The Magical Writings of Ithell Colquhoun

She was too surreal… even for the Surrealists. Ithell Colquhoun stepped into a movement built on dreams, rebellion, and the subconscious—and still managed to make them uncomfortable. While others flirted with mysticism, she went all in, studying the occult and refusing to separate her art from her inner life. That’s where the tension began. The Surrealists, led by André Breton, wanted control over the movement, and Colquhoun refused to choose between their rules and her beliefs. So they made the choice for her—and expelled her.

But she didn’t disappear. She kept creating, developing her own techniques, building a visual language that was entirely her own, and pushing deeper into the subconscious without permission or approval. For years, she was overlooked while others became icons. Now, her work feels more modern, more fearless, and more honest than ever—because she wasn’t trying to fit into a movement, she was building something beyond it. Some artists wait to be accepted. Others redefine what acceptance even means.

Ithell Colquhoun’s reputation as a provocative and accomplished visual artist and writer is becoming well established. However, less is known about her work as an occult and esoteric essayist, primarily because many of her essays were published in occult ephemera, and limited run local and specialist magazines. This illustrated talk will be an introduction to the wide range of topics that Colquhoun masterfully tackled, ranging from primers on the Kabbalah to Celtic spirituality, meditation, mysticism, and magical color theory.

Jessica Hundley Series Editor for TASCHEN Publications multivolume collection, The Library of Esoterica, a book series exploring the visual history of Tarot, Astrology and other esoteric traditions introduces the event.

Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta based writer, curator and critic. She has a PhD in Folklore and Mythology from UCLA and has published academic and popular articles on a wide range of topics such as Paganism and the New Right, women’s esoteric art, Cornish cultural nationalism, Arthuriana, color theory, and occult performance art. She has written widely on artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, notably the biography Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (Strange Attractor 2020) and is currently editing a selection of Colquhoun’s esoteric essays. She is also the editor of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave 2022). She has contributed gallery texts and essays for a number of institutions including Tate, Camden Arts Centre, Art UK, Arusha Galleries, Heavenly Records and Spike Island, Bristol.

Witches: New Fashion, Old Religion (1977)

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An in-depth exploration of several covens' and practitioners' Witchcraft traditions in 1977.

A businessman who studies witchcraft as a hobby and a businesswoman who heads a coven are interviewed about their beliefs and practices. Shows the initiation of new members into a coven and the attempt by a "circle" to heal a member.

Colin Wilson : Strange is Normal

One of the original Angry Young Men along with luminaries such as John Osbourne (see Thomas Maschler's book Declaration), Colin Wilson (1931- 2013) first tasted fame with his book The Outsider, a treatise on outsider genius. As is the way, the mainstream elitist press turned on this working class self taught prodigy and hounded him out of London's class based literary scene.

He fled to the West Country and London's loss was Cornwall's and The World's gain. For over 50 years and 150 books he led us through science fiction (Mind Parasites) and esoteric knowledge (The Occult Trilogy). Truly a man before his time, in the age of The Internet, his philosophy will inform us for centuries to come. Strange is Normal is a late documentary containing interviews from his home in Cornwall with himself and his wife Joy.

The Devil Rides Out (1968)

The Devil Rides Out (U.S. title: The Devil's Bride), is a 1968 British horror film directed by Terence Fisher and starring Christopher Lee, Charles Gray, Niké Arrighi and Leon Greene. It was written by Richard Matheson based on the 1934 novel of the same title by Dennis Wheatley. It is considered one of Terence Fisher's best films. Click on the image above to watch it.

The Witch's Cradle (1943)

The Witch's Cradle, sometimes billed as Witches' Cradle, is an unfinished, silent, experimental short film written and directed by Maya Deren, featuring Marcel Duchamp, and filmed in Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery.

The surrealist film shows repetitive imagery involving a string fashioned in a bizarre, almost spiderweb-like pattern over the hands of several individuals, most notably an unnamed young woman (Pajorita Marta) and an elderly gentleman (Duchamp).

The film also shows a shadowy darkness and people filmed at odd angles, an exposed human heart, and other occult symbols and ritualistic imagery which evokes an unsettling and dream-like aura.

