ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
July 24
Marjorie Cameron: The Woman Who Was Babalon
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In January 1946, a rocket scientist
named Jack Parsons finished a magical ritual designed to summon an “elemental”
woman into his life, and days later, a red-haired painter named Marjorie
Cameron walked into his house in Pasadena. Parsons was convinced he'd found
what he'd invoked. Cameron, who knew nothing about the ritual and hadn't yet
decided whether she believed in any of it, spent the rest of her life
complicating that story on her own terms—first as the unwilling vessel of
someone else's prophecy, and eventually, on her own terms entirely, as one of
the more genuinely original artists to come out of postwar Los Angeles.
She died this day in 1995, and the
four decades in between are a case study in what happens when a woman refuses
to stay inside the myth a man built around her.
The Elemental Woman
Parsons and his collaborator L. Ron
Hubbard had just completed a series of Enochian invocations intended to attract
a woman Parsons believed would embody the Thelemic goddess Babalon. When Cameron appeared at his door days later, distinctive red hair and all,
Parsons decided she was the answer to his working, and the two were inseparable
within weeks. Cameron, for her part, had no religious inclinations and no
particular interest in Thelema when they met; she married Parsons in October
1946 largely uninterested in his occult beliefs, though he gave her a magical
name anyway, “Candida,” shortened affectionately to “Candy.” It would take
years, and his death, before she came to understand, and ultimately claim, the
role he'd already decided she was born to play…
The Artist’s Path
She never was committed, at least not for long, and the Cameron who emerged from that period was someone considerably harder to dismiss. Relocating to Los Angeles, she fell in with the city's avant-garde art scene, befriending the socialite Samson De Brier and filmmakers Curtis Harrington and Kenneth Anger. She appeared in Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and Harrington's cult classic Night Tide alongside a young Dennis Hopper, who later described her as having “an infectious personality” that made her impossible not to want to be near. Her friendship with Anger eventually soured spectacularly; after a public dispute over unauthorized use of his film, he papered Los Angeles with a poster campaign branding her “Typhoid Mary of the Occult World,” though the two later reconciled, and Anger introduced her to a young Anton LaVey, who turned out to already be a fan.
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Through the 1950s and 60s, Cameron kept
producing paintings, poetry, and short films, most notably The Wormwood Star
with Harrington, even as chronic health problems, a period of hand tremors that
stopped her from painting for four straight years, and the general instability
of her circumstances made a conventional art career impossible. Her biographer,
Spencer Kansa, later pushed back on the common shorthand that filed her under
the Beat movement, calling her instead “a pre-Beat bohemian, whose heart lay in
Romanticism”—a distinction Cameron, who insisted on being known by her surname
alone, would likely have approved of.
Death and Legacy
By the late 1970s, Cameron had
settled into a bungalow on North Genesee Avenue in West Hollywood, where she
spent her final two decades raising her daughter and grandchildren, practicing
Tai chi seriously enough to earn a teaching certificate, and remaining, by
every account, quietly devoted to the Thelemic beliefs she'd once resisted. In
the mid-1990s she was diagnosed with a brain tumor that had already
metastasized to her lungs by the time it was found. She died at the VA Medical
Center in Los Angeles on July 24, 1995, at seventy-three, and underwent
Thelemic last rites administered by a high priestess of the O.T.O.—the
organization her first husband had once led a local branch of, and whose
framework she'd spent forty years alternately fighting and living inside. Her
body was cremated, and her ashes were scattered across the Mojave Desert. A
memorial gathering followed that August at Venice's Beyond Baroque Literary
Arts Center.
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Cameron's reputation as an artist, oddly but not uncommonly, expanded after her death rather than during her life. Her painting Peyote Vision, once seized by police in 1957 on obscenity charges when it appeared in Wallace Berman's art journal Semina, was hanging in the Whitney Museum's “Beat Culture and the New America” exhibition within months of her passing. A 2008 exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris placed her work in dialogue with the European surrealist tradition; a 2011 biography by Spencer Kansa, Wormwood Star, finally gave her life a full-length treatment independent of the Parsons story; and a major 2014 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, titled “Songs for the Witch Woman,” cemented her standing as a genuine figure in American surrealism rather than a footnote to someone else's occult biography. Kansa put it plainly: her art and spiritual life were never separable, but the work itself, he insisted, doesn't require belief in any of it to land. It just has to be seen.
OCCULT READS PRESENTS:
DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
Modern Occultist is proud to present today’s “Daily
Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult
Reads... In honor of Cameron, and everyone who has ever had to write
themselves out of someone else's story first...
The Babalon Working
By
Jack Parsons, with Michael Staley | Starfire Publishing
For readers who want the ritual at the actual source rather than any secondhand retelling, this is about as close to the primary document as it gets. The volume (part of Ecpyrosis: The Best of Starfire, Volume I) pairs Parsons's own account, The Book of Babalon, written in the immediate aftermath of the working itself, with Beloved of Babalon, Michael Staley's extended study of Parsons's magical career and its consequences. Reading Parsons's version alongside everything Cameron's own life went on to become is a genuinely useful exercise: his text presents her arrival as the successful conclusion of a ritual; her subsequent forty years suggest a woman who spent decades negotiating with, resisting, and ultimately outgrowing the ending he'd already written for her. Our thanks to Starfire Publishing, a small UK press that has done as much as anyone to keep Parsons's original writing in print and in the hands of serious students of Thelema.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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