(Disclaimer: Yesterday I presented this paper about Witch’s Cradle (Maya Deren, 1943) and Faust (Jan Švankmajer, 1994) at a conference, but I realize this would suit my readers here a bit better, so I've colloquialized it in some sections so that the academic-y language that I used to sound clever in person is removed. lol sorry not sorry)

“Just as the luminescence of the projector evokes its narrative expression of truth on screen, the transgressive illumination brought by the figure of Lucifer signifies the revelation of its own knowledge systems, concealing and disclosing.”

To canonize Lucifer as cinema’s patron saint, I believe, is therefore to recognize the cinema’s inherent complicity in this ultimate dialectic of disclosure and mystification… the palpimset. Cinema promises access to knowledge through illumination (light and storyline), yet what it reveals through its projection of frames on a screen is always mediated by that very apparatus that produces the revelation (filmmaker and camera).

This term/conjunction becomes productive in examining films that foreground ritual and occult symbolism, and, as the scope of research is to locate and consider films that function as occult ritual in themselves… this characterization and organization of various forms of occultism on screen becomes fruitful.

In the grand scheme of my research, I am attempting to provide a multitude of occult frameworks to theorize film.

Subscribe now

My approach to the following films is through what I've been calling ‘Luciferian gnosis’, which can be explained as alluding to a symbolic and theoretical paradigm in which, via this figure of Lucifer, liberation is achieved through forbidden or transgressive revelation- in this case, magickal or occult practice. Here, the figure of the fallen angel of light has since become a reinterpretation of heretical diabolism. I use the term/conjunction here as an analytical framework! (not as some kind of historical designation for a unified theological or occult tradition.)

This interpretation contains an inherent element of Gnosticism (as the term includes gnosis). In its broadest sense, a gnostic structure describes the revelation of an alternative or hidden reality behind the apparent one. Gnosticism, as a theme in cinema, functions as a story in which the unveiling of an alternative or true reality behind an illusion manifests. See Truman Show (1998), Matrix (1999), Dark City (1998).

or check out my list here: https://www.cinematicgrimoire.com/gnostic

According to Arthur Versluis in American Gnosis: Political Religion and Transcendence (2023), Gnostic (uppercase G) refers to the heretical group of antiquity, and gnostic (lowercase g) refers to a person with spiritual knowledge or a direct inner experience. Within the context of gnostic cinema, I would consider the ‘gnosticism’ relating to the lowercase or the anti-cosmic, as the mediation of the relationship between appearance and reality produces a transcendent knowledge (this is also my distinction between luciferian and satanic). This ultimate union of the knower and the known, or the unmaking of the maker into the puppet, has been a theme in many films released right before the millennium and has been written about increasingly over the past twenty-five years. (Some great books and dissertations out there!)

Gnosis in cinema can be read as a paradoxical form of knowledge, as it exposes the structures through which reality is constructed (think Truman Show) all while implicating the subject (audience) within those very structures. As the audience enters the experience of gnosis, the cinematic apparatus is revealed as well. The spectator is therefore placed in a position analogous to this ‘gnostic subject’. (We get the grand reveal when the protagonist gets the grand reveal, even though we know something strange is happening as the moviegoer).

“The cinematic form is extremely apt for the Gnostic vision precisely because film and gnosis are so diametrically opposed. The cinema is a popular commodity that reinforces cultural cliches. Gnosticism frees people from materialism and the stereo­typing that supports it. A Gnostic film aware of the contradictions in its very being is capable of uncovering the conspiracies of commodity culture from the inside, of using the seductions of materialism to expose the dangers of consumerism.”

(Eric Wilson, ‘Esoteric Cinema’ and Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film (2006)

These films present an esoteric or occult experience on film, which then becomes a cinematic understanding of magickal practice. What would appear as magickal revelation then ultimately becomes inseparable from the material operations of the medium that produces it.

Maya Deren’s Witch’s Cradle, 1943, 11 mins

Witch’s Cradle (1943), though unfinished, represents Ukrainian-born Avant Garde filmmaker Maya Deren’s perhaps most personal engagement with magic and occultism on screen. Although occult practices and ritual structures are central to Deren’s broader filmmaking (such as within Divine Horseman: The Living Gods of Haiti, 1954), Witch’s Cradle is notably significant because its occult aspects are inseparable from its formal construction.

Confined to being shot in 10 days within the surrealist exhibition space of Peggy Guggenheim’s ‘Art of This Century’ gallery, the film features artist Marcel Duchamp sitting and playing various games such as chess, and Anne Clark Matta interacting with different sculptures and installations within the exhibit. Clark Matta can also be seen with the pentagram sigil on her forehead, which states “The end is the beginning is…”, a phrase originating as an epitaph of Mary Queen of Scots.

The title Witch’s Cradle itself provides an important point of entry into this particular framework. According to Judith Noble (Clear Dreaming, 2017), the phrase Witch’s Cradle has a few meanings. The first is in reference to Deren’s participation in William Seabrook’s witchcraft experiments in 1939, where the ‘Witch’s Cradle’ was a metal frame from which the witch was suspended to induce trance and visions. Next, the title could reference the magical practice of wrapping an image or poppet of an intended victim with string. String, thread, and the tying of knots are often used in traditional witchcraft, where the repetitive actions increase the efficacy of spell work. And last, Witch’s Cradle or (Cat’s Cradle) quote “refers to a children’s game in which a complex arrangement of string is wrapped around the hands and transferred from one player to another.” Sarah Keller (Frustrated Climaxes, 2013) additionally describes the title of the film, Witch’s Cradle, as a quote, “torture device for suspected witches,” explaining that the title reveals, “the threat of violence, particularly in relation to the often strongly subjective position of the female gaze in these shots.” These meanings are not mutually exclusive. As mentioned, the witch’s thread can bind, suspend, create patterns and games as well as create a means of navigating a geographically confusing space. This opacity makes the thread central to an occult reading of the film.

We do not know Deren’s complete objective with Witch’s Cradle, but as it stands (or at least in the 16mm version at the Anthology Archive in NYC), the film is nonlinear and exists as an open-ended ritual structure as a result of its incomplete state. While each of the previous interpretations mentioned has great value, the figure of Ariadne strikes me as uniquely influential to an occult interpretation, as the enactment of divine myths is central to occult ritual performance.

In Greek mythology, Ariadne, daughter of King Minos, is known for helping the Athenian hero Theseus navigate and escape the Minotaur’s labyrinth by giving him a long thread so he could retrace his steps. After slaying the Minotaur, Theseus breaks her heart and then abandons Ariadne to death on the island of Naxos, where she is found sleeping by the god Dionysus (of wine, festivity and theatre). Here, the thread acts as a means of entering and exiting a space. Theseus is capable of navigating this labyrinth only because he has been given a material structure through which its otherwise unknowable passages can be understood.

At the beginning of Witch’s Cradle, the thread moves on its own around the body of Duchamp into almost a noose around his neck. Then we see a shot of him playing ‘cat’s cradle’ poorly, tangling the string around his fingers, and unable to make proper use of it. Juxtaposed is the image of the thread winding around Anne Clark Matta, which is cut with shots of a beating heart, indicating some sort of circulatory system and branched veins. The string is tight and firm in her hands, as if locked in place. At times, Clark Matta is seen wandering the halls of the gallery or sitting in the center of the webbing. During his short scene, Duchamp becomes entangled in the string as he plays, while Clark Matta appears to live within it and manipulate it. The distinction between Duchamp and Clark Matta can be read perhaps as a gendered response (Theseus and Ariadne).

This string can then be articulated as a maze or trap (like the Minotaur’s lair), meant to ensnare its victims, and an object of navigation (to lead Theseus and the film spectator through the narrative). The web restricts movement while producing a system through which movement becomes intelligible.

This contradiction is central to the film’s occult logic and, I would argue, to the concept of Luciferian gnosis proposed here. If gnosis involves the revelation of a hidden structure, then the revelation does not necessarily remove the structure’s constraints but allows for an acquisition of knowledge of its form. The gallery then becomes a temple in which its initiates confront the divine. The web of thread transforms the exhibition environment into a maze-like structure through which the viewer must navigate, as it becomes part of the film’s occult organization. The spectator is therefore placed in a position analogous to the initiate. This dual aspect exemplifies the paradox of Luciferian knowledge, as it presents “a pathway-obstruction dichotomy” (a term written by Sarah Keller while speaking about Tom Gunning).

“In recognizing the pathway-obstruction dichotomy which the film embraces, Gunning points to such tensions in Deren’s work. In fact, the labyrinth is a fine metaphor for the work Witch’s Cradle effects. As Gunning notes, “If the classical story follows a straight line that incorporates occasional detours, the labyrinth represents a different journey.” That journey is in fact the trajectory of the film: a nonlinear, even circular pathway that promises transformation even while it threatens quite the opposite.”

(Sarah Keller, Frustrated Climaxes: On Maya Deren’s “Meshes of the Afternoon” and “Witch’s Cradle” 2013)

While the film doubles, mirrors, and travels nowhere as it acts as a tangle of restrictions (not unlike how I've been writing so far), there is a sort of liberation through that bondage of string and editing, a kind of revelation/understanding through entrapment. Because there is no final revelation (as it’s unfinished) that resolves the relationships between its images, Witch’s Cradle refuses to close the system it establishes. The spectator must remain within the so-called labyrinth of its signs (as an aside, a labyrinth is actually navigable and I'm not sure why Theseus had such a hard time), and the act of searching for meaning becomes part of the film’s operation.

Within Deren’s research notes for the film, she overtly references occult texts such as The Magus (1801) by Francis Barrett. She includes drawings of various ritual magic talismans and sigils from the Key of Solomon, such as ‘Agiel’, the spirit of Saturn, ‘Zazel’, the intelligence of Saturn, and ‘Hismael’, the Jovian planetary spirit of Jupiter. By drawing the sigils and pentagram on Clark Matta’s forehead, there becomes a direct reference to historical magick systems (direct magickal linkage). This mirror shifts the sigil on film into a secondary space by which the sigil’s purpose becomes projected. (world-on-screen AND world-for-us) This is akin to the Talisman-image by Deleuze. Saturnian astrological magic is generally used to focus self-discipline, create personal boundaries, and understand personal karmic patterns. Here, magical inscription and cinematic projection consequently begin to mirror one another, as both involve the production of an image through which something otherwise inaccessible is made observable.Because of the film's incomplete nature, an understanding of this gnostic constructed-ness of reality is established.

Through this idea, Witch’s Cradle enacts Luciferian gnosis by exposing the viewer to the given ritual knowledge (though a kind of subversive one) whose meanings remain partially concealed (unless you're initiated) because of its occult nature. This is all while implicating the audience within this ultimate structure of revelation and concealment. What emerges, then, is a reconsideration of what an occult cinema might do. (Is it in describing the film as magic that makes it function as such?)