The Witch's Cradle was written and directed by experimental filmmaker Maya Deren. The film was developed at a comparison between surrealists' defiance of time and space and that of medieval magicians and witches. Daren developed the film over a period of one month, lasting from August to September 1943. However, long after principal photography for the film commenced, she abandoned the project, leaving the film incomplete. Some of the film's outtakes were found and stored at the Anthology Film Archives, while several sequences that were shot appear to be lost. Surviving shots from the film are mostly semi-edited sequences, including one particular sequence that Deren had engineered during post-production to be played backwards.

In her essay taken from her dissertation for her doctorate at The University of Southern California, “So I Would Move Among These Things: Maya Deren and “The Witch’s Cradle,” Fox Henry Frazier revives the important legacy and cultural importance of Ukrainian-born, avant-garde poet and filmmaker Maya Deren, who died too young of a brain hemorrhage in 1961. Frazier’s analysis of Deren’s filmic semiotics reminds present day readers not only of Deren’s groundbreaking work as a filmmaker in the nineteen forties and fifties, but her poetic genius as well for creating memorable surrealistic imagery in both her poetry and films. By documenting Deren’s particular brilliance for converting a torturous, misogynistic ritual called “The Witch’s Cradle” at the hand of the writer and “adventurer” William Seabrook, Frazier explains just how Deren ingeniously converted her torturous experience with Seabrook into her own visionary feminist film starring Marcel Duchamp under the same title, thus not only exposing Seabrook’s ritual for his thinly disguised enactment of one of his perverse sexual fantasies in the guise of witch-training for broom-riding, but co-opting it as her own with a far superior philosophical conceit for betraying the complexity of the feminine psyche via the symbolic use of string. “Deren’s interest in the power of objects may feed into bigger questions triggered by the Rhinebeck episode,” Frazier writes, “questions, for example, about bodily/embodied autonomy for female and femme people, and subject-versus-object power within that context…We might ask,” she goes on to suggest, “whether there is an implication here that, if these objects have subjectivity and agency, then perhaps even a woman who has been reduced to an object, in a violent way, might then more easily be able to envision herself possessing subjectivity and agency—even if that, too, must be achieved by supernatural or occult means, i.e., witchiness.” –Chard DeNiord

Otto Rahn - The Secret Glory

The complex story of Otto Rahn (18 February 1904 – 13 March 1939), who grew up amidst the ruins of Germany following its defeat in World War One. His parents awoke an interest in nature, myth and legend in him. At the time in Europe, the narratives of Christianity were being challenged and changed. He took up the legend of the Holy Grail and the heretical Christian sects that lasted up until the Inquisition from the 12th to the 15th centuries. The nature cults of the early 20th century that developed in northern Europe also no doubt fed into his thinking. Rahn wrote books about the Grail and the Cathars, one of the last mass manifestations of Gnosticism in Europe.

It seems Rahn was an outsider queer poet who was given a blank cheque by the Nazis to do his research. Of course, the Nazis wanted a particular result from the research; Aryan primacy and the negation of the dominant Christian morality. Himmler was vehemently opposed to Christian sexual morality and the "principle of Christian mercy", both of which he saw as dangerous obstacles to his planned battle with "subhumans". Rahn's work proved to be more complex and ephemeral than that. Rahn was also expected to participate in the theatre of horror that was developed by the Nazis. Rahn was a poet who dwelt in myth, a product of people like James Frazer and Robert Graves (who's book The White Goddess would not be published until 1948). But at the same time Rahn was within the inner circle of the SS, he participated in the establishment of the vast death machine that is now called the Holocaust and in the Nazi eugenics breeding program. But his mother was Jewish.

Rahn's homosexuality had been known to Himmler but, in 1937, it became the subject of difficulties with other SS officers, who had long contrasted their conduct with the open homosexuality common in Ernst Röhm's Sturmabteilung. Following a "drunken homosexual scrape", Rahn was assigned guard duty at the Dachau concentration camp in order to "toughen him up".

Deeply concerned by what he had witnessed in Dachau, Rahn offered his resignation from the SS in February 1939. This was accepted by Himmler. On 13 March, Rahn's body was found by local children in the forest near Söll (Kufstein, Tyrol), in Austria. Sixty years later, in an interview, one of those who found Rahn's body described finding "two empty bottles" next to it. He had frozen to death while under the influence of the sleeping pills. Rahn's death was privately ruled a suicide but was presented by Himmler to the SS as having occurred following a "mountaineering accident".

