Who is Babalon?
A hidden figure stalks our recorded histories. Draped in red She appears on the edges, in the spaces between fleshiness, consciousness and god. Draped in red She stands, and in Her outstretched hand is the Cup of Abominations. In She walks, drunk on the Sweet Scents of Her Fornications. In She walks, and from Her Cup She Spills the Blood of the Saints. All of the Great Mythic Sacrifice of Humanity, All of our Death, All of our Love, all that we have given, it is all poured into Her Cup, and from Her Cup She pours it forth in a never ending circuit, a frolicking tide that destroys all that came before, eroding it, pounding against the unmoving rock until it is ground into sediment, the sand of the ages, borne upon Her Tides.
Babalon is the Psychopomp, the Anima, the Initiatrix. She is the Dark Goddess that stands behind the sanctum, waiting. She is the force of the tides and singing of the trees. She is the centre of the earth, smouldering. She is the subtlety that keeps us all reeling. And how we crave Her! Babalon is the Goddess of Now, the Wife of Eternity. Playing under Her shifting, effervescent veil is an ecstasy of images. She has a thousand thousand names and a thousand thousand faces. Approach Her Presence. Look upon Her Holy Face. Drink from Her Cup.
Chapter 17 of the Biblical Book of Revelation describes a vision of Babylon, the Great Harlot who Rides Upon the Beast:
One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute, who sits by many waters. With her the kings of the earth committed adultery, and the inhabitants of the earth were intoxicated with the wine of her adulteries.” Then the angel carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness. There I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and was glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls. She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries. The name written on her forehead was a mystery:
Babylon the Great
the Mother of Harlots
and of the Abominations of the Earth.
In 1587, while visiting Southern Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), the famous scholar and magician John Dee and his assistant Edward Kelly underwent a series of magical workings, with Kelly scrying for visions in a black obsidian mirror. They made contact with a spirit called Madimi, who appeared in the figure of a young girl, and offered Kelley a vision:
I am the daughter of Fortitude, and ravished every hour from my youth. For behold I am Understanding and science dwelleth in me; and the heavens oppress me. They cover and desire me with infinite appetite; for none that are earthly have embraced me, for I am shadowed with the Circle of the Stars and covered with the morning clouds. My feet are swifter than the winds, and my hands are sweeter than the morning dew. My garments are from the beginning, and my dwelling place is in myself. The Lion knoweth not where I walk, neither do the beast of the fields understand me. I am deflowered, yet a virgin; I sanctify and am not sanctified.
This is the first appearance of BABALON, whose name is a translation of an Enochian word meaning wicked. The vision granted to Kelly bears a striking similarity with that of the unnamed goddess of the ancient coptic text Thunder, Perfect Mind, one of the manuscripts found at the Nag Hammadi library in 1945.
The infamous decadent Aleister Crowley attempted to copy Dee’s experiment, first in 1900, and then again in 1909, this time with the assistance of his lover Victor Neuburg. This second invocation, which took place in the Algerian desert, was a success, and the pair made contact with the Great Goddess Herself:
I am the harlot that shaketh Death.
This shaking giveth the Peace of Satiate Lust.
Immortality jetteth from my skull,
And music from my vulva.
Immortality jetteth from my vulva also,
For my Whoredom is a sweet scent like a seven-stringed instrument,
Played unto God the Invisible, the all-ruler,
That goeth along giving the shrill scream of orgasm.
Babalon is a Modern Goddess. She has risen like a tide in response to the repression of the Divine Feminine in the West for the past two thousand years. Babalon is represented in a series of archetypes; the Divine Feminine; the Great Mother; the Succubus; the Initiatrix; the Holy Whore. She is often viewed as the female sexual impulse, or else as Lust, but these are false simplifications. Instead, we should understand that through working with Babalon we can come experience divinity in all aspects of physicality. She is Strength - Joy - Joissance - Ecstasy. She is the Glory of Life itself, of passion, desire, instinct, conflict, war, cruelty, and Love itself. She is the Divine Mother who kills everything She creates, and this is the Glory of the World.
Alonsgide Her Great Beast She represents the Mysteries of Polarity, which is the basis of Sex, but also of all Difference and Otherness in the world. She symbolises the great Strength, potential, and the drawing, calling, evocative depths that often appear as passivity. She tells us that the Mysteries of Sex are not as they first appear, and are indistinct from the Mysteries of Death.
In the outstretched hand of Babalon is the Cup of Abominations. This Cup is the Holy Grail. It represents the potential for divinity, and infinity, that lies within the flesh; the Secret of the Holy Grail is the Mystery of the Divinity that your physical body, your skin and hormones and nerves and memories and desires and all your grotesque effluvium, is capable of creating. Babalon is another way of saying, You are Holy and Divine; not despite your flesh, but because of it.
Many believe that ecstasy is the starting-point of Work with Our Lady; they are not wrong, so long as they do not seek only dissolution and escape. Work with Our Lady requires humility, honesty and patience. For, to progress through Her Mysteries requires the work of complex: the working out and working through of all the cultural conditioning that is carried within your body. The more deep and sacred the line appears, the more thoroughly it must be cleaned.
Remember Her name means ‘wicked’; the work of Babalon is the work of questioning what you were taught to regard as evil. Thanks to the ministrations of Plato and St Augustine, in western society evil can always ultimately be reduced to qualities inherent in the body and flesh; specifically, that it can be corrupted, and that it dies. Yet these same things, when viewed from the perspective of Babalon, are the source of Joy; flesh is temporary, but through our flesh, we can experience divinity, which is infinite. Our Lady reveals the potential for experiencing this divinity in our physical bodies, something that can only come about after peeling off the layers of shame that we have grown over the years.