Magickal Women Conference
The Garment of Galvah – Image by Amodali
The Magickal Women Conference, organised by Sue Terry and Erzebet Barthold will take place in London next June 1st. The conference will offer an important platform for women to meet, debate and share their work. There is an incredible roster of speakers, workshops and activities scheduled for this one day event, lead by Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki as headline speaker and keynote speaker Christina Oakley Harrington. I’m honoured that my proposal was selected and will be giving a talk (details below).
The Garment of Galvah: Exploring the Erotic Wisdom Body of Babalon in Practice
During the 16th Century scrying sessions undertaken by John Dee and Edward Kelley that produced the so-called Enochian magical system, the female, angelic intelligence Galvah declared that “true wisdom is always painted with a woman’s garment”. From this quote and the wider Enochian corpus it can be inferred that correspondences may exist between the Wisdom Body of Galvah as representing an emanation of the divine feminine and the Gnostic Sophia (Wisdom), and the complex garb of the goddess epitomised by the mysterious Veils of Isis, symbolising the mysteries of creation. An erotic dimension inherent within the Enochian, feminine current is confirmed when Dee and Kelley encounter the ‘Daughter of Fortitude’ (identified with the Whore of Revelation and the Thelemic Babalon by many present day academics/practitioners), who forcefully affirms the initiatic imperative and primordial nature of her distinctively sexual wisdom. Centuries later, the descriptions of Babalon in Aleister Crowley’s Liber 418 and Jack Parson’s Liber 49 establish her provenance as an Enochian intelligence and role as an avatar of embodied sexual gnosis. Thus it can be construed that the Enochian universe represents an important source of feminine sex-magical wisdom. However, cohesive models of the occult anatomy of Babalon that would support the technical development of progressive sex-magical practices have been elusive.
In this talk/slideshow, Amodali will present a personal interpretation of the magical multi-layered architecture of the ‘Garment of Galvah’, and how it relates to the female body and subtle anatomy as developed over thirty years of practice as a Priestess of Babalon. Amodali uses an experiential, heuristic and reflexive methodology in her practice, based upon direct experiences of communion with Babalon through invocation and trance/possession techniques. The initiatic remit implicit within the Babalon current suggests that women may define and communicate its sex-magical knowledge system from an empowered independent position, within a movement that renegotiates ontological structures and magical formulas within its organisation. Also, as the complex phenomenology and magical cultivation of women’s sexual response and analogous altered states of consciousness within magical settings and practices is sparsely researched and recorded, it’s suggested that the articulation, unveiling or uncovering (apokálypsis) of radical, innovative configurations of magical sexuality by women is an essential aspect of the Babalon or ‘156 Current’. Amodali’s findings suggest that the magic of Babalon offers ingress into a promising but highly challenging sex-magical knowledge system which possesses a specific arrangement of subtle architecture and energetic/kinetic dynamics — powered by magical forms of Status Orgasmus and grounded in a complex alchemical process. By which the central mysteries of the 156 Current as defined by Crowley’s Liber CLVI can be reinterpreted and developed into a sacrament actively formulated and given in initiation by Women.