Jan Švankmajer’s Faust - The Lesson of Faust, 1994, 95 mins

In both the Marlowe and Goethe versions of Faust, the tale revolves around Doctor Faustus, a world-renowned magickian and intellectual, who is frustrated with his learning, the former due to hubris and the latter in dissatisfaction, yet both are starved for power. Approached by the demon Mephistopheles through ritual, Faustus elects to sell his soul to the Devil in exchange for worldly pleasures, unlimited knowledge, and occult prowess.

In Jan Švankmajer’s 1994 filmic adaptation of Faust, the narrative follows an unnamed white-collar protagonist who is initially drawn, unknowingly, into the role of Faustus through a series of invitations and theatrical performances grounded in the political realities of post-communist Czechoslovakia in the 1990s. The main character played by Petr Cepek doesn’t begin by proclaiming his competence in occultism through the traditional monologue (one of my favorite parts of the play) but is deftly lured into the legendary role by demonic forces, in this case young men handing out leaflets for a play. This act mimics the working person’s shift into the burgeoning capitalist infrastructure becoming established in Prague at the time. This distinction between the adaptations is crucial, as in Švankmajer’s version, Faustus does not initially choose to enter an occult world.

The framework of Luciferian gnosis is exemplified throughout Faust in a few ways. Visually, the film blends live-action performance, stop-motion animation, puppetry and marionette theatre, with direct references to Goethe, Marlowe, and Slavic folk traditions constructing a multilayered reality. Within that on-screen constructed reality, there are moments of gnostic slippage. Stop-motion functions as indicating instances of high weirdness, allowing human actors to transform into puppets, and puppets assume personal autonomy (without strings attached!) There are cuts back and forth between physical hands controlling the puppets within the theatre and puppets assuming autonomy through stop-motion outside the theatre. The alternation between visible manipulation (with human hands) and apparent autonomy (without human hands) is particularly significant. The so-called real and so-called constructed traverse in and out of our dimension. Švankmajer’s use of puppetry is important to this critique, as these puppets function as visual metaphors for a kind of mediated agency, suggesting that perhaps even human autonomy may itself be illusory.

In Švankmajer’s Faust, there is a performance of ceremonial magick. During this performance, temporal and dimensional boundaries collapse and double, with quick shots of the magickian in different locations across seasons, revealing a mediated, subjugated reality between puppet/demonic forces and the human/Magickian.

Underneath the theatre’s stage (which links the performance of actors to the performance of the ceremonial magickian), Faustus dons ritual garments and steps into a magickal circle, waving a censer of incense to summon Mephistopheles. Ian Richardson notes that he ‘appears to enter into the diabolic pact not from any great desire, but out of boredom,’ and because he ‘can’t be bothered to resist’. (Richardson 2006, 133).

So, this is the complicated part. This entire performance of ceremonial magick is an imperative way the film exposes its gnostic elements. In traditional witchcraft or ceremonial magick, the casting of the circle establishes a liminal boundary between ordinary reality and sacred space. Because the circle is a closed shape, this closure represents containment, despite it being a space created for connection. Metaphorically, this is akin to Faustus’s desire for communication and ascension, which then paradoxically binds him to his devil’s pact or a system of desire. The dual function makes the circle a productive lens for my concept of Luciferian gnosis.

The film conveys a taste of access to hidden knowledge while continuously revealing systems beyond the subject’s control that mediate and limit that access. In the end, rather than resolving the Faustian pact with the devil, Švankmajer offers enlightenment without any kind of salvation (I’m sure this is why the film is titled The Lesson of Faust), allowing Faustus to be hit by a car with no driver. The lesson is in providing only the knowledge of recognizing one’s entrapment within a grander system. This is similar to Deren’s film… both are left unfinished or unresolved.

Here we have the sigil, or symbol, of Mephistopheles from “Magia Naturalis et Innaturalis” (1505/1849), attributed to Dr. Johannes Faust. In the film, the symbol associated with Mephistopheles appears on the leaflet that directs the protagonist towards the theatre; it reappears on the theatre door and is subsequently inscribed within the magical circle itself. This initial incidental encounter becomes, retrospectively, evidence that Faustus has been guided throughout the entirety of the plot.

In Conclusion, in this paper I have attempted to draw out how Witch’s Cradle and Faust can be understood through a particular occult lens called Luciferian gnosis. This can be seen in Maya Deren’s film through ritual drawing and the movement of the thread, and in Jan Švankmajer’s film, this is presented through a surreal and dreamlike treatment of puppetry, stop-motion, and theatrical performance.

By framing these films in this way, I ultimately attempt to suggest that cinema can function as an apparatus of occult knowledge, or a form of ‘ritual technology’ through which alternative articulations or dimensions are exposed. Yet, because we are talking about ‘occultism’ here, this disclosure remains fundamentally paradoxical. Gnostic cinematic revelation offers no escape from its own mediation. It just highlights the troubling? Not so troubling? recognition of one’s position within it.

So… to conceive of Lucifer as the patron saint of cinema is then to recognize the medium’s paradoxical status as a technology of “illumination founded upon illusion.”

First, the film A Dark Song (Liam Gavin, 2017) has become one of my absolute favorites, both because it’s probably the most accurate depiction of ritual magick on screen, and because, as a practitioner myself, it has always made me feel ‘a type of way’ at the very end –no spoilers.

Second, I was motivated by my continued interest in attempting to elucidate the extremely subjective experience of ritual magick.

And last, I’m just a ridiculous and insatiably curious person. Yes, the honest goal here is really “to know...”

Read more

I wanted to share with my readers that this November, a colleague and I will be hosting an interdisciplinary conference/symposium at Oxford, UK, focusing on grimoires and scholarship structured as a grimoire.

If your research is situated within this space, please consider submitting!

Please find the CFP at this link: https://philevents.org/event/show/150881

Share

Important Dates

• Abstract submission deadline: 3 August 2026

• Notification of acceptance: 17 August 2026

• Conference dates: 19-20 November 2026

Format

The conference will be held in person. Attendance at the conference is free, though food and accommodations are not provided. We will be hosted at St John’s College, Oxford, where there is a café and food options throughout the day of the conference.

Submission & Contact

Please send submissions and inquiries to: grimoire@theology.ox.ac.uk

Submission Guidelines

Please submit:

• A paper title

• An abstract of 250–300 words

• A brief biographical note (100 words maximum)

Proposals for complete panels (3–4 speakers) are also welcome.

‘The pluralism of a postcolonial or decolonial philosophy of religion should be “on both ends” of the discipline; that is, both the phenomena and subjects considered and contemplated by the discipline should be diverse, but also the people, perspectives, and methods engaged in this project should come from diverse backgrounds—not only in terms of race, class, gender, geography, etc. but also in terms of ritual practice, training (both academic and otherwise), initiation or membership in tribes, societies, or “religious” traditions.’

—Oludamini Ogunnaike, “Expanding the Menu or Seats at the Table? Grotesque Pluralism in the (Post)Colonial Philosophy of Religion.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 89, no. 2 (2021): 734.

‘It was in the context of the colonial encounter that Christendom granted other communities and traditions the name it had only ever given itself—religion—and reincarnated it as “secular.”’ —Erica Lagalisse, Occult Features of Anarchism (Oakland: PM Press, 2019), 7.

‘Occultism is the metaphysic of dunces.’
—Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 1951), §151-VI.

The term “grimoire,” refers to a genre of magical literature, specifically denoting manuals of magic or sorcery whose etymological roots in the Old French word grammaire (grammar) reflect its origin as a repository of specialized knowledge and constitutes a codified manual of occult ritual techniques and illustrations. The grimoire is a culturally and historically situated textual artefact appearing predominantly in the form of the manuscript or printed handbook. These books systematize ritual, symbolic, and operative knowledge within a magical or occult framework. This can be seen especially through spirit lists, prescriptive instructions for the manipulation of supernatural agencies (e.g., spirits of the dead, angels, demons), the production of efficacious objects (e.g., talismans, amulets), guides for various forms of divination and the intentional use of technologies to create new forms of spirituality among many others.

These claims to hidden or occulted knowledge have rendered many scholarly traditions grimoire-like in form and function. However, unlike disciplines like theology where the influence of theistic discursive traditions on scholarship is rendered explicit, the intersubsumption of esotericism, occultism, and magic with the study of such is often occulted. So how have scholarly texts functioned as these repositories of magical or occult knowledge?

This conference invites scholars to explore the idea of any form of scholarly text as grimoire. We welcome contributions from across disciplines that interrogate any scholarly form that self describes as a grimoire...

Possible topics of occult-and-scholarly intersubsumption include, but are not limited to:

• Alchemy as Chemistry, Chemistry as Alchemy

• Astrology as Medicine, Medicine as Astrology

• Magick as Media, Media as Magick

• Theurgy as Philosophy, Philosophy as Theurgy

• Demonology as Political Science, Political Science as Demonology

• Geomancy as Topography, Topography as Geomancy

• Mnemonica as Calculus, Calculus as Mnemonica

• Egregore as Extended Cognition, Extended Cognition as Egregore

• Hypersigils as Literature, Literature as Hypersigils

• Sorcery as Coding, Coding as Sorcery

We especially encourage interdisciplinary work drawing from fields such as:

• Anthropology

• Area Studies

• Classics

• Cognitive Science of Religion

• Digital Humanities

• Economics

• Film and Media Studies

• Geography

• History

• History of Science

• Literature

• Manuscript Studies

• Medicine

• Philosophy

• Politics

• Religious Studies

• Theology

Symposium Output

We invite our fellow symposiasts to join us as participants for an application of the Delphi method, a research approach for mediating scholarly discussion and generating expert consensus. The purpose of the study will be to make recommendations for the future of occult studies and sister disciplines, grounded in the findings of this symposium. Upon their approval of the research, participants who collaborate throughout the entire Delphi process will be credited as co-authors of the paper. Further details about the method and study will be given upon invitation to the conference.

Accessibility Info

The conference organizers are committed to holding a symposium which meets the needs of its contributors. Meetings spaces, accessible toilets, and the cafe area are all on the ground floor of our meeting area, with no stairs or steps required for access. Most doors are automatic, but a small number aren’t; conference organizers and/or the college’s Porters will be available to help with most accessibility needs as requested. If there is anything the organizers can provide related to accessibility matters, please let us know.

Thank you for reading, and I hope to hear from some of you!

