Seven are the veils of the
dancing-girl in the harem of IT.
Seven are the names, and seven
are the lamps beside Her bed.
Seven eunuchs guard Her with
drawn swords; No man may come nigh unto Her.
In Her wine-cup are seven streams
of the blood of the Seven Spirits of God.
Seven are the heads THE BEAST
whereon She rideth.
The head of an Angel; the head of
a Saint; the head of a Poet; the head of an Adulterous Woman; the head of a Man
of Valour; the head of a Satyr; and the
head of a Lion –Serpent.
Seven letters hath Her holiest
name; and it is
This is the Seal upon the Ring
that is on the Forefinger of IT;
And it is the Seal upon the Tombs
of them who She hath slain.
Here is Wisdom. Let him that hath
Understanding count the Number of Our Lady; for it is the Number of a Woman;
and Her number is
An Hundred and Fifty and Six.
Waratah-Blossom,Blossom, Aleister Crowley
Circa. 1949, Gerald Gardner, the father of modern
witchcraft, wrote the Leviter Veslis,
literally ‘Lifting the Veil’. From among other sources, the Leviter was paraphrased from the Book of the Law, the central sacred text
of Thelema, and other works by Aleister Crowley, including the Gnostic Mass.
In the early 1950s, probably because of Crowley’s sinister
reputation, the Leviter was revised
as the ‘Charge of the Goddess’ by Doreen Valiente, who edited out the Crowley
material but with a consequent loss not only of the power of Crowley’s prose
but the iconography of the Thelemic Archetypes of the Feminine.
Babalon, the ‘Great Whore’ of the Apocalypse, is one of the
greatest but most easily misunderstood Goddess archetypes within the Thelemic
tradition. My work ‘Babalon the Great’ attempts to lift the veil that obscures
her symbolism and restore her to her place in the pantheon of Goddesses still
worshipped today.
The Great Whore
Babalon has her scriptural origins in the apocalyptic Revelation of St John the Divine. He is
shown a vision of “a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of
blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns”. The ‘Great Whore’ was:
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.
Book of Revelation, Chapter 17, v. 3-6
Crowley himself believed that the Book of
Revelation was a vision of the future, but not of the triumph of
Christianity over the forces of evil, but the dawning of a new, post-Christian
Aeon. He wrote:
The seers in the early days of
the Aeon of Osiris foresaw the Manifestation of this coming Aeon in which we
now live, and they regarded it with intense horror and fear, not understanding
the precession of the Aeons, and regarding every change as catastrophe. This is
the real interpretation of, and the reason for, the diatribes against the Beast
and the Scarlet Woman in the XIII, XVII and XVIIIth chapters of the Apocalypse…
Crowley, The Book of Thoth, pp. 93-94
Biblical scholars believe that the Great Whore was an
allegorical representation of Rome,
a city built on seven hills and whose emperors were severely persecuting
Christians. Even as late as the Reformation, protestant propagandists
identified the Papacy with the ‘Great Whore’ of the Apocalypse.
Others writers have probably mis-identified Babalon with
ancient Babylonian goddesses such as Ishtar & Astarte, goddesses of sexual
love who both had benevolent and terrifying aspects. Babalon has also been
identified, in her demonic form, with Lilith, the legendary first wife of Adam.
However, the “Great Whore of Babylon’s” name is probably a reference to the
so-called ‘Babylonish Captivity’ of the Jews by King Nebucadnezzar and used as
an allegory of the persecution of the Christians by the Romans.
A closer analogy might be with one of Egypt’s most
ancient and greatest goddesses – Hathor, the daughter of the Sun God Ra and
whose name literally means ‘the House of Horus’.
As the ‘Beautiful One’, Hathor was the Goddess of love and
female sexuality; the Greeks identified her with Aphrodite. She was also the
Goddess of joy and music.
Hathor had a less benign aspect as the vengeful ‘Eye of Ra’.
In this form she mercilessly pursued the enemies of the Sun-God. In Egyptian
myth, fearing that Hathor might annihilate humanity in one of he rages, Ra
ordered beer to coloured red and given to her to satiate her blood lust. As a
result of her intoxication by this substituted ‘blood’, Hathor became the
Goddess of drunkenness.
As the ‘Golden One’, Hathor was identified with the setting
sun, and the hieroglyph for the ‘west’ was incorporated into her standard
iconography. As the Goddess of the West, Hathor was associated with the
afterlife, an association strengthened by her close identity with the
Sky-Goddess Nut (Nuit). She was believed to swallow the evening sun which
passed nightly through her body to be given re-birth each morning in the east.
The various roles of Hathor in ancient Egyptian mythology
offer an insight into the fully developed Thelemic theology of Babalon in the
series of Enochian visions experienced by Crowley
in the deserts of North Africa in 1909.
The Vision & The Voice
The Book of the Law and the other early ‘Holy Books of
Thelema’ do not make any direct reference to Babalon by name. However, the
figure of the ‘Scarlet Woman’, who is consort of the ‘Beast’, the prophet of
the new Aeon, and in whom “is all power given” (AL I:15) is identifiable with Babalon.
However, she emerges as the central figure in Crowley’s record of his Enochian skryings (The Vision & The Voice).
Babalon is revealed as the Queen of the City of the Pyramids
towards which the Adept strives in order to attain the highest mystical grades.
