Jack Parsons..and Babalon.
It has been such a long time since I last wrote here! This post might be a bit different to previous ones. So much has happened. And fundamentally there are so many splits between how to approach the weirdness of this world, that I feel at a loss to know who I'm talking to or what level to take when I think about writing, and especially when thinking about Jack Parsons.
You know his story right?
You know that he died painfully, and what must have been for him, slowly, following an explosion. You probably know that L Ron Hubbard had channelled something that seems like a foreshadowing of Jack's death before it happened, and that Jack would most likely have heard it - at the time - as signifying. a crossing, not as his personal doom, but possibly a price to be paid - and not given a second thought to what might happen if he dropped the can until it happened. And you may interpret what happened as evidence of L Ron's hypnotic power, or think that Jack was just careless. Or murdered. I have no answers.
Jack was Crowley's student. he was a member of the OTO. And, once he had reached a certain grade, Jack Parsons began the Babalon working, with L Ron Hubbard acting as his scribe, rather as Edward Kelley had for John Dee.
On March 1 and 2 1946 I prepared the altar and equipment in accordance with the instructions in Liber 49. The Scribe had been away about a week, and knew nothing of my invocations of BABALON, which I had kept entirely secret. On the night of March 2 he returned, and described a vision he had that evening of a savage and beautiful woman riding naked on a great cat-like beast. He was impressed with the urgent necessity of giving me some message or communication..."She is flame of life, power of darkness, she destroys with a glance, she may take thy soul. She feeds upon the death of men." "Beautiful--Horrible." The Scribe, now pale and sweating, rested awhile. From Jack Parson's diary.
The can, waiting for Jack to drop, contained Fulminate of Mercury.
Fulminate is a verb meaning to express forceful, loud, or violent complaints and criticisms against someone or something. AI
And mercury?
The symbolic spirit of Mercury represents a bridge between opposites—spirit and matter, mind and body, and divine and human realms. As a volatile and fluid principle, it embodies intellect, communication, rapid transformation, and the "quicksilver" movement of conscious energy, often acting as a mediator between conscious and unconscious worlds. AI.
Was it even fulminate of mercury?
Or is that simply the most correct sounding agent of his ending?
I'm fascinated by the intersection of possibilities that underlie the different versions of reality people inhabit. And the correspondences between ideas and experience. Many authors have written about the power of myth to create behaviours that jump from the primal, through myth into culture; Freud started it! Joseph Campbell and John Gray for instance explore how narrative alters reality. But I wish to look further, beyond the power of myth, and into The Great Beyond.
Jack Parson's wished to evoke Babalon, and the working had two aspects. First, in a state of distress and in need of a Beloved, he summoned 'the elemental', in the second working - he summoned Babalon and died in flames...soon after. But anyway! We know what he was doing, but only up to a point, and we know why, or think we do, via psychology. And I suppose I am vaguely annoyed that he thought that the overthrow of Christian values would necessarily be a good thing, and that the rule of Babalon would be better - for everyone! Even though I take his point, I disagree.
Meanwhile L Ron went on to create a Christianity-replacement, and this was likewise informed by The Book of the Apocalypse of John - because if everyone was clear, we would all be ok when the end of the world comes! So, in relation to a Bronze age text, to a mythos, two men radically changed their lives. L Ron made a lot of money. Jack died in agony.
Perhaps Freud had a point, about myth, I mean.
And the Great Beyond? I am pretty sure that Crowley - for it was Alistair Crowley who started this whole Babalon thing - imagined Babalon from Babylon in Revelations - see the illustration in Martin Luther's 1534 translation of the Bible. And seeing her as Inanna, a goddess of passion, eroticism and war. And - and this is my view - from a misunderstanding of Vajrayana yidam practice (his misunderstanding of the yidam practice continued, I believe, as the HGA too).
From a Vajrayana text:
A playful energy. She stands naked, sixteen years old. The flourishing experience of bliss. She is bright red, she is the magnetizer of the three realms, blazing like an aeon-ending fire: Her light is primordial awareness. In her right hand she holds a curved knife: severing adorning characteristics, in her left hand she holds a skull-cup of blood: the experiential taste of bliss. Bearing a Khatvanga staff aloft: symbolising the yogini. Wearing a necklace of freshly severed heads.
Now...now we get into a difficult area. A veritable hallway of many doors! First thing, The Philip Experiment. The hypothesis arising from the Philip experiment is, that a thought form can actually manifest. This really should be simple to test. The experiment centred on a group of people imagining a character; working on it's back story and character. They then held a séance.
This whole Tulpa thing began with the Theosophists, and not with the Tibetans, though it is a Tibetan word. Tulpa in Tibetan refers to a magic trick, a phantom, a something - a UAP!
...many students of Parsons’ work believed that the portal of entry that Crowley opened in 1918—when he successfully invoked Lam—may have been further enlarged by Parsons and Hubbard in the 1940s with the commencement of the Babalon Working, which resulted in something wicked coming this way. Perhaps those same students were correct, as soon after Parsons’ occult actions reached their tipping point, pilot Kenneth Arnold had that historic UFO encounter over Mt. Rainier, Washington, followed a little more than a week later by the legendary flying saucer crash outside of Roswell, New Mexico. Redfern, Nick. FINAL EVENTS.
Following the Theosophists, there is a belief that if enough people imagine a being, it can take a physical, or semi-physical form. Another term is egregore (from The Book of Enoch - The Watcher), or as a name for an independently functioning spiritual entity created by one or more practitioners. This leads one way towards reality shifting. or the other way towards alien abduction, poltergeists and shadow figures, and time-slips.
But..perhaps even more fascinating is the bizarre popularity of L Ron. A long time ago, when I set out to investigate Christian religions, I included the Scientologists. I did the test. I had some engrams that needed clearing apparently! And then I was taken into a back room, ushered towards a sofa, and shown a film of L Ron...
My guide for all this, the engram testing, the sales talk, sat by me the whole way through. He clearly thought that L Ron was wonderful. I did not. And so I see that the backroom sofa was a kind of test. I obviously wasn't meant to become a Scientologist. And so I left, having never intended to join anything, with a view that Scientology mirrored psychoanalysis insomuch as, the focus is on what's wrong with you, and if only you would pay the money and take the time, you would become fully actualised.
That's the faith part, right there.
Parsons didn't run that mod, his whole life had been leaps of imagination, pure genius - and just doing the experiment. One man gave us space travel, and the other gave us?
Who knows!
Engrams I guess.
I miss checking out cults, and enclaves of alternative beliefs. They are wise to people like me, who don't want to part with cash! But many are very welcoming and keen to explain their ideas.
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