She waits another three hundred years to find the perfect emissary—strong willed, virile, magically endowed—a man with appetites. After surviving a soul-crushing childhood in a household of Plymouth Brethren, a sect that found Anglicanism too racy, our Dear Old Uncle Al was ready to embrace anything that his parents were against. That included the ultimate bad girl of Revelations. Crowley fetishized the image of Her astride the Beast, especially since he saw himself as the Beast She should be riding.
He describes Her power:
This is the Mystery of Babylon, the Mother of Abominations, and this is the mystery of her adulteries, for she hath yielded up herself to everything that liveth, and hath become a partaker in its mystery. And because she hath made her self the servant of each, therefore is she become the mistress of all. Not as yet canst thou comprehend her glory.
Beautiful art thou, O Babylon, and desirable, for thou hast given thyself to everything that liveth, and thy weakness hath subdued their strength. For in that union thou didst understand. Therefore art thou called Understanding, O Babylon, Lady of the Night!
She’s the most interesting figure never mentioned in the Book of the Law. And it seems at times that Crowley doesn’t know what to do with Her. For him, She remains eternally across the Abyss, though not for lack of wanting. Crowley pursues her as a man in the desert pursues water. But he never gives in to Her. His giant ego prevents it.
She at least gets mention in the Gnostic Mass, and makes the short list for the Gnostic Creed. It’s also plainly obvious that the words of the priestess in the Gnostic Mass are the words of Babalon. Once again, we see the chain, as the words sound familiar to those who have read about Dee and Kelly’s encounter.
The PRIESTESS speaks: But to love me is better than all things; if under the night-stars in the desert thou presently burnest mine incense before me, invoking me with a pure heart, and the serpent flame therein, thou shalt come a little to lie in my bosom. For one kiss wilt thou then be willing to give all; but whoso gives one particle of dust shall lose all in that hour. Ye shall gather goods and store of women and spices; ye shall wear rich jewels; ye shall exceed the nations of the earth in splendour and pride; but always in the love of me, and so shall ye come to my joy. I charge you earnestly to come before me in a single robe, and covered with a rich head-dress. I love you! I yearn to you! Pale or purple, veiled or voluptuous, I who am all pleasure and purple, and drunkenness of the innermost sense, desire you. Put on the wings, and arouse the coiled splendour within you: come unto me! To me! To me! Sing the rapturous love-song unto me! Burn to me perfumes! Wear to me jewels! Drink to me, for I love you! I love you. I am the blue-lidded daughter of sunset; I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky. To me! To me!
Crowley never follows his own instructions. Incapable of surrendering himself, he transforms Her into a concept and nails her to the Tree of Life where She can die a slow death. Then he turns Her into an “office” as if She were a mere figurehead. Crowley’s molls are dubbed Scarlet Woman, and they somehow manage to be under the Beast they are supposed to ride. At least until he tires of them, or they of him, and he picks another.
This is not surprising. For once again we have a court wizard proclaiming Her. Crowley is so much better at organizing tables and abstracting the universe into ten convenient sephiroth than truly experiencing Her power. And she must be experienced. Thelema, and here I am talking about big T Thelema, the faith not the concept, is another solar-centric religion that has God the Sun at the center. Thelema, like its founder, cannot truly represent her because it will not give itself over completely to pagan ways. Though they claim ownership, and some ridiculously try to separate Her from the whore of Revelations, She’s not their goddess. At least not entirely.
Thelema suffers because, in the end, Crowley never got over his fear of God the Father. “I never hated the one true God, just the god of the people I hated,” does not leave room for a goddess.
Luckily, Crowley rubs off just enough on the hero who comes to Her rescue. Her champion. Her Marvel. That would be Marvel Whiteside Parsons, who later changed his name to John, and was known as Jack to his friends. The American rocket scientist, inspired by tales of Greek Fire, created the fuel that sent men to the moon and was the basis for all the solid fuel NASA used for decades.
He understood that you couldn’t usher in the eschaton while sitting next to the powers that be. That you need to side with the people, because all movements have always come from the ground up. It’s the people that say “no more,” and cause the wheel to turn, not the scholars and schemers, who only later co-opt the movement for their own ends.
In Parson’s book, Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword, he does not declare himself catholic. He does not hide in the library. He is out in the darkened wood with the people. He names the true disciples of Babalon:
WE ARE THE WITCHCRAFT. We are the oldest organization in the world. When man was born, we were. We sang the first cradle song. We healed the first wound, we comforted the first terror. We were the Guardians against the Darkness, the Helpers on the Left Hand Side. Rock drawings in the Pyrenees remember us, and little clay images, made for an old purpose when the world was new. Our hand was on the old stone circles, the monolith, the dolmen, and the druid oak. We sang the first hunting songs, we made the first crops to grow; when man stood naked before the Powers that made him, we sang the first chant of terror and wonder. We wooed among the Pyramids, watched Egypt rise and fall, ruled for a space in Chaldea and Babylon, the Magician Kings. We sat among the secret assemblies of Israel, and danced the wild and stately dances in the sacred groves of Greece.
