How our film about the occult side of Hastings told us what it wanted to be about, and we just did what we were told…

It was a sun-soaked afternoon in our old pub, The Marina Fountain; shafts of lazy light saturated the bar, and I sat there with my little lad when a French feller with a vintage camera walked in and introduced himself…

“Hello Michael, I’m Raphael – we spoke by email about whether you knew of any studios going free, I’m about to move here from London,”

“Ah! Hello, Raf! Nice to meet you! Hope you don’t mind me calling you Raf – this is my Raf, you see – I didn’t tell you over our emails, but my son is a Raphael too,”

“Ah! My father was called Michael. He was from Brighton. He used to have one of the biggest collections of Aleister Crowley books in Paris.”

Ha, I thought, what a funny little coincidence. French Raf had got in touch with me a few weeks earlier, after seeing my old film Stranger on the Shore, a rumination about Hastings & St Leonards which features Aleister Crowley and his final days in a gothic boarding house here, called Netherwood (you couldn’t make it up). I told myself I’d have to ask Raf if I could have a look at the surviving bits of his dad’s rare Crowley collection when he moved down, and then didn’t get around to it. 

“A week or two later, I was talking about this funny little coincidence to Raf Rundell, one of The 2 Bears. ‘No way!’ he said. ‘My dad’s a Michael too!’ Now it just seemed weird— the only three Rafs I knew, all with dads called Michael. ‘Maybe we could all form a band together,’ The 2 Bears’ Raf joked.”

That was the first undeniably strange coincidence of many—coincidences that have clustered around our film Magick Hastings like iron filings around a magnet and continue to do so. Ever since we started making it, I have found myself being pulled in a certain direction, like a swimmer being dragged along into a certain current, signposted by a strange sequence of synchronicities saying “THIS LANE PLEASE,” and occasionally, “NO DIVE BOMBING …”

But back to French Raf, or Raphaël Neal to use his proper name. I still hadn’t gotten around to having a look at his collection of Crowleyana, so when I’d begun the writing and research stage of Magick Hastings, I thought it might be a good idea to go and have a browse. I went to see him one evening, after spending the afternoon trying to imagine some way for me and Maxy, my film-making partner, to shoot images that looked like tarot cards, maybe something like the cinematic “moving stills” in Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising or in Soviet Georgian masterpiece The Colour of Pomegranates by Sergei Parajanov. The idea had just popped into my mind that afternoon, but it was beyond my technical capabilities or Maxy, as we’ve always been more reportagey, smash & grab-style filmmakers, and we wouldn’t have a clue how to set a shot up to look like an old oil painting, with lighting, props, costume, makeup and everything.

This was exactly the challenge I was contemplating as I walked round to Raf’s place. When I got round there we got chatting, and Raf showed me some of his photographic work, and my eyes nearly popped out of my head. The pictures he showed me were in exactly the same vein as The Colour of Pomegranates or Lucifer Rising, just like I’d been imagining earlier that day. It was downright bizarre. I’d never seen any of Raf’s work before. Yet here it was – he had costumes, drapes, all the props, the lighting, and a style of work that was almost exactly what I had been imagining but had no idea how to execute. I immediately rang the producer afterwards to see if we could find some money out of the budget to bring him into the project. 

A completely improbable occurrence. But then this film was becoming a web of such improbabilities. It felt like we’d unwittingly set something we didn’t understand in motion. I started to imagine that the film was a spell, and the spell was working, the spell was strong, we just weren’t sure what that spell was yet. We just had to keep swimming with the current and see what happened, I suppose.

The idea to use tarot card imagery in Magick Hastings came because of another odd little synchronicity involving the Rider-Waite Deck a few days earlier. I’d dug out my old Rider-Waite Deck and had been playing around with the cards a bit at the start of the project when we were trying to come up with film ideas. I realised after a few days of playing with them that some of the cards had gone missing (I have small children); the one I was really looking for was the spare card with the photo of the artist who drew them, Pamela Coleman Smith, which was annoying, because I wanted to read up on the biographical notes it contained. Then drinking my coffee one morning, I moved a pile of shite and the spare card about Pamela fell out, and I remember being really pleased to find it, just before I set off to meet Harriet, proprietrix of the Tadhg Mae esoteric art gallery on George Street, with my producer. We weren’t meeting Harriet to talk tarot, we’d gone to look at local esoteric artists really, but once we got to the shop, the conversation settled firmly on the cards, and the Rider-Waite Deck in particular. Harriet, it turned out, was a bit of an expert on Pamela Coleman Smith. An initiate of the Golden Dawn and an adept in its fin-de-siècle mysteries, Pamela had lived, for a while, with fellow Golden Dawners in Winchelsea, a village ten minutes along the coast from Hastings, immediately before she created the Rider-Waite artwork. I had no idea Pamela Coleman-Smith or the Rider-Waite Deck had any connection to our little corner of the world, but once you know this, you can see our enchanted little plot of Sussex in many of the marshy, medieval-looking coastlands of the world’s most famous Tarot deck. 

