This virus released upon the world would infect the entire population and turn them into our replicas. -As reported by the Nova Police in Nova Express (1964) William S. Burroughs
It has been nearly five months since the (unfinished) entry Hacking the Whore was originally composed. Quite a bit has changed since that time and this line of inquiry has become, for all intents and purposes, a narrow tight-rope walk with egg shells strewn below as the only 'safety net.' And in all honesty, I think only Harry Houdini would have been comfortable in such an environment.
What follows are, again, just (almost) random notes. The subject matter is, quite simply put, too vast and daunting at the moment for any clarifying light or illumination to make its way into this rather dusty and dirty cabinet: filled with cockroaches, perhaps barely alive 'lemures' and other miscellaneous parasitic 'fluidic phantoms' of consciousness and unconsciousness.
Dig beneath the surface a bit and one might be hard pressed to find a clear cut sympathetic affiliation or collaborative link between Bobby Beausoleil and Anton LaVey's Church of Satan. Even the allegations of Anton LaVey having a major influence on Beausoleil, which later set the stage for his murderous involvement with the Manson Family, seem rather suspect. On the contrary, according to Bill Landis in his book, Anger: The Unauthorized Biography of Kenneth Anger, Bobby Beausoleil was never particularly enamored with LaVey:
Beausoleil remains steadfast in his feelings toward Anton: " I thought he was a fuckin' jerk, with his black church with his black house in San Francisco. That's my sentiment."
Yet Landis also attempts to downplay the seriousness of LaVey's cult, as others have done in the past, with lines like these:
Devil worship at this point in the sixties was an excuse for exhibitionistic behaviour and kinky sex. LaVey transformed his black Victorian house on 1161 California Street into a safe haven for an All the Loving Couples-era psychodrama. His denunciations of drugs, antihippie rants, and pro-police yammerings were reassuring to his middle-class constituency.
Such light hearted 'libertarian maverick' fun is certainly not to be found in David McGowan's rather lengthy and, quite frankly, spine chilling essay on Henry Lee Lucas (the same Henry from the infamous film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), George W. Bush, and America's so-called 'Satanic Murder, Inc.' In There's Something About Henry McGowan writes:
Back in the Bay Area, Anton Szandor LaVey and Crowley-enthusiast Kenneth Anger would set about busily organizing the Church of Satan in San Francisco, where LaVey would become something of a celebrity - the clown prince of Satanism. From this church would spring forth both the Temple of Set - led by U.S. intelligence asset and psychological warfare specialist Lt. Col. Michael Aquino - and the Werewolf Order, founded by LaVey's daughter Zeena and Manson-admirer Nikolas Schreck.
...
[Ed] Sanders [in his book 'The Family'] links Manson as well to the Church of Satan and the OTO, as well as the Church of Scientology (as was true of Berkowitz as well). All of these connections are quite well documented in [Maury] Terry's and Sanders' books. [Terry's book is titled: The Ultimate Evil: An Investigation Into America's Most Dangerous Satanic Cult]. For instance, two of the Manson family members convicted of murder were recruited directly from LaVey's Church of Satan: Susan "Sexy Sadie" Atkins and Bobby "Cupid" Beausoleil, who is said to be a former lover and roommate of Kenneth Anger.
LaVey in fact provides one of many connections between killers and victims. He had formed a close association with Roman Polanski shortly before the murders, when he served as the technical consultant for Polanski on his film Rosemary's Baby, in which he also made a cameo appearance as - who else? - Satan. Newspaper accounts at the time of the slayings were rife with claims that the Polanskis were Satanists who hosted drug and sex orgies.
There are a few inaccuracies in McGowan's amalgamation of source material above and I will attempt a brief clarification.
First, perhaps it might be a bit erroneous to state that 'LaVey...and Kenneth Anger...set about busily organizing the Church of Satan in San Francisco...' I have found no evidence indicating a tight knit collaborative relationship between the two men; and such a close alliance is obviously the meaning inferred from McGowan's text.
Again from Bill Landis' book Anger:
Beausoleil comments, " I think they liked the idea of having each other in their lives as a sort of symbol or representative of something, like, ' Hey, I know this weird guy.' But I don't get the impression they were really that close."
Additionally, LaVey never served as technical consultant on Rosemary's Baby and never actually made a cameo appearance in the film. Rosemary's Baby features many uncredited cameos, but LaVey is not included on the list.
From the Internet Movie Database: The role [of Satan] was played by an uncredited background actor by the name of Clay Tanner. LaVey did not participate in the film project at all.
But in 'reality' the intention here is not to debunk every little detail of McGowan's text. The late investigative journalist Gary Webb once wrote that research into the spectral realms of covert operations and parapolitics (or deep politics) will, in many instances, never really yield the cut and dry empirical data as evidence required, for example, in a court of law. There is no judge or jury here; therefore, the subject of this particular investigation need not be found guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. Such is the nature of this particular Beast. Unfortunately, many 'consumers' of what basically constitutes speculative inquiry do not understand this concept. Peter Levenda most eloquently elaborates on this concept a bit further in Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft (Book One: The Nine), and it is my intention to reproduce his words here in a subsequent entry.