All the best,

x

Share

The first is Volume III with a foreword by Bridget Marquart.

https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-feminine-macabre-volume-iii/bridget-marquardt/amanda-r-woomer/9798423744229

My essay in this volume is titled ‘EVP Experiments as Alchemical Theater’, which is about the usage of the Estes Method in the series Hellier (2019- ongoing)

“EVP experimentations reflect an experienced reality. They double as both attempts to contact the supernatural through enhancing psychic ability utilizing radios and divination through sonically artistic performance, provoking an initiation into the mythos of the phenomena. Modern EVP experiments on film, such as the ones on Plant Weird’s web series Hellier (2019-), have expanded on previous incarnations of voices from beyond and evoke a kind of alchemical theater theorized by Antonin Artaud in his book The Theater and its Double. The allusion to the material or, in this case, consciously immaterial in EVP experiments, like alchemy and theater, are expressions of a point of view or transformative belief system that has a causal effect in the world. The ‘virtual art’ of EVP experiments such as the Estes Method and the creation of ritual tones parallel avant-garde sound art made from the 1950s to the 1980s and demonstrate their unique interdisciplinary yet transcendental theatrical ability to direct the narrative of investigations and the consciousness of its spectators.”

The second is Volume IV with a foreword by Lisa Morton.

https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-feminine-macabre-volume-iv/lisa-morton/amanda-r-woomer/9798847207942

My essay in this volume is titled ‘A Filmic Cyber Haunting’, which is about Zoom horror, The Host (Savage, 2020)

“In the past decade, screencast or desktop cinema has increasingly harnessed the disquietude surrounding the collective unconscious understanding of our diminished free will within the digital age. In a world that longs for re-enchantment, creators and filmmakers endeavor to formulate different and post-cinematic ways to captivate their audiences. Modern exhibition of cinema can easily fit in your pocket and travel with you, and the collective absorption of moving images in everyday life is commonplace. Nevertheless, ‘newness’ is a fluid concept, and finding something new within the old is imperative. British Zoom horror The Host (2020), directed by Rob Savage, not only reflects our current condition and exhibition interface during the global COVID-19 pandemic but activates a new narrative avenue for horror cinema as spectral hauntings now can travel virtually through cyberspace.”

all the best,

Kachine

Subscribe now

“Out by sixteen or dead in the scene.”

Two inseparable, morbidly inclined teenage girls (Ginger and Brigette), obsessed with the intricacies of their own deaths, make a pact to escape their Canadian suburban home by sixteen or else take their own lives. While holding a colossal butcher knife to her arm in her shared bedroom in the basement, decorated whimsi-goth with matching purple Celtic triquetra blankets and jeweled curtains a la Charmed (1999), Ginger groans, “Fuck... wrists are for girls, I’m slitting my throat.”

The Fitzgerald sisters are grunge in a sea of athletic and preppy high school students, favoring oversized shorts and knits, long dresses, and matching raven skull necklaces. The girls are bullied and othered, and after a particularly messy catfight during a gym class field hockey game, the sisters seek revenge on the school’s popular girl by sneaking out at night with plans to kill her dog, but Ginger gets her period and is then attacked by a giant lycanthrope in the woods.

The romantic werewolf narrative, typically used for adolescent males in films like Teen Wolf (1985) by Rod Daniel, makes the most sense to me as a young menstrual person, thus creating a powerful feminine mythical archetype that follows a cyclical pattern charted by the moon or the inevitability of a monthly transformation.

In the most subversive form of female subjectivity, the two sisters become divided by this transformation. Ginger derives pleasure ultimately out of her libidinous monstrosity, and Brigitte struggles against it.

Ginger Snaps not only deals with monstrosity via werewolf-ism as a subversion of the inevitability of female puberty and menstruation, but is filled with intelligently and hilariously placed aphorisms about being a teen girl. In one of the funniest scenes, when the sisters go to the school nurse for advice about Ginger’s ‘little problem’, she misunderstands and says it is all normal that a girl would have rapid hair growth all over her body, an excess of blood and rage, and even a tail, without realizing the sisters are talking about turning into a werewolf.

Women’s horror as a genre seems to privilege cleverly placed reflections about society, displayed most obviously in Werewolf Woman (1976), by Italian director Rino Di Silvestro, where a young woman who is raped turns into a monster for revenge. Still, menstrual monsters like Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976), Kim Jee Woon’s Tale of Two Sisters (2003), and Richard Bates Jr.’s Excision 2012 have become the genre’s hallmark.

The opening shot of the second film, Ginger Snaps: Unleashed (2004), directed by Brett Sullivan, is an almost abstract body-horror image of a woman shaving her body, the scenes cut up in a way that makes the viewer anticipate blood and the nicking or peeling of skin with a razor. The film, in some ways, opened the doors for more recent female coming-of-age horror classics such as Jennifer’s Body (2009), by Karyn Kusama/ and Diablo Cody, Raw (2016) and Titane (2021), both by Julia Ducournau, and the vaginal horror film Teeth (2007) by Mitchell Lichtenstein.

Unleashed is Brigitte’s turn to change into a werewolf. She wakes up in a girl’s sanitarium after the cops pick her up, passed out, on the street, believing she’s a drug addict. What she’s actually taking is wolfsbane or monkshood medicine via hypodermic needle, to slow her shift into a werewolf, a transformation she, unfortunately, chooses in hopes of stopping her sister Ginger from fully accepting and becoming her monster and killing anyone she pleases. The comical misunderstandings by well-meaning doctors continue in this film, as during a group therapy session, Brigitte describes in a hilariously dark manner what she imagines turning into a werewolf is like, and the therapist writes, “Lesbian??” on her notepad.

In the sanitarium, monstrosity is subjective. A male orderly preys on the female patients by offering them their drug of choice in exchange for sex. A young girl named Ghost, who becomes close with Brigitte, played by a very young Tatiana Maslany, who would go on to star in Orphan Black, is a regular human girl but has killed more people than Ginger/ Brigitte as werewolves in both films combined.

In Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004), directed by Grant Harvey, we are given the final piece of the trilogy, with the Ginger Snaps/Werewolf sister origin story. Instead of dealing with teen issues, Katherine Isabelle and Emily Perkins reprise their roles as Ginger and Brigette, but this time as the girls' ancestors. Set in the 1800s colonial Americas, the movie portrays the world for single young women as being even bleaker than high school, if you can believe it. The world is filled with disease, famine, religious extremism, and the threat of hideous and dangerous beasts haunting the snowy woods at night. Native American monsters such as the Wendigo and Loup-Garou are used to conjure a more ancient version of the werewolf mythology. Nathanial Arcand stars as an Indigenous hunter who will collaborate with this director on the TV show Heartland (2007), and JR Bourne, who will star as another werewolf hunter in MTV’s Teen Wolf (2011-2017).

The menstrual werewolf is simultaneously a life-bringer and a life-taker. It is a monstrous abjection, showcasing that what becomes antagonized in The Ginger Snaps series is just the sincere reality about how society, throughout the ages, views the most natural part of existence– a menstrual period.

Subscribe now

A Solar Eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun, obscuring the Sun, making the day feel like night. In 1900, a British stage magician and a fellow of the British Royal Astronomical Society (F.R.A.S.) Nevil Maskelyne traveled to Wadesboro, Anson County, North Carolina, on his second attempt to film such phenomena. The footage he collected was rediscovered and screened in 2019 and is now considered by British historians to be the oldest filmic astronomical record in existence, available to screen here.

Read more

There are a few passages in the New Testament that I believe correlate directly to the way exorcism functions on screen. The first is,

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”

Right at the beginning, we are presented with a declaration that the concept and the use of language are tools or funnels to direct power. The second is in Genesis, Adam is given the power or ability to name the world’s creatures. This act of naming grants control or signifies the dominion or mastery over something else, and that act is granted by God. A passage in Luke states,

“At that time the seventy-two returned in high spirits. ‘Master,’ they said, ‘even the demons are subject to us because we use your name!’ ‘Yes,’ He said to them, ‘I was watching Satan fall like lightning that flashes from heaven. But mind: it is I that have given you the power to tread upon serpents and scorpions and break the dominion of the enemy everywhere; nothing at all can injure you. Just the same, do not rejoice in the fact that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice in the fact that your names are engraved in heaven.”

In the New Testament Gospel according to Mark, there is a passage which describes the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac, where a man ‘possessed by a demon’ confronts Jesus. This is also referenced in Matthew and Luke… This is to be known as the Miracle of the (Gadarene) Swine and the exorcism of Legion. In the story, when Jesus calls for the demon to leave its host, the demon responds with,

“What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most-High God? I beg you in the name of God never to torment me!” and when Jesus then asks the demon for his name, he’s told, “My name is Legion, for we are many.”

The townsfolk had tried to bind the possessed, but he was too strong to be bound; night and day, among the tombs, and in the hills, he would cry out and cut himself with stones. The demon(s) beg Jesus not to send them away but instead to send them to the pigs on a nearby hillside, which he does, and then Jesus sends those pigs right off a cliff.

I believe this Biblical interaction has since inspired the ‘diagnostic’ or seeking of knowledge through incarnations of evil, and the initiation of specific nomenclature in religious exorcism and possession in pop culture and media. The apotropaic powers and semiotics of naming, by addressing the specificity of the demand for their invader’s name, have become a plot device in cinema, serving as implicit power over evil and the loss of individual sovereignty.

The central aspect or plot point of exorcism on-screen revolves around learning the inhabiting demon’s name; by knowing the name of that particular demon, the exorcist or demonologist can gain control over that demon/ spirit. The knowledge of this directs or aims the willpower granted by God during the ritual toward the intended. This is also presented in the barrel or embodiment of God’s power in famous film quotes, such as from The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1974): “The Power of Christ compels you” or “In the name of Jesus Christ, I cast you out!” Asking or usually demanding the name of the spirit is crucial in asserting control, and it’s also important to know who you’re speaking to.

The asking of names does not occur in real life modern interpretations of “major exorcism” or “Roman rite.” However, it is a fundamental requirement in various forms of ritual magick and Goetic magick. In order to call a spirit to work with as a ritual Magickian, you must know its name, for to know it would confer the ability to invoke it. Often called the ‘checking of contacts,’ it is a large part of the performance of conjuration. When doing a ritual, other spirits may be curious about what is happening, or a major demon might send a lesser demon. Etcetera etcetera… So, one might ask something like…

“Are you the same, whom we have moved & called forth to visible appearance here before us at this time, known by the name (N)”

The (N) is usually put in grimoires to denote the name of the spirit that would be substituted in. Kenneth Grant calls this the root of primitive man’s dread of revealing his name. It is also the reason for the elaborate lengths to which ancient Egyptians went to preserve the sacrosanct secrecy surrounding their names.

