25

Baba-loca-lips

 

 

To the Goose and the outcast dead of Cross Bones Graveyard, and to John Crow the caretaker.[1]

To all the girls I ever loved before, and to Chris de Burgh.

To the Lady in Red, and to the Lady in Scarlet.

 

We both read the Bible day and night,

But thou readest black and I read white

William Blake

It is I who am the wife; it is I who am the virgin.

It is I who am pregnant; it is I who am the midwife.

It is I who am the one that comforts pains of travail.

It is my husband who bore me; and it is I who am his mother.

And it is he who is my father and my lord. It is he who is my force;

What he desires, he says with reason.

I am in the process of becoming; yet I have borne a man as lord.[2]

On the Origin of the World

(late 3^rd century)

On Halloween in 2006, I forwent my usual ritual of dressing up in rubber shorts and a gasmask codpiece, to attend a belated wake for the medieval dead of Cross Bones. It was a fluffy affair, full of dyed-in-the-woolly armpit pagans, but it was definitely necromantic enough for an old romantic like me, and the dead were as lively as ever.

But this story begins earlier, with a comic book I read two weeks before. Alan Moore’s stunning Promethea series was blowing my mind with every instalment, and then I came to the 21st edition, The Wine of Her Fornications. The essential issue in this issue, and the paradox central to Uncle Al’s cosmology, is that the Virgin Mary and the Whore of Babylon are one and the same, and her name is BABALON. Whilst this always appealed to my sense of aesthetics, I couldn’t get my head around the concept, but neither was it something I could forget, because in Thelema this secret is tightly bound up with the apocalypse.

But who can say when a story begins? This one winds back at least another two years, to a night promoting a clothing brand at a Japanese nightclub. I was inspired that night, ranting tirelessly about hemp and graffiti and London, and the B-boys were interested, but I was far more interested in girls. I was very horny indeed, but there were very few ladies out. This was the curse of working for an uber-trendy drum n’ bass brand in a country without much of a scene; it was so cutting-edge that the clubbers were nearly all boys with puffer jackets and vinyl fixations.

So the horn rose, ascended into my throat and splashed out all over the club in ecstatic praise of the goddess of hemp, the fabric, the fuel, the ecologistics, the medicine, the buzz, and a whole lot more. I left in the morning, alone of course, and boarded a train bound for Kyoto and my deeply lonely abode, a large, dilapidated, two-storey house. It had no furniture, three naked light bulbs, and no decoration of any sort except for a creased piece of foil pinned to a wall, and a photocopy of it pinned by its side. The rent was very cheap, however, because the house was awaiting renovation, as were my housemate and I, both of us getting over our respective wives. He took me in when she threw me out for the sixth time, and we spent the time drinking heavily, making misogynistic jokes, and playing computer games in the room with the communal light bulb. Those were the days! A cold winter of discontent with a poisonous caterpillar plague in the garden, the slow throb of loneliness disturbed only by drunken bicycle injuries and suicide notes from the ex.

Figuring that I was unlikely to attract any women in this pitiful state, I had started practising Taoist seed retention a few months beforehand, and my nuts were about to explode. The train was not leaving for another half an hour, and I was literally squirming in my seat. Something had to give, and that something was my attitude towards prostitution. This was one of the few sexual taboos I had left intact, and I would sit quietly contemptuous when my expat friends reminisced about their sordid trips to Bangkok. No one was going to bust me at six in the morning, so I jumped off the train and hit the smutty streets of Minami-Hanyku.

Getting laid in the red light district is not as easy as one might imagine. Although prostitution is perfectly legal in Japan, most establishments are closed to foreigners, and it took me half an hour of polite Japanese refusals from scantily clad women to find a welcome with Ai-chan, who was friendly and had nice teeth. Unfortunately, another ugly foreigner found her about twenty minutes after I did, and was not cultured enough to sit quietly in the waiting room. He poked his bald head into our tacky love-nest, and asked in appalling Japanese if he could watch. Ai-chan shouted ‘NO!’ in English, and pulled the covers over us, an harlot genuinely abashed. She asked me if he was a friend of mine. I shouted ‘NO!’ in English, and sank into the bed in horror, painfully aware of why most knocking shops don’t welcome foreign barbarians like us.

Ai-chan quickly regained her composure, asked him to wait, and fleeced me blind. She also left me hooked on hookers, and there begins a whorey story, because the brothel door is very difficult to shut once opened. It lasted about six months, until I witnessed the deeply unreverend Nemu running at full speed through the streets of Kuala Lumpur in a frenzied and ultimately futile search for an open brothel. I was unsatisfied by the two other prostitutes that night, but the ladies of the night melted away as the sun came up, and the Reverend Neverend give up his quest frustrated.

Back in England a winter later, I had regained my composure, though not, of course, the mojo of a Western man in Japan. The whore was on my mind again, and this time I decided to approach her with a little more ceremony. Two friends and I were conducting a healing ayahuasca session for a friend who had had an operation for cervical cancer, and it seemed appropriate to invite BABALON, Queen of the cosmic uterus.[i] Her tarot card ‘Lust’ went on the altar, a beautiful naked temptress straddling the beast, reins held tightly in her hand and a look of exquisite abandon on her face. In the ceremony I was too busy concentrating on playing the music to think about her, or even look at the card. The beast was reined for the session, we held it together, and two years on, news from our friend’s cervix is good.

The following day I awoke with a burning desire to know a particular whore in a Biblical sense. I began chasing women through the pages of The New Testament, The Golden Bough and The Greek Myths with the one-track mind of a depraved divorcee chasing hookers through the streets of Southeast Asia. It was soon clear that there was something about Mary, because this name is shared by all the significant women in The New Testament, but five days later I had a party to get to, so I towelled off my sweaty palms and went to the Cross Bones bash.

