by John Carter
This diabolical questioning of the dead for the knowledge of future accidents was put into practice by the said Kelley, who, upon a certain night in the park of Walton-le-Dale in the County of Lancaster with one Paul Waring (his fellow companion in such deeds of darkness) invocated some of the Infernal Regiment, to know certain passages in the life, as also what might be known by the Devil's foresight of the manner and time of the death of a noble young gentleman, as then in wardship. The black ceremonies of the night being ended, Kelley demanded of one of the gentleman's servants what corse was the last buried in Law churchyard, a church thereunto adjoining, who told him of a poor man that was buried there but the same day. He and the said Waring entreated this foresaid servant to go with them to the grave of the man so lately interred, which he did; and withal did help them to dig up the carcase of the poor caitiff, whom by their incantations they made him (or rather some evil spirit through his organs) to speak, who delivered strange predictions concerning the said gentleman. I was told this by the said serving-man, a secondary actor in that dismal abhorred business, and divers gentlemen and others are now living in Lancashire to whom he hath related this story. And the gentleman himself (whose memory I am bound to honor) told me a little before his death of this conjuration of Kelley, as he had it by relation from his said servant and tenant, only some circumstances except, which he thought not fit to come to his master's notice.
Kelley, called “the crop-eared wizard” because he had had his ears cropped as a punishment for earlier sorceries, moved with his family into a room in Dee's house, where they subsisted on a £50 per year salary paid by Dee.
On a cold evening in 1582, March 8, Dee and Kelley sat down and gazed into one of the shewstones. Impatient, Dee soon got up and moved toward the fire, but within 15 minutes Kelley was seeing angels. Dee came quickly but saw nothing and became content to assume the role of scribe, recording what Kelley relayed he was seeing.
According to Kelley, the angels showed him large tablets bearing unusual letters, which supposedly formed the oldest language of them all: the language of the angels. Kelley described the tablets to Dee, who wrote down what was said. The angel then proceeded to dictate the lost books of Enoch to Kelley, by spelling them out letter-by-letter. The angel would point to a letter, and Kelley would tell Dee which letter it was.
During these transmissions, Kelley was so afraid that the mere mention of these letters would be sufficient to invoke demons, that he only would call out the row and column of each letter as the angel pointed to it. Dee would then look up the corresponding letter and write it down. There were many more tablets, Kelley told Dee, which were not dictated.
The books completed, the angel next dictated the 30 “Aethyrs” (or “Aires”) and their 19 Calls, which are for summoning angels to the caller, for the purpose of “scrying” or viewing what was in the Aethyr. The first five Calls were considered so powerful that the angel dictated them backwards to avoid conjuring up the guardians of the corresponding Aethyrs; the remainder were dictated in the usual way.
The Aethyrs are likened to the spheres of the ancients, the planetary orbits thought to surround the earth. According to ancient mythology and religion, souls ascending to heaven had to pass through each sphere in succession, aided by a series of holy names and passwords. Unsuccessful attempts led to reincarnation at best, or to hell. Tradition holds that many of the Aethyrs are guarded by harsh angels, even demons, who have no patience with men or magicians.
After the hazardous dictation process was completed, the angel provided Kelley with the English translations, which required that Dee had to go back over the entire collection of transcripts and substitute the English. Although each Enochian letter has its English counterpart, it is not a letter-for-letter substitution or a code. The letter correspondences were only provided as a pronunciation guide. An actual dictionary was dictated, and Dee had to translate accordingly. Enochian is thus a language unto itself, with its own grammar and syntax. It is very succinct and has an odd relationship to English that it does not have with other languages. One example of Enochian is the word “Babalon,” meaning “harlot” in Enochian, as in the “Whore of Babylon.” The Enochian system being complicated, the entire process of dictation and translation took seven years, from 1582 to 1589.
Amazingly enough, considering the language's complexity, the Enochian Calls translate into English remarkably well. Regardless of the fact that they were dictated backwards and forwards, and that the translations were only provided later, Enochian turned out to be a coherent language previously unknown to man.