Sometimes we move openly, sometimes in silence and in secret. Night and day are one to us, calm and storm, seasons and the cycles of man, all these things are one, for we are at the roots. Supplicant we stand before the Powers of Life and Death, and are heard of these Powers, and avail. Our way is the secret way, the unknown direction. Our way is the way of the serpent in the underbrush, our knowledge is in the eyes of goats and of women.
Always a rebel, Jack Parsons ignores Crowley’s warnings and performs his own magnum opus, the Babalon Working. From it, in an act of supreme arrogance and disregard for his superiors in the OTO, he produces his own chapter for Crowley’s precious Book of the Law. Finally, the Red Goddess gets Her due in Liber 49 – The Book of Babalon.
From the get-go, Parsons recognized just how fucked the Age of the Tantrum Throwing Brat Prince has become. He calls the Aeon of Horus the shit-storm that it is in the introduction to the Book of Babalon. He writes:
The present age is under the influence of the force called, in magical terminology, Horus. This force relates to fire, Mars, and the sun, that is, to power, violence, and energy. It also relates to a child, being innocent (i.e. undifferentiated). Its manifestations may be noted in the destruction of old institutions and ideas, the discovery and liberation of new energies, and the trend towards power governments, war, homosexuality, infantilism, and schizophrenia.
This force is completely blind, depending upon the men and women in whom it manifests and who guide it. Obviously, its guidance now tends towards catastrophe.
The catastrophic trend is due to our lack of understanding of our own natures. The hidden lusts, fears, and hatreds resulting from the warping of the love urge, which underly the natures of all Western peoples, have taken a homicidal and suicidal direction.
This impasse is broken by the incarnation of another sort of force, called BABALON. The nature of this force relates to love, understanding, and dionysian freedom, and is the necessary counterbalance or correspondence to the manifestation of Horus.
The book also contains instructions on how to honor Her. They seem a bit less restrained than the derivative Gnostic Mass:
And gather my children unto me, for THE TIME is at hand.
And this is the way of my incarnation. Heed!
Thou shalt offer all thou art and all thou hast at my altar, withholding nothing. And thou shalt be smitten full sore and thereafter thou shalt be outcast and accursed, a lonely wanderer in abominable places.
Not the description of a bunch of solid citizens. These are the kind that throw Sabbaths on blasted heaths. As She instructs:
Gather together in the covens as of old, whose number is eleven, that is also my number.
Gather together in public, in song and dance and festival. Gather together in secret, be naked and shameless and rejoice in my name.
Work your spells by the mode of my book, practicing secretly, inducing the supreme spell.
The work of the image, and the potion and the charm, the work of the spider and the snake, and the little ones that go in the dark, this is your work.
Who loves not hates, who hates fears, let him taste fear.
This is the way of it, star, star. Burning bright, moon, witch moon.
You the secret, the outcast, the accursed and despised, even you that gathered privily of old in my rites under the moon.
You the free, the wild, the untamed, that walk now alone and forlorn.
Of the woman who is to be Her vessel, Parsons transcribes:
But let her think on this: my way is not in the solemn ways, or in the reasoned ways, but in the wild free way of the eagle, and the devious way of the serpent, and the oblique way of the factor unknown and unnumbered.
Her ways are not shackled by astrological determinism or gematria number games. Her ways are the witch ways.
And unlike Crowley, there are no Victorian mealy-mouthed metaphors.
Thy tears, thy sweat, thy blood, thy semen, thy love, thy faith shall provide. Ah, I shall drain thee like the cup that is of me, BABALON.
Let me behold thee naked and lusting after me, calling upon my name.
Let me receive all thy manhood within my Cup, climax upon climax, joy upon joy.
Apologists for Crowley often say that he worked within the constraints of Victorian sensibilities. That he disguised his sexual metaphor in order to avoid persecution. Maybe it’s true. But Parsons wrote this in 1945, when sodomy was still illegal, even in California. Truly he was a man ahead of his time.
But being only a man, he falls into the same trap as Crowley. He sees his manifestation of Babalon, his Scarlet Woman, as a possession. To his dismay she never manifests her true destiny. Parsons would die in fire, an accident that happened while he mixed explosives, a request from a film company.
As the newly born OTO went through its first growing pains, dwindling to just a few members, so did interest in Babalon dwindle. In a story most of us know, it took the licentious 60s to reignite interest in the metaphysical. Crowley’s glowering image on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s, was a ghost that whispered in the ears of those who were building the counter-culture. If the Ordo Templi Orientis is to be credited with anything, it’s the task of keeping the idea of Babalon alive until it could once again find fertile soil.