Manon Hedenborg White in conversation with Amodali: On Babalon, sacred fem(me)ininity, and occult embodiment

The biblical Book of Revelation (17) features the Whore of Babylon as an antagonist of the early Church — a feminized and eroticized symbol of debauchery and moral corruption. In the early 20th century, the British occultist Aleister Crowley revisioned the goddess Babalon as an emblem of ego annihilation through passionate union with all of existence and the sacredness of the sexual impulse.

Today, magical practitioners are (re)envisioning Babalon as a wellspring of feminine sexual force. This session will utilize the goddess Babalon as a starting point for an exploration of the stakes of fem(me)inine embodiment, essentialism and anti-essentialism, and the different ways in which sexual magic and art may be used to formulate new and radical visions of femininity and the erotic.

Manon Hedenborg White, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at Karlstad University, and author of The Eloquent Blood: The Goddess Babalon and the Construction of Femininities in Western Esotericism (Oxford University Press, 2020). She is co-director of the Esotericism, Gender, and Sexuality Network (ESOGEN). Her research focuses on modern occultism, with an emphasis on questions of gender, sexuality, and authority.

Amodali is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and practitioner of sexual magic. She has investigated the metaphysics, phenomenology, and practice of sexual magic for over thirty years through the development of a post-Thelemic interpretation of the Goddess Babalon, which is used to excavate psycho-physical aspects of sacred femininity and occult anatomy she considers unformulated/underexplored within the Western magical tradition. She uses extended vocal techniques, ritual performance, collage, and sculpture to ground and communicate sexual trance states and embodied magical consciousness. Her practice is extended through writings on the magic of Babalon in relation to feminism, queer sexuality, and new materialism.