Jack Parsons

[Magda Hassan]

The father of astral travel

John Whiteside Parsons

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John Whiteside Parsons (born Marvel Whiteside Parsons) (October 2, 1914 in Los Angeles, California June 17, 1952 in Pasadena, California), better known as Jack Parsons, was an American rocket propulsion researcher at the California Institute of Technology and a pioneer in solid rocket fuel research and development. He was one of the principal founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Aerojet Corp.
Parsons was also an occultist and one of the first Americans to take a keen interest in the writings of English author and Thelema's founder Aleister Crowley. In this capacity, he joined and eventually led an American lodge of Crowley's magical order, Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.).[SUP][1][/SUP]

Early life

Parsons was the only child of a rich and dysfunctional family.[SUP][citation needed][/SUP] When he was a teenager his father walked out on his mother and him. Parsons landed a job with the Hercules Powder Company while still a senior in high school. The following year, he entered Pasadena Junior College and spent two years at the University of Southern California, although he did not graduate.

Career

In 1936, Parsons joined the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT) of the California Institute of Technology, where he worked for Frank Malina and Theodore von Kármán in Pasadena.
While his formal education was limited, Parsons demonstrated tremendous scientific aptitude and genius, particularly in chemistry. His rocket research was some of the earliest in the United States, and his pioneering work in the development of solid fuel and the invention of JATO units for aircraft was of great importance to the start of humanity's space age. The noted engineer Theodore von Kármán, Parsons' friend and benefactor, declared that the work of Parsons and his peers helped usher in the age of space travel.[SUP][2][/SUP] Parsons co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, commonly referred to as JPL. According to von Kármán, Parsons' work in solid fuel research "... made possible such outstanding rockets as the Polaris and the Minuteman."[SUP][3][/SUP]
It was in 1942, the same year Parsons was appointed as head of the Agapé Lodge by Aleister Crowley (who himself had studied chemistry), that Parsons made the crucial breakthrough in the development of rocket solid fuel. Following intuition, Parsons switched from black powder to asphalt and potassium perchlorate.[SUP][4][/SUP] Compared with Peenemünde, the contemporary German army research facility, America was finally in the race for rocket propulsion with solid fuel for the space age.

Parsons and the occult

Parsons saw no contradiction between his scientific and magical pursuits. Before each rocket test launch, Parsons would chant Crowley's hymn to the Greek god Pan.[SUP][5][/SUP] In 1942 Parsons was chosen by Aleister Crowley to lead Agapé Lodge of OTO in California following Crowley's expulsion of Wilfred Smith from the position.[SUP][6][/SUP]
Parsons and Helen Northrup were married in April 1935.[SUP][7][/SUP]
Sara Northrup (aka "Sarah Elizabeth" or "Betty" Northrup), began living with Parsons and Parsons' wife, Sara's half-sister Helen Northrup; later, Parsons and Sara started an affair, which caused strife with Helen and eventually led to Helen leaving with Wilfred Smith.
Parsons' 11-room home, nicknamed "The Parsonage", became a boarding house for a variety of artists and eccentrics, including journalist Nieson Himmel, physicist Robert Cornog, and author and future Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard became involved with Parsons' mistress Sara Northrup and they later married.

Babalon Working and Marjorie Cameron

Parsons, a science fiction fan, had read in the fantasy pulp magazine Unknown the 1940 original version of Jack Williamson "Darker Than You Think". Parsons identified the redheaded female love interest of the protagonist with Babalon or the "Scarlet Woman", whom Crowley had prophesied would usher in and help fulfill the Aeon of Horus and end the Aeon of Osiris represented by Christianity, other patriarchal religions, and male-dominated social institutions. In 1946, Parsons and Hubbard (whose works Fear and Typewriter in the Sky, among others, had appeared in Unknown) participated in a work of ceremonial magic known as the Babalon Working. In simple terms, the Babalon Working was a ritual to summon this Scarlet Woman. Paul Rydeen writes:

The purpose of Parson's [sic] operation has been underemphasized. He sought to produce a magickal child who would be a product of her environment rather than of her heredity. Crowley himself describes the Moonchild in just these terms. The Babalon Working itself was preparation for what was to come: a Thelemic messiah.[SUP][8][/SUP]

Crowley, who lived in England at this time and had little say over the matter, disagreed strenuously. Though he had never met him, Crowley had no love for Hubbard and considered him a con artist.
Almost immediately after the first stage of the Babalon Working, Parsons met Marjorie Cameron right in his own home, and regarded her as the Scarlet Woman and the fulfillment of the ritual. Parsons, Hubbard, and Cameron then proceeded to the Working's next stage, in which Cameron acted as Parsons' magical sexual partner with whom he planned to sire a Moonchild. The creation of this Moonchild had been previously covered in fictional form in Crowley's novel Moonchild. Parsons ended the Babalon Working by declaring it successful. A physical child was not conceived, but this did not affect the results and intentions of the ritual. Parsons and Cameron soon married.

Allied Enterprises

In January 1946, Parsons, Sarah Northrup, and Hubbard had began a boat dealing company named Allied Enterprises. Parsons put in the sum of approximately $21,000 of which Hubbard contributed $1,200. After the Babalon Working, and just as Crowley had predicted, Hubbard eventually abandoned Parsons and their business plans, and left for a port in Florida with the boat and with Sarah. Parsons retreated to his hotel room and attempted to summon a typhoon in retribution (viz., with an evocation of Bartzabel[SUP][9][/SUP]an intelligence presiding over the astrological forces associated with the planet Mars). A squall developed at sea and ripped the sails from the boat, forcing the ship back to port where Hubbard and Sarah were detained by the U.S. Coast Guard.[SUP][10][/SUP] A Florida court later dissolved the poorly-contracted business, ordered repayment of debts to Parsons, and awarded ownership of the boat to Hubbard. Parsons resigned his leadership of the Agapé Lodge and sold The Parsonage in 1946.

Death

On 17 June 1952 Parsons was killed by an explosion of fulminate of mercury at his home laboratory. Though gravely injured, he survived the immediate explosion, but he died of his wounds a few hours later. Distraught, Parsons' mother killed herself just hours after he died.[SUP][2][/SUP]
Unsubstantiated rumors of suicide, murder, or a magical ritual gone wrong have attempted to explain Parsons' death. However, Parsons did store many volatile chemicals and compounds in his laboratory and had been working to finish a contract for a special effects firm.[SUP][2][/SUP]

Personal life

Religious beliefs

"No philosophy, theory, religion, or system of thought can be absolute and infallible. They are relative only. One man's opinion is just as good as another's."


Jack Parsons[SUP][11][/SUP]

Parsons adhered to the occult philosphy of Thelema, which had been founded in 1904 by the English occultist Aleister Crowley following a spiritual revelation that he had in the city of Cairo, Egypt, whenaccording to Crowley's own accountsa spirit being known as Aiwass dictated to him a prophetic text known as The Book of the Law.[SUP][12][/SUP]
On July 31, 1945, he gave a speech to the Agape Lodge in which he attempted to explain how he felt that The Book of the Law could be made relevant to "modern life." In this, which was subsequently published under the title of "Doing your Will", he examined the Thelemite concept of True Will, writing that:
The mainspring of an individual is his creative Will. This Will is the sum of his tendencies, his destiny, his inner truth. It is one with the force that makes the birds sing and flowers bloom; as inevitable as gravity, as implicit as a bowel movement, it informs alike atoms and men and suns.To the man who knows this Will, there is no why or why not, no can or cannot; he IS!There is no known force that can turn an apple into an alley cat; there is no known force that can turn a man from his Will. This is the triumph of genius; that, surviving the centuries, enlightens the world.This force burns in every man.[SUP][13][/SUP]He identified four obstacles that prevented humans from achieving and performing their True Will, all of which he connected with fear: the fear of incompetence, the fear of the opinion of others, the fear of hurting others, and the fear of insecurity, but he insisted that these must be overcome. He wrote that "The Will must be freed of its fetters. The ruthless examination and destruction of taboos, complexes, frustrations, dislikes, fears and disgusts hostile to the Will is essential to progress."[SUP][14][/SUP]

Politics

"[Parsons] had witnessed the blinding overnight successes achieved by the government-by-terror totalitarianism of Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. He had the foresight to see that [the United States of] America, once armed with the new powers of total destruction and surveillance that were sure to follow the swelling flood of new technologies, had the potential to become even more repressive unless its founding principles of individual liberty were religiously preserved and its leaders held accountable to them.
Two of the keys to redressing the balance were the freedom of women and an end to the state control of individual sexual expression. He knew that these potent forces, embodied as they are in a majority of the world's population, had the power, once unleashed, to change the world."


Hymenaeus Beta, current Frater Superior of Ordo Templi Orientis.[SUP][15][/SUP]

Politically, Parsons was a staunch and vocal social libertarian, believing strongly in the personal freedoms of the individual. This was in keeping with his religious adherence to Thelema, which holds to the ethical code of "Do what thou wilt." In his article, Freedom is a Lonely Star, he championed the libertarian social views of some of the founding fathers of the United States, which were enshrined in the American constitution, claiming that by his own time these had been:
sold out by cheap and venal politicians, by benevolent authoritarians, by "loyal" party men, by shrewd and greedy capitalists, by wise guys and smart guys that know all the answers. It has been sold out by the great middle class that prefers its false security and false freedom, by the labor leaders that put power first, and the little man who prefersat last with at least a decent reasona full belly, or the promise of a full belly, to freedom turned dangerous and hungry.It has been sold out by America, and for that reason the heart of America is sick and the soul of America is dead.[SUP][16][/SUP]He went on to criticise many aspects of contemporary American society, including the police, whom he felt "are little more than the agents of a corrupt political machine... [for whom] the collection of revenue and the terrorization of opposition is of far greater importance than the suppression of crime." Believing that "The police mind is usually of a sadistic and homicidal trend", he noted that they carried out the "ruthless punishment of symbolic scapegoats in the form of prostitutes, derelicts, Negroes, radicals, drunks, and other helpless and insignificant members of the nation indivisible" under the pretence of a country that had "liberty and justice for all".[SUP][17][/SUP]
Parsons was interested in socialism and communism,[SUP][18][/SUP] but he was sceptical of the ideas of Marxism and how they had been put into action by self-described 'communist' governments of the time, sarcastically writing that "The dictatorship of the proletariat is merely temporarythe state will eventually wither away like a snark hunter, leaving us all free as birds. Meanwhile it may be necessary to kill, torture and imprison a few million people, but whose fault is it if they get in the way of progress?"[SUP][19][/SUP] He was also wary of integration of Marxian ideals into Western governments, prefacing his essay Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword with the warning: "The golden voice of social security, of socialized 'this' and socialized 'that', with its attendant confiscatory taxation and intrusion on individual liberty, is everywhere raised and everywhere heeded."[SUP][20][/SUP] He was critical of the socialist policies instituted in the Soviet Union by the Communist Party under the leadership of Joseph Stalin at the time, believing that like the fascist leaders Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, they led to the "establishment of concentration camps, the murder and torture of free citizens, and the annihilation of all freedom."[SUP][17][/SUP] He was also a zionist and was supportive of the early creation of the State of Israel, making plans to emigrate there when his military security clearance was revoked due to his leftist beliefs[SUP][18][/SUP] and/or for passing technology to Israel,[SUP][21][/SUP] but his attempt to emigrate was prevented by his death.
In order to help bring about a freer society, Parsons believed in bringing about a liberalisation of sexual morality, which at the time was largely constrained by the dominant socially conservative attitudes within the United States. He believed that "The advent of psychonautical sciences and the publication of the Kinsey Report" into sexual diversity had an impact on western society that was "comparable to that of nuclear physics and the advent of the atomic bomb" and that in the future the restrictions on sexual morality within society should be abolished in order to bring about greater freedom and individuality.[SUP][22][/SUP]
Although he commented primarily upon the situation of civil liberties and individual freedoms in his native United States, he believed that such things were of worldwide importance, and that:
We are one nation but we are also one world. The soul of the slums looks out of the eyes of Wall Street, and the fate of a Chinese coolie determines the destiny of America. We cannot suppress our brother's liberty without suppressing our own and we cannot murder our brothers without murdering ourselves. We will stand together as men for human freedom and human dignity or we will fall together, as animals, back into the jungle.[SUP][16][/SUP]

Parsons in popular culture

Before his death, Jack Parsons appeared in science fiction writer Anthony Boucher's murder mystery Rocket to the Morgue (1942) under the guise of Hugo Chantrelle. In the same book, a fictional version of L. Ron Hubbard appears as a character named D. Vance Wimpole.
Parsons' relationship with Hubbard also appears in Feral House's Apocalypse Culture, Paradox's Big Book of Conspiracies, Alan Moore's Cobweb story in Top Shelf Asks the Big Questions, and in the Jon Atack nonfiction book A Piece of Blue Sky. He was one of the characters in Craig Baldwin's collage film Mock Up on Mu. A character named Zachary Carsons, based on Parsons, appears in the 2001 film The Profit. Parsons also was the main villain of the Atomic Robo short story "Rocket Science is a Two-Edged Sword," wherein Robo prevents Parsons from attaining godhood through a system of magick infused with science.
He is referenced in Philip K. Dick's novel Dr. Futurity, in which the protagonist is named Jim Parsons. He briefly appears in a 2002 issue of Alan Moore's comic book series Promethea entitled "The Wine Of Her Fornications" where he is one of the adepts in the "city of pyramids" in Moore's version of the Binah sphere of the Tree of Life and is watched over by John Dee. A play about Parsons, Babalon, by Paul Green, was performed in London in December 2005 by Travesty Theatre. A stage play about Parsons by George Morgan, Pasadena Babalon, premiered at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena in 2010.[SUP][23][/SUP] It was directed by film and TV actor Brian Brophy. Adam Howden portrays him on a 2012 episode of the Science Channel series, Dark Matters: Twisted But True. He also appears as a major character in his own name in Jake Arnott's 2012 novel The House of Rumour.

Honors

The crater Parsons on the far side of the Moon is named after him.[SUP][24][/SUP]

Bibliography

• Freedom Is a Two-Edged Sword by John Whiteside Parsons, Edited by Marjorie Cameron and Hymenaeus Beta, ISBN 0-9726583-2-7 (on-line 1976 Edition Edited by C.R. Runyon)
  
• The Collected Writings of Jack Parsons: The Book of Babalon, The Book of Antichrist, and other writings" including:
  
• Three Essays on Freedom by John Whiteside Parsons (2008). With an Introduction by Hymenaeus Beta. Teitan Press. ISBN 978-0-933429-11-6
  • The Book of Babalon
    
  • The Book of Antichrist
    
  • The Birth of Babalon (poem)
    
  • We are the Witchcraft
    
  • The Woman Girl with a Sword
    
  • Letters to Cameron
    
  • The Manifesto of the AntiChrist [1]
    

Books on Jack Parsons:

• Carter, Jack; Sex and Rockets, Feral House, 1999 ISBN 978-0-922915-56-9
  
• Pendle, George; Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons, Harcourt, 2005[SUP][5][/SUP]
  
• Testa, Anthony; The Key of the Abyss, Lulu.com, 2006, ISBN 1-4303-0160-0
  

Parsons' history with L. Ron Hubbard is further detailed in:

• Miller, Russell; Bare-faced Messiah, Michael Joseph books, 1987, ISBN 0-7181-2764-1
  

Parson appears in the graphic novel:

• Carbonneau, Richard The Marvel: A Biography of Jack Parsons, Cellar Door Publishing, 2011, ISBN 978-0-9766831-4-8
  

Much of its content can be found at Carbonneau's website: The Marvel: A Biography of Jack Parsons

References

Notes
Footnotes

• ^ Carter, John (2005). Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons. Venice, Calif: Feral House. ISBN 0-922915-97-0.
  
• ^ [SUP]a[/SUP] [SUP]b[/SUP] [SUP]c[/SUP] Pendle, George (2005). Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons. Harcourt. ISBN 0-297-84853-4. OCLC 59352636.
  
• ^ Sutin, Lawrence (2000). Do What Thou Wilt: a Life of Aleister Crowley. Macmillan. p. 396. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/ [IMG]chrome://skype_ff_extension/skin/numbers_button_skype_logo.png[/IMG]0-312-25243-4 |0-312-25243-4[[Category:Articles with invalid ISBNs]]]] Check |isbn= value (help). "Parsons was a brilliant scientist without a college degree."
  
• ^ Levenda, Peter (2002). Unholy alliance: a history of Nazi involvement with the occult. Continuum International Publishing Group. pp. 244245. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/ [IMG]chrome://skype_ff_extension/skin/numbers_button_skype_logo.png[/IMG]0-8264-1409-0 |0-8264-1409-0[[Category:Articles with invalid ISBNs]]]] Check |isbn= value (help). "Further, it was probably no secret at all to American and British officials..."
  
• ^ [SUP]a[/SUP] [SUP]b[/SUP] G. Landis, Book review, The Three Rocketeers, American Scientist, JulyAugust 2005
  
• ^ Starr, Martin P. (2003-11). The Unknown God: W. T. Smith and the Thelemites. Teitan Press. ISBN 0-933429-07-X.
  
• ^ Pendle, pp. 85-87
  
• ^ Metzger, Richard (2003-04-08). "John Whiteside Parsons: Anti-Christ Superstar". Retrieved 2009-08-12.
  
• ^ Alexander Mitchell (October 5, 1969). SCIENTOLOGY: Revealed for the first time... The Sunday Times.
  
• ^ Carter, John (2004). Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons. Feral House. 157. ISBN 0-922915-97-0.
  
• ^ Parsons 2008. p. 21.
  
• ^ Beta 2008. p. x-xi.
  
• ^ Parsons 2008. p. 67.
  
• ^ Parsons 2008. p. 69-71.
  
• ^ Beta 2008. p. xi.
  
• ^ [SUP]a[/SUP] [SUP]b[/SUP] Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword. Author's preface.
  
• ^ [SUP]a[/SUP] [SUP]b[/SUP] Parsons 2008. p. 09.
  
• ^ [SUP]a[/SUP] [SUP]b[/SUP] Beta 2008. p. ix.
  
• ^ Parsons 2008. p. 11.
  
• ^ Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword by Jack Parsons; full text
  
• ^ "The Magical Father of American Rocketry" by Brian Doherty, May 2005, Reason
  
• ^ Parsons 2008. p. 13.
  
• ^ Evelyn Barge, " Pasadena Babalon: the World of Jack Parsons, on stage at Caltech," Pasadena Star News February 23, 2010. See Pasadena Babalon page at George Morgan web site (accessed August 21, 2010)
  
• ^ Carter, John (2000). Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons. Feral House. vii. ISBN 0-922915-56-3.
  

Bibliography

• Beta, Hymenaeus (2008). "Foreword" to Three Essays on Freedom (J.W. Parsons). York Beach, Maine: Teitan Press.
  
• Parsons, John Whiteside (2008). Three Essays on Freedom. York Beach, Maine: Teitan Press.
  

External links

• JPL Early History
  
• Aerojet corporation
  
• Cameron-Parsons Foundation website
  
• Thelemapedia entry on Jack Parsons
  
• Kaos Magazine 14, dedicated to Jack Parsons and Babalon Working.
  

[Magda Hassan]

[Magda Hassan]

The BABALON Working I
Sub-Figura vel Liber Babalon

According to tradition, the Sirians who originally settled in Sumeria had cat or lion like bodies. How many hybrids and just plain humans were absorbed into the ancient culture is not exactly known. What is known is that at some time they settled into the area of Cairo and called it Babalon or Babylon which meantBaby Lyon. This city was designated as one of the Sacred Places of the Lion and it was decided that a large repository of knowledge should be constructed nearby so as to preserve their collective wisdom. This construction project turned out to be what we know today as the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx. The Great Pyramid and its satellite pyramids were designed to serve as ancient time clocks that were in synchronization with the entire cyclic nature of the universe. The Sphinx represented the goddess in the form of Bast who was also known as Babalon and eventually Isis. To reiterate what was said earlier, the names Isis and Osiris were derived from Sirius.

In the Sphinx and Great Pyramid, the Sirians illustrated the two key principles of their religion. The two aspects were connected by sacred knowledge which could be found in the Hall of Records.

Aleister Crowley was schooled in all of this information. When he slept in the Great Pyramid prior to receiving The Book of the Law, he was seeking initiation with no strings attached. Projecting himself beyond his own understanding, he had a profound experience. He connected with forms of consciousness that were not only far beyond the norm, they knew the precise mathematics of the universe and this never ceased to amaze him. The resultant effect was that he spent the rest of his life trying to explain what had happened.

Earlier, we spoke of Tetragrammaton, the magical or alchemical formula that accompanied the "first tetrahedron" of existence. The first element in alchemy or the tarot is fire and is assigned to the first point of the tetrahedron of Tetragrammaton. As fire itself forms a wave, the actual pattern of that wave is reproduced to illustrate the vortex shape that resides in the tetrahedron of Stan Tenon's work. This is identical to the ram' s horn and is also the basis of the Hebrew fire letters whereby all the letters of the alphabet could be perceived by rotating the shape within the tetrahedron. With this much symbolism encoded in one particular shape, it is easy to grasp that an energy stream of consciousness is emitted from within the geometric matrix that contains a tetrahedron or a pyramid. It is actually a conical spiral of energy which conforms to a precise mathematical formula known as the Fibonacci spiral. That this cone of energy can influx a mind with extra intelligence was illustrated in history by placing a dunce cap on a slow student. The cone on the head was supposed to make him smarter but evolved into a punishment style degradation of the student concerned. Although Crowley was not known to wear a dunce cap, he did use a magician's hat for some occasions which is really the same thing.

The fire or primal energy of Tetragrammaton that exists in the Great Pyramid was linked to the fire and passion of the Sphinx through the passageway known as the Hall of Records. The Sphinx represents the lustful and unrestricted loins of Bast but also the intelligent female Virgo (known to the Romans as Diana, Goddess of the Moon) who transmutes the lower energies into the higher form. In other words, she could tap into the Hall of Records. When Crowley performed sexual magick, he was often trying to tap into the higher consciousness portrayed in the Hall of Records. He was using the lower energies to tap the higher.

The Great Pyramid itself is a very curious structure for many different reasons. One of its more intriguing features is that it is not a symmetrical polygon. In other words, if you consider the Great Pyramid to be the upper half of an octahedron, you would expect two angles at the base of each triangular surface to measure 60' each. This is not the case. The angles at the base of each triangle are 51.51'. This means that the pyramid has been squashed. In other words, you would get the same result if you took a perfectly symmetrical octahedron and pushed the top and bottom towards the center. The angles would shift under the force exerted. The reason for this is that the Earth itself is not a perfect sphere. It is a spheroid, i. e. it looks like a tangerine. What this is telling us is that the matrix lines which make up the blueprint for the Earth are not perfectly symmetrical either. They may have been in their original condition, but whenever the Earth was squashed into a spheroid or otherwise assumed that particular shape, the corresponding grid lines assumed the shape of the Earth and were distorted accordingly. The 51.51' angles of the Great Pyramid correspond exactly to the geometric distortion of the Earth from a sphere to its current shape. What this means is that whoever built the Great Pyramid knew the exact shape of the Earth's grid.

There is another interesting aspect when you consider the angles of the Great Pyramid. When it was in its heyday, the pyramid was encased in limestone which is really just calcium carbonate. If you put this chemical under a microscope and apply a protractor to what you see, you will discover that calcium carbonate also consists of two 51.51' angles at the base of each triangular molecule. In other words, the molecules in the limestone facing of the pyramid were mirroring the very shape of the Great Pyramid which mimics the Earth's grid itself. Taking this a step further, calcium carbonate is what human bones are made of. This is why the dead bones of the Montauks were so important to tapping into the grid. The geometry of the bones was in complete resonance to the pyramidal structure of the grid. Of course, all human bones have this property. They resonate energy which can include consciousness as well. And if you don' t believe that bones can influence consciousness, try scaring the living daylights out of somebody through the use of a skeleton. Actually, you shouldn't. It works only too well.

In his different works, Crowley hints that he knew these various aspects of the Great Pyramid and its energies. Using this, along with his other knowledge which included an extensive study of the Sumerians, he created specific rituals that were designed not only to reach other planes of consciousness but to communicate with unseen worlds by every conceivable means. This was very much intended to include aliens.

In 1918, Crowley began a sexual magick operation with a lady in New York by the name of Roddie Minor. It was known as the Amalantrah Working and was done just a few months before he spent the summer at Montauk Point. One of the main features in this working was the symbolism of the egg. They were told, "it' s all in the egg". This corresponds exactly to the sacred geometry precepts given earlier in this book. The egg is the first sphere of existence and all the potential that unfolds thereafter. The entity contacted was LAM and an artistic rendering of him by Crowley looks hauntingly familiar to the gray aliens we have all heard so much about. LAM's bulbous head has the shape of an egg.

Documents of the OTO indicate that LAM is the Tibetan word for Way or Path and that a LAMA is "He who Goeth". The Tibetan connection appearing in Crowley's work just before he traveled to Montauk is interesting and should be noted. Earlier, we defined the Tibetan word "mantak" as clarity or understanding. In the Amalantrah Working, Crowley was told "Thou art to go this Way". It is easy to associate LAM with Montauk although the connection warrants further research. But it is certain that Montauk does connect to Tibet, not only through the word "mantak" but by virtue of the German connection mentioned earlier in this book.

Of additional interest concerning LAM is that it is a Celtic word for door jam and implies a stop on the path as opposed to a pathway. There is also an ancient land in present day Iraq that was known as Elam. It is located on the northeast banks of the Tigris River at the beginning of the Persian Gulf. The language spoken in Elam was a curiosity as it had no known relationship with any other language.

There is also current interest in LAM today. The OTO has founded a Cult of Lam for their members who are drawn to this entity and want to use the egg as an astral space-capsule for traveling to LAM's domain and for tantric time traveling.

The main point concerning LAM is that Crowley was contacting an extraterrestrial entity who had links to almost every aspect we' ve studied. The idea that Crowley continued to function in some aspect of LAM after his death in 1947 is a possibility especially when you consider that is the year when the rash of UFO sightings began.

The year 1947 has an amazing correspondence in itself and that has to do with a major grid point that has been found to exist on different planets. It was discovered that Cydonia, the region of Mars that houses the face and the pyramids, rests at 19.47' from the equator. The same can be said for the whirling red spot on Jupiter and a similar area found on Neptune. On our planet Earth, pyramids are exact at 19.47' north of the equator on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. I have also been informed by someone who just recently visited the island of Hawaii that pyramids have been found there but are covered with jungle vegetation. They are at 19.47' north of the equator as well.

None of this proves that Aleister Crowley or his death in 1947 is responsible for the UFO sightings since that time period, but many people have noticed and commented upon it along with the UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico that occurred in the same year. Actually, Crowley's death occurred on December 1[SUP]st[/SUP]which was well after the Roswell incident. Of course, we could argue that he was weak and dying and that was why the military in New Mexico were able to shoot down "his" flying saucers with their SAGE Radar. That is an unlikely scenario, but whatever the case is with Crowley, it is undeniable that he deeply influenced another magician who has been inextricably linked to aliens, the CIA and Montauk. That man is Jack Parsons and his grand experiment was in 1946.

Jack Parsons was described in Montauk Revisited as having conducted a sexual magick experiment that has been hailed by some as the magical experiment of the century. This activity was done in conjunction with two magicians who were part of the Wilson Clan: Marjorie Cameron and L. Ron Hubbard. The experiment was called the Babalon Working and was designed to invoke the Mother Goddess in her crowning glory: she who is called Babalon.

I have done a considerable amount of research into Jack Parsons since Montauk Revisited was published. He deserves an entire book and only a very brief summary of what I've found can be included here.

Jack was a cofounder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and his innovations in rocketry made our space program a reality. He died officially on June 17, 1952 as the result of a chemical explosion in his laboratory, but a search through all the newspapers and a talk with his wife and a friend revealed mysterious circumstances. His wife, Marjorie Cameron, arrived after the explosion but before the ambulance had left. The attendants would not let her ride in the ambulance nor was she allowed to see him in the hospital. What is most outrageous is that the police violated standard procedure when they omitted asking her to identify the body. She was Jack's next of kin as his mother was declared dead from suicide after hearing the report that Jack had died. Neither Cameron nor George Frey, who took care of Jack's cremation, saw the actual dead body. Further, the newspaper accounts are filled with suspicious characters and accounts. The death of Virginia Parsons, Jack's mother, had equally bizarre circumstances surrounding it.

I asked the Pasadena police department if I could look at the file for the case. They said it was old and that I should write to the microfiche department. If it wasn't sealed, I should be able to review it. I wrote them a letter requesting permission to review the relevant files and after a long delay, I was told that the file was purged from their system. I do know that the FBI watched his every move. Maybe somebody will provide that file someday.

While the circumstances surrounding Jack's death are a mystery, his magical career is not so murky. He was perhaps more passionate and dedicated to theMother Goddess than any popular magician of the century. Crowley and Jack did not see eye to eve about the Babalon Working. Crowley was at the end of his life and Jack was playing the part of the wayward and rebellious son. According to reports, Crowley wrote him off as a failure, but he did leave a door open. He said that he hadn't received an expected report from Parsons and that a final conclusion would have to remain open.

When Jack conducted the Babalon Working in 1946, he invoked the goddess Babalon and sought to bring an end to the tyranny which had dominated mankind during the dark yuga. That he at least had an idea of what he was doing can be seen by virtue of the yantra he used. A yantra is a two dimensional glyph that is designed to evoke a fourth dimensional experience. It is a common device in magick, yoga and other meditative arts. The yantra that was used for the Babalon Working was the seven pointed star and has been reproduced on the following page.

