Dear Friends,
We have had several requests to publically post the text of the speeches made by Alkistis Dimech and Peter Grey on BABALON at the International Thelemic Symposium.
Some of the material builds upon The Red Goddess though we have more BABALON related work to publish in due course through Scarlet Imprint.
It was particularly heartening to find members of other traditions, in particular Witchcraft, being enthused by the idea of working with BABALON.
We are also delighted to say that we will be publishing essays by Jake Stratton-Kent who spoke on Goetia and the Grimorium Verum, and Charlotte Rodgers who spoke on Blood Magic, in the very near future.
Also great to have David Beth speaking on Voudon Gnosis to close the day.
We were pleased to meet more of our readers, and participate in an event with such vibrancy, vitality and promise of a new occult revival.
Here are the texts in full:
BABALON - Peter Grey
It is dark in the Ephesus cell.
Helena ties the band across her forehead.
Greek letters in the single light of a lamp.
Mystirio.
Before she had lashed in black and draped in chains across Asia.
Stood as the moon on the roof of the brothel in Tyre.
Now dressed in cardinal red and proud purple of this bishopric she is the voices of the thunder perfect mind.
The world soul Sophia, a pythoness curled around the bread of the last supper.
I am ready for them Simon.
The voice of split tongue wisdom flickering lightning like.
The pleroma strobe lit with hissing.
This is the Goddess come to earth.
Listen.
Bernice the Jewish Empress stirs in her villa on the seven heads of hills,
mouth heavy with the communion wine she shares with the conquerors.
A she-wolf giving suck to the divine twins of Jerusalem and Rome.
There is no henbane or haoma in the blood of this dead god.
But power, influence, greed.
In the Temple of Aphrodite the whores dress for war with carmine lips.
A dusk sashay to lure the converts of Jesus the hunchback Christ.
The split fig cunt song of do-what-thou-wilt-with-me.
Do you have that single coin for my lap?
Yet it is John who evokes Her.
John of Patmos.
John stranded on his miserable rock, still unable to escape the low throb in his balls.
John whose words are the bitter sponge they offered to the lips of the Saviour.
John steeped in the hatred of the Patriarchs who saw their god fail them, again and again.
The Temple smashed, the Ark lost, the lions fed.
Prochoros bends his head as John dictates and writes down the words which will poison the world.
‘And
the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour and decked with gold
and precious stones and pearls having a golden cup in her hand full of
abominations and filthiness of her fornication:
And upon her forehead was written MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT. THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.
And
I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the
blood of the martyrs of Jesus: And when I saw her, I wondered, with
great admiration’
Simon
Magus falls from the window on the orders of Paul, has his broken
legged body sawn in half. The beloved assistant is not there to unite
the severed parts with their guts of lolling silk scarves.
Helena is gone from the oracular Ephesus cell, fled to the walnut tree of Benevento and obscurity. Left and lost to witchcraft.
No-one pursues Babalon like the Magdalene.
Chasing the wrong chalice of mystical Christianity,
not supping from the true wound of menstrual blood.
We lost our Love Goddess to the substitutes in a switched card trick.
Instead we have the Blessed Virgin Mary a cliterodectomy sewn up with the black beard hair ofYahweh.
Never fucked but full of suffering, eyes averted lest the Savior raises a hard-on while he dies on the cross.
Bound into every Bible, John’s words.
Delivered into every hospital, John’s words.
Guilt slipped in the hotel room drawer, John’s words.
An enemy for every prisoner, John’s words.
Repression for the schoolroom, John’s words.
Hatred for Babylon, John’s words.
This is our history of THOU SHALT NOT.
These are the words that will echo out again as the world edges degree by degree into one final Apocalypse.
Are you ready for the Revelation?
The striptease of your vain grades and titles, the loss of order, sense, Will.
The burning black blood of Ereshkigal is making the world a battlefield, a bridal bed.
Our scorched Eden sees BABALON risen on the incense of petroleum and roses and filled with furious Love.
John, we turn your words against you.
Our curse comes out as the last Love song.
The four snaking swastika rivers knotted and dammed in Babylon.
What was Sumeria is looted by American troops.
The Empire never ended.