There is absolutely no doubt that some degree of imbrication exists between left-hand path occultists, cult groups and the National Security State. For example, one only need look at the history of the Church of Scientology or the Temple of Set to discover how these seemingly disparate 'shores overlap.' As Dr. Alan Scheflin, Professor of Law at Santa Clara University and author of the book 'The Mind Manipulators' has noted, one of the later intentions of the CIA's MK-ULTRA program was the infiltration and creation of religious cult groups in order to extend the operational capabilities of mass behavioral influence and control:
But it was in the 1960's that the idea of using these techniques on essentially freestanding populations was experimented with and the cults provide the laboratory setting for social influence processes where the people are not taken into complete physical custody. The cults themselves represent, I think, the step from the laboratory experiments into real world operational use...
What is more important, however, are the larger overriding concepts that have uncritically permeated Western media culture as a whole resulting, in part, from this theoretically potent co-opting of esoteric traditions, which may have very well produced an unwelcomed and 'occulted' marriage of information and control.
One such case in point may be found in Martin Scorsese's introduction to the booklet accompanying the Fantoma Films DVD release of The Films of Kenneth Anger Volume One:
Every cut, every camera movement, every color, and every texture seemed, somehow, inevitable, in the same way that images of the virgin in the renaissance painting seemed inevitable--in other words, pre-exisiting but dormant, and brought back to life through some invocation.
...
It seemed as if nothing else existed, as if everything else had been wiped clean, and we are seeing the first images--totemic, talismanic images.
...
...the structure, the form, the feel of these films appears to be less invented than received, from a source hidden from the rest of us.
...
It's time that Kenneth Anger's work became more available, because he is, without a doubt, one of our greatest artists.
The works in question span the years 1947 through 1954. And on many different levels, that particular point in time did indeed set the machinery in motion for everything to gradually become 'wiped clean' on a grand and global scale, though obviously not in the same way intended (perhaps rather naively) by Scorsese in his liner notes. But, rather in the way intended by Francis Fukuyama with his declaration of the 'End of History' exactly forty-five years later in 1992. 1947 is of particular importance and was a landmark year in many respects. Most significantly, 1947 marked the year the National Security Act was signed into law in the United States, ushering in the formation of an apparatus that, as Sylvere Lotrin writes in his introduction to Baudrillard's Forget Foucault, is '...gradually gnawing away at every singularity.'
Another more startling example of this uncritical permeation of esoteric (or 'New Age') traditions and their historical baggage into Western media culture's data stream can be found in the writings of Richard Metzger. Here are some excerpts from Richard Metzger's article, John Whiteside Parsons: Anti-Christ Superstar:
If you consider the New World Order multinational corporate monoliths poisoning the planet and reducing mankind to the level of wage slavery for the benefit of the very few to be representative of the 'good,' then the Babalon Working must sound like the most outright evil deed ever perpetrated by a human being. But if you're like me, and would dearly love to see the vile, puss-ridden edifice of Western society burned to the ground, you should see Parsons as the penultimate style icon of psycho-sexual/magickal insurrection, a truly American original if ever there was one.
...
A whole culture is collapsing and a new one is about to be born. Jack Parsons would be pleased.
...
Did the Babalon Working actually work? For the sake of argument, if you believe it to be true, it's true enough. As a metaphor or a myth to explain the psychic and atmospheric turbulence taking place in the world today, it certainly works for me. What has long been prophesied by the world's major spiritual traditions is now coming to pass. Turn on CNN for a couple of hours for ample proof: wars, killer viruses, floods, famines, violent crime, earthquakes, Armageddon cults armed with nerve gas, suicide bombers; Heaven's Gate; the list goes on and on.
...
Since the first link below is to an article I wrote about John Whiteside Parsons which pretty much sums up my ideas about him and his magickal legacy (and my entire political philosophy as well!) this intro is going to be quite brief.
And think about it. The Babalon Working, I mean. What a wonderfully strange idea: If the cosmic perfection of mankind is to be achieved by the return of the Christ consciousness, what better way to hurry the process up than to attempt to actually bring on the Apocalypse by inviting in the spawn of Hell?
Metzger, the Creative Director of disinfo.com, posits a meme which is rather common and perhaps one that is not too deeply explored amongst ‘bohemian alternative’ or 'hipster' types. These are popular descriptions of 'lifestyles' completely devoid of meaning and essentially reduced to hollow and amnesiatic fashion posturing and, in many cases, explicitly fascist posturing as well; especially amongst those who have 'chosen' a ‘left hand path.'