The film is made by Richard Stanley, a South African filmmaker, known for his work in the horror genre. He began his career making short films and music videos, and subsequently directed the feature films Hardware (1990) and Dust Devil (1992), both of which are considered cult classics. He was the original director of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), but was fired early into principal photography due to creative differences, an episode recounted in the 2014 documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau. In 2019, he returned to feature films after more than 20 years, directing the H. P. Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space.

Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg

Anita Pallenberg (6 April 1942 – 13 June 2017) was an Italian-German film actress, artist, and model. A style icon and "It Girl" of the 1960s and 1970s, Pallenberg was credited as the muse of the Rolling Stones: she was the romantic partner of the Rolling Stones founder, multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones, and later, from 1967 to 1980, the partner of Stones guitarist Keith Richards, with whom she had three children.

Pallenberg appeared in over a dozen films over a 40-year span. One of her first appearances was as the Great Tyrant in Roger Vadim's science fiction film Barbarella (1968); however, the character's actual voice was dubbed by Joan Greenwood. She played the sleeper wife of Michel Piccoli in Dillinger Is Dead (1969), directed by Marco Ferreri. Pallenberg also had roles in the German crime thriller A Degree of Murder (1967), which featured music composed by Brian Jones; the cult film Candy (1968) as James Coburn's possessive nurse; Volker Schlöndorff's Michael Kohlhaas – Der Rebell (1969), which was filmed in Slovakia; and the avant-garde Performance (1970), in which she played the role of Pherber. Performance was shot in 1968, but a nervous studio delayed its release.

Pallenberg appeared in a documentary about the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil (1968), directed by French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. In an interview she gave The Independent, which published it on 16 March 2007, she related her encounters in Rome while La Dolce Vita (1960) was being filmed, with its director Federico Fellini, other filmmakers such as Luchino Visconti and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and with the novelist Alberto Moravia.

In 1985, for the video of "Wild Boys," Duran Duran used a clip of Pallenberg from Barbarella. She portrayed "The Queen" in the comedy-drama Mister Lonely by Harmony Korine, and played a character named Sin in Go Go Tales (both 2007).

In the 1990s, Pallenberg returned to education to study fashion. She graduated from Central Saint Martins in London in 1994 with a fashion and textile degree. However, she decided not to forge ahead with a career in fashion, finding it too cutthroat and cruel.

Pallenberg has been portrayed several times by other performers. Monet Mazur played a young Pallenberg in the film Stoned (2005), a biographical film about the last year of Brian Jones's life, while the NBC television show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (2006) included a story arc in which the character Harriet Hayes was hired to play Pallenberg in a film.

Pallenberg's burgeoning relationship with Jones encouraged him to experiment musically in their 1966 album Aftermath, while her intelligence and sophistication both intimidated and elicited envy from the other Stones. Pallenberg played an unusual role in the male-dominated world of rock music in the late 1960s, with Jagger respecting her opinion enough for tracks on Beggars Banquet to be remixed after she criticised them. In the 2002 compilation release of Forty Licks, Pallenberg is credited as singing background vocals on "Sympathy for the Devil".

Tony Sanchez's account of his time as Richards's bodyguard and drug dealer mentions Pallenberg's spiritual practices: "She was obsessed with black magic and began to carry a string of garlic with her everywhere—even to bed." Sanchez goes on to describe Pallenberg as having been "like a life-force, a woman so powerful, so full of strength and determination that men came to lean on her".

Jo Bergman, who was the band's personal assistant from 1967 to 1973, said of Pallenberg: "Anita is a Rolling Stone. She, Mick, Keith and Brian were the Rolling Stones. Her influence has been profound. She keeps things crazy."

In the 1977 Toronto heroin arrest, Pallenberg pled guilty to marijuana possession and was convicted and fined several weeks after Richards' arrest.

Pallenberg was a friend of singer Marianne Faithfull, Jagger's girlfriend in the late 1960s. They appeared together in the fourth series (2001) of the BBC sitcom Absolutely Fabulous in episode four, "Donkey", with Faithfull playing God and Pallenberg the Devil.

Pallenberg died on 13 June 2017, aged 75, due to complications from hepatitis C.

This films is based on an autobiographical manuscript titled Black Magic discovered by Pallenberg's children after her death in 2017.

Cick on the above image for the full film.

