By the autumn of 1967 the Summer of Love had curdled at its edges, and nowhere did the psychedelic dream tilt more sharply toward the occult than inside a converted movie house at 1702 Haight Street. On the evening of the autumnal equinox — Thursday, September 21, 1967 — the Straight Theater hosted "The Equinox of the Gods," an event whose poster (catalogued today as AOR 2.226, its imagery invoking the Egyptian sun-god and, obliquely, Aleister Crowley) reads less like a rock bill than a ceremonial program. Presented by "Kenneth Anger and the Bringers of Light," the night gathered the Magick Powerhouse of Oz, Anger himself, the Congress of Wonders, the Amazing Charlatans, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Duncan Company, and the theater's own house dancers. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco date the poster to this evening, and a Weiser Antiquarian reprint of the handbill confirms the same event at the Straight on September 21, 1967; the COAU Straight Theater list carries it as well.

At the center stood two men whose collaboration would soon become one of the counterculture's darkest footnotes. Kenneth Anger, the underground filmmaker and self-described Crowleyan magus, had for a year been shooting "Lucifer Rising," an occult film-poem. His collaborator and would-be soundtrack composer was a charismatic young musician named Bobby Beausoleil, who assembled a small orchestra of Bay Area players and christened it the Magick Powerhouse of Oz. The equinox performance was conceived, at least in part, as a benefit to finish the film — a "ritual" in Anger's sense, in which the presentation of images was itself meant to summon spiritual forces.

What happened next has hardened into legend, and here the archival record demands caution. The widely repeated story holds that on this very night four reels of the master cut of "Lucifer Rising" were stolen, and that Anger, distraught, publicly announced his own death in the pages of the Village Voice. The COAU cache repeats the dramatic "stolen from the theater that night" framing. But the timing and the culprit are genuinely contested, and no reachable second source confirms a theft on September 21 (the corroboration check leaves this claim unverified, backed only by community-wiki accounts). The better-sourced tellings do not fix the theft to the night of the equinox at all; they place it afterward, as the Anger–Beausoleil partnership disintegrated — Anger reporting to the Berkeley Barb that his home, not the theater, had been burgled, and accusing Beausoleil, who flatly denied it. The chronicle should not assert that the reels vanished from the Straight that night. The honest telling is that the equinox performance was the last time the two men's project held together, and that the film and the friendship both came apart soon after.

The coda is grim and famous: within two years Beausoleil had fallen into the orbit of Charles Manson and was convicted in the 1969 murder of the musician Gary Hinman — a trajectory that retroactively lends the equinox night a chill it did not carry at the time.

For a poster-and-art chronicle, the Straight Theater equinox earns its anchor not for a Bill Graham print but for what it represents: the moment the Haight's utopian pageantry shaded into ritual and rumor. The poster's own designer is uncredited in every reachable catalog — recorded here as an honest gap rather than guessed at. The competing bill that same Thursday — Blue Cheer and Vanilla Fudge across town at the Fillmore Auditorium, on Bonnie MacLean's handsome BG-84 (which recurred on the 23rd, the room dark on the 22nd) — is the tidier poster story, and it is well imaged on Wolfgang's. But the Equinox of the Gods is the one the era could not stop retelling, and the one whose facts still resist the tidy retelling. Elsewhere on this date the ballroom rooms kept their weekend rhythm: in 1968 the Avalon's FD-138 Steve Miller weekend and the Fillmore West's BG-137 Albert King run were both mid-stand, and Spooky Tooth were closing a Matrix residency.