What led Kenneth Anger to curse Jimmy Page? *FREE excerpt!
Anger met Jimmy Page in 1971 at a Sotheby’s auction of Aleister Crowley artifacts and they struck up a friendship based on their mutual interests. Around 1973, Page would invite Anger to Boleskine House to perform an exorcism as he was experiencing some ghostly disturbances. Curiously enough, Anger had rented Boleskine House for a brief period in 1969 before JP had purchased it in 1970.
Anger and Page then agreed to collaborate on Anger’s film, Lucifer Rising. Page was to compose the soundtrack and come up with some unique music to go along with Anger’s surreal imagery. Page worked on the soundtrack intermittently while touring the world with Led Zeppelin. In 1976, JP allowed Anger to edit his raw footage in the basement of the musician’s London home which was originally fitted out to edit the concert film The Song Remains the Same. Page gave Anger free reign to use his subterranean film laboratory to trim the initial seventeen hours of raw footage down to roughly one and a half hours.
The first reports were that JP's live-in girlfriend Charlotte had discovered Anger giving unauthorized tours of their home and demanded that he leave. The filmmaker supposedly returned the next morning to collect his belongings and found the door bolted. The movie footage as well as his prized 'Crown of Lucifer', which was supposedly made with rhinestones from a dress once worn by Mae West, were all still inside. Anger then informed the folks at Zeppelin’s record label, Swansong, that the collaboration was off, and Page was officially fired from the project. He was eventually able to collect his things (including the movie footage) over the next couple of days. JP claimed that a housekeeper, not Charlotte, had asked Anger to leave.
Anger later stated that he'd been unable to reach Page for months and that the rock star’s dedication to the project had obviously waned. Additional griping from the filmmaker included that JP was behaving contradictory to the teachings of their mutual hero Aleister Crowley and that his demeanor was akin to a ‘lunar landscape’. He said that communicating with Page was like trying to speak through thick plate glass. Anger went on to say that JP was dried up as a musician and didn’t have anything left creatively, etc. You know; the usual stuff you say to someone when you're pissed at them. He also alluded to Page's heroin addiction by referencing his 'affair with the white lady' and saying his behavior was very Jekyll and Hyde.
Either way, Page had the upper hand as he didn't need this pet project with a tempestuous character like Anger. It is important to note that Page did indeed produce over twenty minutes of music for the soundtrack, but Anger said it wasn’t enough and that what was presented was unusable. The filmmaker was so upset that he threw a curse and let everyone know about it. Curiously enough, this is when the majority (but not all) of Led Zeppelin’s bad luck started.
In my opinion, curses are not very effective unless propelled by an appropriate level of toxic, malevolent emotion. Of course, the technical aspect, the ceremony, has to be there but without vicious yet focused rage the results will be lackluster. There are many cultural systems that have their own specific approach to harming a person or group of people. There are certain ritualistic steps one must take which equate to a formula or recipe. But just as a successful chef injects love or positive energy into their meals (however immeasurable some might think this is) a Black Magician must inject hate into their curses for them to be truly effective.
After their fallout, when asked if he felt vindictive towards Jimmy Page, Anger responded 'you bet I do; I'm not a Christian turn the other cheek kind.' He also reportedly said with a smile, 'In fact, I'm all ready to throw a Kenneth Anger curse.'
