Posts Tagged ‘Babalon’

The Red Goddess

BY: Mark

Scarlet Imprint, one of my favorite esoteric publishers, recently republished their first book, The Red Goddess, in an unlimited paperback version. As this was one of the few books of theirs I didn’t have, I eagerly jumped at the opportunity to procure it. I’ll been working my way through it this summer. While the author, Peter Grey, has written it as a manifesto for magickians, it also serves well as a call to arms for writers. We, too, know a little something about the Red Goddess, though we tend to call Her by a different name.

Unless you can fall in Love all your works are as nothing . . . Your mind must be consumed with passion for Her, your body resonating to Her pulse. If your devotion is pure the Holy Whore will receive you in the body of her Priestess. If you have never been in Love then stop reading now. There is no point in reading a book on the Goddess of Love when you have not experienced it. (pp. 43-44)

Isn’t that the way every writer got their start? Falling in Love with someone else’s words, wondering how that magic could be accomplished. Lying awake at night, staring into the darkness, thinking of how you were going to write differently, better. You were going to change the world with your words. You were going to seduce your Muse.

Loosen up. Have a drink and allow yourself to be intoxicated with Love for the Whore Goddess. If that is not enough She will quite happily spike your drink and drag you down to he’ll. Some of us can meet Her over a cocktail, others of us will need rohypnol and ravishment. (p. 56)

Suddenly, the point of a writers’ convention becomes astonishingly clear, doesn’t it?

Grey is a bit hyperbolic in his soap-boxing, but it is entirely forgivable, given his subject matter. He is, after all, taking on several thousand years worth of patriarchal nonsense when it comes to occult thinking. We could use a bit of inflammatory rhetoric to kick us out of our moribund ways of thinking. In the first part, Grey walks through a history of the Red Goddess, from Sumeria to Egypt, from Jerusalem through the holy apocalypse of Revelations. Throughout these periods and places, there were cults and sects who looked upon the face and body of the Goddess and found what they were looking for. Mary Magdalene was kissed by Jesus and held in higher regard than any of his companions, and this devotion lasted until his death upon the cross.

And then everything fell apart. As it does.

Grey offers lip service to the stories of the Holy bloodline–the descendants of Jesus and Mary who fell into the myth of the West–but, much like his earlier discussion of Her story, he says that all of these tales are but the dusty record of who She was. His concern–and what every modern magickian should be thinking about–is the presence of Babalon in our lives now.

[more to follow . . .]