Vali: The Witch Of Positano (1967)

A psychedelic documentary portrait shot in Positano, Italy in 1965 about Australian artist and occultist Vali Myers.

The Witch of Kings Cross

Meet Rosaleen Norton, an artist and self-identified witch who the tabloids called “the witch of Kings Cross”. She was repeatedly arrested, had her artwork burned and was shunned and mocked by society.

Norton eked out a modest living selling her art, and putting spells and hexes on people. Norton, who lived in Kings Cross in the postwar years until her death in 1979, had been fascinated with the occult since she was a child.

Rosaleen Norton was an artist and self-identified witch who the tabloids called “the witch of Kings Cross”. She was repeatedly arrested, had her artwork burned and was shunned and mocked by society.

Norton eked out a modest living selling her art, and putting spells and hexes on people. Her story has been captured in a new documentary, released online on Tuesday.

Norton, who lived in Kings Cross in the postwar years until her death in 1979, had been fascinated with the occult since she was a child.

All her life, Norton combined her interest in the occult with art. Her paintings, some of which were seized by police and burned, could loosely be defined as esoteric: canvases often filled with hectic images of women embracing the Greek god Pan, snakes and horned demons.

Australia in the postwar years was almost 90% Christian, and Norton was made a target for her beliefs. Surveillance and raids from the vice squad, and seizure of her work, criminalised her, and turned her into a notorious and shocking tabloid figure. One of her sex magic partners, the celebrated Sydney Symphony Orchestra conductor Sir Eugene Goossens, was forced to flee Australia when his luggage at Sydney airport was found to contain pornography, masks and sex toys. The pair each suffered in their own way for transgressing the strict moral boundaries of the time.

Click on the image above for the 2020 biopic by Sonia Bible. 

"Dispatches" Beyond Belief (1992)

Dispatches is a British current affairs documentary programme on Channel 4, first broadcast on 30 October 1987. The programme covers issues about British society, politics, health, religion, international current affairs and the environment, and often features a mole inside organisations under journalistic investigation.

On the evening of February 19th, 1992 Dispatches featured a special episode about Satanic ritual abuse. Days later, newspapers reported that the video was misrepresented. The clips of the alleged abuse were drawn from First Transmissions (1982), an experimental video produced by Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (T.O.P.Y.) a geographically disperse occult collective committed to subverting mainstream media.

Presented by journalist Andrew Boyd, the Dispatches show promised to present, for the first time, the programmed claimed unequivocal evidence of Satanic abuse and ritual murder having been carried out in Britain. The show featured the testimony of an alleged survivor of Satanic abuse, 'Jennifer', and had been trailed heavily with reports in the broadsheet newspapers in the days leading up to broadcast. In particular, the show was able to shockingly broadcast clips of a tape that the British police had seized a decade earlier which, the programme makers claimed, was a home-video recording of a Satanic ritual killing. Over a hundred people called a helpline number advertised after the show ended.

Far from being a Satanic snuff movie, the video was quickly determined after broadcast to be performance art video by TOPY, an offshoot of a group of musicians and performers including Genesis P. Orridge's Throbbing Gristle and Psychick TV. Most shockingly of all, First Transmission had itself been funded by Channel 4.

The show was denounced in the media over the following days and weeks as a grotesque lapse of journalistic integrity. The programme stands as a particular testament to a moment in British social, cultural and criminal history at the height of the so-called 'Satanic Panic' which swept the USA as well as the UK in the 1980s. There is an extensive interdisciplinary literature on the programme and its associated impacts and phenomena, from historians, art historians, criminologists, psychologists and others. The overwhelming majority of commentary on Beyond Belief is critical of the programme.

A transcript of the broadcast has been shared online and there is considerable information about the programme to be found. The show itself, though, has never been repeated, and has never been made available online in full. The show has also proven difficult to access by professional researchers in archive holdings at Channel 4, or at the production company, Looktwice.

In November 2020, YouTube user 'RileyELFuk' made a 37 minute version of the show available on their channel which runs to the final credits. About 8 minutes of the 45 minute broadcast time (10:30pm - 11:15pm) are thus still missing. Comparing this upload with the transcript suggests that much of this time would have been taken up by advertisements before the show started, as only one page of the transcript, featuring the programme's introduction, are clipped from the film.

