Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome:

‘Inauguration of The Pleasure Dome mixes the sacred and profane. Originating in a fancy dress masque where guests dressed as mythological deities, Anger’s own performers engage in a decadent occult Eucharist. They are accompanied by the swelling organ notes and rapturous drumming of Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass (1923) into which screaming is mixed. Here, the deities are given a Crowleyan slant, and feature Pan, Astarte, the Great Beast and the Scarlet Woman. They are joined by Cesare, the Somnambulist from Robert Wiene’s German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1922)…References to “strange drugs” feature strongly, from Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan which is evoked in the films title, to Crowley’s opium pipe, the Scarlet Woman’s “big fat joint”, and narcotic wine and powders…Shiva adopts different forms to receive each guest, becoming Osiris to Isis. He gradually induces the loss of individual identities as characters blend into each other and unite in him at the ritual’s consummation. This mystic melding lends itself naturally to superimposition, the film’s dominant technique…Flash-frame and superimposition add photographs of Crowley, the unicursal hexagram and alchemical symbols, such as the white lion and the red eagle.’ (page 68 moonchild)

In Alchemy the Lion represents, ‘any salt or fixed substance obtained from metals. It is red, green, or black according to its state of perfection.’ The eagle (Aquilla) is the worldly bird of soul; in some depictions it represents the feminine side and the elements Water and Earth. The Eagle is ‘a symbol of volatilization. For instance, an Eagle devouring a Lion indicates the volatilization of a fixed component by a volatile component. Denotes sublimation or distillation.’

Salt (Lion) is the third heavenly substance in Alchemy, which represents the final manifestation of the perfected stone. The Emerald Tablet calls it “the glory of the ‘Whole Universe’.” It has also been associated with the Astral Body. In general, Salt represents the action of thought (meditation, prayer) on matter (metals, other substances), be it the One Mind acting on the One Thing of the universe or the Alchemist meditating in his inner laboratory.

When Alchemists discuss the Universe they are referring to the material Universe in which we live; when they speak of the ‘Whole Universe’ they are referring to not only the material Universe in which we reside (Below) but also the spiritual universe (above). That which is below corresponds to that which is above, and that which is above corresponds to that which is below.

‘Inauguration of The Pleasure Dome associates light with the precious stones swallowed by Shiva, who later eats a crystal pendant, a pearl and a gold snake. Such mixing of sight and taste recalls the experiments in synaesthesia by Baudelaire and other Symbolists. This process involves the extension and melding of the senses conditioned into five different spheres. As the jewels intrinsically possess light, the action of swallowing them suggests a talisman which only releases its power when ingested as food for the inner being. In Crowley’s teachings, the oral ingestion of fluids in a sex-magick context deploys the absorption of supernatural force. This produces intoxication with the god until the body is gradually purified by inner light. It is not sufficient to merely contemplate the light, but it must be consumed to be fully effective.’ (The Occult: A Torch For Lucifer, page 56 by Anna Powell)

‘We see then that there are in nature certain scenes, certain classes of objects, certain materials, possessed of the power to transport the beholder’s mind in the direction of its antipodes, out of everyday Here and toward the Other World of Vision. Similarly, in the realm of art, we find certain works, even certain classes of works, in which the same transporting power is manifest. These vision- inducing works may be executed in vision-inducing materials, such as glass, metal, gems or gemlike pigments. In other cases their power is due to the fact that they render, in some peculiarly expressive way, some transporting scene or object.

The best vision inducing art is produced by men and women who have themselves had the visionary experience; but it is also possible for any reasonably good artist, simply by following an approved recipe, to create works that shall have at least some transporting power.

Of all the vision-inducing arts that which depends most completely on raw materials is, of course, the art of the goldsmith and jeweler. Polished metals and precious stones are so intrinsically transporting that even a Victorian, even an art nouveau jewel is a thing of power. And when to this natural magic of glinting metal and self-luminous stone is added the other magic of noble forms and colors artfully blended, we find ourselves in the presence of a genuine talisman.