The Calls, when translated, are quite evocative, and contain some very beautiful passages. Although it could easily be claimed Kelley was making the whole thing up, the Calls were nothing at all like his usual writing style, which was quite crude even when he wrote verse. It seems improbable for Kelley to have defrauded Dee in this regard, as the system is just too immense and well structured.
Along with the Calls were dictated instructions, such as when scrying or crystal-gazing the two were to arrange a special cedar table, around the perimeter of which was inscribed in Enochian, “This is the place of the outpouring of forgotten treasure in the form of ecstasy. Only fire is substantial here. This is the way of Babalon and of the Beast who is the first form. The eyes only need rest upon the name of any guardian and its representative will speedily be encountered.” The whole thing is scrambled in the original, and the name “Babalon” is extremely so, in order to avoid summoning the Harlot.
In addition, a special ring and robes had to be worn. Some of these artifacts are preserved in the British Museum. The angels provided additional messages as well, some of which were cause for great concern on the part of Dee and Kelly. These communications parallel unorthodox messages received from 19th-century fairies and 20th-century occupants of UFOs. For example, at one point Dee and Kelley were told:
That Jesus was not God.
That no prayer ought to be made to Jesus.
That there is no sin.
That man's soul doth go from one body to another childes quickening [i.e., reincarnation].
That as many men and women as are now, have always been.
That the generation of mankind from Adam and Eve, is not historical but allegorical.
Such seemingly blasphemous messages made Kelley balk, and he grew more and more reticent to continue with their work. Dee had a devil of a time keeping him on, despite the £50 salary. The stress of the constant scrying once sent Kelley running into the street like a madman, at which point Dee had to catch him and calm him down.
However, being a pious man, Dee had occasional misgivings himself. At one point he burned his entire collection of “angelick” works, allegedly to find three of his books intact a few days later. Another time Kelley knocked over a lamp and accidentally burned several valuable manuscripts of Dee's.
Other messages were less onerous, such as one instance in which the angel supposedly began dictating in Greek. Kelley, however, did not know Greek and soon threatened to stop dictating if the angel persisted with this “Ghybbrish.” Nevertheless, enough came through for Dee to recognize the message as a warning not to trust Kelley.
According to the story, the angel later told Dee and Kelley to swap wives, but the two were so shocked at this message that they and their wives all signed a pact (at Dee's prompting) never to reveal this message to anyone. As noted, the breaking of religious and sexual taboos, from the eating of meat and wine to incest and homosexuality, is considered a part of tantra. The shock is intended to decondition the initiate from his usual lifestyle. In the case of Dee and Kelley, living in prudish Elizabethan England, it was asking too much—at least for now. They did finally persuade their wives to agree to this seeming commandment from God: Dee recorded in his diary on May 3, 1587, “I, John Dee, Edward Kelley and our two wives, covenanted with God and subscribed the same, for indissoluble and inviolable unities, charity and friendship keeping between us four, and all thi
ngs between us to be common, as God by sundry means willed us to do.”
Dee and Kelley left Mortlake for a tour of Europe in 1583, continuing their work with the angels as they traveled. When they returned in 1587, they were horrified to see that a superstitious mob had sacked Dee's house and burned the contents, destroying most of his valuable library.
Undeterred by such a faith-destroying event, the two continued, their work with the Calls ending one day when Kelley was scrying alone in the 7th Aire, during which time he received the following proto-thelemic message:
I am the daughter of Fortitude and ravished every hour from my youth. For behold, I am Understanding, and science dwelleth in me; and the heavens oppress me. They cover and desire me with infinite appetite; for none that are earthly have embraced me, for I am shadowed with the Circle of the Stars, and covered with the morning clouds. My feet are swifter than the winds, and my hands are sweeter than the morning dew. My garments are from the beginning, and my dwelling place is in myself. The Lion knoweth not where I walk, neither do the beasts of the field understand me. I am deflowered, yet a virgin; I sanctify and am not sanctified. Happy is he that embraceth me: for in the night season I am sweet, and in the day full of pleasure. My company is a harmony of many symbols, and my lips sweeter than health itself. I am a harlot [BABALON] for such as ravish me, and a virgin with such as know me not. Purge your streets, O ye sons of men, and wash your houses clean; make yourselves holy, and put on righteousness. Cast out your old strumpets, and burn their clothes and then I will bring forth children unto you and they shall be the Sons of Comfort in the Age that is to come.
