A Thoroughly Modern Goddess
Babalon is a thoroughly modern Goddess. Aspects of Her constellation are ancient, but the programmatic syncretism by which Aleister Crowley dredged Her archetype from the mud of the aeons was a thoroughly modern thing; a form of thought and approach to religion enabled by empire, and by the othering of the ancient east. There have been Goddesses of Love, and Goddesses of Death, and great wrathful Goddesses who are Cities, and Queens who are the Goddess, and all of these share in the constellation that is Her; but this ability to self-consciously recongise the Goddess as a process of syncresis is distinctly modern ability.
Religion has always borrowed and changed, and the esoteric has often manifested at the interstices of religious traditions, as sacred technologies are utilised in new contexts. The power that Babalon has, however, does not come from Her ancientness, but from our belief in the enduring power of Her archetype, and our contemporary understanding of the loss of the Goddess, and our desire to reinstate the feminine principle. These ideas have not been a reaction to Babalon, but are Her very creation.
Our Goddess was first manifest as a city, the polemical other of a rigid form of Christianity that despised the gnosis of the flesh, for the gnosis of the flesh does not good sheep-slaves make. She is the glory of the Earth, and in this, Her first epiphany, She is already despised. We have no evidence of Her glories; the legends of Marah, of Persephone, of Ereshkigal—these are stories of the Goddess already deposed. She has always been constructed as the other, and it is in Her otherness that we, who are other, know Her. She is a conglomeration of all that is repressed, the unspoken centre of the unarticulated side of culture; She is the monstrous woman, the demon woman, the devil woman. She is the succubus, for She is the emptiness which draws. She is a star chart upon which anything and all can be arranged, a syncretism that denies schematisation, and revels in chaos.
We can chart the genealogy of our Goddess, the similarities and inspirations, the vortexes and evolutions, but we must not forget that what we worship is not an ancient Goddess, but a Goddess whose form is in the mode of modern thought: the movement away from the symbol to the sign, the departure of the metaphysical referent, and the loss of the easy certitudes of medieval morality.
Babalon, in Her baphomet form, is Pan, a trickster God, God of ecstasy and excess. Yet let us not fool ourselves; we are not bacchantes. We draw inspiration from the past and create something new. There is no Babalon priestesshood, no line of transmission, no ancient hymns or temples. Babalon is a modern goddess.
She is as old as time itself, and unique to this apocalypse—as She was to every apocalypse that went before. That is to say: there is no contradiction above the Abyss. Babalon is Binah, which is Saturn, and Saturn is time itself. Thus She is both the most ancient thing, and the thing just created. “And this is the grace of god, that these things should be thus. And this is the wrath of god, that these things should be thus.” The trial before the Goddess, the legend of the Cup, the Grail: these too are ancient things, rendered modern and new as the world tore itself into pieces. As men witnessed bloodshed on a scale never seen before, the blood in the Cup of the Saints changed colour and viscosity.
Babalon is a thoroughly modern goddess. Her trials take the shape of those of Eurydice, or Persephone, those of Innana, and Bearskin. She is a thoroughly modern conception of an ancient, tangled thread. We are post-Christians. With the fear of the bearded Moloch drawn from our eyes we see keenly the mourning of the world for its Queen, this Queen whose darkness seems incidental; but this is our pattern, our prediction. We see Her in chains and assume there must have been a time before She was put in them, a time of the Great Goddess. This time did not exist; Her chains are bracelets of gold.
What She veils or signifies is the potential for every human being to experience the divine, not through the force of the logos-Word, but through that which is called Understanding: the sensation of the body, the nerves, and skin, and synapses, and the knowledge that they bring. We call this gnosis, for we have no better classification. Yet there is not one gnosis, but an infinity of noetic forms, wherein that which is learnt is indistinguishable from the sensation of learning itself.
Babalon relies on modern conceptions: of the shape and nature of time, the concept of evolution, our ease with syncretism, the knowledge of the cultural structure of othering, contemporary understandings of how sexuality, freedom, and liberation function. Our Babalon is a revolt, and we are revolutionaries. She is the rearing head of the feminine in the midst of the cult of patriarchy. Consequently She has been stripped and flogged, as Goddesses always are. Yet this time, we call this torture Her glory.
Babalon is neither an ancient vision of gilded temples and debased splendour, nor is She the manifestation of the divine in the woman playing with Her own fire; yet She is both, for She is a great lurking depth, a vacuum of un-signification. It is in this Choronzonic form that we see Her now, and we begin to realise that we had called divine all that seemed clear, and light, and unified. Thus we have no understanding of divinity, and seek only and ever to leave our bodies, our bodies that are the sole sites of divinity in this world. Is not the mind a part of the body? Is it not the inner eye?
Babalon is not a reaction merely to the patriarchy; She is a reaction to the enlightenment, to the industrial revolution; She is the shadows of shadows that haunts the falsity of progress. Everything dies. Thus She is the mad woman in Rochester’s attic, the heroine’s monstrous double; She is all haunting things. She is Freud’s concept of the unheimlich, the uncanny quality of the unconscious dynamics that underlie and construct our subjectivity. Babalon is a thoroughly modern goddess, forged in the fire of a sexual liberation that failed to deliver all that it had promised. Hers is the laugh in the cold grey after the orgy. She is the Goddess of the single mum, the slut, the whore, of all the ways that sexual liberation kept us from being free.
This Goddess that we seek, this Babalon, She is the secret centre of Christianity. She is the revelation that Kundry and the Grail Maiden are one and the same. She is the Christian fear of the woman, the Goddess who must be dark. She is an amalgamation, the reification of dark spaces and unsaid things. She is the Devil Woman, the Witch. Faced with our refusal to articulate the divine feminine She has slithered like a snake through culture. She is the cup of gnosis, an immense, unspoken power, coextensive with our very selves. Seek any of the byways of strange, forbidden thought and She will be there, for She waits in your mind. Babalon is a mode of interpretation. The cup of gnosis holds the force of our bodily experience, our bodily sacrifice. All this waits within Her, the cup that is Her womb, and She gives birth to Herself, a new daughter for a new age: the daughter who would kill the mother, as we would kill ourselves. All this is Babalon. She is Form itself, and the embodiment of all that has been unspoken. She is the Dark Mother, the Divine Feminine in all Her dualistic glory.
In the final analysis it is crucial to remember that Babalon does not exist. She is a re-creation, a conglomeration of empty space, the virtual restoration of the empty centre of the sacred mandala. Our Lady is no more, nor less, both different and the same, a chimera which changes with every approach, a ruby with innumerable facets, a room of dancing girls all fitted with veils. Yet she sits, static and saturnine, regal upon her throne. This Babalon; She is a thoroughly modern Goddess.