The harlot from outer space

New Birth

It was like the drugs kicked in after the party had ended. All the other guests had left. She came up fast, a geyser of madness, a geyser of hot blood. The psychosis that had floated her in and out of asylums was loosed on the winds. The prophet who had foreseen their entwined destiny was licked up by sudden flame, the wastelands beckoned.

Finally alone, the realisation broke that it was Jack who was the constant in her life, and that she now stood on the other side of a great river of time. It was only through cruel loss that their love affair could truly ignite. Strange, all the ritual he had done was about destroying precious possessions, or passing offerings through the veil of fire, and just so, he had departed. The black box survived, and the gift of letters where he gave his patient magical instructions and in which he wrote:

We can be insulated against everything but death – in fact, death is the very substance of our initiation. But to be used by life we must be naked and to be naked is to be hurt. But it is also to be alive.¹

She looks out of her angular bird bone skull and reads, the letter clutched in long artistic fingers. Cameron had fled to Mexico, and would have been a strikingly distraught sight amongst the bohemians, painters and spiritual seekers. Her questions insistent: Where has Jack gone? How and when will he return to me? What is it that I must do?

Then she turns the pages of his diary, and despite the coarse woollen Mexican blankets she is costumed in, there is a shiver. He has drawn in the marginalia a secret sign she alone had witnessed, the transmission of an alien goddess.

When Cameron set out to illustrate his collected poems, Songs for the Witch Woman, a project they had begun together, she draws his portrait in India ink with her fluid, expressive line. It is fated to accompany ‘The Fool’ and the symbol is hung portentously about his neck. It is the sign of the New Birth.

---

A week after Jack’s death on June 17, 1952, she cut her wrists for the first time. Ritual, she said, apparently not like the other suicide attempts, nor the ones that were to follow. She was working with spiritualist Nancie Patterson, and the goal of the ritual was inevitably to contact Jack. Patterson and her husband Bill were part of White Eagle Lodge, which was an English cult named after both John the Revelator and a Native American spirit guide who relayed the teachings of the Star Brotherhood. How the loving Christ-consciousness couple understood Cameron’s apocalyptic theology is unknown, but they will certainly not have expected her to go at herself, however ineffectually, with a knife during their sessions.

Startling news made it to San Miguel de Allende soon after, fluttering out of the foreign press kiosks near to the dusky pink painted monastery that housed the Belles Artes school where the American students hung out, and was duly noted in the ironed pages of newspapers hung out in the lobbies of the smarter hotels. The universe had answered her ritual with saucers strung up over DC like pearls falling from a broken necklace. In memoriam, an incursion which reinforced the connection between the Babalon Working and the UFO phenomena. It was an unmistakeable sign from Jack. The time was at hand.

---

Back in March 1946, at the conclusion of the Babalon Working, Cameron had her close encounter of the second kind. A soundless silver cigar-shaped craft appeared over 1003 S. Orange Grove Blvd. She clearly remembers it later as a spiritual event:

THE FLYING SAUCERS – THE MIRACLE! – OUR WAR MACHINE! I SAW THE FIRST ONE IN THE SPRING OF 1946 AT 1003. – OH – MY GOD. THIS IS THE SIGN (DRAWING OF AN INVERTED TRIANGLE WITHIN A CIRCLE) FLYING SAUCERS – IMAGINE!²

We know that this is a late recollection because the term ‘flying saucer’ was not in use until 1947. We are in the prehistory of modern American ufology, before both Kenneth Arnold’s sighting and the Roswell incident. The sighting by Cameron is therefore highly significant in that it does not conform to a pre-existing model or conditioned expectation. Even if Cameron had flicked through the copies of Astounding Science Fiction strewn about the Pasadena mansion she would have seen images of rockets with fins. The same is true of film – whether Flash Gordon a decade earlier in 1936, or Buck Rogers in 1939 – with their stylishly high art deco but nonetheless sputtering and noisy ships. These were nothing like the kind of craft she described.

If she wanted to impress Jack, a committed rocketeer, surely she would have described a craft with a propellent engine, not a silent cigar.³ With no flight surfaces and no signature (i.e. sound) her sighting demonstrates two of the five traits of UAP identified by Luis Elizondo.