 

The party was held in the SE One club, on the site of a Roman temple to Isis, and featured bawdy medieval drinking songs and sordid verse from the lips of London sex-workers. I had to bully Seth into coming; though he is usually up for a spot of necromancy, his plan was to curl up at home under a duvet, listening to Goth music and weeping over his ex-girlfriend. My girlfriend refused to come, asking why I was so into dead people. I told her they had fewer hang-ups than the living. Seth had a great time despite himself, and I regretted sitting next to him only once, when it was time to do the group tantric exercise, squeezing our neighbour’s hands in time with our perineal muscles and pelvic floors. He was my first tarot teacher and a dedicated Thelemite, so we had occasion to nod knowingly at each other whenever the poetry wound round to the Whore of Babylon, or when the divine harlots sung choruses of the ‘a-poca-poca-poca-lips’. Widdershins around the altar, where I had left my ‘Lust’ card, and incantations to the goddess and to he of hoof and horn. A masked priestess gave each of us a word on a leaf-shaped card. Mine was ‘Strength’, the name for ‘Lust’ in traditional tarot decks. This was the card that had set the ball rolling in the first place, the energy of the lion that sets all balls rolling.

John was curb-crawling the shadier streets of the astral in his acid-fuelled pimpmobile when he first met his muse, the Goose, a seventeenth century prostitute with a good ear for verse. The Revelation of my mate John (otherwise known as The Book of the Goose) begins as she sets the scene:

For tonight in Hell they are tolling the bell

For the Whore that lay at the Tabard.

And well we know how the carrion crow

Doth feast in our Cross Bones graveyard.[3]

Cross Bones sounded to him like a fitting poetic name for an outcast’s graveyard, but later John discovered that it really was the name of an unconsecrated burial ground, where bodies unwelcome in Southwark Cathedral cemetery were interred. Outcasts included the Winchester Geese, who were prostitutes licensed by the Bishop of Winchester since 1161. They rested in peace until the mid 1990s, when London Underground began developing the derelict site, and digging up skeletons. John received his first message in November 1996, since which time, he and his chaotic confederates have made a Discordian shrine of an urban wasteland, where they conduct monthly rituals to honour the dead.

The hookers and their John lead a procession of pagans, ayahuasqueros and other Halloween fiends from the club to Cross Bones, were we sang songs of gin and syphilis. We remembered the dead by reading their names, which had been given out on ribbons at the beginning of the night. I had one for a baby girl, and another for a man from the workhouse who shared a name with the founder of my school. I met some lovely randoms, and ended up fried at a dirty tekno party in Camberwell, in my Reverend’s robe, and my gasmask at last. A nearly divine London harlot gave me a kiss, then turned and left me pining, remembering the SM temptress I had married, whose face glowed scarlet with anger, the lion’s mistress who had turned me out and inside-out, who fleeced me of everything worth anything, and left an empty shell.

On the bus home I did some automatic writing, producing a page of disturbed filth, which is dedicated to John Collet of the workhouse:

TRI TEMPTING TOLEO. FORNAN TATION HOMOPOFLATE GATE CATINIG REER RE KIDNEY KIDN ME ME DOWN HERE IN THE.

BOAT BROWN BONCE BEGUILED + BESPECTACLED CHROMIANIC BLISTO-CHOW NO SHOW DON’T GO.

KEEL. KEELED REAL. DEALIGHTFUL SWITCH, MITCH MINDER FLICH FINDER CRAGEWAT. SANTA MARIA MAE DE DEUS, AI MI DEUS~ FORWARD FAT CONTROLLER, ONWARD + FORWARD, NO MATTER, THE THIN MAN STAYS + IS STUCK - CONTROLLED BY THE CONTROLLER LOCKED IN BLEEP

SIM-LFE. GONE INTO THE BOX.

HHHHMMMMMMMMMM………..

FOOL FLASHED BACK TO THE BEGINNING AND WHAT IS THAT SMELL, SMELLS DIVINE SEEPING THROUGH THE DOOR - BUT THEY SLEEP YET.

CONFUZED, CONFINED, SWEARS BLIND THEY’RE GETTING STONED IN THERE.

SLP SLIPPED, SLIPPING ALL WEEK. HALLOWEEN BRINGS IT OUT BUT IT IS HARD TO STICK BACK IN.

SLIPPED. BUT ARISE, FALCON BOY, ARISE FROM THE ASH OF YOUR OWN FAILED……OBLIVIOUS PERCEPTIONS. WE KEEP WRITING, KEEP THE PEN MOVING STOREYS FALLING, STRESS EVOLVING INTO LINE BY LINE DICK TURPENTINE SPLASHED ACROSS A VOID.

VOID - AVOID DAN AKROYED HANEY VOIDED, STOKED INTO STOKEY TAXI TAXI NO TAXI IN THIS BREATHE, AND ON AND FINALRY THE WORDS TRACED IN PERMANENT PRIMES, DUCHESS BEJUSTESS CLUSTER, HEADACHES + BOMBS PCP THOREPONS, LETHAL WEAPONS, FONDNESS FOR MOND.NESS - SHE, SHE

 

RANT TALKING ROUND TO RANT AGAIN FALLING WONDRE FRACTIONS FALACIOUS ONE-BIG-LIE, LYING TO THIS SIDE OF THE VOIDS REVE.LAY.SHON

POCCA POC POC BEJESUS + HOLY MARY, AND ALL THE MARYS, THE SWEET SCENT OF HEAVEN SENT CASCADING BLUE OUT OF THE, THE THRUST OF NOTHING - IS THIS WHAT YOU MEAN, A DESK FLASHES INTO MY THIRD EYE. AND REAL, SAT A DOW DOWN, SUPER-CHAN, SEATED MISTREATED 13^TH HEATED MOMENT. GOOSE SQUARKS, PEN WALKS OVER THE LANDSCAPE, PEN DOWN.

AN OFTEN DEM, SHE WALKS, SHE TIPPY TAPS CARDBOARD CATS AND WELCOME MATS UNPRESSED, NOT IMPRESSED.

ROBOT DOG WAITING, ROLLING ROUND THE CORNER LIKE A REDICULOUS MUTT ENOUGH. BARK ALONE TONIGHT. BACK HOME, BACK TO ME + PEN, TOGETHER, BEAUTIFUL SYMBYOSIS, OSIS.TERS OF MERCY, ALL THE MARYS FALL INTO ONE SISTER, ANNOINTER, CHRIST APPOINTER ISIS BLEEDING TEARS FOR HER BROTHER + LOVER. FORGOTTEN TEAR MAKER, TEMPLE CAREER MAKER, WITHER THE WHORES OF ISIS, AS IF OSIRIS COULD CARE FOR HER MORES, OUR MORES, HE HAS HIS TEARS, HIS RESURRECTION, THIS THE SOUCCOUR OF A DYING GOD. WHO WANTS TO BE IMMORTAL ANYWAY.