In the following, I will specifically track the demons, looking at films that name or invoke spirits from historical grimoires, such as the 1577 manuscript by Jonathan Weyer titled Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, and other monographs such as The Testament of Solomon and Ars Goetia. In The Testament of Solomon, he calls upon a huge number of demonic entities, interrogating each one and demanding their names. The Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, or PD for short, is a treatise on the falsehoods of witchcraft and the magical arts. The book is a catalog of 69 demonic spirits and their conjuration hours, unlike the Ars Goetia, also known as the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis or The Little Key of Solomon. This grimoire, and subsequently the practice of goetic magick or invocation, refers tangentially to the expression “barbarous names,” which evidently refers to “monstrous speech,” or the speech of monsters, and this is the key to the meaning of the word “goety,” which translates to howling (like a beast). This manuscript includes 72 demons, their correspondences to disease, and how to conjure and bind them, themes that frequently appear in horror. The demons Vassago, Seere, Dantalion, and Andromalius are new additions in Ars Goetia that are not present in the PD upon which it is based. In contrast, the demon Pruflas appears in the PD but not in Ars Goetia.

The names of some of these demons are commonly used in Anime and comics such as Gundam, DXD, Genshin Impact, Constantine and its adaptations, the Supernatural TV series, and other fantasy-driven media.

There will be some spoilers ahead…

Belial, Lucifer, Cain, Nero, Judas/ Iscariot, Legion: The Exorcism of Emily Rose (Scott Derrickson, 2005)

This first film is maybe the best example of what I have been talking about so far. The Exorcism of Emily Rose is based on a true account of an exorcism being performed on Anneline Michel in the 1970s, and the court case that followed her negligent death. The film is interesting because through the lens of a court trial, there are recreation scenes of both the supernatural and then a rational explanation of the events in sequence. The demon also speaks German during the exorcism, which is a nod to the true story.

The aim of the lawyers in the film is to “validate possession in the court of law”, which is based off the trial of Arne Cheyenne Johnson, also known as the “devil made me do it” case, which is the first known court case in the United States in which the defense sought to prove innocence based upon the claim of demonic possession and denial of personal responsibility for the crime. But ultimately, Johnson was convicted of first-degree manslaughter for the killing of his landlord.

During this film, our main possessed character Emily Rose is inhabited by 6 entities. The pluralization of the demons is mainly to enhance the danger and stakes of the film. There is a common theme throughout possession films of seeing the demon in the reflection of a mirror or window. Also, there’s generally lots of screaming, scratching, bodily contortion, and petrification, eating bugs, ripping out hair, and speaking in different languages.

Emily’s possession trauma begins at 3 am, the ‘witching hour’, as she awakes and smells something burning in her dorm room at university. Doors began slamming, windows flew open with a strong gust of wind, and as she lays in bed, objects began to move about the room by themselves, her blanket is pulled off and an impression of weight was created on the bed. Slowly, she becomes physically crushed and suffocated by an invisible force.

At the climax of the film, Father Moore, who was asked to attend to Emily by her family, begins the exorcism with “Who are you, demon? Tell me your name.” To which the demons residing within Emily reply, “I am the one who dwells within…” The Father then demands, “In the name of Christ, identify yourself!” which exemplifies the use of a name as power to gain something. The demons throughout the exorcism count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, over and over. Father Moore prays, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…” To which Emily patronizes him, “and the word was the word, what a wonderful word it was…” The father yells over the violent thunderstorm, which shakes the barn when the exorcism is held, demanding, “he who commands you is he who ordered you thrown down from the highest heaven into the depths of hell. In the name of our lord, Jesus Christ, I now command you! Give me your name, demon!” Emily cries, “Name(s)! Names(s)! 1,2,3,4,5,6,” to which Father Moore demands, “ancient serpents, depart from this servant of God! Tell me your six names!” Emily’s demons are howling at this point and finally reveal “We are the ones who dwell within” (in Hebrew she says)- I am the one who dwelt within Cain! (in Aramaic she says) - I am the one who dwelt within Nero! (in Greek)- I once dwelt within Judas! (in German) And I was with Legion! And lastly, I am Belial! And I am Lucifer, the devil in the flesh.”

So Belilal is our Goetic star here.

The sixty-eighth Spirit is a mighty King and powerful; he was created next after Lucifer and is of his order. He appears in the form of two beautiful angels sitting in a chariot of fire speaking with a comely voice, declaring that he fell first from amongst the worst sort which went before Michael and other heavenly Angels. His office is to distribute preferments of senatorship and to cause favor of friends & foes, he gives excellent familiars and governs 80 Legions of Spirits, partly of the order of Virtues, partly of Angels. This demon must have offerings, sacrifices, and gifts presented to him by the Exorcist, or else he will not give true answers to his demands. Belial is a Hebrew word “used to characterize the wicked or worthless.” The etymology of the word is often understood as ‘lacking worth.’

During the court case, an expert in possession is called to the stand and describes Emily Rose as being hypersensitive and experiences as a ‘separate reality’ via Carlos Castaneda (which is a funny reference to make). At the end of the film, Emily asks the Virgin Mary who appears to her during the height of her possession after the failed exorcism “Why do I suffer like this? Why did the demons not leave me tonight?” to which the mother replies, “you can die, or you can continue, and suffer but through you, many can see the realm of the spirit is real” and so Emily chooses to stay in her tortured body stating, “people say that god is dead, but how can they think that if I show them the devil.”

As Belilal represents the lack of worth, her possession and sacrifice become all the more meaningful.

Asmodeus: The Pope’s Exorcist (Julius Avery, 2023)

In the opening scene of the film The Pope’s Exorcist, Russell Crowe, who is cast as Father Amorth, a real Vatican exorcist, and the inspiration for the film The Exorcist, (and who Crowe was allegedly friends with offscreen) arrives at the home of a ‘possessed’ person in Italy. Suspecting that the young man is not actually possessed, he states in the film that he used the power of suggestion and a little theatre to help this first boy… so, in a way… it seems uniquely suited for exorcisms to become a sub-genre of horror cinema, with an actor playing an exorcist.

Back to the film…the possessed person growls, “I am legion, I am Satan, I am foul-mouthed behemoth.” To which Russell Crowe replies incredulously, “Difficult to believe, if you are Satan, what is my name? Describe Hell?” They then bring in a large squealing pig, as the Father holds up the Cross of St Benedict and demands, “Answer me, Satan. Why possess this boy? Why not someone more influential?” The possessed person then pleads that he can possess anything he wishes. To which Father Amourth then antagonizes the possessed and says, “I do not believe you; I don’t believe you could even possess this pig. Could you do it? You have the power. Could you possess the pig? Come on, Satan. Possess the pig.” The man goes limp after wailing and writing around. They shoot the pig in the head. This scene was heavily inspired by Jesus’s exorcism of Legion in the Bible, to which I transcribed earlier.

There are quite a few large-scale Biblical references that Russell Crowe, as Father Amorth, has placed himself in during this film. For instance, our main demon in this film is Asmodeus, who has been referenced in history on multiple occasions, including the Ars Goetia, Jewish legend, the Apocryphal book of Tobit, and the Quran. In the Testament of Solomon, the King evokes Asmodeus to aid in the construction of his mighty Temple, and in the Malleus Maleficarum (1486), he was considered the demon of lust.

Even though the film casts Asmodeus as the main antagonist, Father Amorth, the filmic battle with Asmodeus actually reflects the story of Solomon and Beelzebub in the Testament of Solomon (which reads like a Biblical Avengers film.)

The main character of this film is a young boy named Henry who witnesses the horrific death of his father and has since stopped speaking. When Father Amorth arrives to aid the possessed young boy, the first interrogation reveals that the demon knows everyone’s name, but they don’t know the demon’s name, which reflects the control that the demon has over the majority of the film. This drives the plot forward, but also creates the task of finding out the demon's name, which will allow them to beat him. The film makes the direct correlation to finding the name and winning the battle. Instead of a diagnostic, they find the name in a book in the basement, but just saying the demon’s name out loud breaks all the windows in the house. Finally, at the climax of the film, there’s stuff flying around the house, people are floating, God’s words are landing physical blows on the possessed person, and Father Amorth demands, ‘Admit to thy name Asmodeus!’ To which Henry replies, “I am Asmodeus, King of Hell!” securing our main character’s victory. The film ultimately blames the entire Spanish Inquisition on this demon, which removes the blame from the entire church. So, there is also this theme of revitalizing the church through the presentation of these specific demons

Paimon: Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2017)

While Hereditary 2017 by Ari Aster is a sincere film about the occult, the subtext for this film is that mental illness and grief are used as ‘bait and switch’ for the supernatural, not just that the supernatural elements are metaphorical stand ins for grief, mental illness, and familial abuse, but the occult motifs are weaponized throughout the grief process, so the viewer is meant to feel unclear about what’s actually going on. (and I think this can happen in real life paranormal as well)

The demon they invoke in this film is named Paimon, who ultimately becomes an amalgamation of info from different sources. In the Goetia of Dr. Rudd, he is the ninth spirit, wearing a crown on his head. Paimon is a god of mischief and, previously, a djinn. He is the king of the northwest, “Rex occidentalis” (Latin for “king of the west”) in the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum. The significance of ‘northwest’ is heavily indicated in the film West High School/ Utah (NW of USA), and Joan directs Annie in the car park toward the northwest, toward the sunset.

In the Abramellin and other grimoires, Paimon possesses the knowledge of past and future events. (So, this is how the cultists are able to orchestrate all these events) Paimon teaches the arts (we can see this in Charlie’s craft-making, and maybe even in Annie’s art-making). There are light flares and sound indicators of Paimon throughout the film. Paimon is represented by a ‘Tinkling sound or small bell,’ and he is also depicted riding a camel, so we hear the sound of hooves. Paimon is written as always being accompanied by a fanfare of music- cymbals, harps, trumpets, and all sorts of musical instruments. Decapitation is also a Paimon trait (there are teens watching a decapitation video at a party, Charlie is decapitated, so is Ellen’s corpse, and so is Annie in the end), and the decapitated body is a great metaphor. The head, bearer of the brain, seat of reason, is detached from a body that it can no longer govern – a kind of sacrifice. To connect these last two points, we can hear Annie ripping open the piano to slit her own throat with. Paimon is removing the last of the three heads.

The seal of Paimon is incorrect in the film, and what I believe has been adjusted is the seal to fit the context of the film, only having three loops instead of the normal four. Maybe having to do with this kind of matrilineal submission of the divine feminine with the grandma/crone, mother/Toni Collette’s character, and the daughter/maiden, Charlie. They are also the three sacrifices. The sigil appears many times throughout the film- being worn in gold on Annie during the funeral and on Ellen's corpse, on the doormats, and on the light post where Charlie is decapitated. I’ve found that the lamppost depiction is generally where viewers begin to realize that something else is happening in this movie.

The bird cluck/ click sound (that Charlie makes and then Peter) that represents Paimon (tic of the demon body) croak- in the Goetia, he cannot speak human language until ordered to. The cluck feels like the voice of Paimon from Sloane MS 3824 and the Liber Officiorum Spirituum, which describes him as having a hoarse or non-human voice.