Given that Pasadena is close to the Edwards Airforce Base flight corridor, a military or experimental craft could have provided a false sighting. Equally, Edwards has been the sight of numerous UFO reports and ultimately became the location of the storied Area 51.⁴ A bare metal finish that would gleam in the sun is common for prototypes, and was initially the case for the U-2 spy plane before it was sheathed in radar denying ‘black velvet’ paint. But the U-2 did not fly until 1955.

If we pursue the fringe possibility of the reverse engineering of non-human technology, the earliest crash report comes from Magenta, Italy in 1933, the so-called Vatican UFO. We can be sure that it was not a Nazi Wunderwaffe (wonder weapon) such as the much hyped Die Glocke (The Bell), as the Italian authorities contacted the Third Reich to query if it was indeed theirs, and received a definitive Nein.

That object, coveted by the American crash retrieval program,⁵ could not have been extracted until 1943 with the fall of Mussolini. It is wildly unlikely that three years would have been enough to master such technology and fly it successfully over Pasadena. Likewise, Nazi scientists extracted from Europe with Operation Paperclip could never have cracked anti-gravity or zero-point energy, built test rigs and conducted field tests in those brief years. The individual most likely to have that know-how was rocketeer Wernher von Braun, with whom Jack had corresponded and, dressed in a different uniform, was only installed in the American military industrial complex in October 1945.

We have to consider Cameron’s as a foundational witness account of the emergent phenomena. Her younger brother Bobby, employed at JPL, also lost his position for reporting a UFO that same year. He made a further incredible claim, that his wife’s job was to remove UFOs from footage shot at the telemetry tests, cutting the incriminating frames from the films and splicing them back together. These statements are impossible to verify. However, given that we now have a compelling body of evidence for UFOs observing, and in some cases intervening, at nuclear missile sites and tests, it falls within the bounds of possibility. The nuclear signature and the rocket delivery system is clearly of great interest to them.

Cameron’s credibility as a witness is not entirely secure, it would be fair to consider her at the lower end of the scale. We cannot put the sighting on the same footing as a professional observer, such as a commercial or military pilot, and we have no data beyond a single eye-witness account. She is an artistic and creative individual with a facility for phantasy. She has ongoing serious mental health issues, suffering from psychotic episodes, suicidal ideation and auditory hallucinations. Her drug use is documented, and accelerates when she falls in with the bohemian set living at 1003. At the very least she is drinking alcohol and smoking Mexican weed, eventually she will add hashish, peyote and LSD. Her new lover is a sci-fi loving rocketeer who traffics with angels and entities, and she is competing for attention with the tall tales of L. Ron Hubbard. A sighting would undoubtedly give her status.

What we can extrapolate is that a UFO flap in Pasadena was discussed by JPL employees, sci-fi aficionados and occultists in 1946. The event is so early in the timeline of the black state that exotic technologies of human origin do not need to be accounted for. The situation in our skies is more complicated now, but for Cameron it can only have been an alien unknown or a hallucination. It was a full year before Kenneth Arnold’s pursuit of nine craft over Mount Rainier which skipped like saucers and created a media sensation. My suspicion is that there must be other witness accounts in California in that time frame, and those sightings could be compared with Cameron’s to add to our data set. These would be particularly valuable in that they would not be conditioned by media reports, or the endemic desire to hoax; evinced by over 800 reports in the year after Arnold went public. The Pasadena event is notably before the misinformation campaign of Project Sign, Grudge and Blue Book were rolled out, so witnesses and accounts are unlikely to have been tampered with by men in black. Furthermore, the black state was coalescing around the Manhattan Project bomb, not anti-gravity systems and novel aircraft; though the two ultimately become entangled with Oppenheimer allegedly being shown a downed saucer.

Cameron’s encounter was of the second kind, meaning that the craft interacted with her. She received a sign, the inverted triangle in a circle. Given the psychic communication associated with contact events, we can assume that it flashed into her consciousness when she witnessed the apparition.

