kaos

been with me since, though she goes back to New York next week. She has red hair and
slant green eyes as specified.” (Russell Miller’s account of the phase of the working after
Feb 28 in Bare-Faced Messiah, his biography of Hubbard, is a product of his own
imagination. The version in L Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman?, by Bent Corydon
and L Ron Hubbard Jr, is also misleading.)
Carter’s book, particularly in its dealings with the Babalon Working and the
circumstances of Parsons’ death, and also the peripheral influence of Jack Williamson’s
werewolf novel Darker Than You Think on the way Parsons envisaged Babalon, is well
worth reading despite its sparsity of source citation and slapdash errors (another one:
on p 116 he equates Babalon to Chokmah rather than Binah). On a small but interesting
point, Carter mentions one odd coincidence in the Babalon Working I hadn’t noticed
before. In The Book of Babalon, on January 10 1946, Parsons writes that after his Enochian
invocations he was awakened at 12 pm by nine loud knocks and a table lamp in the
opposite corner of the room was thrown violently to the floor, there was no window by
it nor any wind. Carter points out that given that L Ron Hubbard was Parsons’ Scribe
at this time it is curious that there is an Enochian word “Hubard”, which means “living
lamps”. Actually this is a slight error that appears to be attributable to Israel Regardie’s
Enochian Dictionary (as published in Enochian Sex Magick by Duquette and Hyatt),
the actual word for “living lamps” used in the 17 th Key is “hubaro”. Nonetheless, “hubar”
is the stem for “lamp” or “lantern” in Enochian, and it is conceivable that the Enochian
spirits, by knocking nine times and throwing a lamp to the floor, were by this omen
attempting to warn Parsons about Hubbard. Parsons admits himself inexperienced in
such phenomena; he saw it simply as the result of imperfect magical technique (I suppose
he means a kind of turbulence) and didn’t consider investing the event with significance
or interpreting its meaning. While on the one hand it is fully explainable away (he
heard the knocks in a dream, the lamp was already unstable, he awoke with a start, the
vibration tipped the lamp), for a Master of the Temple it is an obligation to look deeply
into the significance of even the most inconsequential of events, so how much more so
an apparently supernatural occurrence during the timespan of an occult working. And
while Parsons had not at that time taken the Oath of the Abyss, it is surprising he was
not more familiar with omen phenomena, because in any case most true omens take a
far more mundane form and it is the state of consciousness of the one experiencing the
omen that recognises its significance as an omen.
Although Crowley’s final assessment of Parsons as a “weak-minded fool”, despite
earlier regarding him as a man of great potential, may in some respects be accurate
(although it is more that he was over-trusting and enthusiastic), I found on revisiting
my interest in him that he still held a great deal of allure. He went over the edge with
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