In the film, Joan gives Annie barbarous words to invoke Paimon to fully possess Peter- the ritual to perform in the guise of being able to speak to Charlie. Joan says, “Say the words to make things start.” And as Annie chants the name, the climax and more supernatural elements of the film begin. The language is funny, though, because it’s like Latin and Hebrew paraphrasing. “Salve Paimon, Rex Occidentalium, Baruch Ha Paimon!”

Valak: The Conjuring 2 (James Wan, 2013), The Nun (Corin Hardy, 2018)

The next two demons are found in the Conjuring Universe.

The Conjuring 2 (2013) takes the true story of the Enfield poltergeist and mixes it with demonic entities. The character of ‘The Nun’ is the film's visual representation of the demon Valak, and the young daughter of the haunted family, who is our main possessed person, begins her possession in the wake of trauma, after getting into trouble at school following her father's leaving home for good.

Valak is the sixty-second spirit, he is a President and appears like a boy with Angels’ wings riding on a two headed Dragon, his office is to give true answers of hidden treasures, and to tell where serpents may be seen which he will bring and deliver to the Exorcist without any force or strength he governs 30 Legions of spirits.

At the climax of the film, a ghost gives Lorraine Warren a riddle to help them get rid of the demon.

It goes “I am given, and I am taken, I was there at your first breath. You didn’t ask for me, but I will follow you unit your death.” Ed exclaims it’s “Your name! you didn’t ask for it, it was given when you were born!” To which Lorraine excitedly replies, “That’s it! Knowing the demons name gives us power over it and we can cast it out!”

That’s when the name Valak is first spoken in the film: a huge bolt of lightning strikes a tree, setting it ablaze. The name is power incarnate. Thus, in the main diagnostic scene of the film, Lorraine cries, “Your name gives me dominion over you, demon, and I do know your name. You are Valak. The defiler. The profane, the marquis of snakes! In the name of the Father and the Son and the holy spirit. I condemn you back to hell.”

Mathus: Annabelle (John R. Leonetti, 2014)

In the films Annabelle (2014), Annabelle: Creation, and Annabelle Comes Home, the spirit that has latched onto a porcelain doll known as Annabelle is called Malthus, also known as Halphas.

Malphas is the thirty-eight spirit and a great Earl and appears in the form of a stock dove and speaks with a hoarse voice, his office is to build up towers and to furnish them with ammunition and weapons, and send men of war to places appointed, he Rules 26 Legions of spirits. Malphas is said to build houses, high towers, and strongholds, throw down the buildings of the enemies, destroy the enemies’ desires or thoughts (and/or make them known to the conjurer), and all that they have done, give good familiars, and quickly bring artificers together from all places of the world.

According to the writers, Malphas accepts willingly and kindly any sacrifice offered to it, but then it will deceive the conjurer. In the film, Malthus appeared as a black ram-like demon instead of a raven-like demon, and it seeks to steal and feed on the souls of its victims, but only if they offer their souls to the demon.

Ba’al: The Rite (Mikael Hafstrom, 2011)

The Rite (2011) stars Anthony Hopkins as a Vatican exorcist who takes a skeptical priest/ exorcist in training under his wing. The professor of the Vatican exorcist course states, “It’s the job of the exorcist to ascertain the number of possessing demons and their names, something the demons protect with great ferocity, and when the exorcist has a name, he can then begin to assert control over the entity and cast it out.”

The first possession of the film is a sixteen-year-old girl who’s been raped and impregnated by her father. Anthony Hopkins’ character asks, “Speak your name.” To which the possessed person hisses back, “Never!”

He then asks the possessed why they are possessing her. What do they plan to do with her? How did you enter her?

To which the demon responds, “Because her suffering is sweet, I’ll eat the flies from her rotting flesh, and that he entered with her father’s seed.” Here, like in The Exorcism of Emily Rose, we are confronted with trauma that allows for the demon to possess the host.

During the second possession, (sorry spoiler) Hopkins character himself, we find the name of the demon, which is Baal, who is a Demon King and is described as a hoarsely-voiced demon with the power to make men invisible and ruling over sixty-six legions of demons. The Lesser Key of Solomon describes him as appearing in the form of a cat, toad, human, some combination thereof, or other “diverse shapes.” While the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum and the Dictionnaire Infernal state that he appears with the heads of a cat, toad, and human simultaneously, this is alluded to through a scene where many cats are living with Hopkins' character, and then when the possession occurs, the young priest’s room is filled with frogs.

Astaroth: To the Devil a Daughter and many others

To the Devil a Daughter (1976) is not an exorcism film, but about a satanist group summoning a demon through the birth of a child who becomes a nun in the church. The possession comes in the form of a pregnancy or the incubation of the demon. Christopher Lee is the high priest doing all the magickal invocations and sex rites. To invoke the demon, they use many different star sigils/ motifs that match the Goetic symbol for the demon Astaroth.

The twenty-ninth spirit is Astaroth, who is a mighty and strong Duke and appears in the form of a beautiful Angel riding on an Infernal like a Dragon and carrying in his right hand a viper. You must not let him come too near you lest he do you damage by his stinking breath. He teaches mathematical sciences and handicrafts, can make men invisible and lead them to hidden treasures, and answers every question formulated to him. He was also said to give mortal beings the power over serpents.

Astaroth appears in the most films of any of the goetic demons, such as Bed knobs and Broomsticks, Antrum, Pyewacket, and Golem.

Orobas: Lovely Molly (Eduardo Sanchez, 2011)

The film Lovely Molly is a found footage film about newlyweds moving into the wife’s childhood home where she as a recovering addict had many traumatic memories of familial abuse and she slowly becomes possessed by the demon prince Orobas, who acts a kind of PTSD though out the film.

There’s a lot of horse imagery in the promotional images. Orobas answers questions and gives one power and control over others. He protects one from the persecution of evil spirits and also from one’s enemies. He will put a stop to slander and gossip. He can foretell the future and discern the past and present. Orobas is the Patron of horses and appears as a black stallion bucking up with lightening. He appears both as a small, unusual-looking, dark-haired man and as a boy with medium blonde ring curls. He gives true answers in divinity [theology] and in the Creation of the world; he is very faithful to the Exorcist and will not suffer him to be tempted by any spirit; he governs 26 Legions of spirits. So Orobas is actually a demon that helps exorcists.

Vassago: Hideaway (Brett Leonard, 1995)

The next film is called Hideaway (1995) based off the book by Dean Koontz. This film stars Jeff Goldblum as a man who dies in a car accident and is miraculously revived. He is then psychically connected with a young man who is possessed by the demon Vassago and has visions of the murders the demon commits in order to create this giant sculpture/portal to hell. Vassago is the third mighty spirit and is actually known as a prince “of a good nature,” and his office is to declare things past and to come, and to discover all things hid or lost.

Pazuzu: The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)

So, last but not least, Pazuzu from The Exorcist film is actually not a Goetic spirit but of Assyrian/ Babylonian origin, but I thought I’d include them for sheer fame.

All of these films have this motif of names, specifically the names of the spirit or antagonist of the film, as a way to have power over them. The possessed people already have trauma that is identified, which, within these films, allows them to be possessed. Philosopher John Keke says the effect of evil must include actual harm that “interferes with the functioning of a person as a full-fledged agent.”

The naming progresses the film, as it's not the name of the demon that provides power, but the usage of God’s name to give them power. The diagnostic is then viewed here as a McGuffin, or an object or event that is important to the plot and motivation of the characters but insignificant in itself. (This is only useful when looking at cinema/ not real ritual magick)

The asking of the names of the demon does not actually exorcise or provide physical blows on the demon, but pushes the plot forward, creates a dramatic effect, and raises the stakes.

By looking at demons that are real or have real context outside of cinema, then the question is what it means to invoke these names on screen, but if we abide by the rules of the film, we would all be safe because we know the demon’s name…

Subscribe now

References:

1. Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (Liber officiorum spirituum); Johann Weyer, ed. Joseph Peterson; 2000.

2. A Book of the Office of Spirits; John Porter, Trans. Frederick Hockley, Ed. Colin D. Campbelll; Teitan Press, 2011. pp. xiii-xvii.

3. The Goetia of Dr Rudd; Thomas Rudd, Ed. Stephen Skinner & David Rankine; 2007, Golden Hoard Press. pp. 14-19, 399

4. Delrio’s Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex (Leuven, 1599), Rémy’s Dæmonolatreiæ libri tres (1595),

5. Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia (Paris, 1531),

6. Elich’s Dæmonomagia (Frankfurt, 1607),

7. Spina’s Quaestio de strigibus (Rome, 1576),

8. Bodin’s De la démonomanie des sorciers (Paris, 1580), Gödelmann’s Disputatio de magis, veneficis, maleficis et lamiis (1584)

9. King James’ Dæmonologie (Edinburgh, 1597). ]

10. Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584),

11. Weyer’s De præstigiis dæmonum (Basel, 1563).

(the two stills are both from Bande à part (Godard, 1964))

About 5 or 6 years ago, I became obsessed with the concept of liminality. At the time, I was devoted to Hermes. I still am, but the sheer amount of strangeness arising from this particular connection has since lessened. I wonder now that I’m posting this, whether that will amplify again, but I digress. At the time, I was considering the threshold and the liminal zone to a degree, which I noticed aspects of it everywhere. So, for a master’s course on ‘French New Wave’ cinema, I found that a specific film­– Bande à part (Godard 1964)­– did something very peculiar: it was in absolute constant motion. Not only is film itself a medium liminal as it occurs in constant motion, but this films' narrative does as well.

The following is a very close narrative consideration of this idea.

Yes, there are spoilers… the whole thing is a spoiler!! I talk through almost every scene... so if you want to discover the film for yourself, please read this afterward.

In an issue of Cahiers du Cinema journal in 1956, Godard explains, “Si mettre en scène est un regard, monter est un battement de cœur.” Which translates to “If directing is a look, editing is a heartbeat.” Like a heartbeat, the playful opening sequences is a fast, rhythmic series of jump cuts superimposing the letters of the title rotating over the actors ’ faces, obscuring their gaze, beginning with “A”. Then, individually adding B, A, N, D, E, P, A, R, T with cheerful piano music playing in the background. The music stops abruptly, and Bande à part or Band of Outsiders (1964)– the film Godard made in the wake of his critical success with Les Mempris or Contempt (1963), begins its story with a view of the southeastern suburbs of Paris shot in black and white, juxtaposing Contempt’s vibrant and melodramatic Italian setting.

The camera is angled from above, with a vantage point centered on a top-down convertible carrying two men, driving east along Quai Fernand Saguet. They pause for a millisecond at an intersection, and a crossing guard waves them by. As the film’s credits flash on the screen, the viewer is shown heavy industrial traffic and cars moving about. There are natural noises of the engine like a musique concrete until orchestral sounds slowly enter the score. Jean-Luc ‘Cinema’ Godard’s directing credit is placed on popular 60s French iconographies such as a Citroën 2CV and a truck carrying Pernod Ricard Pastis, a popular anise-flavored pastis aperitif.