Though superficially similar to the tattvas used in the Golden Dawn, and subsequently by Crowley for training clairvoyance, the symbol is distinct. The inverted triangle is a symbol of manifestation, the feminine, held in the circle of perfection. We have already veered off-book, given that the central mystery of Thelema is conventionally expressed by the point (Hadit) in the circle (Nuit). That central point or bindu is the male creative principle, the sperm, nested in the void of the female. Cameron is in a sense providing Jack with a new dispensation, the manifestation, or birth, of Babalon is presaged. It is an oracle delivered by a UFO to open a New Aeon.

Though the science-fiction authors and fans who were very much part of Jack Parsons’ orbit would have talked excitedly about the possibilities of visitation, when she calls it ‘the war machine’ the event is given a specifically Thelemic provenance. The phrasing shows her grasp of the sacred texts is a little loose. Crowley records the words of the hawk headed lord of war Ra Hoor Khuit, in Liber AL vel Legis III:

7. I will give you a war-engine.
8. With it ye shall smite the peoples; and none shall stand before you.

The proclamations of war, banners, armies and conflict typifies the Babalon revelations as well, just as one would expect with a goddess of apocalypse. Cameron would, at her lowest point, become obsessed with a race war and cataclysm, though unlike Manson, she was on the side of the Blacks. It may have been Jack who equated the UFO with the war-engine, because Cameron was not sufficiently familiar with Crowley’s work at the time. Though, it is a conclusion she could have reached by herself in a later free-reading of the text. By doing so, the prophetic works of Liber AL and the Babalon Working are yoked together. Whether that conclusion is theologically secure or not, the UFO does represent a weapon an order of magnitude greater than the bomb, given that it would presumably need a zero-point energy (ZPE) propulsion system. ZPE theoretically unlocks unlimited energy and could deliver an instantaneous payload to any location, totally negating deterrence-based models. It is as good an answer as any to one of the many riddles that Aiwass delivered sphinx-like back in 1904.

---

Those familiar with the timeline will know that Cameron was not a formal participant in the rituals of the Babalon Working. Yet she was the erotic accelerant, and must be counted as the inspiration for the reception of the Book of Babalon itself. In bearing witness to the UFO, it is arguably Cameron who concludes the entire sequence of events.

Her UFO sighting is undated, but as she says spring, I would suggest after March 3, 1946, with the performance of the final rites, and before her trip to New York. It can therefore be understood as not so much a seal upon the Babalon Working but as a door that opens in response to the call.⁶ Interestingly, that is the position adopted by elements within the US government who have enshrined the Babalon Working in their own telling of what is a ufological Christian apocalyptic, perhaps we can now call it Uapocalyptical? For them, the deeds of Parsons are a live event in what are prophetic times, and serve as a powerful confirmation of their own religious worldview.

The brief notes that survive from Jack’s magical diary cover the final three days of operations. On March 2 he is promised ‘a sign and signs’ and on March 3 he is told:

Take the black box, concentrate upon its emptiness for one hour, gaze into it, and thou wilt see, imprinted upon it, a shape, a sign, a sacred design, which shall be the sign delivered by Our Lady Babalon Incarnate. When thou hast finished, when thou hast recognized this pattern, construct it in wood." [my emphasis]

It is clear from the quoted text that Cameron has not shown him a sign at this point.

He is then told that the success of the work will be revealed by a further sign, by which is meant an omen or token:

Thou shalt recognize by the sign. BABALON is born! It is new birth, all things are changed, the signs, the symbols, the every-thing!

The proclamation is channelled by no less an authority than a sweating and distressed L. Ron Hubbard.⁷ It speaks in a voice quite different to that of his novels and the religious fictions to come. The words have a Nietzschean and Promethean quality, a revaluation of all values is promised. The world will be forever transformed as a result of this disruptive semiotic herald.