Note that the seven letters of Babalon fit into the triangles. In this glyph, all the angles are designed to be 51.51'. These are the same angles of the Great Pyramid of Giza which found their numerical value as a result of the pyramid being structured so as to be in harmony with the Earth's grid. If you multiply 51.51 by seven, you get 360.57, the approximate length of an ancient calendar year. It was by this means that the Babalon workers (Jack, Ron and Cameron) were plugging into the consciousness of the time line. What happened to the participants after they entered their altered states of consciousness is still anyone's guess. But, they did project themselves out of this reality and the consequent result and synchronicity of the act has led in no small part to the writing of this book.

Cameron has said that the operation changed Jack and Ron Hubbard forever. They were never quite the same. After recovering from a paralysis on his right side (as a result of the working), Hubbard eventually accessed incredible genius and a considerable amount of energy. Most of this was channeled into the Dianeticsand Scientology movement. He had people doing regressions on alien implants forty years before it became vogue.

Parsons took a different route. Always considered a security risk by the military industrial complex, he continued his pursuit of magick. He had completed theBabalon Working ritual itself, but the consequent chain reactions and results still had to reach their appointed conclusions.

Concerning the Babalon Working, Jack wrote a statement to the effect that he would be consumed by the fire. Whether he meant this in an allegorical or real sense, we don't know. It was said in honor of Babalon and he was willing to serve as the supreme sacrifice. Just a few months before his reported death, he foresaw that some kind of end was near. He knew that this end could mean physical death and he didn't rule it out.

There is yet a greater mystery that has been overlooked by many. Although Jack was on the outs with the OTO after the Babalon Working, he had obtained the Ninth Degree in the order. In order to progress beyond that grade, one has to give up their identity. There is no question that this was accomplished. Whether he assumed a secret identity within the confines of the secret government or simply died is not known. That he might have died physically is rather insignificant in the higher scheme of things. But, he did change his identity. Jack Parsons has been legally dead for forty years.

Another fact about Jack that is often overlooked or not mentioned is that he was not only a member of the OTO but was a member of the A:.A:. No mention is ever made of him having ever fallen out of grace with that particular order which is, of course, the Illuminati. What is of further interest in this regard is thatCameron once told me that she gave Jack's birth time to some of the top astrologers in Southern California. They told her his chart indicated he was or could be the real head of the CIA.

As Crowley and Parsons were both members of the Illuminati, we have to take a look at what the organization is and what it actually represents. From what has been said already, we know that it is related to Sirius. There are also countless books and conspiracy theories on the subjects According to the dictionary, the Illuminati refers to those of a secret society who profess to have special intellectual or spiritual enlightenment.

Let us next consider what happens when someone achieves a brilliant illumination and transcends all experience known. He goes into another dimension and basically understands the entire picture of creation. This is sometimes referred to as a kundalini experience or tapping into the universal consciousness. There are, of course, many types and variations of illuminations. I am referring to a particularly grand one. When one achieves such a state, he is still left with the predicament of relating to the Earth plane which has its share of imperfection and turmoil. If one person achieves such a state, it does not automatically transfer to the entire human race.

All of this catapults us right into the war of consciousness. There are those of us who want to be more aware and expand the consciousness across the entire parameters of existence. There are also those who want to limit such activity. Splendorous and gigantic scenarios can be recognized or imagined that pit various secret groups against one another.

Most important to our investigation, Aleister Crowley and Jack Parsons were plugged into a tradition that identified with the Illuminati and sought to expand consciousness. Whether their activities were good or bad is not the point. Both of their writings reflect the fact that they were warriors for consciousness. Those who decried them seemed to be on the other side of the coin.

Aleister Crowley's goal was to set occult forces in motion that would result in the illumination of all by the end of this century. Jack Parsons followed in the same tradition but the circumstances of his death at a young age leave a different enigma. We are forced to consider whether he lived and has orchestrated forces in a super secret capacity or whether he died and did the same thing from the spirit world. The bottom line is that his magick has reverberated and created effects beyond his own ordinary mortal means. Both men encountered dark forces in their work and neither were afraid to deal with them. They have also chosen dark vehicles by which to communicate. But, ultimately, what did they communicate? That all creation manifests from the light, also defined as the electromagnetic spectrum which is just another word for Mother Nature.

Crowley offered us all a clue when he announced he wouldn't officially assume the name "Phoenix" until the work was completed. In this regard, the true Phoenix Project would be to redeem mankind by purging the forces of ignorance and oppression that have ruled during the last 13,000 years.

Armageddon awaits us all, but not in the sense it has been perpetrated on us by the merchants of fear and those with ulterior motives. For each of us, it will be a personal encounter, if it hasn't been encountered already. In one corner will be the Christ with all the angelic forces he can muster. In the other, will be theAntichrist with his demons.

The BABALON Working II
Sub-Figura vel Liber BabalonThe below story was taken from issue number 35 of "Insight Magazine" a British publication on the occult.It is provided in its incomplete form as it is found in the magazine

THE BABALON WORKING
by Alexander Mitchell

John Whiteside Parsons, a brilliant Rocket fuel scientist, joined the American branch of Aleister Crowley's cult in 1939. He struck up an earnest correspondence with the Beast 666, as Crowley was known by his followers, and soon became his out- standing protégé in the United States. By January, 1946, Parsons was impatient to break new frontiers in the occult world. He decided to take the spirit of Babalon, the "Whore of Babalon," and invest it in a human being.

But to carry out this intricate mission, Parsons needed a female sexual partner to create his child in the Astral (Spiritual) world. If this part of the fixture went successfully Parsons would be able to call down the spiritual baby & direct it into a human womb. When born, this child would incarnate the forces of Babalon. During his magical preparations for this incarnation Parsons found himself overwhelmed by assistance from a young novitiate named Ron Hubbard.

Parsons wrote to Crowley at the beginning of 1946.

"He (Hubbard) is a gentleman, red hair, green eyes, honest & intelligent and we have become great friends. Although he has no formal training in magic, he has an extraordinary amount of experience and under- standing in the field. Ron appears to have some sort of highly developed astral vision. He describes his angel as a beautiful winged woman with red hair whom he calls the Empress and who has guided him through many times in his life. He is in complete accord with our own principles. I have found a staunch companion and comrade in Ron."

But within 3 months, the bonds of friendship were under some strain; Ron claimed Parsons wrote to Crowley,

"She has transferred her sexual affections to Ron. I cared for her rather deeply but I have no desire to control her emotions."

As if to cement their loyalties, Parsons, Hubbard and Betty decided to pool their finances and form a business partnership.

Meanwhile, preparations for the mystical mission were well under way.

From January 4th to 15th, 1946, Parsons and Hubbard engaged in a nightly ritual of incantation, talisman-waving and other Black Magic, faithfully described in Parsons Diary as Conjuration of Air, Invocation of Wand, and Consecration of Air Dagger. With a Prokofiev violin concerto blaring away, the 2 of them pleaded with the spirits for "an elemental mate" -- a girl willing to go through sexual rites to incarnate Babalon in the spirit world.

Parsons mentions that windstorms had occurred on a couple of nights and one night the power suddenly failed. But nothing seriously responsive until Jan. 14th when Ron was struck on the right shoulder and had a candle knocked out of his hand.

"He called me" Parsons wrote, "and we observed a brownish yellow light about 7 feet high. I brandished a magical sword and and it disappeared. Ron's right arm was paralysed for the rest of the night".

The following night was even more portentous. Hubbard apparently saw a vision of one of Parsons enemies. Parsons wrote,

"He attacked the figure and pinned it to the door with 4 throwing knives with which he is expert". For 4 days, Parsons and Hubbard were in a state of tension. Then on Jan. 18th, Parsons turned to Ron and said "It is done." He added, "I returned home and found a young woman answering the requirements waiting for me."

The incarnate Ritual set out in Parsons manuscript, The Book of Babalon, is difficult reading for the unconfirmed Spiritualist. Broadly interpreted, Parsons and Hubbard constructed an alter and Hubbard acted as high priest during a series of ceremonies in which Parsons and the girl shared sex. The owner of the documents, who is an expert on Crowley's magic says that Parsons at this stage was completely under Hubbard's domination. How else can one explain Hubbard's role as high priest in the rites after only a few weeks in the trade?

For the first of the birth ceremonies which began on Mar. 1, Hubbard wore a white robe and carried a lamp while Parsons was clocked in a black, hooded garment, carrying a cup and dagger. At Hubbard's suggestion, they played Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead as background music.

Parsons account of the start of the birth ritual is as follows:

"The Scribe (Hubbard) said, "The Year of Babalon is 4063. She is the flame of life, power of darkness, she destroys with a glance, she may take thy soul. She feeds upon the death of men. Beautiful-Horrible". The Scribe, now pale and sweating, rested awhile then continued."

There are 2 possible reasons why Hubbard showed anxiety at this stage of the ceremony, the owner of the papers says. He was either deeply moved by the spiritual depth of the ceremony or he couldn't think what to say next.

Hubbard further instructed Parsons:

"Display thyself to our lady; dedicate thy organs to her; display thy mind to her; dedicate thy soul to her; for she shall absorb thee. Retire from human contact until noon tomorrow. Speak not of this Ritual. Discuss nothing of it. Consult no book but thine own mind. Thou Art a God. Behave at this Alter as one God before another."

On the 3rd day, the ritual began 4 hours before dawn. Ron tells his companion,

"Lay out a white sheet. Place upon it blood of birth. Envision her approaching thee. Think upon the lewd, lascivious things thou coulds't do. All is good to Babalon. All. Preserve the material basis. The lust is hers, the passion yours. Consider thou the Beast raping."

These invocations along with other passages in the book indicate that Parsons had collected specimens of his own sperm and the girl's menstrual fluid.

The climax of the ceremony occurred the following day with Ron at the alter working his 2 subjects into a sexual frenzy. Over Rachmaninoff he intoned such gems as:

"Her mouth is red and her breasts are fair, and her loins are full of fire."

An exalted Parsons wrote the next day,

"Babalon is incarnate upon the earth today awaiting the proper hour of her manifestation. And in that day my work will be accomplished and I shall be blown away upon the breath of the father, even as it is written (in fact, Parsons was blown away in a rocket fuel explosion at his experimental labratory in Pasadena in 1952)

Unable to contain his joy, Parsons decided to tell Crowley what had happened. On March 6th he wrote:

"I can hardly tell you or decide how much to write. I am under command of extreme secrecy. I have had the most important devastating experience of my life." Crowley was dumbfounded by the news of the incarnation ceremony. He wrote back, "You have me completely puzzled by your remarks. I cannot form the slightest idea of what you can possibly mean."

With a distinct note of concern, he dashed off a letter on the same day to the head of his American Cult saying,

"Apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is producing a Moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts." This acid rebuke comes from a man whose activities were once summed up by a judge like this: "I have never heard such horrible, dreadful blasphemous stuff as that which has been produced by the man who describes himself as the greatest living poet."

By May the same year, Crowley was not only concerned about Parsons' spiritual well-being. There was a small matter of certain monies. When the trio formed their business enterprise, Parsons is believed to have put in 17,000 dollars. Hubbard had about 10,000 dollars of the money, Hubbard and his newly acquired girlfriend Betty, bought a yacht. A report to the head of the American branch by another cult member says,

"Ron and Betty have their boat at Miami, Florida and are living the life of Riley while Brother John (Parsons) is living at rock bottom and I mean rock bottom."

In a more sinister way, the report added,

"Let us consider this matter of the magical child which John Parsons is supposed to turn loose on the world in 9 months (now 7) Ron, the Seer, was the guy who laid down the main ideas, technic (sic) etc. of the operation."

On reading Parsons' accounts of the ceremony and from the reports from the branch HQ in the States, Crowley cabled his U.S. office on May 22nd.

"Suspect Ron playing confidence trick -- John Parsons weak fool -- obvious victim prowling swindlers" In a letter a few days later he said, "It seems to me on the information of our brethren in California that Parsons has got an illumination which he lost all his personal independence. From our brother's account he has given away both his girl and his money. Apparently it is the ordinary confidence trick."

A must chastened Parsons wrote to Crowley on July 5th.

"Here I am in Miami, pursuing the children of my folly. I have them well tied up. They cannot move without going to jail."

"However, I am afraid that most of the money has already been spent. I will be lucky to salvage 3,000 to 5,000 dollars." Just how Parsons managed to capture the errant lovers is in keeping with the other extraordinary chapters of this story. "Hubbard attempted to escape me" Parsons wrote, "by sailing at 5p.m. and performed a full invocation to Bartzabel within the circle at 8p.m. (a curse). At the same time however, his ship was struck by a sudden squall off his sails and forced him back to port where I took the boat in custody."

Parsons recovered financially and possibly as a backlash to his experience with Hubbard he took the Oath of the Anti-Christ in 1948 and changed his name toBelarion Armiluss Al Dajjal Anti-Chirst. In his scientology publications, Hubbard says of the period,

"Crippled and blinded at the end of the war, I resumed my studies of philosophy and my discoveries recovered so fully that I was reclassified in 1949 for full combat duty."

Hubbard claims that more than 2 dozen thinkers, prophets and psychologists influenced scientology (which was launched in 1951); everyone from Plato, Jesus, to Sigmund Freud whom he says he studied under in Vienna.

The record can now be righted with the inclusion of Aleister Crowley, the Beast 666

BABALON & The Pleiades (III)
Sub-Figura vel Liber Babalon

Encounter In The Pleiades: An Inside Look At UFOs
by Preston Nichols & Peter Moon

My trail to the Illuminati began during an intermission of the first lecture I heard about Montauk and the Philadelphia Experiment. Upon asking Preston how he became involved in all of this, he told me that in a previous life, he and Duncan Cameron had been twin brothers who were named Preston and Marcus Wilson. They had been the first manufacturers of crude scientific instruments in Great Britain and had formed a company with Aleister Crowley's father which eventually became known as Thorne E.M.I., the same company which released the video cassette entitled The Philadelphia Experiment.

I subsequently searched for any references to the Wilson brothers in Crowley's writings but could find none. I only found suspicious references to a Duncan Cameron and a trip Crowley had made to Montauk in 1918. Not much was said about either, but I began to encounter incredible synchronicities between the Cameron and Crowley families which are discussed in the book Montauk Revisited. Eventually, I would discover that the wife of Jack Parsons, L. Ron Hubbard's former magical partner, was named Cameron. I thought this was too much to believe and I sought her out and encountered her under the most peculiar of circumstances which is described in Montauk Revisited.

The upshot of the synchronicities between the Camerons and Crowleys was best described by Cameron. She told me that her original name was Wilson (her father's name was originally Wilson but he was adopted by his uncle Alexander Cameron and ended up using his surname) and that the Wilson clan had descended from the Cameron clan. Further, she told me that Hubbard was a Wilson, too. His father, Harry Ross Hubbard, had been adopted and was originally a Wilson.

A couple of years later, I would discover something about the Wilsons that not even Cameron knew. Researching into the genealogy of her husband's family, I discovered that both the Parsons and Wilson families traced back to Catherine Parr. Parr evolved into Parrsons with the "r" eventually being dropped.

Jack Parsons was also a member of the Illuminati which is known in occult circles as the Order of the Silver Star, the silver star referring to Sirius. His father worked for President Woodrow Wilson, somewhat infamous for his role in World War I and for founding the League of Nations. He is also the president who helped give us the Federal Reserve.

If you read Freedom Is a Two-Edged Sword by Jack Parsons, you will find that Parsons believed the consciousness of the world was topsy turvy. Consequently, he took it upon himself to invoke the goddess Babalon, the mother of all creation. In keeping with the aforementioned theory of Excalibur, he recognized the true power of the universe to be encapsulated in the feminine energy of the universe. Parsons began a series of magical experiments which he called the Babalon Working, but he lacked one important element and that was a familiar. A familiar is a living creature that a magician or witch uses to carry out their spell or specific intention. It is usually a cat. As Parsons did not have a cat, he decided to use L. Ron Hubbard who also acted as scribe. After invoking the goddess Babalon for three days, Cameron suddenly showed up at his door. She fit the bill and became the sexual vehicle used in the experiment although she was not clued in on the full nature of what was going on.

At first glance, it might seem a little vague as to what the Babalon Working has to do with UFOS. If we consider that Babalon is the mother of all creation, we have to backtrack to what was said in Preston's section of the book about quantum mechanics and chaos theory. Babalon opens the door to all possibilities in creation without discrimination. She welcomes all, and this means that everything that has been suppressed in the subconscious of mankind is going to come out of the woodwork. UFOs are a prime sample of the unknown. Hubbard's work Excalibur was aimed at the same thing-. opening up the unconscious. This is the secret of the feminine energy.

It is no mere coincidence that all three players in this working came from the same Wilson stock. The answer to this secret lies in their particular genetic structure. Before we examine this angle, we will first consider the general nature of genetics.

Creation is a process of geometry. This is readily observable in chemistry and biology. If it weren't, mathematics wouldn't work at all. The DNA in each cell contains not only the complete blueprint for the human body, but the entire consciousness and manifestation of the universe itself. In psychological terms, DNA contains the potential for all archetypes and their potential interplays. In computer terms, DNA is coded just like a program and can ultimately manifest any aspect of existence.

When ritual sex is performed, it stimulates the creative processes on a biological level and this ignites the DNA's creative potential. What translates to humans as the sexual urge is based on a biological program to combine one matrix with another so that the vast panorama of evolution can be created. It is all rather fascinating.

In society, people tend to be somewhat particular in regard to whom they mate with. inbreeding is an example where people lower the quality of creation based upon their own incorrect DNA coded programs. The Nazi's sought to increase the quality of life with their breeding programs, but this program ended up lowering the quality of life and resulted in conflict and destruction. For centuries, most people have just gone about their business and mated with the man or woman of their fate. More importantly, they seldom try to drastically alter the programming because they aren't even aware of it.

Sexual magick is based upon the idea that you can alter the programming in the DNA through the will or projection of thought forms. It is a time honored practice, the entire procedures of which have been carefully guarded and relegated to secret societies. This is where the two major taboos of our society cross: sex andawareness. By themselves, sex and awareness are not all that easy to master in our society. If you try to create more awareness and direction for your own evolution and that of others through the practice of sex, you are walking on grounds that are even more taboo. While either manipulating or consciously influencing your own DNA and that of your partner might seem like a small scale act, sexual magick teaches the art of doing this on a grander scale. In other words, this is how secret societies try to influence the entire evolutionary program. It is a grand old game that has been going on for millennia. It is not unlike Democrats and Republicans raising signs and cards at a convention in order for their candidate to get the most attention and votes. Secret societies try to steer humanity and the rest of creation in different directions for their own specific agendas.

There is another fascinating aspect when you consider the DNA programming of sexual magick. Because DNA is based upon geometric designs, it is open to other realms or dimensions. If you consider a flat two dimensional checkerboard and realize that you can also have a cubic configuration that could serve as a playing field for three dimensional chess or checkers, you will understand there is a fourth dimensional possibility as well.

Cameron corroborated this view in my last conversation with her which was on her final birthday. Although she was very ill, she had been reading Pyramids of Montauk which describes the geometry I'm referring to here in further detail. She said that was what the Babalon Working was all about. Geometric visions had abounded in her consciousness at the time. These stayed with her for the rest of her life and it was expressed in her art work. She said that the book expressed in words what she had experienced in consciousness. My last conversation with her was a happy one. Cameron passed away on July 24, 1995.

If we consider the Wilson lineage, we have to realize that the DNA of this clan, or at least some of them, have a predisposition to the bizarre. This is not so bad in itself as it is the radical factor in mutations which makes new developments in evolution possible. When one of my friends whose surname is Wilson heard this story, he told me that he was received in a puzzling manner when he visited Scotland. Every time he told them his name, the natives looked at him strangely as if they wanted nothing to do with him, He is extremely personable, too.

The names "Wilson" and "Cameron" have popped up with outrageous synchronicity during my research of time travel and secret projects. Many other people have noticed this too. Robert Anton Wilson is a famous author who has written about the principles of synchronicity for some time. He says that once you reach the horizons of consciousness, you will encounter the principle of synchronicity. It bridges the consciousness of where we are in this fixated third dimensional existence to a possible escape route through which we can access the fourth dimension and beyond.

Flying saucers are fourth dimensional chess pieces and that is why Preston found that space went on and on when he walked aboard one. They are based upon geometrical configurations and a different sort of consciousness than what is considered typical "Earth think".

When Jack Parsons (right) and L. Ron Hubbard (left) engaged in the Babalon Working, there was plenty of sexual excitement going on. Parsons was copulating with Cameron on the altar and Hubbard was scrying and tapping the energy. Geometric incantations were used along with symbols, not unlike what Hubbard referred to in the book I had discovered. They were deliberately working with the same energies and some of the protocols that John Dee and Edward Kelly had used during the reign ofQueen Elizabeth I (Dee was her court astrologer). An earnest communication had been made with the territory known as the unconscious or the great unknown.

Many believe that the 1946 Babalon Working was responsible for or tied to the UFO phenomena which became so abundant after that period. This was confirmed forCameron when she witnessed a UFO shortly after the Babalon Working. She said that the sight filled her with an insurmountable joy. Cameron and her brother were working at the jet Propulsion Laboratory during this period and had seen a UFO while taking a nature walk in the area. Although she warned her brother not to say a word about it, he blabbed and was ridiculed to the point where he had to leave his job due to embarrassment. He ended up working for the Ralph Parsons Corporation, a huge international conglomerate who builds underground railways and cities among many other things.

After this working, Hubbard founded the subjects of Dianetics and Scientology and proceeded to talk about some of the most far out stuff known to man. He spoke about Fifth Invader Force aliens who were insect-like in nature, and he talked about implants as well. He worked out a whole system designed to free mankind from the confines of three dimensional reality. His relative success or failure is an entirely different subject.

Parsons continued his magical work but was supposedly blown up in an accident in 1952. In a bizarre legal precedent, his next of kin (his wife, Cameron) was not consulted in order to identify the body. in fact, she was not allowed to see him in the ambulance or hospital. The newspaper stories were loaded with oddities. In fact, one of them was by Omar Garrison, a journalist who would later be contracted to be Hubbard's biographer. He brought the house down on Hubbard as far as the courts were concerned. It is quite remarkable that he had also covered the Parsons incident some thirty years earlier.

A few short weeks after Parsons' death, UFOs were spotted en masse over the Capitol. Ever since that time, Parsons has been associated with having some sort of hold on the UFO phenomena. When Cameron had Jack's horoscope evaluated by some of the top astrologers in Los Angeles, she withheld the name connected to the chart. After a detailed analysis, they came back to her and indicated that this person would have to be the head of the CIA. Remember, I said earlier that Parsons was a member of the Illuminati.

Parsons was also a founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. To this day, people at NASA refer to it as "JPL: Jack Parson's Laboratory". There is a whole case to be made that he is currently in charge and controlling things from a secret location, but that is not the purpose of this book. If he were a leader of the Illuminati, it wouldn't matter whether he was alive or dead, for these characters do not live by the rules of ordinary human existence. They regulate the space-time continuum through sex, death, taxes, implants, alien abductions and the like.

Jack Parsons may have been a leader of the Illuminati, but it was his idea to invoke Babalon and thereby change the world. It is my personal opinion that he got caught somewhere in between and that his soul will not be at rest until the goddess reigns supreme.

Cameron has also warned against people judging her husband. She once said very wisely that history can't even begin to adequately evaluate a man until at least one hundred years after his death. The jury is still out.

The Babalon Working and its colorful characters continue to surface as a reference point to many different researchers who study UFO phenomena. The legend and mystique will only grow as time goes by.

Cameron also made another interesting comment to me in our last conversation. When I told her I was working on this book you are reading, she said that she had a very strong connection to the Pleiades.

It was all about the feminine energy that is also known as Babalon.

[Magda Hassan]

Jack Parsons
Beloved of BABALON
A Psych Profile of JPL's Magickal Scientist
from "StarFire" magazine, a Thelemic publication

"But I say that that perfect image in the heart of man is patterned by the awful lust in space-time that shapes all women, the insatiable and eternal lust of Pan that is BABALON."
-J.W. Parsons

"About J.W.P. -- all that I can say is that I am very sorry -- I feel sure that he had fine ideas, but he was led astray firstly by Smith, then he was robbed of his last penny by a confidence man named Hubbard ... I have no further interest in Jack and his adventures; he is just a weak-minded fool, and must go to the devil in his own way..."
-A. Crowley

John Whiteside Parsons was born on 2 October 1914 in Los Angeles, California. His mother and father separated whilst he was quite young and Parsons said later that this left him with "...a hatred of authority and a spirit of revolution", as well as an Oedipal attachment to his mother. He felt withdrawn and isolated as a child, and was bullied by other children. This gave him, he thought, "...the requisite contempt for the crowd and for the group mores...". Parsons was born into a rich family, and sometime in his youth there was what he referred to as a loss of family fortune.

This loss must only have been a temporary one, though -- perhaps caused by the break-up of the family -- since in the 1940's he inherited from his father a large, Victorian-style mansion in the well-to-do area of Pasadena. During adolescence, Parsons developed an interest in science, especially physics and chemistry, and in fact he went on to develop a career as a brilliant scientist in the fields of explosives and rocket-fuel technology. His achievements as a scientist were such that the Americans named a lunar crater after him when they came to claim that territory for their own. Appropriately enough, Crater Parsons is on the dark side of the moon.

Parsons made contact with the O.T.O. and the A.'.A.'. in December 1938, whilst visiting Agape Lodge of the O.T.O. in California. He was taken along by one of his fellow scientists. At that time Agape Lodge used to give weekly performances of the Gnostic Catholic Mass, seeing this as both a sacrament and a recruiting front. Agape Lodge was by then a moderately thriving and expanding concern, having been founded in the mid-1920's by Wilfred T. Smith, an expatriate Englishman. Smith had many years earlier been an associate of Charles Stansfield Jones (Frater Achad) in Vancouver, Canada. Crowley seems to have had, at least to begin with, a high regard for Smith, and expected great things of him.

Over the years, however, he grew increasingly disillusioned. Crowley felt that the O.T.O. should have flowered in California, given imaginative leadership. Smith was simply not capable of delivering, he thought, and perhaps even deliberately impeding things. By the time that Parsons joined the Lodge in 1939, together with his wife Helen, relations between Smith and Crowley were already in terminal decline, and Crowley was casting around for someone else to take over headship of the Lodge. One of the items in the Yorke Collection at Warburg Institute is a collection of over 200 letters exchanged between Crowley and Smith, in which the steady decline in their relationship is starkly illustrated.

At this time, the Lodge was firmly in the grip of Smith and his mistress, Regina Kahl. They were very authoritarian, and ruled things with the proverbial rod of iron. At the weekly performances of the Mass, Smith was the Priest and Regina Kahl the Priestess. The Parsons were initiated into the O.T.O. in 1939 and like many entrants of the time they took up membership of the A.'.A.'. as well. Jack Parsons took as his motto "Thelema Obtentum Procedero Amoris Nuptiae", an interestingly hybrid phrase which conveys the intention of attaining Thelema through the nuptial of love; the initials transliterated into Hebrew give his Magical Number, 210. He seems to have made quite an impression on his fellow members. Jane Wolfe, who had spent some time with Crowley at Cefalu, was an active member of the Lodge at the time. The following entry is from her Magical Record during December 1940:

"Unknown to me, John Whiteside Parsons, a newcomer, began astral travels. This knowledge decided Regina to undertake similar work. All of which I learned after making my own decision. So the time must be propitious.
Incidentally, I take Jack Parsons to be the child who "shall behold them all" (the mysteries hidden therein. AL, 54-5).

26 years of age, 6'2", vital, potentially bisexual at the very least, University of the State of California and Cal Tech., now engaged in Cal. Tech. chemical laboratories developing "bigger and better" explosives for Uncle Sam. Travels under sealed orders from the government. Writes poetry -- "sensuous only", he says. Lover of music, which he seems to know thoroughly. I see him as the real successor of Therion. Passionate; and has made the vilest analyses result in a species of exaltation after the event. Has had mystical experiences which gave him a sense of equality all round, although he is hierarchical in feeling and in the established order."

Jack Parsons seems to have had something of a reverential attitude towards Smith, perhaps seeing him as some sort of father figure -- the relationship between them seems to have had that sort of ambiguity. In later years, he described how he felt an alternate attraction and repulsion where Smith was concerned; and Smith, whatever his limitations and faults may have been, was evidently a charismatic man. Parsons, for his part, evidently made a strong impression on Smith. In a letter to Crowley during March 1941, Smith wrote as follows:

"...I think I have at long last a really excellent man, John Parsons. And starting next Tuesday he begins a course of talks with a view to enlarging our scope. He has an excellent mind and much better intellect then myself -- O yes, I know it would not necessarily have to be very good to be better than mine...

John Parsons is going to be valuable. I feel sure we are going to move ahead in spite of Max Schneider's continual efforts to discredit me. He still exhibits your letters as proof that I am a number one son of a bitch. I thought you were going to write to tell him to clamp down..."

