Babalon

Babalon as a Thelemic figure emerges from Aleister Crowley’s visionary corpus and liturgical writings. Crowley recorded the name and material concerning Babalon in works such as The Vision and the Voice and treated her as integral to his Thelemic mythos; she is explicitly identified with the Kabbalistic Sephirah Binah and with the Great Mother in the Gnostic Mass. Crowley and later Thelemic commentators syncretized Biblical imagery (the Woman of Revelation, "Babylon the Great") with Enochian lexical items—sources record Enochian terms glossed as BABALOND ("harlot") and BABALON ("wicked") from Dee and Kelley—that Crowley drew on when articulating Babalon as both a salvific/maternal archetype and a sacralized sexual principle. Within Thelema she is also institutionalized as an earthly office, the "Scarlet Woman," a living woman who may embody Babalon’s functions and help manifest the Aeon of Horus.

Iconography of Babalon in Thelemic and source texts emphasizes symbolic costume and attributes rather than a fixed anthropomorphic portrait. Crowley depicts her "riding the Beast," holding the reins in one hand and in the other a flaming chalice or Holy Grail containing the elements of the Aeonic sacrament (The Book of Thoth). This visual vocabulary draws heavily on Revelation’s description of the woman "arrayed in purple and scarlet, decked with gold and precious stones, having a golden cup in her hand." Common attributes therefore include scarlet and purple garments, jewels and pearls, and the chalice/Grail as her primary emblem.

Primary functions attributed to Babalon in the sources are sacramental, archetypal, and institutional rather than an enumerated list of mythic feats. She is presented as the vessel of mystical transformation—the holder of the Grail containing the "elements of the sacrament of the Aeon"—and as the Great Mother or "Womb of all that lives," identified with Binah and with Mother Earth in the Gnostic Mass. She embodies and sacralizes the female sexual impulse and is paired cosmologically with a masculine creative principle (Chaos); together they form a polarity central to Thelemic aeonic thought. Crowley also conceived an earthly manifestation: the Scarlet Woman, a living office-bearer who participates in ritual and in manifesting Aeonic energies. Earlier Enochian feminine utterances (Dee & Kelley) and the Revelation figure provide linguistic and imagistic antecedents but the sourced materials frame Babalon’s power in metaphysical/ritual terms rather than as a catalog of supernatural assaults or defenses.