Omnia Babalon

by Georgia van Raalte

Babalon is always both/and: the in-between of what can be spoken, what can be signified. She defies easy categorization. She encompasses polarization. She is All, and to restrict Her to one position is to stop talking about Her entirely. She has an infinity of facets and veils and none of them are the real Her and all of them are the real Her, for She is the very nature of reality. She is the manifesting force of consciousness. She is the atoms and the amoebas, the stars and the solar system. She is All.

As All, and in defiance against the limited roles the Goddess has been given, She stands over the gates of hell, the hungry maw of the bottomless pit. Heaven and Hell exist on this plane, and She is the thinness of the razor edge, the fun-house mirror that exists (or does not exist) between them. Hers is the face that looks out from the Abyss, and into Her blood-stained mouth do we fleshy little things pour all our holy filth.

She is All: the painted ape and the virgin inviolate. She is the nexus of all charity, and the nexus of all infection. For any statement that we may make of Her, we must understand that the opposite is also true. Babalon is the Goddess that defies theogony. We are all children clinging to her starry skirt, and in her infinite arms and infinite womb there is no morality, no ethics: only force, expansion, and continuity.

Babalon does not have any political ties. She is neither the Goddess of the Pussy Hats, nor of the Neo-Fascists. She does not care about your lovingly crafted social identity, and She cannot be co-opted for your cause. She is not the middle: She is below, and everything falls to the compost heap in the end. The only laws She knows are the flows of rot and mold, of death and reproduction. I think of a rotting corpse, torn apart by wild dogs. I see Her, and I see us all.

Babalon has no political ties. We live in a world where the ties between words and meanings, between signs and signifiers, have broken down. We live in a relativity spiral, an orgiastic free-for-all of information, none of which can ever be true. Babalon lurks beneath like a Leviathan and reminds us that there is always an apocalypse, that humans exist in an infinite donut-shaped spiral of self-destruction.

All this is true. And yet we say, Babalon is a Goddess. An entity of divine femininity. And there are many things that can be said about this. And there are no things that can be said about this. But by stating “She is a Goddess, riding on the Beast who is beneath Her”, we are making the radical and incredibly mundane statement that women partake of divinity, too. And since we live in a world which clings ever to binaries, ever to polarization, we say that a woman is everything that is not-man. All the great and monstrous conflagration of excess, deformity and divinity that constitutes the divinity of the fleshy, bleeding body. We say Babalon is a Goddess, and we mean: everyone is just as welcome, and everyone is just as unwelcome. There is no difference, and all distinguishing features will be worn down by the sandstorms on the path to the City of Pyramids.

Babalon is a Goddess. And it should not be a controversial thing to say, “all people are deserving of compassion, and none are”. And it should not be a controversial thing to say, “no one should suffer the intimate violence of sex, and we all should”. But it is a far more enjoyable an endeavor to build yourself a tower and crown yourself king than it is to stand in the center of the scales, ever-dancing. And it is far easier to speak with a voice of authority from the top, when we are so used to looking up to the godhead. But divinity is in the ground, and when the flag-wavers declare themselves the discovers of some new continent, we should look to the ground, and remember that Our Lady was fucking dwarves long before the sky-gods reigned.

Babalon is All, and you may say whatever you will of Her. But remember, whatever pit you dig for Her to lie in, there you will sleep yourself one day.

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Sex, Power and Ethics in Contemporary Thelema

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Mother of Abominations