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Evidently, the spirits relented. One day, an attractive young woman named Marjorie
Cameron showed up at the Parsonage. Parsons later claimed that a bolt of lightning had
struck outside, followed by a knock at the door. A beautiful woman was standing there.
She had been in a trac accident. “I don’t know where I am or where I’ve come from,”
she told him. (Cameron’s version is that she had been interested in the stories of the
naked women jumping over res in the garden, and she persuaded a friend who was
boarding at the Parsonage to take her for a visit.) “I have my elemental!” Parsons
exclaimed in a note to Crowley a few days later. “She has red hair and slant green eyes
as specied.… She is an artist, strong minded and determined, with strong masculine
characteristics and a fanatical independence.”
The temple was lit with candles, the room suused with incense, and Rachmanino’s
“Isle of the Dead” was playing in the background. Dressed in a hooded white robe, and
carrying a lamp, Hubbard intoned, “Display thyself to Our Lady; dedicate thy organs to
Her, dedicate thy heart to Her, dedicate thy mind to Her, dedicate thy soul to Her, for
She shall absorb thee, and thou shalt become living ame before She incarnates.”
Whereupon Parsons and Cameron responded, “Glory unto the Scarlet Woman, Babalon,
the Mother of Abominations, that rideth upon the Beast.” Then, as Hubbard continued
the incantation, Parsons and Cameron consummated the ceremony upon the altar. This
same ritual went on for three nights in a row. Afterward, Parsons wrote to Crowley,
“Instructions were received direct through Ron, the seer.… I am to act as instructor
guardian guide for nine months; then it will be loosed on the world.”
Crowley was unimpressed. “Apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is producing
a Moonchild,” he complained to another follower. “I get fairly frantic when I
contemplate the idiocy of these goats.” Cameron did become pregnant, but got an
abortion, with Parsons’s consent, so it’s unclear exactly what this ceremony was
designed to produce. (Parsons and Cameron later married and aborted another
pregnancy.) Nonetheless, Parsons asserted that the ritual had been a success. “Babalon
is incarnate upon the earth today, awaiting the proper hour for her manifestation,” he
wrote after the ceremony. “And in that day my work will be accomplished, and I shall
be blown away upon the Breath of the father.”
Until that apocalypse occurred, Hubbard and Parsons decided, they would go into
business together. The plan was for Hubbard to purchase yachts in Florida, sail them
through the Panama Canal to California, and resell them at a prot. Parsons and Sara
sold the Parsonage and handed over the money to Hubbard—more than twenty
thousand dollars from Parsons alone. Hubbard and Northrup promptly left for Miami.
While in Florida, Hubbard appealed to the Veterans Administration for an increase in
his medical disability. He was already receiving compensation for his ulcers, amounting
to $11.50 per month. “I cannot tolerate a general diet—results in my having to abandon
my old profession as a ship master and explorer, and seriously hampers me as a writer.”
He said his eyesight had been aected by “prolonged exposure to tropical sunlight,”
incurred while he was in the service, which caused a chronic case of conjunctivitis. He
also complained that he was lame from a bone infection, which he theorized must have
occurred by the abrupt change in climate when he was shipped to the East Coast. “My