Angela Puca AP: If you’re interested in the goddess Babalon and how her representation has evolved across history and in the role of the feminine and femininity in Thelema as well as in the role of the Scarlet Woman stay tuned because you’re just about to find out.
Hello everyone I’m Dr. Angela Puca and welcome to my Symposium. I’m a Ph.D. and a university lecturer and this is your online resource for the academic study of magic, esotericism, shamanism, paganism, Thelema, and all things occult.
Today I have a very special guest here on the channel which I’m very excited to introduce to you and her name is Dr. Manon Hedenborg White. She is a senior lecturer in Religious Studies at Karlstad University and obtained her Ph.D. in History of Religions at Uppsala University. Her doctoral dissertation “The Eloquent Blood: the Goddess Babalon and the Construction of Femininities in Western Esotericism” was published by Oxford University Press last year. This is a fantastic book that I highly recommend and will leave the link in the infobox. In the past two years, she was funded by the Swedish Research Council as a post-doctoral fellow at Södertörn University and was also a guest researcher at the Center for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam. Her post-doctoral project explored the roles of women in Aleister Crowley’s religion of Thelema. So are you excited yet?
This is going to be a fantastic interview so please help me in welcoming Dr. Manon Hedenborg White. Hello Manon. How are you today?
Manon Hedenborg White MH: Hello Angela. I’m doing well thank you. How are you?
AP: I’m okay. I’m super excited to have you here. Thank you so much for accepting to be on the Symposium.
MH: Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m delighted to be here.
AP: I already mentioned in the intro your fantastic book which, by the way, I really like the title; “The Eloquent Blood.” It’s very graphic but to me, it’s in a good way.
MH: Thank you.
AP: Graphic titles, that instil a certain emotion tend to stick better.
MH: Yeah, yeah definitely. I like the title as well. To me, when I was digging around for something and I was reading bits of poetry and various pieces of writing and it just sprung out at me and I was just sort of like; yes, that works. Okay, what can we do with this? So yeah, thank you for saying so.
AP: So I guess my first question will be on the goddess Babalon, her role in history and how that changed over time, and her role in western Esotericism.
MH: Yeah, so obviously, of course, a big question. Lots of different parts to this answer potentially but to put it quite simply Babalon is a goddess and one of the most important deities within the religion Thelema which of course was founded by the British occultist Alastair Crowley in 1904. Crowley came out of a dispensationalist, evangelical background so he studied the Book of Revelation from a very young age and Babalon is quite strongly inspired by Crowley’s favourable sort of reinterpretation or counter-reading, one might say, of the biblical war of Babylon. So in the Book of Revelation, of course, the Whore of Babylon is this antagonistic figure she is this majestic, drunken, libidinous woman riding astride the Beast but in Crowley’s rendering she is of course a positive figure and a soteriological figure and she represents, in essence, the magickal formula of passionate union with all aspects of existence and, more simply put, is also a sort of embodiment of the sacredness of the liberated sexual impulse and, perhaps especially, the feminine or the female liberated sexual impulse, one might say.
So Babalon first, and I want to say just something very briefly about my approach to this topic as well and about methodological agnosticism in this vein also. So when I’m lecturing about this topic I get a lot of questions like; is there a concordance between Babalon and Lilith or are Babalon and Kali the same entity or Babalon and Inanna or Ishtar or Astati or these various goddesses or spirits or angelic or demonic or chthonic feminine figures, from across the world, that seem to have in common this connection between sex and death and aggression and power and female power and all these things like are they the same entity? I get that question a lot and I think that’s perfectly valid, that’s a perfectly valid question to ask from an emic point of view, so from the point of view of insider belief and practice. But of course, the way that I’m looking at this is in this very dry, boring, historical way which is we’re not looking for whether or not these are the same entities but we’re looking for actual documentable, verifiable chains of historical transmission.
So the way that I’m looking at this figure is as a conceptualization of a goddess under that specific name and in that form, the story of Babalon starts properly with Aleister Crowley even though Crowley, of course, drew on a lot of older sources. So but from my historical point of view, that’s the way that story is going to be told. So Crowley’s first vision of Babalon or experience magically with Babalon was really in 1909. So she doesn’t appear in the “Book of the Law” from 1904. There’s a reference to the figure of the Scarlet Woman, which is related, and I know we’re going to get back to that and there’s also the Goddess, that does appear in the Book of the Law, is the goddess Nuit who represents the totality of existence and the night sky and who is the sort of main character or the speaker of the first chapter of the Book of the Law. And there’s a brief reference to Nuit having a secret name or a hidden name and Crowley later came to identify that name as Babalon.
And that’s based on an experience that he had in 1904 (1909 see corrigenda below) when he was traversing the desert of Algeria with his current lover and magickal disciple the poet Victor B. Neuburg. And they were exploring the Enochian magickal system or the system of the Ethers which was the Enochian magickal system, of course, which was developed by John Dee and Edward Kelly during the Elizabethan age. And Crowley and Neuburg were intending to scry all of the Ethers one by one. And, so, one night Crowley entered into the 12th Ether and he sees this vision of a great woman astride a great beast and he realizes that this is Babylon. This is Babylon the Great, basically, and he later changes the spelling of her name from the biblical or like the conventional Babylon to the B-A-B-A-L-O-N that has become the canonical Thelemic spelling. But Crowley, during this time, he was undergoing this magickal ordeal which is one of the penultimate stages in his magickal system and which he refers to as the crossing of the abyss. So having climbed up the Tree of Life and this is Crowley’s magickal system as structured within his magickal order A∴A∴ which held a Golden Dawn-based structure up to a certain… with Crowley’s own flair added to it.