Caesar’s men now rule a wasteland of depleted uranium and ship home Arkansas boys with shrapnel for legs.
A chalice of abominations , this fertile crescent now waxed pubis bare.
The women go black -veiled not for Tammuz, but Mohammed.
It is here where the first roses bloomed.
It is here that we evoke Her again.
Our fingers scrabble in the broken bricks for the sacred texts until the evening star rises.
Inanna our lady of the great wild bridled lion.
Inanna of honeysuckle sweetness.
Inanna Goddess of Love and War.
Inanna, the Kingmaker come upon us.
Easter is the chamber at the top of the seven-step ziggurat.
Babel wreathed in lightning.
Where language is lost in the thighs of the Priestess become Goddess.
Where divine woman and divine man celebrate their Equinox.
In the bedchamber Venus rings steel sword blue, the morning star of dawn, the gate of the Sun.
But Babylon is fallen, an abode of serpents and unclean things.
The Jews bring Her back with them from captivity and have Her beaten by Jeremiah on the anvil of nationalism.
The wisdom of Solomon will not be repeated,
There will be no whoring after Goddess on the temple mount.
With every hammer strike the name changes,
Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Ashtaroth, BABALON.
Her face is smoked shulamite dark with the burning cedars cut down from the high places.
She is blamed for the beauty of the daughters of Jerusalem,
thrown as Jezebel to the dogs,
castigated as Salome,
mistaken for the Magdalene,
muddled with the lesser lilith.
Smouldering red with iniquities and the denial of Love,
She knows Her Strength.
She is not destroyed by your history John, but brought with it.
A bloody pomegranate seed pressed in the pages which once tasted recovers the lost dream.
Augmented by the whispers of mandrake, poppy, hemlock, belladonna, hashish, wine.
The rising stench of sex and sweat and sperm and blood and always ever roses.
BABALON is conjured in a monastery nightmare of succubi and dis-embodied cocks.
An inquisitors fantasy tortured from the lips of the lost.
Torn with pincers, boot crushed and hoisted in strappado to the heavens.
This is how Witchcraft learned how to fly.
The wisdom of the Whore is the control of Her body and life.
Irregular attempts are made to break the tyranny of marriage,
To abort the bastard children of mother church.
The Queen of the Sabbat reveals a thin slit of red petticoat beneath the damnable black.
Yet the church shackles woman to misery.
Drags her down from the high places
where she is forced to buy freedom by being fucked in the alleyways.
Sacred sex profaned into possession, for an hour, or a lifetime of slavery.
A litany of rape, murder, abuse.
John Dee, bent in prayer does not hear this.
Kneeling
with Kelley he seeks the language of Angels, and receives a revelation
liveried green as garlic blades, white as lilies, red as blood and
black as bilberry juice.
Unfolding from the showstone, an Empire of Angels that divides the globe for the red headed Harlot on the Lion throne.
Madimi moves through the library stacks.
My Mother will make her house here.
Jesus is not god, no prayer should be made unto Jesus, none shall judge you.
BABALON again from the long dark ages.
BABALON as Kelley, Dee, Jane and Joan exchange places between the sheets.
BABALON in the solve et coagule.
BABALON in the sex sphinx secret of alchemical interchange.
The retort shatters on the stand.
The four fall apart forever.
Kelley plunges from the tower, to his death.
Babel again, and Simon Magus,
a final transformation in the red mercury mess of his shattered shanks.
We pay our debts to BABALON in blood, not gold, and Her cup runneth over.
Who will heed the speech of the Daughter of Fortitude?
Her cross-crystal, golden girdle and naked breasts.
Make your houses clean, for I come unto you again.
Dee’s papers tumble from the secret chest and pass into the Golden Dawn.
Miscoloured, mispronounced, and mystified.
Only Crowley pursues Her into the Aethyr,
Spells Her like Dee, as wickedness.
Storms heaven on pearlescent cocaine wings and sexual excess,
Eats grass like an ox,
Wills, Knows, Dares, and tells.
Yet the Beast remains without a Bridal,
The cat, the snake, the camel, the monster..
Where is the Woman in this menagerie?
Incomplete, Alys kisses the back of his hand preparing for a Love he never surrenders to.