The last sentences in this quotation throw light on an important factor in the affairs of Agape Lodge -- the turmoil and personal friction that was a constant emotional backdrop, and which seems finally to have invalidated all their efforts. The Lodge was constantly driven by personal feuding and upheaval, andCrowley's influence over the course of events seems in reality to have been marginal. The nucleus of Agape Lodge was some sort of forerunner of a hippie commune. Apart from anything else, Smith appears to have regarded the women members of the Lodge as constituting his personal harem, and of course this added to the friction. Crowley was in correspondence with many of the members at this time, and seems to some extent to have encouraged people to tell tales on each other. No doubt he saw it as a good way of keeping in touch with what was going on, but it tended to inflame the widespread personal clashes that were going on. He did try to make openness and honesty a policy -- laying down a rule that if "A" wrote to "B" attacking "C", then "A" was duty-bound to copy the letter to "C" as a matter of course. This seems to have happened but rarely, however.

In his attempts to assert his authority over the Lodge generally, and Smith in particular, Crowley was frustrated by the loyalty -- despite all the bitchiness around -- to Smith and Kahl. On the face of it, he should have been able to exert his authority easily enough. Karl Germer, his trusted right-hand man, was in New York; whilst his colleague from the Cefalu days -- Jane Wolfe -- was a member of the Lodge. Jane Wolfe was the same age as Crowley, but she was very weak and indecisive. Reading about the course of the Agape Lodge during the 1930's and 1940's is a bewildering experience. The whole thing, despite the glamour that time and mystery now lend it, seems to have been a mess. It is as well for us to bear in mind that Jack Parsons -- his obvious gifts notwithstanding -- was part of this melodramatic flux and flow.

Although Crowley grew increasingly despairing of and impatient with Smith, and saw all too clearly the need to replace him as head of Agape Lodge, the problem for Crowley -- quite apart from HOW to get rid of Smith -- was with whom to replace him. In the course of a letter to Crowley of March 1942, Jane Wolfe made her recommendations:

"Incidentally, I believe Jack Parsons -- who is devoted to Wilfred -- to be the coming leader, with Wilfred in advisory capacity. I hope you two get together some day, although your present activities in England seem to have postponed the date of your coming to us. Jack, by the way, comes in through some inner experiences, but mostly, perhaps, through the world of science. That is, he was "sold on the Book of the Law" because it foretold Einstein, Heisenberg -- whose work is not permitted in Russia -- the quantum field folks, whose work is along the "factor infinite and unknown" lines, etc. You two would have a whale of a lot of things to talk over. He and Helen are lock, stock and barrel for the Order."

By 1943, Crowley appears to have decided that some definite course of action was necessary to get rid of Smith, and that his continued presences in the Lodge was harmful. In a letter of May 1943, to a member called Roy Leffingwell, he wrote:

"I think that Smith is quite hopeless. I am quite satisfied with what you say about his reactions to your family. It is all very well, but Smith has apparently nothing else in his mind. He appears to be using the Order as a happy hunting ground for "affairs". You say the same thing, and I have no doubt that it is quite correct. I think we must get rid of him once and for all; and this will include the Parsons, unless they dissociate themselves immediately from him, without reservations."

At this time Helen Parsons was having an affair with Smith, and also supplanting Regina Kahl as Priestess in the public performances of the Gnostic Mass.Jack Parsons retained his strong feelings of loyalty towards Smith, although perhaps a little confused by events. Crowley, determined to get rid of Smith, viewed with concern the extent to which Parsons -- of whom he seems to have held a high opinion -- was under the spell of Smith. Whilst having a high regard for Parsons, Crowley was also keenly aware of his faults, which he hoped Parsons would outgrow in the course of time and experience. In view of subsequent events in the life of Parsons, these perceptions are interesting and important. Once again, they can best be conveyed, perhaps, by extracts from several letters that Crowley wrote. In a letter of July 1943 to Max Scheider, we read:

"As to Jack; I think he is perfectly alright at the bottom of everything; but he is very young, and he has at present nothing like the strength to deal with matters within his jurisdiction objectively."

In the course of a letter to Jane Wolfe, in December 1943, Crowley made the following assessment:

"Jack is the Objective (Smith is out, an affaire classe'e: anybody who communicates with him in any way is out also; and that is that, and the best plan is to sponge the whole slate clean, and get to work to build up Thelema on sound principals. And no more brothel-building; let's use marble, not rotten old boards!). Jack's trouble is his weakness, and his romantic side -- the poet -- is at PRESENT a hindrance. He gets a kick from some magazine trash, or an 'occult' novel (if only he knew how they were concocted!) and dashes off in wild pursuit. He MUST learn that the sparkle of champagne is based on sound wine; pumping carbonic acid into urine is not the same thing.

"I wish to God I had him for six months -- even three, with a hustle -- to train in Will, in discipline. He must understand that fine and fiery flashes of Spirit come from the organization of Matter, from the drilling of every function of every bodily organ until it has become so regular as to be automatic, and carried on by itself deep down in the Unconscious. It is the steadiness of one's Heart that enables one to endure the rapture of great passion; one doesn't want the vital functions to be excitable."

In February 1944 he wrote in somewhat similar spirit to Mr. and Mrs. Burlinghame, who were Lodge members:

"...I am very glad indeed of your offer to co-operate practically in any way possible. I have left Jack Parsons in charge; he is quite all right in essence, but very young and easily swayed by passing influences. I shall look to you to help in keeping him up to the mark."

And more expansively, in the course of a letter to Jack Parsons himself in March 1946:

"I am particularly interested in what you have written to me about the Elemental, because for some little while past I have been endeavoring to intervene PERSONALLY on your behalf. I would however have you recall Levi's aphorism 'the love of the Magus for such beings is insensate, and may destroy him'.

It seems to me that there is a danger of your sensitiveness upsetting your balance. Any experience that comes your way you have a tendency to over-estimate. The first fine careless rapture wears off in a month or so, and some other experience comes along and carries you off on its back. Meanwhile you have neglected and bewildered those who are dependent on you, either from above or from below.

I will ask you to bear in mind that you have one fulcrum for all your levers, and that is your original oath to devote yourself to raising mankind. All experiences, all efforts, must be referred to this; as long as it remains unshaken you cannot go far wrong, for by its own stability it will bring you back from any tendency to excess.

At the same time, you being as sensitive as you are, it behooves you to be more on your guard than would be the case with the majority of people."

Resolved though Crowley was to get rid of Smith, it was a long and difficult maneuver, and had to be approached piece-meal at first. Many of the Lodge members remained loyal to Smith, and were reluctant to see him go. Smith was only too happy to hang on, in the hope that what he saw as "popular opinion" would persuade Crowley to retain him after all. Throughout all this, Smith seemed unable to understand the depths of Crowley's hostility towards him; his letters toCrowley of this period carry the tone -- whether implicitly or explicitly -- of some wretch having to bear the gratuitous beatings of his master. Some sort of dual authority apparently operated between Smith and Parsons for a while -- to the reluctance of Parsons, himself still very much a Smith loyalist.

Eventually, Crowley seems to have hit upon a novel way to remove Smith; he declared that Smith was the avatar of some god and should go away on a Magical Retirement until he had realized his true identity. To this end Crowley wrote a document of instruction for Smith to follow, "LIBER 132". Smith made an attempt at this Operation but had no joy at all in plumbing the depths of his divinity. It seems doubtful if Crowley intended him to; I have seen another letter from Crowley to an American correspondent at the time, in which Crowley came as close as he could to admitting the Machiavellian thrust of the whole affair.

The way was now clear for Crowley to appoint Parsons as head of Agape Lodge. If he had hoped that the Lodge would be more stable without Smith in charge, however, he was wrong. Smith continued to live there for some time after, despite all attempts by Crowley and Germer to declare him a leper, contact with whom would warrant immediate expulsion. Parsons remained unhappy at what he considered to be the unjust treatment of Smith. In late 1943 he wrote to Crowley attacking him on this point, and offering his resignation. Crowley's esteem of Parsons may be gauged from the fact that he declined to accept the resignation, and asked Parsons to reconsider. Parsons agreed to remain as head of the Lodge.

Parsons had by this time inherited a large, Victorian-style mansion from his father, in a well-to-do area of Pasadena. He needed to rent out some rooms to make ends meet, and he scandalized the neighborhood by ensuring that only bohemians and the like were accepted. By the summer of 1943 Helen had had a child by Smith, and divorce was in the air. Jack Parsons took up with Helen's younger sister Sara Northrup, known as Betty. This time was one of turmoil for Parsons. We can get a glimpse of it from a document he wrote some years later, "ANALYSIS BY A MASTER OF THE TEMPLE", where he speaks of himself in the third person. It includes the following allusion to this time:

"Betty served to effect a transference from Helen at a critical period. Had this not occurred, your repressed homosexual component could have caused a serious disorder. Your passion for Betty also gave you the magical force needed at the time, and the act of adultery tinged with incest seemed as your magical conformation in the Law of Thelema."

We get a further glimpse of Parsons' uncertainty in the course of a letter from Jane Wolfe to Crowley, early in 1945. She wrote:

"Last evening, when Jack brought me these various papers for me to post to you, I saw, for the first time, the small boy, or child. This is it that is bewildered, does not quite know when to take hold in this matter, or where, and is completely bowled over by the ruthlessness of Smith -- Smith, who has a master-hand when it comes to dealing with this boy."

However, Parsons was also beginning to be seen in something of a sinister light. In the course of a letter to Karl Germer, Jane Wolfe wrote about a strange atmosphere that was manifesting. The following comes from the end of 1945:

"There is something strange going on, quite apart from Smith. There is always Betty, remember, who hates Smith. But our own Jack is enamoured with Witchcraft, the houmfort, voodoo. From the start he always wanted to evoke something -- no matter what, I am inclined to think, as long as he got a result.

According to Meeka yesterday, he has had a result -- an elemental he doesn't know what to do with. From that statement of hers, it must bother him -- somewhat at least."

Phyllis Seckler, from whose account this passage of Jane Wolfe's has been drawn, adds her own memories to this:

"Meeka also reported to Jane that another two persons always had to do a lot of banishing in the house. They were sensitive and knew that there was something alien and inimical was there. When I had been there during the summer of 1944, I also knew there were troublesome spirits about, especially on the third floor. It got so I couldn't stand being up there, and a friend of mine couldn't even climb the stairs that far, as the hair on the back of her neck began to prickle and she got thoroughly frightened."

Brother ElRon
Into this maelstrom came a very fateful contact. In August 1945 Parsons met L. Ron Hubbard, the future founder of Scientology, who at that time was known as little more than a writer of pulp stories and something of an eccentric. At the time he met Parsons he was a naval officer on leave, and Parsons invited him to stay at his house for the remainder of his leave. They had quite a lot in common. Parsons was very interested in science-fiction, as was Hubbard. Hubbard, for his part, was interested in psychism and magic. As anyone will know who has read the critical biography of Hubbard, "BARE-FACED MESSIAH", by Russell Miller, he was a very bizarre character indeed. For all his charisma, charm and eccentricity, Hubbard appears to have been little other than a confidence trickster, and from his point of view Parsons was one more victim to be exploited. There is a certain parallel with Parsons' relationship with Smith -- the more so because Hubbard and Betty started a passionate affair. In spite of this, Parsons' admiration of and enthusiasm for Hubbard remained unabated. In a letter to Crowley of late 1945 he wrote:

"Although he has no formal training in Magick, he has an extraordinary amount of experience and understanding in the field. From some of his experiences I deduce that he is in direct contact with some higher intelligence, possibly his Guardian Angel... He is the most Thelemic person I have ever met, and is in complete accord with our own principles... I think I have made a great gain, and as Betty and I are the best of friends there is little loss. I cared for her rather deeply, but I have no desire to control her emotions, and I can, I hope, control my own. I need a magical partner. I have many experiments in mind..."

Enochian Air Tablet

The "magical partner" is a reference to Hubbard -- not to a Scarlet Woman, as might at first be supposed. In January 1946 Parsons devised an Operation to, as he put it, "...obtain the assistance of an elemental mate". The core of this Working consisted of the utilization of the Enochian Tablet of Air, or rather a specific angle of it. This was to be the focus of VIIIº sexual magick, with the purpose of giving substance to the elemental summons. Parsons continued with this for eleven days, evoking twice daily. He noted various psychic phenomena during this period, but felt discouraged by the apparent failure of the Operation. However, success followed several days later. In his own words:

"The feeling of tension and unease continued for four days. Then on January 18 at sunset, whilst the Scribe and I were on the Mojave Desert, the feeling of tension suddenly stopped. I turned to him and said 'it is done', in absolute certainty that the Operation was accomplished. I returned home, and found a young woman answering the requirements waiting for me. She is describable as an air of fire type with bronze red hair, fiery and subtle, determined and obstinate, sincere and perverse, with extraordinary personality, talent and intelligence.

During the period of January 19 to February 27 I invoked the Goddess BABALON with the aid of magical partner (Ron Hubbard), as was proper to one of my grade."

In case any reader has just beamed down from another planet, perhaps it should be mentioned that the "young woman" referred to was Marjorie Cameron. The more romantic amongst us will perhaps be disappointed to learn that she seems to have existed prior to Parsons' elemental summons. She and Parsons married in October 1946; and the certificate gives her age as then 24, her birthplace as Iowa, and her profession as an artist. At one time she had served in the U.S. Navy. At the time of this Working she was on a visit from New York, where her mother lived, and she returned there after the Babalon Working for a while.

The passage by Parsons just quoted is a striking one, for several reasons. It is notable that, even with the advent of Marjorie Cameron he continued to regard Hubbard as being his magical partner. I don't think that Parsons ever considered that he had conjured her from thin air, so to speak. However her appearance is accounted for -- synchronicity, sheer coincidence, magical manipulation of events, or whatever -- is irrelevant. The aim of the Operation as a whole was to invoke Babalon, and obtaining the services of a suitable Scarlet Woman by elemental summons was -- at least at the time -- a means to this over-riding end. This needs to be borne in mind, because otherwise there is a temptation to see Parsons and Cameron as constituting the love-story of the century; in fact, the relationship was rather more complex than that.

At the end of February 1946, Hubbard went away for a few days. Parsons went back to the Mojave Desert and invoked Babalon. He gives no further details of this, unfortunately. All he does say is that during this invocation

"...the presence of the Goddess came upon me, and I was commanded to write the following communication..."

This communication, which purports to be the words of Babalon, consists of 77 short verses. Whether it was direct voice, trance, or inspired writing, he does not say. The answer probably lies in his Magical Record of this period, but as far as I know it has not survived.

This communication of 77 verses he entitled "LIBER 49". He does not explain the title, but no doubt considered such explanation unnecessary, since 49 is a number sacred to Babalon. Chapter 49 of Crowley's "THE BOOK OF LIES" is a panegyric to Babalon. The connection is evident in "THE VISION AND THE VOICE", in which Babalon is a strong and alluring current, and indeed the core of the series of visions. In the account of the 27[SUP]th[/SUP] Aethyr the symbol of Babalon is as a blood-red rose of 49 petals -- red with the blood of the saints who have squeezed every last drop into the Cup of Babalon. In the afore-mentioned 27[SUP]th[/SUP]Aethyr we read:

"O Mother, wilt thou never have compassion on the children of earth? Was it not enough that the Rose should be red with the blood of thine heart, and that its petals should be 7 and by 7?"

Crowley's note to this adds:

"This is the use to which Babalon puts the blood of the Masters of the Temple (see 12[SUP]th[/SUP] Aethyr) to vivify the rose of eternal creation; i.e. the attainment of the Master of the Temple fills the world with life and beauty..."

Since it casts further light on the symbolism of Babalon, and shows how firmly rooted this Babalon Working is in "THE VISION AND THE VOICE", it will be useful to quote one further passage, this time from the account of the 15[SUP]th[/SUP] Aethyr:

"There appears immediately in the Aethyr a tremendous column of scarlet fire, whirling forth, rebounding, crying aloud. And about it are four columns, of green and blue and gold and silver, each inscribed with writings in the character of the dagger. And the column of fire is dancing among the pillars. Now it seems that the fire is but the skirt of the dancer, and the dancer is a mighty god. The vision is overpowering.

As the dancer whirls, she chants in a low, strange voice, quickening as she goes: Lo! I gather up every spirit that is pure, and weave him into my vesture of flame. I lick up the lives of men, and their souls sparkle from mine eyes. I am the mighty sorceress, the lust of the spirit. And by my dancing I gather for my mother NUIT the heads of all them that are baptized in the waters of life. I am the lust of the spirit that eateth up the soul of man. I have prepared a feast for the adepts, and they that partake thereof shall see God.

Now it is clear what she has woven in her dance; it is the Crimson Rose of the 49 Petals, and the Pillars are the Cross with which it is conjoined. And between the pillars shoot out rays of pure green fire; and now all the pillars are golden. She ceases to dance and dwindles, gathering herself into the centre of the Rose."

Parsons spent the rest of his life devoted to Babalon -- some would say that he became obsessed by Her.

---

"LIBER 49" contains instructions for the earthing of this Babalon current in the form or an avatar, daughter or manifestation of Babalon, who was to appear amongst us. It would seem that Parsons was expecting a full-blown incarnation, and not simply the inauguration of a force. The second verse of the text declares it to be the fourth chapter of "THE BOOK OF THE LAW", and it is worth quoting this in full:

"And this is my book, that is the fourth chapter of the Book of the Law, He completing the Name, for I am out of NUIT by HORUS, the incestuous sister of RA-HOOR-KHUIT."

In terms of content, level of inspiration, and style, "LIBER 49" is nothing like "THE BOOK OF THE LAW"; and on this basis alone, the claim can be looked at askance. We could expect, I think, that a fourth chapter would evince some sort of continuity with the three chapters received by Crowley, and this is not at all evident in "LIBER 49". However, the key to the claim lies in the reference, in the quoted passage, to "the Name". The name is Tetragrammaton, IHVH; and the "He completing" is the He final. On this basis, Parsons considered it axiomatic that Father-Mother-Son, IHV, was incomplete without the Daughter, the He final; this he considered to be Babalon, the natural complement of Vau, the Son, Horus. Consideration of this is, I can appreciate, something of a hiccup to a straight narrative of Parsons and the Babalon Working. However, it is so central to his thinking that it really ought to be outlined now.

I can best give the flavor of this by quoting a couple of passages from one of his essays that has yet to be published. He discusses the break-up of patriarchy in the dawn of the twentieth century, and the beginnings of a new age of Horus. The nature of this is seen as disruptive, bringing confusion and terror. He instances two terrible wars, the atomic bomb, and an increase in epicene and homosexual tendencies. He continues as follows:

"But the great event of the aeon, which will bring with it the possibility of redemption to the whole of the western world, has not yet been made manifest. We, who contain the knowledge of this event among Ourselves until the time is right, and who were in fact the instruments of its gestation, give these present indications.

The Aeon of Horus is of the nature of a child. To perceive this, we must conceive of the nature of a child without the veil of sentiment- ality -- beyond good and evil, perfectly gentle, perfectly ruthless, containing all possibilities within the limits of heredity, and highly susceptible to training and environment. But the nature of Horus is also the nature of force -- blind, terrible, unlimited force. That is why the West stands in imminent danger of annihilation. that is why the West also stands in the possibility of the most rapid and tremendous evolution that the world has ever known. The balance must be love and understanding, or else all else fails. Now We have said enough for this place.

Then let the student read and meditate upon the ritual of Horus, constructing the total nature of Horus out of the polyphony of the component concepts. And, if he dare, let him invoke Horus and partake of the power and energy that is his right under the New Aeon. And let him also consider the love whereby Horus may be fulfilled and dignified; and meditating on this, let him prevision and invoke that which is to come."

I haven't come across any material written by Parsons prior to the Babalon Working. However, the probability must be that ideas similar to this -- the need for a complement to Horus -- were on his mind before 1946.

A few days after receiving "LIBER 49", Parsons put in hand the ritual preparations as indicated in the text. Again in his own words:

"On March 1 and 2, 1946, I prepared the alter and equipment in accordance with the instructions in "LIBER 49". The Scribe, Ron Hubbard, had been away about a week, and knew nothing of my invocation of BABALON, which I had kept entirely secret. On the night of March 2 he returned, and described a vision he had had that evening, of a savage and beautiful woman riding naked on a great cat-like beast. He was impressed with the urgent necessity of giving me some message or communication. We prepared magically for this communication, constructing a temple at the alter with the analysis of the key word. He was robed in white, carrying a lamp; and I in black, hooded, with the cup and dagger. At his suggestion we played Rachmaninov's "Isle of the Dead" as background music, and set an automatic recorder to transcribe audible occurrences. At approximately 8pm he began to dictate, I transcribed directly as I received."

Hubbard's vision sounds a bit too glib to me. It sounds rather like he'd seen a copy of "THE BOOK OF THOTH" Atu XI, "LUST", showing the Whore astride the Beast. There would have been at least one copy of "THE BOOK OF THOTH" around Parsons' place, I would have thought. Interestingly, in spite of Hubbard being referred to as "the Scribe", it was Hubbard who was giving utterance to "astral communications", and Parsons writing them down. As far as the Babalon Workingis concerned, Hubbard is the joker in the pack, the factor infinite and unknown. His whole career, both before and after his involvement with Parsons, shows him to have been a confidence man par excellence.

Events after the Babalon Working, when he effortlessly swindled Parsons out of thousands of dollars, demonstrate that Parsons was as readily taken in as anyone. It is surely legitimate for us to wonder, therefore, to what extent Hubbard's undoubted talents for deceit -- both of himself and of others -- colored the whole Working. This is not to invalidate it, or to declare it abortive, but to sound a cautionary note. After all, Edward Kelly seems by some accounts to have been a person of dubious repute, to put it mildly; but this does not automatically negate the worth of the Workings which he conducted with John Dee. There is another interesting parallel between Hubbard and Kelly, as we shall see later.

The Workings arising from "LIBER 49" continued for several nights, and they contained instructions for further rituals. These rituals were intended to facilitate the earthing of Babalon. Some of the communications received in the course of these Workings are of a fierce, intense beauty, as a few excerpts will illustrate:

"She is flame of life, power of darkness, she destroys with a glance, she may take thy soul. She feeds upon the death of men.

"The first ritual. Tomorrow the second ritual. Concentrate all force and being in Our Lady BABALON. Light a single flame on Her alter, saying: Flame is Our Lady, flame is Her hair, I am flame.

Display thyself to Our Lady; dedicate thy organs to Her, dedicate thy heart to Her, dedicate thy mind to Her, dedicate thy soul to Her, for She shall absorb thee, and thou shalt become living flame before She incarnates. For it shall be through you alone, and no-one else can help in this endeavour."

The rituals used included, for the most part, passages adapted from Crowley's works. For instance, there is material drawn from "THE GOTHIC MASS", "THE VISION AND THE VOICE," and "TANNHAUSER". This is not plagiarism on the part of Parsons. The rituals had to be drawn up quickly, and these passages were at hand. Parsons had a beautiful and lucid writing style of his own, and would have been more than capable, in different circumstances, of devising his own invocations.

Some of the communications received in the course of the Babalon Working have very forceful sexual expression, bordering on the rapacious. Consider, for instance, this passage:

"In verse seven verses of seven lines, seven magick words. Stand and chant seven times. Envision thyself as a cloaked radiance desirable to the Goddess, beloved. Envision Her approaching thee. Embrace Her, cover Her with kisses. Think upon the lewd lascivious things thou couldst do. All is good to BABALON. All.

"Then rest, meditating on this:

"Thou as a man and as a god hast strewn upon the earth and in the heavens many loves. These recall; concentrate, concentrate each woman thou hast raped. Remember her, think upon her, move her into BABALON. This verse shall be used in worship when She appears.

"Then meditate upon thy desire, think upon Her, and, touching naught, chant these verses. Recall each lascivious moment, each lustful day, all set then into the astral body, touching naught.

"Preserve the material basis... The lust is Hers, the passion yours. Consider thou the Beast raping.

"Leaving thy casual loves -- all belongs to BABALON, thy lust is BABALON's. She is with thee three days. The sign is Hers, secret, and no man knows its correspondences. Guard."

We should be wary of seeking to draw too close an analogy between differing systems, and particularly between deities from those systems. Bearing this in mind, however, an analogue does suggest itself between Kali and Babalon; perhaps Babalon is more sexually loaded. In any case, all are aspects of the One Goddess, and Babalon is a particular aspect of Nuit. Verse 22 of the first chapter of "THE BOOK OF THE LAW" says,

"Now, therefore, I am known to you by my name Nuit, and to him by a secret name which I shall give him when at least he knoweth me...".

This secret name was the correct spelling of Babalon, which was given to Crowley whilst he was scrying the 12th Aethyr; until then, he had been using the Biblical form -- "Babylon". By Gematria, Babalon enumerates as 156; and in a note to his account of the 12 Aethyr Crowley tells us that "the formula of 156 is constant copulation or samadhi on everything". It is the blind, sexual passion that carries all before it -- dionysian. There is a close connection between Babalonand Pan. In a note to the account of the 2nd Aethyr, Crowley observes:

"From this it would appear BABALON (who is speaking through one of her ministers) is the feminine (or androgyne) equivalent and not merely the complement of Pan. This is shewn in many of her images."

This is echoed elsewhere by Parsons, who wrote:

"But I say that that perfect image in the heart of man is patterned by the awful lust in space-time that shapes all women, the insatiable and eternal lust of Pan that is BABALON."

After the Babalon Working had been concluded, all that Parsons could do was wait. He had been told that the Operation had succeeded, that conception had occurred, and that in due course the avatar or Daughter of Babalon would come to him, bearing a secret sign that Parsons alone would recognize, and which would prove her authenticity. Hubbard, though, had rather more mundane considerations on his mind, and several weeks later he and Betty absconded with a vast amount of Parsons' money. This amounted to many thousands of dollars as an investigation in Allied Enterprises, a fund set up by Parsons, Betty and Hubbard, and into which Parsons was persuaded to sink most of his savings. Parsons eventually managed to track them down, and recovered a fraction of his money after taking legal action. Parsons had no further contact with either Hubbard or Betty after this.

He was, though, beset with other problems. Preoccupied with the Babalon Working as he had been, he neglected his duties towards Agape Lodge and its members. This was perhaps the final straw for many of his peers. I get the impression that many of them considered him something of a prima donna, were tired of his waywardness, and saw an opportunity to cut him down to size. The various members of the Lodge never seemed to have much compassion in telling tales on each other to Crowley, and he received reports from several different sources on this latest escapade of Jack Parsons. From these reports, Crowley concluded that Parsons' flaws had finally overcome his promise, and that Parsons was a gullible fool beyond redemption. He was, furthermore, infuriated by Parsons' intimations that, in the interests of secrecy, he could not provide a full account of what had transpired during the Babalon Working. Parsons was suspended from his position as head of the Lodge, and departed soon after.

---

It is hard to know in greater detail just what did go on at this time. I have seen a letter which Crowley wrote in January 1946 -- some weeks prior to the Babalon Working -- in which he names someone other than Parsons as Grand Master of Agape Lodge. Be that as it may, I have also seen a reference to Parsons being called to account, at a special Lodge meeting, over certain things with which his colleagues were unhappy -- such as coming up with a text which purported to be the fourth chapter of "THE BOOK OF THE LAW", an act of heresy for which he was lucky not to be burned at the stake. It is certain that he departed the O.T.O. at around this time, though he continued to regard himself as a member of the A.'.A.'. He remained on friendly terms with many of his colleagues, and he continued to correspond with Germer until his death.

Not so with Crowley, however. Crowley must have been bitterly disappointed with Parsons. He had had a high regard for his abilities, as well as a keen awareness of faults such as impulsiveness and recklessness -- faults which, as Crowley now saw it, had led to an inevitable downfall. Two short letter extracts show this disappointment -- both, as it happens, to Louis T. Culling. In the course of a letter dated October 1946, he said:

"About J.W.P. -- all that I can say is that I am very sorry -- I feel sure that he had fine ideas, but he was led astray firstly by Smith, then he was robbed of his last penny by a confidence man named Hubbard."

His last words are in the course of a letter of December 1946:

"I have no further interest in Jack and his adventures; he is just a weak-minded fool, and must go to the devil in his own way. Requiescat in pace."

Although Parsons and Hubbard went their separate ways after the court settlement, that is not quite the end of the story as far as Hubbard is concerned. Mention was made above to a further parallel between Hubbard and Kelly. In the course of a letter in January 1950, Parsons drew attention to an interesting similarity. In the course of the Babalon Working, the rituals included the Enochian Call of the Seventh Aire. This was in line with a passage in "LIBER 49", where Parsons was urged to "...seek me in the Seventh Aire". Parsons continued:

"I have the text of Dee's skrying in the Seventh Aire, which as he said '...so terrified me that, beseeching God to have mercy upon me, I finally answer that I will from this day forward meddle no more herein'. The voice, speaking from Kelly, resulted in a sinister dissociation of Kelly's personality. The parallel with my own Working with Ron, is appalling. After this Kelly robbed Dee, absconded with his wife, and developed a criminal confidence career. This is the voice:

'I am the Daughter of Fortitude, and ravished every hour from my 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; few or 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 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 come and dwell amongst you; and behold, I will bring forth children unto you, and they shall be the Sons of Comfort in the Age that is to come.'

In view of the fact that this MSS was unknown to Hubbard and I, the parallelism is really extraordinary. I have found another prophecy in "KHALED KHAN", which I shall send later..."

Quite how much of this is true, I don't know. The passage as quoted in the letter does differ in some ways from the passage as published in Meric Casaubon's selection of the Dee diaries,

"A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed For Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits", published in 1659.

