I know I have been writing a bit fewer posts this month, but it is because I am learning how to stream audio onto this blog and create podcasts.

This will be amazing! I am rejoining a former member of my 1990′s Celtic band, Castlerigg, and we will recording some of the Scottish Fairy ballads that in the archives of this blog. Hearing the music will enhance your understanding of why these songs are the Keys to Faery.

Initiatory Faery Ballad: Tam Lin

Thomas Rhymer: An Exploration of A Faery Ballad

I also plan some podcast interviews with prominent occultists. For instance Paul Green, author of Babalon, has agreed to speak about Crowley, Parsons, Carmeron, Babalon and the Rite of the Moonchild as part of the Babalon Diaries.

I think the addition of audio will make the blog more fun and hopefully interactive. I may also have to write something very controversial to get a conversation going on here…what do you think?

Also! News! A couple of months ago, my love of writing fiction caused to start a new blog Gothic Faery Tales: For the dark side of Faery Tales….

Angela Carter

I have a few posts but it is new. Nonetheless, there seems to be a lot of interest. I plan to read tales via podcasts on there as well. There are some very old tales, some new — for instance there is one by Angela Carter posted already, and one by A.S.Byatt from her great novel “Possession” some original like my forthcoming “Roses, Briars, Blood”.

Check it out: here’s the link:

http://www.gothicfaerytales.com

I hope this sounds as exciting to you as it is for me! I can’t wait to get my first audio on here — hopefully this weekend.

by Aldrovandi

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Podcast Interviews Coming Up!

This is the eighth in a series of posts about my adventures during 2005, leading up to the performance of Paul Green’s play Babalon. The story is full of cloak and dagger, initiatory strangeness, chaos, and hysteria. It shows what can happen on the Magical path if one is not careful…(as if one has choice…)

Directed by occultist, Alison Rockbrand, Babalon was performed on December 5, 2005, at the John Gielgud Theatre at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts to a sold out audience of London’s finest occultists and magicians. If you want to listen to it, click Radio QBSaul: Archives: Babalon. I played Marjorie Cameron/Babalon. I am called Angela Murrow because I had to hide my identity.

Babalon Dairy 8. Search for Babalon

Research is an important part of creating a character, especially if it is an historical figure. I was embarrassed to say that I had never heard of Marjorie Cameron, but then again, I was never a Thelemite. I had heard of Jack Parsons a long time ago, in some distant connection with the Manson murders, perhaps to do with the Hollywood location, and through this, I knew he was known for performing rites of black magic with L.Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology. I later found a reference to Parsons in a book by Kenneth Grant, a magician who seems to combine Crowely’s teachings with the Cuthulu mythos created by H.P. Lovecraft. In discussing Crowley, and the atom bomb, Grant mentions the rocket scientist, Jack Parsons, as an early American devotee of the Great Beast.

But Cameron was completely new to me, and it was she I had to become…

I was also not very familiar with the internet in those days. I had to be tutored by Sara, the graphics designer for the play, on how to find images on google. She also told me about wikipedia. What I read there was so astounding that I will just reprint it here because if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! (I had to edit some of it, I found to my chagrin, after this post was published…)

Marjorie Elizabeth Cameron (23 April 1922 – 24 July 1995) was an American writer, painter, actor, and occultist

Biography

Cameron was born in Belle Plaine, Iowa, the eldest of four children. Her father, Hill Leslie Cameron, was a Scot from Illinois who worked with the railroad. Her mother, Carrie V. Ridenour, of German and Dutch decent, was a native of Iowa. The night of Cameron’s birth was surrounded by chaos; there was a terrible thunderstorm and her father got drunk and attempted suicide because he thought his wife was dying. Her grandmother, a staunch churchwoman, believed Cameron to be a child of the devil because of her fiery red hair.

As a child, Cameron began to have strange and powerful visions that were so vivid, she could not be sure if they were real or imaginary. One night from her bedroom, she saw a ghostly procession of four white horses float by her window. Later she would recall these dreams in detail and was able to capture this in her artwork and poetry. In a letter to magician and Aleister Crowley associate Jane Wolfe, she mentions finding a “hole to hell” in her grandmother’s backyard:

“I remember always a tree on my grandmother’s property from which hung an old, old swing where my mother had played as a little girl. Near this spot I recall a well which I always believed was the hole to hell – also the blue Bachelor Button flower grew near this spot. Herein I find again a new concept of the 4 elements and the name of god – the tree, the well, the swing (water’s life) and the flower – which is seed.”

When she was 17, the Great Depression was underway and Cameron moved with her family to Davenport, Iowa, a considerably larger town than Belle Plaine. Having trouble adjusting after the suicide of a close friend, Cameron tried to take her own life several times by overdosing on sleeping pills. She claims that these near brushes with death further enhanced her psychic abilities, reportedly giving her a glimpse into the realm of the dead.

In 1943, in the midst of World War II, the 21 year-old Cameron turned down several scholarships to join the Navy. She was sent along with 3000 other women to boot camp in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Soon she was selected for a high-level job in Washington, DC, where she applied her artistic skills by drawing maps for the war efforts. She was then sent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff where she once met Winston Churchill. She had a drafting table at the head of their conference room. Later, she felt that many men died in the South Pacific as a result of her drawings, Cameron considered all of her drawings to be magical talismans that had a very real effect on the world, she always felt a karmic connection to these men and believed that later tragic events in her life were the result of her participation in their deaths.

By the late 1950s, Cameron was living in Malibu and hanging out with a crowd of artists that included the likes of Dennis Hopper, Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, and others. Wallace Berman’s show at the Ferus Gallery was closed in 1957 after displaying one of Cameron’s drawings which depicted a woman, possibly Cameron, being taken from behind by an alien creature.

Cameron also played the role of a ‘sea witch’ in experimental avant-garde film directed by Curtis Harrington. This 1960 black and white supernatural thriller, Night Tide, starred actor Dennis Hopper and Linda Lawson. This film was shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1961, and released in the U.S. in 1963.

Hmmm. With all the visions I was having, I felt an sense of coincidence to be playing Cameron. But my visions were not so dark, but sublime, and beautiful. I was not a dark person, but a nature loving witch, and healer. The sense of foreboding returned as I wondered how deep I was going to have to go into this whole Babalon thing….where was it going to take me?

The Scarlet Woman

When rocket propulsion researcher and occultist Jack Parsons met Marjorie Cameron, he regarded her as the fulfillment of magical rituals he had been performing as the beginning of the Babalon Working, roughly, an attempt to incarnate, in a physical body a divine entity, a living Goddess, that would usher in the Aeon of Horus ,and change the course of history.

Parsons wrote of Cameron in a letter to his mentor Aleister Crowley in 1946:

Jack Parsons

“The feeling of tension and unease continued for four days. Then on January 18 [1946] 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 [Marjorie Cameron] 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 [a particular aspect of the Egyptian goddess Nuit] with the aid of magical partner (Ron Hubbard), as was proper to one of my grade.”

They termed this incarnation the Moonchild. Writes Aleister Crowley on the subject:

“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 sentimentality – 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.”

The Babalon Working was allegedly successful.

After her husband Jack Parsons’ death, Cameron starred in Kenneth Anger’s 1954 cult-film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, which also featured Anais Nin. Both Cameron and Anger believed that this film was proof to the world that she had manifested the force of the Goddess. “She was doing art for the sake of magick and her soul. She never sold her paintings.”

Cameron burned most of her paintings in the late 1950s in a symbolic suicide performed with her second husband Sherif Kimmil. They had been up for several days on speed and had formed what Cameron called a “suicide club”. Kimmil slit his wrists in the bathroom while the paintings were burning.

Cameron’s two brothers, her sister, and her father worked at JPL, the company co-founded by her husband, Jack Parsons. She was a protege of mythologist Joseph Campbell.

Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel died of cancer on July 24, 1995.

Alison Rockbrand is also a highly creative person who fuses her art with occult workings. I am still not sure exactly what was going on behind the scenes, but there was an enormous energy at rehearsals. It was unsettling for me, destabilizing at times, and yet created a wonderful spell of bright darkness  that is very hard to describe to someone who has not experienced it. Alison and I both resonanate with Cameron/Babalon. She more consciously than I.

To listen to the Radio Show, Babalon, click here:

Babalon: Part One

Babalon: Part Two

Please leave comments. For updates of the Babalon Diaries, subscribe to my RSS Feed or my email list. There is more to come…

Fossil Angel by Cameron

Below, I have posted some books and DVD’s from Amazon that I used to study these incredible people. Among them Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome from which most photos of Marjorie Cameron are pulled.

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Babalon Diaries 8: The Search for Babalon

Directed by occultist, Alison Rockbrand, Babalon was performed on December 5, 2005, at the John Gielgud Theatre at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts to a sold out audience of London’s finest occultists and magicians. If you want to listen to it, click Radio QBSaul: Archives: Babalon. I played Marjorie Cameron/Babalon. I am called Angela Murrow because I had to hide my identity.

