a prose poem about marjorie cameron

The Birth of Babalon

Marjorie Cameron, occult artist and actress, is possibly best known for being prominently featured in Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. Her life after that film, however, involved sex magick with her husband, rocket scientist Jack Parsons, and Scientology’s founder L. Ron Hubbard. They were enacting the Babalon Working rite of Crowleyan magick, and were attempting to create a Moonchild. There are varying opinions as to whether the rite was successful. Cameron had a striking presence and star quality that came across on film and through her rituals.

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Her father shot himself in the head at the instant of her exiting the womb. He was afraid of the red-headed devil had just slid out of his wife. In time he wasn’t the only one to die. Girls in her hometown pined for her and slit their wrists when crushes went unrequited. Marjorie’s tentacles were spreading.

There were rumors of a cadre of black cats, of train-hopping and midnight trysts. Back-fence talk about the girl with a shock of red hair, ambulating through town in scant but a nightgown.

After a stint as a Naval map-maker (she quits because she believes her maps have become extensions of her nature, sigils wreaking havoc on soldiers lives) she finds fat city in swinging Pasadena, the home of jet propulsion and atomic armaments. They call her Candy now, the smoldering smartass always about to crack wise. She shacks up with master alchemist Jack for sex rites at the Parsonage. It is the birth of Babalon.

Later she spends week upon week in a haunted Swiss Convent, which precipitates a breakdown. She drops down on her haunches and howls, believing herself the Scarlet Woman from Revelations. Soon she loses Jack, her king, the rocket scientist who brewed absinthe in his winding copper laboratory instruments, next to his explosives. It is all ignited as he drops a vial of mercury fulminate. She scatters his ashes between two towering transformers in the Mojave, and isolates herself in an abandoned canyon.

Up several days on speed, a new Marjorie is born, and she’s no paper shaker.

The occultic Cameron is now the Inaugurator of the Pleasure Dome, a hermetic ritual of the silver screen enacted on celluloid. Whether water witch or wormwood star, she is always an elemental. Anger and Orange Grove, everything converges in Kali Fornia.

After decades of decadence, the reclusive crone comes to rest in Los Angeles, curly crimson hair gone long, straight, and stark white. She sets her paintings on fire, and quietly expires, like a torch in the desert winds.