Godard has since described Band of Outsiders as “Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka.” (NYT 1964). Among a smattering of cultural references, Godard names his three main characters with the literary in mind. Franz (Sami Frey) is named after Franz Kafka, who undergoes a Kafkaesque struggle over the love triangle he is in during the film. Odile (Anna Karina), who is named after French writer Raymond Queneau’s 1937 novel Odile, which also happens to be Godard’s mother’s name, and played by his wife. The last of the trio is the macho Arthur (Claude Brasseur), who tells Odile his surname is Rimbaud while he plays a carnival shooting game, a reference to the 19th-century transgressive French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Godard also recites Rimbaud’s poetry during a narrated exposition of Arthur’s inner thoughts, From Les Illuminations (1886) he says: “Rien ne bougeait encore front des palais. L’eau etait morte,” translating to, “Nothing was stirring yet at the front of the palace. The water was dead.”

Our trio of outsiders, who border conflicting social spaces, are always running, climbing, switching seats, driving, biking, and actively gesturing towards the door or at each other, indulging in their peripatetic states. They happily shuffle through a choreographed dance, and in the brief moments when they sit still, they talk about where in the world they want to travel. The protagonists of this film characteristically find themselves straddling the border between competing forms of identity as they enter into the rites of passage through a Parisian landscape forever in transit, unable to escape lawlessness and moral uncertainty. They are not outsiders because they are far from society, but because society is far from them and has no power over them. Just like Alice of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll, when she goes down into the rabbit hole and enters the middle stage of what cultural anthropologists Victor Turner and Arnold Van Gennep theorize as ‘liminality’ and ‘communitas’ within a ritual of initiation.

Liminality is an ambiguous expression of transition to another state that evokes an embryonic, in-between, yet perceptible, and ponderable, transitory, and traversing moments that occur somewhere between inciting and resolution reflecting states of being on the thresholds of ritual and passage. The mise en scene of this film is precociously placed in limbo, somewhere between past and present, in spaces for people who do not stay. Every scene is filled with concerns with the threshold and a rumination on conflict and violence. Within a morally oppositional space, the characters embody a median mentality and effectively ask the viewer to rethink the margin and the center.

“Examples of a “median mentality” that is more productively triadic or liminal abound in Bakhtin’s theorizing, which resembles what Turner says about cultural performance: that it posits social spaces and practices that “dissolve all factual and commonsense systems into their components and ‘play’ with them in ways never found in nature and in custom“ (Palmer 2007: 71)

During the liminal state, the feeling of fellowship, or ‘Communitas’ in Latin, between the trio is experienced as their roles and status within organized society become revised, and the blurring of distinctions and oppositions between life is established.

The first shot of our two male main characters in the car are taken from behind in the back seat. They are driving with the top down in the winter, so their costuming is bundled up. The first dialogue uttered is “We almost there?” “yeah, straight ahead.” They idly chat about business being bad, and if they are scared for something not yet mentioned, they remark at Paris’ pothole covers and then suddenly the camera moves to the front of the moving car and Franz says, “There she is!” but the audience doesn’t see her yet. Throughout the film each of the travelers and strangers will individually experience this liminal state within its communal context.

Then, an omniscient narrator voiced by Godard himself states, “My story begins here. Two weeks after meeting Odile, Franz from Arthur out to show him the house”

This disembodied voice becomes an agent of Hermes. Translating to “He of the stones or stone heap,” Hermes is an Olympian deity of travelers, thieves, and orators. He is a boundary-crosser and a trickster. Godard traverses the filmic and speaks directly to the audience in prose and lies, acting as a messenger between realms, the divine, and humanity. Hermes is a ‘charming sociopath’ with no problems doing or saying whatever he wants. (Hansen 2001: 38) The word hermeneutics, which is the study of interpretation, determining the meaning and the foundation of communication, derives from Hermes.

Franz and Arthur park their car, cross the riverside drive of Avenue du Maréchal Joffre, as they follow their pointed fingers towards the embankment of the Marne towards the Ile des Corbeaux at Saint-Maurice. They look towards the house owned by Odile’s wealthy Aunt Mme. Victoria (Louisa Colpeyn) and an M. Stoltz, whom they plan to rob.

American film noir, or in this case, the gangster or neo-noir film as a genre, typically embarks narratively on journeys that transgress society’s social contract. This unofficial agreement between the individual and a collective asks its participants to exist with the mindset of the common good. This theory made famous by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his book The Social Contract (1762) also subliminally perpetuates a society in which there are various forms of inequality. The criminal of the gangster film then cannot live with the boundaries created by society and will always be an outsider.

Arthur bursts into a monologue about the infamous American outlaw and gunslinger ‘Billy the Kid’ being shot in the back on July 13th, 1889, by the sheriff of Tombstone, Pat Garrett. The pair then theatrically impersonates a wild west shoot-out, equipped with finger guns when Arthur pretends to get hit and theatrically dies very slow and dramatically, writhing around in the ground outside the car until he casually gets up and hops in the driver’s side of the car taking the car recklessly onto the sidewalk next to pedestrians. The symbolic mimesis of this cinematic performance and the other bits of mimicry the pair of men act out creates a type of power that ultimately affects the outcome of the players. “With the magical power of replication, the image affecting what it is an image of, wherein the representation shares in or takes the power from the represented” (Taussig 1993: 2) Each performance forms an ellipsis which in turn effects the characters’s filmic trajectory.

When we finally meet Odile, she is riding her bike to her English class she takes with Franz, ‘Loui’s Cours,’ located at 95 Rue du Faubourg Saint Antoine at Avenue Ledru-Rollin. The three meet up in front of the school first, and Franz sneaks Arthur into the class. They sit on different sides of the classroom to find out which man she draws her gaze. They both fall for the sweet and childlike Odile, but Odile immediately falls for the brash and forthcoming Arthur.

They look at each other from across the room. The camera focuses on each of their eye contact. The teacher writes “Classique = modern” on the chalkboard. She calls on Odile to recite the words of T.S. Eliot: “Everything that is new is thereby automatically traditional.” Throughout his many books, the religious historian Mircea Eliade made a distinction between profane space or ordinary space and sacred space, where liminal experiences occur, similar to the ancient Greeks, ‘Chronos’ meaning clock time and ‘Kairos’ meaning significant time. Eliade believed that only tribal or primitive groups of people could access this sacred space, to which Victor Turner reevaluated and found that modern people did indeed experience it. (Moore 2001: 91)

“Perhaps the most significant subtext that will emerge from these theories is the scholarly effort to conjure- or conjure away- what it means to be modern. Debates over magic provide an extraordinarily rich ground for exploring the nature of modernity, its values, and its limits.” (Styers 2004: 4)

Therefore the T.S. Elliot quote evokes the similar idea that we must recontextualize how we categorize the modern, and anything that feels revelatory is because it has been done before. The cultural and literary mimesis that Godard adds to this film reflects and mimics previous incarnations, creating a powerful copy that rivals the original.

The teacher goes on to ask the class to spell Thomas Hardy and reads theatrically from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”, in the ‘No Fear’ section. Arthur sends Odile a humorous note mocking Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, ‘tou bi or not tou bi contre votre poitrine, it iz ze question’ her heart beats loudly.

“To quote Bakhtin, the chronotope (a melding of the Greek words for time and space) helps us understand the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature [and by extension in the fiction film]” (Palmer 2007: 130).

After the class Arthur asks Odile and Franz why M. Stolz; the man they will steal from has so much paper money in his home. Odile explains Stoltz cheats on his taxes and steals from the government, so they feel it’s okay to steal from him. Franz responds with that sometimes “Hidden in Plain Sight is very effective” and that he read “an American book” where someone hid an important letter by simply leaving it out on his table, which was “The Purloined Letter” by Edgar Allan Poe. Godard, like Hermes in this film is a trickster who classically is a boundary crosser, and disrupts and plays with the societal structure, or in this case cinematic structure as he inserts an enormous amount of cultural, cinematic, and literary references and quotations within the plot for the fun of it.

After class, Odile goes back to the house to check and see where the money is and how to access it, as she counts the money, she takes a scarf off the pile but carelessly forgets to put it back on top. Franz and Arthur play act out a scene from an American NASCAR Indy 500 race. “You will never win at Indianapolis!” Arthur yells. Odile is an outsider even within her gang of thieves, as they are slacker cinephiles constantly referencing and acting out scenes from movies. Odile when talking to her Aunt Victoria says, “I hate the cinema, I hate the theater” and when her aunt asks what she likes, she responds with “I don’t know… I love nature.”

After a series of cuts displaying Odile running, skipping, hopping, jumping, and feeding a tiger, the threesome meets back up. Franz decides they should go to a café to make a concrete plan for the money heist. Odile makes an aside glance and breaks the 4^th wall as she asks the camera “why a plan?” This is an irreverent move by Godard to not only play with filmic technique but is a moment that the actor’s traverse into our realm.

The group always situates themselves with Odile at the center. Franz leaves the collective to walk away first, as Odile and Arthur walk together, arm and arm, afterward. The formation of the three allegorically invokes the goddess Hekate who is often represented and emphasized in iconography as a triple, emblematic of the power between the three realms- heavens, sea, and earth. She is the liminal goddess present at all boundaries and transitional moments in life and associated with black dogs of the crossroads. Both Hekate and Hermes served as guides through the underworld in Greek mythology, just as they metaphorically guide the viewer through the symbolic in this narrative.

Next there is an establishing shot of the bustling city. The camera then focuses on the café before the three walk to the back and sit down and light cigarettes. The movement continues as they shift seats as Arthur orders their drinks. The cigarette smoke is the constant of the scene as it billows in front of their faces. The sound of the café almost overtakes the conversation. Music begins to play, and the waiter drops off their drinks, they shift all of the drinks one over. Arthur, who orders schnapps while Odile is distracted and lost in thought, pours his whole glass of alcohol into her Coca-Cola, in a move to get her to relax and loosen her lips concerning the money. They shift seat again and again, rotating around in a circle around the table. Odile walks through the space and sees the actress and singer Chantal Goya, who will star in Godard’s future film Masculine and Feminine (1966) in the bathroom.

The angle of the camera shifts so that when Odile returns, a mirror is present behind the two men sitting, reflecting the café around them. Because of the stagnation in conversation pertaining to the heist, Franz says if they have nothing to say, they should sit in silence. Then after a countdown of 3, 2,1, and the film’s audio goes quiet as the three look at each other and down at their drinks. Finally, after about 30 seconds, Franz gets up and says, “that’s enough, I’ll put on a record,” and the sound resumes. The role of silence breaks yet again the structure of a normal film.

