Big Wish by Nemo

  Beauty & the Beast: Conceptions of Babalon

By Shade Oroboros 817


"And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will show unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters;
With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.
So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.
And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication:
And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT: THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.
And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her I wondered with great admiration."        - Revelations, 17, 1-6

    The Book of the Law proclaims that the rites of magick are to be carried out by human avatars of Nuit and Hadit, and that they bear the titles of the Scarlet Woman Babalon (so spelled for qabalistic reasons) and of the Beast. Clearly much of this symbolism is drawn from the biblical book of Revelations, and it has always been my feeling that this particular vision was received by a prophet who perceived the fiery New Aeon but found it so alien to his belief system that his only response could be one of terror. Early Christianity was obsessed with an exclusively male image of the deity, while the Aeon of Horus is rediscovering the more primal concept of the Goddess. In looking upon this notion of Babalon we find her image suppressed and distorted but still surviving, and we may examine the roots of her worship and consider her power today.
    The Greek name Babylon is derived from the Semitic Bab-El (or AL) meaning "Gate of God", specifically that of On, which was a city of the Sun God. It appears in the Bible as the Tower of Babel, and opens up a whole complex of symbols: of the holy city at the center of the world, or in The Vision & The Voice as the city of the pyramids which links Babalon to the sphere of Binah the Great Mother; of the gate as a metaphor for the yoni, and the chalice, cauldron, grail or womb which contains the solar force of the sacred child; and of the wild Goddess who rides upon the Beast, an archetypical form found in countless mythologies. In the Middle East we have various deities of passion, magick and war often linked to lions, such as Astarte, Qatesh, Anath, Lilith, Inanna and Ishtar; and the whole interlocked complex of Egyptian goddesses whose aspects ceaselessly flow into one another: Sekhmet and Isis and Maat, Hathor and Tefnut and Bast, all may share a leonine form. Other goddesses of unfettered sensual power might include the Chinese Hsi Wang Mu, South American Tlazolteotl, Greek Aphrodite Pornea, and Afro-Caribbean Erzulie, Oshun and Pomba Gira. In India great Kali's mount is the tiger, and in northern climes the vehicle of Freya the lady of romance is again the cat. These are all primal deities of love, life, fertility, intoxication, magick, music, dance, and the raging solar fire. All represent Shakti, the fundamental energy of the universe itself, also seen in serpent form as the Hindu Kundalini or the Egyptian Uraeus symbolizing royalty. The Tarot trump of Strength or Lust, that represents her as a woman riding upon a lion, is connected to the Hebrew letter Teth which means 'serpent'.
    This goddess is often seen as the giver of sovereignty to the king, the physical manifestation of the realm or city he rules. In early times it was the rite of sacred marriage repeated at yearly intervals in the holy temple that empowered or legitimated all rulership. Later the rites of so-called sacred prostitution (which can never be understood in the shallow and twisted terms of our contemporary morality) gave every man the chance of communion with the goddess through the hierodules or priestesses who represented her. On a very deep level many once realized that it was the female force, whether seen as woman or deity, who gave life and dealt death to all. She was fate, power, wisdom, beauty, and magick, and to link with her was to know the divine.
    Unfortunately compulsory monotheism came along and screwed us all up, destroying what had worked for centuries and filling the world with gray sorrow. Wilhelm Reich was not the only person to notice that sexual repression leads to warfare, but of course he had Nazi Germany for a case study. Nasty old men vowed to celibacy have long attempted to pervert and control society, and to do this it was necessary to dominate the libido of men and utterly terminate the occasionally more rational influence of women. Temples and libraries were burned, whole cultures were destroyed, and we were left with the foul polluted mess we have today, as exemplified by the recent massive pedophilia scandals in the Catholic Church. However, it has proven impossible to utterly remove the influence of the Lady. Even in orthodox Christianity the cult of the Virgin Mary constantly resurfaced, and in the heretic sects of the Gnostics we find her even more clearly. There Sophia, or Wisdom, is the female face of God, exiled and defiled, fallen from grace, but ultimately inseparable from the primordial glory. Another of her divine names is Barbelo, clearly cognate to Babalon; and the Hebrew concept of the Shekinah is another strand of the weave.
    In Elizabethan times the magicians John Dee and Edward Kelly performed a series of workings designed to communicate with the angels who transmitted the Enochian language, employing a special altar of cedar wood to hold the crystal or shew-stone in which they scryed. About its border were these words: "This is the place of the outpouring of forgotten treasure in the form of ecstasy. Only fire is substantial here. This is the way of Babalon and of the Beast who is the first form. The eyes only need rest upon the name of any guardian and its representative will speedily be encountered". In Enochian the word Babalon means 'harlot’ and this section of Dee's record gives some sense of her ways:
   