First, however, he or she must cross the ‘Abyss’, the gulf that separates the
divine Qabalistic world of the Supernals, in which the City of the Pyramids is
located, from the world of the Ruach.
In order to successfully cross the Abyss, the aspirant must
surrender every vestige of the Ego-self. This is the esoteric meaning of the
Cup of Babalon containing the ‘blood of the saints’. But, Crowley warns, “if a
single drop of blood be withheld from Her Cup it putrefies the being below the
Abyss, and vitiates the whole course of the Adept’s career” (The Vision & The Voice, p. 23)
The central image of the painting is based on the Seal of
Babalon design; a
vesica piscis shaped sigil in the midst of a seven-pointed star.
On the sigil of Babalon, the vesica piscis is divided by a central line and adorned with three
small crosses. These are in fact the mathematical signs used in the Qabalistic
formula of Babalon’s sacred number, 156:
To the aspirant, that is, to the adept who is already in Tiphareth, to him who has attained to the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, this is the path which leads upwards; and this card, in one system entitled the Priestess of the Silver Star, is symbolic of the thought (or rather of the intelligible radiance) of that Angel. It is, in short, a symbol of the highest Initiation.
Book of Thoth, p.74
The pearlescent Sigil of Babalon is shown surrounded by a
seven-pointed silver star, forming the Seal of Babalon. Its silver points
allude to the drawn swords of the seven eunuchs who guard Babalon in Crowley’s poem The Waratah-Blossom(quoted above) and
the seven flames within the points to the seven lamps that light her bed. They
also refer to the seven traditional planets of astrology.
Describing his own design of the Tarot Atu XVII, ‘The Star’,
Crowley points
out that:
Most prominent among its features
is the seven-pointed Star of Venus, as if declaring the principal
characteristic of her nature to be Love.
Book of Thoth, p.109
Venus, the Goddess of, and also the planet ruling, Love, is
attributed to the seventh sphere of the Tree of Life, Netzach or ‘Victory’. In Qabalistic terms, Netzach is the sphere of
the instincts, rather than the intellect, and the emotions that they give rise
to. Dion Fortune, in her The Mystical
Qabalah, notes that Venus, or in her Greek form, Aphrodite:
…The Aphrodite cult was something
very much more than the simple performance of an animal function. It was
concerned with the subtle interaction of the life force between two factors;
the curious flow and return, the stimulus and the reaction, which plays so
important a part in the relations of the sexes, but extends far beyond the
sphere of sex.
Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah, pp.227-228
…This is that which is written,
“O my God, in one last rapture let me attain to the union with the many”. For
she is Love, and her love is one, and she hath divided the one love into
infinite loves, and each love is one and equal with The One…
The Vision & The Voice, p.150
In The Book of
Revelation, Babalon is depicted as “a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured
beast”. In this painting, the Beast is shown as seven dragon’s heads, with a
total of ten horns, interspersed between the seven-points of the star. The
design is adapted from that of the floor of the seven-sided ‘Vault of the
Adepti’ of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. There it symbolised the “Evil
powers of the Red Dragon” to be redeemed by the crucified god of the Old Aeon
who “descended into Hell” and was represented by a Rose-Cross. But, in the new
Aeon, it is Babalon, the consort of the Beast, who is the divine guardian of
the Abyss and offers ‘redemption’ to the world below it:
And in her is a perfect purity of
that which is above; yet she is sent as the Redeemer to them that are below.
For there is no other way into the Supernal Mystery but through her, and the
Beast on which she rideth…
The Vision & The Voice, p.213
The seven-headed Beast 666 of Revelation represents the
solar-phallic energy of the new Aeon. Babalon is described several times as his
‘consort’ or Sakti. In Tantric philosophy, and art, the Sakti is the feminine aspect of a deity
through which the deity manifests. As Crowley
notes of Babalon, it is she “in whom is all power given” (AL I:15) and the Beast “cannot truly exist
without Her” (The Vision & The Voice,
p.244, n.1).
The Seven Veils
In his skrying of the exalted 2 Enochian Aethyr,
Crowley has a
vision of a ‘great black Rose’. Although black, its petals had a ‘luminous
blush’. He notes that the black rose was the ‘Veil of Babalon’ (The Vision & The Voice, p.235). In
this work, the ‘seven veils’ of Babalon are represented by the seven petals of
the great dark-coloured rose that encloses the central Seal of Babalon motif.
The Cup of Babalon
The cup ‘filled with the blood of the saints’ is the primary
emblem or symbol of Babalon. Its esoteric significance has been discussed
above. In standard representations, the cup is shown as an ecclesiastical
chalice, in which the sacramental wine is transmuted into blood, and contains a
seven-petalled rose stained red with blood and a blue, bloodless heart.
In view of the strong Tantric dimension to Babalon, it
seemed appropriate in this painting to replace the chalice with a symbol drawn
from Tibetan Tantric iconography; the
kapala or skull cup.
In Tibet,
the craniums of deceased lamas were used to make ritual cups for offerings to
so-called ‘Wrathful’ deities. These powerful beings were thought to be able to
shatter illusion or cut through the veil of ignorance that prevents the mind
from being Enlightened.
Ritually, beer was substituted for blood. But, in Tibetan
art, the skull cup was usually shown either filled with blood or offerings of
the heart and the sensory organs. This symbolised the rejection of the illusory
world of samsara and the renunciation
of the ego-self.
Gary Dickinson
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario