MASKS OF BABALON:

Emma Doeve talking to Matthew Levi Stevens

It seems strange of course that the resurgence of Babalon a goddess of

female empowerment, after all should come to be known through men.
The first instance was none other than Queen Elizabeth Is noble
intelligencer, Dr. John Dee, and his skryer, Edward Kelley. Famously,
they had a vision of a goddess clad all in gold bare-breasted, like the
Minoan snake-goddess found at Knossos the Daughter of Fortitude,
who declared:
I am deflowered, yet a virgin; I sanctify and am not sanctified... I am a
harlot for such as ravish me, and a virgin with such as know me not...
It is also interesting to compare and contrast the transmission received by
Kelley and Dee with the early Gnostic text, Thunder, Perfect Mind a
significant part of the Nag Hammadi library, which makes similar
explorations of such paradoxical themes:
I am the honoured one and the scorned one, I am the whore and the holy
one, I am the wife and the virgin...

Dee and Kelley had enough trouble over their researches, even with Royal
patronage under Elizabeth or Rudolph of Bohemia, so one can only
imagine what it would have been like for some poor woman trying to
announce Visions of the Return of a Pagan Goddess! Undoubtedly there
were some who did indeed receive Visions one only has to think of
Hadewijch of Brabant in the 13th Century, or about a century earlier the
better-known Hildegard von Bingen but even they had a tremendous job
trying to modify their Visions so that they could be accepted or even just
heard within the prevailing Christian paradigm, and stay one step ahead of
the Inquisition.
Then, of course, in the 20th Century, its Aleister Crowley who picks up
the baton, as it were, after skrying the Enochian Aethyrs with Victor
Neuburg in the Algerian desert in 1909. As we might expect from Crowley,
the imagery gets raunchier, and plays into-and-with his whole Scarlet
Woman fantasy of a suitable consort for The Beast:
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.
Crowleys work is the catalyst for Jack Parsons, of course, his Babalon
Working a rather dubious collaboration with the even more dubious L.
Ron Hubbard which may not have invoked Babalon to actual physical
incarnation (Marjorie Cameron notwithstanding), but certainly had all
manner of side-effects of some sort or another. Interestingly, as Paul
Weston has recently pointed out, a curious prequel to the whole affair is
this peak experience Hubbard claims to have had an Out-of-the-Body, or
Near-Death Experience, which was the inspiration for his infamous
Excalibur! writings (precursor to his breakthrough work, Dianetics, and a
text so potent that it could allegedly send mad or even kill those who read
it unprepared, like something out of Chambers The King In Yellow.)
Hubbard always said that the source for this cosmic revelation was a
powerful female entity he referred to as The Empress.
At the same time as The Beast and his would-be followers were trying to
pursue the Logos of the New Aeon of Horus, the Shakti of the Age, Dion
Fortune, was trying to call back into Being an older, more primeval female
force that she believed was sadly lacking in our Modern Age:

I was of the Cult of the Black Isis, which is very different to that of the
green-robed Goddess of Nature to whom the women prayed for children...
the Black Isis is the Veiled Isis, upon whose face none may look and live...
Some equate the Black Isis with Kali, and say that She is evil; but I do not
think She is, unless one counts elemental force as evil, which I do not. She
is indeed the Breaker in Pieces, but then She sets free...
It is clear to me that Babalon is of the lineage of Sekhmet also of the
likes of Astarte, Inanna and Ishtar, who were Goddesses of Fertility and
Love and Warfare and in this She is closer to the primordial Black Isis of
Dion Fortune and the Nu-Isis of Kenneth Grant, than She is the allembracing Mother of the New Age...
Coming myself from a background in Fine Arts drawing and painting,
with an emphasis on the figurative but also being an occultist, I suppose
it is fair to say that first and foremost my attention was drawn to women
with a strong visual sense, but who also drew much of their inspiration
from esoteric sources. I have been delighted to discover a number of these
among the women artists who were, in one way or another, associated with
the Surrealist movement. Particular personal favourites include Remedios
Varo, Leonor Fini, and Leonora Carrington who is fast becoming
everybodys favourite Witchy Grandmother! As well as her paintings and a

number of quirky Surrealist short stories, her novel, The Hearing Trumpet,
explores ideas of Female Grail Mysteries and the Return of the Goddess...
Although a number of the men involved in Surrealism paid a kind of lipservice to notions of the occult, a lot of it wasnt really much more than
window-dressing, part of the general engagement with the irrational, the
subconscious, and so on. The more I studied, the more I found that it was
the women who tended to have the more authentic engagement. A number
of them found the ideas of Jung more empowering than the same old
Freudian sexual clichs. Carrington and Varo had both studied alchemy
and the qabalah, and by the time they were living as expats in Mexico
City, they would also visit with local brujas, or cunning women,
incorporating folk magic and remedies with their more esoteric studies
wanting to root it in actual practice, as well as inspiration for their art.
Although it is fair to say I concentrated more on the painters to begin with,
I have also discovered a great deal of kinship in a figure like Joyce
Mansour: born in England to Jewish-Egyptian parents, who then ended up
living in Paris and writing 16 volumes of uncompromising and sometimes
visionary verse, very much juggling themes of Eros and Thanatos, and
drawing heavily on Egyptian and Middle Eastern themes:

I made away with the yellow bird / Who lives in the sex of the devil / It
will teach me how to seduce / Men, deer, angels with double wings...
Mansour was raised a Sephardic Jew, reading the Torah and studying
qabalah, lived in Alexandria as a young woman during WWII, and could
have been the reincarnation of Cleopatra to look at her. She was also a
Leo, which I can identify with, and was suitably Babalonian in attitude!
Like Leonor Fini, she was feline and naturally regal, but men dont always
know how to deal with this they like their pussycats and their sexkittens, but fully-grown lionesses can be a bit of a challenge!
Another example although not particularly a Surrealist would have to
be the pioneering film-maker Maya Deren: her anthropological field-work
broke all the rules, but with her film and book, Divine Horsemen: The
Living Gods of Haiti, she left behind an important document of direct
encounter with the Voodoo mysteries... And although it may not have been
Babalon in so many words, in her experience of possession by the loa
Erzulie, Deren surely had a direct and empowering experience of the
Female Divine.
Most of these women were either quite independent, going their own way,
and sometimes paid the price for that, or else chose to hold their own in

predominantly male circles often with little-or-no female solidarity,

beyond, perhaps, one-or-two close friends. Almost like the witches of old...
I know from private correspondence with a lot of contemporary would-be
Babalons that this is still very much an issue...
This is one of the reasons I was more than happy to be invited to
contribute to the anthology, Women of Babalon, because it was an
opportunity to be a part of something that would present images of
Babalon from an exclusively female perspective and being experienced
NOW. Theres quite a range represented, from shall we say the more
orthodox Thelemic position, to those influenced by Tibetan Buddhist
practice, exploration of the Nightside a la Kenneth Grant, even
Luciferian and Voodoo points-of-view. And they dont all agree, not by
any stretch of the imagination, but the important thing is that they are all
personal, individual experiences of Babalon by women living and working
in the Present Day: so, hopefully, the examples and suggestions will
encourage other women and maybe even men! to get to grips with
Babalon themselves.
This has to be the way forward.