The entire passage is reminiscent of the gnostic text, “Thunder Perfect Mind,” unearthed at Nag Hammadi in 1945 but written at least 1700 years earlier.
This message was the last straw for Kelley, and he finally snapped, robbing Dee of a large sum and leaving town with Dee's wife. The two did not return but ended up in Germany, where Kelley endeared himself to the Emperor. Focusing his attention increasingly on practical alchemy, Kelley was soon knighted but was later imprisoned (either for killing a man or simply to keep him close to the Emperor), and died during an attempt to escape. Dee was also imprisoned when James I, patron of the King James Bible, ascended to the English throne in 1603. Despite his own personal, extrabiblical peccadilloes, the pious King James was scared of magic and put a quick end to Dee's career as royal astrologer.
Dee was subsequently put on trial for witchcraft but was acquitted and spent his remaining years penniless. In 1608, he died, financially ruined but spiritually whole, apparently having used the Enochian system for little more than the satisfaction of his own curiosity. The papers he had hidden away near the end of his life were not found for 100 years, and his diary was not found for 200 years, but for at least one later student Dee's personal tragedy would eerily appear to repeat itself.
As is well known in the world of the esoteric and occult, crystal-gazing is not the only way one may scry in the Aethyrs, as tantric energy, or sex magick, may also be used to induce the same sort of ecstatic states that Kelley used so long ago. The provocative Parsons used this method, as did his libidinous mentor Crowley, who claimed to be the reincarnation of Kelley, although that role would in reality be played to Parsons’ Dee by another man in his personal drama. In addition, Crowley further heightened his awareness through the use of psychoactive drugs (see his Liber LXXXIV vel Chanokh). Crowley's The Diary of a Drug Fiend, both well-received and vilified, was accused of encouraging drug abuse. During the course of his life, Crowley consumed massive amounts of alcohol, opium, cocaine, hashish, peyote and heroin, to which he was addicted at his death.
Like Dee and Kelley, Parsons eventually found himself in trouble, seemingly at the hands of the infamous Babalon, the Enochian Whore of Babylon, the traditional spirit of Rome who subjugated the children of Israel. Babalon, as the Harlot, is also a symbol of the material world in general, the root “mater” also meaning “mother,” as in “Mother of Abominations.” Adherents to the Jamaican religion of Rastafari use her this sensual way, as any listener of reggae music might know. A similar symbol for certain gnostic sects in the Middle East was the “Land of the Dead,” i.e., Egypt. Like Egypt, Babylon was the land of corruption to the composers of the Bible, as in Revelation 17:3-6:
He [the angel] carried my spirit away to the desert. I saw the Scarlet Woman sitting on the Beast with seven heads and ten horns, covered with blasphemous names. The woman was clothed in purple and scarlet, and gilded with gold and precious stones and pearls, with a golden cup in her hand filled with abominations and the unclean things of her fornication. On her forehead a name had been written, a mystery: Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots and of the abominations of the Earth. I saw the woman was drunk from the blood of the Saints, and from the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. Seeing her, I wondered greatly.
According to Parsons, Babalon is the gnostic Sophia, slighted by John the Revelator, but justifiably so, as she is still in her fallen state. John fails to offer her redemption. She is also the Helen of Simon Magus mentioned by Parsons in his Analysis By A Master of the Temple. She is the Chokmah of the Kabbalah, the Holy Wisdom who cries out in the first and eighth Psalms, folded into the Shekhinah of the Hebrews.
The Greek name Babylon is derived from the Semitic Bab-Il, meaning “the gate of God.” At one time or another every holy city believed it was at the center of the world, the mystical center where the gate between the upper and lower worlds is located. So it is with Jerusalem today for three of the world's major religions, with Benares for the Hindus, and with Mecca and Rome. Like so many other religious symbols, however, gates have a sexual symbolism as well.
