Take a Walk on the Dark Side

by R. Gary Patterson

  One of Marianne Faithfull’s scenes took place in Giza, with the Sphinx as a backdrop. It was here that she sensed that Anger’s creative powers of “magus or a director” were overrated: “Even as inept as Kenneth was, I knew he was dangerous in a way. I knew that simply by being in the film I was involving myself in a magic act far more potent than Kenneth’s hocuspocus Satanism.” After smearing herself with stage blood, Marianne filmed a sequence where she crawled around an Arab cemetery shortly before dawn as the sun slowly rose over the pyramids. Thinking back on this particular scene, Faithfull claimed, “If I’d been my normal self I would have just laughed, but by then I was a hopeless junkie. I used to feel a lot of the bad luck in my life came from that film.”

  For the next film sequence the setting changed to Star Mountain, an ancient neolithic place of worship in Germany. According to Faithfull, “There are two hundred stone steps cut into the mountain. When the sun rises on the solstice, the rays go through an aperture and hit a sacred spot.” To achieve the mystical effect the filming began on the morning of the winter solstice. Marianne Faithfull began climbing the mountain in what she calls a “dope sick” condition until she reached the top. As the sun was shining through the aperture and illuminating the rock, she passed out: “What had happened, of course, was that I had run out of smack and had a slight dope fit. I think I lost consciousness for a second time and when I came to I realized I was falling off the mountain. I came to as I was tumbling through the air and remembered in midfall that I had to do some somersaults and land on my feet. Which I did. They rushed me to hospital. They thought I must at least have a concussion. But nothing. So there, Kenneth Anger. My magic was bigger than yours! (Kenneth would have liked me to fall off the mountain and die. It would have been a magnificent climax for his film.)”5

  As she thought about her performance in Lucifer Rising, Marianne Faithfull also remembered the aftereffects of her role: “Doing the film was bad enough, but there were further consequences. Pictures came out in the papers with me looking like death in gray makeup and a nun’s habit, with pyramids in the background. All contributing to creating a quite fiendish, devilworshiping image of me. Even old photographs of me outside Yew Tree cottage now took on a sinister aspect! That sweet little cottage began to look like a witch house. After Lucifer Rising I ended up on the wall and became a junkie. I felt unclean and dangerous to the people I loved.”6

  If Kenneth Anger had misread Mick Jagger’s “Satanic pantomime,” he was convinced that within the group there lurked other kindred spirits: “The occult unit within the Stones was Keith and Anita and Brian. I believe that Anita is, for want of a better word, a witch. You see, Brian was a witch, too. I’m convinced. He showed me his witch’s tit. He had a supernumerary tit in a very sexy place on his inner thigh. He stated, ‘In another time they would have burned me.’ He was very happy about that. Mick backed away from being identified with Lucifer. He thought that it was too heavy.”7

  In seventeenth-century witchcraft, “the witch’s tit” was also referred to as the Devil’s Mark. This mark was made when the witch pricked his or her finger with a silver pin in order to sign the Devil’s Black Book. Of course, the signature had to be in his or her own blood. When this was accomplished, Satan would provide the newly initiated witch with a familiar spirit, a demon in the form of some animal, that would enable the witch to cast spells against her enemies and do the will of her unholy master. The mark would then move to some other location upon the body (perhaps on the inner thigh?) and the familiar would use this mark to feed on the sorcerer’s soul. Remember, in the Salem Witch trials the visionary girls claimed to see a yellow bird that would appear around the accused witch. Since no one in the crowd could see the creature, it was taken as evidence of the accused being in league with Satan. This so-called “spectral evidence” led to the hanging of many innocent victims in Salem, Massachusetts.

  Early witch finders also believed that this “witch’s tit” could take the shape of a mole, freckle, or a third nipple. In this case victims were rather easy to find. The legend also goes that this mark would emit no sensation. The witch finders would often plunge needles into suspicious blemishes to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused witch. If the victim was found guilty, she could be hanged or burned alive. Of course, the ultimate test was throwing the defendant into a body of water to see if he or she would float. The reasoning behind this is that water is a purity symbol of baptism and would cast up a servant of Satan. If the victim sank, and could be freed before drowning, that person was innocent. Isn’t it rather strange that Brian Jones drowned in his pool on July 3, 1969?

  One of the great ironies associated with the Rolling Stones’ interest in black magic was guitarist Keith Richards being a former choirboy at Westminister Abbey: “I was once a choirboy—Westminister Abbey, soloist. To me it was a way of getting out of Physics and Chemistry, because if you gave me a Bunsen burner back then I’d set the school on fire… There was a certain part of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus,’ a section for three sopranos, and it was me, a guy called Spike, and another named Terry. We were the reprobates of the school, definitely, but at the time we sang like angels.”8