D YA HOVE HER

ITS OVER.

    

     It was the wrong bus so I had to walk for miles. I ended up in A & E, on E, pondering the A (it is indeed an A, not a Y, but best not ask too many whys of hoes; it always adds up the way the lady says). I wasn’t sick, just a little dizzy from the MDMAganism, but it was freezing outside and I needed somewhere to catch the flood of words. BABALON’s limitless love-juice was drowning me in pungent poetry. This one is dedicated to baby Mary Ann Merrow of Cross Bones:

 

Babababacadabralon, all my wishes all mydreams, to you I offer, from you I merit, oh massive cunt of creation, oh dolce sempre cherry, oh how much will you take from me? More and more, all you have and all you thought you could own. Fleece me, sweet BabAlon, scour my soul and tear out my nothings, all yours, I give you all, it was yours anyway. From bust to bust, asses to asses, BABALON, bouncing along the curve, always taut, always teaching, BABALON, glistening and bleeding and sempre unrevealing. Flow, flow flow my love, my penits moving for you, always for you, everything for you, and all from you. There is only one you, Bab-U-London dishes fishy fishes, queen of this and this and this is Yeah-man-Jah jammin’, happy wimmin. 4 or 3, which will it be, look at me, ten million thaousand infinities of infinities, all meaning meaning. A nipple at the end of every tunnel spouting the meaning of life, the exilixir of life into a mouth which screams loud enough. Minha nossa! Mae di Deus, mae di tudo, bendito e o fruto de vosso ventre ventre ventrilaquist, who iS this describing this? 450 voices and one nob asking questions. Ca ca ka ka kack - I kacked, kacked meaning into the toilet/ mihna nossa! Give me beans woman, make me beans, creeping beany beaners, crawling up mountains of prophets and prophets up mountains, moving mountains, losing mountains, finding mountains to honour her fountains.

What are these round things? Who wants to know where the water doesn’t go, where my juices never flow, It is I, ABARAHAM, bye bye Babalaham, Abomnations of the havalaham. Babbling no more, sensible four by four, through the door, feet on the floor, you know the score. And if you don’t? You don’t. you’re going to find out that you don’t, neither the why nor the A, the rhyme nor the way, the time of day, nor what to say to me, mistress of forms, qui Deus adorns, filling worlds with. Words. In thirds. Father and sun and holy ghost, falling over each other to give me most, I made the bread and burnt the toast, 14^th fortune.

Fastabalon. Going on. I love you so much I’ll leave you until Sunday.

 

As Noah’s flood subsided, the dry island of consciousness rose out of the waters of chaos, and everything that had been remembered stepped off the Ark. Noah’s family multiplied, and ‘the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech’.[4] They voiced the same idea with the same tongue, to build a tower to the heavens:

And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven[5]

The first project of the old New World Order was a noble goal, but soon the structure was more beloved than the builders. The rabbis tell stories of how even pregnant women were forced to build, and how the infirm were cursed for their uselessness.[6] As the Tower of Babel grew, it took ever more effort to raise masonry to the top. The builders wept for a falling brick, but not for a falling man.

What was the Tower of Babel? There was a 70-meter ziggurat in Babylon called Etemanaki, the End Platform of Heaven and Earth, but bricks were not all that were baked in Babylon. Babylonians also baked clay tablets pressed with some of the earliest alphabetic writing. The ziggurat is dust today, but the Hammurabi Code of Law survives, four millennia after it was made. An ancient obelisk carved with it is housed in the Louvre, but its shadow falls over the entire planet.[7] Tablets scratched with laws were laid upon one another and built up, as Kings and Presidents sought to approximate the laws of God. Law is codified, but whilst words are fixed, interpretation is a different matter. Tongues become confuzed, and the project is lost, despite its good intentions. When one truth is for all, the bricks of the structure become more important than the builders. Milgram’s nightmare begins, and people start dropping from the scaffolding. ‘The Truth’ is lethal. Man is saved from himself when ‘Truth’ is fractured into a multitude of languages.

The Bible relates the word Babel to the Hebrew balal (to confuse). It is derived from the Akkadian bāb ili (the gate of god),[8] and this ba-ba-baby talk is also the root of the English verb ‘to babble’. In a world of confuzed babblers at the gates of infinity, names are changed to protect the intransient, and meaning streams into 70 currents of consciousness. Matthew turns on a new tap with a redefinition in the first chapter of The New Testament:

And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins. Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.[9]

The prophet referred to is Isaiah, translated in the KJV as follows:

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin [sic] shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.[10]

But what about this virgin? Mark and John never mentioned a virgin, and neither did Isaiah. The Greek word in Matthew is parthenos, which does indeed mean virgin, but the Hebrew in Isaiah is almah, which simply means young woman. The KJV translates it as ‘virgin’. Wherever almah is found in The Old Testament, the KJV renders it as ‘virgin’ (or ‘maid’, meaning virgin), but it makes for some silly scripture. In Proverbs, for example, the Hebrew clearly refers to a little bump and grind, but in the KJV:

There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid [sic].[11]

What is so wonderful about the way of a man with a virgin? Nothing at all! This is not an ambiguous Hebrew word, it’s a mistranslation. Another instance makes a nonsense of The Song of Solomon:

There are threescore queens, and fourscore concubines, and virgins (sic) without number. My dove, my undefiled is but one[12]

What are all these virgins doing in a harem? If they are virgins, how can there only be one who is not violated? This prejudiced translation wouldn’t fool a rabbi. In Jewish Bibles, these virgins are all young women, because to a Jew, altering the word of God is high blasphemy. To anyone with a sense of aesthetics, it is a crime against poetry.

