Thanks, Jana. For a long time I have felt They used this mechanism to control us. Women, too!

I use Jung's terminology. The Animus is the male spirit, Anima is the female. Note the similarity between Animus and Animosity.

Women were separated from their Animus for centuries; little girls were given dolls and miniature stoves and cookware to play with, while boys were given bats and balls. Hmmm...bats and balls?

But a few decades ago something happened to many women: Liberation. The return of the Animus. As an urban male I struggled through the Seventies and Eighties with the sneaking feeling that most of the women I met were way ahead of me.

How did that happen to so many women at about the same time? One element was birth control, and legal abortion (some of you oppose it and I won't argue it, so let's be objective, ok?) was another, freeing up masses of women from their "barefoot and pregnant" social programming. But these were mere technological factors that abetted a spiritual process. I wonder if that process began with the Babalon Working.

If so, then it can be traced by a circuitous route to the Templars. After a visit from a German spy named Theodore Reuss, Aleister Crowley assumed leadership of Ordo Templi Orientis (Order of Oriental Templars), whose central occult secrets dealt with the harnessing of sexual energy to achieve magickal results. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out, you just have to train yourself in yoga and other disciplines.

In the '50's in Pasadena lived this guy named Jack, and he was a high adept of the OTO. He met a guy named Ron, and they discussed things, then the two of them met a woman named Marjorie, and the three of them decided to do some sex magick to materialize the Goddess Babalon.

In Crowley's pantheon Babalon is the Great Whore who lures ordinary men onto the path toward enlightenment (in the '60's somebody made a folk song out of a Yeats poem called "the Song of the Wondering Aengus." It describes in simple language the post-fin-du-siecle Yeat's meeting with Babalon, and what it did to him. A short, hauntingly beautiful read.).

So anyhow, Jack, Ron and Marjorie (though maybe not in that exact sequence--"lucky Pierre" I'd guess) did their thing to bring Babalon to earth.

These things take time to materialize. The immediate phenomena are manifestations of the karma of the participants, not the end result.

Meanwhile, Ron, who was covert Naval Intelligence, ran off with Jack's wife--and his yacht too! Jack,invoking Mars, caused a storm to bring them back to port, and they negotiated. I think Jack might have got his boat back.

Well, Marjorie Cameron appeared in a film by Kenneth Anger. Jack Parsons, a genuine rocket scientist, died under mysterious circumstances.

Ron? Oh, he later fell in with an early sci-fi writer named L. Sprague de Camp. He bet Sprague that he, Ron, could found a brand new religion within six months. And L. Ron Hubbard won that bet.

Babalon? Oh I think she's around.

You can read Orlin Grabbe's exquisite story about Parsons at the link below. Orlin knows some things I don't about the Babalon Working and its aftermath.

Don't be nervous, guys, it's inevitable.

Oliver Haddo