Shortly afterwards, leafing through French Raf’s old Crowley books, I found a dusty old tome with beautiful colour plates of Crowley’s own Thoth Tarot Deck, Illustrated in strikingly modernist style by Dame Frieda Harris, compared to the more art nouveau manner of Pamela. I knew Harris had visited Crowley in his final days in Netherwood, so the link to this area, however tenuous, was there with the Thoth Deck too. Back at home, I was mulling over whether this was too tenuous a link to fit into the script when some random video about Crowley’s influence on Paul McCartney and The Beatles popped out of my interweb algorithm; it was part of a series and this episode was all about Winchelsea, because Paul has a windmill near there, and I believe recorded McCartney 2 in it, noodling away on synths with a big bag of weed (I’d imagine); it also informed me that Dame Frieda Harris had also lived there for a while, following in the footsteps of Pamela Coleman Smith. So the two most recognisable Tarot packs, The Rider Waite and The Thoth Deck have a little bit of our little corner of Sussex in them. The film began to feel like it was sort of writing itself by this point. An idea would arrive and then little coincidences would flesh it out for me in the following days, like it was willing itself into the script. The path through the script writing towards the film shoot just kept opening out in this way. It felt as much like receiving as creating.

The shoot day arrived. The synchronicities kept coming. We went round to Raf’s lock-up at the Big Yellow Self Storage depot for some props. His little unit was an Aladdin’s cave. I remember pulling out a plastic crate full of wigs with a bottle of Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo in it. We’d borrowed Mark from Supernature’s van and packed it full of such stuff—kimonos, velvet robes, fake flowers—all balanced precariously while I sat on the spare tyre in the back. Oh, the glamour of small independent filmmaking. If I could find the funds, I’d happily spend every day of the rest of my working life sitting in the back of vans on spare tyres like these.

We got to Hastings Museum, where we were shooting one of the world’s greatest throwers of garden parties, Glenn Veness, in the style of Saint Francis. I was thinking about the legend of Saint Francis talking to the birds (Glenn loves all the animals in his garden), and the image of butterflies around him suddenly came to mind. I knew we had some stuffed crows and seagulls but wasn’t sure about the butterflies. “Did we bring those fake butterflies?” I asked as we waited to be let in through the big wooden gothic door. The instant I asked the question, a brilliant, golden butterfly seemed to just materialise out of the dark wood of the heavy gothic door and flutter around our faces for a minute before fucking off. It might not seem like much on paper, but it had an air of the miraculous about it at the time. 

Another sign and wonder from the sky came when me and Maxy were shooting my mate Gary the Wizard as an old, worn-out Crowley drifting around dilapidated bits of Hastings town centre. At one point, we had him collapse, exhausted, in a red art deco bus shelter, posing as Osiris Slain, a secret physical sign from the magical rituals of the Golden Dawn, a pose also employed often by Jimmy Savile. As soon as Gary made the sign, a hawk flew down in front of us and killed a pigeon, flying off with it before we got the chance to film it. “He is with us,” said Gary, deadpan, like it was the most natural thing in the world. I was gobsmacked. As any fan of the Crowley myth will tell you, Uncle Al considered himself to be the prophet of the New Age of Horus, the Hawk-headed god of ancient Egypt, son of the slain Osiris. Crowley believed he received his calling on the Equinox of the Gods, the advent of this new age, which occurred when Crowley received a transmission from the emissary of Horus, a discarnate entity called Aiwass, who dictated The Book of the Law to him for an hour a day at exactly noon for three days in a row in Cairo in 1904. Horus, the hawk-headed Lord of the Aeon, killing a pigeon in front of Osiris Slain, keeping us on our toes.

We went for a glass of vino after the shoot. Our conversations always go off on quite far-out tangents (“Far out” being one of my favourite phrases of Gary’s), and somehow he’d got on to the subject of the mystic significance of the number 72—72 demons of the Goetia, 72 angels of the Shem HaMephorash, the secret unsayable 72-lettered name of God.

“Did you know that in a pentagram, the angles of the points of the star are all 72 degrees?”

“Are they really?”

“Yeah—72 is one-fifth of a circle of 360 degrees.”

“Far out…”

And so we sat on the airy terrace of the White Rock Hotel and waxed esoteric while we drank a few glasses in the early evening violet hour. We’d been using my Aleister Crowley book Magick In Theory & Practice as a photographic prop. It’s a thick old book—”the Blue Brick,” they call it—and Gary was enjoying a peruse.

“Here, Gary, do you want to borrow that book for a bit?”

“Nah, I’ve got a pile of them on the go at home… here, let me show you something my brother used to believe in though—give the pages a little rub—go on, like a pack of cards—good, just like that—now, open it at the page that seems right. What’s the first thing you read?”

“72.”

“Wow!”

“It’s a footnote. ‘… and in one hand I destroyed a universe.’”

“Go on then, I will have a borrow of it.”

And that’s magick.

Exclusive Premiere Event

 

at the Smugglers Caves

This Halloween, to mark the release of Magick Hastings, an exclusive screening will take place in the Smugglers Caves—one of Hastings’ most mystical and historically rich locations. The event will feature live music, poetry, DJs, and supernatural happenings, creating an immersive experience that captures the essence of Hastings’ occult heritage. So invite your friends…

Date: Saturday, 26 October 2024

Time: 7:00 PM – Late

Location: Smugglers Caves, West Hill, Hastings

Booking essential. Visit magickhastings.co.uk

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