The Hebrew for “gate of God” is Bab-Al, usually written Bab-El or simply Babel. The name (actually a title) of God usually translated El (if translated at all) is actually spelled with an “A” (or aleph in Hebrew).
Although he no doubt followed the Enochian spelling, Crowley claimed to have “corrected” “Babylon” to “Babalon” to give what was to him a meaningful gematria, a term used by medieval Jewish scholars to describe the ancient practice of substituting numbers for the letters in a word or name and adding them up to get a significant result. Gematria comes from a Greek word meaning “to measure (land),” and this practice dates at least to Babylon, when single letters were used to stand for numbers rather than spelling them out. In an age that has used Arabic numerals for centuries, the significance of this achievement may be hard to appreciate.
In this system of numeration, A = 1, B = 2, and so on. After the 10th letter (“I” in the Hebrew and Greek alphabets, sometimes written as “Y”) there was no need for an 11 since “IA” stood for a 10 followed by a 1, which is the way we form numerals in our base 10 system. Eleven, in fact, is Crowley's “number of magick.” The 11th letter is “K,” which, according to gematria, equals 20, and so on. Thus BABYLON = 2 + 1 + 2 + 400 + 80 + 800 + 50 = 1335, which is not a meaningful result.
In the Book of Revelation the original Greek is BABYLON with an upsilon (Y), rather than an alpha, while the final vowel is not omicron but is the long “o,” omega. Crowley's “corrected” spelling BABALON = 2 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 30 + 70 + 50 = 156, a number significant to John Dee as the product of 12 and 13, the dimensions of the table upon which he received the Enochian alphabet from the angel.
Crowley referred to the number 156 as that of the “City of the Pyramids,” where initiates would spend the “Night of Pan.” Babylon was known for its ziggurats, stepped pyramids built for the gods to descend and humans to ascend, serving as a model for the biblical Tower of Babel, also immortalized in the 16th card of the Tarot.
In the Enochian system, the City of the Pyramids lies in the 14th Aire, above which (i.e., 13th) is the Garden of Nemo, Nemo being Enochian for “Master of the Temple.” The 12th Aire belongs to Babalon, and the 11th is called the Holy City. The 10th Aire will be discussed in a later chapter. While Dee and Kelley may have discovered the Enochian syst
em and Babalon the Harlot, Parsons was to make the latter more infamous.10
* * *
10. The primary reference on Babalon remains Crowley's Liber 418, reproduced in Magick and elsewhere.
seven
The Babalon Working, Part 1: January–February 1946
Now that he had achieved extraordinary success in his physical jet propulsion, it seems Parsons was intent on creating high-flying adventures on the metaphysical plane. In early 1946, using the Angelic language of John Dee and Edward Kelley, Parsons planned his magickal operation, keeping diligent records per Crowley's constant advice. The surviving fragments of Parsons’ Babalon Working have been circulated since the days of mimeograph machines, and are widely posted on the World Wide Web. They are not a part of Freedom Is A Two-Edged Sword, though the near future may see collected writings of John Parsons printed under one cover.
The working began January 4, 1946. At 9 p.m. Parsons wrote, “I followed this procedure for eleven days, from January 4 to 15,” which is actually 12 days. Presumably, Parsons miscounted and carried on the working for one extra day, a simple mistake difficult to believe of a rocket scientist.
To begin the working, Parsons chose one of the squares from the Enochian “Air Tablet” (there are four 12-by-13 tablets, one for each element), also known as the “Great Watch-Tower of the East.” He did not record which of the 156 possible squares he chose. After preparing the other magical weapons, at 9 p.m. he prepared and consecrated his “Air Dagger.” An actual dagger purchased for this purpose, the weapon, he said, was the “special talisman of the operation.”
Parsons then copied the symbols contained within the chosen square onto virgin parchment. These symbols consist of one of the seven planetary signs, one of the 12 zodiacal signs, a unique permutation of the four signs of the elements, and an Enochian letter in the center. Present as “Scribe” for the entire operation was none other than Hubbard, in what would eventually resemble the Dee-Kelley operation. The ritual was ready to begin.