For instance, the concluding phrase "...in the Age that is to come" does not appear. Also, I have yet to ascertain how true the account is of Kelly's exit from Dee's life and his subsequent career. Nevertheless, it is an intriguing thought the Hubbard's life could have been disrupted through the Babalon Working. After reading the critical biography about Hubbard ("BARE-FACED MESSIAH", by Russell Miller) it seemed to me that the time with Parsons was a definite watershed for Hubbard. Prior to it, he seemed basically a colorful, mendacious eccentric; after it, he seemed to slide into insanity. There is no sharp dividing line, but the difference is clear.

In 1969, the "Sunday Times" newspaper published an article on the lines of "Founder of Scientology involved in Black Magic", in which they recounted details ofthe Babalon Working. The article was based on details gleaned from the Gerald Yorke Collection at the Warburg Institute, to which the reporters had gained access. Hubbard instituted legal proceedings for libel, and the "Sunday Times" for reasons of their own decided not to fight it. Subsequently, Yorke withdrew from the Warburg those papers relating to the Working. They were incidentally, returned some years ago, following Yorke's death, but are under a 25-year seal. At the time of the action, the Church of Scientology made a statement alleging that Hubbard had been sent in as an FBI agent to break up a "Black Magic group" which had included several prominent scientists. The operation had, they continued, succeeded beyond the wildest expectations: he rescued a girl that they were "using", and the group was dispersed and never recovered.

The activities of Parsons during the next few years are not at all clear. I have only been able to catch glimpses through letters and the like. In 1948 Parsons lost his security clearance to perform classified government defense work, and for a man of his profession this was the virtual withdrawal of his livelihood. This action was stated to be "because of his membership in a religious cult ... believed to advocate sexual perversion ... organized at subject's home ... which had been reported subversive". Parsons commented later that he was suspended on charges of belonging to the O.T.O. and circulating "LIBER OZ". Parsons defended himself in closed court, and the charges were dropped. In the meantime, Marjorie Cameron left him; their estrangement lasted several years. What lay behind this rift I do not know, but it did seem final at the time. In the document referred to earlier, "ANALYSIS BY A MASTER OF THE TEMPLE", he makes the following allusion -- again, he is speaking in the third person:

"Candy appeared in the answer to your call, in order to wean you from wetnursing. She has demonstrated the nature of woman to you in such unequivocal terms that you should have no further room for illusion on the subject.

The suspension and inquisition was my opportunity -- one of the final chains in the link. At this time you were enabled to prepare your thesis, formulate your Will, and take the Oath of the Abyss, thus making it possible (although only partially) to manifest. The exit of Candy prepares for the final stage of your initial preparation."

"Candy" is short for Candida, the Magical Name of Marjorie Cameron. There was a reunion in late 1949 or early 1950, and they resumed living together as man and wife.

As mentioned earlier, Parsons still considered himself a member of the A.'.A.'. In December 1948 he took the Oath of Magister Templi, and the name Belarion, Antichrist. This oath was taken in the presence of Wilford T. Smith, with whom he had evidently retained some sort of relationship. In 1949 he issued "THE BOOK OF THE ANTICHRIST". This is a short text, and in it he relates how he was stripped of everything that he was, and then rededicated to Babalon. This was, he considered, a recharging of the current generated by the Babalon Working. He also pledged that the work of The Beast 666 would be fulfilled, and he seems to have seen that work as being, at least in part, a subversion of Christian ethics. He further prophesied that within seven years Babalon would manifest, so bringing his work to fruition.

In September 1950 his employment at Hughes Aircraft Corporation was terminated. He was found to be in possession of a number of classified documents -- several of them, as it happens, being co-written by him and dating from his days at Cal. Tech. A lengthy investigation by the State Attorney followed in which the FBI were involved. Parsons it emerged, was hopeful of finding employment in Israel. To this end he was seeking to persuade them of the case for building a jet-propulsion factory complex, and had been using the documents for background information. It was eventually concluded that there were insufficient grounds for prosecution, many of the documents containing information that should by then have been declassified anyway. However, there were repercussions. The Appeals Board, who had reinstated his security clearance in March 1949, informed him that in their view he no longer had the requisite honesty and integrity; accordingly, the clearance was again withdrawn in January 1952. This would have been the end of Parsons' career in that particular scientific area.

From some incomplete essays that survive from this period, it seems that Parsons was working towards building up some sort of teaching Order with a Thelemic core, but relating to paganism and witchcraft, and was preparing papers of instruction for such an Order. By profession he was now building his own chemicals practice. He had sold the main part of his property -- the mansion itself -- for redevelopment some time earlier, and occupied the coach-house. The garage he had converted into a laboratory, equipped with chemicals and equipment. There was a plan to move to Mexico for awhile, both to pursue mystical and magical research and to further his chemical practice. He and Cameron had actually vacated the coach-house, Parsons went back and forth over the course of several days, moving out his chemicals onto a trailer. On one such visit, on the afternoon of 17 June 1952, he dropped a container of fulminate of mercury, a highly-unstable explosive. The resulting explosion was powerful and devastating, destroying most of the coach-house. Parsons was seriously injured; horrifically enough, though, he was still conscious when rescuers got to him. He died an hour later, in the hospital.

Controversy has remained over his death. Many regarded it as highly unlikely that a scientist of his experience could so mishandle such a powerful explosive. During those last days he wrote what was probably his last letter, to Karl Germer. It is bizarre, and merits quoting in full, it perhaps casts light on his frame of mind at the time:

"No doubt you will be delighted to hear from an adept who has undertaken the operation of his H.G.A. in accord with our traditions.

The operation began auspiciously with a chromatic display of psychosomatic symptoms, and progressed rapidly to acute psychosis. The operator has altered satisfactorily between manic hysteria and depressing melancholy stupor on approximately 40 cycles, and satisfactory progress has been maintained in social ostracism, economic collapses and mental disassociation.

These statements are mentioned not in any vainglorious spirit of conceit, but rather that they may serve as comfort and inspiration to other aspirants on the Path.

Now I'm off to the wilds of Mexico for a period, also in pursuit of the elusive H.G.A. before winding up in the guard (room) finally via the booby hotels, the graveyard, or ---? If the final, you can tell all the little practicuses that I wouldn't have missed it for anything."

No one. Once called 210.

The manner of Parsons' death brings to mind the association of Babalon with flame. The lengthy passage quoted earlier from the "THE VISION AND THE VOICE" uses the idea of flame, as did the material communicated during the Babalon Working. The passage,

"...for She shall absorb thee, and thou shalt become living flame before She incarnates..." is particularly haunting.

In some of his letters written in the years after the Babalon Working, Parsons seemed to be expecting a violent death, and he almost certainly had this similar passage in mind. A fragment survives from an earlier version of "THE BOOK OF BABALON", which is interesting in this connection:

"...because of this mystery BABALON is incarnate upon the earth today, awaiting the proper hour for Her manifestation. And this my book, that is dedicated to Her, is preparation and a portent for that time. And in that day my work will be accomplished, and I shall be blown away upon the Breath of a Father, even as it is prophesied. And thus I labour lonely and outcast and abominable, and he-goat upon the muck heaps of the world. Yet I am content with my lot, since though I am clothed with barncloth, yet shall I come in power and purple, for of this also am I contemptuous. Yea, I am."

Whatever the truth of this matter, Jack Parsons has remained over the years a figure of fascination to many. I have attempted in the course of this essay to summarize the events of the last fifteen or so years of his life. A more considered evaluation of his life and work requires a lot more research and experience, and remains a labour of love for someone. To that person, "BELOVED OF BABALON" is offered as a foundation.

[Magda Hassan]

Jack Parsons
JPL's Sorcerous Scientist

Excerpted from:
Jack Parsons: Sorcerous Scientist
1990 by Douglas Chapman
Strange Magazine #6, ISSN 0894-8968
P.O. Box 2246, Rockville, MD 20847
(301) 881-3530

[TABLE="width: 600"]
[TR]
[TD="align: center"]"The [Babalon] Working began in 1945-46, a few
months before Crowley's death in 1947, and just
prior to the wave of unexplained aerial phenomena
now recalled as the 'Great Flying Saucer Flap'...
Parsons opened a door and something flew in.

"A Gateway for the Great Old Ones has already been
established -- and opened -- by members of the O.T.O.
who are en rapport with this entity [Lam, an extra-
terrestrial being whom Crowley supposedly contacted
while in America in 1919]."

-Kenneth Grant, O.T.O.
[/TD]
[TD="width: 175, align: center"]
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

The Sorcerous Scientist

"I hight Don Quixote, I live on peyote,
marijuana, morphine and cocaine,
I never know sadness, but only a madness
that burns at the heart and the brain.
I see each charwoman, ecstatic, inhuman,
angelic, demonic, divine.
Each wagon a dragon, each beer mug a flagon
that brims with ambrosial wine." [SUP](1)[/SUP]

-John Whiteside (Jack") Parsons (1943)

The preceding poem is the most famous written work of John Whiteside Parsons (1914-1952). He helped make science fiction into fact, yet this dark and handsome man, born of a well-to-do Los Angeles family, made his private life "visionary" in a different way, being as involved with ceremonial magic outside of working hours as he was with rocketry research during the day. In the mid-to-late 1940s, his major accomplishments behind him, magic came to obsess him all the more.

Frank Malina, one of his colleagues at Caltech (California Institute of Technology) in Pasadena, has chronicled John (Jack) Parsons' contributions to rocketry.[SUP](2)[/SUP] In 1936, Parsons and Edward S. Forman came upon a report of a GALCIT (Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory-Caltech) lecture concerning the idea of a rocket-powered airplane. Parsons, though a self-trained chemist, had powers of imagination that proved to be invaluable in all of his pursuits (whether scientific or magical). He and Forman (a mechanic) bad together been making small black-powder rockets.

They wanted to experiment with a liquid propellant rocket motor, so (lacking the funds) they approached Caltech. As a result, Malina (in 1936) came up with a proposal for his doctoral thesis on rocket propulsion and performance in-flight. Theodore von Karman (who headed GALCIT) gave Malina permission to collaborate with Forman and Parsons, even though the latter two were neither students nor staff members of the institute.

Even so, funds were scarce, and the three experimenters chipped in necessary funds for the materials. They conducted the tests at Arroyo Seco, behind the Devil's Gate Dam in Pasadena (very near the present-day Jet Propulsion Laboratory), a site that, unbeknownst to them, had previously been used by rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard. (Forteans should make special note of the 'Devil's Gate' place-name.)


The "Suicide Squad"

Weld Arnold and Hsue Shen Tsien soon joined GALCIT rocket research, completing the well-remembered team. The group became known as the 'suicide squad" because of a 1937 test misfire in which a nitrogen dioxide/alcohol cloud caused a thin layer of rust to appear on much lab equipment. Henceforth, the small scale rocket motor responsible was moved from the building. The failed experiment, providentially, gave Parsons an important idea (to be recounted shortly).

In the summer of 1938, the staff decreased, leaving Malina, Forman and Parsons as remaining core members. A few months later, the National Academy of Science (NAS) Committee on Army Air Corps Research commenced study with the GALCIT rocket research group, with the express interest of finding ways to assist the takeoffs of heavily-laden aircraft by using rocketry.

A $10,000 contract was thus awarded by the NAS to Caltech to develop "jet" (actually rocket) propulsion to be used to provide "super-performance" for propeller aircraft. Liquid and solid propellant rocket engines were part of this research. Von Karman took charge, with Malina, Parsons and Forman being the major members of his staff. In 1940, Parsons was able to show the Air Corps that red-fuming nitric acid was a better oxidizer than liquid oxygen (making use of knowledge gained from the 1937 misfire). [SUP](3)[/SUP] This led to important later developments.

As can be seen, Parsons was already invaluable to the development of the technology that eventually got America into outer space.


The Secret Parsons

But he had a secret life, which appeared totally at odds with his public one, and it came to further dominate his life as the '40s progressed.

Jack Parsons and his wife Helen bad come into contact with the Agape lodge of the O.T.O. (Ordo Templi Orientis international magical fraternity) in Los Angeles in 1939, and had joined it in 1941. It was under the leadership of Wilfred Talbot Smith, a Britisher who had founded this particular lodge about a decade earlier, circa 1930.

Smith and Parsons' wife hit it off nicely and he was soon not much in evidence around the house and the O.T.O. Gnostic Mass temple in the attic. This latter space was fully fitted out, and even had a copy of the Egyptian 'Stele of Revealing,' venerated by followers of the famous magician Aleister Crowley. It was the only such temple in the world at that time which was properly functioning.

Crowley, the world head of the O.T.O., took action that increased Parsons' stature in the Order. Circa 1943-44, he convinced Smith, via a paper entitled 'Is Smith a God?' that astrological research had shown that Smith was not a man, but actually an incarnation of some deity. Taking the hint that Crowley wanted him out, the "god" went into private magical practice, eventually with reportedly rewarding results, remaining head of the lodge in name only.

Parsons became acting master of the lodge. [SUP](4)[/SUP] Why did Crowley in effect kick Smith upstairs? The ostensible reason seemed to be the danger that the man was turning the Order into (as Crowley put it) 'that slimy abomination, a love cult'." [SUP](5)[/SUP]

Actually, Crowley, who was unable to emigrate to the United States, was isolated from the only successful O.T.O. lodge in the world. Because of this frustration, bad blood resulted, despite the fact that Smith was probably the best field commander Crowley ever had.

Parsons had lost his wife to Smith, yet remained on good terms with her. He was kept busy by Order activities, one of the most important of which was the sending of money to Crowley, for both the old man's minimal upkeep and the O.T.O. publishing fund. A good percentage came from Parsons' own pocket." [SUP](6)[/SUP]

Crowley, who brought actual fame to the O.T.O. (which was already well-known in Masonic circles), was one of Parsons' major inspirations in life. The elderly man's accomplishments had been many: as a poet, publisher, mountain climber, chess master, and bisexual practitioner of sexual magic (or "Magick," as he termed it). Made famous by yellow journalists as the "Wickedest Man in the World," he considered his central identity to be the "Great Beast 666" as referred to in the book of "Revelation" in the Bible, though he was not leaning on that work particularly in his religious ideas.

Needless to say, Crowley felt that the Bible had misconstrued the meaning of the Beast and the Whore of Babylon necessary elements of the succession to the Aeon of Horus, the Aeon of the Crowned and Conquering Child.

Crowley synopsized human development thusly:

"Within the memory of man we have had the Pagan period, the worship of Nature, of Isis, of the Mother, of the Past; the Christian period, the worship of Man, of Osiris, of the Present. The first period is simple, quiet, easy, and pleasant; the material ignores the spiritual; the second is of suffering and death: the spiritual strives to ignore the material.... The new Aeon is the worship of the spiritual made one with the material, of Horus, of the Child, of the Future." [SUP](7)[/SUP]

Renowned as the most noted master of the occult of the last century, Crowley's work is still influential (his books are sometimes stocked even in New Age bookstores).

According to most accounts, when Parsons' father died (circa the early '40s), Parsons inherited a mansion and coach-house at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena, California. To the shock of the neighbors, the place became a haven for Bohemians and atheists, who were the sort of people to whom Parsons liked to rent out rooms.

The lodge headquarters was moved to this location, making use of two rooms in the house: the bedroom (which became a properly decorated temple), and a wood-paneled library dominated by an enormous portrait of Crowley.

According to a story told by L. Sprague DeCamp (most recently appearing in the June 24, 1990 Los Angeles Times, p. A35), at one point the police -- who had heard neighbors' reports of a ritual in which a nude pregnant woman jumped nine times through a fire in the yard -- came to investigate, but Parsons put them off by emphasizing his scientific credentials.


His Career Rockets

Returning to the events of 1940, the explosions of many of Parsons' rockets on the test stand caused second thoughts among many involved in the government-financed project. After work by Von Karman and Malina on the differential equations involved on the theoretical side, Parsons was given permission to keep on with his tests, and a few months later the earliest "jet-assisted takeoff" rockets were created. These were the direct forerunners of the modern large solid-propellant engines.

The first American rocket-assisted takeoff (August 12,1941) made use of a Parsons-developed solid-propellant (GALCIT 27 -- which provided a 28 lb. maximum thrust for 12 seconds). But tests showed that GALCIT 27 would explode when stored for long periods, so Parsons, Mark M. Mills and Fred S. Miller came up with a more stable fuel (GALCIT 53) in June 1942.

At the same time, others were working with Parsons' idea for a red-fuming nitric acid-gasoline engine (a liquid propellant rocket). On April 15, 1942, the first American flight of an aircraft making use of such rocket engines to assist takeoff was accomplished.

The previous month, Malina, Parsons and Forman, with the advice of von Karman's attorney, had set up the Aerojet Engineering Corporation in March 1942, for the express purpose of properly exploiting the developments that they had been making. Jack Parsons was one of the vice-presidents at the time of incorporation and helped supervise the changeover to full-scale production." [SUP](8)[/SUP]

Parsons' High Ideals

Also a science fiction enthusiast, Parsons met fellow fan Alva Rogers, who romanced another resident of Parsons' house.

"I always found Jack's insistence that he believed in, and practiced, magic hard to reconcile with his educational and cultural background," Rogers opined.

He originally thought that Parsons was just doing it to shock his friends until he saw letters from Crowley, and evidences of Parsons' funding of the guru. [SUP](9)[/SUP]

Parsons' magical idealism becomes clear if one peruses his writings. In the 1946 essay "Freedom is a Two Edged Sword" (newly reprinted in an anthology of the same title, published by Falcon Press) he writes of the deeper meanings of his quest:

"[The individual] must go down like Moses, into his unknown self ...into the labyrinths of the dark land. There he will meet the Mother and hear her final question, which is not a silly riddle but the most wonderful and terrible of all questions: 'what is man?'

"And thereafter ...he may find the Graal, ultimate consciousness ...For it is he, wonderful monster, embryo god, that has swum in the fish....peered from the eyes of serpents, swung with the ape, and shaken the earth with the tramp of the tyrannosaurus hoof. It is he who has cried out on all crosses, ruled on all thrones, grubbed in all gutters. It is he whose face is reflected and distorted in all heavens and hells, he, the child of the stars, the son of the ocean, this creature of dust, this wonder and terror called man." [SUP](10)[/SUP]

After having lost Helen Parsons to Smith in 1944, Parsons soon fell for her younger sister, Sara Northrup (a.k.a. Betty), who was 18 year old and a student at USC. Parsons encouraged her to drop out of school and come live with him (not exactly thrilling her parents). She joined the O.T.O. and was not monogamous, since she agreed with Parsons that jealousy was a base emotion not fit for the illuminated.

Delineating such beliefs, he once wrote that,

"...by debasing the mother image into a demon-virgin-angel, it has denied each daughter the possibility of her fulfillment," and that "...by imputing the concepts of nastiness, dirt, shamefulness, guilt, indecency and obscenity to the entire sexual process, it has poisoned the life force at its source." [SUP](11)[/SUP]

He tried his hardest to live up to his philosophy, but events put him to the extremist possible test, leading as they did to his eventual estrangement from Betty.

During this period, also (circa 1945), Parsons became friends with science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, with whom he shared many interests. Details of their friendship can be found in the biographies of Hubbard.


The Scarlet Woman

Parsons and an associate attempted to bring about some sort of incarnation of the goddess Babalon. To understand Parsons' attitude towards Babalon, one can refer to his "Freedom..." essay:

"She will come girt with the sword of freedom, and before her kings and priests will tremble and cities and empires will fall, and she will be called BABALON, the scarlet woman....And women will respond to her war cry, and throw off their shackles and chains, and men will respond to her challenge, forsaking the foolish ways and the little ways, and she will shine as the ruddy evening star in the bloody sunset of Gotterdamerung, will shine as a morning star when the night has passed, and a new dawn breaks over the garden of Pan" [SUP](12)[/SUP]

Parsons performed rituals (reportedly to the background music of Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff records) for 11 days in a process known as the "Babalon Working." On the second and third days he got an unwanted result, writing to Crowley that "the wind storm is very interesting, but that is not what I asked for." [SUP](13)[/SUP]

On the seventh day of the Working, Parsons was awakened by seven loud knocks. Getting up, he soon discovered a smashed table lamp.

Other phenomena occurred on subsequent nights, including an (alleged) attack by an entity against one of their group which knocked a candle out of the man's hand and paralyzed his right arm overnight. Parsons banished - by gesturing at it with a magical sword - what they took to be a seven-foot-tall, brownish-yellow light. It is rumored that he thought the apparition to be Wilfred T. Smith. [SUP](14)[/SUP]

On January 18, 1946, Parsons returned from a magical undertaking, finding the needed "Scarlet Woman" (Marjorie Cameron) waiting for him at the house. Parsons was overjoyed and wrote to Crowley:

"I have my elemental! ...She has red hair and slant green eyes as specified." [SUP](15)[/SUP]

Parsons, on February 28, 1946, went out into the Mojave Desert in order to invoke Babalon, thus taking down 77 clauses of what came to be known as his Book of Babalon.

Further work at the home temple produced more instructions for an imminent ritual, the directions for which were supposedly emanating from the astral plane.

The rituals (whose objective was to produce a magical child, "mightier than all the kings of the earth") continued for two days. Parsons was confident of their effectiveness, and wrote an exultant letter to Crowley, whose response was not what would have been wished. Parsons was upset by his mentor's lack of comprehension. Crowley immediately wrote a letter to Karl Germer (who was the head of the O.T.O. in the U.S. at that time) stating that,

"Apparently Parsons...or somebody is producing a Moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts." [SUP](16)[/SUP]

Crowley reorganized the lodge on the basis of these actions removing Parsons from power.


Stormy Relationships

Parsons, Betty, and a key magical associate activated Allied Enterprises (a yacht business of theirs), the intent of which was to buy boats in the East in order to sail them to California -- where they could command a higher price.

The business had been founded some time earlier. But, as it eventually worked out, Parsons was undergoing financial hardship in the West, and went after his partners to find out why they had not shown up in California. They were nowhere to be found. He soon discovered that they were out at sea. From within a Miami, Florida hotel room, Parsons invoked Bartzabel (the spirit of Mars and war). A squall forced his associates back to port. [SUP](17)[/SUP]

Dade County, Florida court records reveal that Parsons filed a lawsuit. [SUP](18)[/SUP] The result: Parsons got two of the boats back and made an arrangement with his partners, so that they could pay him off for the third. He never saw them again. Betty continued to think well of Parsons (despite their estrangement), calling him a "truly great man." Even so, she married the other business partner. One can easily imagine Parsons' feelings about this turn of events. Both had been key people in his personal, magical and business lives.

Because of the O.T.O. disaster, Parsons changed his magical emphases to "the Witchcraft." [SUP](19)[/SUP]

He sold the main house at South Orange Grove, moving (with Marjorie Cameron - whom he later married) into the coach-house on the property.

Several of the original incorporators of Aerojet sold out their stock in the company to General Tire in 1952. Frank Malina did not do so, and became, as a result, very rich. [SUP](20)[/SUP] It is rumored that Jack Parsons had sold his shares in the mid-1940s.

In 1949, with, surprisingly, Wilfred T. Smith as witness, Parsons took the Oath of the Abyss, to unite himself with the Universal consciousness, taking the magical name of Belarion Armiluss Al Dajjal AntiChrist. John Symonds, a biographer of Crowley, has stated that Parsons had by now become psychotic [SUP](21)[/SUP](but it should be kept in mind that Symonds is a man of generally harsh judgments). On the contrary, Parsons' writings from the late 1940s and early 1950s show a sparkling lucidity.

Take, for example, this again-timely comment from "Freedom...":

"Religious groups, backed by a publicity conscious press, are constantly campaigning for the prohibition of art and literature which, as if by divine prerogative, they term, 'indecent,' immoral or dangerous.

"It would seem that all organizations are devoted to one common purpose, the suppression of freedom. Nor is their sincerity any excuse. History is a bloody testament that sincerity can achieve atrocities which cynicism could never conceive." [SUP](22)[/SUP]

In a 1950 Introduction to the essay, he writes: "We are one nation, and one world....We cannot suppress our brothers' liberty without murdering ourselves. We will stand together, as men, for human freedom and human dignity, or we will fall together, simians all, back to the swamp." [SUP](23)[/SUP]

Parsons' answer to the dilemma was magick, discussed in his essay "On Magick."

"It may be stated," he writes, "that magick is the method of training individuals towards total consciousness by the stimulation of various centers of the mind and by the cultivation of field thinking. The object of this training is the manifestation of initiated leadership towards a more conscious, better integrated, and more interesting and significant social culture. In short the object of magick is the unfoldment of the individual in all the ways of love; and the enlightenment of society to accept all the commitments of this unfoldment as the necessary conditions of progress." [SUP](24)[/SUP]

If these are the writings of a madman, then many people are mad, including a number of those promoting the New Age way of life.


Sorcery And Science: An Explosive Combination

On June 20, 1952, Parsons was working in the private experimental laboratory in his garage. At 5:08 p.m., the place exploded. The general opinion was that he had dropped fulminate of mercury [SUP](25)[/SUP]. His shattered body lay within the destroyed edifice.

[TABLE="width: 15%, align: right"]
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[TD="align: center"]
The Homunculous
a tiny artificial man with magic powers
[/TD]
[/TR]
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It has been rumored that this was the end result of building psychological pressures. Otherwise, why would he have dropped what he was said to have, when a trash can containing cordite and wrappers of fulminate of mercury was nearby? Especially since he was about to travel to Mexico to test a new explosive he had devised, which was "more powerful than anything yet invented."George Santmeyers, who had worked with him for five years on industrial projects (and did not believe in the rumors of his magical activities) did not think an accident plausible, considering Parsons' technical knowledge. [SUP](26)[/SUP]

But there were other theories. In Nat Freedland's book The Occult Explosion, Renate Druks, an artist and educational filmmaker (who once, at her Malibu beach house, hosted Marjorie Cameron) related an alternate version:

"I have every reason to believe that Jack Parsons was working on some very strange experiments, trying to create what the old alchemists called a homunculus, a tiny artificial man with magic powers. I think that's what he was working on when the accident happened." [SUP](27)[/SUP]

As magical work does not usually lead to explosions, nor deal with explosives, this seems unlikely. Having lost his security clearance because of providing Israel some secrets of his wartime work, Parsons was doing movie special effects work at this time, but of the explosive variety, not the fantastical. [SUP](28)[/SUP]

There were rumors of self-inflicted death or even murder connected with Parsons' demise. Sources close to Parsons have suggested that there was not just one explosion, but two. It is said that Parsons and Cameron would mix dynamite and other explosives in the many vats in the lab. Why then, it has been asked, was the first explosion supposedly from under the floorboards?

This would seem to hint that a bomb bad been planted there. There has been some speculation that the rumored perpetrator was neither a friend nor associate of Parson's, but rather an individual who must have bad a strong motive such as revenge.

Nevertheless, if Parsons' death was not a suicide, it becomes even sadder. He and Cameron had many plans for the future, having intended to travel to Mexico-and next perhaps to Spain or Israel, according to what Cameron told others. [SUP](29)[/SUP]

Whatever actually caused Parsons' death, and whether there was any public distortion of the truth or not, in regard to what happened next there has been no dispute. His mother, Ruth Virginia Parsons, after hearing the tragic news, committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping tablets, in front of a frightened, crippled friend who could not move to help her. [SUP](30)[/SUP]

Many men of genius have behaved quirkily in their private lives. Parsons' tragedy was that his brand of idealism was often 'rewarded' by betrayal. Yet, while his delvings into magic may not have been as beneficial to society as his rocketry research, they have left us with some points to consider. Frater H.H.D. introduced his contribution thusly:

"By applying to occultism the scientific acumen so intrinsic to his professional research, he anticipated the ontological implications of current quantum physics concerning the nature of reality." [SUP](31)[/SUP]

While this claim may be debatable (and similar ones have been advanced towards other modern mystics), Parsons did keep careful records of his magical work, thus allowing the generations that follow to have some chance of evaluating his magick experiments, designed to make use of alleged unknown aspects of reality.

Some have tried to make sense of it already. Kenneth Grant, a British magician, has made some -- to say the least -- astounding inferences about Parsons' Babalon Working. He writes that:

'The Working began in 1945-46, a few months before Crowley's death in 1947, and just prior to the wave of unexplained aerial phenomena now recalled as the "Great Flying Saucer Flap." Parsons opened a door and something flew in...." [SUP](32)[/SUP]

Crowley's 1919 Portrait of LAM

Grant's associates have kept busy in this regard. Grant states that:

"A Gateway for the Great Old Ones has already been established -- and opened -- by members of the O.T.O. [an English splinter group] who are en rapport with this entity [Lam, an extra-terrestrial being whom Crowley supposedly contacted while in America in 1919 - click image right].

Crowley's portrait of Lam has been reproduced in [Grant's] The Magical Revival....[SUP](33)[/SUP] Crowley's rendition, by the way, resembles the typical representation of an UFO entity.

If these suggestively "Lovecraftian" details turn out to have any merit, Parsons may have helped us contact outer space in more ways than one. At the present time, however, such ideas seem highly debatable. Certainly, neither Crowley nor Parsons were of the opinion that their work concerned extraterrestrials of the Lovecraftian or the UFO varieties (though Cameron once sighted a UFO). [SUP](34)[/SUP]

Yet, having turned what had been termed "science fiction" into science fact, is it conceivable that Parsons' work may someday do the same for elements of "fantasy?"

