Babalon Aesthetic
In “A Double Vision of Babalon” thelemic practitioner Nema critiques the ‘playboy Centrefold’ image of Babalon, arguing that its liberating potential is destroyed by it being a ‘product of the male imagination’ that is no longer transgressive in the modern age (Nema 2008, 22-23). Nema implicates the imagery and practices surrounding the goddess Babalon in the high levels of misogyny and sexual abuse found within the thelemic current. Indeed, a red thread of sexual abuse does indeed run through the contemporary Babalon current, one that is propagated by this centrefold image.
2017 bore witness to what has become known as the thelemic world’s #metoo moment. Many of the key figures of modern Babalon magic publically announced themselves to have been victims of sexual assault and abuse that was justified and propagated within the Babalon paradigm. Much of this discussion took place on online forums, such as the “Thelema” Facebook page; a series of articles were written on the community blog Thelemic Union; Amodali published a blog post titled “#metoo” detailing her own experiences (Amodali 2017); Paul Rovelli, husband of and co-founder of the church L.V.X with Soror Syrinx was publically accused of abusive behaviour on a blog devoted to his actions, alongside his close colleague Xioti Jones, about whom Erica Cornelius wrote On Getting a Bullshit Meter, which details her accusations against his abusive and cult-like behaviour (Cornelius 2016).
Thos who promote the playboy vision of babalon claim that is is a symbol of feminine liberation; yet, as Foucault noted, in the past century sexual liberation has become its own form of hegemony, and its own form of repression. In fact, what I would like to show, following the lines of thought proposed by Hugh Urban in his article “Elitism and Esotericism: Strategies of Secrecy and Power in South Indian Tantra and French Freemasonry,” is that this association of rape and abuse with the ‘liberated womanhood’ of the Holy Whore paradigm aspect of Babalon theology is in fact a structural thing. Arguing against popular interpretations of the esoteric as subversive or revolutionary, Urban states “I wish to show on the contrary that esotericism is very often an elitist phenomenon: it is the province of highly educated, affluent and powerful intellectuals, who do not wish to over-throw the existing religious and political structures, but rather, either to reinforce them or else to bend and reshape them to suit their own private interests” (Urban 1997, 3). Though many claim that Babalon opens up new femininities, but according to Urban these will, whatever their symbolic purport, only preserve the socio-political status quo. And, looking at the textual, historical and evidence from contemporary milieu, it does indeed seem to be the case that Babalon femininity has the oft-enacted potential to further entrench feminine subjectivity through discourse on sexual liberation. Babalon-centric sexual liberation discourse is not necessarily liberationary, nor does it truly offer new socio-political roles for women. Rather, it is a symbolic construct that has often been proven to do the opposite of what it claimed. For, what the #metoo movement showed was that, rather than being a figure of liberation and empowerment for women, the symbol, rhetoric and practice surrounding the goddess Babalon was one that had contributed to a huge body of sexual and emotional abuse toward women, as well as the continued cover-up and silencing of this abuse, which relied on the same mechanisms of the abuse itself, whereby the power and sexuality of a woman are defined by patriarchal hierarchy in general, and their relationship to their male magical partner specifically.
Babalon work (at least, one vision of it) involves the reification of aesthetic as a form of religious practice. Can this be feminist and transformative? Certainly; but not in the pornographic, aestheticized form found throughout thelemic culture today. The figure of the ‘Scarlet Woman’ has long since ceased to be radical. It is interesting to note that Aleister Crowley’s chosen aesthetic for the original Scarlet Woman was one of thinness, sickness, and filth, “a great Goddess, strange, perverse, hungry, implacable, […] I must love even Her mask, the painted simper, the lewd doll-monkey face, the haggard shamelessness of her flat breast… the insolence of Death pushing through flesh’s flimsy curtain.” (Symonds 1989, 263) This original concept is a site of potential for new understandings of embodiment and eroticism; but the aesthetic that has sprung in recent years, promoted in particular by Peter Gray in his popular book The Red Goddess, has rendered this haggard, challenging figure into a buxom redhead. Soror Syrinx uses a naked, bodacious red head as the cover art for her book Dea Babalon: An Adoration of Our Lady by Two Servants. Her later book Vault of Babalon: Three Temples: Moon, Sun, and Star also pictures a naked, large-breasted woman on the cover. Many claim that these kinds of iconography offer a space to reclaim power through sexuality. However this iconography, which is not of voluptuous or scrawny women but specifically thin, large breasted women, naked and highly sexualised according to conventional standard of the sex and beauty industries, is problematic when we consider the ideological implications of aesthetic.
The aesthetic is always on hand to become a kind of phantom proxy for whatever manoeuvre hegemony conducts. Indeed, it is ideology. And because ideology requires a scene of seduction in which the fierceness of power and the brutality of capital can be disguised, hegemony brings on the dancing girls.’ (Armstrong 1993, 222)
Red Goddess aesthetic is the chap-book of the dancing girls that disguises the rapacious brutality of an ‘enlightened’ system as a space of sexual liberation. ‘The virtuosic feats of hegemony, that look-no-hands trick by which hegemony makes people do what it wants by persuading them that they are doing it voluntarily, are performed through the aesthetic’ (Armstrong 1993, 222). Reifying aesthetic positionalities over embodied experience allows her to take a mechanism of repression and abuse and declare it a choice, and liberation.