Religious art has always and everywhere made use of these vision inducing materials. The shrine of gold, the chryselephantine statue, the jeweled symbol or image, the glittering furniture of the altar-we find these things in contemporary Europe as in ancient Egypt, in India and China as among the Greeks, the Incas, the Aztecs…For Ezekiel, a gem was a stone of fire. Conversely, a flame is a living gem, endowed with all the transporting power that belongs to the precious stone and, to a lesser degree, to polished metal (think of the motorcycle, in Scorpio Rising, that scintillates as it is swathed in light.’ (The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell, page 106,107,108 by Aldous Huxley)

And so humankind, it would seem, has a natural attraction to the scintillating and the luminous. Furthermore, Humans seem to have a primal attraction to evolution. Like metals (think Alchemy), precious gems form in many different environments in the earth. Almost all gems are formed beneath the earth’s surface. Some gems are brought to the surface by man through mining and many are brought to the surface through the forces of nature (faulting, folding, large scale uplift, volcanism).

The interaction of water with copper-rich rocks will form malachite and azurite or turquoise. Magmatic gems crystallize in magmas or in gas bubbles (holes) in volcanic rocks. Examples include: zircon, topaz and ruby. Deep mantle gems such as kimberlites are eruptive volcanics that come from quite deep in the mantle and carry with them diamonds. Diamonds are made from carbon. The stable form of carbon at the Earth's surface is graphite. High pressures and temperatures are required to convert graphite to diamond. Thus, almost all diamonds formed about 100 miles below the Earth's surface. Dates suggest that their formation was restricted to in the first few billion years of the Earth’s history.

Precious gems are the perfect manifestation of evolution; the combination and transformation of liquids, gases and solids into the perfect, raw matter. We literally deck ourselves in evolution without giving our accoutrement a second thought. Think of the semi-precious stone Amber which is the preserved resin of prehistoric trees that grew tens of millions of years ago. Beyond their obvious beauty there exists a much deeper attraction and I believe this attraction rests with our intrinsic, instinctual desire to move beyond what we are and what we ‘know’; the attraction rests with our desire to evolve.

‘Intertextuality is shown by the filmmaker’s casting of bohemian writer of erotica Anais Nin as Astarte, goddess of the moon. Swinging her glittering mesh net she blurs our perspective and hypnotizes us. The net references the pivotal Priestess card in Crowley’s Thoth Tarot deck…In the film, focus on Astarte’s feet in black mesh (fish net) stockings. The symbolic meaning of feet in the Correspondence Tables is “the elder witch”, referring to one aspect of the triple goddess.’ (The Occult: A Torch for Lucifer, page 68 by Anna Powell)

Astarte: was the West Semitic counterpart of the Babylonian goddess Ishtar (the Sumerian Inanna) worshipped in Mesopotamia. Like Ishtar, she had both a benevolent and a terrifying aspect-she was a goddess of love and fertility, but also of war. This latter aspect was dominant in the goddess’s Syro-Canaanite manifestation – she appears as a war goddess in the Hebrew Bible (I Samuel 31) and entered Egypt in this guise during the New Kingdom where she was particularly linked to the military use of chariots and horses. She is mentioned on the Sphinx Stela set up by Amenophis II (perhaps her first appearance in Egyptian texts) as being delighted with the young prince’s equestrian skill and, like the Syrian goddess Anat, was believed to protect the pharaoh’s chariot in battle. She was adopted into the Egyptian pantheon as a daughter of Re (or sometimes Ptah) and wife of the god Seth with whose fearsome and bellicose nature she could easily be equated. According to the fragmentary 19th-dynasty story of Astarte and the Sea, the goddess seemed to have been involved in thwarting the demands of the tyrannical sea god Yam, though the details of this myth are lost to us. While the sexual aspect of Astarte does not seem to have been as pronounced in Egyptian religion as in her Canaanite homeland, it was probably not entirely absent in her Egyptian mythology.

Pan: PAN was the god of shepherds and flocks, of mountain wilds, hunting and rustic music. He wandered the hills and mountains of Arkadia playing his pan-pipes and chasing Nymphs. His unseen presence aroused feelings of panic in men passing through the remote, lonely places of the wilds.
Pan was depicted as a man with the horns, legs and tail of a goat, and with thick beard, snub nose and pointed ears. He often appears in the retinue of Dionysos alongside the other rustic gods. Greeks in the classical age associated his name with the word pan meaning "all". However, its true origin lies in an old Arkadian word for rustic.

