Marjorie Cameron,1922-1995) was an artist, occultist, actress, and wife of rocket pioneer and occultist Jack Parsons. Cameron played a major role in the 1946 Babalon Working ritual.
Cameron was born in 1922 in Belle Plaine, Iowa, and graduated from Davenport High School in 1940. She enlisted in the Navy and served drawing maps and working with photographs.
Cameron left the Navy after World War Two and moved to Pasadena where she met Jack Parsons after he performed the Babalon Working, an occult rite to manifest the Goddess potential in society and throughout the human race. He said that she was at his home when he returned, and he believed her to be the entity
he and L. Ron Hubbard, (yes, that one!) had conjured.
Cameron identified herself with theScarlet Woman, as did those around her.
After further magical workings together, Parsons, Hubbard and Cameron felt that they had conceived a Moonchild, as described in the novel of the same name by Aleister Crowley, although no physical child was born.
They were referring to a spiritual entity. Cameron said that she had an abortion after conceiving a child within two weeks of meeting Parsons, so clearly a physical child was not the aim.
Aleister Crowley thought that their workings were idiocy (although he never met Cameron), and some believers feel that Parsons, Hubbard, and Cameron had unleashed a magical force on the world, the goddess Babalon.
Paradoxically, at times Cameron herself was referred to as an incarnation of Babalon by Parsons, and later claimed this identity for herself, saying she had given birth to a spiritual child.
Like many women interested in magic, such as Ithell Colquhoun, Vali Myers, Rosaleen Norton and the surrealist Leonora Carrington, Cameron was also an artist. Her art depicts many images of an otherworldly nature drawn from the Elemental Kingdom and the astral plane.
She played a prominent role in Kenneth Anger's film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, again as the Scarlet Woman.
She also appeared in two films of Curtis Harrington, - - his ten minute 1956 portrait, The Wormwood Star, which focused on Cameron and her artwork, The Wormwood Star
(for cameron's segment go to- 6:19)
and Night Tide (1961), where she starred as a mysterious woman credited as 'Water Witch'.
Marjorie Cameron was also an accomplished artist. Her artworks were recently on display @ the getty center as part of pacific standard time- los angeles.
Los Angeles in 1995.
posted by rick castro~ editor- antebellumblog
posted by rick castro~ editor- antebellumblog
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