Never finds.
Where is She?
Lady Frieda Harris draws Her for us distilled from the Master’s last breaths.
LUST.
An explosion of red and gold.
Parsons adores Her with pressed black powder charges.
Chanting Enochian, mescaline, amphetamine.
Here is the spirit of the Law, flowing as nectar.
Flowering with the Pasadena roses,
Spreading Her petals on the backdrop of the city of Angels.
Gone West to the new world Dee promised Her.
With huckster Hubbard, Jack strains for Love on this Battlefield Earth.
Despite the elemental mistakes he wins his vision.
Flame is our lady, flame is Her hair.
I am living Flame.
Cameron, miscast, fails to shoulder her role.
Parsons goes after the Witchcraft as a smashed flask of red mercury, as a storm of dust blown across the Mojave desert, as a crater on the darkside of the Moon.
The A-Bomb cracks the Akashic.
The fallout drifts down like sakura.
Babalon unveiled is starmarked by it.
The two thousand year Reich of Horus draws short.
Grant sees the teratomas, but there is little Love in his Craft.
Magick bickers and splits as we tilt past the tipping point.
Our Goddess is not Nuit blue emptiness, but brimful Belsen furnace red.
She tells us:
It is the woman who initiates.
It is Love which transforms.
It is blood which transmits.
Exchange your cakes with kalas cooked to cinders.
For kisses from Her living lips.
Let go of false learning.
Forsake the cult of the severed head.
For BABALON sings in your blood.
The world is drunken and vexed, running on fumes.
A price on everything, a value on nothing.
It is here BABALON, that we evoke thee.
Everything becoming red.
Enochian angels pouring warlike from the watchtowers ,
and the 24 elders of days wondering where their God has gone.
Holy, Holy, Holy is the Whore.
BABALON
Here is the vision of a universe composed of burning roses,
Of everything fucking everything.
Be drunken as the reeling stars.
Adore the whore on hands and knees.
Open your beds and your hearts
Fuck and find Love.
Dakinis eviscerate the fallen Saints for their bridal wear.
The armies mass for battle and She is here.
Babalon is here to bridle, bind, blossom and burn.
Her time is NOW.
Holy, Holy, Holy is the Whore -Alkistis Dimech
But who is this whore?
Babalon, the patroness of sex workers is not just the Goddess of call girls, rent boys the dispossessed and despised.
I want to move on from this initial image of the whore as we have a tendency to get caught in Her fishnets and lipstick and go no deeper into the mystery.
We are all of Babalon. We are all Babalon.
BABALON has been archetyped, stereotyped and hyped - and still remains an enigma to us.
She does not fit neatly into Thelema. For all the voices, Hers is absent from the Book of the Law.
BABALON is entirely other than Nuit.
BABALON is our sex, our body, our world.
She vibrates with raw sexual energy.
This is what makes Her whore.
Mortgages cannot be guaranteed on this kind of Love.
This is a Love which destroys in order to create.
She has claimed whoredom as the domain of the free. Those in the know.
To maintain the status quo, our society has driven sacred respect for sex onto streetcorners, into dungeons, brothels, and kink.
BABALON controls and diverts this sexual and creative energy toward enlightenment.
Society perverts this energy to enslave us.
Even now, in England women are forced into arranged marriages,
Female circumcision is practised.
Rape and domestic violence are common.
America preaches abstinence programmes to prevent AIDS.
Abortion rights are continually under threat.
Islam places its women in slavery.
I
hear few complaints about ID cards, a country bristling with cctv
cameras, the slavery of a nine to six day propped up on designer coffee
and paid for by the starvation wages of the developing world.
Perhaps this is the isolation of I-pod and an always on mobile phone, shivering our reality into sound-bite snippets of gossip.
In the modern retelling of the Tower of Babel myth we are reduced to the paucity of text message speak and emoticons. AC 93s LOL
Do you spend more time online than in meditation?
Is Babalon a photoshop collage rather than embedded in your living flesh?
To Work with Babalon is to have these superficial veils rent.
The eye of the screen is replaced by the passionate presence of the beloved.
Control of people through their sexuality goes hand in hand with exploitation of the world,
and BABALON is the world, is matter.