Whilst virginity is exalted in Christianity, there is none of this in The Old Testament. When ‘Jephthah … a mighty man of valour, and … the son of an harlot’ has to sacrifice his only child to fulfil a promise to the Lord, his dutiful daughter insists that he honour his word, and she does not complain about her death. She asks only ‘let me alone two months, that I may go up and down upon the mountains, and bewail my virginity’.[13] Virginity is a curse in Judaism, not a virtue. Sex is our duty, every day for men of independent means, once a week for scholars and ass-drivers.[14] Two weeks without nookie was already perfectly reasonable grounds for divorce,[15] and you can leave the hole in the sheet for the Puritans. In Jewish law, lovers were to be completely naked, so nothing could come between them.[16]

The Israelites were neither prudish nor moralistic about sex. Judah went a-whoring, and he fathered a great tribe.[17] Eleazar ben Dordia ‘did not leave out any harlot in the world without coming to her’,[18] and at the end of his life, God calls him ‘Rabbi’, and tells him he is ‘destined for the life of the world to come!’

So why the mistranslation? Did Matthew make an honest mistake, and carelessly change the nature of the religion? What about the later clerics who reconstructed the hymens of various Old Testament young women to fit in with Matthew’s fetish? Once is a mistake, as my dad likes to say, twice is stupid, but three times is on purpose. It is true for a night’s whoring, certainly, and for translation of scripture as well. Did Matthew have a thing for virgins, or was there a particular virgin on his mind?

Virgin mothers were worshipped all over the pagan world, from the Amazon to Babylon. Was it Isis, or Ishtar, or Astarte that Matthew was remembering, or was this almah Al-Mah, the Persian virgin goddess of the moon? One of the earliest virgin mothers was from Sumer, one of the oldest settled civilisations, where some of the oldest surviving text was written. Her name was Inanna, and her habits are not what one might expect from a maid. According to ancient poetry, she went scantily clad into town wearing ‘the pearls of a prostitute’, to play drinking games and ‘snatch a man from the tavern’.[19] ‘She praised herself, full of delight at her … remarkable genitals’,[20] but she was always a virgin, regardless of what she got up to. Like the moon, and like a woman, she always returns to her pristine state, ready to bear again.

Inanna was the goddess of many things, including shepherds,[21] carpenters,[22] love, sex, and the sacred temple lovers.[23] Her priestesses kept a sacred institution, a ritual dramatisation of the value of sexual love, and in some temples even respectable married laywomen would make love to strangers who approached in the darkness and left a coin. This is called ‘sacred prostitution’ in modern terminology, but the term is a poor one, because of what prostitution means to us. Back in the day, these women were religious temple attendants performing a vital service for the community, a role that is performed today with much less ceremony in scummy motels and backstreets. The Har of Babylon, as she was titled, is remembered in The Bible as the Whore of Babylon. She was one of many virgin mothers who bore dying solar heroes on the solstice as Virgo popped over the horizon, but whilst the saviour mythology survives, most of his mother’s nature has been forgotten. But is The New Testament betrayed by a smudge of scarlet lipstick?

In Egypt, Astarte was Asat (Isis), protectress of the dying god Azar (Osiris). Asat was addressed as Meri in Egyptian, meaning beloved.[24] In The New Testament, Mary is always the name of a helper or protectress, with the exception of the Virgin Mary. Mary Magdalene accompanies Jesus to his death and to his tomb,[25] where she watches over him, and is the first to meet him after his resurrection.[26] The Mary in Romans ‘bestowed much labour on us’,[27] and another from Acts hides St. Peter when he is on the run.[28] Mary sister of Lazarus is another helpful soul, who spends much of her time weeping in sorrow over her brother Lazarus, who had been dead for four days. In Egyptian mythology, Asat wept over her brother Azar until he was resurrected. Azar’s name seems to have been smuggled in as well. A Romanized Azar becomes Azarus, and with an honorary ‘El’ (like El Shaddai or El Salvador Dali), the name becomes a familiar El Azarus, or Lazarus. Lazarus is the only character resurrected in The Bible besides Christ. Asat’s sister Nephthys took part in Azar’s resurrection in the Egyptian myth. She was also titled Meri, and hence the title of both sisters together, was the plural Merti.[29] This is very close to Marta (Martha in English), the name of Lazarus and Mary’s other sister.[30] Mary sister of Lazarus spends a year’s wages on the ointment to anoint Jesus’ feet,[31] an extremely significant act which makes Jesus ‘the anointed one’, or Messiah.[ii] Two verses later, the Messiah is betrayed as Azar was betrayed, setting the scene for his execution and resurrection.[32]

There is something else about Mary, something both exalted and shameful. The anointer is named Mary in Matthew, Mark, and John, but in Luke she is unnamed, and she is not connected with Lazarus. It is also only in Luke that she does more than just anoint his feet. She also showers him with tears and kisses, and gives his feet some serious attention.[33] We learn ‘what manner of woman this is that toucheth him: for she is a sinner’,[34] and the people pass judgement upon her, but Jesus tells Simon that ‘her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much.’[35]

Luke brings the holy harlot back into the story in this pivotal role as Messiah maker, at a time when she was falling out of favour in the Roman world. The geographer Strabo wrote in 23 AD that this custom continued at the Temple of Aphrodite in Corinth, but he called it ‘wholly shameful’.[36] Whether he actually visited is unknown, but it shows that the idea was still in currency, and frowned upon by his time. Perhaps this is why the other Gospels, which call the anointer by the honourable name of Mary, make no allusion to her harlotry. Mary Magdalene is one of those who ‘ministered unto him of their substance’.[37] She had her demons, but she was no slapper. All the other Maries are spotless, but the unnamed Messiah-maker in Luke was a sinful woman.