The role of computerised media in this program is interesting. It came out right at the cusp between the earlier cultural networks of mail and radio, clubs and cellars (to reference the site of satanic abuse) and the rise of the internet, where much of this culture exists today. Terrorism is even named as a source for the satanic abuse, in how its 'survivors' manifest PTSD. Computers feature in many of the interviews, often as a backdrop to interviewees appearing as 'experts' (never for the 'victims'). At the same time the psychological explanations for how 'victims' are effected by the 'abuse' is spoken of in terms of 'imprint', 'programming', 'memory', 'information' and so on. The allegations never come to any concrete point, with names of perpetrators, or even victims, apart from the anonymous 'witnesses' speaking on camera (considering one of the few 'witnesses' Jennifer, states in the programme she murdered her own child in a ritual sacrifice, it would not have been so difficult to check up on this). The visual media depicting the 'abuse' is seen as both evidence and the corrupting material that causes the apparent abuse. However, no origin of the material is even really established. Since it was colaged performance art, mostly featuring actors, this is understandable.

This program and what it represents is important because it shows us a time when many of the present-day folk devils and moral panics were finding their form, if not their content. Attempts to police this sort of media are still underway.

The entire collection of the First Transmission videos is available here

(First Transmission was a collection of video tapes that were made available through Psychic TV's mail order system in the early 80s. Fans of the band had to own all of the albums in order to qualify to be given the videos as a gift. Psychic TV and TOPY were a kind of cultural and cult pyramid scheme).

The transcript from the Dispatches programme is available here in two parts: https://arsoninformer.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/1992-feb-19th-dispatches-program-beyond-belief-script-part-1.pdf 

https://arsoninformer.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/1992-feb-19th-dispatches-program-beyond-belief-script-part-2.pdf

Lucifer Rising

Kenneth Anger began working on the idea for Lucifer Rising in 1966. He filmed it in 1972 but it was not released until 1980 after the sountrack was completed. Anger is 96 years old today. He represents a bridge between the older occult of rich wierdos and the new world of mainstream people following occult teachings. Lucifer Rising is the point of turning, when the counter culture and the older culture of mystercism met. Manson Family member and murderer Bobby Beausoleil, with his prison band The Freedom Orchestra, completed the soundtrack for Lucifer Rising in 1979. The film premiered in New York in 1980.

Lucifer Rising is a short film by director Kenneth Anger about the ceremonial rising of Lucifer, a sort-of birthday party of the Aquarian Age, the Love Generation. It is also a symbolic analogy of the coming Aeon of Horus as prophesied in the Thelemic sacred text, The Book of the Law. Anger himself said in The Guardian: “Lucifer Rising was about Egyptian gods summoning the angel Lucifer – in order to usher in a new occult age, in accordance with the principles of Ordo Templi Orientis – an occult order founded by British genius Aleister Crowley.”

Lucifer is not the devil. He’s the god of light and color. Luciferous – I bring the light. To me Satan and Lucifer are totally different entities. — Kenneth Anger

The film’s central theme as impersonation of gods, known to Crowley as the Dramatic Ritual, with Isis and Osiris appearing in Egypt invoking the natural elements that conjure the rising of Lucifer, not as devil but as the rebellious Angel of Light in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), the Venus morning star, bringer of Light and “patron saint of the visual arts,” said Anger.

Black Axe: Nigeria’s Mafia Cult

Black Axe is a confraternity in Nigeria that now operates as an international criminal organization, which originated around 1980. Among many crimes it was responsible for the Obafemi Awolowo University massacre.

According to BBC Africa over the 2010s they became one of the most far-reaching and dangerous organised crime groups in the world.

Two documents state that in Benin City, 35 million naira was funnelled to the Black Axe to "protect votes" and secure victory in a governorship election in 2012. In exchange for the support, the files suggest that "80 slots [were] allocated to NBM Benin Zone for immediate employment by the state government".

Over 2021 they attempted to steal €1m in welfare fraud during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Republic of Ireland.

Interpol arrested six alleged Black Axe leaders in Johannesburg in 2021, and they may be extradited to the United States. Members of the group are known as "Axemen". Its South African wing allegedly has security known as "butchers" to maintain discipline.

In November 2021 a massacre led by the group claimed six lives in the Okitipupa community, headquarters of Okitipupa Local Government Area of Ondo State, Nigeria.