Babalon

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ANNOUNCER: BABALON

CAMERON/BABALON: (SFX: whispered, reverb) I am the naked brilliance of the
voluptuous night-sky….Come to me..

Priestess/ Nuit

In the end, I had no choice.

Here’s a little back story:

The skinny, blond Hungarian pole dancer who had been my flatmate in Highgate got her thong too far up her _____ and decided she and I were “not friends”. I could never figure this out as I liked her well enough. I had been warned about “Hungarian women living abroad” , but she being a pushy little thing, and life at Oak Lodge on the Heath having sunk into a morass of stormy Kiwi DJ NOISE!!!! made moving imperative. I was also outlining this Vampire novel (mentioned in part 666)  and thought hearing the  Hugarian language every day would be good research. Besides, living next to Highgate Cemetery was irrisistable. Of course my Vampire/ heroine would begin her adventures in Highgate! Thus was I seduced into giving in to Salamadra’s demands.

Lease up, she moved out. I wanted to stay put, so in a moment of desperation, I talked Kallistratus and Pippi into moving in. I am so glad I did….

I met them when they were working in Camden Lock Market. Journeying to London from far Grantham, in search of decadance, they sold their own line of clothing in an attempt to survive.  Hung on  outdoor railings, these glamorous togs blew in the wind  like black smudges in the English gloom. Business was not that great, so they started working in Fairy Goth Mother, a Goth shop specializing in beautiful corsets and fetish gear.

Fairy Goth Mother, London

They were great friends. Kallistratus had a way with the ladies. “Hello, lovely lady,” was his special greeting.Though he is tall, dark and handsome, I didn’t fancy Kallistratus, though we loved each other dearly. Pippi liked me– perhaps because I was the only woman on earth who didn’t fancy her husband.

Once they moved in with me, my Gothic Romance flat was transformed into proper a Goth lair. Bats hung from the ceiling, a collection of Living Dead Dolls and Tortured Souls gazed out from the shelves, a picture of Bram Stoker hung over the kitchen table.  When the picture fell off the wall, breaking the glass, we all three crossed ourselves and groaned…

Posey, Living Dead Doll

Kundalini Rising

I had a full blown Kundalini Awakening in 1986. This was after clearing my energy fields through 18 months of  almost constant meditation. Dramatic, archetypal, hallucinatory images rose and subsided within me for weeks. ( Without LSD, mind you.) My  third eye blossomed open, intensifying my psychic abilities, and making me a clear channel for healing energies. Kundalini launched my career as a healer.

Kundalini has another side to it, though. A sexual side. I had become Shakti.

I was attending a talk on Chaos Magic at Treadwells. There was a pleasant looking young man there that I will call G.G. ( he is commonly known as the sitar playing Bulgarian)  The next time I was at Treadwells, he came into the shop. When he saw me, he made a beeline for me and gazed into my eyes. G.G. looks a bit like a cross between a Russian Prince in a fairy tale, and a deer. Pretty cute, but I was dazzled by his eyes! They were pale fiery green!

After that, we kept running into each other. One night G.G., and a friend of his followed me home wanting to go to Highgate Cemetery. It was 2 or 3 AM, but what fun! We wanted to go into the cemetery but it was locked. Walking around on the road below the tall wrought iron railings, we found a black kitten, sitting peacefully on a grave, peering out through the bars. Not far along there was a gap in the fence. We broke in and hiked up to Waterlow Park . On this clear autumn night, the moon was full, the trees rustled and dropped their leaves. We lay on the dewy grass looking up at the stars.

Highgate Cemetery

On our way out of the park, a a red fox crossed our path. G.G. knelt down and beckoned it over. Next thing we knew, the fox was sniffing his fingers and letting G.G. pet him.                  

I Am Called.

Scarlet Woman, by Air Adam

To listen to the Radio Show, Babalon, click here:

Babalon: Part One

Babalon: Part Two

Please leave comments. For updates of the Babalon Diaries, subscribe to my RSS Feed or my email list. There is more to come…

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Babalon Diaries # 7: Foxy Red

Babalon Diary 666

This is the sixth in a series of posts about my adventures during 2005, leading up to the performance of Paul Green’s play Babalon. The story is full of cloak and dagger, initiatory strangeness, chaos, and hysteria. It shows what can happen on the Magical path if one is not careful…(as if one has choice…)

Directed by occultist, Alison Rockbrand, Babalon was performed on December 5, 2005, at the John Gielgud Theatre at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts to a sold out audience of London’s finest occultists and magicians. If you want to listen to it, click Radio QBSaul: Archives: Babalon. I played Marjorie Cameron/Babalon. I am called Angela Murrow because I had to hide my identity.

