Yielding Peaches and Women with Whips
This chapter analyzes how Aleister Crowley’s ideas about Babalon and the Scarlet Woman—a title Crowley bestowed upon his most important female lovers and magical partners, designating them earthly representatives of Babalon—developed after 1909, when Crowley increasingly systematized his magical teachings. In 1912, Crowley became British head of Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), an initiatory fraternity claiming to possess the secret of sexual magic, which subsequently became increasingly important to his magical practice. In 1920, Crowley cofounded a religious commune, the Abbey of Thelema, in Cefalù, Sicily, with his lover and disciple Leah Hirsig, who became Crowley’s Scarlet Woman. Later in life, Crowley developed Babalon’s function further in a number of texts. I argue that Crowley’s Babalon—by symbolizing assertive and transgressive feminine sexuality and the erotic threat to stable, bounded subjectivity—both reifies and challenges dominant perceptions of femininity and feminine sexuality in the early twentieth century.