SCHOOL IS FER JERKS

Jack Parsons had come to believe that Christianity was the enemy of civilization, of humanity, and that it had to be destroyed. Parsons felt that, as the Antichrist, he could summon forth Babalon(the Scarlet Women of the Apocalypse and consort of the Great Beast 666) and instigate the coming upheaval of western civilization. Parsons was not anti-Christian per se, as his writings demonstrate; he believed that the real Christ, however, had been hidden and buried beneath mainstream Christianity and that codified Christianity as false, whereas the Gnostic version was true. Parsons realized that Christianity's power lay in its simplicity of message and symbol, and that the failure of hermetic cults such as the Gnostics derived from their complexity and intellectual demands. He dreamed for a way to promote a more magickal, more Thelemic spiritual revolution and sought a simple message and symbol... but stumbled on the catch-22 of the Scarlet Women, Great Beast, and Antichrist, symbols that had been created by the Church and which contain a built in failure mechanism: whoever attests to being anti-Christian becomes part of the Christian duality, part of the problem. In a sense, that person revitalizes that which he opposes. Satanists, for example, are part of the Christian continuum for it was the Church that created Satan. Buddhists are not Satanists; nor are Hindus, Daoists, or members of other non-Christian religions. But Parsons was working within what was essentially a Christian-or Judeo-Christian-tradition and could not extricate himself from its symbols, try as he might.
-PL