We are still deluded by the Christian lie that everything is God given for us to use and abuse, and the planet is ravaged.
Our resources are war spoiled, plundered by the greed of industrialisation,
Peoples, languages, flora and fauna are being lost.
But if Amazon one-click ordering still works we have that next book to look forward to. Tomorrow always comes.
We are left with the same bland products and told that consumption is freedom.
Biodiversity is undergoing a genocide to support a society, drunk on oil.
Babalon delights in multiplicity, but this is a diminishing.
John Dee felt that the book of nature was corrupting in his fingers.
That there was an acceleration towards a reckoning, a revelation, the second coming of Christ.
This is what the angels told him, make your houses clean.
The signs were written in the skies, a grand conjunction, a comet, a new star.
And here we are 418 years later. The warnings unheeded.
The signs we have now are more than warnings.
As we map the human genome the world is disappearing under water, fire, famine.
The elements are out of control.
Can you be sure how long we have left?
We have been criticised for suggesting these are apocalyptic times.
Some
seem to think that by clicking our heels three times and saying the
word of the Aeon of Horus everything will conform to the Thelemic
paradigm.
Neither Aleister nor Aiwass predicted global environmental collapse, so perhaps we can ignore these facts:
1 in 4 mammals is threatened with extinction
1 in 8 birds
1 in 3 amphibians
Three quarters of the world’s fish stocks are at risk.
The extinction rate is from 100 to 1000 times higher than at any time in our fossil records.
Our oceans are dying.
Our forests are clear cut.
Our air is poisoned.
Even if we see this as a natural cycle, the planet simply cannot support the burgeoning populations of the developing world and the inflated supersized lifestyles of the developed.
Natural catastrophes, disease and resistance to drugs, artfully constructed wars to support stuttering economies. The world stage has never been so slick, with images, with oil, with blood.
The cup is filling, in torn arterial torrents.
My concern as a Thelemite is we are still reading from Crowley’s dated scripts.
The mass and rituals degenerating into panto with costume and cake.
We must pursue and encourage new work, new voices.
We must allow ourselves to hear new revelations, the voices speaking to us now.
Stop reading from scripts and stray into heresy.
The
world is drastically different from when Thelema arose, and we have
right-royally fucked up the royal road. There is more to learn by
straying, doing what thou wilt requires killing the Buddha, Lao Tzu ,
Edward Kelley and of course Sir Aleister Crowley. Once you’ve mastered
the master, become a god. She is waiting for you.
Dee’s green woman has told us, ‘Nature is preparing for a world without humans’.
BABALON is here at our moment of crisis.
Not
another fuck fantasy imploring us towards the divine feminine and the
rehabilitation of our divided selves. For Love’s sake She has come to
fuck us up,
to shift our awareness,
to transform us radically in an earth from which we have wrenched our own roots and landfilled to oblivion.
We have to Work with BABALON.
But it is not for the magician to lie back and be straddled because his dexterity is mental rather than physical.
To meet Babalon on the battlefield or in the bedroom you need conditioning.
It is not enough for the Priestess to slip on a red dress and then put it back in the wardrobe at the rituals end.
How can one even face Her without having worked and sweated and pushed into one’s limits,
let alone expect a kiss from those sweet lips?
She is ever present—now beyond our boundaries, our confines, our thoughts.
She can be held, She is real.
When we exceed ourselves we know that.
And feel Her.
Only when you let yourself fall, going beyond mental, emotional, and physical limits.
Draw your circle with your hips, find Her in ecstacy.
It is not simply an anecdote that Crowley was a mountaineer.
The energy body arises from the physical.
Spirit and matter intertwined.
We are in the world, and in our bodies. Adding and subtracting is not the way to work it out.
Put down your Abracadabacus, IT is in the body.
The missing piece in this burning ground, this Eden, is Love.
I suggest you prepare yourselves.
BABALON is here.
If you want more, we would gently point you to www.scarletimprint.com and Peter Grey's The Red Goddess.
