kaos

“You’re insane Boris!”—Boris Balkan, mentioned above, is the bibliophile occultist
played by Frank Langella in Polanski’s brilliant but much misunderstood film The Ninth
Gate, in which the allure of Babalon and the left hand path is depicted, which went
completely over the head of many critics who hadn’t a clue who “the girl” was. Although
she is presented simply as a dark “guardian angel”, ambiguous as either protector or
predator, her true identity as Babalon is confirmed by the ninth engraving from the
fictional book at the heart of the film, De Vmbrarvm Regni Novem Portis or The Nine
Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, which shows a naked woman bearing a strong
resemblance to “the girl” riding a seven-headed dragon, hence she is specifically the
Great Whore of Babylon ie Babalon in occult terms, although even the screenplay
doesn’t spell it out (I haven’t read the novel it was based on, The Club Dumas [El Club
Dumas] by Arturo Perez-Reverte). Babalon is played by Polanski’s wife, Emmanuelle
Seigner, who was also in Bitter Moon. I was discussing with Satyr the origin of some of
the engraved plates used in the film; the “hanged man” plate is clearly influenced by the
tarot, but I was particularly interested in the engraving of the serpent that features on
the title page of the Novem Portis and is also tattooed on the thigh of the priestess of
The Order of the Silver Serpent (Liana Telfer played by Lena Olin). Satyr noted:
I wandered into the library, and pulled A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology off the shelf. In
it is reproduced Daniel Stolcius’ Pleasure Garden of Chymistry, 1624, which includes an
illustration of a figure that bears a remarkable resemblance to the Serpent of the title
page from the Nine Gates.
Alas, on viewing the film again the identification is not that close. The Stolcius plate
features a lion-headed serpent eating its own eagle-headed tail in the shape of the
figure “8” with two faces in the loops which appear to be sun and moon, obviously
alchemical. The serpent in the film has an extra loop to the “8” and has a straightforward
serpent head and tail, coiled around a tree struck by lightning on the title page, the
tattoo being just the snake, but the manner of looping is similar before the Ouroboroslike
bite (the word “ouroboros” actually means “tail eater”, one of the earliest being the
depiction in the Chrysopoeia [“Gold Making”] of Cleopatra).
As for W F Ryan, I was haphazardly looking through his list of published papers
and spotted this little-known gem: “The Great Beast in Russia: Aleister Crowley’s
Theatrical Tour in 1913 and his Beastly Writings on Russia” in Arnold McMillin (ed.),
Symbolism and After: Essays on Russian Poetry in Honour of Georgette Donchin, Bristol,
1992, pp 137–161.
JB
103