His imaginative powers had solved tricky scientific problems and thus paved the way for space travel. Yet, perhaps because of his lack of accredited training, and the fact that the scientific papers to which he contributed were often unpublished (due to wartime secrecy), his name is not to be found in the scientific "who's who" (though a crater on the moon -- 37' N. 171' W. was in 1972 named for him). But his name has often been noted in the histories of magic.

Will further examination of the full extent of his work make him more of a name to conjure with-a man who led the way to inner as well as outer space?

Some corrections and clarifications by OTO's Bill Heidrick


Footnotes:

1. John W. Parsons, from a poem printed in the Oriflamme, Journal of the O.T.O., 21 February 1943.
   
2. Frank J. Malina, "Origins and First Decade of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory," in The History of Rocket Technology, ed. Eugene Morlock Emme. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1964), pp. 46-59.
   
3. Ibid., pp. 46-54.
   
4. Francis King and Isabel Sutherland, The Rebirth of Magic (London: Corgi Books, 1982), p. 180; and Hymenaeus Beta, in 22 July 1990 telephone conversation with Mark Chorvinsky and Douglas Chapman.
   
5. John Symonds, The Great Beast (Frogmore, St. Albans, Herts: Mayflower Books, Ltd., 1973), p. 445.
   
6. lbid; and Hymenaeus Beta, 22 July 1990.
   
7. Aleister Crowley, "Synopsis," The Holy Books of Thelema (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1983), p. xxxi.
   
8. Malina, pp. 54-59.
   
9. Alva Rogers, Darkhouse, 1962.
   
10. Jack Parsons, "Freedom is a Two Edged Sword," in Freedom is a Two Edged Sword, ed. Cameron and Hymenaeus Beta. (Las Vegas: Falcon Press, 1989), p. 35.
    
11. Jack Parsons, "On Magick," in Freedom is a Two Edged Sword, ed. Cameron and Hymenaeus Beta. (Las Vegas: Falcon Press, 1989), p. 48.
    
12. Parsons, "Freedom," pp. 43-44.
    
13. Symonds, p. 447.
    
14. Hymenaeus Beta, 22 July 1990.
    
15. Symonds, p. 447.
    
16. Ibid., p. 448.
    
17. King and Sutherland, p. 181.
    
18. Case No. 101634, Circuit Court, Dade County, Florida.
    
19. King and Sutherland, p. 182.
    
20. The Frank J. Malina Collection at the California Institute of Technology -- Guide to a Microfiche Edition, ed. Judith R. Goodstein and Carol H. Bugd. (Pasadena, CA: Institute Archives, Robert A. Millikan Memorial Library, California Institute of Technology, 1986), p. 17.
    
21. Symonds, p. 449.
    
22. Parsons, "Freedom," p. 18.
    
23. Ibid., p. 10.
    
24. Parsons, "On Magick," p. 47.
    
25. Symonds, p. 449.
    
26. Nat Freedland, The Occult Explosion (New York: Berkley, 1972), pp. 163-164.
    
27. Ibid., p. 164.
    
28. Hymenaeus Beta, 22 July 1990.
    
29. Ibid.
    
30. Pasadena Star News, 21 June 1952 and 5 July 1952.
    
31. Magick, Gnosticism and the Witchcraft. Ed. Fra. H.H.D. (South Stukely, Quebec: 93 Publishing, 1979).
    
32. Kenneth Grant, Outside the Circles of Time (London: Frederick Muller Limited, 1980), p. 50.
    
33. Ibid., p. 228. [Grant also reproduces this picture on Plate 13 of this book.]
    
34. Hymenaeus Beta, 22 July 1990.
    

[Magda Hassan]

JPL's Jack Parsons
and his BABALON Brethren

Excerpt from:
Jack Parsons and the Fall of Babalon
Paul Rydeen
P.O.B. 1371, Kerrville, TX 78029-1371.

Occultist Aleister Crowley, Pasadena JPL's Jack Parsons & Scientology's L.Ron Hubbard
"That's the way they all became the BABALON Bunch©"

Brother Jack Parsons: The Magickal Scientist and His Circle
by Paul Rydeen

"[The angel] carried my spirit away to the desert. I saw the scarlet woman sitting on the beast with seven heads and ten horns, covered with blasphemous names. The woman was clothed in purple and scarlet, and gilded with gold and precious stones and pearls, with a golden cup in her hand filled with the abominations and the unclean things of her fornication. On her forehead a name had been written, 'A Mystery: Babalon the great, the mother of harlots and of the abominations of the earth.' I saw the woman was drunk from the blood of the saints, and from the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. Seeing her, I wondered greatly."

Revelation 17:3-6

I shall I write of the mystery and the terror, of the wonder and pity and splendor of the sevenfold star that is Babalon? I shall tell of the tragic life of her most devoted disciple and beloved son, Jack Parsons. In doing so, I will correct previous misconceptions while correlating the known facts and wild legends that lie in several far-flung sources.

Kenneth Grant gives a good description of Parsons in The Magical Revival:

"Imbued with the idea of the Kingly Man, as that expression is understood in the Cult of Thelema [Crowley's invention], Parsons bent his not inconsiderable energies, physical and intellectual, to the discovery of his True Will.

Born on October 2, 1914, in Los Angeles [descendant of a HellFire Club founder, according to Michael Hoffman], he lived a lonely childhood, due in part to his parents' broken marriage. He spent a great deal of his youth reading and day-dreaming, and nurturing a growing resentment of all interference, especially of the kind posing as "authority." He developed strong revolutionary tendencies and when he encountered Crowley's writings -- which he first did through Wilfred T. Smith -- he was instantly alive to the significance of Thelema. He joined Smith's Agape Lodge [OTO], and, at the same time, became a Probationer, 1º = 10º, of the A:. A:.

Smith was a member of Frater Achad's (Charles Stansfeld Jones) OTO lodge in Vancouver. He met Crowley there in 1915. Smith moved to California in 1930. He immediately founded the Agape Lodge in Pasadena. Frater Achad kept the Vancouver lodge open during this period, under a different name. It would later close. In "Alchemical Conspiracy and the Death of the West" Michael Hoffman writes of Parsons. Hoffman tells us that the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) had a temple on nearby Mount Palomar. The local Indians regarded the mountain as holy. Hoffman says, "The OTO believed that Palomar was the sexual chakra of the Earth." Parsons commuted regularly between Palomar and Pasadena. The Mount Palomar Observatory opened in 1949. Smith probably consecrated his temple on Palomar soon after his move to California in 1930, before the Observatory was planned.

Palomar lies just minutes north of the 33[SUP]rd[/SUP] parallel. This is significant because 33 is an important number in Masonic symbolism. It is the number of the highest grade of the Scottish Rite. It is also the number of years Christ walked on the earth. Hoffman mentions the 33 bones of the human spinal cord. This brings to mind kundalini yoga. Crowley's OTO was a quasi-masonic order. The higher grades show esoteric Hindu influences of a sexual nature.

Parsons first met Smith in 1939. He joined the Agape Lodge in 1941. Parsons was to be its head during the turbid 1940s (ca. 1942-1947). Smith was known in the Lodge as Frater Velle Omnia Velle Nihil (aka Fra. 132). He was an expatriate Englishman. Smith had a reputation for womanizing that equaled Crowley's. Parsons saw Smith as a second father. The two stayed close throughout their lives.

Smith wrote to Crowley in March, 1941,

"I think I have at long last a really excellent man, John Parsons. And starting next Tuesday he begins a course of talks with a view to enlarging our scope. He has an excellent mind and much better intellect than myself...John Parsons is going to be valuable."

Soror Estai (actress Jane Wolfe) had been with Crowley at Cefalu [Italian island where Crowley had previously set up residence before being kicked out by the local authorities] before coming to California. She recorded her first impression of Parsons in her Magical Record for December, 1940:

"Unknown to me, John Whiteside Parsons, a newcomer, began astral travels. This knowledge decided Regina [Kahl] to undertake similar work. All of which I learned after making my own decision. So the time must be propitious. Incidentally, I take Jack Parsons to be the child who 'shall behold them all' [i.e., the Mysteries. See the Book of the Law I: 54-55].

"26 years of age, 6'2", vital, potentially bisexual at the very least, University of the State of California and Cal. Tech., now engaged in Cal Tech chemical laboratories developing 'bigger and better' explosives for Uncle Sam. Travels under sealed orders from the government. Writes poetry -- 'sensuous only', he says. Lover of music, which he seems to know thoroughly. I see him as the real successor of Therion [Crowley]. Passionate; and has made the vilest analyses result in a species of exaltation after the event. Has had mystical experiences which gave him a sense of equality all round, although he is hierarchical in feeling and in the established order."

Parsons' father died in 1942. He left his son a mansion in an expensive part of Pasadena. This may have been his way of making up to his son for his childhood. Parsons shocked the staid residents of this well manicured neighborhood when he started renting out rooms to less-than-desirable tenants. "Only atheists and those of a Bohemian disposition," his newspaper ad stated. The frequent visitors, noisy parties, and questionable goings-on raised many eyebrows. Parsons needed the extra income these renters paid. His progress with rockets had yet to yield any success.

Alva Rogers was a long-time resident of the Parsons house on Orange Street. Rogers became associated with the house after attending several science fiction meetings there. Parsons held these informal meetings regularly on weekends. Rogers wrote,

"Mundane souls were unceremoniously rejected as tenants. There was a professional fortune teller and seer who always wore appropriate dresses and decorated her apartment with symbols and artifacts of arcane lore. There was a lady, well past middle age but still strikingly beautiful, who claimed to have been at various times the mistress of half the famous men in France. There was a man who had been a renowned organist in the great movie palaces of the silent era. They were characters all. [From the rent they paid] Jack admitted that he was one of Crowley's main sources of money in America."

At one point local police came to investigate an alleged backyard ceremony. A pregnant woman had reportedly jumped nude through a fire nine times. The police made it clear how absurd they thought the claim was. Parsons easily assured them of his community standing. He was an important rocket scientist with a professional reputation to uphold.

Burton Wolfe writes of a sixteen-year-old boy who reported Parsons to the police. He told them that Parsons' followers had forcibly sodomized him during a Black Mass at the house. The police investigated. They found Parsons' cult to be little more than an organization dedicated to religious and philosophical speculation, with respectable members such as a Pasadena bank president, doctors, lawyers, and Hollywood actors." At one point the FBI became involved after receiving some anonymous letters. One bore the signature, "An American Soldier." The police again cleared Parsons of all charges. They would later stand by their findings when further accusations arose.

Wilfred Smith's mistress of many years was Regina Kahl. She was also his High Priestess of the Gnostic Mass. Separate photos of her and Smith are in The Equinox Vol. III, no. 10. Smith had a charming personality, a strong affinity for the opposite sex, and what Grant calls "something more than an aptitude for magick." One of Smith's conquests was Soror Grimaud, aka Helen Northrup. She was Parsons' first wife.

Helen bore Smith a child in 1943. Crowley decided that was enough of Smith's sexual infidelity. His affairs were a detriment to the Order. Crowley expelled him through an ingenious means. Crowley drew up a horoscope for Smith based on the unusual circumstance of his birth. Smith's horoscope had a complex of eight planets. One could interpret this horoscope as if Smith were an avatar of some god. This was something Crowley had found in only one other instance, that of Shakespeare.

Crowley sent Smith on a Grand Magical Retirement to find the god within himself. Crowley wrote Liber Apotheoosis (aka Liber 132) for Smith to use as his guide. Smith's Retirement took place on Temple Hill at Rancho Royale, not Mount Palomar. Helen accompanied him. Crowley formally expelled Smith in late 1943. Parsons then became Acting Head of the Lodge. Regina Kahl would die during Smith's Magical Retirement, in late 1945 or early 1946. Her untimely death deeply depressed him.

Parsons divorced Helen in 1943. In the meantime he struck up a relationship with her younger sister Betty. Like Helen, Betty acted as Parsons' priestess at the Gnostic Mass. She was also his partner in the performance of 9th Degree magic. This is the magic of inducing altered states through prolonged sexual ecstasy. At Parsons' urging the teenage Betty left the University of Southern California (USC), to her parents' chagrin.

Enter "Frater H." Grant refers to him as "a confidence trickster who had wormed his way into the OTO on the pretense of being interested in Magick." He was "still at large [1972], having grown wealthy and famous by a misuse of the secret knowledge which he had wormed out of Parsons." Other writers refer to him merely as "Frater X." The late Frater X's identity is now clearly a matter of public record. I see no reason to do anything other than call him by name. He wasL.Ron Hubbard: philosopher, world traveller, science fiction author, and founder of Scientology.

Parsons was young and impressionable. He had gone through repeated upheavals during his short life. He was vulnerable. Hubbard made a big impression on him. Parsons forgot his obligation and violated his oath to the Order. He revealed to Hubbard the secrets of the highest grades of the OTO.

Parsons wrote to Crowley in July, 1945,

"About three months ago I met [Hubbard], a writer and explorer of whom I had known for some time [because he wrote science fiction]...He moved in with me about two months ago, and although Betty and I are still friendly, she has transferred her sexual affections to him...We are pooling our resources in a partnership that will act as a limited company to control our business ventures. I think I have made a great gain, and as Betty and I are the best of friends there is little loss...I need a magical partner. I have many experiments in mind..."

The magical partner Parsons envisioned was to be his partner in a 9[SUP]th[/SUP] Degree working. Grant writes,

"Having lost confidence in women, Parsons decided to attract an Elemental Spirit to take Betty's place..."

These spirits are called Elementals because of their association with the four elements of the ancients. To summon one requires a large amount of magical energy, the kind generated by an 8[SUP]th[/SUP] Degree working. The practice of the 8[SUP]th[/SUP] Degree is a solo sexual rite.

Says Grant,

"The instructions that accompany the eighth Degree of the OTO contain methods for evoking an Elemental, or familiar spirit. It is said to be an easy matter to attract such a spirit because the souls of the elements desire constantly to be absorbed into the cycle of human evolution, this being the only way in which they can achieve salvation and perpetuity of existence. On being appropriated by a human organism, the elemental finally becomes absorbed in the immortal principle in man."

Compare Jim Morrison's remark to an interviewer that the air around us is full of spirits.

"They know we exist, and envy us our bodies."

Grant quotes from the instructions for the 8[SUP]th[/SUP] Degree, written about the adept desirous of performing such an operation:

"(1) That he choose wisely a reasonable soul, docile, apt, beautiful, and in all ways worthy of love.

"(2) That he fall not away from love of the Great Goddess into love of this inferior, but give only as a master and of his mercy, knowing that this also is service to the Goddess.

"(3) That of such familiar spirits he have but four [one for each element?]. And let him regulate their service, appointing hours for each.

"(4) That he treat them with kindness and firmness, being on his guard against their tricks.

"This being said, it is enough; for to have them is but the pains to call them forth from their homes. And the Spirits of the Elemental Tablets given by Dr. Dee and Sir Kelley are the best..."

In 1943 Parsons published a brief poem in the Oriflamme, an OTO publication. At this point it bears repeating:

"I hight don Quixote, I life on peyote,
marijuana, morphine and cocaine.
I never know sadness, but only a madness
that burns at tle heart and the brain.
I see each charwoman, ecstatic, inhuman,
angelic, demonic, divine.
Each wagon a dragon, each beer mug a flagon
that brims with ambrosial wine."

Symonds and Wilson have documented that narcotics and hallucinogens were a basic staple of Crowley's magical diet. It is easier to induce astral vision when one alternately dulls and excites the senses by chemical means. One cannot underemphasize the role of drugs here. I suspect they were a part of the Babalon Working. Combined with sex magick, this makes a powerful tool.

Using the "Angelick" language channelled by Elizabethan astrologer John Dee and his scribe Edward Kelley, Parsons began his operation. He recited the Seventh Aire (or Aethyr) in the original Enochian. Per Crowley's advice, he kept diligent records. Parsons would later compare some of the curious results to Kelley's own criminal life. The surviving fragments of Parsons' Babalon Working are now the property of the OTO. Parsons' second wife Marjorie Cameron holds the copyright to Freedom Is A Two-Edged Sword.

The preliminaries began January 4, 1946 at 9 pm. Prokofiev's Violin Concerto played loudly on the phonograph. The formal working would begin the following evening. Russell Miller refers to it as eleven nights of "talisman waving." Later that month Parsons would write Crowley describing his progress. He noted a spontaneous windstorm as a curious side-effect. It began the second day and lasted throughout the Babalon Working. Parsons awoke on the sixth day of the Working, January 10. He heard nine loud, unexplainable knocks. I note a similarity to the nine regular knocks that Whitley Strieber felt confirmed the existence of his Visitors [interesting correlation here, no? -B:.B:.]. Parsons got out of bed. He noticed a lamp lay smashed on the floor. The knocks were repeated on the 15[SUP]th[/SUP].

January 15 was the eleventh and final day. Hubbard perceived a spirit "clad in a black robe and having an evil pasty ["grey" -B:.B:.] face." Grant says this was Smith, who had failed to identify the god within himself. Grant says Smith astrally attacked Parsons in revenge. The electricity went out as they began invoking and something struck Hubbard on the right shoulder. It knocked a candle from his hand. "He called me," Parsons wrote, "and we observed a brownish-yellow light about seven feet high. I brandished a magical sword, and it disappeared. Ron's right arm was paralyzed for the rest of the night." Parsons awakened later that night after hearing a "buzzing, metallic" ["alien" -B:.B:.] voice. The voice cried, "Let me go free!" Parsons sleepily performed the brief magical operation (nonsexual) known as the License to Depart. It is in the Goetia, or Lesser Key of Solomon. Smith's spirit was free to return to his body.

Parsons wrote Crowley,

"I have diligently followed the VIII[SUP]th[/SUP] Degree instructions as:

(a) creation of new orders of beings with consecrated talismanic images. Possible connective result: increase in writing output;
(b) Invocation of Mother Goddess, using Priest's call in mass and silver cup as talisman; sometimes using suitable poetry such as Venus. Possible connective result: loss of Betty's affections as preliminary to
© Invocation of Air Elemental Kerub [Cherub]...in Enochian Air Tablet."

The rite ended with Parsons commanding the spirit to appear in human form. On January 18 they went into the Mojave Desert to recuperate. Parsons turned to Hubbard at the end of the trip and said simply, "It is done."

On February 23, 1946 Parsons triumphantly wrote to Crowley, "I have my elemental! She turned up one night after the conclusion of the Operation, and has been with me since." The Elemental was Marjorie Cameron, sprung from Parsons' head like Sophia from the Godhead or Pallas Athena from Zeus. She adopted the magical name "Candida," [candida -- a vaginal and occasionally intestinal parasitic yeast/fungus -B:.B:.] calling herself "Candy" for short. Soon she married Parsons, and helped him with his magick.

Crowley sent Parsons an admonishment about Cameron. He reminded him of Eliphas Levi's advice that, "The love of the Magus for such things [Elementals] is insensate and may destroy him." Be aware that Crowley considered himself to be the reincarnation of Levi. Crowley also claimed to have intervened personally on Parsons' behalf, presumably on the astral plane. He does not say. It is possible Crowley knew someone who could send a girl like Cameron to Parsons. Cameron was from New York, though she had been born in Iowa and raised in the "Cthulhu Country" of Wisconsin. Crowley had spent some time in New York during World War I. Cameron spent most of her February back in New York visiting her mother. Hubbard was out of town on business.

On February 28, Parsons made a solo trip back to the desert and received Liber 49 in an unexplained manner. Jacques Vallee says Parsons claimed to have met a Venusian there in 1945 or 1946. Without the exact date, one cannot tell if the Venusian was the implied source of Liber 49. Parsons took this to be an affirmation of the need to produce a magickal child.

When Hubbard returned he channelled a message from a red-haired, green-eyed angel ordering them to,

"Light first flame at 10pm, March 2, 1946. The year of Babalon is 4063."

That would be 2118 BC, the significance of which I have not determined. Cameron returned from New York and moved in with Parsons. She was now to be an integral part of the Babalon Working. After Parsons' initial contact with the Beyond, Hubbard began acting as seer. Parsons called him Scribe in his notes. I do not know whether Hubbard actually participated in the higher workings of the OTO. Based on other sources I will discuss shortly it is clear he was present when Parsons did.

The operation began as directed on March 2. That evening a fire started in Parsons' chimney. Later he decided it had occurred when he had smashed an image of Pan as a sacrifice. The idol had been a favorite personal possession. The papers containing the Seventh Aire that he burned may have had something to do with the fire as well. Parsons expressed his confidence, but wrote, "Now I can do no more than pray and wait."

Between the second and fourth of March, 1946, Parsons recorded in a letter to Crowley what he described as,

"the most devastating experience of my life. I believe it was the result of the IXth Degree working with the girl who answered my elemental summons. I have been in direct communication with one who is most Holy and beautiful, mentioned in The Book of the Law. I cannot write the name at present."

Secretly he did write her name. He called her Babalon. [Hence the latter-day "BVM" apparitions of Fatima, Lourdes and Medjugorje (read: strife-torn Bosnia) which, though ostensibly benign, caused "the most devastating experience of Parson's life" and ushered in the current wave of "UFO/ET" phenomenology via the soon afterward Roswell crash, Ken Arnold and George Adamski (et al) sightings -- giving birth to the modern "UFO" mythos. All this from the apocalyptic "great whore of Babylon." -B:.B:.] The one identified in The Book of the Law is the Egyptian goddess Nuit. In Liber 49 Babalon says she is the incestuous daughter of Nuit and Horus. Her avatar on earth is the Scarlet Woman. Babalon is not mentioned in The Book of the Law. The Scarlet Woman is.

Parsons documented the working in The Book of Babalon, of which a little survives. Liber 49 he came to see as a heretical fourth chapter of The Book of the Law. There are only three. He saw the four chapters as corresponding to the four letters of the ineffable name of God: YHWH, the Hebrew Yod He Vau He. He assigned one chapter to each letter and to what each letter represented. Unknown to Parsons, Frater Achad would proclaim the Aeon of another goddess in Vancouver, the Egyptian Maat. Crowley expelled Achad (Charles Stansfeld Jones) from the Order as well.

[Magda Hassan]

The Book of BABALON
Sub-Figura vel Liber Babalon

PART ONE: THE BOOK OF BABALON
January 4 - March 4, 1946 E.V.

INTRODUCTION

This book contains the record of a magical experiment relating to the invocation of an elemental, the thereafter of the Goddess or Force called BABALON, and the results thereof. An appendix contains some details of the method, published for the first time. The contents should be clear enough to those who are prepared for understanding, and a little study and effort should make it so for those who desire understanding. For the rest, each will no doubt interpret it in accord with his own predilections.

A note on the underlying philosophy. 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 catastrophy.

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 underlay 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.

It is indicated that this force is actually incarnate in some living woman, as the result of the described magical operation. A more basic matter, however, is the indication that this force is incarnate in all men and women, and needs only to be invoked to free the spirit from the debris of the old aeon, and to direct the blind force of Horus into constructive channels of under- standing and love. The methods of this invocation are described in the text.

The background of this material may be found in the Book of the Law, the Comment thereon, and other writings of Aleister Crowley; also in various magical, anthropological, psychological, and philosophical texts. These are all necessary to an understanding and use of the material.

One further point. It should be remembered that all human activities, after the vital functions are fulfilled, arise from the need to love or to be loved. It is therefore quite literally true that in understanding (i.e. that which embraces all categories of love) is all power given. A grasp of the principle of bipolarity should make this clear.

With this crude and rudimentary philosophical discourse, then, I present the Book of Babalon:



A. CONCEPTION

In January 1946 I had been engaged in the study and practice of Magick for seven years, and in the supervision and operation of an occult lodge for four years, having been initiated into the Sanctuary of the Gnosis by the Beast 666, Fra. 132, and Fra. Saturnus. At this time I decided upon a Magical operation de- signed to obtain the assistance of an elemental mate. This is a well known procedure in Magick (cf. Ch. VIII in Magick in Theory and Practice), consisting of the invocation of a spirit or ele- mental into tangible existence by various magical techniques.

I decided upon the use of the Enochian Tablets obtained by Dr. Dee and Edward Kelley, employing the *n*n*n square of the Air Tablet. The technique was approximately as follows:

(January 4, 1946, 9:00 PM)

1. Prepared and consecrated Air Dagger. (The other magical weapons were previously prepared. This dagger served as the special talisman of the operation.)
2. Prepared Enochian Air Tablet on virgin parchment.
3. Prepared Parchment Talisman
4. Rituals as follows:

• Invoking Pentagram of Air
  
• Invocation of Bornless One
  
• Conjuration of Air
  
• Consecration of Air Dagger
  
• Key Call of third Aire
  
• Invocation of God and King of Aire
  
• Invocation of Six Seniors
  
• Invocation of (RZDA) by *n*n*n and (EXARP), to visible appearance
  
• Invocation of wand with material basis on talisman
  
• Invocation with dagger
  
• License to depart, purification, and banishing
  

I followed this procedure for eleven days, from January 4 to 15, with the following entries in my record:

• Jan 5. A strong windstorm beginning suddenly about the middle of the first invocation.
  
• Jan 6. Invoked as before. Wind storm continued intermittently all day and night.
  
• Jan 7. Invoked twice. Wind subsided. Used Prokofief Violin Concerto No. 2 as musical background.
  
• Jan 8. Invoked twice, using blood.
  
• Jan 9. Invoked twice, replenishing material basis.
  
• Jan 10. Invoked twice. I retired about 11 PM, and was awakened at 12 PM by nine strong, rapid knocks. A table lamp at the opposite corner of the room was thrown violently to the floor and broken. There was no window in this corner, and no wind was blowing at the time.
  

(Note: I have had little experience with phenomena of this sort. Magically speaking, it usually represents "breaks" in the operation, indicating imperfect technique. Actually, in any magical operation there should be no phenomena but the willed result.)

• Jan 11. Invoked twice, using blood.
  
• Jan 12. Invoked twice. A heavy windstorm.
  
• Jan 13. Invoked twice. Windstorm continued.
  
• Jan 14. The light system of the house failed about 9 PM. Another magician who had been staying at the house and studying with me, was carrying a candle across the kitchen when he was struck strongly on the right shoulder, and the candle knocked out of his hand. He called us, and we observed a brownish yellow light about seven feet high in the kitchen. I banished with a magical sword, and it disappeared. His right arm was paralyzed for the rest of the night.
  
• Jan 15. Invoked twice. At this time the Scribe developed some sort of astral vision, describing in detail an old enemy of mine of whom he had never heard, and later the guardian forms of Isis and the Archangel Michael. Later, in my room, I heard the raps again, and a buzzing, metallic voice crying "let me go free." I felt a great pressure and tension in the house that night, which was also noticed by the other occupants. There was no other phenomena, and I admit a feeling of disappointment.
  

The feeling of tension and unease continued for four days. Then, on January 18, at sunset, while the Scribe and I were on the Mojave desert, the feeling of tension suddenly snapped. I turned to him and said, "it is done," in absolute certainty that the operation was accomplished. I returned home, and found a young woman answering the requirements waiting for me. She is describable as an air of fire type with bronze red hair, fiery and subtle, determined and obstinate, sincere and perverse, with extraordinary personality, talent, and intelligence.

During the period of January 19 to February 27 I invoked the Goddess BABALON with the aid of my magical partner, as was proper to one of my grade.



B. COMMUNICATIONS

On February 27 my magical partner went East for a visit, and on Feb. 28 I went back to the Mojave, invoking BABALON. During this invocation, the presence of the Goddess came upon me, and I was commanded to write the following communication:

LIBER 49

1. Yea, it is I, BABALON.

2. And this is my book, that is the fourth chapter of the Book of the Law, He completing the Name, for I am out of NUIT by HORUS, the incestuous sister of RA-HOOR-KHUIT.

3. It is BABALON. TIME IS. Ye fools.

4. Thou hast called me, oh accursed and beloved fool.

5-8. (Missing and presumed lost. Ed.)

9. Now know that I, BABALON, would take flesh and come among men.

10. I will come as a penelous (sic) flame, as a devious song, a trumpet in judgement halls, a banner before armies.

11. And gather my children unto me, for THE TIME is at hand.

12. And this is the way of my incarnation. Heed!

13. Thou shalt offer all thou art and all thou hast at my altar, witholding nothing. And thou shalt be smitten full sore and thereafter thou shalt be outcast and accursed, a lonely wanderer in abominable places.

14. Ye Dare. I have asked of none other, nor have they asked. Else is vain. But thou hast willed it.

15. Know then that thus I came to thee before, thou a great Lord, and I a maid enrapt. Ah blind folly.

16. And thereafter madness, all in vain. Thus it has been, multi- form. How thou hast burned beyond.

17. I shall come again, in the form thou knowest. Now it shall be thy blood.

18. The altar is aright, and the robe.

19. The perfume is sandal, and the cloth green and gold. There is my cup, our book, and thy dagger.

20. There is a flame.

21. The sigil of devotion. Be it consecrated, be it true, be it daily affirmed. I am not scorned. Thy love is to me. Procure a disk of copper, in diameter three inches paint thereon the field blue the star gold of me, BABALON.

22. It shall be my talisman. Consecrate with the supreme rituals of the word and the cup.

23. My calls as thou knowest. All love songs are of me. Also seek me in the Seventh Aire.

24. This for a time appointed. Seek not the end, I shall instruct thee in my way. But be true. Would it be hard if I were thy lover, and before thee? But I am thy lover and I am with thee.

25. I shall provide a vessel, when or whence I say not. Seek her not, call her not. Let her declare. Ask nothing. Keep silence. There shall be ordeals.

