kaos

earth at this moment, although I do not know where or as whom. I believe that She will
manifest in Her proper time, and that thereafter the rest of the prophecy will naturally
follow.” He was still educating her, and the poignancy of it all emerges when one knows
that Cameron would later, years after his death, come to believe herself to be the avatar
Jack awaited. Had he just set his heart on a particular scenario unfolding and he could
not countenance, or rather recognise, the fulfilment of his desire in another and much
closer form? Or did he secretly know Cameron was his avatar, but had to wait for her to
find out for herself ? Carter on p 135 claims Cameron said Jack had been warned in the
desert not to tell her she was Babalon and also that she saw a silver cigar-shaped ufo
and she felt this was the sign and told Jack about it. No source is given. This assertion
is hard to fit together, Jack is not able to tell her she is Babalon while at the same time
she supposedly sees a ufo and presents the sighting to him as the sign expecting to be
confirmed as his avatar, which becomes even more confusing when Carter says that it
wasn’t until nine years after his death that she claimed to be Babalon (p 153). ( Jack
Parsons is also said to have been up in a plane with Kenneth Arnold, the pilot who
coined the term “flying saucer” to describe the silver disks he saw in 1947.)
Despite reading The Book of Babalon many times and seeking the answer again in Sex
and Rockets, I don’t feel I am really any closer to understanding exactly what Jack Parsons’
magical objective was, beyond some vague wish to fulfil an equally vague prophecy in
Crowley’s Book of the Law, a prospect which Crowley himself appears dismissive of, if
that is indeed what he suspected was happening because even he seemed confused by it.
Liber AL vel Legis contains a pseudo-Apocalyptic prophesy suggesting that a chosen
priest—and Crowley was “not so chosen”—would come later and reveal great mysteries
and his woman would be called the Scarlet Woman, this theme is broadly traceable
through Chapter I, verses 15, 17, 54–57, Chapter II, verse 76, and Chapter III, verses
34, 45–47. It is conceivable that Parsons believed he was the chosen one, particularly
given that like most of the chosen ones to date he proclaimed Liber 49 to be the fourth
chapter of The Book of the Law, or, rather, Babalon did through him in verse 2. Not every
Thelemite regards this as heresy, Kenneth Grant says on p 17 of Beyond the Mauve
Zone that “it is highly probable that the Book of Babalon manifested as the final chapter
of AL.” Jane Wolfe, who had been with Crowley at the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu,
certainly saw in Parsons a fulfilment of Liber AL when she wrote her first impression of
him in her magical journal in December 1940 after he joined the Agapé Lodge: “I take
Jack Parsons to be the child who ‘shall behold them all’ (the mysteries hidden therein.
AL I, 54–55).”
Jack’s clearest statement concerning his magical objective I feel is contained in the
introduction to The Book of Babalon. After explaining that we are in an impasse of the
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