Marjorie Cameron

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Marjorie Elizabeth Cameron (23 April 1922 - 24 July 1995) was an American writer, painter and occultist.

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[edit] Biography

Cameron was born in Belle Plaine, Iowa, the eldest of four children. Her father, Hill Leslie Cameron, was a Scot from Illinois who worked with the railroad. Her mother, Carrie V. Ridenour, of German and Dutch decent, was a native of Iowa. The night of Cameron's birth was surrounded by chaos; there was a terrible thunderstorm and her father got drunk and attempted suicide because he thought his wife was dying. Her grandmother, a staunch churchwoman, believed Cameron to be a child of the devil because of her fiery red hair.

As a child, Cameron began to have strange and powerful visions that were so vivid, she could not be sure if they were real or imaginary. One night from her bedroom, she saw a ghostly procession of four white horses float by her window. Later she would recall these dreams in detail and was able to capture this in her artwork and poetry. In a letter to magician and Aleister Crowley associate Jane Wolfe, she mentions finding a "hole to hell" in her grandmother's backyard:

"I remember always a tree on my grandmother's property from which hung an old, old swing where my mother had played as a little girl. Near this spot I recall a well which I always believed was the hole to hell - also the blue Bachelor Button flower grew near this spot. Herein I find again a new concept of the 4 elements and the name of god - the tree, the well, the swing (water's life) and the flower - which is seed."[citation needed]

When she was 17, the Great Depression was underway and Cameron moved with her family to Davenport, Iowa, a considerably larger town than Belle Plaine. Having trouble adjusting and after the suicide of a close friend, Cameron several times tried unsuccessfully to take her own life using sleeping pills. She claims that these near brushes with death had further enhanced her psychic abilities, reportedly giving her a glimpse into the realm of the dead.

In 1943, in the midst of World War II, the 21 year-old Cameron joined the Navy-turning down several scholarships. She was sent along with 3000 other women to boot camp in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Soon she was selected for a high-level job in Washington, DC, where she applied her artistic skills by drawing maps for the war efforts. She was then sent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff where she once met Winston Churchill. She had a drafting table at the head of their conference room. Later, she felt that many men died in the South Pacific as a result of her drawings, Cameron considered all of her drawings to be magical talismans that had a very real effect on the world, she always felt a karmic connection to these men and believed that later tragic events in her life were the result of her participation in their deaths.

By the late 1950s, Cameron was living in Malibu and hanging out with a crowd of artists that included the likes of Dennis Hopper, Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, and others. Wallace Berman's show at the Ferus Gallery was closed in 1957 after displaying one of Cameron's drawings which depicted a woman, possibly Cameron, being taken from behind by an alien creature.

Cameron also played the role of a 'sea witch' in experimental avant-garde film maker Curtis Harrington's 1960 black and white supernatural thriller, "Night Tide", starring actor Dennis Hopper and Linda Lawson. This film was shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1961, and released in the U.S. in 1963.

[edit] The Scarlet Woman

When rocket propulsion researcher and occultist Jack Parsons met Marjorie Cameron, he regarded her as the fulfillment of magical rituals he had been performing as the beginning of the Babalon Working, roughly, an attempt to incarnate in a physical body a divine entity, a living Goddess, that would bring about great change for the Aeon of Horus and change the course of history.

Parsons wrote of Cameron in a letter to his mentor Aleister Crowley in 1946:

"The feeling of tension and unease continued for four days. Then on January 18 [1946] at sunset, whilst the Scribe and I were on the Mojave Desert, the feeling of tension suddenly stopped. I turned to him and said 'it is done', in absolute certainty that the Operation was accomplished. I returned home, and found a young woman [Marjorie Cameron] answering the requirements waiting for me. She is describable as an air of fire type with bronze red hair, fiery and subtle, determined and obstinate, sincere and perverse, with extraordinary personality, talent and intelligence. During the period of January 19 to February 27 I invoked the Goddess Babalon [a particular aspect of the Egyptian goddess Nuit] with the aid of magical partner (Ron Hubbard), as was proper to one of my grade."[1]

They termed this incarnation the Moonchild. Writes Aleister Crowley on the subject:[1]

"The Aeon of Horus is of the nature of a child. To perceive this, we must conceive of the nature of a child without the veil of sentimentality - beyond good and evil, perfectly gentle, perfectly ruthless, containing all possibilities within the limits of heredity, and highly susceptible to training and environment. But the nature of Horus is also the nature of force - blind, terrible, unlimited force."

The Babalon Working was allegedly successful.[citation needed]

After her husband Jack Parsons' death, she starred in Kenneth Anger's 1954 cult-film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. Both Cameron and Kenneth believed that this film was proof to the world that she had manifested the force of Babalon on Earth. Anger later said of her that "She was doing art for the sake of magick and her soul. She never sold her paintings."[citation needed]

Cameron later burned most of her paintings in the late 1950s in a symbolic suicide performed with her second husband Sherif Kimmil after they had been up for several days on speed and had formed what Cameron called a "suicide club". Kimmil slit his wrists in the bathroom at the same time as the burning.[citations needed]

Cameron's two brothers, her sister, and her father worked at JPL, the company co-founded by her husband, Jack Parsons. She was a protege of mythologist Joseph Campbell.

Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel died of cancer on July 24, 1995.[2]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b Hubbard and Black Magick
  2. ^ Typhonian Ordo Templi Orientis XII

[edit] References

[edit] External links