I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net

preparation for their departure. He accidentally dropped a small tin container
of the extremely volatile chemical fulminate of mercury, which unleashed a
huge explosion. Parsons, acutely conscious of mythical correspondences as
he was, would have known that Mercury is the messenger of the gods, who
as Hermes is both god of science and escort of the dead to Hades. Critically
maimed by the blast, Parsons held on to life for an hour, but died shortly after
being rushed to a nearby hospital. As Parsons (whose imagery was invariably
erotic whether he was describing his phallic rocketry experiments or the
mysteries of initiation) wrote two years before his explosive passage, "at the
last, our life closes in the orgasm of death."
The headline announcing Parsons's demise in the Los Angeles Mirror
Times newspaper established the tone of later accounts for decades to come:
"SCIENTIST SLAIN IN BLACK MAGIC CULT."
The Spawn Of Babalon
What objective result did the Babalon Working, surely the most famous sex
magical Working of the twentieth century, have? Jack Parsons himself firmly
believed that it would lead to the physical incarnation of a living female who
would embody the spirit of Babalon. Other than that, he seemed unwilling to
speculate, writing cautiously that "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..."
Other commentators have been less guarded, speculating that the
Great Whore Babalon did not manifest in human form but as a metaphysical
spirit, a liberating current of creative chaos observable in the world at large.
In Satan Wants You, a breezy and not always accurate study of diabolic
movements, author Art Lyons surmises of the Babalon Working: "It was
thirteen years later, the period of human maturation, that twins were born in
San Francisco – the counterculture and the Church of Satan." Others, taking a
slightly more materialistic view, have inferred that the daemonic entity
brought into being actually entered into human form and experienced the
normal term of gestation. In his commentary to The Book Of Coming Forth
319
By Night, Michael A. Aquino, founder of the Temple of Set, makes note of
the synchronicity that he was born in 1946, "precisely nine months after a
Working by Crowley's California disciples to create a homunculus per a
secret instruction of Crowley's to the IX° of his Ordo Templi Orientis." And
Typhonian Thelemite author Kenneth Grant has speculated that the Babalon
Working was one of the terrestrial events that incited the post-World War II
UFO phenomenon.
As previously noted, the sex-magical forces brought to hear by
Parsons, Hubbard and Cameron during their now infamous rite of erotic
theurgy have also been held accountable for such diverse post-World War H
phenomena as the woman's liberation movement, the 1960s sexual
revolution, the advent of California as Earth's apparent occult capital, and
much else besides. To attribute such complex social detonations to one
magical operation seems a simplification at best, but these notions illustrate
how an obscure sex-magical act can inflame the imagination, and be elevated
to the stature of myth. They also demonstrate the important sex-magical
principle of non-natural creation, the practical application of which we will
examine in a later chapter.
The lion's share of interest in the Babalon Working phenomenon has
tended to focus on Parsons, but less attention has been paid to the legacy of
Cameron, the shakti power of the operation, whose embodiment of the
Feminine Daemonic was essential to the rite's enigmatic attainment. Because
she never conveyed her own magical ideas in the linear written form that has
been so important to the Western occult tradition, her contribution as a force
in the modern sinister current has sometimes been undervalued. Cameron's