It was no simple task merging the exalted feminine of the old pagan world with the paternalistic mores of the Hebrews and the Roman Empire, and the explosive success of early Christianity is a testament to the ingenuity of its authors.[38] Inevitably, however, and tragically, Christianity was institutionalised and sanitised as it grew. Any ambiguity about the anointer was ironed out by Pope Gregory in 591, who ruled that the sinner’s sin was sexual, and that Mary Magdalene, Mary sister of Lazarus, and the unnamed sinner, were one and the same hussy.[39] The beloved nurturer was dragged from the foot of the Cross of the King to the grimy streets of King’s Cross, the work of her priestesses became the shame of prostitution, and there begins a tale of misogyny and the repression of female sexuality, which continues to impoverish both the women and men of Christendom today. Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ lover in The Gospel of Philip, but such scandalous stories were excluded from the canon. The only woman worthy of devotion became the Virgin Mary, who most certainly does not put out, not for love nor money. Within a few centuries, Christianity had become a dreadfully frigid faith most unlike its Jewish and pagan roots.

Goddesses worth their salt, however, are not in the habit of being dominated by stuffy old clerics, at least not for long, and the holy whore went underground. Asat’s sacred geese were sacrificed well into the Common Era, all the way from North Africa to South Londinium. Goosey-goosey gander waddled across the continents and the millennia, upstairs, downstairs and in the master’s chamber, and all the way to Medieval England, where the Old English term for prostitute was ‘goose’.[40] The Winchester Geese lived and died in the Liberty of the Clink, and were buried in Cross Bones graveyard, where they rested in disgrace until London Underground diggers disturbed their sleep.

Asat may have been forgotten, but her rites continue to this day with the festival of Easter. The name ‘Easter’ derives from Astarte, and the festival was a heathen fertility rite. It is mentioned only once in The Bible; the evil King Herod attends Easter as Peter languishes in his dungeon awaiting execution.[41] Hot cross buns were offered to pagan gods 1500 years before Christ. The Easter pig is eaten for the boar that killed Ishtar’s lover Tammuz, whose rites are called ‘abominations’ in Ezekiel,[42] and he is still mourned today with our 40 days of lent. There are no rabbits in The Bible. The Easter bunny hopping about delighting Christian children is a celebration of the defining characteristic of a rabbit, which is sex, and the Easter eggs he distributes are a rather obvious fertility symbol.

It is obvious when you think about it, but thinking is exactly what church fathers sought to prevent, using threats of excommunication, such as this, by Pope Cyril in 431:

If any one refuses to confess that the Emmanuel is in truth God, and therefore that the holy Virgin is Mother of God, for she gave birth after a fleshly manner to the Word of God made flesh; let him be anathema.[43]

Like Inanna, Mary is always a virgin, and is remembered as such in the Greek Orthodox liturgy, where every mention of her name is prefixed with the words ‘always virgin’. Unlike Inanna, however, her virginity was protected by a new magick, which suppressed thought with fear. Mary’s virginity was far too questionable to be questioned. Catholic dogmas concerning Mary multiplied, and soon Catholics were also terrified into accepting that the immaculate conception was a unique event, and that Mary was a virgin until death, at which point her entire body including her immaculate hymen ascended into heaven.[44] The Pope was still issuing warnings in 1950:

If anyone, which God forbid, should dare wilfully to deny or to call into doubt that which we have defined, let him know that he has fallen away completely from the divine and Catholic Faith.[45]

The pagan origins of Christianity have always upset purists. Jehovah’s Witnesses valiantly attempted to chase the heathen from their midst, throwing out crosses, candles, Easter, Christmas and New Year parties, retaining little more than a God-fearing frown. For the Witnesses, the party comes at the end of time. They give eschatology a bad name, as far as I am concerned, and I like to think that my group is the complete opposite of theirs. Wherever Christians gather there is the danger of Christian fascism, and sadly, Daime is no exception, but for the most part we love pagan wisdom, and we always shout ‘Viva!’ for all the beings of the Celestial Court to close our ceremonies. Whereas the Witnesses dream of a past age of purity, our party is a post modern mash-up in a free house, where all are welcome, and we sing so loud that the gods start to boogie.

The virgin mother has been with us for at least 6,000 years; we should be grown up enough by now to learn the truth about where her baby comes from. The Virgin Mary is the goddess of the new moon, but the cycle continues into the ripeness of the full moon. She is the divine temptress, the nurturer for whom all nature swells into readiness, whether lemons or lingams. Mary Magdalene carries a clue in her name, the root of which is gadol, meaning both ‘large’ and ‘grow’ in Hebrew. She accepts all comers into her double-D cup of compassion. She accepts us because she knows us and the depravity of our desires. She knows we are all the same with our trousers down. She has seen it all before, and she forgives and keeps giving. It is time for us to reciprocate, to love her as she was loved in ancient times. Greeks sculpted sexy women for their temples, Indian goddesses are painted dancing in boob tubes, and Inca effigies have enormous knockers. Women are sexy. They are nurturing, and comforting, and divine, but Christians got stuck with a virgin fixation. The sacred harlot has become a demon under the force of repression. The desires of her flesh are a disgrace, her rites are practiced in alleyways and valued in rocks of crack.

The goddess has been defiled in Christendom and her divine name made vulgar. In India she was Kunti, who summoned gods with a secret mantra and bore their children. In Rome she was Cunina, protectress of babies. Derivatives of the sacred C-word were titles for goddesses, priestesses, and wise-women, including, it is believed, our good ‘Queen’, but the word ‘cunt’ is our dirtiest, so offensive that well raised American girls cry if you say it with enough malice. Our hang-ups about the word, the organ, and the woman surrounding it are abstractions built upon a confused mess of neuroses. Why does a healthy appetite make a slut of a woman and a stud of a man? Dogs aren’t offended by cunts, nor by the word ‘cunt’. What exactly are we scared of?

The feminine shifts between absolutes, indistinct in the moonlight, moving in and out of balance, swelling up and shrinking down, and always returning to the source. The mother is confuzing and contradictory, one thing and then the other, and this constant wave is the wellspring of life. The Law of the Lord is laid down with a word, and the wave collapses into one particle, going one way. It’s potential is fixed, later to be falsified. The masculine limits, but the cosmic cervix is dark and limitless. Code gestates quietly until it tumbles fully formed and perfect into the world, a symphony, a cosmology, or a baby. But behind the mystery of infinity is the terror of the black hole. She drives men to poetry and murder, and all for nothing. The feminine is a great gaping 0, pungent, potent, and dripping with blood.

