MARJORIE CAMERON
An Appreciation
Michael Staley
MARJORIE CAMERON PARSONS died on the 24th July 1995. Since Starfire Vol.1 No.3 was given over to an essay upon Jack Parsons and an edition of The Babalon Working, we would not like this event to pass unremarked. Little is known publicly about the early life of Marjorie Cameron, although we hope that paucity of information will be rectified by a forthcoming biographical study of Jack Parsons. However, it is known that she came from Iowa. She first entered Parsons' life in response, as he considered, to an 'elemental summons' which he had issued in January 1946. He described it thus:
The feeling of tension and unease continued for four days. Then on
January 18 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 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.
It seems that Parsons had met Marjorie Cameron some time
prior, and that she had turned up to visit him at the time of
culmination of his Operation. Soon after, they married. The
relationship was never a calm one, however, and after a short time they
separated. During this period of separation they remained in
correspondence, and Parsons penned her a series of letters in which he
took it upon himself to act as her magical instructor. This is an
extremely interesting and at times beautiful series, and will shortly
be published.
At the time of Parsons' death in 1952 they were once more living
together as man and wife. After the death, Cameron lived a very
precarious existence, convinced that she was the avatar of Babalon
which Parsons had spent the last few years of his life awaiting. A
patchy account of this period is given by Kenneth Grant in the
chapter 'Parsons In Mauve' in his Hecate's Fountain; patchy,
because
it is a glimpse of Cameron's life through her letters to Jane Wolfe. It
was during this period, in 1956, that she s tarred in Kenneth Anger's
film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.
Cameron lived as an artist and poet in her own right, and was active
almost until the last on the lecture circuit. She will be remembered by
occultists for her association with Jack Parsons, however, and I should
like to close this brief appreciation with an extract from one of his
letters to her. It was written whilst they were estranged, and gives an
insight into both Parsons' regard for Cameron and his own sense of
mission:
My dear, do not think that you are alone. The legions are with you that
tried and hoped, those now trying and hoping - the unborn to come,
dreaming of a world to be - all, all are with you. The gods themselves
bend and whisper at your doorway, and your windows are portentous with
the possible hour. I have heard Aldebaran speak of you to Rigel, and
the Pleiades whispering your name that is to be.
All that I have and all that I am flared up in the birth fires that
time, and left me just three tasks: to guide in infancy, to counsel in
adolescence, to renounce in maturity to go outwards whence I came.
If I was the one you could love, yet it was needful for you to learn
contempt and hatred, and to equilibrate these again with Love. You have
done it, and passed that fire. You have needed to know loneliness and
terror and despair. You burn there, and it is passing. And now you come
to the last unspeakable barrier, the ultimate thule, that you may
labour long and painfully to kindle a small spark that will consume all
you have - that will burn down the heavens as a torch, until even the
black stars burn with furious joy.
If you only knew the ache to dissolve, to pass away, to go, to be one;
to drink utterly of the cup men call death or madness; to be away, at
rest, at
peace. But I will endure. I will do what must be done, to the last
moment of putrefying flesh, to the last pulsation of a dying brain. Not
for myself, not for you, but for the vision that I saw once - that is
forever.
One day my hands will fall away, and you will go alone into regions I
cannot follow - take the sky in wings I have only known in dream.
God knows, it is not my body that now speaks to you; that is a tedious
thing of days, of dim awareness in the half-shadow. It is my spirit
that spoke to you in the beginning, that speaks to you again now, that
will always be with you, until we meet and fuse in the darkness of
which all light is a shadow.
with permission:
STARFIRE II,1, 1992
BCM Starfire
London WC1N 3XX
England
back to the Typhonian Ordo Templi Orientis overview
O.T.O. Phenomenon content page | main page | What's New on the O.T.O. Phenomenon site? | mail
|
