In honor of the 62nd Birthday of Our Decider, George W. Bush, which was celebrated quietly aboard Japan-bound Air Force One, this past Sunday, July 6, 2008, let me call your attention to a new movie, CHEMICAL WEDDING, directed by Julian Doyle (normally a film editor: LIFE OF BRIAN 1979; TIME BANDITS, 1981; BRAZIL (1985), and written by Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden fame. The Sci-Fi Horror Film, which deals with the resurrection of the notorious but influential Satanist, Aleister Crowley, has recently been released in the UK, but for some reason, perhaps its ineptitude, the picture has not found a distributor in the United States. However, another explanation is that The Great Beast Crowley has recently been in the news because of his alleged relationship with George W. Bush's maternal grandmother.

So far, CHEMICAL WEDDING is either being condemned as of execrable taste and execution, praised for being a return to Hammer Horror Film glory, dismissed as over-the-top Ken Russell-like fun -- or all three. Hyperbolic types tend to identify the picture as one more piece of symbolic evidence linking the Bush Family with witchcraft, Armageddon/Apocalypse/Rapture thinking, Eugenics, the rise of Nazi Party in Germany, and the coming of fascism to America.

   Well, they can't be wrong about everything!

Briefly, CHEMICAL WEDDING relates how, in 1947, a young Cambridge don witnesses in an English nursing home the apoplectic death of Aleister Crowley (John Shrapnell), the self-styled "Great Beast 666," writer, magician, mountaineer, chess expert, student of quantum physics, charlatan, drug addict, sexual pervert of immense proportions, occasional advisor to Winston Churchill, sometime British secret agent keeping tabs on Yanks, Nazis and Soviets. [Crowley's death would have come a little over a year after the birth of Our President (1946), and two years before the death in a puzzling car crash of Barabara Bush's mother, Pauline Robinson Pierce (1949), free-spirited, cult-loving wife to Marvin Pierce, the Publisher of McCall's and Red Book magazines. She is rumored to have had a "free love" affair with Crowley, in 1925, ten months before the birth of Barbara Pierce, later to become First Lady Barbara Pierce Bush.] Sixty years later, the don who witnessed Crowley's death persuades a cybernetics genius, combining a super-computer with DNA matter, to reincarnate within the present day Great Beast Crowley. The subject of the experiment, Professor Haddo, a stuttering Cambridge lecturer becomes the resurrected Crowley, dressed in a violet velvet suit and fedora hat. He proceeds to recite in perfectly Churchillian diction Crowley's typical doggerel ["To pee or not to pee/That is the question/"] while urinating on hapless students. A young, red-haired feminist beauty, Lia, ace reporter of the Cambridge student newspaper, gets hot on the case, and . . . .

The perfect touch to this over-ripe sausage is that the reincarnated Aleister Crowley is played by Simon Callow (4 WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL), chewing scenery, co-eds, and anything else he can get his teeth into. [Most critics say, he is the best thing in the picture.] In any case, Callow may find it ethically difficult to continue to look down his nose at "Orson Welles the Ham Actor," in Volume III of his projected Welles' biography (which one writer says he hopes Callow will devote his ill-gotten CHEMICAL WEDDING salary to).

   The title, CHEMICAL WEDDING, is drawn from a medieval alchemist's treatise, and screeds that Simon Callow utters are based on The Great Beast's writings and recordings. A little Wilde combined with a dash of Ambrose Bierce (who, coincidentally, disappeared from San Francisco about the time of Crowley's visit to America during the First World War) -- Everything is thrown in. There is a lot more, evidently, because, years later, Crowley died just at a time when Rock Bands were beginning to fulminate under the surface of Post-World War II Britain; hence his influence on bands like The Beatles, Iron Maiden, etc, which also explains Bruce Dickinson's longtime interest in the man and his philosophy.

    All kinds of other stuff are alluded to, including Crowley's jealousy over the rise of Lafayette Ron Hubbard's Scientology cult, and his discomfit over losing his American deciple, Jack Parsons. No wonder because, besides being a . . . well . . . a rocket scientist [co-founder of Aero-Jet General and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory], Parsons was a satanist, too. Parsons blew himself up in his his California lab, in 1952.

Seems strange that a man so interested as Crowley was in influential gatherings of Occultists, a man so well connected during the First World War through British Intelligence with American power brokers, would not have wangled a visit to Northern California's Bohemian Grove, where our powerful and well-connected men meet once a year to pee on Redwood Trees and to re-enact mock lynchings, etc. If so, that would set up another connection with him to the Bush and Pierce famlies, all of whom appear to have been interested in the Occult, Eugenics, and other arcane subjects, long before Our President's grandfather, Prescott Bush, helped finance the Nazis' rise to power, or pleaded nolo contendere to a charge of Trading with the Enemy, in 1942.

   I cannot say if there is truth behind the apocryphal gossip that Pauline Pierce gave birth to one of Crowley's many love children, in this case, Barbara Pierce Bush, but one look at pictures of Aleister Crowley and Barbara Bush, side by side, would heighten the suspicion. We know that Pauline Pierce left her two young children behind to go visit her lubricious friend Nora O'Hara Harris, wife of the notorious womanizer and publisher, Frank Harris, in Paris. The three were joined there by Aleister Crowley in late 1924, after he had been thrown out of Italy by Mussolini, when an Englishman died accidentally during a pseudo-religious sexual ritual in Sicily.

[Suicides, madness, accidental death, murder and various types of mayhem abound in the history of Crowley's group, and its successor, L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology Movement.]

Ten months after the foursome -- Frank and Nora Harris, Pauline Pierce, and Aleister Crowley -- shared the Harris's Parisian flat, Pauline gave birth back in the States to Barbara, her third child, future wife of President George H.W. Bush, future mother of President George W. Bush.

The story reminds me a bit of ROSEMARY'S BABY, and I've just learned more of the circumstances surrounding the death of Pauline Robinson Pierce. She died instantly from striking a windshield in 1949, when Publisher Husband, Marvin, drove their car into a stone wall. Officially, he was trying to prevent a cup of hot coffee from spilling on his wife, but while he suffered a broken cheekbone and several ribs, the coffee cup survived unbroken. Later, rumors were floated that Pauline was up to her old tricks, having an affair with General Dwight Eisenhower, who was being persuaded (successfully, it turned out) to run for the Presidency, as a Republican, by his golfing buddy, re-habilitated traitor (thanks to his founding the USO), Senator Prescott Bush, Our President's paternal grandfather. If we follow the ritual mythological logic inherent in CHEMICAL WEDDING, both Pauline Pierce and The Great Beast would have gone to their graves, satisfied. After a long series of misfires on Aleister Crowley's part -- Lola Zaza, Amado, Isis, Hecate, Poupee, Dionysus, and Aleister Attaturk Crowley -- the Anti-Christ, "Moonchild" George W. Bush, ready to Crusade, had been safely delivered to The New World Order, in July of 1946.

It's all lore, of course, but there is a hell of a lot of Bohemian-type tinder in California, America, and the World, these days. The rumors have been going on long before CHEMICAL WEDDING, and no doubt, will continue long after, too.

"Weaving Spiders Come Not Here"?

The Bohemian Club meets in California's Sonoma County next week. How much would a picture of Aleister Crowley and Vice President Dick Cheney, dressed as druids, be worth? I wonder.

  That would be a hot time in the old forest, that night, for sure.

  Just a thought.