kaos

Chevalier, Parfrey, & the “home movies” rumour
On the web, one of the best archives of Jack Parsons’ writings is Shedona Chevalier’s
babalon.net. Chevalier, of the Caliphate oto “Living Flame” camp (founded in 1997 in
memory of Jack Parsons, although “living flame” is actually L Ron Hubbard’s phrase),
appears to describe herself as an “Incarnate Avatar In Your Midst” but has lately clarified
what she means by adding a codicil to her website, presumably to allay any excitement
that she is actually Parsons’ hoped-for Moonchild, explaining that we should think of
the word “avatar” not in the true sense of the word as an incarnation of a deity but
simply as we would if we used the word in cyberspace. Babalon.net is an excellent website
and Shedona’s obvious love for Jack is touching. She says she’s writing her own book on
Parsons, more inclined towards the magical aspects. Shedona engaged Sex and Rockets
publisher Adam Parfrey in a lengthy correspondence on his inclusion of a paragraph on
p 183 stating that after the explosion home movies were found in a trailer in a box
decorated with snakes and dragons in which Jack was filmed having sex with his mother
and the family dog.
Shedona took exception to the inclusion of what she saw as mere hearsay without
any evidence. Although it is true that Jack never wrote anything about sex with dogs he
did write concerning himself in his Analysis by a Master of the Temple: “The invocation
of Babalon served to exteriorize the Oedipus complex.” It is anyone’s guess what he
may have meant by that, and he did also confess to finding the vaguely incestuous and
adulterous nature of having sex with his wife’s 18-year-old sister Betty (Sara Northrup),
after his wife ran off with one of his friends from the oto and before Marjorie Cameron
came on the scene, a bit of a turn-on. Here I paraphrase, he actually phrases it thus,
addressing himself: “the act of adultery tinged with incest served as your magical
confirmation in the Law of Thelema”, by which I presume he interprets “Do what thou
wilt” essentially as an overcoming of taboo, interestingly enough. Jack does also say,
however, that Betty tore him away from “the now unneeded Oedipus complex”. There
seems to be a lot being alluded to here.
The home movies rumour must have been music to Adam Parfrey’s ears. After being
an underground writer for a while—and his Fucking Andrea Dworkin in issue 4 of RAPE
magazine is quite funny—Parfrey made his name with the book he edited and published
Apocalypse Culture (1987), which Hakim Bey described as “art-creep death nerdism &
Nazi shit-eating” in a letter to me in KAOS 13. Hakim’s work was included in the book
but when he saw the finished product he disassociated himself from it on a point of
principle, saying:
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