  When it became obvious that Keith Richards was falling in love with Anita Pallenberg the tension mounted between Richards and Brian Jones, Pallenberg’s first lover within the Stones. Marianne Faithfull was living with Mick Jagger and remembers, “Anita was certainly into black magic. And although I can’t really say whether she was a witch or not, there’s no denying the fact that Anita was sort of a black queen, a dark person, despite her blond looks…. It’s very hard to define wickedness, but when Anita looked at you sometimes with that incredible smile on her face, it was not a smile you had ever seen before, it was a smile that seemed to be a camouflage for some dark secret that she was hoarding…. The best way I can describe Anita is that she was like a snake to a bird and that she could transfix you and hold you in place until she wanted to make her move.”9

  Anita Pallenberg, when told of Marianne Faithfull’s description of her powers, answered, “Oh, she’s probably referring to that spell I put on Brian. She knew about that.” Brian and Anita had a terrible fight and Pallenberg was forcibly thrown from the house. She picked herself up all “scraped and bloody” and went to a friend’s house. The longer she sat there the angrier she became, and since revenge is a great motivator, she explained, “I was sitting there, in tears, angry, getting my wounds treated, feeling terrible, and I decided to make a wax figure of Brian and poke him with a needle. I molded some candle wax into an effigy and said whatever words I said and closed my eyes and jabbed the needle into the wax figure. It pierced the stomach.”

  The following morning Anita returned to Jones’s house and found him very ill and suffering from severe stomach pains: “He’d been up all night, and was in agony, bottles of Milk of Magnesia and other medications all around him. It took him a day or so to get over it.” Anita also commented that “Yes, I did have an interest in witchcraft, Buddhism, in the black magicians that my friend, Kenneth Anger, the filmmaker, introduced me to. The world of the occult fascinated me, but after what happened to Brian, I never cast another spell.” Pallenberg has also claimed that “I have a very old soul from another time that entered my body and lives in me. I feel younger now than when I was eight years old. When the soul entered my body I felt very oppressed, very heavy, that something was bearing down on me. But now I am young and released with this new soul in my body.”10 But according to Rolling Stones insider Tony Sanchez, this would not be the last time she would cast a spell!

  Sanchez recalled one episode in which there was an old man dying in a roadway outside Marrakesh. It appeared that the man’s simple cart had been struck by a truck. As the crowd gathered around the overturned cart, Anita Pallenberg made her way through the crowd and dipped a handkerchief in the old man’s blood: “Later Anita was to attempt to use the same handkerchief to put a curse on a young man who had angered her. Subsequen
tly, he died.”11 Of course, Kenneth Anger had taught Anita the power of a dying man’s blood. Throughout history onlookers at public executions would attempt to dip handkerchiefs in the blood of the condemned. It was believed that the shed blood of kings would contain even more magical properties. At the execution of Louis XVI onlookers dipped handkerchiefs in his blood and pulled hairs from his powdered wig as his decapitated body quivered upon the scaffold. The same held true at the execution of King Charles I of England and for other members of the unfortunate English nobility. One legend mentioned a Puritan doctor whose family obtained the very cervical vertebra split by the executioner’s ax in the execution of King Charles I. This talisman stayed in the family until Queen Victoria determined it should be reburied with her unfortunate ancestor. It also seemed that instead of using this grisly object for the purpose of magic, it had been used instead as a salt and pepper holder for the good doctor’s family’s dinner table.

  It has been rumored that Anita Pallenberg also placed a curse upon Joe Monk, a former friend of Keith Richards. After a drug bust had occurred in the summer of 1973, Pallenberg had become convinced that Monk had served as an informant for the police. She claimed that she would get her revenge upon the supposed double-crosser by placing a curse upon him: “A short while later Joe Monk was driving along a lonely cliff-top road in Majorca when his car crashed and he was killed. Nobody saw it; no other vehicle was involved. The police said it was the strangest accident that they had ever heard of. One can only assume it was a coincidence of course.”12

  The influence of Kenneth Anger continued to grow, and with this the Stones began to fear the powers of their new guru. Anger claimed to be a magus, a magician of the highest order, and an equal to that of Aleister Crowley. Mick Jagger’s musical compositions for Lucifer Rising were used as the sound track for Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother. This short film included scenes of magic, the Stones in concert, and American soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War. The staring role of Lucifer went to Bobby Beausoleil. Beausoleil was a former guitarist with the California rock group Love and was Anger’s first choice for the starring role in Lucifer Rising. Beausoleil was cast as Lucifer but after a few months of filming he became involved in a terrible argument with Anger. It has been suggested that Beausoleil stole the film negatives and tried to extort money from Anger. Kenneth Anger responded with a “ritualistic curse.” Strangely enough, shortly after this argument, Beausoleil became a member of the Manson family. He reportedly tortured and killed Gary Hinman, a musician who had sold the family some bad drugs. After the murder Bobby Beausoleil scribbled “political piggy” in his victim’s own blood. Some sources now claim that the Manson family committed the Sharon Tate murders as a sort of copycat killing in order to convince the police that they had arrested the wrong man, and to force them to free Bobby Beausoleil.