So after building and developing the self, the adept arrives at a point where they have to traverse this terrifying void, which is the abyss, which separates the manifest from the numinous or on the Tree of Life separates the three topmost Sefirot; Keter, Chokmah, and Binah, from the lower seven and in order to do so, Crowley believed, the adept had to utterly annihilate their individuality. Totally kill and sacrifice their ego and become completely receptive to all of existence and only by doing so could that person die and be reborn on the other side. And Babalon is very strongly linked to this process. So Crowley talks about draining your blood into Babalon’s cup and being reborn through her womb but he also describes this as a mystical death and rebirth. But he also describes it in sexual terms in terms of – I think I’m paraphrasing or I might be quoting directly – but an ecstasy in which there is no trace of pain like the giving up of the self to the beloved, is how he writes about it as well. So in that sense, Babalon the sexual, the very strongly sexual components of her as a symbol and as a figure, also relate it to this idea of complete surrender of the self.
So that’s really where Crowley’s idea of Babalon as a goddess starts to take form, in 1909. And he, of course, wrote lots more about this figure and he wrote lots more in terms of the idea of the Scarlet Woman as well. One of the ideas that he understands the Scarlet Woman, but we’ll get back to this, is as the earthly avatar or embodiment of the goddess Babalon. But yes, so long, long, long, monologue here and this takes us up to the point of Crowley, basically, but Babalon has gone beyond Crowley we might say.
So one of the really important people, in the 20th-century history of Babalon, was Crowley’s disciple John Whiteside Parsons who was one of the earliest adopters of Thelema in the United States who joined the Agape Lodge of Ordo Temple Orientis in the early 1940s. But who quite quickly developed a sort of experimental take on magick which was very much in line with his personality. He was of course one of the pioneers of rocket science as well and he started in 1946 doing a series of rituals which were aimed at producing the earthly manifestation of the goddess Babalon and, as many of the viewers will know, as well, he was very famously aided in this endeavour by L. Ron Hubbard, the future founder of Dianetics and Scientology and also by Marjorie Cameron, who was Parsons’ lover and they would later get married but also an illustrator and an artist.
So they were trying to produce the earthly incarnation of Babalon and Parsons added his own interpretation of this figure as well which was much more socio-politically oriented. So this was in the era of post-World War II but early Cold War days and the emerging era of McCarthyism and increasing social control in various areas or what Parson’s perceived as such, anyway. So he saw Babalon as this very warrior-like, revolutionary, feminine messiah who would descend to earth and liberate all of humanity and would liberate women who would then help to liberate all of humanity and bring about this age of Dionysian freedom and love and social justice and all of these things. So he brought his own flair to this idea a more sort of concrete figure in a lot of ways he also touched on the crossing of the abyss stuff definitely but he emphasizes a more anthropomorphic figure, in some ways, who’s gonna descend to earth and fix society in a lot of different ways. But he also envisioned Babalon partly as a force or an idea or like a symbol for an energy that could also be incarnate in anyone, regardless of gender, and which is linked to this sort of rebellion against oppressive authorities and sexual freedom and all of these things.
So the third person, who’s written a lot about this figure in the 20th century is, of course, Kenneth Grant who was – so moving back to Britain – who was an occultist as well and he was Crowley’s secretary, very late in Crowley’s life, and who was initiated into the ninth degree of Crowley’s OTO but who was also an initiate of Indian left-hand path Tantra, so what Grant refers to as the Vama Marg. So Kenneth Grant had this idea of a primordial, religious tradition or a mythical, mystical tradition that he believed to have originated in prehistoric times in Central Africa but which then migrated to Egypt and which was characterized by a sort of stellar-lunar cult of the, what he referred to as, the goddess Typhon and her bastard son Set and which Grant believed centred on the veneration of the female sexual organs and of female genital fluids and he then believed that this, what he called the Typhonian Tradition or the Typhonian Cult was driven underground by solo worshippers and then flourished in the tantric traditions of South Asia and Southeast Asia. And Grant saw Thelema as a Tantra for the West and as an iteration of this very ancient primordial cult as well. But he believed that Crowley got one thing very fundamentally wrong about sexual worship because Grant saw the left-hand path of Tantra as being characterized by the deliberate use of trained, female, sexual priestesses and of course Crowley also, like a fundamental portion of Crowley’s magickal practice and teachings, was the practice of sexual magick. But in Crowley’s version of sexual magic the male, the masculine genital fluids or the semen play a very important role and Crowley in several of his most important sex magickal writings identifies the semen with the directing magickal will that fuels a magickal operation. And Grant, basically, says that Crowley got this wrong and it’s not the male partner, it’s actually the female sex-magickal partner and he uses the term Babalon to refer, variously, to the trained female sex-magickal priestess but also to the divine feminine force which is at the root of everything in which Grant sees Babalon or the Scarlet Woman, as he also calls her, or the priestess as an incarnation of her.
So that’s interesting and that’s something that I think that, and I say this a lot but I actually I don’t think it gets said enough, Grant was actually quite early or one of the earliest people to formulate this sort of explicit critique of male centrism in Crowley’s system of sexual magick and he wasn’t doing it from a feminist point of view or what we’d see as a feminist point of view today, necessarily. But I think it’s interesting that it was happening at the same time as when Kenneth Grant wrote his books on the Typhonian Tradition and the nine, so-called, Typhon Trilogies, the first of which comes out in the early 1970s – that’s like when everything is happening with the second wave of feminism. So I think that’s interesting, even if Grant wasn’t drawing explicitly on those second-wave ideas, it’s at the same time as that is happening and as also feminist witchcraft or feminist Wicca is emerging as well. So that’s interesting.