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Pharaon was the constant companion of a gentleman who will henceforth  be referred to as the Wizard, or the Wiz if I get lazy.  When I first saw the Wizard, and he saw me, we were attending a talk by Gareth Knight at Treadwells.  Gareth Knight is one of the great Western Mystery magicians of Britain, author of many books on Arthurian material and the Goddess. This was the second time I heard him speak, the first being shortly after I arrived in London in 1998 when I went to Wales for a Holy Grail Conference starring most of my favorite teachers and authors. Gareth Knight is a shy, quiet man, so to have seen him speak twice is a privilege.

Anyway, Pharaon and the Wiz were sitting together, as always. The Wiz was looking at me, and I had the strange sensation of energy bouncing back, or reflecting back as in a mirror.  I didn’t like this feeling. Perhaps he had psychic protection up, but I sensed the vibe had a manipulative undercurrent that was being blocked by me. It is still a mystery…He put me on red alert anyway.

After I gave the Grimoire to Kallistratus, we all met up at the famous Goth Pub, the Devonshire Arms, (now the Hobgoblin)  in Camden Town.  (This pub used to scare me before I found my Dark Side. It is full of Vampires. The owner, Robin, painted all these Tarot images along the walls that are very cool. He shows the most amazing old films and has the best music I heard in London where James Blunt had taken over the airwaves as an alternative to constant HipHop. I have outlined a Vampire novel that begins in the Devonshire Arms if I ever get to it…)

Devonshire Arms

My friend/ Tarot client, Katy, came along as well. Pharaon took a fancy to Katy and decided she was a natural Sorceress. Kallistratus, expecting the author of such a powerful little book to look like Anton LeVay,  decide Pharaon looked like a milkman.  I mention these people because they all have their parts to play in my near demise…

Vampire meeting at the Dev

Cutting to the chase!

I had arranged a meeting newteen Pharaon  and Kallistratus at the Dev because he was looking for  actors to audition for a play called ‘Babalon’ to be directed by Alison Rockbrand. I thought Kallistratus might make a good Aleister Crowley. If  not,  the Goth scene in  general, would be a good place to find someone to play Crowley — the most difficult role to cast. Pharaon came with a few fliers calling for auditions. As he was putting one up on the wall, he mentioned that they needed someone with an American accent to play Marjorie Cameron. I told him I had a lot of theater experience, but I was uneasy about getting involved.

“Magic has a very disruptive effect on me. I am writing a novel. I don’t need any horrible upheaval just now.”

“Well, just come read for it. It will be fun. Jack Parsons is my favorite magician of all time.”

“I bought a Grimoire from a milkman…I can’t believe I bought a Grimoire from a milkman…” moans Kallistratus to himself.

“I don’t know…”

“Please, just come an read for it so we can get a sense of it. You can say ‘no’ later.”

“OK.” I didn’t want to admit I had no idea who Marjorie Cameron was, though I had heard of Jack Parsons in passing as someone who was a follower of Crowley and done Black Magic with L.Ron Hubbard.

Alison Rockbrand as Babalon

Later that week:

That evening at Treadwells, I was sitting in a circle with other hopefuls clutching a script handed to me by Alison. This was the second time I had met her. This time she was dressed in office clothing having come straight from work, looking very professional and capable.  As we read the through the script, I played Marjorie Cameron, called Cameron, with my usual sense of irony, for laughs.

I did not want to to be in this play! At that point the kind of Magick these folks were into scared me. But I am fearless and a fool sometimes, so I let Alison talk me into taking the script home and at least giving it a good once over.

Script

This was the first page of the script I got. It has a little information about these characters.

SYNOPSIS -CONCEPT & BACKGROUND

Jack Parsons (1914-1952) pioneered the rocket-fuel technology that culminated in NASA’s Apollo missions and Space Shuttle flights. He was also the Californian head of the Order of Oriental Templars, an esoteric group founded by the occultist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947)
who was his mentor and inspiration.

By 1946 Crowley, prophet of the turbulent Aeon of Horus, was slowly dying in an English seaside boarding house. With the assistance of the writer L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986) and the artist Marjorie Cameron (1922-1995), Parsons performed the notorious “Babalon Working”, a magical experiment allegedly intended to invoke a new entity who would re-focus the energies of the Aeon.

The Babalon Working transformed the lives of the main participants -notably Parsons himself, who suffered a series of personal and career crises, ending with his death in a mysterious explosion -another episode which has been the focus of much speculation.

