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?
And there is a great documentary that I will post a link to...
You know that Jack 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 those words - at the time - as signifying. a crossing. Not as a warning.
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, and as Kelly had told John that the angels wanted a bit of wife swapping, so L Ron likewise, took Jack's partner away with him on Jack's boat!
Meanwhile.
The Working.
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 coffee can.
Falling from Jack's hand.
Contained Fulminate of Mercury.
Fulminate is a verb meaning to express forceful, loud, or violent complaints and criticisms against someone or something. [ref 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. [ref AI.]
Was it fulminate of mercury?
Is that actually what he dropped?
Or is it a poetic truth?
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 with the Oedipus complex. Jung, Joseph Campbell and John Gray especially 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 Babalon Working had two aspects.
1. First, in a state of distress and in need of someone to love, he summoned 'the elemental'.
2. In the second working - he summoned Babalon and died in flames...soon after.
OK, I'm missing a lot out. I recommend The Two Antichrists by Peter Grey! We know what Jack was doing to some extent - but I don't know ceremonial magic - so I don't know what he was doing. And other people think that they know, by using a psychological theory or two. Personally speaking - and I am categorically not a Christian! - 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.
Such hubris goes with the times, when the first atom bomb was exploded - around the time Jack was screaming into the abyss in the Mohave desert - scientists thought that it just might set fire to all the Earth's atmosphere.
They did it anyway..
Babalon from the Book of Revelations, turns up at End Times.
Jack was fine with that.
Crowley wrote:
All I get is that the Apocalypse was the recension of a dozen or so totally disconnected allegories, that were pieced together, and ruthlessly planed down to make them into a connected account; and that recension was re-written and edited in the interests of Christianity, because people were complaining that Christianity could show no true spiritual knowledge, or any food for the best minds: nothing but miracles, which only deceived the most ignorant, and Theology, which only suited pedants. So a man got hold of this recension, and turned it Christian, and imitated the style of John. And this explains why the end of the world does not happen every few years, as advertised. From Wiki.
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 what the Scientologists class as clear, we would all be ok when the end of the world comes!
So, in relation to a Bronze age text, L Ron made a lot of money. Jack died in agony.
What was Crowley up to really?
I think that he had got a misunderstanding of Vajrayana yidam practice (his misunderstanding of the yidam practice becomes the HGA too).
So is Babalon really Vajra Yogini?
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.
Meanwhile we have this, 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.
Now...now we get into a difficult area. A veritable hallway of many doors! If enough people imagine Vajra Yogini, does she manifest?
No, only in their imaginations.
This too is testable, but not very exciting.
Tulpa - and Vajra Yogini - are Tibetan concepts, not thought forms. Tulpa in Tibetan refers to a magic trick, a phantom, a something - an anomalous phenomena!
Thought-forms as a being taking a physical, or semi-physical form is a Theosophist idea.
But...
...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. ]
Here is a splendid documentary about Jack:
So, back to the Theosophists, from them we have a belief that if enough people imagine a being, it can take a physical, or semi-physical form. Another term for this is is egregore (from The Book of Enoch - The Watcher). An egregore is an independently functioning spiritual entity created by one or more practitioners.
And I can see why bad translations of Tibetan prayers could make it seem as if this is something Tibetans did - but honestly, the Theosophists were and perhaps still are, just selling fantastical ideas.
--
A long time ago, when I set out to investigate religions, I included the Scientologists.
Surprise surprise, when I was tested it seems that I had some engrams that needed clearing!
And then I was taken into a back room, ushered towards a sofa, and in the gloom where I was expected to watch and enjoy? a film of L Ron...
My guide clearly thought that L Ron was wonderful. I did not. And so I left, having never intended to join anything. It looks like Scientology is a kind of CBT, 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 engrams.
By JP:
I remember
When I was a star
