Lucifer Rising (1972/1980 Film)

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Most films that touch a closed or initiatory religious tradition are made by outsiders looking in. Lucifer Rising was made by someone already inside. Kenneth Anger was an initiated member of Ordo Templi Orientis, the order Aleister Crowley built to organize the practice of Thelema, and he built his film around Crowley's own public writing rather than around any secondhand account of it, drawing specifically on Crowley's description of Lucifer as the light bearing god, a figure of illumination rather than the Christian devil, and on Crowley's poem Hymn to Lucifer. Gerald Yorke, a recognized Crowley scholar, served as the film's Thelemic consultant, a role that exists in the production record precisely because Anger wanted the symbolism handled with some rigor rather than treated as generic occult decoration.

What the film shows is Egyptian deity imagery and ritual staging in service of what Anger frames as the coming Aeon of Horus, the new spiritual age Crowley's foundational text, The Book of the Law, prophesies. What it does not show, and what this entry does not describe, is any specific oathbound teaching or ritual belonging to a particular initiatory degree of Ordo Templi Orientis or A A, the material those orders confer only on sworn members and never publish for outsiders. Anger's film sits entirely on the open side of that line: a public artistic statement of Thelemic cosmology by someone entitled to make it, not a leak of anything the tradition withholds.

The film took an unusually long time to reach an audience, shot across six years starting in 1966 and not widely distributed until 1980, fourteen years after the first footage was captured.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In early 1967, Kenneth Anger saw a young musician named Bobby Beausoleil performing at a countercultural gathering and asked him to appear in his still unfinished film Lucifer Rising, on one condition Beausoleil set himself, that he would also compose the score. Both men agreed, and for a time the arrangement held.

It did not hold for long. The two fell out during the troubled production, and by the time Anger's original master print was lost, the musical side of the project effectively collapsed with it. Anger turned instead to Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, who recorded an early score during a period when Anger was living in Page's London home. That arrangement ended too, when Anger was evicted from the property in 1976. What happened next is the part of the story that makes this film's production history genuinely unusual among religious films of any kind. Beausoleil, by then incarcerated at Tracy Prison in California, wrote to Anger proposing to finally deliver on their original 1967 agreement. Working with a band of fellow inmates he called the Freedom Orchestra, Beausoleil composed and recorded the score inside the prison between 1976 and 1979, and its release on vinyl in 1980 is what finally let Anger distribute the finished film, fourteen years after the first footage was shot.

Reviewing the completed work, Anger's biographer Bill Landis called it a religious movie of the top order, a description this atlas treats as one serious critic's assessment of a film whose own maker was a sworn initiate of the tradition it portrays, not as this atlas's own theological judgment.