Kenneth Anger was integral to the burgeoning psychedelic He returned to London in 1965 to prepare the LSD version of scene in California, with 1965-1966 marking a dr amatic Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome-The Sacred Mushroom Edition (Lord Shiva 's Dream} and to make Anger Aquarian aesthetic change in his work. Nevertheless, his films continued Arcanum, 1965, a short sequence of magical symbols for the to reflect his interest in ritual and magick, synergizi ng t he prelude to his Magick Lantern Cycle, a compilation of his best­ pan -cultural symbols and references (departing from Crowley's known work to be screened at the Filmmakers Cinematheque iconography) with consciousness expanding, abstract psychedelic in New York in Spring 1966. The screening featured a prelude of stills of Aleister Crowley as well as images from the Anger visuals, and music written specifically to accompany the imagery. Aquarian Arcanum, a repertory of symbols and talismans This pan-cultural fusion became central to the aesthetics and including the Pentagram of the Goat-God Baphomet; The ethos of psychedelia of the late 1960s as exploration beyond Crowned Dragon of Alchemy; The Sacred Sigil of The Great socially prescribed mores became the agenda of the new Beast 666; The Holy Talisman of the Templars, Abraxas. The program. designed by Anger, allowed for a "Brief Intermission": generation. Anger pioneered visualizing psychedelic states "*Note: Psychedelic researchers desirous to Turn On for as early as 1954 with Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.' Pleasure Dome should absorb their sugar cubes at this point", followed by "*Note: Psychedelic researchers preparing for Pleasure Dome should remain seated during this intermission. The following film should, under ideal circumstances, be experienced in that Holy trance called High." Anger's increasing interest and experimentation with a psychedelic aesthetic and its concomitant social stance, is a marked and manifold stylistic break from Kustom Kar Kommandos of the previous year. Whereas most experimented on their own bodies and minds, Anger was to manipulate celluloid to recreate these effects to the highest level of sophistication. Living in the Haight­ Ashbury district of San Francisco in a mansion called the Russian Embassy, the next project he conceived was about the "love generation" and his encounter with a certain Joe Lucifer sparked If the doors of perception were cleansed off Lucifer Rising. which he began filming in 1966 with a 19 year every thing would appear to man as it old guitarist from the band Love, Bobby Beausoleil [who turned out to be less than interested in being directed). is, I nfi nit e .... There are things that are In 1954 Aldous Huxley wrote The Doors of Perception and Heaven known and things that are unknown­ and Hell, exploring the effects of mescaline. The manifestation of the Mysterium tremendum, and a quasi-religious ecstasy, is in between are the doors. evident in Anger's major work to follow, Invocation of My Demon Brother and Lucifer Rising.' The connection between religion, William Blake trance, ritual and hypnosis aided by mind-expanding substances has been widespread from the beginning of time in the rituals and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 154 trances of most cultures-shamanistic to Dionysian traditions­ from Tibetan Buddhists to Aztecs, ancient Egyptians and practitioners of the occult; a door to paradise or to the infernal regions . Jim Morrison was an avid reader of both Huxley and William Blake, and hence the name The Doors, formed in Los Angeles in 1965, while The Velvet Underground was formed in New York the same year, an integral part of Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Los Angeles was also home to the burgeoning psychedelic rock scene that gave birth to, amongst others, Steppenwolf, Buffalo Springfield, Love, Kaleidoscope, The Seeds, Frank Zappa, Iron Butterfly and The Byrds. That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely.... Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory-all these have served, in H. G. Well's phrase, as Doors in the Wall.' Ritual continued to form a structural framework for Anger's new projects despite the aesthetic change visible in Lucifer Rising and Invocation of My Demon Brother, in a new context of consciousness expansion of the visionary variety. Symbolism, Decadence and Aestheticism, the automatism of Surrealism, and psychedelia all share what was expressed succinctly by Arthur Rimbaud: "To arrive at the unknown through the disordering of all the senses, that's the point." [It is no coincidence then, that a psychedelic aesthetic adopted styles of Symbolism and Decadence, i.e. Aubrey Beardsley, Art Nouveau, Gustav Klimt and Viennese Jugendstil.) In 1965, Dr. Timothy Leary was a professor at Berkeley experimenting with the new drug lysergic acid diethylamide [LSD]. The drug, ingested by pill form or on sheets of brightly painted paper. produced an eight to 12 hour chemical vacation highlighted by profound changes in sensitivity to color, sound, mood; an alternative hallucinatory consciousness. Brilliant illumination seemed to shine from within objects, with preternaturally intense colors on a good trip. LSD was originally intended to be used to help victims of psychological disorders, however, Leary tested it on himself and became enraptured with it. In 1965 LSD was not yet illegal and would only become so in June 1966. So taken with the psychological and sensory effects R1ght and overleaf: Stills from Invocation of My Demon BrothGr. 