The Cosmic American

The Cosmic American: Harry Smith's Alchemical Art

Jimmy Page - Lucifier Rising

In 1972, Kenneth Anger commissioned Jimmy Page to score the soundtrack to the film Lucifer Rising. Page ultimately recorded a 24 minute composition, but it was not used. Page and Anger had a falling out, and when the film was finally released in 1980, it featured the music of Bobby Beausoleil.

A SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT FROM JIMMY PAGE

On March 20th, the Spring Equinox 2012, the title music for Lucifer Rising and Other Sound Tracks will have its premiere and release.

The title music, along with other musical pieces recorded at my home studio in the early Seventies, have been revisited, remixed and released for the first time.

This is a musical diary of avant-garde compositions and experiments, one of which was to appear on the film Lucifer Rising.

The collection has been exhumed and is now ready for public release. This will be available exclusively on the website.

There will be a standard release on heavyweight vinyl.

In addition there will be a special run of 418 numbered copies. The first 93 copies will be signed and numbered.

There are liner notes and commentary to each track. The tracks are:

Side One

1) Lucifer Rising - Main Track

Side Two

1) Incubus

2) Damask

3) Unharmonics

4) Damask - Ambient

5) Lucifer Rising - Percussive Return

Jimmy Page, March 2012

Zeena Lavey

(click to enlarge)

beyond the black rainbow

"Hello, my name is Doctor Mercurial Arboria, founder of the Arboria Institute. Through our unique blend of benign pharmacology, sensory therapy and energy sculpting, we can guide you to a new, better, happier you..."

The trailer for this new Canadian sci-fi film has a distinctly retro-chic vibe that recalls classic Kubrick as well as George Lucas' THX 1138. With soundtrack by Jeremy Schmidt of Sinoia Caves and Black Mountain. Release date unknown.

XV: The Devil DIY

Image found on Tumblr. I am very curious to know if this is part of an entire photo series of the tarot. If you have any information or can locate similar images please get in touch.

dread the passage of Jesus

The soundtrack to the television show X-Files contains an usually hidden track. While most often, tracks hidden on CDs are found at the end of the recording, after a lengthy pause, Nick Cave's collaboration with the Dirty Three appears on the release at the beginning, that is, at the very very beginning, before track one. To listen to it you must rewind past the beginning. Over the Dirty Three's haunting folk dirge, Cave reads the following:


We were called to the forest... when we went down. 
A wind blew warm and eloquent 
We were searching for the secrets of the universe... 
And we rounded up demons and forced them to tell us what it all meant 
We tied 'em to trees and broke them down one by one 
And on a scrap of paper, they wrote these words... 
And as we read them, the sun broke through the trees... 
"Dread the passage of Jesus, for he will not return." 
Then we headed back to our world and left the forest behind... 
Our hearts singin' with all the knowledge of love. 
Then somewhere, somehow, we lost the message along the way... 
And when we got home, we bought ourselves a house. 
And we bought a car that we did not use... 
And we bought a cage and two singing birds... 
And at night we'd sit and listen to the canary's song. 
For we'd both run right out of words... 
Now the stars, they are all angled wrong... 
And the sun and the moon refuse to burn 
But I remember a message in a demon's hand 
Dread the passage of Jesus for he does not return... 
...he does not return... 
...he does not return...


In this lyric parable, the two protagonists, for we imagine that they are two even if Cave doesn't say so, receive the secret of the universe after torturing it from a demon. The knowledge of this secret, then, does not come from an elder, or a priest, or a professor, or God incarnate, but a demon, who must be handled violently. It is a forced confession. What is most perplexing here is the response to the two who read the demon's message. While the message says "dread," the two leave the forest "their hearts singing with all the knowledge of love." Somehow the condition for a knowledge of love is the knowledge that Jesus is not coming back. What can this mean? How does one live when one knows that Jesus will not return, and how then does one love others? 


It is not an easy question. Here we can only say, perhaps, that when Jesus returns, I will be judged, and if Jesus does not return, then I am responsible for judging myself, in the absence of any celestial accounting that can evaluate and disentangle the good in my soul from the evil. Additionally, in Saint Paul's time, the knowledge that Jesus will return was the condition for a knowledge of universal truth. If Jesus can be resurrected, says Paul, then resurrection is available to everyone - provided they can adhere to the tenets of Christian morality. Knowledge of Jesus not coming back, then, is not only a knowledge of existential moral responsibility, but of finitude: in Cave's world, nobody gets to come back. In some way, this responsibility for judging, which I am in a way condemned to enact or burdened with, or radically bound to, combined with the knowledge of my own mortality, becomes the condition for a joyous knowledge of love. 