"I am the daughter of Fortitude and ravished every hour from my youth. For behold, I am Understanding, and science dwelleth in me; and the heavens oppress me. They cover and desire me with infinite appetite; for none that are earthly have embraced me, for I am shadowed with the Circle of the Stars, and covered with the morning clouds. My feet are swifter than the winds, and my hands are sweeter than the morning dew. My garments are from the beginning, and my dwelling place is in myself. The Lion knoweth not where I walk, neither do the beasts of the field understand me. I am deflowered, yet a virgin; I sanctify and am not sanctified. Happy is he that embraceth me: for in the night season I am sweet, and in the day full of pleasure. My company is a harmony of many symbols, and my lips sweeter than health itself. I am a harlot for such as ravish me, and a virgin with such as know me not. Purge your streets, O ye sons of men, and wash your houses clean; make yourselves holy, and put on righteousness. Cast out your old strumpets, and burn their clothes and then I will bring forth children unto you and they shall be the Sons of Comfort in the Age that is to come."

    In the esoteric Gnostic text from the Nag Hammadi Library called Thunder, Perfect Mind, George W. MacRae translation, we find a similar vision of the female form of the divine:

 “For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter.
I am the members of my mother.
I am the barren one and many are her sons.
I am she whose wedding is great, and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not bear.
I am the solace of my labor pains.
I am the bride and the bridegroom,
and it is my husband who begot me.
I am the mother of my father and the sister of my husband,
 and he is my offspring.

I am the silence that is incomprehensible
and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.
I am the voice whose sound is manifold
 and the word whose appearance is multiple.
I am the utterance of my name.

For I am knowledge and ignorance.
I am shame and boldness.
I am shameless; I am ashamed.
I am strength and I am fear.
I am war and peace.
Give heed to me.
I am the one who is disgraced and the great one.

I am the one who is hated everywhere
 and who has been loved everywhere.
I am the one whom they call Life, and you have called Death.
I am the one whom they call Law,
and you have called Lawlessness.
I am the one whom you have pursued,
 and I am the one whom you have seized.
I am the one you have scattered,
 and you have gathered me together.
I am the one before whom you have been ashamed,
 and you have been shameless to me.
I am she who does not keep festival,
and I am she whose festivals are many.
I, I am godless, and I am one whose God is great.”
   
    From yet another context we draw this version:

"Axis, earthmen, is not one idea, or even one place... it is a thousand million ideas and places... it is an apocalyptic magnet... a dazzling jewel that none can possess... a brilliant candle consuming wandering butterflies... a fantastic spider's web strewn with the remains of a billion dreams...
... but perhaps most of all, Axis is the eternal erotic chimera, an extraordinary creature possessed of an unnatural, terrifying beauty, which is more than the eye of man can withstand, a terrifying beauty which violently destroys all that surrounds it while concealing deep within… a heart of... fathomless... mysterious silence...
... the erotic chimera, she who is a living embodiment of the sublime paradox, which is a complete mystery not only to the world... but to itself, also... "
- So Beautiful And So Dangerous, Angus McKie

    Other visions appear in Crowley's The Vision & the Voice, and in those ancient words of Isis: "I am all that was, is, and ever shall be; no man hath lifted my veil."
    Perhaps it is not surprising that Crowley and Parsons would be drawn to such powerful imagery, and to feel themselves somehow incomplete without union with such a bride. Jack Parsons was notorious for his Babalon Working, performed with L. Ron Hubbard and designed to manifest the goddess in a physical incarnation. In tantra it is often proclaimed that: "Shiva without Shakti is a corpse". The classical magician Simon Magus apparently believed that his consort Helen was in fact Sophia, the Gnostic personification of the female side of God, separated by the act of the original creation of the world, cast down through the spheres of the tree of life represented by the archons, lost to forgetfulness, incarnate through myriad forms, until the final time of reuniting. Many mages throughout history have sought partnership with women of power who could initiate them into the mysteries; in Tibetan Buddhism the Dakinis or 'wisdom-holders' have the power to transfigure the devotee, and in Hindu tantra the Suvasini or 'sweet-smelling woman' bestows union with the Goddess herself. This powerful female role of the enchantress or seductress is an ancient archetype, descended from primordial wise women and shamans; consider Medea, Circe or Calypso in Homer's Odyssey. 
    The forced role of slave or abused victim has sadly become far more prevalent in so-called Christian times, when the bizarre ‘sin complex’ has twisted so many psyches into truly warped forms; and the current involuntary reflex is that of the dominatrix or virago. The very concept of the Scarlet Woman Babalon as an officer or priestess of the new Aeon has mutated through Revelations and the Book of the Law, and must now be taken beyond the cultural limitations of Crowley's conceptions to a new vision of the neo-tantrik suvasini or dakini. Who, after all, is a mere 19th century man to say how the sexuality of Hell's Belles shall manifest now that centuries of oppression and repression are slowly drawing to a well-deserved demise? On some level we must accept the notion that every human is in essence both a physical and a divine incarnate presence.