  One chilling photograph taken at this time portrays Beausoleil dressed in nineteenth-century apparel in front of a church with Crowley’s slogan “Do What Thou Wilt” painted upon the wall. Of course Manson and his family were close to the Satanic movement in San Francisco. Convicted killer Susan Atkins had once been a topless dancer for one of Anton LaVay’s early side-shows while he was founding the Church of Satan. It has also been rumored that Sharon Tate, shortly before her death, had developed a strong interest in witchcraft. In one of her later films, Eye of the Devil, she played the role of a character involved with the occult. There is some suspicion to this day that the murders of Tate and her friends were due to a drug deal that went bad rather than an unprovoked ritual killing. It was also ironic that Tate’s husband, Roman Polanski, had completed the occult classic Rosemary’s Baby at the time of the killings. Chilling coincidences exist, with Sharon Tate’s unborn baby being killed by Satanists, and the film character Rosemary being led to believe by Satanists that her baby had died. The terrifying scenes of a very pregnant Mia Farrow carrying a long, sharp butcher’s knife were also very disturbing, knowing the outcome of the Tate murders. It was also during this time that Sharon Tate had become well acquainted with Alex and Maxine Sanders. The Sanderses were leaders of an occult society called the Alexandrians and billed themselves as the king and queen of witches. While doing a series of lectures on magic, the Sanderses came into contact with another occult society whose members gave up all material possessions to become members. One follower asked to borrow several rare books dealing with ritual magic. When the books were returned Maxine Sanders noticed that one passage in one of the books dealing with blood rituals had been underlined. The highlighted passage stated “kill the pig …” Some investigators took this as an early involvement with California cults that may very well have included the Manson family.

  The Stones’ break with Kenneth Anger came after a series of strange happenstances. Tony Sanchez remembers, “We were all just a little afraid of Kenneth. Again and again inexplicable things involving him would happen.” Once, for example, Stones and Beatles insider Robert Fraser sponsored an opening party for some sculptures created by John and Yoko Lennon. Since the sculptures were white, all the guests were to follow suit and dress in white as well. According to Sanchez, “We were even forced to drink a white mineral water.” Then Sanchez noticed Kenneth Anger at the party. As Sanchez moved toward the filmmaker, Anger seemed to have vanished into thin air. Strangely, says Sanchez, Anita Pallenberg, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Richards, and Mick Jagger all had the same experience. Each noticed Anger moving through the crowd and as each sought him out for conversation, Kenneth Anger seemed to just disappear. “Anyway,” said Anita, “it’s very strange because Kenneth told me he wouldn’t be able to come to the exhibition because he was going to be away on business in Germany.”

  Kenneth didn’t return for two weeks, and by then numerous other people who had been at the party—John, Yoko, Robert, artist Jim Dine—all remarked on having seen Kenneth across the crowded room, but having been unable to speak to him: “Eventually we asked almost everyone who had been there if he or she had spoken to him—and none of them had. ‘Were you there?’ I asked him one day. And he only laughed.”13 When Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg suggested that they would like to marry, but didn’t want the legal paperwork hassle of a marriage between an English citizen and a German-Italian, it was Anger who suggested a pagan service. He said that the door to their house was to be painted gold with a special paint enriched with magical herbs. This newly painted door would then represent the sun, and the marriage service would then be blessed. Early the next morning Anita’s screams awakened both Richards and Sanchez. The heavy three-inch mahogany door had been flawlessly painted during the night. To do such a masterful job, the door would almost certainly have had to have been removed from the hinges. This would have been impossible due to the heavy lock. Sanchez says that he, Richards, and Anita Pallenberg, then trembling, came to the belief that Kenneth Anger somehow could enter their home by his mere will alone. Anita began carrying strings of garlic after she was convinced by Anger that her enemies would send a vampire to destroy her. He repeated the tale of Aleister Crowley’s struggle with a vampire sent by MacGregor Mathers to kill him until Crowley “smote the sorceress with her own current of evil.”

  Pallenberg’s interest in the occult continued to grow, and she was to later tell Sanchez never to disturb her while she was casting a spell. He claims he noticed a strange chest that she kept in her room: “The drawers were filled with scraps of bone, wrinkled skin and fur from strange animals. I slammed the door shut in disgust and ran from the room.” Keith Richards was impressed with being considered as another of the great rebels of English literature to dabble with the occult. Obviously, Anger made it very flattering for Keith Richards to consider himself alongside great English writers like Byron, Blake, Wilde, and Yeats. In an interview with Robert Greenfield in Rolling Stone, Richards stated: “Kenneth Anger told me I was his right-hand man. It’s just what you feel. Whether you’ve got that good and evil thing together. Left-hand path, right-hand path
, how far do you want to go down? Once you start there’s no going back. Where they lead to is another thing. It is something everybody ought to explore. Why do people practice voodoo? All these things are bunched under the name of superstition and old wives’ tales… before, when we were innocent kids out for a good time, they were saying, ‘They’re evil, they’re evil.’ Oh, I’m evil, really? So that makes you start thinking about evil. What is evil? Half of it, I don’t know how much people think of Mick as the devil or as just a good rock performer or what? There are black magicians who think we are acting as unknown agents of Lucifer and others who think we are Lucifer. Everybody’s Lucifer.”14