As the music Franz picked plays, Arthur asks the group, “Shall we dance?”

As the trio sets up for their choreographed dance number affectionately known as the ‘Madison dance,’ a sequence that has become eponymous with the French New Wave. This dance scene’s beloved longevity endures through its numerous future reimagining, including Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994).

Before they begin, a man bumps Franz and tells him, “Empire’s crumble, republic’s flounder, but fools go on.’ To which he responds with, “ok M. Segalot, that’s nice furniture.” With their casual attitude, the trio invokes a careless ambivalence to the future robbery like holy beggars or fools in the midst of a liminal experience. (Turner 1987: 110) The seemingly spontaneous and digressive dance scene also represents a kind of alienation that the three outsiders experience during the film.

During this scene, the music pauses, there is silence except for the clapping and snapping of the choreographed dance, and out narrator returns with, “Now it’s time for digression in which to describe our heroes’ feelings.” There is an intercutting of sound back in forth. Music and then silence as the narrator speaks, bringing a sense of filmic self-awareness to the scene. He speaks about what they are thinking in dance instead of the plot of the film. Arthur thinks about Odile’s romantic kisses, and Odile wonders if the boys can see her breasts under her sweater. As the narrator discusses Franz he says, “Franz thinks of everything and nothing. He wonders if the world is becoming a dream or if the dream is becoming a world.” Just as before Franz leaves the group and stops dancing first. Arthur then secretly slips away while Odile is left dancing a while more. The scene distances the trio from the task while reflecting on the nature of ordinary experience.

“Consider, for example, the Bakhtinian conception of the carnival, complexly performative and “bordering” in that, as Sue Vice (following Julia Kristeva) describes, it is “a spectacle, but without a stage, in which the participant is both actor and spectator,” a liminal effect whose textualizing correlative is grotesque realism.” (Palmer 2007: 149)

The carnivalesque in this case is the subversive, eccentric, and irreverent behavior the trio exhibits through the random dance break, as a kind of ambivalence to the society that liberates them from responsibility.

They drive through the city of Paris in expansive, framing camera shots, wind whipping through their hair; our Hermes/narrator tells the audience that Odile thinks it was smart to paint the Louvre white and that they deserve an award. In the next scene, they famously run through the Louvre to beat the American record set by Jimmy Johnson of San Francisco, another move by Godard to insert Americans into this film. This scene traverses time as Bernardo Bertolucci recreates it for his film The Dreamers (2004).

The narrator interjects again with, “Arthur said they’d wait till nightfall, in keeping with the tradition of bad B movies” for them to begin with their criminal plan.

“It is the marginal or inferior person or the outsider who often comes to symbolize what David Hume has called the sentiment of humanity, which in its turn relates to the model have termed communitas.” (Hansen 2001: 58)

These rituals of communitas, like dancing and running through the Louvre, can sometimes involve the temporary shift in mindset concerning status and gain a type of confidence and trust through each other.

The staging of somewhat ordinary, if not random events, between their plotting of a crime creates tension and destabilization of the liminal state in which Odile, Franz, and Arthur must cross.

This is the last of their playfulness as they soon will begin the heist. The group parks their car nearby and chats about where to enter the house, and the men promise not to hurt Odile’s aunt. They put Odile’s stockings on their heads to cover their faces and identities, but they put their hats on top to retain their stylish mobster-like fashion. The two men then take the pre-planned route through the brush and on the rowboat. Odile, who arrives at the house separately, fidgets around the house, waiting for them to arrive. As the men enter and stalk around the property, Arthur casually puts a book in his pocket.

In a violent attempt to keep up appearances, the two men get rough with Odile, gagging and tying her up; it almost seems as if they have turned on her.

The door to Stoltz’s room is locked, so the two men, in an extremely slapstick manner, a la Laurel and Hardy, a humor Godard, is known to enjoy. Odile plays with a black dog, invoking the allusion to Hekate outside as the two men comically bring an oversized ladder to the second-floor window. Gentle music plays as they struggle to climb up the ladder and find that the window is locked. After the failed initial heist, the men run away, leaving the ladder up for everyone to see. Instead of breaking the window and finishing the job, Arthur shows his true character as he slaps Odile across the face.

Without structure, communitas cannot last. The danger is that what is wild and free could soon become profane, as Dionysian or dark, exuberant, and potentially totalitarian elements can emerge, as the destruction of communitas is upon them. (Hansen 2001:58) However, that fluidity and chaos are crucial for a rebirth of the self and passage through initiation.

As the group leaves the house, the narrator speaks poetically but cryptically as always – this time about how Franz cares for Odile, which foreshadows Franz’s future romantic interludes.

The camera pans across the quiet city, juxtaposing wild jazz playing in the non-diegetically evokes a sense of turmoil for the viewer. The camera then halts abruptly to show Odile unaware, smoking on the balcony of the house, as Franz and Arthur come back mask-less to finish the heist, pretending to be TV reporters. Odile runs to stop them as her Aunt is home, and she and Stoltz have been suspicious due to the failed previous attempts. She tries to hold the door closed and keep them out, then runs around worried in the house as they enter. They grab her as she screams non! the Aunt appears and is held hostage in exchange for the key to the money room. Arthur shoots warning shots with his gun. Franz implicates Odile, who is feigning innocence to the theft, by asking her to tie up her Aunt. The men push Odile around constantly, and she tries to sulk and hide in the room as they lock the bound Aunt in the closet. As Odile frantically roams around the living room, Franz asks her why she does not love him... and tells her he wants to hold her in his arms, to which she replies, “this is hardly the time.”

When the men go for the stash of cash, they realize that the money, which becomes this film’s McGuffin, a Hitchcockian device indicating a focus or item that has no consequence except to drive the narrative forward, is gone, and they search wildly about the house. They retrieve the Aunt from the closet to ask where the rest of the money is. She does not stir like she is passed out, but they decide she is not breathing, and they might have killed her. Odile starts loudly sobbing as they drag her from the house.

They become performers the moment they begin plotting. Not only are their impersonations of American films constructed roles of the gangster, a way to conjure up the archetype in themselves as they try to pull off a heist, but they also disclose their performances and reveal their true selves during the climax of the film. Odile, even as shy and innocent as she seems, most likely was the one to have initiated the heist. By the end of the film she is guilt-ridden and pretends she did not know anything about it. Franz pretends to not care about Odile’s love until she is betrayed by Arthur, and Arthur pretends to be a charming and casual guy but is not above hitting a woman and ultimately killing his own uncle.

The narrator informs the audience that Arthur senses, as they leave, that the money might be in the doghouse; he says he is going to run back to check on the aunt just in case. He says he will meet them at “Tout Va Bien,” in a reference or inspiration to the 1972 Godard film of the same name. As Franz and Odile drive away, they see Arthur’s uncles’ car on the way to the house and decide they must warn him, so they turn around.

Arthur’s crooked uncle (Ernest Menzer), who appeared earlier in the film asking Arthur about when he is going to get the stolen money, comes out from behind a tree with a gun the moment Arthur appears with the money and shoots him, scattering the money on the ground. Arthur takes out his gun and approaches the uncle, who methodically fires five more shots at Arthur as he slowly approaches. Franz and Odile watch the showdown from the horizon point like two looming shadows. Arthur then takes one single shot as his uncle raises his arms and theatrically falls to the ground under the brush of a tree.

Arthur then begins to dance around extremely theatrically, running and falling around in circles for almost a whole minute, as he feels the bullet and begins to die. The narrator tells us that the thought of Odile’s face is on his mind as “a dark fog descended on him.” This death scene comes three days after his pretend death, an elliptical simulacrum that ties Arthur’s story to a close. M. Stoltz returns home to find the bodies and the money intact on his lawn; the Aunt who they thought was dead is alive.

The story ends with Franz and Odile tragically running away together. The couple decides where they will escape to, the north or the south, with a word game. As they drive, Franz asks Odile:

“Vous n’avez jamais eu l’impression que c’est étrange, que les gens ne fassent pas un tout?/ Isn’t it strange how people never form a whole?” “Comment? /In what way?” “Oui. Qu’ils ne s’amalgament pas ensemble, qu’ils restent séparés, ils vont chacun de leur côté, méfiants et tragiques. Même quand ils sont ensemble dans les grands immeubles ou dans la rue… Vous n’avez pas envie de parler?/ They never come together. They remain separate. Each goes their own way, distrustful and tragic. Even when they’re together, in big buildings, or in the street… Don’t feel like talking?” “Non/ No.”

This antagonistic or unsocial sociability outlook, as demonstrated by the conversation itself, articulates the liminoid state, which differs from the liminal in that it lacks the option of resolution. Immanuel Kant states in his fourth thesis of Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784) that “The means employed by Nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society, so far as this is, in the end, the cause of a lawful order among men.”

The quote meaning that as man feels like he can associate with others, it’s only because they have mutual propensities and feel the need to be oppositional to others. As Franz and Odile drive away from their botched robbery, they have only each other as the opposition they have perhaps, unintentionally, created within the structure of society as criminals through communitas during their liminal stage, and they move into a new stage of their lives. Before our narrator/ Hermes ends the film, he adds: “After all catastrophes, the world keeps on following its course….”

Godard is Hermes in Band of Outsiders, not only through his command over boundaries and ability to cross them to bring insight and a bit of nostalgia for the viewer, but also by upholding and guiding the protagonists across the threshold of transition. The course through a liminal space is recognized through their constant motion and their marginal status. As the band marches to their own drummer, as criminals, violate the social order, displacing them from the realm of the everyday, they are never fully integrated into that society. Norman Brown in his book Hermes the Thief (1947) states that “Hermes symbolized the aspirations of the non-aristocratic classes.”

Godard/Hermes/Narrator ends the film with an image of a globe and the phrase,

“My story ends here, like in a pulp novel, at that superb moment when nothing weakens, nothing wears away, nothing wanes. An upcoming film will reveal, in CinemaScope and Technicolor, the tropical adventures of Odile and Franz.” An overt lie as this sequel never happens.

The embodied paradoxes and contradictions brought by our narrator are due to the fact that Hermes is also a Trickster figure living on the margins himself despite governing over them. The ideas of reflexivity, mirroring, reflection, self-reference, and projection are interrelated in the context of the Trickster. Godard, like this trickster, films his films with quotes and references to other things, appearing like Jungian synchronicities that manifest during liminal stages, offering transitions across the margins and boundaries between the psychological and the physical, or the real and the cinematic universes.