26. My vessel must be perfect. This is the way of her perfection.

27. The working is of nine moons.

28. The Astarte working, with music and feasting, with wine and all arts of love.

29. Let her be dedicated, consecrated, blood to blood, heart to heart, mind to mind, single in will, none without the circle, all to me.

30. And she shall wander in the witchwood under the Night of Pan, and know the mysteries of the Goat and the Serpent, and of the children that are hidden away.

31. I will provide the place and the material basis, thou the tears and blood.

32. Is it difficult, between matter and spirit? For me it is ecstacy and agony untellable. But I am with thee. I have large strength, have thou likewise.

33. Thou shalt prepare my book for her instruction, also thou shalt teach that she may have captains and adepts in her service. Yea, thou shalt take the black pilgrimage, but it will not be thou that returnest.

34. Let her prepare her work according to my voice in her heart, with thy book as guide, and none other instructing.

35. And let her be in all things wise, and sure, and excellent.

36. 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.

37. For I am BABALON, and she my daughter, unique, and there shall be no other women like her.

38. In My Name shall she have all power, and all men and excellent things, and kings and captains and the secret ones at her command.

39. The first servants are chosen in secret, by my force in her -- a captain, a lawyer, an agitator, a rebel -- I shall provide.

40. Call me, my daughter, and I shall come to thee. Thou shalt be full of my force and fire, my passion and power shall surround and inspire thee; my voice in thee shall judge nations.

41. None shall resist thee, whom I lovest. Though they call thee harlot and whore, shameless, false, evil, these words shall be blood in their mouths, and dust thereafter.

42. But my children will know thee and love thee, and this will make them free.

43. All is in thy hands, all power, all hope, all future.

44. One came as a man, and was weak and failed.

45. One came as a woman, and was foolish, and failed.

46. But thou art beyond man and woman, my star is in thee, and thou shalt avail.

47. Even now thy hour strikes upon the clock of my FATHER. For He prepared a banquet and a Bridal Bed. I was that Bride, appointed from the beginning, as it was written T.O.P.A.N.

48. Now is the hour of birth at hand. Now shall my adept be crucified in the Basilisk abode.

49. 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.

50. Stand thou fast, and I shall pass the first veil to speak with thee, through the stars shake.

51. Stand thou fast, and I shall pass the second veil, while God and Jesus be smitten with the sword of HORUS.

52. Stand thou fast, and I shall pass the third veil, and the shapes of hell shall be turned again to loveliness.

53. For thy sake shall I stride through the flames of Hell, though my tongue be bitten through.

54. Let me behold thee naked and lusting after me, calling upon my name.

55. Let me receive all thy manhood within my Cup, climax upon climax, joy upon joy.

56. Yea, we shall conquer death and Hell together.

57. And the earth is mine.

58. Thou shalt (make the?) Black Pilgrimage.

59. Yea it is even I BABALON and I SHALL BE FREE. Thou fool, be thou also free of sentimentality. Am I thy village queen and thou a sophomore, that thou shouldst have thy nose in my buttocks?

60. It is I, BABALON, ye fools, MY TIME is come, and this my book that my adept prepares is the book of BABALON.

61. Yea, my adept, the Black Pilgrimage. Thou shalt be accursed, and this is the nature of the curse. Thou shalt publish the secret matter of the adepts thou knowest, witholding no word of it, in an appendix to this my Book. So they shall cry fool, liar, sot, traducer, betrayer. Thou art not glad thou meddled with magick?

62. There is no other way, dear fool, it is the eleventh hour.

63. The seal of my Brother is upon the earth, and His Avatar is before you. There is threshing of wheat and a trampling of grapes that shall not cease until the truth be known unto the least of men.

64. But you who do not accept, you who see beyond, reach out your hands my children and reap the world in the hour of your harvest.

65. 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.

66. Work your spells by the mode of my book, practicing secretly, inducing the supreme spell.

67. 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.

68. Who loves not hates, who hates fears, let him taste fear.

69. This is the way of it, star, star. Burning bright, moon, witch moon.

70. You the secret, the outcast, the accursed and despised, even you that gathered privily of old in my rites under the moon.

71. You the free, the wild, the untamed, that walk now alone and forlorn.

72. Behold, my Brother cracks the world like a nut for your eating.

73. Yea, my Father has made a house for you, and my Mother has prepared a Bridal Bed. My Brother has confounded your enemies.

74. I am the Bride appointed. Come ye to the nuptials -- come ye now!

75. My joy is the joy of eternity, and my laughter is the drunken laughter of a harlot in the house of ecstasy.

76. All you loves are sacred, pledge them all to me.

77. Set my star upon your banners and go forward in joy and victory. None shall deny you, and none shall stand before you, because of the Sword of my Brother. Invoke me, call upon me, call me in your convocations and rituals, call upon me in your loves and battles in my name BABALON, wherein is all power given!

C. BIRTH

[March 2, 1946 E.V.] On March 1 and 2, 1946
I prepared the altar and equipment in accordance with the instructions in Liber 49. The Scribe had been away about a week, and knew nothing of my invocations of BABALON, which I had kept entirely secret. On the night of March 2 he returned, and described a vision he had that evening of a savage and beautiful woman riding naked on a great cat-like beast. He was impressed with the urgent necessity of giving me some message or communication.

We prepared magically for this communication, constructing a temple at the altar with the analysis of the key word. He was robed in white, carrying the lamp, and I in black, hooded, with the cup and dagger. At his suggestion we played Rachmanninoff's Isle of the Dead as background music, and set an automatic recorder to transcribe any audible occurrences. At approximately 8 PM he began to dictate, I transcribing directly as I received.

THE SCRIBE:
"The Angel of TARO. A three day retirement to greet her. Purify thyself. The symbol is seven by three. It is BABALON. Keep secret. The communications are sacred.

"These are the preparations. Green gold cloth, food for the Beast, upon a hidden platter, back of the altar. Disclose only when the doors are bolted.

"Transgression is death.

"Back of main altar. Prepare instantly. Light the first flame at 10 PM, March 2, 1946.

"The year of BABALON is 4063.

"Beware of the use of profaned rituals.

"She is flame of life, power of darkness, she destroys with a glance, she may take thy soul. She feeds upon the death of men.

"Beautiful -- Horrible."

The Scribe, now pale and sweating, rested awhile, then continued:

The First Ritual

"The first ritual. Tomorrow the second ritual. Concentrate all force and being in Our Lady BABALON. Light a single light on Her altar, saying: Flame is Our Lady, flame is Her hair. I am flame.

"A plate of food, unsalted. An altar cloth hitherto undefiled.

"Make a box of blackness at ten o'clock. Smear the vessel which contains flame with thine own blood. Destroy at the altar a thing of value. Remain in perfect silence, and heed the voice of Our Lady. Speak not of this ritual or of Her coming to any person. If asked, answer in a manner that avoids suspicion. Nor speculate at any time as to Her future mortal identity. To receive flatter- ing communications to thy damnation. Press not to receive teachings beyond those given.

"Questions: you may ask but three. Spend one half hour in composing these at 11:30 PM. The answers must be written at midnight.

"Thou shalt take the alkahest in thine own mouth, and in the box of darkness carefully store this matter.

"Display thyself to Our Lady; dedicate thy organs to Her, dedicate thy heart to Her, dedicate thy mind to Her, dedicate thy soul to Her, for She shall absorb thee, and thou shalt become living flame before She incarnates. For it shall be through you alone, and no one else can help in this endeavour.

"It is lonely, it is awful.

"Retire from human contact until noon tomorrow. Clear all profane documents on the morrow, before receiving further instructions. Consult no book but thine own mind. Thou art a god. Behave at this altar as one god before another. And so be prosperity.

"Thou art the guardian and thou art the guide, thou art the worker and the mechanic. So conduct thyself. Discuss nothing of this matter until thou art certain that thine understanding embraces all."

Here the Scribe ceased dictation. I proceeded to follow these instructions and those of March 1, utilizing the following rituals. I include the rituals used in the operation of the first night, in order to indicate the nature of the Force invoked.

1 [The First Invocation]

The temple is opened with the analysis of the key word: I N R I. Yod Nun Resh Yod. Virgo Isis Mighty Mother. Scorpio Apophis Destroyer. Sol, Osiris slain and risen. IAO. The sign of Osiris slain (given). The sign of the mourning of Isis (given). The sign of Apophis and Typhon (given). LVX, Lux, the Light of the Cross.

The invoking hexagram is drawn in the four quarters and the name ARARITA vibrated in each quarter. In closing, the hexagram is reversed.

2 The [Second] Invocation
(From the Gnostic Mass)

THE PRIEST
"O circle of stars whereof our Father is but the younger brother, marvel beyond imagination, soul of infinite space, before whom time is ashamed, the mind bewildered, and the understanding dark, not unto thee may we attain unless thine image be love. Therefore by seed and root and stem and bud and leaf and flower and fruit do we invoke thee."

BABALON
"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 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 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! Sing the rapturous love songs unto me! Burn to me perfume! 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."

3 The Third Invocation.
(From The Vision and the Voice)

CHORUS
"Glory unto the Scarlet Woman, BABALON, the Mother of Abomination, that rideth upon the Beast, for She hath spilt their blood in every corner of the earth, and lo! She hath mingled it in the cup of Her whoredom.

"With the breath of Her kisses hath she fermented it, and it hath become the wine of the Sabbath; and in the Holy Assembly hath She poured it out for Her worshippers; and they have become drunken thereon, so that face to face they beheld my Father. Thus are they made worthy to partake of the mystery of this holy vessel, for the blood is the life.

"Beautiful art thou O BABALON, 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. There fore art Thou called Understanding, O BABALON, Lady of the Night.

"O my God, in one last rapture let me attain to the union of the one with the many. For She is Love, and Her Love is one, and She has divided the one love into infinite loves, and each love is one, and equal with the One, and therefore is She passed from the Assembly and the Law and the enlightenment into the anarchy of solitude and darkness. For ever thus must She veil the brilliance of Herself.

4 [The Fourth Invocation]

O BABALON, BABALON beloved, come now, partake of the sacrament, possess this shrine. Take me now! Let me be drunken on the wine of your fornications; let your kisses wanton me to death. Accept thou this sacrifice willingly given!

5 The Fifth Invocation
The Call of the Seventh Aire

Rass I Salman Paradiz Oa-Crimi Aao Ial-Pir-Gah Qui-In Enay Butmon Od I Noas Ni Paradial Casarmg Vgear Chirlan Od Zonac Luciftan Cors Ta Vaul Zirn Tol Hami Sobol Ondoh Od Miam Chis Ta Zo Od Es V-Ma-Dea Od Pi-Bliar O Phil Rit Od Miam C-Crimi Quaada. Od. O Michaloz Oriom Bagle Papnor I Dlugam Lonshi Od Umplif V-Ge-Gi Riglied. BABALON!

6 The Sixth Invocation
(from Tannhauser by A. Crowley)

Isis art thou, and from thy life are fed
All showers and suns, all moons that wax and wane,

All stars and streams, the living and the dead,
The mystery of pleasure and of pain

Thou art the mother, thou the speaking sea

Thou art the earth, and its fertility,
Life, death, love, hatred, light, darkness return to thee

To Thee!

Hathoor am I, and to my beauty drawn
All glories of the Universe bow down,
The blossom and the mountain and the dawn

Fruits blush, and women, our creations crown
I am the priest, the sacrifice, the shrine

I the love and life of the divine
Life, death, love, hatred, light, darkness are surely mine,
Are Mine!

Venus art thou, the love and light of earth,

The wealth of kisses, the delight of tears
The barren pleasures never came to birth,

The endless infinite delight of years.
Thou art the shrine at which my long desire

Devoured me with intolerable fire.
Thou wert song, music, passion, death upon my lyre-

My lyre.

I am the Grail and I the glory now;

I am the flame and fuel of thy breast
I am the star of God upon thy brow;
I am the queen, enraptured and possessed,
Hide thee sweet river, welcome to thee, sea

Ocean of love that shall encompass thee
Life, death, love, hatred, light, darkness return to me-

To me!

[March 2, 1946 E.V. continued]

On the night of the first performance of these rituals, I prepared the altar and box and food, also flowers and wine. At the beginning of the rituals, I burnt the Enochian Tablet and smashed an image of Pan, a favorite possession. (About this time the roof on my guest house caught fire from a faulty chimney, and was partly destroyed.)

I proceeded with the rituals, noting a mounting tension, and the sense of a presence inexpressibly poignant and desirable. There was no other manifestation. At twelve PM I put the three questions and received answers as follows:

1. How can I communicate directly with BABALON, hear her, see her, feel her, be sure that I am working aright?

Answer. "At the altar in meditation, as you know how. Also, invoke me carnally with all your passion. Thus will you feel my desire and increase my substance."

2. How can I serve best?

Answer. "Follow instructions exactly and in detail. Avoid loose interruptions. Be diligent. Do not hesitate or question, act. All depends on your time."

3. How can I be certain of the vehicle?

Answer. "Do not trouble yourself with this. It does not concern you. I will provide the vehicle, I will show you a sign, and signs. It is the now which concerns us. Keep your faith, think not overmuch."

After this an hour's meditation, and so to sleep.

[March 3, 1946 E.V.]

The next day I slipped badly. An inmate of the house disturbed my morning meditation. I opened the door and cursed him (in the Anglo Saxon fashion). Shortly after he was taken ill, and I succumbed to a black mood. I perceived my terrible error, and apologized to him, mentally withdrawing the curse. However, the day went very badly for me.

That evening the Scribe and I resumed our work. In a short time the dictation began:

"In the presence of our Lord PAN, at the feet of Our Lady BABALON, at the feet of Her (servants?) (changing?) we declare unto thee this message (consecrated, dedicated, never to be defiled?) (the Scribe was uncertain here) containing the rituals of the second and third days, of the welcome and preparation in the Name of Our Lady of the Night most gracious, to pure lewd and whore- some Lady BABALON. Oh thou who art mortal tremble; given it is unto thee a feat never before performed in the annals of your histories, never before accomplished successfully. Many have dared, none succeeded.

"Our Lady BABALON must descend to triumph."

"Mortality. We have not asked this of another, nor shall we ever. Even now we doubt thy faith. Is this accepted, are you willing to proceed. Answer aloud.

Answer. "I am willing."

"Then know thou art already faulty in thy delivery. These are ex- traneous things. The elemental was not properly released," (this was corrected) "thou wert guilty of human rage, the current of force has been disturbed. Beware, should'st thou falter again, we will sure slay thee.

"But insofar as thy working was consecrated it has succeeded. Rectify thy mortal fault and error. Consecrate all. Now receive the second and third rituals."

The Second Ritual
[March 3, 1946 E.V. continued]

"Consecrate thyself as instructor of Our Lady Incarnate.
"Take the black box, concentrate upon its emptiness for one hour, gaze into it, and thou wilt see, imprinted upon it, a shape, a sign, a sacred design, which shall be the sign delivered by Our Lady Babalon Incarnate. When thou hast finished, when thou hast recognized this pattern, construct it in wood.

"This is the sigil.

"Ten be the hour appointed. Invoke long, to music indicated."

[...] (This I keep secret.)

"When thou canst feel Our Lady incarnate in thy being, take the black box and perform the consecrated rite.

"Wear thou scarlet, symbolic of birth. Be sashed in black. It matters not the quality of goods. Take then the box, make then the sign.

"Paint upon it a second sign which thou knowest. If thou hast forgotten, gaze into thy crystal.

"Meditate while gazing on the qualities of an instructor. Thou shalt inscribe in Her book, for Her guidance.

"Thou art forbidden to leave thy room.

"The end of the second ritual.

At the end of this dictation, the Scribe showed signs of exhaustion. He rested awhile, then we continued:

The Third Ritual
[March 3 1946 E.V. continued]

"Begin four hours prior to dawn.

"A period of eradication of all inimical influences. Complete perfection. Wear black. Cut from thy breast the red star. Renew the blood. Lay out a white sheet. Place upon it blood of birth, since She is born of thy flesh, and by thy mortal power upon earth.

"Thou shalt recognize by the sign. BABALON is born! It is new birth, all things are changed, the signs, the symbols, the every thing!

"Thou shalt compass with the aid of the muse suitable invocation of the birth of BABALON, and this thou shalt deliver to the flames which now burn too.

"Now thou shalt flame the third, chanting the invocation. She is born in the third flame.

"In verse seven verses of seven lines, seven magick words. Stand and chant seven times. Envision thyself as a cloaked radiance desirable to the Goddess, beloved. Envision Her approaching thee. Embrace Her, cover Her with kisses. Think upon the lewd lascivious things thou couldst do. All is good to BABALON. ALL.

"Then rest, meditating on this:

"Thou as a man and as a god hast strewn about the earth and in the heavens many loves, these recall, concentrate, consecrate each woman thou hast raped. Remember her, think upon her, move her into BABALON, bring her into BABALON, each, one by one until the flame of lust is high.

"Then compose a verse of undetermined lines on this, to BABALON. This verse shall be used in worship when she appears.

"Then meditate upon thy desire, think upon Her, and, touching naught, chant these verses. Recall each lascivious moment, each lustfull day, all set them into the astral body, touching naught.

"Preserve the material basis.

(Question: "In the box?" Answer: "Yes.")

"The lust is hers, the passion yours. Consider thou the Beast raping.

"Leave thy casual loves -- all belongs to BABALON, thy lust is BABALON's. She is with thee three days. The sign is hers, secret, and no man knows its correspondence. Guard!

The next section contains a prophecy which I shall not write here.

There follows the indicated invoking poem.

The Birth of BabalonWhat is the tumult among the stars
that have shone so still till now?
What are the furrows of pain and wrath
upon the immortal brow?

Why is the face of God turned grey
and his angels all grown white?
What is the terrible ruby star
that burns down the crimson night?

What is the beauty that flames so bright
athwart the awful dawn?
She has taken flesh, she is come to judge
the thrones ye rule upon.

Quail ye kings for an end is come
in the birth of BABALON.

I have walked three dreadful nights away
in halls beyond despair,
I have given marrow and tears and sweat
and blood to make her fair.

I have lain my love and smashed my heart
and filled her cup with blood,
That blood might flow from the loins of woe
to the cup of brotherhood.

The cities reel in the shout of steel
where the sword of war is drawn.
Sing ye saints for the day is come
in the birth of BABALON.

Now God has called for his judgment book
and seen his name therein
And the grace of God and the guilt of God
have spelt it out as sin

His bloody priests have clutched his robes
and stained his linen gown
And his victims swarm from his broken hell
to drag his kingdom down.

O popes and kings and the little gods
are sick and sad and wan
To see the crimson star that bursts
like blood upon the dawn

While trumpets sound and stars rejoice
at the birth of BABALON.

BABALON is too beautiful
for sight of mortal eyes
She has hidden her loveliness away
in lonely midnight skies,

She has clothed her beauty in robes of sin
and pledged her heart to swine
And loving and giving all she has
brewed for saints immortal wine.

But now the darkness is riven through
and the robes of sin are gone,
And naked she stands as a terrible blade
and a flame and a splendid song

Naked in radiant mortal flesh
at the Birth of BABALON.

She is come new born as a mortal maid
forgetting her high estate,
She has opened her arms to pain and death
and dared the doom of fate,

And death and hell are at her back,
but her eyes are bright with life,
Her heart is high and her sword is strong
to meet the deadly strife,

Her voice is sure as the judgment trump
to crack the house of wrong,
Though walls are high and stone is hard
and the rule of hell was long

The gates shall fall and the irons break
in the Birth of BABALON.

Her mouth is red and her breasts are fair
and her loins are full of fire,
And her lust is strong as a man is strong
in the heat of her desire,

And her whoredom is holy as virtue is foul
beneath the holy sky,
And her kisses will wanton the world away
in passion that shall not die.

Ye shall laugh and love and follow her dance
when the wrath of God is gone
And dream no more of hell and hate
in the Birth of BABALON.

[Magda Hassan]

The Book of ANTICHRIST
Sub-Figura vel Liber Babalon

PART TWO: THE BOOK OF ANTICHRIST

The Black Pilgrimage

Now it came to pass even as BABALON told me, for after receiving Her Book I fell away from Magick, and put away Her Book and all pertaining thereto. And I was stripped of my fortune (the sum of about $50,000) and my house, and all I Possessed.

Then for a period of two years I worked in the world, recouping my fortune somewhat. But that was also taken from me, and my reputation, and my good name in my worldly work, that was in science.

And on the 31[SUP]st[/SUP] of October, 1948, BABALON called on me again, and I began the last work, that was the work of the wand. And I worked for 17 days, until BABALON called me in a dream, and instructed me on an astral working. Then I reconstructed the temple, and began the Black Pilgrimage, as She instructed.

And I went into the sunset with Her sign, and into the night past accursed and desolate places and cyclopean ruins, and so came at last to the City of Chorazin. And there a great tower of Black Basalt was raised, that was part of a castle whose further battlements reeled over the gulf of stars. And upon the tower was this sign.

And one heavily robed and veiled showed me the sign, and told me to look, and he hold, I saw flash below me four past lives wherein I had failed in my object. And I beheld the life of Simon Magus, preaching the Whore Helena as the Sophia, and I saw that my failure was in Hubris, the pride of the spirit. And I saw my life as Giles de Retz, wherein I attempted to raise Jehanne Darc to be Queen of the Witchcraft, and failed through her stupidity, and again my pride. And I saw myself in Francis Hepburne, Earl Both well, manipulating Gellis Duncan, that was an unworthy instrument. And again as Count Cagliostro, failing because I failed to comprehend the nature of women in my Seraphina. And I was shown myself as a boy of 13 in this life, invoking Satan and showing cowardice when He appeared. And I was asked: "Will you fail again?" and I replied "I will not fail." (For I had given all my blood to BABALON, and it was not I that spoke.)

And thereafter I was taken within and saluted the Prince of that place, and thereafter things were done to me of which I may not write, and they told me, "It is not certain that you will survive, but if you survive you will attain your true will, and manifest the Antichrist.

And thereafter I returned and swore the Oath of the Abyss, having only the choice between madness, suicide, and that oath. But the Oath in no wise ameliorated that terror, and I continued in the madness and horror of the abyss for a season. But of this no more. But having passed the ordeal of 40 days I took the oath of a Magister Templi, even the Oath of Antichrist before Frater 132, the Unknown God.

And thus was I Antichrist loosed in the world; and to this I am pledged, that the work of the Beast 666 shall be fulfilled, and the way for the coming of BABALON be made open and I shall not cease or rest until these things are accomplished. And to this end I have issued this my Manifesto.



The Manifesto of the Antichrist

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

I, BELARION, ANTICHRIST, in the year 1949 of the rule of the Black Brotherhood called Christianity, do make my Manifesto to all men. And I, THE ANTICHRIST, come among you, saying:

An end to the pretence, and lying hypocrisy of Christianity.

An end to the servile virtues, and superstitious restrictions.

An end to the slave morality.

An end to prudery and shame, to guild and sin, for these are of the only evil the sun, that is fear.

An end to all authority that is not based on courage and manhood, to the authority of lying priests, conniving judges, blackmailing police, and

An end to the servile flattery and cajolery of moods, the coronations of mediocrities, the ascension of dolts.

An end to restriction and inhibition, for I, THE ANTICHRIST, am come among you preaching the Word of the BEAST 666, which is,

"There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt."

And I, BELARION, ANTICHRIST, do lift up my voice and prophesy, and I say:

I shall bring all men to the law of the BEAST 666, and in His law I shall conquer the world.

And within seven years of this time, BABALON, THE SCARLET WOMAN HILARION will manifest among ye, and bring this my work to its fruition.

An end to conscription, compulsion, regimentation, and the tyranny of false laws.

And within nine years a nation shall accept the Law of the BEAST 666 in my name, and that nation will be the first nation of earth.

And all who accept me the ANTICHRIST and the law of the BEAST 666, shall be accursed and their joy shall be a thousand-fold greater than the false joys of the false saints.

And in my name BELARION shall they work miracles, and confound our enemies, and none shall stand before us.

Therefore I, THE ANTICHRIST call upon all the Chosen and elect and upon all men, come forth now in the name of Liberty, that we may end for ever the tyranny of the Black Brotherhood.

Witness my hand and seal on this [...] day of [...] 1949, that is the year of BABALON 4066.

Love is the law, love under will.

Belarion, Antichrist

ANALYSIS BY A MASTER OF THE TEMPLE
of the Critical Nodes in the Experience of his Material Vehicle

"I shall regard all phenomena as the particular dealing of God with my soul."

I. Birth

Oct. 2, 1914, Los Angeles, in, rising in midheaven, in favorable conjunc., at apehelion. I chose this constellation in order that you might have an innate sense of balance and ultimate justice, responsive and attractive nature, a bountiful environment and sense of royalty and largesse, strength, courage and power combined with cunning and intelligence. Saturn was bound in order that you might easily formulate a lower will which would have satisfied and overwhelmed you with its spectacular success.

Your father separated from your mother in order that you might grow up with a hatred of authority and a spirit of revolution necessary to my work. The Oedipus complex was needed to formulate the love of witchcraft which would lead you into magick, with the influence of your grandfather active to prevent too complete an identification with your mother.

II. Childhood

Your isolation as a child developed the necessary background of literature and scholarship; and the unfortunate experiences with other children the requisite contempt for the crowd and for the group mores. You will note that these factors developed the needful hatred for christianity (without implanting a christian guilt sense) at an extremely early age.

III. Adolescence

Early adolescence continued the development of the necessary combinations. The awakening interest in chemistry and science prepared the counterbalance for the coming magical awakening, the means of obtaining prestige and livelihood in the formative period, and the scientific method necessary for my manifestation. The magical fiasco at the age of 16 was needful to keep you away from magick until you were sufficiently matured.

IV. Youth

The loss of family fortune developed your sense of self reliance at a critical period, the contact with reality at this time was essential. Your early marriage with Helen served to break your family ties and effect a transference to her, away from a dangerous attachment to your mother. The experience at Halifax and Cal Tech served to strengthen your self reliance, scientific method and material powers. The influence of Tom Rose at this period, as that of Ed. Forman in adolescence, was essential in developing the male center.

V. Later Youth

The house on Terrace Drive, Music, Lynn, Curtis, and Gloria, and the increasing restlessness were, of course, all preparations for the meeting withA.'.A.'. and O.T.O. The alternate repulsion and attraction you felt the first year after meeting Fra. 132 were caused by a subconscious resistance against the ordeals ahead. Had you had these experiences before, without such resistance, you would have become hopelessly unbalanced. Betty served to effect a transference from Helen at a critical period. Had this not occurred your repressed homosexual component could have caused a serious disorder.

Your passion for Betty also gave you the magical force needed at the time, and the act of adultery tinged with incest, served as your magical confirmation in the Law of Thelema.

At this time the O.T.O. was an excellent training school for adepts, but hardly an appropriate Order for the manifestation of Thelema. Therefore, in spite of your motto you were not able to formulate your Will. The experience with the O.T.O. and Aerijet were needed to dispel your romanticism, self-deception, and reliance on others. Betty was one link in the process designed to tear you away from the now unneeded Oedipus complex, the overvaluation of women and romantic love. Since this was unconscious, the next step was to bring it into consciousness, and there to destroy it.

VI. Early Maturity

The final experience with Hubbard and Betty, and the O.T.O. was necessary to overcome your false and infantile reliance on others, although this was only partially accomplished at the time. The invocation of Babalon served to exteriorize the Oedipus complex; at the same time, because of the forces involved it produced extraordinary magical effects. However, this operation is accomplished and closed -- you should have nothing more to do with it -- nor even think of it, until Her manifestation is revealed, and proved beyond the shadow of a doubt. Even then, you must be circumspect -- although I hope to take complete charge before then.

Candy appeared in answer to your call, in order to wean you from wet nursing. She has demonstrated the nature of woman to you in such unequivocal terms that you should have no further room for illusion on the subject.

The suspension and inquisition was my opportunity -- one of the final links in the chain. At this time you were enabled to prepare your thesis, formulate your Will, and take the Oath of the Abyss, thus making it possible (although only partially) to manifest. The exit of Candy prepares for the final stage of your initial preparation.

VII. Conclusions

The numerous rituals you have performed have resulted in a well developed body of light. The ordeals have purged most of the emotional and mental garbage -- your only real dangers are, and have ever been, sentimentality, weakness, and procrastination.

It is interesting to note that the first weapon you formulated was the Lamp of the Spirit, in the invocation to Pan (although the Sword was prefigured). Next the Sword in the Horus ritual, as was appropriate to your intellectual development at that time.

Then the Cup out of the wine of your emotional life -- the disk out of material failure. The Sword remains to be manifested.

You will note that it has been impossible to truly formulate your Will with any of these weapons -- naturally -- that is only possible with the wand. On the other hand, if you had done so previously, you would have been unbalanced by the lack of initiated preparation. It is a right and natural procedure; the True Will cannot be truly formulated until you are initiate in all the other planes, and it is well to make no pretense of doing so. Until that point all you can know of the true will is the aspiration to the next step -- towards further experience. That is the glory of the Law of Thelema -- DO!

The physical and emotional stresses you feel at present are a result of the pull of the Abyss -- your present poetry is indicative. Naturally you find no power in any spell, no comfort in any ritual, no hope in any action. You are cut off by your own oath. Nor can I or any other aid you at this time. There is only manhood, only will, only the vector of your own tendencies, developed through the aeons of the past. I do not say how long the state will last, or what the outcome may be.