I’ve done extensive research into the source materials -which are often obscure or contradictory, particularly for the period 1947-52. So BABALON is not a definitive “drama-biog” of Parsons’ life. It is rather a dramatic exploration of the Parsons myth, in all its mysterious paradoxes. The story time covers the years 1938-52.

VOICES & CHARACTERSJACK : John Whiteside Parsons -educated Californian. Frater 210 of the OTO.

ED: Ed Forman – technician at CIT -Californian. Life-long friend of Jack.

CROWLEY: Aleister Crowley, Baphomet, Frater Perdurabo 666, Master Therion, the Great Beast, Supreme Caliph of the Order of Oriental Templars etc etc. In this last phase of his life, Crowley suffered from severe asthma. A 1920s recording of his inimitable voice survives.

FRIEDA: Lady Frieda Harris -artist, wife of Sir Percy Harris, Bart. Crowley’s loyal pupil and patron. In her sixties. Patrician English.. .

SMITH: Wilfred T. Smith. In his fifties. suave Anglo-American. Frater 132. Crowley’s original OTO representative in California.

HELEN: Helen Northrup Parsons, Jack’s first wife. Californian

BETTY: Sara Elizabeth Northrup, Helen’s sister. Later Jack’s mistress.

RON: Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, author, explorer and religious teacher. Mid-West

CAMERON : Marjorie Cameron Parsons, aka Candida or Candy, artist and vessel of BABALON.

POLICE OFFICER/FBI OFFICER/RADIO ANNOUNCER

and YOUNG CROWLEY

666: Number of the Beast

In those years I was living in Highgate in a wonderful flat ten minutes walk from Highgate Cemetery and about two minutes from the Highgate Tube Station (a very important consideration when renting a flat in London.)

I went home on the tube and read the script, full of inner conflict. The script was really good. So good in fact that I felt I would miss out if I didn’t participate. But I had determined NOT to engage in other peoples’ magic. It just wasn’t safe. I rolled the script up and put it in my bag.

I had to pick up a few things at the corner shop. Squeezing in between the loaded shelves in the tiny store owned by very nice  brothers from Sri Lanka, I picked up a few bits and headed for the checkout. Imagine my surprise — NO! Total shock at the amount of my purchases. Up on the face of the old fashioned cash register, big white and shiny, were the numbers 666!

Aleister Crowley

***

Foolish People

BABALON – A Fable of Rocketry, Sex and High Magick Mystery Theatre of the Aether and 93 Fm present Travesty Theatre’s production of BABALON – A Fable of Rocketry, Sex and High Magick  on FRIDAY DECEMBER 16 at 8.00
in the Gielgud Studio Theatre  at RADA, Malet Street, London WC1
£7.00

On Friday December 16th at 8.00 in the Gielgud Studio Theatre at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art , Mystery Theatre of the Aether presents Travesty Theatre’s production of Babalon.

***************************************************************************************************************

Paul Green’s play, originally written for radio, explores the enigmatic life and mysterious death of Jack Parsons (1914-52),  pioneering American rocket scientist,  disciple of the magus Aleister Crowley, and passionate devotee of Lady Babalon,  the Scarlet Woman of the New Aeon.   Alison Rockbrand’s highly stylised production  reinforces the resonance of the text with soundscape and visual projections to create  unique moments of ritual theatre. There are also elements of dark farce and tragedy as Parsons’ apocalyptic vision is subverted by hostile forces.

Paul Green’s plays include: The Dream Laboratory, The Aleph (CBC Radio Canada); Ritual of the Stifling Air (BBC Radio 3); Powerplay, (Capital Radio); The Mouthpiece (Resonance FM); Terminal Poet (New Theatre Works)

Alison Rockbrand founded Travesty Theatre  and  the  Dead Dolls Cabaret in Montreal.  Her productions include the collective creation Mumbo Jumbo: King Leopold’s Opus  and a rendition of Macbeth including stylised dance gestures based upon the Kathakali  dance tradition in India.  In February 2006 she is directing Stuart Draper’s Departure Lounge in the Prompt Corner at the South London Theatre Company.

Tickets for Babalon can now be reserved via  the RADA Box Office on 020 7908 4800.

Posted by John Harrigan on December 02, 2005 at 09:39 PM in Magick, Occult, Theatre

To listen to the Radio Show, Babalon, click here:

Babalon: Part One

Babalon: Part Two

Subscribe to my email for updates of the Babalon Diaries. The plot thickens….

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Babalon Diaries: The Audition