"Dead Sound"
Hear the sound of falling love
As I wonder where you are
Hits the ground with a dead sound
Know you ain't got far
Too stupid and sissy like
To say that you want out
You make the eyes of a million girls
And think you'll make them shout
Dead sound
Dead sound
Dead sound
Dead sound
I used to take you on every time
That sparkle turned to black
I used to drag you through my streets
When you came crawling back
Your cheap words that you bought on sale
Won't help you through tonight
You make the eyes of a million girls
And think that's what they like
Dead sound
Dead sound
Dead sound
Dead sound
And now you go through a million girls
And try to pick what's right
When nigtfall comes and you're still alone
Do you feel it deep inside
It's oh so cold on the other side
Where thoughts can turn you down
You make the eyes of a million girls
But I see no girl around
Dead sound
Dead sound
Dead sound
Dead sound
I just can't stop listening to this right now for some reason..
]]>Dear Friends,
Just a brief announcement.
We are preparing a new title for publication in October.
Voudon Gnosis by David Beth.
For those interested in the Voudon Gnostic Workbook and the world of Michael Bertiaux's esoteric voudon, this will prove to be an invaluable guide.
Those wanting all the booknographic details of the publication will have to wait a little while.
Pre-orders will be opening in mid september for our subscriber list.
If you want to get a sense for the text, fuller details can now be found on the scarletimprint.com website.
We can tantalisingly promise that there will be other titles before the end of the year.
In Nomine Babalon
Scarlet Imprint x
]]>Our google alert brought up another reader review, we thought we'd share with you, the word is spreading:
Book Review
The Red Goddess By Peter Grey
Scarlet Imprint,
UK Summer Solstice 2008 edition
I
enjoy the mythos of BABALON. There is something about powerful and
sexual female energies that sits right with me (having worked in the
past with Lilith and Morrigan, whom I still work with). But BABALON is
the best aspects of both in a single entity.
So when I heard about this book, I insisted on buying it. Although the first time I heard about it, the first 2007 print run had been done (156 copies) and was sold out in quick time. And then I found a 2008 run being done, 777 copies (I got #63) with 49 hand bound leather editions being made. I bought both (still waiting for the hand bound edition to be finished and then arrive, it will be a few months).
This book is very hard to describe in words in a coherent manner. It is a wondrous mix of history, and gnostic speculation on the behalf of the author, Peter Grey.
He starts with the history of Babalon and her appearance in The Book of Revelations and why she is essentially feared by the Phallo-jealous monotheists. She empowers the freedom of enjoyment, pleasure and powerful-dangerous womanhood.
To quote two small paragraphs:
We are watchers of the dance of veils as Salome, Mary Magdalene, Isis and Astarte display the shrine of the mystery to our hungry eyes. She is a pole dancer, a dollar whore, a catwalk advert for impossibly red lipstick, a beautiful young girl. Your first love.
She is the Sophia of the Gnostics, a Black Madonna, a heroine of the heretic heart.
Both
Aleister Crowley and Jack Parson's get a good lot of mention throughout
the book, although in itself, it is not a Thelemic portrayed idea
within the pages. Infact Grey spends a small amount of time politely
attacking Crowley as a person and his documented behaviour towards
women, whilst praising his spiritual practices and the path the To Mega
Therion paved for the rest of us. In my reading, Grey's approach to
Crowley didn't sit badly, although it may annoy or upset Othodox
Thelemites partially.
The second third of the book, where the references to the O.T.O and Thelema exist the most follows on the history of Babalon to historical manifestations of her and her worship. Jesus is mentioned, along with Simon Magnus, Jack Parsons and other quite interestingly Iohn Dee, alongside his Enochian discoveries.
The third and final part explores the means to worship and bring Babalon into your life, through ritual practices, ingesting sacraments, sexual acts, bondage, chemicals and even as simple as inhaling the scent of a Damascus rose. But, as warned by the author, bringing Babalon into your life may leave scars, as she is a Goddess of both Love, Lust and War.
And last and not least, before words fail me entirely, the visual presentation of this book is breathtaking. White cover, with the BABALON lamen / sigil pressed into it in red, the bookends in a deep scarlet red, lovely thick stock paper, with smatterings of red text sprinkled throughout. And four gloss plates, illustrating Babalon herself in various forms. The Thoth Lust card by Lady Frieda Harris being the last plate.