But this has, of course, continued and these ideas have continued to spread and in the occult milieu of the last few decades one thing that is really important and has been really important to the way that Babalon is understood, is that there has been an increasing proliferation of women, as writers on occult topics, and also within Thelema and also specifically on the goddess Babalon. So from starting in the early 1990s we have a number of texts that have come out which have been authored by women or queer practitioners and which have been really important in rephrasing this symbol in various ways today. So what we see today, and this is within Thelema, within Thelema proper, but the symbol of Babalon or the figure of Babalon has also very much been taken outside of orthodox Thelema into like a broader, esoteric, or occult landscape.
So we see what Crowley wrote rubbing shoulders with interpretations which draw quite heavily on feminist thinking or queer-feminist thinking and quite a lot of contemporary interpretations of Babalon which link her very strongly to the idea of female liberation or LGBTQ liberation, of sexual minorities or like non-normative sexual practices or things like sex work and seeing these people seeing Babalon as being a champion of all of these things. So yeah, so a long, long, long, long answer to that question but what I think is interesting, just to put it all in a nutshell, is that Babalon, if we are to trace her history and her place in contemporary esotericism, is that we have an example, here, of a figure who originates very much as a negative stereotype within the Book of Revelation in the Bible as this very demonized sort of figure. And whether or not it’s the same figure this, I don’t want to say archetype because that has a lot of connotations that I don’t necessarily want to bring into this, but that keeps coming back over the last 2000 years which is kind of the bad girl or the slut or the whore or the harlot or the temptress and who comes back as a femme fatale in the Victorian era for instance. And which, within Thelema gets inverted and transformed into this very positive symbol of completely shameless, unabashed, feminine, sexual desire and lust and passion and empowerment. And all of these things and in the contemporary period gets even transformed, in some iterations, into a sort of feminist symbol. So I think that’s interesting.
AP: Yes, very much so. And how come Babalon, specifically, has been considered the symbol of all of these feminine elements and aspects?
MH: It’s well. That’s a good question. I think there is… I mean the history of Babalon, as an idea, starting with Crowley’s inversion of this negative figure from the Bible. I mean it parallels with that of other figures as well. So, like what’s happened to the idea of the witch, for instance, in the last 100 years, maybe, which of course has been this very loaded negative figure in the public imagination as well but was reclaimed and embraced and taken up as a symbol of resistance. I mean it also parallels with, of course, the development of modern Satanism, although those are very distinct traditions but still there’s an overlap in the way that these figures are taken up. So I think that’s one instance of it and of course like the history of the word ‘queer’ as an identity, for instance. There’s something, I think that if you want to express that you’re against the prevailing order, in some way, a very powerful way of doing so, in a very successful way of doing so, a lot of the time is taking something that the prevailing order says is evil and then, being like, I’m gonna embrace this and I’m gonna say that this is good and I’m gonna put this on a pedestal and in a place of sacredness instead. So that’s a very powerful form of…
AP: Empowering.
MH: Yeah, symbolic resistance. Of course, that’s a very sort of, I don’t know, sociological, anthropological way of answering that question. There are other possible responses to that question as well. I think another issue, which I think doesn’t get said enough as well, is that during Crowley’s early years and his life so the Victorian – Edwardian period like they’re really, especially around the fin de siècle, there really weren’t very many positive images of female sexual power during that time. You either had the femme fatale images which were largely…
AP: A cautionary tale sometimes. She always ends up…
MH: Yes, usually they meet sticky ends and although they were empowered figures, some of them, they were written or painted, a lot of the time, from a slightly or majorly, misogynistic viewpoint so that was like a negative idea and even within the first wave of feminism. First-wave feminists tend to take a quite pessimistic outlook on sexuality, as well and were more concerned with protecting women from the dangers connected to sexuality, which was really important during that time, as well with sexually transmitted diseases, with raising the age of consent and fighting for sex workers rights during that time as well.
But also, that early first wave of feminism also wasn’t hugely concerned with women’s right to say yes to sexual desire and sexual pleasure. So having that sort of imagery, at that time, that was quite rare and quite radical to have not only an image of when most of the people, who were more sex-positive within the early, first wave of feminism were, like, the extent that they’d go to was it’s marital, if it’s monogamous, if it’s reproductively oriented, if it’s heterosexual, then it’s okay – it might even be good. But to have someone saying that, in fact, all of the transgressive, all of the anti-normative things are not only fine and acceptable but they’re actually sacred and that like for a woman to be promiscuous or to be non-monogamous or to be engaged in sex just for the mere pleasure of it, that was very, that was very radical at that time. So I think that’s quite a powerful idea as well and I think it still is, in a lot of ways. Obviously, a lot has changed and people today or people who identify as women or as fem today face very different social mores than did women at the beginning of the 20th century. But I think in a lot of ways that that idea is still relevant and more radical today than one might think.
AP: Yeah that’s very interesting and I really liked your answer and your explanation of how reclaiming a derogatory term or a term associated with something considered to be evil is a way of reclaiming and also contrasting the dominant system and that also happens with paganism. Paganism also started out, as you know, as a derogatory term and in that case, as well, you do have a progressive reclamation of that of the term as being sacred. So it’s fascinating to me how something considered evil or transgressive or forbidden can be elevated to the status of sacredness. That is a very interesting evolution that you see in western esotericism. Perhaps not just with Babalon but with other things as well.