There are many reports of the ill-effects of cultism on Nigerian society. One such report from 1999 states: "[Cults] have brutally ravaged Nigeria's 37 state-run institutions. The Obafemi Awolowo University massacre is only the most recent tragedy. Observers estimate that 150 students have been slain in the last five years, with scores more victimized by rape, assault, extortion, kidnapping, blackmail, torture and arson attack. Cultists—who often emulate the music and attitudes of American street-gang culture—dominate several campuses with intimidation tactics. Sometimes they employ threats of murder or extortion for seemingly petty ransoms, like an 'A' grade or a fraudulently written term paper. Unprotected students, professors and administrators are often forced to surrender whatever grades, goods and privileges the cultists demand."

By 2015 the Black Axe had become a persistent problem. Responsible for the involvement in the murders of at least 200 people in 2014 and carrying out other criminal activities around the world including Internet fraud (romance scams, inheritance scams, real estate scams and business email scams), murder, international smuggling of drugs, human trafficking, prostitution, use by politicians as 'hired thugs', extortion, counterfeiting of identity documents, cloning of credit cards, cheque fraud, advance-fee scams, robbery, and rape.

Members pledge allegiance to a deity called Korofo, the unseen God, according to their ideology they are fighting against colonial oppression. Their name comes from the Neo Black movement symbol featuring a black axe cutting chains of oppression. They have spies known as "eyes" all across Nigerian society.

The Occult Experience (1985)

The Occult Experience is a 95 minute documentary on the international occult scene, filmed in 1984-85 and screened initially by Channel 10, Sydney, in 1985. This digitised copy was made from a high quality VHS recorded directly from the original film print. It was filmed in Australia, England, Switzerland, Ireland and the United States. The director was Frank Heimans. Nevill's role was co-producer, researcher and interviewer. The Occult Experience won a Bronze Award at the 1985 International Film and Television Festival of New York and was released in the USA on Sony Home Video (second hand copies on Amazon). The documentary did not screen on television in either the UK or USA unfortunately, so uploading a really good copy will interest a lot of people in those countries especially. 

 Producer, director, Richard Corfield ; 

series producer, Ken Dyer ; 

editor, John Pleffer ; 

photography, Laurence McManus, Chris Davis ; 

sound, Peter Steege, Colin Jones 

Also a book by Nevill Drury, Ken Dyer, Australian Broadcasting Corporation Publisher - Hale & Iremonger in association with the Australian Broadcasting Corp., 1983 ISBN 0868061069, 9780868061061

"The Glittering Mile" (1964)

The entire 1964 documentary about Sydney's Kings Cross "The Glittering Mile*. David Low's classic narration says it all: King Cross is a "glittering mile of dreams, delusions, hopes and headaches, where life comes out of an espresso machine and you can have it any way you like it."

In some ways, Kings Cross, described as Sin City, hasn't changed at all. One Sydney alderman wants to clean it up, another says it's worth a million dollars a year the way it is.

American singer Wayne Newton, the so-called King of Las Vegas, has just flown in and is seen rehearsing for his opening night at the Silver Spade Room at the Chevron Hotel. He's singing Danke Schön — "Thank you for all the joy and pain."

Outside, the people celebrate the bohemian way of life and complain about the weirdos who congregate there. A dancer at the Pink Pussycat tells a reporter, "Well, you get a lot of creeps around here, I know that. You get pestered walking from one club to another." A New Zealander and his mates perform an impromptu haka outside one strip club.

Dancing girls. Another voiceover demonstrates the way women were portrayed in the media in the '60s: "If it's company you're after, there are plenty of girls at the Cross. The place is full of girls, coming and going. It's hard to understand what keeps them busy all night long." And another: "You can be catered for at places where the girls are provided to please you, but you mustn't touch."

The manager at the Pink Pussycat, "Last Card Louie" says, "I've seen the (striptease) show 39,000 times. It's just one of those things. I don't know what to think about it, to tell you the truth."

Another sign that some things never change is the "frequently heard demand around the Cross" for more police ... and for more police on the beat. One resident even keeps a diary of all the crimes that she hears and sees from her flat.