The Hebrews never discovered zero, and neither did the Greeks. It was imported from India in the thirteenth century, but even then very few understood it. It is more irrational than the irrational numbers the Greeks discovered, more invisible than negative numbers. It is an affront to Aristotle, neither one thing nor the other, neither negative nor positive, so how can it be anything? And yet it is not the same as nothing. A photo of zero children is not the same as a photo of an empty playground. Zero is the assertion of nilness. It is empty potential, and that is something quite different .

Our master is a sun god, an ‘I’ drawn across the sky, following his will(y) on his missions, penetrating territories, parching seas, illuminating and casting into darkness as he dies at the end of the day. The world fractures along the edge of sense defined. We’re stuck here in the conscious mind, and it is only the constant confus(z?)ion of words and definitions that allows for reinterpretation and regeneration. Creative writing redefines the boundaries. Matthew’s ingenious slight of hand brought the virgin mother into the narrative, and some influential patriarchs thought it best to keep mum. YHVH, for all his dynamism, is not an easy father to get along with, Elohim is too dimensionless to relate to, and Jesus on the cross has his own concerns to be worrying about. The goddess, however, is ready to receive you without judgement.

In pagan pantheons, all three phases of the moon and of womanhood are all exalted. Persephone, Diana and Brigit of the new moon are perfectly pure and full of potential, virgins associated with birth and the birthing room. Selene, Luna, and Ceres are full moon goddess, nurturers, protectors, and lovers, with soft curves to cradle our confuzed heads. She attends the wedding and the marriage bed. After a period of plump fecundity the moon shrinks into the crone, whose names are Kali, Hecate, and Nephytys, a wise old woman with a pickled face and a head full of craft. She sees through your charm, and has a herb for every illness, if you have the humility to ask. The crone presides over death and the deathbed; she guides the dying and the dead, and converses with the spirits of their world.

The waning moon suffered a similar fate to the full moon. Her titles of crone, hag, and witch became insults. Her craft was pushed underground. First she was denied in the ninth century, and later she was drowned and hanged, beginning in the fourteenth century. The fire of persecution began to roar in the fifteenth century, with the Spanish Inquisition adding fuel on one side of the Christian divide, and Luther fanning the flames on the other.[46] It burned well into the eighteenth century as the Age of Reason was constructed, and even today the hag continues to suffer. Old women crumbling alone in nursing homes are no less victims of this ugly prejudice than was Helen Duncan, the medium described in São Miguel in Stockwell.

All the Maries appear in order of the phases of the moon. The Virgin Mary is at the beginning of the story and leaves after a few chapters. Mary the nurturer appears in various guises, pushing the story in the middle, and at the end, Mary, mother of James is the crone, attending the death, following the body to the grave,[47] [48] sitting over the sepulchre,[49] and bringing spices to anoint the corpse.[50] Along with Mary Magdalene, she is the first to learn of the resurrection.[51]

Matthew was not the first Gospel written, but it is the first to be read. It appears to be a close copy of Mark with added pagan ideas, such as the star of Bethlehem and the virgin birth. It is also the only canonical Gospel that mentions dreams, and it is the most mystical of the four, but there were contemporary Christian scriptures far more mysterious. All sorts of tribes were mixing in the Hellenistic crucible, including Egyptians, Jews, Romans, Arabs, Africans, and Oriental Kings wandering through, following the stars, carrying strange spices. Different traditions explored the story in various directions for 200 years, leaving as many as 50 contradictory Gospels reflecting a broad spectrum of belief.[iii] The Gospel of Thomas appears to be older than the canonical Gospels, and it is laden with mystical code and paradox, where the end is the beginning, and giving money to the poor harms the spirit (something which make sense in the welfare state). In The Gospel of Judas, written within decades of the canonical gospels, Jesus tells his most beloved disciple ‘you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothed me.’^[52]

For many Gnostics, the Virgin Birth was ‘not fleshly, but pure’. It was the mysterious process of the feminine Holy Spirit giving birth to the cosmos, without anything fertilising it. The Gospel of Philip reads like a Taoist text, with monistic ideas and a healthy mistrust of words, where those who believe in the fleshy Immaculate Conception ‘do not know what they are saying.’[53]

As Christianity became more mainstream, the lunatic fringe became a sensible side parting. The messy mop of Christianity was trimmed to make it as sensible as possible, and easy to control. Gnostic sects were stamped out, Gnostic texts were declared heretical, and those that were not hidden were burned. It was Irineus of Lyons, a converted pagan with a political agenda, who selected which Gospels ended up in The Bible, and he censored most of the stories alluding to a non-material level of reality. He cut, for example, The Acts of John, where Jesus’ steps leave no footprints,[54] and The Apocalypse of Peter, where Peter goes into a trance and sees ‘a new light greater than the light of day’.[55] In the official Bible, doubting Thomas touches the resurrected Jesus, keeping the story in the material world, whereas in most of the Gnostic stories his hand passes through. The least mystical of all Gospels is Luke, which takes place entirely in the physical world, and it is here that the anointing woman is unnamed and sinful. For most Gnostics, the resurrection was not fleshy but spiritual, and the spirit of Jesus returns in dreams, trance, and intuition. The Apostle’s Creed, however, was introduced to homogenise the faith, making resurrection ‘in the flesh’ a dogma to be affirmed weekly, and questioned on pain of eternal damnation. The Creed is lampooned in The Gospel of Philip, where Christians are encouraged to follow the Holy Spirit rather than articles of faith.