MH: Yeah no, I think so definitely, definitely. It has a lot of different parallels and also just inverting. One of the things I think is really interesting, as well lots of things are interesting, but one of the ways that I got into researching this topic was that, when I was an undergraduate, I took a course on religion and sexuality and I got to write a paper for that. And the paper that I wrote was… I’d quite recently sort of stumbled into studying esotericism but this was within history of religions, and the paper that I wrote for that was a comparison of the Virgin Mary and the goddess Babalon as different images of femininity. And that paper’s not available anywhere, for which we should all be very grateful, I think because I’m sure it wasn’t very good. But I think that that sort of idea has stuck with me as well because I think that’s interesting just this idea of like the Madonna-whore dichotomy or this binarization of femininity and how a lot of the time was like… I mean it’s the Madonna who is seen as the good, the good girl and it’s the whore who’s the bad girl, and what happens in Thelema is that like the bad girl gets, not redeemed, not turned into a good girl but, embraced, basically, and that is interesting I think and radical in a lot of ways.
AP: Yeah definitely. And what about the element of the feminine and the understanding and perception of femininity in Thelema?
MH: Yeah, so yeah, big question as well. So, of course, one of the things that are really important. So in “Libri AL vel Legis” or in “The Book of the Law” which, as I’ve said, Crowley penned in 1904 and is the foundational sacred text of Thelema, that text is divided into three chapters, as I’ve mentioned. And they are spoken or narrated by three separate divine entities. And the first, the speaker of the first chapter is the goddess Nuit. So she is feminine and she is within the core Thelemic pantheon she is the utmost, the highest manifestation of the feminine divine and then there’s the second chapter which is spoken by the god Hadit who is the lover and masculine polarity who unites with Nuit. So in that in that polarity Nuit represents the totality of experience and everything that is external to us and everything that, as we go through life and we experience it, that we seek to unite with and Hadit is that infinitely condensed core or life force of each person that seeks union with Nuit. And the symbol of that union or the product of that union, as it’s conceptualized in the “Book of the Law”, is the god Ra-Hoor-Kuit who is a form of the god Horus and who is described as male but also really androgynous in a lot of Crowley’s reasoning around that figure.
So, one important thing there is, I think, that the goddess Nuit is, in one way, arguably the uttermost representation of the divine that is external to the individual within Thelema. So like the divine feminine is tremendously important and, of course, Babalon, as I’ve said, Crowley interpreted this reference to Nuit’s secret or hidden name in the “Book of the Law” as a reference to Babalon. So we might say that Babalon is the earthly, sexual representation of Nuit or the representation of the divine feminine for this particular aeon that Crowley believed started with the reception of the “Book of the Law” and which he refers to as the aeon of Horus. So the divine feminine is very, hugely important in Crowley’s kind of expectation of Thelema and I think it’s also important to say that there’s been quite a lot of research on the occultism of the fin de siècle and especially in England and of women being really formative to movements like Theosophy or Spiritualism also in North America or to the Golden Dawn for instance and I think that that also holds true of the magickal orders that Crowley founded or was involved in so the A∴A∴ which he founded or co-founded in 1907 and also, of course, Ordo Templi Orientis or the OTO which Crowley became involved in properly in1912 and women have always been important to those magickal orders which is still around today, of course, and which will I believe we’ll get back to as well.
So, for instance, during Crowley’s lifetime one of his love-magickal partners Leila Waddell was the Grand Secretary-General of OTO for Britain. One of Crowley’s other lovers and also one of his Scarlet Women was the Grand Secretary General of OTO in the 1920s she was also the Praemonstrātortrix, one of the three governing positions in Crowley’s A∴A∴. There are also people like Crowley’s student and very, very long-term friend Jane Wolfe, who studied with him in Europe in the 1920s and went back to North America in the late 1920s and played a very instrumental role in setting up what became the Agape Lodge, which Jack Parsons would later join, and which was the only active OTO body existing in the world at the point of Crowley’s death. And so Jane Wolfe was absolutely instrumental to that and there have been others as well. Jack Parsonses first wife Helen Parsons Smith and also Phyllis Seckler, both of whom were involved within the Agape Lodge as well and who were really essential to preserving and helping to re-establish the OTO in the US. So and this I feel like this doesn’t get said enough, also, because there’s this pervasive narrative like when we talk about Theosophy and we talk about Spiritualism and we talk about the Golden Dawn we say that women were really empowered in those movements and there’s this pervasive narrative around Crowley which says that he a massive sexist and that he exploited and destroyed all of the women in his life.
AP: I was just about to ask you that so I’m happy that you’re calling it.
MH: Yeah and I think that that narrative is really unhelpful and it’s also a pretty serious misrepresentation of the reality and it’s one of those narratives that wants to masquerade as feminist and I actually find it quite the opposite. Because a lot of the time the narrative around women like Rose Kelly, Crowley’s first wife, or Leah Hirsig, his most influential Scarlet Woman in the 1920s, is that they were drawn in by Crowley who then exploited and destroyed them and it doesn’t do these women any favours and it’s not historically accurate either. What we can see for the historical Thelemic movement, much as it was for Theosophy or for the Golden Dawn, is that most of the women, who were drawn to Crowley, were unconventional in their own right, of course, because otherwise they wouldn’t be drawn to this sort of movement. A lot of them were sort of quite close to this idea of the new woman which was popular in certain branches of feminism in the early 20th century. So they were people who worked for a living, who got married late or not at all, who had children outside of marriage, who had many lovers, who travelled, who studied, who smoked cigarettes and wore trousers, and rode bicycles, and all of these things and who went back to doing so after being with Crowley. So this narrative of Crowley and his poor exploited women is, for me, it’s extremely unhelpful and it doesn’t accurately represent how these women actually lived their lives and most of whom went back to having very long lives with other lovers and other marriages and other forms of spiritual and occult practice in different ways.
