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Marjorie Cameron

People · Articulation · 1922–1995 · documented

The artist who connects the crown to the film rail — Parsons’s widow, Anger’s collaborator, and the person whose arrival Parsons read as a result.123

Documented connection

Cameron married Jack Parsons; her arrival at the Parsonage in 1946 was read by Parsons as the elemental his Babalon Working had summoned — his interpretation, recorded in his own text, not an established fact. After Parsons’s death in 1952 she lived with Kenneth Anger, introduced him to Crowley’s work, and appeared in the underground films that carried the Parsons milieu onto the screen — Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) and Curtis Harrington’s Wormwood Star (1956) and Night Tide (1961). Anger called her, plainly, “a genuine witch.”

Asserted intent — firewalled

That Cameron was the elemental the working called is Parsons’s belief, quarantined here as his claim. What is documented is a marriage, a widowhood, a collaboration, and a body of film work — the connective tissue of the LA occult-film lattice, stated as such.

Role in the thesis

The living bridge of the rail: through one artist, the aerospace-occultist’s household (Parsons) and the underground-cinema-and-rock lattice (Anger, the Stones) are the same circle of people. The connection is documented and dense; what it is often made to mean is not.

  1. Kenneth Anger, AnOther Magazine interview — Cameron as 'a very good friend who was also, without any doubt, a genuine witch… married to Jack Parsons'; after Parsons's death 'Marjorie and I lived together and studied the Crowleyian teachings' — https://www.anothermag.com/design-living/14890 ↩︎

  2. Spencer Kansa, Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron (2011) — biography; her role in the 1946 Babalon Working and her film work with Anger and Curtis Harrington ↩︎

  3. Filmography of record — Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954); Curtis Harrington's Wormwood Star (1956) and Night Tide (1961) ↩︎

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  • The Links Hold — “After Parsons's death his widow, the artist Marjorie Cameron, lived with the filmmaker Kenneth Anger, introduced him to Crowley's work, and appeared in the underground films that carried the Pasadena milieu onto the screen and out toward the rock counterculture — Anger's Invocation of My Demon Brother ran a Mick Jagger score over footage of the Rolling Stones.”