“O night of stars that coruscate
Like semen spated in the womb of Night!
O serpent woman, smiling sinister!
O lovely dancer at the feast to be!”    - Jack Parsons

    Turning now from the goddess to the animal, from Beauty to the Beast, Crowley often defined his male form of magickal sexuality in terms of the Great Wild Beast called Therion, not unlike the satyr-god Pan (whose horns and hooves were appropriated by the Devil) or the primordial form of Shiva as Rudra the Howler, or the tantrik Mahakala, Lord of Time. The joining of women with gods in animal form extends far back in myth, and may even raise the issue of shapeshifting or lycanthropy. ‘Making the beast with two backs’ is quite an old metaphor for intercourse, and bestial or atavistic imagery prevails at the dark sabbat of the witches, where they would ‘Dance in circles, back to back!’ And who is this fabled Beast? He is the first god, the horned god, the son and lover, lord of the hunt; the Celtic Cernunnos and the Lord of Beasts from the ancient Mohenjo-Daro civilization, the shamanic master of all animals, serpent-crowned Dionysos, antlered Freyr, and the Goat-God, great Pan whose very name means 'All'. 

“O goat-hoofed One, O horned One, O pillar of lightning…”
- Liber Liberi vel Lapidis Lazuli I, 23

    Animal and atavistic imagery abounds in sexual magick. For example, those beasties sacred to the lunar Hekate might include the phallic Snake (whose tongue is a symbol of oral sexuality); the Dog or Wolf (doing' it doggy style?); the Ape (monkeys are associated with masturbation); the Owl (sacred to Lilith) and the Frog (a potent image of the Leaper between worlds, as amphibians exist between realms; their splayed legs may resemble those of a human jerking rhythmically during intercourse and they appear as spirits at the very earliest period of Egyptian mythology). These are all numbered among the familiars of witches, and Crowley gave many of his Scarlet Women animal titles including most of those here. I must confess that it took me many years of sleepless nights to have any concept of how on earth the formula of the Frog could be seen in sexual terms. They are hardly as sensual as the Cat, who among the ancient Egyptian goddesses of pleasure, power, joy, destruction, and frenzied sexual heat such as Bast and Sekhmet was held in the highest regard.
    How did Crowley develop so strangely? Well, let's face facts: he was a wealthy upper-class Englishman at the turn of the last century, at a time when the sun had not yet set upon the British Empire, and so he was in a position of male privilege which we can barely imagine today. The notion of women was rapidly changing as well, as the romantic notions of the Decadents and the Art Nouveau movement nearly deified the erotic dancers of the idealized harems or eastern seraglios, inspired by Wilde's Salome or Flaubert's Salambo. Mata Hari, Isadora Duncan, and countless stars of the silver screen forever changed the image of the female. Women began to be seen as both powerful and dangerous: the femme fatale, destroyer and lover. The age-old striptease or dance of seven veils, mythologized in the Babylonian tale of Ishtar's descent to the underworld, now resurfaces as the dance of the path of Teth in Maatian magicks. The Woman as All Otherness is ever the focus of fascination and idol of perversity, possessed of the seductive power to cloud men’s minds.
     Vague rumor has it that men are kind of weird, and in point of fact they do have a higher statistical rate of bizarre and indeed criminal behavior than women. There is no denying that Crowley was a very odd bird indeed, and his challenges with women are legendary; we can say that he was an unusual product of his time, and that he evolved as best he could, and that none of us was actually there at the time. In any event, a pivotal element of his erotic magick remains the concept of the Scarlet Woman called Babalon, the avatar of the Goddess in human form. In Her honor we may perhaps attempt to reclaim the names of Whore or Harlot as terms of honor, power, and absolute freedom; or we may need to create a better terminology, and ‘sex industry workers’ sounds far too Marxist for comfort. Perhaps we may consider courtesan, maenad, hierodule, or simply the Beloved? In any case, we must discard the still all too frequent and very chauvinist notion that she is simply the receptive vessel of male power, and recognize her total independence of all preconceptions. Shakti is the force that manifests all things, and not every goddess is the Mother Goddess.

“15. Now ye shall know that the chosen priest & apostle of infinite space is the prince priest the Beast; and in his woman called the Scarlet Woman is all power given. They shall gather my children into their fold: they shall bring the glory of the stars into the hearts of men.
16. For he is ever a sun, and she a moon. But to him is the winged secret flame, and to her the stooping starlight.
17. But ye are not so chosen.
18. Burn upon their brows, o splendrous serpent!
19. O azure-lidded woman, bend upon them!
20. The key of the rituals is in the secret word which I have given unto him.”
-    from Chapter I of The Book of the Law

The Devil Atu (From the N'Aton Tarot) by Nema