All of that being said, we do have fewer preserved writings, that are of a theological nature or pertaining to magickal theory, by early women Thelemites than by their male contemporaries and I think there might be several reasons for this. One of the reasons is in some cases we know the sources have simply been lost. There are a lot of writings by Leah Hirsig which appear not to have survived, so that’s one factor. Another factor is that I think, in some ways, that the early Thelemic movement was also a product of its time. So I think that there are certain things to suggest that the women in the movement were expected to take on a larger share of the day-to-day organizational stuff. So the cooking and the shopping and the child-rearing and the finances and not, maybe, the same expectation that they would produce large quantities of theoretical or theological writing. So I think that was a factor as well and I think looking at the historical role of women at Thelema it’s important to acknowledge both of those things, both that all of those day-to-day – the cooking and the child-rearing and the finances. I mean that’s absolutely instrumental to making a religious movement function and seeing those as less worthy things to be spending one’s time with, that carries a gender bias of its own, I think. But also on the other hand that there was potentially this inequality as well and part of which was just caused by the roles of women in society at that time as who were more vulnerable to, of course, to unwanted pregnancies and who didn’t have access to safe and reliable contraceptives or abortion care or all of the things that we do today. So all of those things were factors. Yeah, so all of that being said again I mean Crowley was very all over the spectrum in his views on women, or really any given group, in his writings. Sometimes he writes things that are feminist, even by today’s standards. Sometimes he writes things that, by today’s standards, are hugely sexist and sometimes he writes things that are just petty and means and that’s not only towards women that’s towards any given group of people really.
Yeah, so many different things I don’t think that Crowley I think it’s important to distinguish between Crowley as a writer and what was the lived reality of the early Thelemic movement, where women have always been important. And, of course, I mean, looking at Thelema today that is very much still the case. But what we’ve also seen, as I’ve mentioned, over the last few decades is that writers, who are not men, who are women who have been stepping into that space of producing and circulating writings and some of them around Babalon or the idea of the Scarlet Woman woman but also around Thelemic magickal practice, in general, and writings by women achieving much wider circulation. And many of these women writers also critique Crowley for what they see as sexism in his work and also look quite critically at the historical roles of women in the Thelemic movement and develop their own understandings of Thelemic magickal practice from the perspective of feminine and body of experience. So that’s also something that’s been happening in recent decades but definitely magnified, in certain ways, in the last few years so I think that’s important to say as well.
AP: Yeah, thank you for saying that. I think that it is common, you know, this misconception that Crowley and Thelema are misogynistic or against women or they just exploit women.
MH: So it’s also an interesting narrative because it’s strangely, and I mean that’s not to minimize the fact that Crowley was not always, I think, the most pleasant or easy of people to be around for men or for women. He treated people quite appallingly at times and that definitely goes for his male disciples as well. But this was, especially in the early 1920s, when Crowley and Leah Hirsig were running the Abbey of the Thelema in Cefalù, Sicily there was, I think, in 19 starting really in 1922 but then going forward a lot of press circulating around the evil Alistair Crowley and his poor women that he has lured into his spider’s web of black magic and perverse rights…
AP: And which also assumes that women are these feeble…
MH: Gullible, feeble-minded idiots basically.
AP: Yeah.
MH: And we have the writings of the women from that period so we have volumes and volumes of letters from Jane Wolfe, for instance, who was also in Cefalù during this period and was looking at this media, this tabloid media portrayal, and going what!? And basically, like the Sunday Express in the UK, writing that Crowley forced his women to prostitute themselves on the streets of Palermo and Jane Wolfe going; when did this happen exactly? I mean it’s funny but it’s also so dreadful and it parallels with… I mean around that time also connected to these anxieties around the transforming roles of women there were also these anxieties around alternative religious and spiritual moments which were often a forum for challenging gender roles and where women often could like hold positions of power in various ways. So there was this paranoia around what we’d call ‘new religious movements’ that but in the 1920s which masqueraded as concern for the women but was, in fact, quite often, I think, rooted in this fear that women would not marry and not enter into having many children and being the subservient and modest wife but would actually travel around the world and have lovers and be unruly and be shameless and radical in various ways. So a lot of it was quite conservative in its way, I think, and still is.
AP: Yeah, definitely. I’d also like to touch on the figure and role of the Scarlet Woman. What is the Scarlet Woman and what’s the history of this role and how it developed over time?
MH: Yeah, so, of course. The Scarlet Woman, like Babalon, originates, as a concept, can be traced back to the Book of Revelation in some ways and ‘a’ Scarlet Woman, in the 19th century was also used as a negative euphemism for a prostitute or for a sex worker. So when Crowley used that term it was in the context of a wider culture where that was very much a negative term, again. But the Scarlet Woman appears in Crowley’s writings for the first time in the “Book of the Law” or “Liber AL vel Legis”, where she is described as the female counterpart or consort or sort of the feminine equivalent, basically, of the Beast – 666, which was Crowley’s self self-chosen title and it’s said that the Scarlet Woman is to help the Beast in bringing about the new aeon and bringing the teachings of the “Book of the Law” to the people, basically. And Crowley initially interpreted that title, of the Scarlet Woman, as a reference to, his then-wife, Rose Kelly who was with him in Cairo, in Egypt where they were on honeymoon. When the “Book of the Law” was received and she also, of course, played an instrumental role in the transmission of the “Book of the Law” by channelling instructions to Crowley for how to prepare and telling him to prepare to take dictation, which he then did and which resulted in that text and she also amended the text in a few small instances. So she played a really important role.
