As a result he began to suspect that, instead of covering up stories of crashed flying saucers, alien contacts and secret underground bases, the US intelligence agencies had actually been promoting them all along. Meanwhile he has to deal with his own uncertainties, the suspicions of the UFO community and a partner who is starting to believe that the conspiracy theorists might be right after all. With a fresh, funny and objective approach, Pilkington is the ideal guide to steer us through these strange territories, where nothing is quite as it seems and reality is just a matter of managing perceptions.'

I'll be available to talk about the book from early July, so if you'd like to invite me to your society meet, moot, festival, radio or TV programme, please do get in touch.

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That's more than enough about Strange Attractor for one season. 

Thanks again for your continued enthusiasm and support and, as always, watch the skies and check in regularly at http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk/further for (almost) daily updates.

Mark Pilkington

the marvellous Julian Vayne does a bit of devilry to the big city

we forgot to post this at the time, still fun to watch

a link to download a legit free pdf of the excellent join My Cult! by James Curcio

we've had some very nice publicity material made by these folk....

playing violent pc games has a benefit...

here, I co-founded an e-list (and associated Journal) some years back in the field of academic approaches to Magic, we now have 400+ respondents across over a dozen disciplines and it is a fabulous and friendly resource for any scholarly questions/discussion of occult-magic-paganism subjects; please feel free to join up, via this page http://www.uwe.ac.uk/hlss/research/usrc/sasm/discussionlist.shtml