Forming complete and meaningfully independent thoughts and ideas--especially ones based on critical historical analysis--is understandably and undoubtly rather difficult in this fragmented age of mass media conglomeration. And perhaps this is what is so very unattractive about Metzger's self-proclaimed '...political philosophy.' Because on a very important level, the information he presents really is (all irony aside) disinformation, and potentially very dangerous and destructive disinformation at that.
It should not come as much of a surprise that disinfo.com received its initial marketing seed money from a giant telecommunications conglomerate: TCI, Inc.
The origins of disinformation.com from Alex Constantine's Anti-Fascist Research Bin:
... Disinformation was designed to be the search service of choice for individuals looking for information on current affairs, politics, new science and the 'hidden information,' that seldom seems to slip through the cracks of the corporate-owned media conglomerates. Ironically, it was funded by one of the largest media companies in the world (TeleCommunications, Inc. (TCI), now part of AT&T), who paid for placement on Netscape's then ubiquitous search page. ...
It would, of course, be rather foolish to suggest Kenneth Anger be held personally responsible for the obliteration of Western culture and human consciousness as we know it--or more precisely--as we once knew it; no matter how much he, or Jet Propulsion Laboratory co-founder and fellow Thelemite, Jack Parsons, might revel in such nihilistic diabolism. Anger is, after all, the filmmaker who once stated that 'cinema...is an evil force. And '...its point is to exert control over people and events and his filmmaking is carried out with precisely that intention.' Exactly how evil and how powerful a force will be the subject of future explorations.
Kenneth Anger
It is interesting to note in closing here some rather peculiar comments Kenneth Anger made in an interview granted to the British newspaper The Observer in 2004 when presented with a few basic questions regarding Iraq...
...erstwhile seat of the Kingdom of Babylon but now, 'a hideous little country, like a Pekinese nipping at America's heels. We're in the new Dark Ages with all these beheadings,' he muses. 'Pretty soon, beheadings will become rather ho-hum and some new horror will emerge. Like eye gouging.'
What exactly are we to make of Anger's analogy above? It might perhaps reek of nationalism or, even worse yet, perhaps racism. But maybe that is too harsh of a condemnation. After all, Anger is '...one of our greatest artists...' as Martin Scorsese so trustingly and uncritically phrases it. And like many 'great artists,' they end up at some point 'effectively homeless,' with basically no possessions and very little money:
Though he claims that he still receives publishing royalties, he has precious few belongings beyond his books and photographs. He puts a brave face on his penury, but last year [2003] he became effectively homeless and now rents a tiny place in Echo Park, behind a chicken wire gate, surrounded by gang violence.
But, yet again, the creator of Scorpio Rising (1964) may find such surroundings all too familiar. As Maximilian Le Cain writes for the online film journal Senses of Cinema:
Scorpio Rising is practically an amplified remake or, more precisely, a translation of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. The implied destruction that concluded the earlier film referred to Anger's recurring preoccupation with the end of the Christian Age of Pisces, the violent death of which was necessary to allow for the birth of the Age of Aquarius. The arcanely theatrical, neo-decadent imagery and abstract space gives way to a realistic milieu, that of a contemporary biker gang. The fetish objects are now the paraphernalia of youth subculture and the violence more savage and overt. But the patterns are the same, a loving preparation for the ritual, the build up of energy at the ritual and finally the act of destruction. Anger has simply taken his show to the street.
And indeed in 2003, both Kenneth Anger and George W. Bush quite literally took their respective shows to '...the street:' Bush with US troops in the streets of Babylon and Anger homeless in the streets of Hollywood Babylon.
"A whole culture is collapsing and a new one is about to be born."
And exactly what kind of culture is in the process of being born?
That should be the question from here on end, because this culture is pretty much finished in a very profound and perhaps irreversible way: From the cellular, microscopic level, to the cerebral level, to the planetary level and beyond.
I don't share Mr. Metzger's optimism, unfortunately.
The lesson here, I think, CE, is that 'organized religion' or any affiliation thereof, whether it be from the Christian church down the street or the OTO/Thelema Lodge or the Church of Satan or Temple of Set or a Moron Temple...or what have you..is generally a very bad idea.
Posted by: Hemisphere Creep | 03 September 2007 at 18:24
What a wonderfully strange idea: If the cosmic perfection of mankind is to be achieved by the return of the Christ consciousness, what better way to hurry the process up than to attempt to actually bring on the Apocalypse by inviting in the spawn of Hell?
You know what is equally strange? I have often had the thought that George W. Bush and his Family of Zionist 'Christian' Premillenial Dispensationalist Dominionist Corporate Fascists (ie. Tim LaHaye and his idiotic 'Left Behind' series of Apocalyptic fiction) and their Islamists counterparts are basically doing the exact same thing.
Think what you want of Hugo Chavez, but he was spot on for calling Bush 'the Devil' on the floor of the UN last year.
Posted by: ce399 | 03 September 2007 at 23:05