However, I can formulate some rules which may serve to guide you.

VIII. Instructions

A. Works of the Wand -- of the Will alone avail in this state. No other weapon should be used, no other ritual save the hymn to the Unnamed One in the Anthem of the Mass.

B. You should be meticulous in all observations pertaining to the Will, even the most petty. Fulfill all obligations and promises, undertake nothing which you cannot fulfill, be prompt in the discharge of each responsibility.

C. Be neat in your personal and domestic habits, indicate your self-respect to yourself.

D. Do not become unduly involved with any person, and practice all your hard-earned wisdom in your relations with women.

E. Set up your personal affairs in business order. Keep your accounts current and your papers neatly filed.

F. Finish your poetry for publication. Finish the synthesis of the Tarot and start work on the preparation of the lessons of class instruction from your book.

G. Pay no attention to any phenomena whatsoever, and continue in a sober and responsible way of life under all circumstances.

Not magical! For you nothing is more magical. Only thus can the curse of Saturn be overcome. I see you hate this way. But it is an ultimate time -- it is you that have taken the oath. The choice is me or Choronzon.

I await you in the City of the Pyramids.

Belarion
8 = 3

[Magda Hassan]

:. Brother Richard :.
and JPL's Scientific Sorceror

"With the magickal rites of the Babalon Working, it was Parson's goal to bring on the Apocalypse ... the Babalon gambit was dazzling to say the least: If the earth must first be covered in evil before the return of the Christ consciousness and the final triumph of good, what better way to hasten the uplifting of humanity than to rip an alchemical hole in the fabric of reality and invite the very spawn of Hell in for a rip-snorting orgy of howling madness? The question must be asked: Who is the greater hero -- he who prolongs the agony of this pathetic existence or he who opens wide the Pandora's Box of perdition knowing that this is how the final eschatological chapter must play itself out?"

John Whiteside Parsons: Anti-Christ Superstar
by Richard Metzger

"All stories are true, every last one of them. All myths, all legends, all fables. If you believe them true, then they are true. If you don't believe them, then all that can be said is that they are true for someone else."
-- Dave Sim, Cerebus

When the history of the American space program is finally written, no figure will stand out quite like John Whiteside Parsons. Remarkably handsome, dashing and brilliant, "Jack" Parsons was one of the founders of the experimental rocket research group at Cal Tech and the group's seven acre Arroyo Seco testing facility would eventually become Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), NASA's rocket design center.

Werner von Braun claimed that the self-taught Parsons, not himself, was the true father of the American space program for his contribution to the development of solid rocket fuel. Although Parsons has been memorialized with a statue at JPL and has had a crater on the dark side of the moon named in his honor, his story remains shrouded in mystery for what is little known about this legend of aerospace engineering is that Parsons was an avid practitioner of the occult sciences, and for several years, Aleister Crowley's hand-picked leader of the US branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis, the Southern California-based Agape' Lodge.

Parsons was born in Los Angeles on October 2, 1914, the son of a wealthy and well connected family living in a sprawling mansion on Pasadena's "Millionaire Row." His father worked for Woodrow Wilson. After his parents divorce, the solitary childhood of Parsons imbued him with a deep hatred of authority, and a contempt for any sort of interference in his activity. Parsons interest in the occult apparently commenced at an early age and in one of his diaries he claimed to have invoked Satan to visible appearance at the tender age of 13.

After discovering Crowley's philosophy of Thelema (Greek for "true will"), Parsons joined the Agape' Lodge in 1941. Wilfred T. Smith, the expatriate Englishman who started the order in the early 1930's with a charter from the Great Beast himself, wrote of Parsons in a letter to Crowley:

"I think I have at long last a really excellent man, John Parsons. And starting next Tuesday he begins a course of talks with a view to enlarging our scope. He has an excellent mind and much better intellect than myself... John Parsons is going to be valuable."

Another member of the Lodge, Crowley's old friend, actress Jane Wolfe described Parsons as "26 years of age, 6'2", vital, potentially bisexual at the very least, University of the State of California and Cal Tech, now engaged in Cal Tech chemical laboratories developing 'bigger and better' explosives for Uncle Sam. Travels under sealed orders from the government. Writes poetry -- 'sensuous only', he says. Lover of music, which he seems to know thoroughly. I see him as the real successor of Therion [Crowley]. Passionate; and has made the vilest analyses result in a species of exaltation after the event. Has had mystical experiences which gave him a sense of equality all round, although he is hierarchical in feeling and in the established order."

Parsons rose quickly through the ranks, taking over the Agape' Lodge from Smith at Crowley's decree within a year.



BABALON

"For I am BABALON, and she my daughter, unique and there shall be no other women like her."
The Book of Babalon, verse 37

In one of the most celebrated feats in magickal history, Parsons and pre-Dianetics L. Ron Hubbard (whose role is too complicated to describe in this short essay) performed "The Babalon Working," a daring attempt to shatter the boundaries of time and space and intended to bring about, in Parsons own words,

"love, understanding, and Dionysian freedom [...] the necessary counterbalance or correspondence to the manifestation of Horus."

The above reference recalls Crowley's announcement of the Aeon of Horus, described in his Book of the Law (Liber AL vel Legis), a blasphemous, strangely beautiful, prose poem which Crowley "received" from a discarnate entity called Aiwass in Cairo in 1904. Crowley, self-styled "Great Beast 666," considered himself the avatar of the Antichrist and the Book of the Law is a proclamation that the era of the "slave gods" (Osirus, Mohammed, Jesus) had come to an end and that the Age of Horus and "the Crowned and Conquering Child" had begun.

In its infancy, Crowley predicted, the Aeon would be characterized by the magickal formula of bloodshed and blind force, the tearing down of the established orders to make way for the new. Crowley held the two World Wars as evidence of this, but did not see the Horus-force, as evil, rather as embodying the innocence of a hyperactive child who is like a bull in a china shop. Babalon, a Thelemic counterpart of Kali or Isis, was described by Parsons as,

"...black, murderous and horrible, but Her hand is uplifted in blessing and reassurance: the reconciliation of opposites, the apotheosis of the impossible."

The impossible was precisely what Jack Parsons, the scientific sorcerer, had in mind.



Lucifer Rising

In its initial stages, The Babalon Working was intended to attract an "elemental" to serve as a partner for Parsons' elaborate sex magick rituals. The method employed was that of the solo "VIII Degree" working of the O.T.O, the quasi-Masonic organization reformulated by Crowley in the earlier part of the century in accordance with his "Do What Thou Wilt" mythos of Thelema. Parsons used his "magickal wand" to whip up a vortex of energy so the elemental would be summoned. Translated into plain English, Parsons jerked off in the name of spiritual advancement whilst Hubbard (referred to as "The Scribe" in the diary of the event) scanned the astral plane for signs and visions.

Apparently, it worked. In a letter to Crowley dated February 23, 1946, Parsons exclaimed "I have my elemental! She turned up one night after the conclusion of the Operation, and has been with me since."

The elemental was a green-eyed, flaming redhead named Marjorie Cameron, (later of Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome film, an artist of some reknown and a primary force in the New Age "Goddess" movement). Cameron was only too happy to participate in Parson's sex magick and now Parsons could get down to the real business of the Babalon Working: the birthing of a "moonchild" or homunculus. The operation was formulated to open an interdimensional doorway, rolling out the red carpet for the appearance of the goddess Babalon in human form, employing the Enochian Calls [angelic language] of Elizabethan magus John Dee and the attraction of the sex force of the duo's copulation to this end.

As Paul Rydeen points out in his extended essay Jack Parsons and the Fall of Babalon:

"The purpose of Parson's operation has been underemphasized. He sought to produce a magickal child who would be a product of her environment rather than of her heredity. Crowley himself describes the Moonchild in just these terms. The Babalon Working itself was preparation for what was to come: a Thelemic messiah."

To wit: Babalon incarnate as a living female, the Scarlet Woman as consort to the Antichrist, the bride of the Great Beast 666. In effect, Parsons also claimed the mantle of Antichrist for himself, as the magickal heir of Crowley prophesied in Liber AL:

"The child of thy bowels, he shall behold them [the mysteries of the Apocalypse]. Expect him not from the East, nor from the West, for from no expected house cometh that child."

Without the Scarlet Woman, the Antichrist cannot make his manifestation, the eschatological formula must first be complete. In whiter words, with the magickal rites of the Babalon Working, it was Parson's goal to bring on the Apocalypse.



James Dean of the Occult

Parsons' Babalon gambit was dazzling to say the least: If the earth must first be covered in evil before the return of the Christ consciousness and the final triumph of good, what better way to hasten the uplifting of humanity than to rip an alchemical hole in the fabric of reality and invite the very spawn of Hell in for a rip-snorting orgy of howling madness?

So much is written of Parsons as a psychotic lunatic, but I put it to you dear reader, is the Babalon Working the product of a deranged mind or the ultimate exploration of the absolute furthest reaches of consciousness, putting the peddle to the metal for the living end in revolutionary chic and mind expansion?

Parson's perverse "imitation of Christ" was intended to disrupt, oppose, and subvert the established order of things. It's the age old Manichaean battle between good and evil, the forces of order and chaos, the status quo versus revolutionary tendencies. But in the 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century, these lines have become significantly blurred: If you consider the New World Order multinational corporate monoliths poisoning the planet and reducing mankind to the level of wage slavery for the benefit of the very few to be representative of the "good," then the Babalon Working must sound like the most outright evil deed ever perpetrated by a human being.

But if you're like me, and would dearly love to see the vile, puss-ridden edifice of Western society burned to the ground, you should see Parsons as the penultimate style icon of psycho-sexual/magickal insurrection, a truly American original if ever there was one. This darkly handsome, genius scientist, was, I submit, the James Dean of the Occult -- "one spectacularly cool motherfucker."



Who is the Greater Hero

"Only in the irrational and unknown direction can we come to it [wisdom] again"
-- Jack Parsons in a letter to Marjorie Cameron, late 1940s.

The question must be asked: Who is the greater hero -- he who prolongs the agony of this pathetic existence or he who opens wide the Pandora's Box of perdition knowing that this is how the final eschatological chapter must play itself out?

Isn't the Great Work, the cosmic perfection of mankind, the final goal of the alchemists? Just as the rocket scientist Parsons was willing to play dice with heavy explosives, Parsons, the nuclear age warlock was willing to play with fire of a very different sort. Parsons rests firmly in the tradition of the fraternity of Western Magi who include Moses, Solomon, Jesus Christ, John Dee, Adam Weishaupt, Cagliostro, Crowley, Gurdjieff and Timothy Leary -- great revolutionaries and liberators all.

Parsons wrote in his Manifesto of the Anti-Christ:

"An end to the pretence (sic), and lying hypocrisy of Christianity. An end to the servile virtues, and superstitious restrictions. An end to the slave morality. An end to prudery and shame, to guild and sin, for these are of the only evil the sun, that is fear. An end to all authority that is not based on courage and manhood, to the authority of lying priests, conniving judges, blackmailing police, and an end to the servile flattery and cajolery of mods, the coronations of mediocraties, the ascension of dolts."

Amen to that! Parsons was clearly willing to put his money where his mouth was! Abbie Hoffman, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos and Che Guevara seem total pussies in comparison.

Forget your Conspiracy Theory 101, the Illuminati are not the bad guys and George Bush was never a member and neither is Henry Kissinger. If, in the words ofChrist, it is by their fruits and works that men shall be judged, would you want the Mai Lai massacre or the Gulf War slaughter staining your karma?

Hey, being the Antichrist is a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it. It's not such a black and white world anymore. I know who I'm rooting for.



A Magickal Call to Arms

"Parsons opened a door and something flew in."
-- Kenneth Grant, Outside the Circles of Time

Did the Babalon Working actually work? For the sake of argument, if you believe it to be true, it's true enough. As a metaphor or a myth to explain the psychic and atmospheric turbulence taking place in the world today, it certainly works for me. What has long been prophesied by the world's major spiritual traditions is now coming to pass.

Turn on CNN for a couple of hours for ample proof: wars, killer viruses, floods, famines, violent crime, earthquakes, Armageddon cults armed with nerve gas, suicide bombers; Heaven's Gate; the list goes on and on. Certainly Parsons untimely death in a 1952 chemical explosion would leave the crown of the "conquering child" unclaimed to this day as Thelemites continue to await their Chaos Messiah, but perhaps Parsons was an Antichrist and his particular mission was to crack open the Apocalyptic gateway and activate the occult forces necessary for the upheaval of consciousness.

The apostles of the new forms of gnosis unearthed by the Babalon Working will be art, the inspired initiator of sacred science and the torch of Gods appearing in new and unexpected forms in the unfolding of the divine drama. The poets, artists, philosophers and thinkers will form the first ranks of perfected humanity and no rules will apply save for freedom and nobility beyond the Kali Yuga.

But this will not happen without a struggle between the forces of control, black magick, and oppressive boredom on one hand and the Luciferian agents of wisdom, unleashed creativity and anarchic rebellion on the other. What we have been brainwashed to believe is "good": patriotism, so-called "free" enterprise, private property, Christianity (not the teachings of Christ, but the hateful travesty that the religion bearing his name has become thanks to the likes of Pat Robertson and his filthy ilk), is now beginning to be seen by the emerging generation of the crowned and conquering child to be the deathtrip bullshit it truly is.

A whole culture is collapsing and a new one is about to be born.

---

Richard Metzger is the editor of DisInformation and would like to gratefully acknowledge the valuable conversations with Grant Morrison and the enigmatic being known only as Brother Blue that helped in preparation of this essay.

[Magda Hassan]

FREEDOM IS A TWO-EDGED SWORD
by Fra. Belarion, O.T.O. (Jack Parsons)
The Seventh Ray 1976 - C.R. Runyon - Editor

Editor's note: Jack Parsons died in a laboratory accident in 1952.

Author's Preface

Since I first wrote this essay in 1946, some of the more ominous predictions have been fulfilled. Public employees have been subjected to the indignity of "loyalty" oaths and the ignominy of loyalty purges. Members of the United States Senate, moving under the cloak of immunity and the excuse of emergency, have made a joke of justice and a mockery of privacy. Constitutional immunity and legal procedure have been consistently violated and that which once would have been an outrage in America is today refused even a review by the Supreme Court.

The golden voice of social security, of socialized "this" and socialized "that", with its attendant confiscatory taxation and intrusion on individual liberty, is everywhere raised and everywhere heeded. England has crept under the aegis of a regime synonymous with total regimentation. Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia have fallen victims to communism while the United States makes deals with the corrupt dictatorships of Argentina and Spain.

As I write, the United States Senate is pursuing a burlesque investigation into the sphere of private sexual morals, which will accomplish nothing except to bring pain and sorrow to many innocent persons.

The inertia and acquiescence which allows the suspension of our liberties would once have been unthinkable. The present ignorance and indifference is appalling. The little that is worthwhile in our civilization and culture is made possible by the few who are capable of creative thinking and independent action, grudgingly assisted by the rest. When the majority of men surrender their freedom, barbarism is near but when the creative minority surrender it, the Dark Age has arrived. Even the word liberalism has now become a front for a new social form of Christian morality. Science, that was going to save the world back in H.G. Wells' time, is regimented, strait-jacketed and scared; its universal language is diminished to one word, security.

In this 1950 view some of my more hopeful utterances may appear almost naive. However, I was never so naive as to believe that freedom in any full sense of the word is possible for more than a few. But I have believed and do still hold that these few, by self-sacrifice, wisdom, courage and continuous effort, can achieve and maintain a free world. The labor is heroic but it can be done by example and by education. Such was the faith that built America, a faith that America has surrendered. I call upon America to renew this faith before she perishes.

We are one nation but we are also one world. The soul of the slums looks out of the eyes of Wall Street and the fate of a Chinese coolie determines the destiny of America. We cannot suppress our brother's liberty without suppressing our own and we cannot murder our brothers without murdering ourselves. We stand together as men for human freedom and human dignity or we will fall together, as animals, back into the jungle.

In this very late hour it is with solutions that we must be primarily concerned. We seem to be living in a nation that simply does not know what we are told we have and that we tell each other we have. Indeed, it is far more than that. It is to the definition of freedom, to its understanding, in order that it may be attained and defended, that this essay is devoted. I need not add that freedom is dangerous -- but it is hardly possible that we are all cowards.


Chapter 1

For numberless centuries society accepted the proposition that certain men were created to be slaves. Their natural function was to serve priests, kings and nobles, men of substance and property who were appointed slave-masters by almighty God. This system was reinforced by the established doctrine that all men and women were owned 'in mind' by the church and 'in body' by the state. This convenient situation was supported by the authority of social morality, religion and even philosophy.
Against this doctrine, some two hundred years ago, rose the most astonishing heresy the world has yet seen; the principle of liberalism. In essence this principle stated that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights which belong to every man as his birthright.

This idea appealed to certain intractable spirits -- heretics, atheists and revolutionaries -- and has since made some headway in spite of the opposition of the majority of organized society. As a slogan, however, it has become so popular that it is rendered unwilling lip-service by all the major states and yet it is still so distasteful to persons in authority that it is nowhere embodied as a fundamental law and is continually violated in letter and in spirit by every trick of bigotry and reaction. Further, absolutist and totalitarian groups of the most vicious nature use liberalism as a cloak under which they move to re-establish tyrannies and to extinguish the liberty of all who oppose them.

Thus religious groups seek to abrogate freedom of art, speech and the press; reactionaries move to suppress labor, communists to establish dictatorships -- and all in the name of 'freedom'. Because of the peculiar definitions of freedom used by some of these camouflaged tyrants, it seems necessary to redefine Freedom in the terms understood by Voltaire, Paine, Washington, Jefferson and Emerson.

Freedom is a two-edged sword of which one edge is liberty and the other, responsibility. Both edges are exceedingly sharp and the weapon is not suited to casual, cowardly or treacherous hands.

Since all tyrannies are based on dogma and since all dogmas are based on lies, it behooves us to look beyond them for truth and freedom will both be far away. And yet the Truth is that we know nothing...

...Objectively, we know nothing at all. Any system of intellectual thought, whether it be science, logic, religion or philosophy, is based on certain fundamental ideas or axioms which are assumed but which cannot be proven. This is the grave of all positivism. We assume but we do not know that there is a real and objective world outside our own mind. Ultimately we do not know what we are or what the world is. Further, if there is a real world apart from ourselves we cannot know what it really is; all we know is what we perceive it to be. All that we perceive is conveyed by our senses and interpreted by our brain. However fine, exact or delicate our scientific instruments may be, their data is still filtered through our senses and interpreted by our brain. However useful, spectacular or necessary our ideas and experiments may be, they still have little to do with absolute truth. Such a thing can only exist for the individual according to his whim or his inner perception of his own truth-in-being.

The witches and devils of the middle ages were real by our own standards; reputable and responsible persons believed in them. They were seen, their effects observed and they accounted for a large body of otherwise inexplicable phenomenon. Their existence was accepted without question by the majority of men, great and humble. From this majority there was not and still is not any appeal. Yet we do not believe in these things today. We believe in other things similarly explaining the same phenomenon. Tomorrow we will believe in still other things We believe but we do not know.

All of our deductions, for example the theory of gravitation, are based on observed statistics, on tendencies observed to occur in a certain way. Even if our observations are correct, we still do not know why these things happen. Our theories are only assumptions, however reasonable they may seem.

There is a type of truth that is based on experience: we know that we feel hot or hungry or in love. These feelings cannot be conveyed to anyone who has not experienced them. We can describe them in terms of similar feelings experienced by someone else, analyzing their cause-and-effect according to mutually acceptable theories but that someone else will never really know what your feeling is like.

The above may be negative considerations but within their limits we can deduce positive principles:

• Whatever the universe is, we are either all or part of it by virtue of our consciousness but we do not know which.
  
• No philosophy, scientific theory, religion or system of thought can be absolute and infallible. They are relative only. One man's opinion is just as good as another's.
  
• There is no absolute justification for emphasizing one individual theory or way of life over another.
  
• Every man has the right to his own opinion and his own way of life. There is no system of human thought which can successfully refute this thesis.
  

So much for positivism but other problems still remain. There is necessity, expediency and convenience. If these are illusions they are very popular and it is usual to consider them. We might say that politics is concerned with necessity and expediency whereas science is concerned with convenience. This is not intended to discredit science and reason in their proper spheres. Reason is one of our greatest gifts, the power that differentiates us from the animals, and science is our greatest tool, our best hope for building a genuine civilization. (It is curious that this modern truism appears, in this system of reasoning, as a concession.)

In spite of its inestimable value, science is a tool and has nothing to do with ultimate truth. Herein is the danger of science. As a tool it is so valuable, so useful and so irresistible that we incline to regard it as the arbiter of the absolute, giving final and irrefutable pronouncement on all things. This is exactly the position that the pedant, the dogmatist and the dialectical materialist would have us take. Then, posing as a "scientist" or propounding "Scientific" doctrines, he can persuade us to accept his values and obey his orders. Today's science must forever be free to overthrow its yesterdays, otherwise it will degenerate into ancestor worship.

It is necessary that we defend freedom unless we all wish to be slaves. It is expedient that we achieve brotherhood unless we desire destruction and it is convenient that we grant others the right to their own opinions and life-styles in order to maintain our own.

The intelligent individual will not base his conduct on an arbitrary or absolute concept of right and wrong. It may be argued that all motives and all actions are selfish since they are intended to satisfy some requirement of the ego. Perhaps this is true of self-sacrifice, abnegation and the highest altruism. We engage in them in order to satisfy ourselves by attaining some object however intangible it may be.

The ego can be very broad. A man may include the whole world as a part of his ego and thus set out to redeem or save it for no other reason than the pleasure of personal accomplishment. Such a man, far from being unselfish, is extremely egotistical. The artist devoted to the production of pure beauty is so dedicated because of his need and his nature; at least such egotism is not petty. Motives of family-love and patriotism are rooted in bigotry. This does not necessarily detract from such actions and motives. Everything in nature is beautiful and it is no less beautiful because it is understood. However, the unenlightened man will assign arbitrary values to all things in order to protect and justify his own position. His morals are based on things he wishes were true or which someone else wishes were true. His philosophy pays no attention to relative facts or realities and yet in his life he must deal with them. He is consequently involved in a constant round of pretenses and evasions.

The enlightened liberal needs no such justification. He will realize and accept his inherent selfishness and the inherent selfishness of all men. He will understand living as a technique, the technique of getting what he wants on the terms he wants.

Such is the case with freedom. If we abrogate another's freedom to gain our own ends, our own freedom is thereby jeopardized. That is the cost. If we wish to assure our own freedom, we must assure all mens' freedom. That is the technique.

If a liberal were to develop two personalities and one of these personalities were to establish a benevolent dictatorship while the other continued his liberal activities it would only be a matter of time before he killed himself. The restriction of others freedom is ultimately self-enslavement and suicide. The dictator is the most abject of all slaves.

These simple considerations are the logical basis of the philosophy of liberalism. From such considerations and from many more the fundamental principles of liberalism arose as a code of rights, basic in nature and clear beyond misconception. This code must be the Law beyond the law, an ultimate expression of the dignity and inviolability of the individual. It must be above compromise by courts and lawyers, beyond the whim of the populace and the treachery of demagogues.

It must be the epitome of man's aspertion toward liberty and self-determination, a canon so sacred that its violation by a state, a group or an individual is treason and sacrilege. The Bill of Rights in the American Constitution was a step in the right direction and its study will indicate further development. In a world so threatened by positivism and paternalism this doctrine is limited in both scope and application. It permits such violations of liberty as the late National Prohibition Act, the Draft Law, the closed shop, the Mann Act, censorship laws, anti-firearms laws and racial discrimination.

It has been said, with justification, that the Constitution means what the Supreme Court says it means. A document so fundamental as a Bill of Rights cannot be jeopardized by arbitrary interpretations. It should need no interpretations. It must apply equally to the national state, the federated states, counties, municipalities, official agencies and the private citizen within their province. It must apply in such a way that the individual or minority needs no recourse to elaborate, lengthy and costly proceedings in order to protect these rights. It is the duty of the state to provide this recourse to all alike.

Freedom cannot be subject to arbitrary interpretation and misinterpretation. It must plainly include freedom from persecution on moral, political, economic, racial, social or religious grounds. No man, no group and no nation has the right to any man's individual freedom. No matter how pure the motive, how great the emergency, how high the principle, such action is tyranny and is never justified.

The question is, are we able to face the consequences of democracy? It is not sufficient that freedom be assured by purely negative means. Freedom is meaningless where its expression is controlled by powerful groups such as the press, the radio, the motion picture industry, churches, politicians and capitalists. Freedom must be insured.

It can only be insured by the allegiance to the principle that man has certain inalienable rights; among which are the rights:

• To live his private life, insofar as it concerns only himself, as he sees fit.
  
• To eat and drink, to dress, live and travel as, where and he will.
  
• To express himself; to speak, write, print, experiment and otherwise create as he desires.
  
• To work as he chooses, when he chooses and where he chooses at a reasonable and commensurate wage.
  
• To purchase his food, shelter, deical and social needs and all other services and commodities necessary to his existence and self expression at a reasonable and commensurate price.
  
• To have a decent environment and upbringing during his childhood until he reaches a responsible majority.
  
• To love as he desires, where, how and with whom he chooses, in accordance only with the desires of himself and of his partner.
  
• To the positive opportunity to enjoy these rights as he sees fit, without obstruction on the one hand or compulsion on the other.
  
• Finally, in order to protect his person, his property and his rights, he should have the right to kill an aggressor if necessary. This is the purpose of the right to keep and bear arms.
  

These rights must be counterbalanced by certain responsibilities. The liberal accepting them must guarantee these rights to all others at all times, regardless of his personal feelings or interests. He must work to establish and protect them, live in a manner commensurate with them and be prepared to defend them with his life. He must refuse allegiance to any state or organization which denies these rights and he should aid and encourage all who, without qualification or equivocation, endorse them. He must refuse to compromise these principles on any issue or for any reason.

Nothing short of such a commitment will assure the survival of liberty, or democracy of society itself. Liberalism is not only a code for individuals and their state, it is the only possible basis for a future international civilization. However, these principles will be only rhetoric unless they are revered and protected by those to whom they apply. They must be interpreted and applied with understanding and sympathy, with humor and tolerance. Pretentiousness, sentimentality or hysterics are not needed in their application or their defense. Insufferable demagogues of "high principle" are sufficiently numerous as it is.

It must also be understood that we cannot force man's rights upon him. Man has a right to be a slave if he so desires. If he does not assert and defend his rights he deserves slavery. The person who is tyrannized by his family, his peers, by public opinion or slave morality, providing he is free to leave their influence or to challenge it, is worthy of his condition. His protestations are those of the hypocrite.

Freedom, like charity, begins at home. No man is worthy to fight in the cause of freedom unless he has conquered his internal drives. He must learn to control and discipline the disastrous passions that would lead him to folly and ruin. He must conquer inordinate vanity and anger, self deception, fear and inhibition. These are the crude ores of his being.

He must smelt these ores in the fire of life; forge his own sword, temper it and sharpen it against the hard abrasive of experience. Only then is he fit to bear arms in the larger battle. There is no substitute for courage and the victory is to the high hearted. He will have nothing to do with asceticism or the excesses of weakness. Self expression will be his watchword, a self expression tempered keen and strong. First he must know how to rule himself. Only then can he cope with the economic pressures which are employed by institutions and corporations or the political pressures employed by demagogues.

He may then find himself in a difficult predicament. If he calls himself a liberal, he discovers that he is supposedly committed to a policy of accommodation with the Russian Government. If he opposes a pro-Soviet policy he is welcome to the camp of the Catholic Church and the Manufacturer's Association. If he eschews both camps, he is condemned for lack of principle. If he should support the rights of the workingman or minority and racial groups, he is a Red. If at the same time he believes in Constitutional Government and individual rights, he is also a Fascist.

Many liberals are familiar with this situation but few seem to have deduced the conclusion. The difficulty lies in the confusion of the rights of the individual in relation to the responsibilities of the state. It is a sad comment on our mentality that the social reformer subscribes to total regimentation while the alleged individualist propagandizes for total irresponsibility. The rights of the individual can be clearly defined. His responsibilities vis-a-vis the responsibilities of the state can be clearly defined. The individual's rights end where the next man's begin. It is the function of the state to ensure equal rights to all. But, in the absence of a social devotion to the true principles of liberalism, positivists have usurped its name and even its phrases in order to propagandize for their various totalitarianisms. This process has been aided by that faction of pseudo-liberalism which believes that all opinion contrary to its own must be suppressed.

As I write, allegedly liberal groups are agitating for the denial of public forums to those they call fascist. Americanism societies are striving for the suppression of communist or "red" literature and speech. Religious groups, backed by a publicity conscious press, are constantly campaigning for the prohibition of art and literature which, as if by divine prerogative, they term "indecent", immoral or dangerous.

It would seem that all these organizations are devoted to one common purpose, the suppression of freedom. Their sincerity is no excuse. History is a bloody testament that sincerity can achieve atrocities which cynicism could hardly conceive of. Each of these groups is engaged in a frantic struggle to sell out, betray or destroy the freedom which was their birthright and which alone assured their present existence.

Freedom is a two-edged sword. He who believes that the absolute rightness of his belief is an authority to suppress the rights and opinions of his fellows cannot be a liberal. Liberalism cannot exist where it violates its own principles. It cannot exist where the emergency monger or the utopia salesman can obtain a suspension of rights, whether temporary or permanent. Liberty cannot be suppressed in order to defend liberalism.

