Image via Dangerous Minds website
by Richard Metzger/Dangerous Minds
I’ve decided to do a daily sort of “Magick Show Diary” type of thing for the duration of the Magick Show Kickstarter. The month-long sprint when we shot the majority of the (over 50!) interviews was a super fun adventure and each and every day of that saw me meeting as many as eight incredible new people and getting into all sorts of odd and whimsical situations. I can get a lot of blog mileage out of it is what I am saying. I’ll also be conducting some short interviews with some of the participants.
I’m going to start off with a clip from the “What is Magick?” episode, which I see as the overture to the larger project. The foundation, if you will. The rest of the episodes you could watch in any order as long as you’d watch this one first. It’s roughly a three-act structure that begins with a wide variety of people explaining what magick is to them and how they practice their magick. I got some great answers. One thing that all of these vastly different people had in common is that when they answered that question, none of them said anything remotely goofy. You might expect to get at least one kooky woo-woo answer in the mix, but that didn’t happen. What I got instead was an awful lot of amazing interview footage where magick is discussed eloquently and even scientifically by some very, very intelligent people. Someone unacquainted with the occultist mindset, or who had never given the matter any real thought, wouldn’t watch these responses and think “these people are nuts” because they clearly aren’t. The reaction would more likely be one of “hmmm, this all seems somewhat reasonable.” I think many initially skeptical people will walk away from watching Magick Show surprised at their reaction to what they’ve seen.
To be honest, that was a big part of the goal, and again, I was aided by fifty people who knew what they were talking about, some who can express themselves like poets.
Which brings me to the video. In this clip musician/author Rodney Orpheus declares Aleister Crowley to be “the Einstein of magick” and compares Crowley’s Law of Thelema to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. As the person on the other side of the camera, imagine how happy I was to witness these words, in this order come out of his mouth. As anyone who has ever shot a TV news piece or a documentary will tell you, it’s all about the interviews, and when you’re sitting across from someone and they are giving you what Rodney was offering that morning, you want to do Snoopy’s happy dance of joy afterward. He was so good on camera. I’ve also got him talking about the birth of Chaos magick (he was there), Austin Osmon Spare, and Marjorie Cameron. Rodney tells the most wonderful anecdote about meeting Marjorie Cameron during a trip to Los Angeles in the mid-1990s. The tale is charmingly told in his great Irish accent and he describes what her home was like (inside and out), recounts their conversations, and what they did (smoked a joint and saw a movie at the Cinerama dome). He even imitates her raspy voice. It’s a solid gold piece of footage, but not something that I’d have ever been able to use on television. You just can’t have someone telling a five-minute-long story on a TV show, but when Magick Show was recontextualized as more of a masterclass thing, or as a big conversation among 50 people, one of the first things that occurred to me was “Oh great, now I can use Rodney’s Cameron story!”
And now, here’s a two-minute clip from Magick Show of Rodney Orpheus explaining Crowley’s Law of Thelema.
Press play to watch the video.
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