I won't recommend everyone buys this, it
may not be for them, but at least taste from its pages and get a feel
for the Holy Whore, the Scarlet Woman that Rides the Seven Headed Beast.
Dear Friends,
ScarletImprint are deep in the French Alps under a world of thunderstorms and high peaks and writing, writing, writing.
There are six books in progress. We have our Work cut out.
Peter Grey has an extensive essay on Parsons and the Witchcraft published in The Oracle magazine. This is an entirely new piece of writing, which we will publish ourselves in due course.
The Oracle is the only serious occult publication being produced with any frequency in the UK.
The website can be found here: www.oracleoccult.com
Copies can be bought in all UK Occult bookshops or obtained by emailing the editor (address is on the website).
The Oracle is the result of the tireless work of David Blank,
one of the unsung heroes of the current revival. David is a true
gentleman, modest and intensely dedicated to his work, a highly
personal practice of sorcery. ScarletImprint hope to be publishing a piece from him later this year to bring much needed attention to his path.
The Red Goddess is continuing to make an impact, garnering lovely reviews and a steady stream of emails and orders.
We will be emailing our subscribers soon with details of our next confirmed publication, watch your inbox.
In Nomine Babalon
Scarlet Imprint x
Dear Friends,
The first public responses to The Red Goddess are being posted online, and we are thrilled with the reaction, as well as the emails sent to us.
Wanted to share this latest one from Lashtal forums with you all:
I got my copy of The Red Goddess a few days ago and I've done little more than read it since it arrived. It's a gorgeous book. It was expensive (at US$93 incl shipping), but 3/4 of the way through it, I can tell you: Man is it worth every penny! This is a serious piece of business. I'm not a Thelemite, nor a card-carry member of any tradition, but I am a practicing Tantrist and have studied and used various Western and Eastern practices for most of my life. I've never NOT been a devotee of The Goddess. With that as background, I count this as one of the best books I've ever read in the field. Peter Grey is a phenomenal writer. He's obviously well-researched, well-read, and well-practiced, but there's a relaxed, cocky, almost punk-rock style to his prose. There's real heart, gut, and immediacy here, and a kind of intoxicated lyricism -- it's gonzo occultism! But that's all balanced with sound scholarship, big ideas, and a palpable devotion to the subject matter. This is a man who LOVES his Holy Whore. As to do I. I'm so thrilled to be able to add this book as a tool in my devotion.
I
can't recommend this book highly enough. I can only hope that after
he's exhausted the 777 copies in this edition, he puts out a cheaper
general market version. This is few nights in bed with the Goddess
(I've been up till dawn the last two nights reading it) that everyone
working with Her (or those just interested in knowing what the
attraction is) should experience.
On a more tiresome note, the first overpriced copy has sneaked onto ebay.
This
is a contraversial book and will scald a few readers into selling it
on, that is also a sign of success, the books will all find their
rightful owners. We still have plenty of stock left though, and without
a marked up price. Again, thanks to our friends who draw our attention
to these online listings. We are vigilant.
All our best,
In Nomine Babalon
Scarlet Imprint x
]]>What ten songs would you put on a summertime mix?
1.) Eddie Cochran - Summertime Blues
2.) Earthquake - Hit the Floor
3.) The Nice Boys - Teenage Nights
4.) The Temptations - I Can't Get Next to You
5.) The Besnard Lakes - For Agent 13
6.) The Crystals - He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)
7.) Panda Bear - Comfy In Nautica
8.) Johnny Thunders - One Track Mind
9.) Mungo Jerry - In The Summer Time
10.) Shangri-Las - Remember (Walkin In The Sand)
]]>Ya. Ok. Maybe they did. I personally don't believe it's so outrageous. But where is damn proof?Traditionally everyone slipped away into the fields and engaged in sexual activity, laying among the crops, to conclude the ritual"
With subscriber pre-order for the Solstice edition of The Red Goddess underway, we can give you our first glimpse of the new octavo standard edition, the only thing you can't glean from the pictures is the beautiful red and black ink printing throughout..
Full size images and information on the champagne launch party can be found at www.scarletimprint.com
Exciting times.
In Nomine Babalon
Scarlet Imprint x
]]>