Terrible in Their Beauty: Artistic Echoes of George ‘AE’ Russell in A Dark Song

Kevin Cooney

Guiding the audience through a claustrophobic psychological and physical labyrinth in the pursuit of divine revenge, director Liam Gavin’s A Dark Song (2016) presents an overwhelmingly majestic yet equally terrifying vision of an angelic presence that defies rational explanation. The film’s climax, I contend, through elements of terror, beauty, and dread contingent on ecstatic religious experiences, startlingly echoes mystic, poet, and artist George ‘AE’ Russell’s expressions of lost gods and guardians of ancient Eire.

Check out the trailer for A Dark Song:

Set in rural Wales, though filmed in Ireland, A Dark Song follows Sophia’s (Catherine Walker) quest to avenge her son’s death. Instead of turning to guns or knives, Sophia aims to summon her Holy Guardian Angel, believing it will grant her desires to punish those who killed her son. To locate this divine presence, she works with occultist Solomon (Steve Oram), who guides her through the lengthy Abramelin ritual over several months.  The rite, said to have originated with the work of an Egyptian Kabbalah magician, Abra Melin, was translated into German before it emerged in print in the 17th century. However, as Dr. Justin Sledge notes, “there is little evidence this text was written by a Medieval Jewish person at all,” observing that no references or quotes from the Talmud or Kabbalah are found in the text. The film burrows into a cinematic version of the ritual as performed by the late 19th- and early 20th-century occultist Aleister Crowley, who’s said to have attempted the rite at Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness. In A Dark Song, the Abramelin ritual, a grueling trial of sleep deprivation and starvation, subservience to the esoteric master, Solomon, and untold hours of reciting the magical formulas that degrade Sophia’s mind and body, leads to Solomon’s death as reality siphons from the isolated home.

Sophia seeks communion with a higher-level being, an angel who is no magic wish-granting djinn of children’s fables, but a militant guardian being who reshapes reality for those humans to whom they are eternally wedded. A Dark Song portrays the Holy Guardian Angel as it is understood in Crowleyan circles as “the angelic entity traditionally seen as attached to our person with the special task of advising and protecting us in moments of trouble. The goal of this magical system is therefore the ‘knowledge and conversation with one’s Guardian Angel’” (Pasaki 148).  As the horrors of her supernatural journey take hold in the basement, Sophia, tortured and bloodied by the primordial demons of paleolithic rituals, is drawn upward into the once gloomy center of the house, now burning bright and pure. At the darkest juncture of her journey, Sophia is graced with the presence of her Holy Guardian Angel, whose form is unlike any ever put to screen. Its appearance and essence leave the viewer speechless, or more accurately, in divine awe and terror, fully overwhelming not only the character but also the viewer. In its beauty, Sophia’s Holy Guardian Angel is like the images of ancient Ireland’s hidden divinities, the sidhe, as portrayed by mystic George ‘AE’ Russell.

Director Gavin and his Irish creative team manifest a monumental divine figure that, in my view, evokes the art of George ‘AE’ Russell, who swam in the coursing streams of 19th- and 20th-century Irish nationalism, spiritualism, and Theosophy. Russell’s mysticism, as Williams notes, “took the form of a fervent idealism, a sense of the phenomenal world as a veil impalpably penetrated by divine beauty” (312), and A Dark Song’s visual climax echoes Russell’s ecstatic visions of an ancient supernatural folk, the sidhe. Whereas in traditional Irish folklore, the sidhe reside in the eponymous mounds dotted around the country, Russell’s sidhe live in the “other world” that coexists with human existence and appear as glowing, statuesque divine beings, like the Holy Guardian Angel in A Dark Song. These were beings of “harmony and beauty,” present with “other worlds in which we can see horrible shapes” (Russell 377) just on the edge of our waking vision. A Dark Song’s Guardian Angel’s harmony and beauty are in stark contrast to Sophia’s encounter with mud-caked demons, those Russellian “horrible shapes” in the home’s dark, damp basement.