So Crowley initially saw that as a reference to Rose but their marriage disintegrated. So around 1909, when things had really fallen apart between them, Crowley began interpreting the Scarlet Woman, instead, as a transferable office referring to a woman who was his lover and his magickal partner and who, quite often, would help him with various forms of spirit communication or channelling messages from higher entities so Rose Kelly brought Crowley, in Crowley’s view, brought him into contact with the entity Aiwass who dictated the “Book of the Law” and later Scarlet Women also acted in similar ways and channelled communications from other higher beings as Crowley saw it.
So the first woman to hold the title of Scarlet Woman, after Rose Kelly, was Mary Desti who was a cosmetics entrepreneur and who became Crowley’s lover and who channelled, in 1911, a series of messages from the entity Abuldiz and which resulted in the penning of Crowley’s “Book Four” on where Mary Desti is credited as as co-author for parts of it. And then a series of other women including, but not limited to, Jeanne Foster, who was a poet and a journalist and a fashion model, who was Crowley’s lover, briefly, in 1915. Roddie Minor, who was a suffragette and also, of course, Leah Hirsig who helped co-found the Abbey of Thelema in Sicily and who was a school teacher and a teacher of music and who was Crowley’s, what I would argue to be in terms of her impact, within Thelema, Crowley’s most influential Scarlet Woman, maybe, with the possible exception of Rose Kelly. But Leah Hirsig was definitely the one of Crowley’s Scarlet Women who had the longest and deepest level of magickal practice and involvement of her own and involvement in coordinating the Thelemic movement and acting as Crowley’s emissary and assisting him in key writings and she also did these things and channelled messages from Aiwass but also from several of the other entities that the previous Scarlet Women had brought Crowley into contact with. So, and that’s the view that he sticked to for the remainder of his life – that the Scarlet Woman was a transferable office but it referred to one person at a time. So Crowley points to this succession of women who hold this title and he also interpreted that title, of course, as referring to one who incarnated the force of Babalon on earth.
So after Crowley, we have Jack Parsons who conflates the Scarlet Women or the Scarlet Woman and Babalon quite significantly. So he refers to this divine feminine manifestation, that he was trying to produce with Hubbard and Cameron in 1946, as Babalon – The Scarlet Woman. So that, kind of, becomes one person but, in one way, he also interprets it, as I’ve mentioned, a potentially, also, the name of a force that could be incarnate in anyone and especially in liberated women.
And then we have Kenneth Grant who again uses the words Scarlet Woman and Babalon interchangeably but who was one of the earlier writers to interpret the Scarlet Woman, not as one historical figure nor as necessarily just a transferable office, but as a magickal role that can be taken on by anyone who’s female-bodied and who has the requisite level of magickal skill. So Grant rephrases the beast and the Scarlet Woman, from these historical individuals to roles that can be taken on by any magickal coupling, provided that they’re sufficiently skilled. And that is more close to the way that the term Scarlet Woman is used by Thelemic magickal practitioners and others in the contemporary occult milieu today. Which is usually, if people are talking about the role of the Scarlet Woman in something other than in a historical sense, it’s usually in the sense of; this is a role or this is an archetype that can be assumed by any woman potentially or any person, regardless of gender, depending on who you’d ask and which some people interpret as a magickal role or a sex-magickal role and others interpret as a more kind of everyday thing in the sense of representing being liberated in your sexuality or being in touch with your sexual power and all of these things.
But definitely, in the last few decades, it’s been very like, in contemporary writings on the Scarlet Woman, definitely, a pervasive view is that it is something that can be claimed for oneself it’s not something that you need to have been bestowed upon you by another magickal practitioner much as it was during Crowley’s lifetime. Because, during that time, within the Thelemic movement, it was definitely him who appointed and deposed the Scarlet Woman – which we see, very clearly, in the case of Leah Hirsig as well, because she wasn’t necessarily comfortable with being deposed from that role when Crowley suddenly decided that he was going to take on a new Scarlet Woman. So that’s something that’s changed quite significantly.
AP: And why does it have to be a woman? Why does the Scarlet Woman have to be one?
MH: Yeah, Good question. I think in terms of Crowley’s magickal practice that’s just how he envisioned it, for various reasons. I mean he obviously had male lovers, as well, who were extremely important to him for longer or shorter periods. From a magickal point of view the chief of them, I think, being Victor B Neuberg but to my knowledge, he never referred to any of them as Scarlet Men. So I don’t know. It’s just the way that he envisioned it, I guess, which could be linked to this idea of divine gender polarity and the polarity of the masculine and the feminine divine which plays a really important role in the “Book of the Law” and in Thelema and that being represented on earth by physical men and women.
I mean the way that Kenneth Grant writes about this role, he writes about it quite clearly in terms of a specific reproductive anatomy and emphasizing that men and women have different roles in sexual magick and he links vaginal fluids and semen to very different things in this sex-magickal interplay. So in Grant’s writings, it’s really an issue of his take on, I don’t know, what we might call magickal chemistry or just the way that these polarities work in practice. I think if we look at the contemporary esoteric media there are a lot of people who would say that it doesn’t have to be a woman and that it’s a role that can be claimed by anyone regardless of gender and that it’s important to do so.
One of the early essays written in that vein was by a female occultist named Linda Falorio who has also worked a lot in the Kenneth Grantian, Typhonian tradition, and this essay, I think it was published, for the first time actually, in the early 1990s. So that’s one of the really early, within a volume called “Faces of Babalon” published by Black Moon and edited by Mishlen Linden. So that was one of these early sort of writings, early 1990s, volumes that I was talking about that are on Babalon but written by female-identified magickal practitioners and in that essay, Linda Falorio stresses that well, basically, we talk about this as a feminine energy but the only thing that limits the energy is, that any magickal practitioner can access is, their own skill and imagination and Falorio uses gender-neutral pronouns throughout that essay, as I can recall And there’s also another essay in the same volume which talks about sex work and sacred prostitution, in relation to Babalon and the Scarlet Woman, which also uses gender-neutral pronouns, as I can recall.