An interviewer speaks to the infamous "witch of Kings Cross" Rosaleen Norton at the Apollyon Lounge, a cafe that she used to frequent. A robed Rosaleen Norton performs a banishing ritual by inscribing a pentagram in the air with her ceremonial athame, or dagger, thereby purifying and defining the ‘sacred space’ associated with the ritual. However we know that Norton was not always robed during her ceremonial performances because she confirmed in her interview with D.L. Thompson that ‘ceremonial attire ranges from nakedness to full regalia – robes, hood, sandals and accessories...’. Norton appeared during her interview with Thompson clad only in her dark leather ‘witch’s apron’, naked from the waist up, although she later posed for a photograph wearing a cat’s mask in addition to her apron. During Norton’s interview with Thompson her fellow coven members wore ritual animal masks to disguise their identity and referred to each other by using code names like the Rat and the Toad, thereby remaining effectively anonymous. (see Neville Drury's article on Roie)

The excerpt ends with an all-male revue. The narration reads: "A few years ago an all-male revue like Les Girls would have been out of the question in Sydney, as it would in most places where people like the differences between the sexes to be clear and obvious. Today, it's part of the Kings Cross scene." And now years later, it still is ... with the Gay Mardi Gras now one of the highlights of Sydney's social calendar.

The Glittering Mile is a fascinating stroll down memory lane ... looking at Kings Cross as it really was in 1964.

Antonin Artaud's The Theatre and the Plague

Antonin Artaud’s The Theater and the Plague is an international cinematic reading of the essay "The theater and the plague“ by the French poet Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. Directed by Wolfgang Pannek, co-director of Taanteatro Companhia (São Paulo, Brazil), the project is a collaboration of artists and academics from five continents and engaged in multiperspectivist reflection on the critical tension between „death and cure“.

In The Theatre and the Plague, the first, now prophetic-iconic text from his best-known book, The Theater and its Double, originally presented as a peformative lecture on April 6, 1933, at the Sorbonne, Artaud develops the foundations of the „Theater of Cruelty“ by establishing an analogy between the rupture of the civilizational order caused by the "plague" and the "convulsive passions" triggered by the virulence of his transgressive theatrical poetics.

The Artaudian text was divided into 8 distinct segments (in turn divided into sub-segments), each with a specific thematic focus. Each collaborating artist accepted the challenge of developing an audio-visual dramaturgy (and recording Artaud's text in their respective language), corresponding to the segment to be addressed. The only creative indication given to the artists was to perform a cinematographic reading of Artaud's text in the light of their subjective experiences conected to their respective geographical locations, and under the conditions of limited circulation and social distancing in pandemic times. This work process, recorded with simple digital cameras, cell phones or IPads, resulted in a set of 18 films, lasting between 4 and 11 minutes each).

In addition, the audio-visual collection of these cinematic narratives was re-edited for the feature film Antonin Artaud's The Theater and the Plague (62 min., 11 languages, English subtitles). The film presents the text of “The Theater and the Pest ”in its entirety and brings together people, landscapes and sensibilities ranging from São Paulo to Paris, from Brisbane to Garðabær, and from Maputo to Khon Kaen.

Guilty of Romance (恋の罪 Koi no Tsumi) - Japanese Cut

From 2011, directed by Sion Sono. An astonishing film that explores the limits of human understanding through the multifaceted lens of desire, meaning, sex and death. It pivots on the the poem On My Way Home by Ryūichi Tamura. 

‘The Daemonic Mucosal’ - Patricia MacCormack

MacCormack’s illustrated lecture ‘The Daemonic Mucosal’ explores, via Irigaray and Deleuze and Guattari, the role of the vulvic fold, the mucosal and daemonic unions in chaos magick.

Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University. She is the author of Cinesexuality (2008) and Posthuman Ethics (2012), the editor of The Animal Catalyst: Toward Ahuman Theory (2014) and the co-editor of Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema (2008) and Deleuze and the Animal (2017). MacCormack is also the co-founder of the occult-inspired club night Occulture in London.

CUNTemporary
CUNTemporary is a non-profit organisation that works with individuals and groups that explore feminist and queer art practices and theories. CUNTemporary provides a newsletter and daily listings of events related to feminist and queer art practices in the UK. The events team curates talks, screenings, exhibitions, performances, events and club nights with the participation of a multidisciplinary and international group of artists, performers and theorists, mainly in London, but also around the UK and abroad. We welcome networking and collaborative opportunities from curators, academics, artists, activists, institutions and alternative venues.


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Occult Symbolism in Art

Occult symbolism in art. Art curator/historian Lisa Derrick explains some of the occult symbolism in both classical and modern art and helps decipher it for the passive viewer.

