Cricket and the Occult
An investigation in three parts
Part One
Lucifer Rising
‘You know that cricket is actually filled with occult symbols? I mean, It’s a purification ritual, that’s why they dress in white. And the wickets, well, they’re really a wicker gate. And the three stumps, that’s an occult number. Three nails and that… Even the lines on the pitch, is that what you call it? Field. The cricket field. Well, the lines are taken from pagan symbols’ – Kenneth Anger
The name of Kenneth Anger is fading from view now, but from his time as a liminal figure in the counter-culture of the 1960s and for the next couple of decades, he and his most (in)famous film, Lucifer Rising, provoked the gamut of responses from mocking amusement to genuine fear.
I first heard of him then, at the end of the 80s, when I became a writer at the heavy metal magazine Kerrang! Hard rock music had always embraced the occult, or a hokey version of it, and why not? It was cool, it was fun, a neat shorthand for saying who and what you were, with which tribes you aligned. Ronnie James Dio, for a while the singer in Black Sabbath, came up with the devil’s horns hand sign, index and little fingers raised, palm out, which he claimed had come from his grandmother as a way of warding off evil spirits. Motley Crue, the most debauched band in LA, had flirted with Satanism on their album Shout At The Devil (their record company, they claimed, had stopped them from calling it Shout With The Devil – such a fine line…). Van Halen, evidently not as impaired by marketing departments, had a hit called Running With The Devil. Ozzy Osbourne had an even bigger one with Mr Crowley, a song dedicated to the Great Beast himself, writer, philosopher, mountaineer and everyone’s favourite pet Satanist, Aleister Crowley.
The atmosphere was feverish, stoked by Tipper Gore, the fragrant wife of future vice president Al Gore, and her organisation the PMRC, which put warning stickers on records with supposedly unwholesome content, stickers which immediately became a badge of honour for any Metal or Hip-Hop act worth their salt. There were darker moments, too. Judas Priest were sued by the badly-injured survivors of a failed suicide pact who claimed they had been influenced by Satanic messages that could only be heard by playing Priest’s records backwards, which led to some farcically sad courtroom moments.
The daddies of them all were Led Zeppelin, no longer a going concern but nonetheless mythic rock behemoths who had set the bar in terms of the grandiosity and ambition of their music and the rock star lifestyle they had lived. Zeppelin’s guitarist Jimmy Page, rail thin and white faced, silk suit emblazoned with fire-breathing dragons, was their magus, and Page’s links to the occult were very real indeed.
It was through Jimmy Page that Kenneth Anger’s name whispered its way seductively to a new generation. Their paths were always destined to cross. They shared a deep interest in Aleister Crowley and first met at an auction of Crowleyana in London. It was Page, far richer than Anger, who already owned the greatest prize of all, Boleskin House, the property on the banks of Loch Ness that Crowley had bought to conduct his ‘magick’. Page invited Anger to Boleskin to try and banish the spirit of a headless ghost (it was the 1970s) and in return Anger asked Page if he would create the soundtrack for his latest film, Lucifer Rising.
By the time he met Page, Anger had been trying to make Lucifer Rising for a decade. The film was to be based on Thelema, the religion that Aleister Crowley had created, and was set in the new age that Crowley predicted, the Aeon of Horus. Anger tattooed Lucifer’s name across his chest and began looking for a young man beautiful and doomed enough to embody the role of the fallen angel. In San Francisco he met Bobby Beausoleil and cast him right away, only for things to fall apart amid Anger’s claim that Beausoleil had stolen the footage they’d shot and buried it in the desert – Beausoleil countered by saying that Anger had simply wasted the budget and invented the story to satisfy his creditors.
Bobby Beausoleil returned to LA and began living at Spahn Ranch, home to the commune of hippies and outsiders led by Charles Manson. In July 1969, Manson and Beausoleil tortured and killed Gary Hinman, Beausoleil stabbing Hinman twice through the heart and writing the words ‘Political Piggie’ in blood on Hinman’s apartment wall.
Anger, meantime, had travelled to swinging London, where he befriended Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg, and, scraping around in the ashes of his Lucifer footage, salvaged enough that, when added to a few minutes of new film shot with Jagger and Pallenberg, became an eleven-minute short that he called Invocation Of My Demon Brother.
Still he burned to make Lucifer Rising. He tried to persuade Jagger to take the lead role, but the Stones’ appearance at the benighted Altamont festival had put paid to their dalliance with the dark side. Instead, Anger cast Jagger’s brother Chris as Lucifer, and alongside a role for Marianne Faithfull, it was enough to earn him a grant of £15,000 from the National Film Finance Corporation to complete the film – needless to say he didn’t.
Jimmy Page produced a 25-minute score without ever seeing Lucifer Rising, and, as Anger’s film lingered unfinished for the rest of the 1970s, this unreleased and publically unaired piece of music acquired almost holy status among Led Zeppelin obsessives. Page, rich beyond all dreams of avarice after his band’s decade of excess, now owned one of the most beautiful and architecturally significant private homes in London, The Tower House in Kensington, and it was there, in 1979 that Anger was once more trying to complete Lucifer Rising while lodging in Page’s basement.
What happened next depends on whose version you believe, but Anger pissed off Page’s wife Charlotte or their housekeeper and found himself evicted. A vengeful Anger called a press conference and threatened to curse Page, a threat that he very probably carried through on.
When Lucifer Rising was at last released in 1981, it would come with a soundtrack not by Jimmy Page but Bobby Beausoleil, who had somehow managed to compose it while in prison, where he was serving a life sentence for murder. VCR was here and in 1986 Anger granted the rights for his films to appear on home video. Lucifer Rising, long pirated by that point, became a staple of the esoteric underground, played on tour buses and in student houses, deepening its maker’s reputation as the one true artist of the occult.
So far there has not been a lot of cricket in this story. But in part two, with the entrance of rare book dealer and cricket nut Timothy d’Arch Smith, and the enigmatic billionaire John Paul Getty Jr, all of that will change.
PART TWO COMING TOMORROW, 10am.