Babalon Rising brought me back into community.
I haven’t presented in person since PantheaCon in 2020. Of course the pandemic shut everything down for a while. Then I left the Ordo Templi Orientis to take care of my disabled husband. That meant giving up a community where I had spent two decades.
When the world started opening up I stayed home to minimize the risk to Alex. Then in March a caregiver brought COVID into the house. Caring for a paralyzed man who had COVID while I had it myself was as much fun as I had anticipated. On the other hand I came out of it feeling a lot less vulnerable. My physician friends agreed that having the illness on top of all the vaccinations boosted my resistance.
The Babalon Rising team had been reaching out to me for a couple of years. A summer event outdoors felt safe. The stars aligned and this year I said yes, I would love to come! I organized round-the-clock care for Alex, hopped on a train and made the cross-country trek.
I’ve always loved the event. I’ve been twice before and connected with the people and the land. This time felt like coming home. It was the first Babalon Rising since the pandemic so we were all blinking in the sunlight like we were just waking up. Maybe we can have a life again?
Presenting my work is an important part of my writing process. I have an idea, talk about it with people, take the feedback and turn it back into the work. Babalon Rising folk have always been the best people to kick ideas around. It was a great relief and joy to enter into that conversation again.
Even better, we were talking about Thelema. I wasn’t sure whether Thelema would be in my life after the O.T.O. Babalon Rising is a pan-Thelemic event, you don’t have to be in any particular group to attend, but I wasn’t sure how widespread my welcome would be. I was quite surprised when O.T.O. members came up to me and said they were happy to get a chance to connect with me again. It’s an argument for leaving on good terms. I was particularly happy to get to talk to other priestesses again. I’m no longer active in Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, you have to be a member of the O.T.O. for that, but I served in the Gnostic Mass for two decades and I still have a connection to that current.
I was so excited to talk about Thelema again that I lost track of the fact I’d published a new book, Cord Magic. There’s a method of making a twist that took a whole chapter to describe and takes three minutes to actually teach but I forgot to schedule a workshop to do it. So I popped into the local store and collected a stack of yarn, put it on my book table, and invited people to learn. It was a great way to teach the method and also to connect with people. I got to watch people pick out colors and then experience the energy of the twist. It reminded me how powerful that simple magic can be.
The pandemic prompted me to revive the Isis-Nephthys Temple of the Sisters of Seshat. We’re now in our third year of summer initiations in a local park. Last winter we also held an online temple to open membership to women outside our area. At Babalon Rising some of those women founded a new temple with the Earth Initiation. They decided to open their temple to people of all genders who wanted to be sisters. That definitely felt like the culmination of all the conversations I’ve had about gender at that event. It’s their work so I will leave it to them to tell their story.
My part of the story is that I was relieved to see the order expand. It’s hard to lean my weight on something that I founded. I want the organization to have its own life and not just be a way that people relate to me. Now with two temples in existence it’s starting to feel like a real order. It’s especially meaningful to me that Sisters of Seshat has a home at Babalon Rising.
I came home again with an outline for a book, a clear idea of who I am writing for, and a renewed connection with people. There honestly wasn’t a single person there I wasn’t delighted to see. Every moment lifted me up. I’m profoundly grateful to be out in Thelemic community again. I said thank you personally to every event founder I met and to the current organizers.
I also want to say thank you to the people who attend my presentations and read my books. Thank you for listening and sharing your ideas and stories with me. Connection keeps us alive and gives us a chance for joy. That’s ultimately the goal of theurgy and Thelema, to experience the joy of existence, and we find it with each other.
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