This existential re-write of Christian themes continues in the second half of the parable, when the romantic couple has settled down into a comfortable middle-class life, complete with a "car that we did not use." This life has befallen the couple because they have forgotten the message.  The fate of those who fall into a life of materialist comfort and forget the higher knowledge of the universe is a fundamental theme to Christian ethics, which so often exhorts its followers, in a variety of ways, to awaken from their 'fallen' lives on this Earth to awareness of their deeper spiritual destinies. Cave re-writes this theme by portraying the existential knowledge of Jesus' passage as the knowledge that has been forgotten, covered over, obscured - left as a kind of nagging whisper at the edge of perception. We are given only this knowledge and a portrait of a life lived in oblivion to it - the character of a life lived in full recognition of Jesus' passage is left to us to conceive. 

Til the Christ Comes Back

Bill Fay - Til The Christ Comes Back

From Bill Fay's concept album about the end times, his second LP from 1971

"when soldiers spoil your sleep / and writers haunt your dreams / don't strain to hear the screams / when the lights go out.....pain was all you knew / but I think you're coming through /like applause inside a zoo / when a lion gets out...when shadows take your hand / and mist is on the land / hold on to your mind / til the Christ comes back.."

It's worth noting the opposing theological dimensions of Bill Fay and Nick Cave. Fay's song is eschatological, that is, it waits for the end of the world, the return of the Christ. The shape of Christian understanding of history is that life on earth happens in an interlude time, between the birth of Christ and his return. It's bracketed, bookended. Additionally, when Fay talks about 'holding on to your mind' until the return of the Christ, he's interpolating a key theme with regard to Christian eschatology, namely the role of what in Greek is called the kat-echon, the Restrainer, a figure who makes a brief but enigmatic appearance in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians.

Here, the apostle Paul says:

"Let no one deceive you in any way; for [the day of the Lord] will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. Do you not remember that wehn I was still wtih you I told you this? And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, and the Lord Jesus will slay him with the breath of his mouth and destroy him by his appearing and his coming." (2:3-8)

What's remarkable about Paul's formulation of the Restrainer is that while he's a figure of protection and defense, his power is finite, he's only supposed to keep the 'lawless one' at bay until the right time, until the time of the Christ coming back. Jacob Taubes makes an important observation about the kat-echon, namely that it's the only force that can provide room for both eschatology and human freedom. If there isn't a terrestrial force keeping the end of the world from happening until the 'right time', if there's just an apocalypse that's going to just suddenly take place at any moment, it's hard to get up in the morning.

In other words, the kat-echon is an important mediator between the terrestrial and heavenly realms, because it addresses the question of, why is there a terrestrial realm at all? if the divine sphere is perfect, omniscient, etc., why is there a finite, fucked up world below? The only properly philosophical answer, which German Idealism with Hoelderlin, Hegel, Schelling begins to formulate as a modern parallel to Kabbalah's image of God as a broken vessel, is that God is ailing, weak, in trouble, and needs us to keep him alive, just as he needs the help of the Restrainer from keeping the apocalypse from happening until the right time.

Most of the time in political theory, from Thomas Hobbes to Carl Schmitt, the Restrainer is understood to be the Leviathan, or the sovereign, some unifying and grand political force. What we want to add here is that from a critical point of view, the Restrainer is Bill Fay. Keeping the lawless one at bay is the artist's job, because the work of art is a instance of self-legislation, of auto-nomy/nomos. The madness described in "Til the Christ Comes Back" is kept at bay by the work of art, which doesn't overcome or destroy this lawlessness but grants it a law, a nomos, by aesthetically figuring it.


Cave's story, centered around the pronouncement that Jesus will not return, is about an absence of eschatology. The two modern lovers move to a cozy house and forget the demonic annunciation. The scope of their lives begins to occlude or obscure the knowledge that if Jesus isn't coming back, the world can no longer be understood in terms of an expected final judgment.

Cave's story figures an important problem of secular life: with the loss of transcendent ritual, there is no force to keep in place the knowledge of this loss. The circular time of ritual keeps the conduit between earth and heaven open. Without this circular time, there is nothing to mark the dreadful loss of this conduit, so this loss itself is lost, and the misty greyness of earthly life continues to perpetuate itself without salvation.

- originally posted on acknowledged classic, 2.08.08