Chemical Wedding : Aleister Crowley fantasy

During the summer a film titled Chemical Wedding, premiered at the 7th Annual London International Festival of Science Fiction and Fantastic Film. The film attempts to resurrect the English mage, Aleister Crowley. It has been billed as an 'occult thriller' but 'flaky fantasy' might be the more accurate description.

The original screenplay was written by Bruce Dickinson, front man of the metal band Iron Maiden.

In Chemical Wedding the Professor Haddo character, played by Simon Callow, is 'possessed' by Crowley. This unlikely indwelling occurs when Haddo is hooked up to a virtual reality simulator connected to a supercomputer, Z93 - programmed by a lab assistant who amazingly reduced the magickal rituals of Crowley into binary code.

This stratagem provided cover for Dickinson to push the limits, even to the point of having his Crowley surrogate commit murder - an activity the original didn't engage in.

Fortean Times has a review that does a decent job at describing the descent into silliness - here's an excerpt:

The film begins with a flashback to 1947 and Crowley’s death in Hastings, seemingly brought about by rocket scientist and Thelemite Jack Parsons’s attempt to perform the Babalon Working in far-off Pasadena – a plot point that not only resonates later in the film but also provides a springboard for its theme of the confluence of science and magick.

Fast-forward to Cambridge in the year 2000, where scientists are experimenting with a state-of-the-art Virtual Reality suit brought over from Cal Tech and a super-computer called Z93, whose programmer is an obsess­ive Crowleyite. When his friend Professor Haddo (Simon Callow; the name is pinched from Somerset Maugham’s Crowley-inspired novel The Magician), an eccentric English professor with a speech impediment and a secret life as a Mason, tries on the VR suit, things go badly wrong. At the next morning’s Shakespeare lecture, Haddo appears with a shaven head, declares that the bard was an occultist and urinates over his students. It’s clear that the professor is not quite himself – in fact, he’s been ‘possessed’ by Crowley, who plans to stay in this new body.

And it’s really from this point that things go downhill fast, with the film jettisoning its sense of humour and turning into a standard contest between good and evil in which a student journalist and a visiting American scientist try to prevent the Beast from completing the occult ritual that will allow him to remain on Earth and continue doing bad things.

Also a short SCI-FI LONDON review here.

Viewed as a campy take-off the film works ... a sort of schlock-horror flick. I'm sure even Crowley would have enjoyed it on that level, but it's too heavy to be passed off as camp.

Most views of Crowley reflect the yellow press opinion of his day that painted him as a 'black magician' and depraved debauchee. Typically there is a tendency to zero in on Crowley's more outrageous antics and personal idiosyncrasies. These traits are played up in Chemical Wedding in a manner that robs the film of credibility - assuming credibility mattered.










Chemical Wedding sets up a good-versus-evil scenario with Crowley of course being evil incarnate. It's a mistake to identify Crowley with the Christian devil as many insist on doing. The film doesn't push this angle but it's an assumption people tend to make - especially when a character personifies evil. Fact is, Crowley didn't buy the Bible 'truth' at all - and certainly didn't see himself as the inverse side of that mythology. Anton LaVey ... the buffoon Satanist ... Crowley was not.

In reference to the Bible he had this to say:

“If one were to take the bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad.”

He also said:

"To practice black magic you have to violate every principle of science, decency and intelligence. You must be obsessed with an insane idea of the importance of the petty object of your wretched and selfish desires ... I have been accused of being a 'black magician.' No more foolish statement was ever made about me. I despise the thing to such an extent that I can hardly believe in the existence of people so debased and idiotic as to practice it."

Perhaps someone will get around to making a film about Crowley that is worth watching - Chemical Wedding isn't it.

Tags: Chemical Wedding, Aleister Crowley, Bruce Dickinson, London International Festival of Science Fiction and Fantastic Film, Anton LaVey