Babalon and Revelation
Is the Whore of Babylon an archetype of wild female liberation?
Last time, I looked at Gigi Young’s essay on how contemporary pop culture, networks, and platforms exploit sexual energy through a kind of dark occult mass ritual designed to manipulate people’s generative and creative life force energy, keeping them distracted and dissociated. I find it compelling to consider a platform like Only Fans as a kind of parasitic occult technology, getting women to pour out their sexual energy to strangers on the Internet, and then somehow collecting that energy, certainly in the form of commodified exchange but perhaps, also, on a deeper, more esoteric level.
(A brief aside: there is, obviously, so much going on in this hyper-charged political moment. However I still find this inquiry into the occult aspects of Eros deeply relevant. So much of our current political nightmare is based on the “war between the genders,” as men rebel against female independence and seek to reassert patriarchal forms of control and oppression. The root causes of this—the “metaphysics of sex”— need to be understood. Transhumanism can be seen as an expression of a masculine/hyper-rational effort to overthrow (feminine) nature and biology. We can see the new efforts to re-establish an obsolete dominance hierarchy with (white) men on top; the projection of masculine aggression we see in the jarring name-change to the Department of War; the renewed efforts to control women’s bodies and return to a traditional society as parts of an occult battle. We need a much better sense of the underlying dynamics and occult forces operating beneath the surface of current events.)
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Young adopts many of her ideas from Rudolf Steiner, including the belief that we are in an evolutionary cycle with further world incarnations beyond this one, where humans develop new “bodies” such as the “Spirit Self,” by working on themselves over many earthly lives. Young also supports Steiner’s idea that Christ’s appearance was a particular threshold in the development of human consciousness. This leads to a somewhat dualistic view of humanity undergoing a split between those who are evolving through inner work and love and those who are regressing back to an unconscious or preconscious state where they will end up recycled material, reincorporated into primordial chaos.
The upward or evolutionary current involves—Young believes, drawing on Steiner — a process called the “etherization of the blood.” According to Steiner: “In the region of the heart there is a continual transformation of the blood into this delicate etheric substance which streams upwards towards the head and glimmers around the pineal gland. This process — the etherization of the blood — can be perceived in the human being all the time during his waking life.”
“Etherization” is, for Steiner and Young, a super-sensible process, not anything that can be measured by science via biochemical markers. They propose that part of the physical blood gets transformed into a subtler, non-physical substance which they call “etheric.” This doesn’t effect the red blood cells, platelets, and so on; rather, as blood passes through the heart a fraction of its “mineral” nature is lifted out of the purely physical level and becomes an energetic or “life” component. As a person aligns with Christ or the evolutionary impulse, the ethericized blood carries the evolutionary impulse into the head, spiritualizing thinking and over time loosening the subtle etheric body from the dense physical body. I suppose, in the end, you either believe something like this happens, or you don’t.
Major pop stars—Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Madonna, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, others—repeatedly stage themselves in scenes that echo classical depictions of the whore of Babylon: purple and scarlet costumes, golden cups, beasts, apocalyptic stage designs, and visual quotations of paintings and Blakean illustrations where the whore rides the beast. Young connects this to the robot Maria in Metropolis, a false feminine double or “Ahrimanic doppelgänger” whose purpose is to deceive the masses. We cannot prove the conscious intent of any given artist, but the pattern across multiple top performers suggests that, at a certain level of the industry, embodying this archetype functions serves a ceremonial role or functions as a reverse or black magic initiation. Young argues that degeneration or atavistic regression was once symbolized by a woman becoming an animal; today the same idea is now conveyed by a woman—high priestess, pop star—transforming into a robot or cyborg.
For Steiner and Young, Revelation depicts the end of an earth-cycle as a bifurcation into two “streams” — a higher New Jerusalem (or Steiner’s “New Jupiter”) and a lower world formed from the un-redeemable dross of this one. The lower stream — regressing into instinct — is linked to the whore of Babylon; the higher current — evolving via etherization — to “the woman clothed with the sun,” Sophia, representing the purified or exalted feminine, the soul of the new earth.
However, other contemporary esoteric approaches reject this negative view of The Whore of Babylon (or just “Babalon”) archetype, reclaiming her, instead, as an archetype of feminine liberation and erotic power. For instance, Brittany Ronzio writes in her Void Diving Substack: “The interpretation of the Whore of Babylon as a symbol of pure evil fails to capture the deeper mystery she holds, the wild and sacred force that our culture has long sought to suppress. She is not just the personification of excess. She is a complex archetype who embodies the mysteries of the feminine, the body, and of Nature herself.”