Aleister Crowley was a controversial figure, but there is no doubt that he was extremely influential in the shaping of modern magic. Crowley’s major philosophical influence was through a liberation philosophy that focused on creating a powerful magical self, and his impact stemmed from his connection of themes of human evolution (the Aeon of Horus) with modernism (the development of the self through the will). He is also identified as playing a part in the creation of modern witchcraft as a nature religion, although how much he actually contributed is contested. His poem, ‘Hymn to Pan’, written in 1929, displays classical themes combined with a focus on Nature:

Thrill with the lissome lust of the light,
O man! My man!
Come careering out of the night
Of Pan! Io Pan!
Io Pan! Io Pan! Come over the sea
From Sicily and from Arcady!
Roaming at Bacchus, with fauns and pards
And nymphs and satyrs for thy guards,
On a milk white ass, come over the sea
To me, To me,
Come with Apollo in bridal dress
(Shepherdess and pythoness)
Come with Artemis, silken shod,
And wash thy white thigh, beautiful God,
In the moon of the woods, on the
marble mount,
The dimpled dawn of the amber fount!
Dip the purple of passionate prayer
In the crimson shrine, the scarlet snare,
The soul that startles in eyes of blue
To watch thy wantonness weeping through
The tangled grove, the gnarl’d bole
Of the living tree that is spirit and soul
And body and brain – come over the sea,
(Io Pan! Io Pan!)
Devil or God, to me, to me,
My man! My man!

‘Light and colour are expressively used to indicate shifts in consciousness. Shiva changes colour several times, becoming purple, green and pink as he contains all colours within himself. A red shot of him laughing is followed by a white image in the lotus pose of calm contemplation.’ (The Occult: A Torch for Lucifer, page 68-72 by Anna Powell)

Shiva: is referred to as 'the good one' or the 'auspicious one'. Shiva - Rudra is considered to be the destroyer of evil and sorrow. Shiva - Shankara is the doer of good. Shiva is 'tri netra' or three eyed, and is 'neela kantha' - blue necked (having consumed poison to save the world from destruction. Shiva - Nataraja is the Divine Cosmic Dancer. Shiva - Ardhanareeswara is both man and woman. S/he is both static and dynamic and is both creator and destroyer. S/he is the oldest and the youngest, s/he is the eternal youth as well as the infant. S/he is the source of fertility in all living beings. S/he has gentle as well as fierce forms. Shiva is the greatest of denouncers as well as the ideal lover. S/he destroys evil and protects good. S/he bestows prosperity on worshipers although s/he is austere. S/he is omnipresent and resides in everyone as pure consciousness.

Cesare the Somnambulist: In the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Cesare’s character is a peaceful sleepwalker who is forced to carry out the mad whims of his ‘master’ Caligari.

‘The mystical artist Marjorie Cameron, married to Jack Parsons, played the imperious Scarlet Woman. Against a dark ground, in black and white robe, her flaming red hair is thrown into relief, but a later shot shows her pallid, bleached out by the white light of ecstasy.

The Scarlet Woman: ‘Now ye shall know that the chosen priest & apostle of infinite space is the prince-priest the Beast; and in his woman called the Scarlet Woman is all power given. They shall gather my children into their fold: they shall bring the glory of the stars into the hearts of men.’

‘Black and white squares recall the floor of Solomon’s temple reproduced in ritual context. The contrasting elemental colours of blue and red are used for the eye in the triangle, a Masonic symbol of God’s all-seeing unity. Fire and flame imagery increases, to apocalyptic effect, with the brassy sheen of infernal fires as the damned fall into an abyss. A thirteen-petalled sunflower in mandala form has golden petals round a vermilion centre. Golden light emanates from Shiva’s hand in benediction. The predominance of fire at the end signals Anger’s belief that the declining Piscean Age had to be destroyed before the New Aeon of Horus could be born. The lavish costumes, elaborate sets and gorgeously jeweled colours create the effect of stasis and a decadence turned in upon itself and drained of energy…’ (The Occult: A Torch for Lucifer, page 72-73 by Anna Powell in Moonchild: the Films of Kenneth Anger)