As with censorship in the Churche of Scyense, the censorship of Gnosticism was a political exercise, and many of the same issues arose, including the existence of invisible powers and questions of authority. It is almost impossible to control a group of dedicated mystics who take instructions not from appointed authorities, but directly from Jesus or other entities in dreams or visions. In The Gospel of Mary, Jesus appears to his favourite disciple in a vision and tells her to ‘not lay down any rules beyond what I appointed you, and do not give a law like the lawgiver lest you be constrained by it.’[56] This is not conducive to the ambitions of an empire. Tertullian insisted that a Church meeting was only valid with a bishop (poimen in Greek, meaning shepherd), and the Bishop of Antioch argued that separation from one’s bishop meant separation ‘not only from the church, but from God himself.’[57]

For Gnostics, however, it was not the ‘dry canal’[58] of a bishop that validated a church but the Holy Spirit, which was invisible, but instantly recognisable. It was also feminine. Adam was the psyche, or the thinker in Gnostic thought, and Eve was the pneuma, or spirit, the connection to the invisible world. Some churches left the ceremony in the hands of the Holy Spirit, choosing the prayer leader by drawing lots,[59] or waiting in silence until someone was moved to speak, as do modern Quakers. It was the Holy Spirit, personified as the lovely Sophia, who made Adam’s snake rise and opened his eyes. Her ecstasies gave intimate knowledge, or gnosis, to the Gnostic, and she gave out far too much authority. Trance, miraculous healing, and communication with spirits were normal parts of Hellenistic ceremony, and in one church, the initiation ceremony concluded with the words ‘Behold, Grace has come upon you; open your mouth, and prophesy.’[60]

In the early years of Christianity, the feminine was in the ascendant. Many early Christians ditched the Jewish custom of segregating men and women in prayer, and in some churches, women were uttering prophecies and even leading ceremonies. Church fathers, however, banned the worship of Mary,[61] and Tertullian preferred ‘the devil’s gateway’ in her traditional role:

Do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on your sex lives on in this age; the guilt, necessarily, lives on too.[62]

He knew he was on shaky ground when he wrote that the resurrection of the flesh ‘must be believed, because it is absurd’,[63] and by the end of his life, he had completely disavowed most of his early anti-Gnostic polemic, but his immature convictions stuck fast. The Holy Spirit was bound and gagged, the passage of the moon was arrested at the first stage, leaving us with a third of a goddess and an irrational fear of the irrational, a culture where the wisdom of women was removed from discussion for centuries.[iv] Christians, with nothing better to believe in, fell into line behind their shepherds, a flock of docile sheep, and occasionally a gang of battering rams. But the lion can be reined and ridden, and it eats sheep for breakfast.

Gnostics questioned authority all the way from bishops up to the Lord YHVH Himself. He was Yao, the demiurge, a limited and ignorant being, master of the world where the completely sinless Jesus suffers and dies.[64] He punishes Adam in envy[65] and floods the world out of spite,[66] and in The Testimony of Truth, He demands you ‘serve him in fear and slavery all the days of your life’.

There is a middle way between angry rejection of and capitulation to YHVH. This Lord is a part of us, and a condition of our world. Whilst conditions can be overcome, He and His bishops have dominated us for millennia, and recently His Gospel of one true truth has been taken over by scientists and lawmakers who, like He, are convinced that they know it all. YHVH censors BABALON’s narrative and filters out rays of infinity, but time is on her side. She flows on, a babbling brook, as he scribbles along, a bloody long book. Jehovah has thrust his way from A to Y, rubbing his way around the world, but all this friction is coming to a sticky end. BABALON keeps coming, a multiple, perpetual orgasm, her pagan love juice streaming sweet scents of infinity, whereas His sense is finite. She swells, bears, and shrivels, and she reverts to her immaculate state. BABALON is mother of everything and mistress of forms, with poetry tumbling from her void, lubricated with the intoxicating potion of liquid intelligence. She is the ever-changing moon, and He is an oldskool hardcore tune, remixed until the end of the record.

The world begins with Mama. First comes Ma, Mum, Ima,[v] Mae, and Mary, Mama’s mammaries, massive and milky and mine, for meeeeee! ‘Maa’, ‘Am’, and ‘Mam’ are the first noises babies make, along with ‘nana’ and ‘Inanna'. ‘Maa’ is measure in Sanskrit, marking limits and making the world, but there is more to ‘mama’. ‘Mmmm’ is the sound of pleasure, the sweet sound of sex. The cosmic cervix draws us in, and makes everyone moan. ‘Tell me about your mother,’ says the shrink, but he already knows. ‘Mmm’ is also all the noise a dying person may be able to make. Mother Mary is with us at the birth, the nuptial bed, and the deathbed, with a different face for each.

Outside of these sacred places, however, some sense is required of us. ‘Ma’ is the first noise, but ‘bah’ is the first word, an easy plosive phoneme somewhere between the immensity of ‘ma’ and the point of ‘pah’, between mindless utterance and voiced intention. Once we get to ‘pah’ and ‘fah’, father, papa, papu,[vi] pater,[vii] and pitara,[viii] we know who we’re talking about, but the first thoughts begin with a ‘bah’. The Bible begins with ‘Bereshit’ (‘in the beginning’), a beth and not an aleph, and it is forbidden to inquire into what went on in the breath of aleph, before beth was said.[67] Now we’re talkin', but listen to the sense we’re making. We’re babies talking boobies and baba. Baba is slang for ‘poo’ in Japanese, but ‘bah’ is also the root of aunty, and Baa is granny. In Gujarati Ba is mother, and in Greek it is Buha. It is feminine, but over in Yoruba lands, Baba is father, and in Hebrew father is Abba. Ab- is a masculine root in Hebrew, and macho man Abraham was the root of the tribe, beginning with the breath of aleph followed by beth. ‘Bah’ crosses the border, as yet undecided what it wants to mean. This is where BABALON babbles and bubbles, forming sense and nonsense at the edge of the cosmic cervix, before ‘who’s yer da-da?’ becomes a question. Phonemes frame coded chaos, and the world is cut into shape. Mama / Papa is the first division and they are some of the first words learned, followed by other dualities: on and off, hot and cold, up and down et cetera. Now spend the rest of your life trying to get over that…

‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’,[68] but this word is unpronounceable, and when it is uttered, the aeon crumbles. It is the beginning and the end, the Alpha, the Omega and the mega-Om, the opening of the cosmic joke and its rib-splitting punch line. The Word is limited, and bound at both ends. BABALON will be bound, and you can bend her any way you wish, but whatever kinky position you have in mind, she ends up on top. Entering her mysteries at the point of ecstasy, sense fails as blinding blackness descends. The magician penetrates the unconscious void, his wand firm amidst the undulations. From here he can direct his will where he will, and shape magick worlds with magick words.