So definitely lots of people that I’ve spoken to today would say that it doesn’t necessarily, doesn’t have to be a woman. It doesn’t have to be limited to any gender. I think what is quite significant, though, is that a lot of the time this role of the Scarlet Woman and the need to identify with that role in one’s own magickal practice or one’s own daily life, that seems to be more sort of intensely felt among people who identify as women or who identifies them, I think, partly because of just the way that femininity is is conceptualized in society and the way that it has been more difficult for people who identify as women or fem to inhabit that very unrestrained, sexual autonomy and power. So I will say that I have encountered very few cis-gendered males who have explicitly identified with the role of the Scarlet Woman but I’ve encountered plenty of people of all other genders that do. So, I also think it’s partly an issue of just who finds that role more meaningful and spiritually transformative. If that makes sense?
AP: Yeah and perhaps, since it is linked to the figure of Babalon and that reclamation of femininity or a different form of non-normative, non-conformist femininity, perhaps, that might also play a role into the Scarlet Woman being associated with femininity?
MH: Yes, there’s definitely a very… and this is very much what my book is about. I think it is important to say, as well, that in terms of Crowley’s writings as well. I mean he links Babalon, very clearly, to femininity but it’s not always. That doesn’t always mean a particular reproductive anatomy in his writings because he sometimes steps into that role and writes about himself as the whore dressed in scarlet who’s sexually receptive and steps into a feminine persona. And in Crowley’s rendering of the abyss ordeal… I mean Babalon has this dual role. She’s partly this thing that’s external to the self, which the adept sacrifices their individuality in order to unite with but she’s also the emblem of the spiritual-magickal attitude that’s necessary to survive the abyss. So, in one way, crossing the abyss successfully is, in Crowley’s writings, an emulation of that feminine spiritual standpoint and he also expresses this in the “Book of Lies” from 1911 where he says that I think I’m quoting; “the brothers of A∴A∴ are women the aspirants to A∴A∴ are men,” and he’s talking about the magickal order A∴A∴ and the brothers of A∴A∴, in this phrase, represent the people who have fully undergone the crossing of the abyss and emerged on the other side claiming the degree of Masters of the Temple and, of course, he’s not talking about physical reproductive parts here, he’s talking about how those who have undergone the crossing of the abyss have, in one sense, undergone a feminization, at the spiritual level, by embracing this receptive standpoint. So there’s definitely this link to femininity but I think it’s also important to say that womanhood and femininity are not the exact same thing although of course they’re linked, yeah, I think that’s important.
AP: Yeah thank you very much for clarifying that now I’d like to move on to a few questions from my patrons the first two are from Andrew. So the first one is; Thelema gave birth to a number of daughter religions but how is Thelema itself doing in the modern age? Is there a thriving movement, mostly hidden from the public eye, or has it fractured into subgroups of which none is gaining a foothold amongst the myriad forms of 21st-century paganism?
MH: Oh it’s definitely, definitely still around and not very hidden, I think. So the two orders, the two magickal orders, that Crowley utilized during his lifetime to promulgate Thelema are very much still around. The largest of them is Ordo Temple Orientis which, yeah, so Crowley became the British head of that in 1912 and eventually in the 1920s became the international head of it and it was around for the rest of Crowley’s life. It led to a more or less dormant existence for a couple of decades after Crowley’s death and was reconstituted in the United States in 1969 by Grady McMurtry aided by a few of the people that I mentioned earlier. So Helen Parsons Smith and Phyllis Seckler of the old Agape Lodge, among a few other important figures as well. And since then, essentially, the OTO has progressively grown slowly and steadily. So OTO today has about 4 000 members globally and has been very successful in acquiring the copyrights to Crowley’s works and putting out editions of Crowley’s works also. And has a presence on all continents, basically, if not in all countries and is, I mean, so f4 000 people that is much larger than OTO was at any point during Crowley’s lifetime and actually makes it one of the larger, more formalized occult orders, that are in existence today. So that’s definitely very much still around. Crowley’s A∴A∴ is still around as well, though here’s a few different groups that all claim descent from Crowley’s A∴A∴ and that’s a whole other issue. But that’s definitely still around as well and is not as large as OTO and tends to be more personalized and more private. So OTO is more of a social order and which actually does a lot of its activities publicly. So one of the things that the OTO does is organize Crowley’s Gnostic Catholic Mass which is celebrated, in non-Covid times, every week somewhere in the world and most larger OTO bodies do it at least monthly. So and do a lot of reading groups and classes and workshops and social gatherings and other things publicly so so not at all hidden really.
The things that are hidden from the public, in terms of OTO, one of the big things, at least, is, of course, the initiation rituals which are secret. But then like OTO and A∴A∴ are definitely the big two, in terms of Thelemic groups, in the present day esoteric landscape. There are other smaller splinter groups as well and new groups that have been formed of varying sizes; some of which are a handful of people some are maybe a few dozen people and then there are, of course as the question asking patron brings up, there are a lot of what we could call daughter religions or post- Thelemic groups as well or solitary practitioners or more or less loosely organized groups of practitioners who draw very strongly on some of Crowley’s ideas and some aspects of Thelemic tradition but who are not within orthodox Thelema, as we’d say. But yes, so definitely alive and vibrant in a lot of ways.
AP: Thank you for answering that. I guess I was thinking of Italy, which is where I do my fieldwork, and I was thinking that the OTO is very much alive and vibrant as you said.
MH: Oh yeah, yeah definitely. Definitely very vibrant in Italy, absolutely, yeah.