To Russell, Catholicism seemed ripe for fusing angels with the sidhe. In a letter to his friend W. B. Yeats, Russell wrote, “I think if I was allowed to, I would do all the Sidhe as archangels and seraphim. I would dearly love to make a faery chapel and put mystical figures so that the good Catholics who went there would become worshippers of the Sidhe without knowing it” (Denson 46). In A Dark Song, Sophia’s angel, though not a Christian seraph, blazes and looms like Russellian sidhe, radiant with terror and awe. The film’s warrior angel, with its towering presence filling the room, knelt before Sophia. Even on a bent knee, normally a sign of supplication, the Holy Guardian Angel dominates a shocked and terrified Sophia. Its sword and golden scale armor, adorned with Celtic-style curvilinear designs and scrollwork on a stylized ancient Celtic helmet, echo the overwhelming power of the Russellian sidhe (as well as a touch of John Duncan’s ‘The Riders of the Sidhe’).

Indeed, reading Russell’s description of the sidhe offers a glimpse into the Celtic mythos that also subtly infuses A Dark Song. The Guardian’s appearance swells with Russell’s experience with the sidhe as a world growing, “luminous” with “a dazzle of light, and then I saw that this came from the heart of a tall figure with a body apparently shaped out of half-transparent or opalescent air, and throughout the body ran a radiant, electrical fire” (Russell 378). Russellian sidhe appear equally martial and beautiful, with a spear in hand, guardians of a forgotten or suppressed Ireland.

In Russell’s painting, The Crusade, a trio of sidhe stands abreast, variously armed, possibly with a sword and many spears. One sidhe stands out for their gold scale armor, like A Dark Song’s Holy Guardian Angel. Heralded by deafening silence, which manifests as a tremor that shakes every glass, cup, and bowl in the house, and a cascade of shimmering petals or embers, the film’s Holy Guardian Angel shares imagery with the shower of light accompanying the Russellian sidhe. Rather than pleading for revenge on her behalf, Sophia seeks forgiveness. The angel smiles beneath the golden helmet as joy flows from glowing eyes.

Russell’s sidhe populate paintings and sketches as etheric and statuesque. They are the fairy folk of Ireland but reside as potent forces of the hidden potential of the country. This hidden potential, as viewed during Russell’s time as the power of the Irish people to break free of British rule, is found in Gavin’s filmic angel. The angel in A Dark Song is the hidden power within Sophia, brought into existence through grueling labor before connecting to a transcendental cosmic force. The Holy Guardian Angel’s ferocity lay not in barbaric instruments, but rather in its stature and warrior nature. It arises from two places, after all of the mystical machinations, simultaneously from within Sophia and from some occulted power within the stars. Sophia sought revenge for her son’s death. However, in the grueling ritual and moment of terror, she experiences what Rudolf Otto would describe as “impotence and general nothingness as against overpowering might…the annihilation of the self, and then, as its complement, of the transcendent as the sole and entire reality” (21). A Dark Song captures this moment of smallness through awe of the Holy Guardian Angel, whose majesty and power are heightened by seeing them as inheritors of that Russellian sidhe, which glowed brightly as protectors of order and righteousness.

A Dark Song is an incarnation of power that infuses the cosmos and Sophia’s rage-filled grief. Her anger takes the form of an armor-clad warrior, but the angel also embodies Sophia’s soft, radiant love for her lost son. The film exhibits the classic talents of syncretism, pulling together conflicting systems and traditions to coalesce around imagery and create a whole new phenomenon, or, in this case, a bleak, at times terrifying film that reveals the sublime in the darkest of moments.

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References

Denson, Alan. Letters from AE. Abelard-Schuman, 1963.

Gavin, Liam, director. A Dark Song. Samson and Tall Man films, 2016.

Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. Oxford University Press, 1973.

Pasi, Marco. “Varieties of Magical Experience: Aleister Crowley’s Views on Occult Practice.” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, vol. 6, no. 2, 2011, p. 123–162.

Russell, George William, et al. The Descent of the Gods : Comprising the Mystical Writings of G.W. Russell “A.E.” C. Smythe, 1988.

Sledge, Justin. “ Abramelin- Introduction to the Magical Text and the Ritual made famous by Aleister Crowley.” YouTube, uploaded by Esoterica, 22 January 2021.

Williams, Mark. Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth. Princeton University Press, 2016.

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