LOOP Barcelona19.11. - 21.11.2024, Almanac, Barcelona

Video
24:53 min
Jan Ijäs’s House of the Wickedest Man in the World (2023) is not actually part of his Waste series, which explores how something valuable turns into something useless, but it shows a similar curiosity about things going wrong. The central character of the film tends to evoke strong emotions: Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), a mountaineer, poet, painter and occultist, was called ‘the wickedest man in the world’ by the contemporary press, while Crowley himself preferred the more apt sobriquet the Beast 666.
The actual subject of Ijäs’s film, however, is the house of the beastly priest: the Abbey of Thelema, founded by Crowley in the small town of Cefalú on the north coast of Sicily in 1920. Activities in the Abbey were short-lived as after the unfortunate death of one of Clowley’s followers, Mussolini expelled Crowley, and authorities whitewashed over the occult murals that adorned its interior surfaces. The house fascinates modern urban explorers and, though it is quite modest in its proportions, it is presented alternately as beautiful and terrifying in the material shot by Ville Piippo and Ijäs. The shots search for Crowley’s spirit or other mystical spirits, but they also capture Cefalú’s daily life along the way: ordinary Sicilians running errands in the streets and squares and lying in their swimming pool. The music composed by Lauri Ainala, Vilunki 3000 and Juho Liukkonen intensifies the atmosphere and reminds us that music, like magic, has the potential to affect its environment and change its essence into something completely different.
A recap of the history of the Abbey of Thelema is peppered with quotes from the diaries of Crowley and his entourage. Extreme life is part of a cult leader’s job description, but sex magick, drugs and channelling creativity into wickedness require dedication and endurance. The diary entries quoted in Ijäs’s film illustrate how the distinction between rituals and routines is blurred. Harmless remarks like “It’s been a very lazy day for me” or “a rather amusing day touching up pictures” might be accompanied by poltergeist sightings or the poem Leah in Plain Figures, into which Crowley crammed all the obscenities he could think of. We get a picture of tension between occultism and daily life, magic, destruction and work, in which human ambition and the thirst for success also play a not insignificant part.
Insofar as occultism is inseparable from the mundane, a filmmaker is able to focus on one of the two things in his interpretation: he can either notice the banal and be amused by it, which is what Ijäs does, or embrace the magic, which was Kenneth Anger’s approach. In the film’s epilogue, the Abbey of Thelema is visited by two explorers in 1955, when it had been slumbering, abandoned for more than 20 years: young Anger, who had just made The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), a ritualistic film inspired by Crowley, and sexologist Alfred Kinsey, whose research revolutionised the notion of modern sexuality. More things are about to go wrong: Anger and Kinsey uncover some of Crowley’s murals and witness spirits wreaking havoc. Anger even wrote to Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque française about his plans to make a spectacular film in colour about a black magic ceremony at the Abbey of Thelema, but the film either disappeared or was never completed. The Abbey keeps its secrets.
Tytti Rantanen