If we are to achieve a democracy, the rights of individuals and the responsibilities of states must be openly defined and ardently defended. It is inconceivable that men who fought and died in a war against totalitarianism did not know what they fought for. It seems a fantastic joke that the institutions they believed in and defended have turned, like a nightmare, into home-grown tyrannies. A generation went down in blood and agony to make the world "safe" but the evil that makes the world "unsafe" still goes undefeated, plotting new sacrifices of misery and blood. The guilt lies not entirely with the warmongers, plutocrats and demagogues. If a people permit exploitation and regimentation in any name, they deserve their slavery. A tyrant does not make his tyranny. It is made possible by his people and not otherwise.

Much of our modern thought is characterized by pretenses and evasions, by appeals to ultimate authorities which are non- liberal, superstitious and reactionary. Often we are not aware of these thought processes. We accept ideas, authorities, catch- phrases and conditions without troubling to think or investigate and yet these things may conceal terrible traps. We accept them as right because they have a surface-level agreement with the things in which we believe. We welcome the man who is for liberalism, against communism, without troubling to inquire what else he is for or against. In our blindness we leave ourselves open to exploitation, regimentation and war.

Tumultuous developments in science and society demand a new clarity of thought, a reexamination and a restatement of principles. It is not sufficient that a principle is sacred because it is time-worn. It must be examined, tried and tested in the crucible of our present needs.

In our law, in our social and international relations, we are guilty of a myriad of barbarisms and superstitions. These injustices continue and proliferate because we have become used to them. We have lost our freedom through tolerance and inertia.

The principle we have developed herein is simple: the liberty of the individual is the foundation of civilization. No true civilization is possible without this liberty and no state, national or international, is stable in its absence. The proper relation between individual liberty on the one hand and social responsibility on the other is the balance which will assure a stable society. The only other road to social equilibrium demands the total annihilation of individuality. There is not further evasion of nature's immemorial ultimatum: change or perish but the choice of change is ours.


Chapter Two

Of all the strange and terrible powers among which we move unknowingly, sex is the most potent. Conceived in the orgasm of birth, we burst forth in agony and ecstasy from the Center of Creation. Time and again we return to that fountain, lose ourselves in the fires of being, unite for a moment with the eternal force and return renewed and refreshed as from a miraculous sacrament. Then, at the last, our life closes in the orgasm of death.

Sex, typified as love, is at the heart of every mystery, at the center of every secret. It is this splendid and subtle serpent that wines about the cross and coils in the bloom of the mystic rose.

The sexual perversion of Christianity becomes obvious when it is realized that "The Holy Ghost" (The Sophia) is feminine. The very Tetragrammaton, Yod He Vau He, means: Father-Mother-Son- Daughter and asserts the splendor of the biological order. How could life proceed from a strictly masculine creation? What miracle could possibly be superior to the miracle of copulation, conception and gestation? In the corrupt and demonic Jehovah, the priesthood blasphemed nature in order to perpetuate a tyrannical and superstitious patriarchy. Woman was insulted and affronted with the calumny of immaculate conception -- then, by this mystery mongering, a premium was placed on moral and spiritual sterility. This sublimation of the sex-urge has been the basis of the power of the church and is the source of much of the psychosis rampant in the modern world.

It has been asserted that the church has been a champion of progress and freedom; nothing could be more fallacious. Organized Christianity has been inevitably allied with tyranny, reaction and persecution. No organized dogma can contribute to progress except by occasional accident. The church's main contribution has been to unintentionally foment revolt against its bigotry. It could hardly be otherwise with an organization founded on a double fallacy: the sin of sex and the infallibility of man. No religion can hope to benefit humanity while it preaches love and reviles the root of love. Anyone hoping to understand and cope with human relations must understand both the importance and over-emphasis of sex in society.

Sexual concepts and symbolism underlie all the world's religions. As I mentioned above, sublimated sex has been the source of power for the Christian church. Sex and sex neurosis are fundamental factors in the attitude of modern men. These three facts give sex a place of prime importance in our liberal examination of society.

Our sex attitudes are largely characterized by pretense. The majority of people under fifty today have, at one time or another, engaged in what is termed illicit intercourse -- and yet we pretend, publicly, that we have not done so. Some of us go so far as to state that we don't do it, never would do it and disapprove of the criminal types who do. Policemen arrest and judges convict persons discovered in a pursuit which they themselves indulge in. The enjoyment of a natural urge is defined as a crime. Young persons thus enjoying the urge in the wonder of the beginning are burdened with a sense of guilt and shame. They are classed with common criminals -- why?

The shameful answer is that back in the Middle Ages, under conditions of squalor, ignorance, superstition and oppression, the sex taboo became a prime instrument of power in the arsenal of a band of brigands known as the Christian church. This is the reason that young people in love are classified as criminals. Venereal disease thrives and abortionists prosper as an inevitable result. The superstition which fostered this shameful condition is no longer absolutely dominant but the institution that promoted the belief that the human body was obscene, that love was indecent and that woman was forever made foul by original sin remains to mold our thoughts and shape our laws. It is most significant that the spiritual and physical inheritors of that church, both catholic and protestant, vigorously and effectively oppose birth control, venereal disease education, divorce law reform; i.e., anything which would limit the power of their weapon.

If the Christians enforced these taboos only among their believers they would be within their rights. Man has the right to any personal stupidity however monstrous it may seem but this is not their principal concern. They seek to impose this nonsense on everybody, by every method of legislative, moral and economic intimidation at their command. The success of their efforts can be judged by the reflection of such attitudes in the press, the radio, the motion picture industry and our legal statutes. True to fascist form, the censor utilizes his moral victory to impose political and social censorship in all fields. Bigots and demagogues invoke the divine right of religion and of morality in order to gain extraordinary power. Freedom of religion and of he press should not afford a justification for giant propaganda campaigns to suppress freedom! We must not only have freedom of religion, we must have freedom from religion.

The concept that sex in art, literature and life is subject to criminal law is based entirely on this superstitious sexual taboo. The censorial power of the church, the state and established press is founded solely on this one assumption: that the taboo of a particular religion should have universal legal sanction. This sanction, once established, is then subtly extended to imply that all the other dogmas of that religion are now the "unwritten law" of the land. Such a religion, always respectable and conservative, forms alliances with fascist and capitalist cliques, thus gaining a privileged position from which to persecute liberalism in all its forms. Superstition, taboo, reaction and fascism augment one another most effectively. The fact that one type of totalitarianism persecutes another -- or appears to do so -- is hardly a palliative.

Modern man must recognize the source and nature of his sexual taboos and discredit them in the light of truth. Only thus can he achieve sanity in sex and a healthy outlook on life in general.

In our society early marriages are often prevented by economic considerations, therefore pre-marital sexual relations are natural and often desirable. Contraceptive techniques, available to any intelligent young person from a druggist or doctor, can minimize the problem of venereal disease and unwanted pregnancies. The development of sexual technique, the determination of the qualifications of one's partner and the gratification of the youthful urge to experiment all assure a far more lasting and stable marriage than one begun in ignorance and prudery. In marriage itself the social contract is biding. Property acquired by the joint efforts of husband and wife belong to both jointly. Where any two persons have pledged their love together, no outsider has the right to interfere. Either party is justified in resisting such interference by force if necessary. But neither party, whether the relation be in or out of wedlock, has any right or jurisdiction over the love, affection or the sexual favors of another for longer than that person desires.

Where children are concerned a separation presents a serious problem. Broken homes are hard on children but a loveless and bitter home is worse. No state can assure a child the affection of his parents but it can guarantee his physical welfare and security, thus insuring him against many of the frustrations of childhood and adolescence which develop into unstable and maladjusted adult behavior. The laws against mutually agreeable sex expression must be repealed, together with the laws prohibiting nudism, birth control and censorship. We must emphatically deny that love is criminal and that the body is indecent. We must affirm the beauty, the dignity, and joyousness and even the humor of sex.

Indeed there are obscene things in the light and in the darkness; things that deserve destruction: -- The exploitation of women for poor wages, the shameful degradation of minorities by the little lice who call themselves members of a 'superior race' and the deliberate machinations towards war. Nowhere among these genuine obscenities is there a place for the love shared by men and women. There are sins but love is not one of them and yet, of all the things that have been called sins, love has been the most punished and the most persecuted. Of all the beauties we know, the springtime of love is closest to paradise. And as all things pass, so love passes -- too soon.

This most exquisite and tender of human emotions, this little moment of eternity, should be free and unrestrained. It should not be bought and sold, chained and restricted until lovers, caught in the maelstrom of economics and laws, are hounded like criminals. What end is served and who profits by such cruelty? Only priests and lawyers. Let us adhere to a strict morality where the rights and happiness of our fellow man is concerned. Let us call our true sins by their right names and expiate them accordingly -- but let our lovers go free.

If we are to achieve civilization and sanity, we must institute an educational program in love-making, birth control and disease prevention. Above all we must root out the barbaric and vicious concepts of shamefulness and indecency in sex, exposing the motives and methods of their proponents.

Happy are the parents who, as a result of sexual experimenting, are well mated, taking joy in each other's passion, seeing beauty in their nakedness and not fearing to expose their bodies or the bodies of their children. They would never shame their children for their natural sexual curiosity.

Jesus told the "fallen woman", "Go and sin no more" but I, who am a man, say to you who have given your body for the need of man's body, who have given your love freely for his spirit's sake:

"Be blessed in the name of man. And if any god deny you for this, I will deny that god."

The ancients, being simple and without original sin, saw God in the act of love and therein they saw a great mystery, a sacrament revealing the bounty and the beauty of the force that made men and the stars. Thus they worshipped. Poor ignorant old Pagans! How we have progressed. What was most sacred to them, we see as a dirty joke. From this sordid joke we have played on ourselves only Woman Herself can redeem us. She has been the ignominious butt of the joke, the target of malice and arrogance and the scapegoat for masculine inferiority and guilt. She alone can redeem us from our crucifixion and castration.

Only woman, of and by herself, can strike through the foolish frustration of the advertisers' ideal. She must elevate her strong, free and splendid image to take her place in the sun as an individual, a companion and mate fit for, and demanding no less than, true men.

Let there be an end to inhibition and an end to pretense. Let us discover what we are and be what we are, honestly and unashamedly. The rabbit has speed to recompense his fear, the panther strength to assuage his hunger. There is room for both even though the rabbit would probably prefer a world of rabbits (dull and overpopulated). All traits are useful wrath, fear, lust and even laziness -- if they are balanced by strength and intelligence. If we lie about things we call our weaknesses and sins, if we say that his is "evil" and that is "wrong", denying that such faults could be part of us, they will grow crooked in the dark. But when we have them out in the open; admitting them, facing them and accepting them, then we will be ashamed to leave any vestige of them secret to turn crippled and twisted. Fear can sharpen our wits against adversity. Anger and strength can be welded into a sword against tyrants both within and without. Lust can be trained to be the strong and subtle servant of love and art.

It is not necessary to deny anything. It is only necessary to know ourselves. Then we will naturally seek that which is needful to our being. Our significance does not lie in the extent to which we resemble others or in the extent to which we differ from them. It lies within our ability to be ourselves. This may well be the entire object of life; to discover ourselves, our meaning. This does not come in a sudden burst of illumination; it is a constant process which continues so long as we are truly alive. The process cannot continue unobstructed unless we are free to undergo all experience and willing to participate in all existence. Then the significant questions are not "is it right" or "is it good" but rather "how does it feel" and "what does it mean". Ultimately these are the only questions that can approach truth but they cannot be asked in the absence of freedom.

There was a time when these questions were whispered in the shadow of the stake. That Christian instrument of conversion is not sanctioned at present but the will and the malice remain and will continue until the power of the superstition-mongering tyrants is finally broken. Meanwhile religious dogmatism continues to support the sexual jealousies of neurotic parents for their children and neurotic marriage partners for their mates. It is not because of economic desperation and greed that crime and war wash over the world in ever-mounting waves. It is only necessary to look back on the Middle Ages when St. Vitus' Dance, epidemic flagellation and the Witchcraft Persecutions, all spawned out of Christian guilt and shame, swept the Western World. It was the tone set by these fearful events, reinforcing the divine right of reactionary monarchs, that produced the liberal revolutions of the 18th century. But the root, the sexual taboo, was unfortunately not destroyed. It remained to revitalize the power of religion over the new bourgeoisie.

The frenetic hatred of Jews and Negroes (symbols of illicit sexual freedom) and the lust toward the blood-and-fire baths of warfare are the very aberrations of sexual frustration. They are the nightmares of souls in a hell of guilty desire, laboring like madmen over their instruments of destruction in order to destroy the world which has denied them satisfaction. It is only in the unobstructed exercise of sexual function, by a generation trained from youth in contraception and the technique of love, that it will be possible to achieve mature social relations.

In this childish folly of sexual possession each man and each woman hates and fears every other man and woman as the potential despoiler or some joke by the ever-present specters of jealousy and suspicion. It is possible that the application of two old axioms; "that you love one another" and "that you do unto others as you would have others do unto you" might go a long way in helping us solve our sexual problems. The application of these maxims in sexual relations is easy and pleasant. If firmly established the principles might spread to other areas of human intercourse.

The sexual revolution will not produce any instantaneous paradise nor will it be accomplished without tears. The way to racial maturity is long and painful but it is at least possible to attain the maturity and richness that comes with full and satisfactory sexual expression in private life. It may be that other considerations become more important in one's later years but I would hesitate to say at what age to set the mark. It does not seem possible to grow old gracefully unless one has known something of a graceful youth.


Chapter Three

There is no evidence to show that man was created and accoutered to serve as God's vice-regent upon the earth. There is no reason to believe that he is naturally good and kind, brave and wise -- or that he ever was. On the contrary, there is much to show that he was a beast who took a strange turning in the jungle and blundered rather aimlessly into a mental world in which he was certainly not at home.

There is much evidence that man is by nature cruel, cowardly, lustful, avaricious and treacherous. He holds dominion over these terrible internal enemies and defends against the other predators (his fellow men) by virtue of his ferocity, his cunning and his indomitable will. This is his beauty and his significance: that out of the blind primordial forces of sex and the survival urge, he has forged reason and science and spun the splendorous web of art and love. If there is no other reason and no other significance, man himself has on occasion created reason and significance, standing as the maker of his gods in a garden made fruitful by his own creative power.

We think in terms of ourselves relative to the external universe. It cannot be shown, however, that this external universe is other than an extension of our own perception. But if we differentiate the internal from the external, we are still part of and not separate from the entire process of nature. We are made from the nova by way of the sun and built from the air, the rock and the sea, animated by the primordial fire of life. There are filaments in our consciousness that reach back to the first ancestor and extend to all other men and all other life with which we share a common creation and a common destiny.

Here is the totality that the Greeks called "Pan"; all-devourer, all-begetter -- life and death, good and evil, pain and pleasure, unity, duality and multiplicity; all things and beyond all things. The Soul of Night and the Stars.

If in our folly and fear we will ascribe moral qualities to the lightning that strikes, to the star that shines, to the tiger that kills, then we will not hesitate to assign them also to the woman who gives and the man who takes. Thus we will define god and found a religion. And thus we degrade the living universe into a bewhiskered and irascible character endowed with immortal omnipotence and a hatred for our enemies, or with those nature lovers who catch cold communing with "The All" in the park at night, we sink into the platitudinous sitz baths of various 'religious science' systems on our way to the catalepsy of middle age.

All nature partakes of the eternal sacraments of life and death, of ebb and flow, of creation and destruction and regeneration. These are the harmonies of eternity that change forever and never change. The cry of the baby is echoed in the tumult of the nova. Men suns and seasons pass and return again. The spate of semen is one with the jet of stars men call The Milky Way.

The mind that comprehends these immortal processes in love and in worship is an immortal mind that soars beyond time and death. We are of one age with Aeschylus and Sophocles and Shakespeare, of one blood with Moses, Lao Tse and Newton. The body changes and decays while time cuckolds all shapes of desire and all transient things. But the shapes of desire, although transient, are the very vehicles of man's adventure. He cannot attain by denying these steeds but by strengthening them -- by training and bridling them with love and creative will until their wings are revealed. Sex and hunger are the raw stuff of art. Out of his passion, fury and despair the artist transmutes the shapes of terror and wonder into an eternal beauty.

All ways are the right way when will and love are the guides. The grace and bounty of life are free to all, saint and sinner alike, who desire them. The voice of the wind, the poignancy of music, the shout of thunder all cry out to man, daring him to know himself. Sunlight, sea and stars and the splendour of a naked woman are the signs and witnesses of a covenant that is forever. We know these things; we know them with the only certainty that is ever given us. This is the beautiful-pitiable knowledge of childhood and first youth -- that the world denies and necessity circumvents. This is the knowledge of the poets, artists and singes who are beloved and outcast by men and of the mystics whom the world calls mad.

And man, self-castrated and self-frustrated, flees down the corridors of nightmare, pursued by monstrous machines, overwhelmed by satanic powers, haunted by vague guilts and terrors -- all created out of his own imagination. He escapes into absurdity, drowns his spirit in pretense, worships brass gods of power and tin gods of success. Then, shamed by his pretenses and frustrated by his self-denial, he projects his horror on imagined enemies, seeks release in scapegoats and false issues, thereby propitiating those bestial gods who have arisen from the shattered edolons of his spirit with sacrifices of blood.

Nothing is of its nature, evil -- and nothing is of its nature, good. Evil is only excess; good is simply balance. All things are subject to abuse and likewise susceptible to beneficial use. Balance does not consist in denial or excess in indulgence. Balance can only be obtained by exceeding. The elemental forces in man's nature are so tremendous that they can only be balanced by an ultimate self-expression. To place limitations and restrictions on this nature is to build a wall of plaster around a sun. If we clip an eagles' wings or feed carrots to a lion we will not uplift or improve either species.

The fundamental purpose of religion is to attain an identity with a power which we believe to be greater than ourselves, whose omnipotence and immortality we can share. Having achieved some sense of this identity, we then feel that we can cope with problems and attain ends with more confidence. The reliance on religion as well as the reliance on property can indicate a lack of self-reliance.

We ourselves create this 'God of Power'. It is from our own individual 'self' that his power is drawn and this self is greater than any god which it creates. Therefore to know ourselves is the highest form of wisdom and to believe in ourselves is the highest form of faith. Science which seeks to know and art which seeks to interpret are two forms of love which constitute the only availing way of worship. That these two greatest expressions of the human spirit should be subservient to religion, politics, nationalism and war is the ultimate blasphemy.

We are now in the midst of a tremendous battle of forces contending for domination over the mind and spirit of man. It is not, unfortunately, a battle between good and evil, between freedom and tyranny but rather a struggle of dogma against dogma and authority vs. authority. The contenders are fascism and communism. Each is a doctrine alien and hostile to the ideal of freedom. Each says that we must choose between one or the other and each is, in reality, identical. Each demands the absolute enslavement of the individual, the abnegation of the intellect and the subjugation of the will.

The authoritarian is right, absolutely right, so right that every extreme of falsehood, suppression and tyranny is justified in the accomplishment of his 'divine' ends. Behind his benevolent paternalism lurks the star chamber and the concentration camp; behind his morality looms the stake and the inquisition of the "Old Time Religion" so many profess to long for. All these systems are old; older than human history. Freedom and democracy are the only new things under the sun and they offend alike the slaves and the slave masters.

"Come unto me," goes the old harlot's song. "Come unto me you weary and heavily laden. Surrender your intolerable burden of freedom and I will fill your mouths with miracles and your bellies will be full of food. Come with me and I will confound your enemies and show you paradise. Look, you do not even have to change a name, only keep the letter and deny the spirit, for the letter giveth life."

She is harvesting the nations now, that old whore, for an appointment in the place called Armageddon. There will be a hunting of free men in the name of freedom and there will be prisons and pogroms in the name of democracy, murder and slavery in the name of brotherhood, and all for the sake of dominion over the minds and bodies of men.

There is a choice: the choice of freedom which has no other name and no other cause. Man, freed of his demons, without the need of a dogma or the use of a creed, can, of and by himself, avail, triumph and achieve significance. This is the faith of a liberal; belief in himself and belief in man. There is no other way to the full status of manhood. It is the long way, the hard way; through trial, error, failure and heartbreak -- but it is the way guided by science and inspired by art; leading at long last to the stars. This is our choice: we may believe in ourselves, believe in our fellow men and in freedom and in brotherhood. We may start to achieve here and now that paradise which has so long been relegated to the hereafter. Or, with the dogmatists, the positivists, the authoritarians we can return again to the ape-hood from which we have so late arisen.

If we wish identity with a greater power, let us seek union with ourselves -- our total self, raised to its highest potential of wisdom, knowledge and experience. If we wish to unite with the universe, let us court the whole of nature, all experience, all truth and the splendour of the awesome cosmos itself. For 'out there' lies the great campaign that comes first and last; the ultimate adventure of the individual into himself. He must go down like Moses into his unknown self, out into the new dimension, out with Orpheus and the barque of Arthur, with Tammuz and Adonis, with Mithra and Jesus, into the labyrinths of the Dark Land. There he will meet The Mother and hear Her final question: "What is man?".

Thereafter, close by the heart of the cryptic Mother, he may find the Graal; ultimate consciousness, total remembrance, instinct made certain, reason made real. For it is he, wonderful monster, embryo god who has swum in the fish, shed the skin of the crocodile, peered from the eyes of serpents, swung with the apes and shaken the earth with tramp of the tyrannosaur's hoof. It is he who has cried out on all crosses, ruled on all thrones, grubbed in all gutters. It is he whose face is reflected and distorted in all heavens and hells -- he, the Child of the Stars, the son of the ocean; this creature of dust, this wonder and terror called MAN.


Chapter Four
The Woman Girt With the Sword

It is to you woman, beautiful redeemer of the race, whom I address this chapter. That which stirs in you now is not madness, not sin, not folly -- but Life! This new life is the joy and the fire that will beget a new race; create a new heaven and new earth. When you were a child, did not the wind and the sun speak to you? Did you not hear the mountain's voice; the voice of the river and of the storm? Have you not heard the whisper of the stars and the ineffable voice in silence? Have you not gone naked in the forest with the wind on your body and felt the caress of Pan? Your heart has swollen with Spring, blossomed with Summer and saddened with Winter. These things are the covenant and in them is the truth that is forever.

You have sought companions as high-hearted as yourself and found them not save in the elusive memories of dream and song. For you found a blight over the world; a blight of silence and sorrow. Your companions walked in guilt and shame, in fear, in hate, in sin and in the sorrow of sin. There was only nervous laughter and furtive pleasure; unsatisfying and shameful -- But be no longer sad, my beloved. Be joyous and unafraid for within you is the song that shall shatter the silence, the flame that will burn away the dross.

It is you who are the redeemer from sing and sorrow, from guilt and shame. WOMAN; oh splendour incarnate! How long have you served in chains, a slave to the lust and guilt of pigs? How long have you writhed under the degradation of your Holy Name, "Whore", or suffered silently under the degradation called, "virtue"? How well you have known the stake, the rack, the whip, the chains of imprisonment and even entombment in the service of your master.

And was the bond fear, was it weakness, was it cowardice and inferiority? Oh shame of man, it was none of these; it was love. A man was once crucified in a redemption that failed, yet if ten times ten million men were crucified, this infamy could not be redeemed. Husband, father, priest, jailer, judge, executioner, exploiter, seducer, destroyer -- so has your lover mastered and defiled you. Yet pity him for he sought love... But finally there is an end and then the beginning and all the future will be with you. For you are the mother of a new race, the redeemer and lover of the new men; the men who shall be free.

I shall speak to you of men. Men desire three things of a woman: a mother greater than themselves, a wife less than themselves and a lover equal with themselves. Against the mother they are in revolt, the wife they hold in contempt and the lover ever eludes them. Consider the husband; how he throws his clothes about, eschews dirty dishes and housework and asserts himself in a loud voice. Consider the homosexual; how he hates woman and flees himself, fearing that he will slay her. Consider the great lover; how he grasps for love and his hands close on nothingness. These are bewildered, frightened children playing games against the dark. And those who wear brass and swords, who strut and slay, are they not the most frightened of all? Therefore pity them and forgive them.

In the ancient world there were men for a season, before cities arose and they turned to gilded popinjays, gracefully accepting futility. Then came Christianity, an anodyne for slaves, an enteric for barbarians whose deeds gave them indigestion -- and ultimately, a whip for slave masters.

Faust was the prototype of the Middle Ages, but not the Faustus of whom Kit Marlowe tells. It was a darker Faust; Gilles de Rais, who betrays the Maid in his lust for power, then, after his fall and the failure of his prayers, he descends to horror in his cellars. This theme lasted an age until man, appalled by his nightmares, turned finally to a dream of liberty.

It is the voice of Voltaire, jaded, cynical, weary of folly, that sounds the opening bar of a tremendous, mocking prelude. Tom Paine, one real man, broken and at last betrayed by all the wooden champions, Cagliostro, plotting the revenge of the Templars with a woman and a necklace, Will Blake, speaking uncomprehended with the tongue of angels, Shelley and his beautiful gesture; Swinburne, who almost recreated Helas before he too was broken -- Byron, Pushkin, Gautier; all instruments in a prelude to a symphony that was never played. And Science -- how it was to save us! That "Brave New World" of Huxley, Darwin and H.G. Wells with only the voice of Spengler in dissent.

Science remaking the world; an international language, a universal brotherhood beyond nationality, prejudice or creed... A beautiful vision fallen like a house of cards. You creators of the "New Age" who dare not speak, think or move without permission from the military, you unfettered titans who will hang for speaking across one border -- where is your 'New World'? Champions, where is freedom? What treasure have we lost? We must turn to women for that answer.

The key lies back ten thousand years ago in the Age of Isis that is mistakenly called "The Matriarchy". It was not a Matriarchy as we conceive it; a rule of club-women, of frustrated chickens, in fact it was not a rule at all; it was an equality.

The Woman was and is the Priestess. In Her reposes the Mystery. She is the Mother, brooding yet tender, the lover, at once passionate and aloof, the wife, revered and cherished. She is the witch woman. She stands co-equal with her mate who is the chieftain, the hunter, the thinker and the doer. The woman is the Priestess, guardian of the mystery, syble of the unconscious and prophetess of dreams. Together they balanced each other until the catastrophe of the Patriarchal Age, arch-typified by the monosexual monster, Jehova.

Then, under the rule of Priests, woman became an inferior animal while man became isolated in his imagined superiority and found himself at the mercy of his own merciless intelligence. It was total war between the emotions that must and the intellect that will not. Every patriarchal religion is a self-contradictory monstrosity. They are dogmatic creeds that shift like straws in the wind of the intellect. Upon this shifting structure man has failed. He knows the futility of such artificial systems but he fights for them with all the sick fury his frustration can generate. In the process he has lost his mother, his wife has failed him and his lover eludes him. The Mystery has gone out of the Temple, banished by a senile and self-sufficient council of beards.

Woman, Woman -- where are you? Come back to us again. Forgive even if you cannot forget and serve once more in our Temples. Take us by the hand. Kiss us on the lips and tell us we are not alone. Witch-Woman, out of the ashes of the stake, rise again! It was in the Dianic Cult that the old way continued. Those splendid and terrible women; Messilina, Toffana, La Voisin and DeBrinvillies raised revenge to a high art. Others sought the forbidden mystery in secret rites and purchased a brief reunion at an awful price. This was the ope in the Maid of Orleans, the dream of hopeless millions that the woman who was to redeem them had come at last. Her failure and her fate teach us that innocence is no protection. Be cunning, oh woman, be wise, be subtle, be merciless. I have asked you to understand and forgive -- but forget not overmuch. Trust nothing but yourself.

Now I have spoken of those great poisoners but there is a worse revenge. Know that all revenge is revenge on self and the most terrible is that taken by the frigid woman. Count her in the tens of millions. The curse lies in the failure of her mate to be a man and her failure to be true to herself but the cause is the dark guilt with which parents poison their children. There is also suppressed incestuous love and the fear of unwanted children -- yet those who have known of these things should have no shame there-from. Strength is not born, it is gained by understanding and overcoming. Go free; sing the old, wild song:

EVOE IO, EVOE IACCHUS IO PAN, PAN! EVOE BABALON!

[COLOR=#000000][FONT=Times New Roman][FONT=Arial][size=12]Go to the mountains and the forest; go naked in the Summer that you may regain the old joy. Love gladly and freely under the stars. But you say your body is not beautiful? Here is a secret: the body is molded by the mind. If you have embraced fear, repression, hate -- then you may find your body repulsive. But go free, love joyously and without restraint. Run naked then watch the cheeks flush, the breasts well and the supple contours develop from the flowing rhythms of life. Disease and deformity are bred in fear and hate, therefore be fearless lovers and ever beautiful.

The woman is the Priestess of the Irrational World! Irrational - but how enormously important, and how dangerous because it is unadmitted or denied, we do not want to be drunken, murderous, frustrated, poverty-stricken and miserable without cause. These conditions are not reasonable or 'scientific' and yet they do exist. We say we do not want war but war seems a psychological necessity. Wars will continue until that need is otherwise fulfilled. We do not love or hate a person because it is "reasonable". We are moved willy-nilly, despite our reason and our will, by forces from the unconscious, irrational world. These forces speak to us in dreams, in symbols and in our own incomprehensible actions. These passions can only be redeemed by intuitive understanding...