The goddess’s cycle generates a stable world, but this world doesn’t go anywhere. YHVH breaks through the wave, causing devastating intervention and permanent transformation. His name has changed over the rises and declines, but His story has been roughly the same, ever since man pressed code into clay. Gilgamesh is one of the oldest narratives, a story a man who turned against the luscious goddess of love to trek to the end of the earth in a futile quest for immortality. YHVH’s earthly representatives wrote the law on a monolith raised over Babylon. His lawyers started the oldest argument, and are still holding freedom hostage. He is Yaldabaoth, ‘child of chaos’, order arising from the noise of the void. He is the phallus, erect with desire. He makes the goddess writhe when He worships her infinity, but if he descends into the rank shabbiness of Mr. Loverman, he makes her into the Whore of Babylon, and the planet becomes sick.

In the beginning was the Word, which split into a confuzion of tongues and perspectives to interpret our beautiful universe. Under the homogenising force of Christianity, most of the world was united, but for this to happen the moon had to be fixed and the tides held back. The Western psyche has finally grown up enough to enjoy Sophia’s many tongues in his ear, and just in the nick of time. Nukes, gung-ho bioengineering, rampant materialism, and fundamentalist fuckwits threaten us, whilst new technologies are forcing us together into a global system, a net that stretches rather than a tower, which falls. It grows by forming links rather than by pressing down on old foundations. It brings us together whilst maintaining our space. We are a few clicks, not bricks, away from New Jerusalem, and a few ticks away from complete annihilation. Sit back and enjoy the grand-finale. The goddess is returning, and she’s still a virgin, but this time she’s in fishnets.

It is time to remember her, succulent and delicious, and to give her the love she deserves. The virgin planet is long since fucked, rubbed raw by the jealous god manhandling her and intellectual rapists forcing themselves upon her, siring bastards. She can’t help us anymore; the Virgin is long gone by the time of the resurrection. It is time to get a curvier goddess with ‘remarkable genitals’ back on top where she belongs. She is eying you across the cosmic disco party, waiting for you to come over to her side. Her pheromones permeate the air with significance and the magick of the everyday. Feel her rhythms, and your step gets funkier. Caress her curves and your clumsy desires are transformed. Her dark eyes bewitch, and she invites your embrace. Kiss her and the void is at the tip of your tongue, for she is aching with fertility. She lives for loving touches in the right places, but we perverts keep looking for the G-spot with our endoscopes.

The divine harlot teases us to give up our currency of exchange, the meaning we make of the world. She lures us across the abyss into a wordless silence. She strips us of our material attachments and draws us up into the universal current, one small step for a man, one giant leap for a tin-canned mind. The beast that sends a respectable Reverend running wild through the streets of Kuala Lumpur can be redirected towards the infinite. Hold on tightly to the reins, for the clear light outshines the red. The whore and the virgin are one, a mirror reflecting what you offer, an empty page dreaming of stories, a quiet space aching for song. Touched by the wand, she erupts in a fountain of words, ever-changing, redefining and recreating. Approach her as you will, and receive what you deserve. Let her fleece you of everything you own, let her take you into her chamber on her terms, and she will open your eyes to the universe: Yin-yang, thank-you Ma’am! Offer her arguments and rationalisations, however, and she might tear out your balls. However illogical and wrong it is, for her it is right, even if the neighbours are complaining, even if the last bus is leaving, even if the world is ending.

The goddess is a mega-babe, but occasionally something dreadful comes tearing out of the void. We are due for a tremendous whack of PMT. There will be rivers of blood, hot flushes, violent mood-swings and broken crockery as the womb is cleared to make way for the New Aeon. A small-minded man deserts his beloved at a time like this, but a wise man keeps his head down, sweeping up what she smashes up, strong but silent at the eye of the storm, bringing cups of tea and they pass through the difficult period together.

‘Strength’ was not the only card Uncle Al renamed. He also changed the final card from ‘The World’ into ‘The Universe’, expanding our horizons for the New Aeon. As the sun prepares to change its ways to save our souls and cool off our Mother Earth, the awakened are breaking through the scales of this dimension into the astral, and into galactic consciousness. Magnetic fields have recently been discovered stretching across galaxies, coherent domains over distances hitherto unimagined by physicists.[69] Kepler’s intuition that the planets are in mathematical harmony has been proved correct,[70] and macro-organisation stretches into the apparent chaos of the galaxy. Sirius, the star of BABALON, is the brightest star in the sky, and is almost the same size as our sun, but not quite. The ratio is an intriguing 1:1.053, apparently a mathematical constant precise to three decimal places, putting the stars into resonance.

Oh my goodness gracious goddess, things are getting Sirius!? Here in the final chapters, the Reverend reveals himself, with whores and heresies from East Asia to Outer Space, my goodness graceless godless me. Listen carefully, you sons of virgins and sons of whores, you daughters of purity and sin, listen to the ba-ba-bits and bobs broadcast on Radio BABALON. There is sense amongst the nonsense, order amongst the chaos, and meaning in the madness. All this crazy maths is a bit far-fetched for my pulpit, but call it what you like, Starseed transmissions or amphibious extraterrestrials, there is something about Sirius that attracts the attention of the skyward bound. I could go on about Sirius at great length, others have, at much too great length if you ask me, but Nemu’s End has an impending and very final deadline, and I don't have time to sift the chod from the chaff. I prefer to dream (See Appendix Sirius)

Perhaps Uncle Al’s greatest service to humanity was to get together with Auntie Frieda and redesign the tarot deck for divination and revelation. A deck of cards is a random number generator par excellence. The cut pulls code from the chaos of the shuffle, throwing out a story of numbers and elements, princes and players to reveal the theme beneath the surface. The ‘trumps’ of tarot and all cards are named after the trumpets of the angels of Revelation, and each of the twenty-two tarot trumps represents one of the twenty-two chapters of this intriguing book. There is one final trump Uncle Al renamed, the penultimate step of the Fool’s journey towards understanding the whole. It used to be called ‘The Final Judgment’ in traditional decks, but now it is called ‘The Aeon’, because…

 

…shhhhhhhhhh…

 

Perhaps we should keep quiet about that.

 

Ω