AP: Then the second question that Andrew is asking is: looking into Thelema I came across Nema Andahadna, I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing her right, and her Maat Magic, which she developed from Crowley’s ideas. Some writers lauded her as being very influential in historic circles. Why have most, like me, never heard of her?
MH: Well yes, absolutely she has been very influential so Nema is one of those people that I might say – one way that she could be described is in terms of this post-Thelemic landscape of esoteric practitioners and authors and teachers. So she’s been very influential and she inspired Kenneth Grant but she was also herself inspired by Grant’s work in several ways. So she has been, I think, extremely formative in inspiring, again, forms of esoteric practice and engagement that are broadly informed by Crowley and Thelema but take it in a novel direction. So she has been very influential and I think also definitely as what we’ve been talking about as a female author who’s been very prolific and also active as a teacher and as an initiator. I think she’s been extremely important. Can’t speak to why the person asking the question hasn’t heard of her. I think that…
AP: I think that what he meant is that lots of people, who are part of the practising community, don’t really know of her so he was wondering why her outreach hasn’t been as influential among practitioners that are interested in or practice magic.
NH: Well if we’re talking about Crowley and Thelema, Crowley does tend to sort of dwarf anyone else. So because he was so prolific and he’s such a big author and personality in this milieu as well but, quite honestly I’m not sure when the last time was that I walked into, if not an occult section of a regular bookshop, but at least an occult or pagan bookshop that doesn’t have a copy of Nima’s “Maat Magick”. It’s usually there among the staples, so I would argue that a lot of people have heard of her but I mean, of course, we could, I don’t know if it’s true in the case of Nema, but we could also bring gender into the discussion and say that as progressive as the occult milieu has often been, in terms there being space for women as leaders and organizers and initiating figures, the occult community definitely has not been immune to these broader societal structures were women are not credited to the same extent for their work so I don’t know if that is the case with Nema but I know it’s definitely been the case with a lot of other female occult writers who have been very influential, so yeah.
AP: Then we have one final question from Vocatus and he’s asking: I would be interested to know if there is a connection with Pistes Sophia and also is there any connection with the Babylonian goddess narrative and the biblical character in Ezekiel.
NH: Right, so yes. This goes back to my previous point about methodological agnosticism. I’m not sure of the viewpoint from which this person is asking their questions. So if we’re looking at whether or not these entities are the same, that falls outside of what I’d be comfortable answering as a scholar. If we’re looking at verifiable chains of textual transmission or the transmission of ideas the connection to Ezekiel would be such that definitely, the Book of Ezekiel was one of the largest sources of biblical inspiration for the “Book of Revelations”. There are very clear parallels in language and in imagery. I’m also fairly sure that Crowley studied the book of Ezekiel quite keenly. I know I found a passage in Crowley’s “The Vision and the Voice” which is the visionary record of his Enochian experiments of 1909. I found I believe, if I recall correctly, I know I found a passage there which refers to Babalon and which has very clear linguistic parallels to the book of Ezekiel with imagery that does not appear in the “Book of Revelation”. So yes, in terms of direct textual influence I would say that there is that link. In terms of the Pistes Sophia, I’m actually not sure. That’s a good question, I don’t know. I’ll have to look into that. That’s really…
AP: What if people want to reach out to you? Is there any place where people can find your work?
MH: Yes, so the easiest way to find my academic publications is at my academia.edu profile. If you google my name that comes up very, very quickly. On Facebook, I have a Facebook page called the Thelemic Women’s History Project which is centred on the research that I’ve been doing for my postdoc, which has explored some of the women in Thelema in the 20th century. One of them being Leah Hirsig. Another one of them being Jane Wolfe who we’ve talked about. And I’m also on Instagram and on Twitter – slightly more active on Instagram – both under the handle doctor underscore Scarlet Woman (dr_scarletwoman) and, yes. so you’re very welcome to follow me there and to reach out if there are questions about anything.
AP: So thank you so much Manon for doing this interview I found it very fascinating it was quite thought-provoking and there were a few points that I will have to sort of revisit and explore further in my own research as well.
MH: Well thank you, thank you, Angela, thank you so much for inviting me. It’s been a pleasure and yeah, I’m just delighted to be on your channel. And thank you also to those who have listened to this.
AP: Indeed. Let us know in the comments what you think about what we said.
So this is it for today’s video. What do you think about what we discussed let me know in the comment section. You know that I always look forward to reading what you think and of course, if you did like this video, don’t forget to SMASH the like button, subscribe to the channel, activate the notification bell so that you will never miss a new upload from me, share my content around – it really helps us grow and thank you so much for being here and stay tuned for all the academic fun.
Bye for now.
BOOK MENTIONED
White, M.H. (2020) The Eloquent Blood: The Goddess Babalon and the Construction of Femininities in Western Esotericism. Illustrated edition. New York, NY, Oxford University Press.
US link https://amzn.to/3yeZMdq
UK link https://amzn.to/3xgo6Kk
Canada link https://amzn.to/3ffcLo2
CONTACT DETAILS
Instagram: dr_scarletwoman
Facebook: The Thelemic Women’s History Project
Twitter: dr_scarletwoman
CORRIGENDA FROM THE INTERVIEWEE
1) Around 7.40 Manon talks about Crowley’s exploration of Enochian magic in the Algerian desert and incorrectly state that he was traversing the desert in 1904. This is incorrect of course — Crowley and Neuburg were in Algeria in 1909.
2) In the patron-generated question portion, Manon misheard my third question about the Pistis Sophia and Jezebel — here, her Zoom connection must have fractured, so she thought the questioner was asking about (the biblical book of)