155 of acid, Leary organized "be-in's" where attendees dropped acid, danced and grooved to experimental music enhanced by light shows, and generally "freaked out" -it was suggested that attendees would participate in "out-of-body" and mystical experiences. In San Francisco, Anger was able to borrow electric lamps and projectors used for such light shows for the 1966 Lucifer Rising footage with Beausoleil (which was to become Invocation of fvly Demon Brother). It took the world press two years to catch on to this underground movement, which soon took root internationally. Pop music transformed, reflecting psychedelic experience with new electronic sound effects and distortions such as those created with the Moog synthesizer (and the amplifier]. creating unearthly experiential sounds as well as reproducing instrumental music once only available in orchestras. This world was light-years away from mainstream film representation, and the visualization of psychedelic states in film was rare (popularized by Dennis Hopper's The Trip).' While abstract, rhythmic filmmaking had been pioneered by Len Lye and Oskar Fischinger in the 1920s (hand-painted frames, in Fischinger"s case, an extension of Kandinsky's search for visual parallels to music, operating directly on the viewers' perceptual faculties], the advent of analogue computer graphics in the 1950s and 60s enabled abstract, psychedelic and personal films: Jordan Belson's Re-Entry, 1964, James Whitney"s Lapis, 1963-1966, the kaleidoscopic 7362by Pat O'Neill, 1965-1967, among others. Sitney described Sidney Peterson's The Cage, 1947: "Even though structurally he related anamorphosis to various forms of madness, his distorting lens offers an alternative to haptic perspectives." 5 The distorted imagery represented the perspective of the '"liberated" eye . I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments .... Whereas in the past, the point of disagreement has been between dissonance and consonance, it will be, in the immediate future, between noise and so-called musical sounds. John Cage, 1956 M1dd le. /\ngor· s a rm w1 l h Lu c1 fer s sea l tattoo. Oppo s1 le Anger 1nvokes The Go ds at Eq umox, Stra 1ght Theater. Rol tom Sa turn meets the steelworker. San Fran c1s co . 1967 While psychedelic music transcended the rock music boundaries by enhancing, creating or recalling altered states of reality, visual artists explored optical effects and experiments. Op artists had their leading practitioner in British painter Bridget Riley, and color field painters in the United States explored the optical field and perceptual properties of color. The collaboration of artists and scientists concerned with the physical and experiential properties of light and space evolved, and led to Southern Californian Light and Space artists such as James Turrell and Robert Irwin ·s explorations of the perceptual and experiential properties of light, space and audio sensory perception. In 1965 the seminal Op Art exhibition The Responsive Eye [organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York] traveled to the Pasadena Art Museum, and Bridget Riley had a solo exhibition in Los Angeles. 21 September 1967: Kenneth Anger intended to project the footage of his still unfinished Lucifer Rising at the Straight Theater on Haight Street, in the Haight-Ashbury ''hippie haven·· of San Francisco, much of which was of Bobby Beausoleil.' The occasion was The Equinox of the Gods, a celebration of the Autumnal Equinox [based on a ritual written by Aleister Crowley]. and a benefit with Beausoleil's new band "The Magick Powerhouse of Oz" intended to help the filmmaker finance the film 's completion, during which Anger was to conduct an elaborate ritual. Anger asserted in interviews that 1,600 feet of original footage disappeared from the trunk of his car that night. In frustration with the thwarted project. he ran a full-page advert in New York's The Village Voice the week of Halloween which read: "in Memoriam Kenneth Anger Film Maker 1947-1967". It was not an announcement of his death but of the end of his career as a filmmaker. After a "burning ceremony" in New York in front of Jonas Mekas [in which Mekas mistakenly believed Anger was burning his earliest films]. he soon departed for London.