The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome is a short 38-minute film by Kenneth Anger, filmed in 1954. Anger created two other versions of this film in 1966 and the late 1970s. According to Anger, the film takes the name "pleasure dome" from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's atmospheric poem Kubla Khan. Anger was inspired to make the film after attending a Halloween party called "Come as your Madness." The film has gained cult film status.

Early prints of the film had sequences that were meant to be projected on three different screens. Anger subsequently re-edited the film to layer the images. The film—primarily the 2nd and 3rd revisions—was often shown in American universities and art galleries during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

The original edition soundtrack is a complete performance of Glagolitic Mass by the Czech composer Leoš Janáček (1854–1928). In 1966, a re-edited version known as The Sacred Mushroom Edition was made available. In the late 1970s, a third revision was made, which was The Sacred Mushroom Edition re-edited to fit the Electric Light Orchestra album Eldorado, omitting only "Illusions in G Major," a blues-rock tune which Anger felt did not fit the mood of the film.

The differences in the visuals of the 1954 original and the two revisions are minor. An early version, just shown once on German television in the early 1980s and hold until today by the NDR (Germany) includes an additional 3 minutes at the beginning, including a reading of the poem "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

The film reflects Anger's deep interest in Thelema, the philosophy of Aleister Crowley and his followers, as indicated by Cameron's role as "The Scarlet Woman" (an honorific Crowley bestowed on certain of his important magical partners).

The film uses some footage of the Hell sequence from the 1911 Italian silent film L'Inferno. Near the end, scenes from Anger's earlier film Puce Moment are interpolated into the layered images and faces.

Donald Cammell - The Ultimate Performance (1998)

Donald Seton Cammell (17 January 1934 – April 1996) was born in Edinburgh on 17 January 1934 into a formerly wealthy family that had lost its considerable fortune in the crash of 1929. A precocious boy, he obtained a scholarship to the Royal Academy and after further studies in Florence successfully set himself up as a portrait artist in London in the early 1950s.

By the mid 1960s he had given up painting to concentrate on filmmaking. His first two scripts, The Touchables (d. Robert Freeman, 1968) and Duffy (d. Robert Parrish, 1968), combine crime and hippies to unremarkable effect (The Touchables was re-written by Ian La Frenais). Cammell decided to try the same formula again in his next script, but to preserve his work insisted on directing as well. His agent, the aspiring producer Sandy Lieberson, paired him with cinematographer Nicolas Roeg as co-directors of Performance. The film brilliantly melds the narcissistic glamour of London's East End gangsters and the late '60s rock star phenomenon, but its mixture of homoeroticism, violence and rock music so alarmed its backers that it sat on the shelf for over a year before its release in 1970. The final version, completed without Roeg in Los Angeles by Cammell and editor Frank Mazzola, is a rich, sophisticated and stimulating work, elliptically shot and magnificently 'performed' by its stars James Fox and Mick Jagger. The themes of masculinity in crisis, sexuality, death and rebirth, transformation and extreme violence would re-appear throughout the rest of the films Cammell directed, all of which were made in America.

After a number of false starts, Cammell accepted an offer from MGM to direct Demon Seed (US, 1977), a science fiction horror story about a supercomputer that imprisons the wife of its creator inside their home so as to make her bear its child. Although eventually taken out his hands, its lurid premise (from a novel by Dean Koontz) is offset by a strong performance from Julie Christie and a kinetic 'shock' finale that has an emotional ambiguity reminiscent of the ending of Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (US, 1968). Cammell subsequently wrote a number of scripts, spending a long and fruitless period collaborating with Marlon Brando on Jericho, a project that was never made. The only one of his films over which he maintained complete control was White of the Eye (US, 1987), co-written with his wife China Kong, a sympathetic look at a homicidal psychopath featuring an uncompromising performance by David Keith as the misogynist killer.

Wild Side (US, 1995), Cammell's last film, was first released in a version heavily re-edited by its production company, but was eventually returned to an approximation of his original intentions by Kong and Mazzola and re-released as Donald Cammell's Wild Side (2000). With its original non-linear structure restored, this version closely resembles Performance in its fragmentary editing style - full of flashbacks and flash-forwards - and in its candid and exhilarating sex scenes. A true visionary, Cammell sadly only completed four films as a director before committing suicide at his home in Los Angeles in 1996.