kaos

regard, it is curious that Michael Staley in his essay “The Babalon Working/Belovèd of
Babalon” in Starfire I, 3 (1989), while realising that the 7 th Key is corrupt in Parsons’
version and correcting it for republication, did not similarly realise that it is not the Call
of the 7 th Aire.
In Crowley’s skrying of the 7 th Aire in The Vision and the Voice he speaks of seeing
“the form of a woman like the woman in the Apocalypse, but her beauty and her radiance
are such that one cannot look thereon, save with sidelong glances”. There are some
striking descriptions of “the lady of the Æthyr” and Crowley says the splendour of the
vision is difficult to bear.
Parsons doesn’t explain why he called his text Liber 49, but Chapter 49 in The Book of
Lies is about Babalon and also The Book of Babalon has 77 verses, and 7×7 = 49.
The biography Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons is reviewed in this
issue, see p 168.
JB
From Necronomicons to Pazuzu and whirlwinds
The “Simonomicon” mentioned earlier is the popular name for the Simon Necronomicon,
first published in 1977, which many people who get into the occult from role-playing
games and comics imagine is a real grimoire, and even those who know the book was
made up persist in believing it was “channelled”. The Simon Necronomicon does, however,
contain fragments from the “Maqlû” text, which is a genuine Sumerian curse text that
translates as “Burning”. This may account for the fact that a number of people appear to
have got their fingers burnt by playing around with the “spells” in the Simon
Necronomicon. Such people can regularly be seen asking for advice on occult newsgroups,
such as this classic I saved from a teenager:
I accidentally used the sign of Kosh to invoke the seal of the Worm that Gnaws and now
my dog Sparky is dead and I need to know how to send the Worm that Gnaws back into
the great abyss!
George Hiram Derby, proprietor of “Panpipes Magickal Marketplace”, an occult trinkets
store in Hollywood, encapsulates the manner in which the Simon Necronomicon was
“channelled”:
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