The claim echoes Crowley’s own antinomian proclamation of a New Aeon in his earlier prophetic text upon which the Book of Babalon is founded:

Abrogate are all rituals, all ordeals, all words and signs…⁸

Even the final ritual instruction in the Babalon Working returns to the secret sign:

Leave thy casual loves--all belongs to BABALON, thy lust is BABALON’s. She is with thee three days. The sign is hers, secret, and no man knows its correspondence. Guard! [my emphasis]

This is the last time Hubbard and Jack will do ritual together. Hubbard will have quite enough rituals and procedures of his own to pursue.

It is into this atmosphere that Cameron returns and, oblivious to the events that took place in her absence, witnesses her UFO.

She is, in a sense, a virgin, a tabula rasa awaiting, even craving, an impression. The sighting is utterly novel, and with the appearance of the UFO all things are changed. The State must admit that it is powerless to defend its own airspace, and Christian theology breaks unless it can be made to contain a convincing account of ufology. Thelema too breaks from its Aeonic moorings, with the two thousand years of Horus going in a direction Crowley did not anticipate or approve.

The secret sign is given to Jack who will ultimately become NEMO (no man) when he accepts the mantle of Antichrist and the grade of Master of the Temple in 1949.⁹

At the time, Jack recorded the symbol in his own diary alongside the date, only for Cameron to discover postmortem. The sign was a communication from the goddess to him directly. He did not speak of it again.

That curious seeming behaviour is no doubt because he was following the example of the reception of Liber AL in Cairo. Not wishing to indulge his young wife Rose, Crowley put her claims of contact with a non-human intelligence through a strict series of tests. Likewise, Jack allowed Cameron to provide the proofs that she herself was ‘the sign’ of the Babalon Working without his coaxing, and either become, or perhaps physically give birth to the Soteira.¹⁰ It was not for him to insist on Cameron’s cosmic eschatological importance; being an imposition on her Will, it could derail the whole fragile magical project. Of that he was sure.

By the sign he understands that he is to open the way for Babalon, for the inverted triangle is immediately recognisable by him as referring to Binah, the Supernal Mother on the Tree of Life. That is not an arbitrary symbol, but has profound significance within Thelema, with its grade structure and attainments plotted schematically on the Kabbalistic tree. Binah is above the Abyss and designates the grade of Master of the Temple, as he was told on March 3:

Our Lady BABALON must descend to triumph.

Here is encapsulated the technical difference between the Babalon revelation and the model of theurgic ascent which characterises even Crowley’s OTO. Direct contact on our plane of existence is required. Incarnation.

The Babalon Working has opened the gates to an alien goddess.

---

---

Postscript

This is the first in a series of explorations of Thelema beyond Parsons.
I welcome your thoughts in the comments.

If you are a new reader and the material here is too technical, The Red Goddess will give more background, and is an accessible entry point to understanding Babalon. For my more advanced readers The Two Antichrists covers Parsons and Hubbard extensively. Further essays on Babalon can be found in The Brazen Vessel.

1. The online quotation has ‘insulation’ rather than ‘initiation’ I’ve corrected this, as Jack was dyslexic, and his handwriting isn’t always easy to interpret. I don’t have the original to consult, but I would wager that I am right on this one.

2. Not attributed, but quoted by Brian Butler.

3. That was the case in Europe in 1946 with the thousands of ‘ghost rocket’ sightings that did make it into the American press in July, but were treated for the most part with skepticism and derision.

4. Also close by is the Lockheed Martin Skunk works and the Hughes Aircraft Company at which Parsons briefly worked. I note that Area 51 itself was not operational until 1955.

5. A US crash retrieval programme is now a matter of public record, however the details of what they have retrieved remains unclear and is subject to both speculation and misinformation.

6. In his Wormwood Star, Kansa suggests the sighting was earlier in the relationship, perhaps January, but that does not tally with Cameron’s own recollection, or my own reading of the ritual notes.

7. For more on Hubbard and his mental state at this moment see The Two Antichrists.

8. More technically, Crowley is talking about the Golden Dawn here, and was being given authority to replace their rites by his own ‘secret chiefs.’

9. I believe that it may be the sign referred to in The Book of Antichrist which he used to enter the sunset and journey to Chorazin.

10. Parsons was unaware that Cameron had aborted their child, conceived in January, when she took her trip to New York to break off with her previous boyfriend Napoleon.