Subscribe now

Bibliography/References:

Archer, Eugene, “Film Festival: New Wave at Its Crest: Woman Is a Woman’ Is Best So Far Godard Works Have Charm and Depth”, New York Times, Sept. 19, 1964

https://www.nytimes.com/1964/09/19/archives/film-festival-new-wave-at-its-crest-woman-is-a-woman-is-best-so-far.html

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’ The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, pp84-258, 1988

Eliade, Mircea, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth, Spring Publications, Woodstock, Connecticut, Second Edition, 1995

Hansen, George P, The Trickster and the Paranormal, Xlibris Corporation USA, 2001

Kael. Pauline “Godard Among the Gangsters” The New Republic, September 10, 1966

Kant, Immanuel, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, Fourth Thesis (Originally published 1743) Translation by Lewis White Beck. From Immanuel Kant, “On History,” The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1963

Moore, Robert L, The Archetype of Initiation: Sacred Space, Ritual Process, and Personal Transformation, Xlibris Corporation USA, 2001

Palmer, Barton R, “The Divided Self and the Dark City: Film Noir and Liminality” Cinema Without Borders Vol. 15, pp. 66-79, 2007

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, The Social Contract, Eckler, University of Illinois, (Originally published 1762) 2018

Styers, Randall, Making Magic: Religion, Magic and Science in the Modern World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004

Taussig, Michael, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, New York, and London: Routledge, 1993

Turner, Victor, The Anthropology of Performance, New York: PAJ Publications, 1987

Wilson, Leigh, Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult, Edinburgh University Press Ltd, 2013

Wood, Robin “Society and Tradition: An Approach to Jean Luc Godard” The New Left Review, September/October, 1966

I always get asked, ‘Why cinema and the occult?’ and I actually think this medium is (and has been) a natural next step for magical practice. We utilize the things we know and what we see.

I created a zine this year that’s available for purchase at goodpress.co.uk, but I thought I would make more of my content/ musings accessible.

About the archive:

A database dedicated to magician and occultist contributions to cinema…

With the cinema’s 1895 public debut, many stage magicians immediately adopted film as they had done with the magic lantern as an attraction for their performances. And vice versa, stage magic illusions and Victorian interest in the supernatural created a vital context for the production of special effects and tricks on the screen, showcasing the medium’s possibilities. Since magic and cinema have been intertwined since their inception, my hope is that this website will serve as a database of magical films and the Magician & Occultist’s contributions to cinema. The website lists filmmakers who have also worked as stage magicians and those who can also be considered occultists. It categorizes and lists films that portray these ideas, workings, and function as rituals themselves.

Thoughts and conclusions about the first magic film

Throughout early cinema (1895-1910), magicians emerged as an identifiable group of artists and technicians who used film, helping lay the foundation for modern cinema.

I am defining Magicians in two ways. Magician - Supernatural/ceremonial as practitioners of beliefs, rituals, and actions which are said to control and manipulate beings and forces, and encompass a wide variety of long, elaborate, and complex rituals of Magic. Magician-Illusionist, stage practitioners performing theatrical entertainment utilizing optical tricks.

Given the inclusion of the magician in early cinema, I was curious about which was the first film to present Magic? I am defining Magic in two ways to coincide with my earlier Magician definition.

I began my search utilizing keywords within the Lantern.mediahist and Newspaper search engines, but this proved difficult due to the indexical occult and spiritualist terminology used to describe the filmmaking, screening the film, and how we experience watching film. Terms such as seance, Magic, occult, ghost, spirit, phantom, medium, and spiritualist all aggregated 10,000-plus hits per engine. Terms like Magic, Magician, trick, and sleight of hand aggregated a similar amount and selection of hits due to the popularity of live theatrical magic performances during this period.

Because of the broadness of the search, I created a list of notable cinema names like Thomas Edison, Auguste, and Louis Lumiere and all Magicians like Georges Melies (Illusion), Willaim Selig (Illusion), John Nevil Maskelyne (both), David Devant (both), Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin (Illusion), J Stuart Blackton (Illusion), Billy Bitzer (Illusion), Walter Booth (Illusion), Isola Brothers (Illusion) among many others, who began making films or worked within the film industry during my time frame of 1895- 1910, to narrow it down. I collected these names through the books Encyclopedia of Early Cinema and Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema, published by the British Film Institute, and general Google searches.

During this process, most magician-filmmakers began to be featured in films and to create their own films in 1896, but nothing was capturing or recording magic acts until the 1900s. In 1896, Thomas Edison’s company filmed “Inventor Edison Sketched by World Artist,” the sketch artist featured was J Stuart Blackton, a magician who was so taken by the experience that he and partner Albert Edward Smith founded the motion picture company Vitagraph in 1897.

The earliest record available of a magic film was a short film made in 1896 by Georges Méliès called “Seance de Prestidigitation, “ also known as “The Conjuring, “ that was rediscovered in 2014 by the Cinémathèque française when they received it from the collector François Binétruy. The discovery was a short fragment of chromolithographed animated film, rotoscoped from an unidentified 1896 Méliès film, showing Méliès himself performing a magic trick.

Film scholar, historian, and author of numerous books on Méliès, including “Méliès. Magic and Cinema,” Jacques Malthête identified the film as “Conjuring,” which was thought to have been lost.

In 1986, the Lumière Brothers were screening short programs displaying work created with their Cinématographe. Inhabiting the seats of these first screenings was a stage magician and director of the Theatre Robert-Houdin, specializing in magic shows. Georges Méliès was born in 1861 in France and became known as the earliest practitioner of special effects in film. He pioneered techniques for creating Magic’s illusion on the screen, such as substitution splices, stop motion, slow motion, multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, and hand-painted color. From 1896 to 1910, Méliès produced films of various genres under his name and for his own company, Star Films.

The following sources lead us to believe in the authenticity of 1896 is the date of creation of the film “Conjuring” or “Seance de Prestidigitation.”

Scholar and author of the book “The Great Art of Light and Shadow: the archaeology of cinema,” Laurent Manonni states in the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival catalog, “it is here that Melies introduced magic into the nascent cinema for the first time.”

My first primary source is the Georges Méliès Production Company’s “Star Films” Catalogue, listing all of Méliès’s films in order. This document is an authorized reprinting made in 1955 by the film company itself. The booklets’ original copyright is 1905, Paris, France, and within its Class 1 category lists 421 negative titles manufactured by the Star Films Moving Picture company. The first film on the list, “The Players” (1896), is known as Méliès’s very first film, an actuality short about three people playing cards.

The second title is “Conjuring” in 1896.

My second primary source is Georges Méliès, a two-page handwritten invoice on ‘Manufacture of Films for Cinematographs G. Méliès’ letterhead to a Monsieur Carole of about 45 titles created by Méliès for sale in color and black and white. The document was found on the website of a Parisian auction house named Tessier -Sarrou. The document lot 308 was purchased on June 23, 2015, for 900 euros as part of the Affiches; Graphisme de 1860-2000 (publicité, spectacle, cinéma, politique) public auction. The expert in the room was Stanislas Choko of Intemporel Galerie in Paris. Some other Georges Méliès items in the lot include hundreds of small sketch drawings made in the 1920s, a few personal letters, and articles by Merritt Crawford, W. Sargent, and Charles Hastings. The articles concern Méliès and the essential place he had in the development of Cinematographic Art. (No year was listed)

The third source I would like to mention is a tweet from the @gmeliesproject Twitter account dated April 11, 2019. The tweet states, “Here’s one of our little treasures. A lithograph (chromolithograph) reproducing the movie “Une séance de prestidigitation” by Georges Méliès, shot in 1896. This movie never found is number 2 in the Star Films catalog.

©Private collection P.Méliès, which includes a photograph of the colored negative “Seance de Prestidigitation.”

The secondary sources I utilized to contextualize were Tom Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny.” An article, “Magic and Illusion in Early Cinema,” was written for the book Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era, by Murray Leeder, and for “Magic and Illusion in Early Cinema” by Dan North. The North article focuses on Melies and the Lumiere brothers being influenced by the magical arts of the 19th century and how “magic and cinema help us understand early film’s ambiguous relations to both art and technology.”

Gunning’s article provided color on spiritualists, ghost photography, and magicians who began to utilize new technologies as they were invented to provide more connections to magical phenomena. Both articles give a backdrop for why filmmakers and magicians would be drawn to the film as a medium.

My search yielded the understanding that a Magician created the first Magic (Illusion) film, if not the first Magic film, in the earliest years of cinema-making. However, this fact raised issues with the white Western colonial perspective and epistemologies, as it delegitimizes Edison’s 1984 film “Sioux Ghost Dance,” which fits the (supernatural/paranormal) definition of Magic.

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines the Ghost Dance as

“either of two distinct cults in a complex of late 19th-century religious movements that represented an attempt of Indians in the western United States to rehabilitate their traditional cultures. Both cults arose from Northern Paiute (Paviotso) prophet-dreamers in western Nevada who announced the imminent return of the dead (hence “ghost”), the ousting of the whites, and the restoration of Indian lands, food supplies, and way of life. These ends, it was believed, would be hastened by the dances and songs revealed to the prophets in their vision visits to the spirit world, and also by strict observance of a moral code that resembled Christian teaching and forbade war against Indians or whites. Many dancers fell into trances and received new songs from the dead they met in visions or were healed by Ghost Dance rituals.”

The Edison film catalog describes the film as “One of the most peculiar customs of the Sioux Tribe is here shown, the dancers being genuine Sioux Indians, in full war paint and war costumes. 40 feet”. The film is listed under “Peep shows, Silent films, Short films, Nonfiction films” in the Library of Congress database. It marks the first appearance of Indigenous people before a motion picture camera.

The complexity of discourses surrounding Indigenous customs and rituals brings up questions of colonial perspective within other categories of filmmaking, and would need more research in the future.

Reference Sources

1.) Richard Abel, ed Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (Routledge, 2003)

2.) British Film Institute. African & Caribbean Unit, edited by Herbert, Stephen and McKernan, Stephen, Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema: A World Wide Survey, British Film Institute Publisher, 1996
3.) Encyclopedia Britannica

Secondary Sources

1.) North, Dan “Magic and Illusion in Early Cinema.” 2002 EBSCO Publishing.

2.) Gunning, Tom “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny.” In Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era. Ed Murray Leeder. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 17-38. Screen Studies.

Primary Sources

1.) Melies, Georges -”Complete Catalogue of Genuine and Original “Star” Films”, Rutgers University. Libraries

2.) Melies, George- handwritten invoice and note for a Mr. Carole of a list of films for sale in color or black and white dated 5/6/1906. The item for sale at auction on Tessier- Sarrou, a Parisian Auction House, also known as the study, was founded in 1691 during King Louis XIV.

3.) @gmeliesproject twitter - Image from P.Melies Private Collection

4.) “Sioux Ghost Dance” Dickson, W. K.-L. (William Kennedy-Laurie), Created / Published United States: Edison Manufacturing Co., [1894] “Sioux Ghost Dance” September 24, 1894, Black Maria studio in West Orange, New Jersey.