Andrew WK revisited: Babalon

An exhaustive deep-dive into the hermetic and occult symbolism in Andrew WK's video for the single, Babalon

I desperately wish that I could talk to Frater AWK. For a guy whose public persona is so outgoing and charismatic, he guards his privacy with a rare determination. What you see on the screen and up on the stage is the persona that he allows you to see. Like most magicians of note -- Crowley, Spare -- he self-mythologizes, so that the person you see is a manifestation of his Will. It's fascinating shit, man. I've talked a bit before about the magical qualities of Andrew WK but his new single, Babalon, is more on-the-nose than usual.

The Babalon egregore varies, depending on who you ask. The Babalon of Crowley wasn't the Babalon of Parsons. To me, for instance, she's Sophia, the Sephirah Binah, the Virgin Mary, and Mary Magdalene; the lens from which order is made from chaos. The emanations from Kether are given voice in Chokmah but given form by means of language in Binah. She's the third step in creation that determines the three dimensions of patterns and thrusts the divine will across the abyss and down into the Kingdom where it's made to manifest. To Andrew, though, she seems to be an inversion of that. If you're climbing the tree back to the Ain Soph, at least by my model, then you're going to face Babalon and ultimately pass through where rather than bring chaos to order, the order ends up dispersed on the other side of the lens. You become scattered. But it's Andrew we're talking about here, so who knows (WK)?

It stands to reason, however, that Andrew likely intends this to be an invocation. I'm sure that he's intended for some of his songs in the past to be such a thing, but this is the first time he really let his guard down and made it obvious to folks that are tuned into the current that this is what he's doing. Now consider that the lyrics to this song, an invocation of Babalon, are going to be taken on the road. Covid is making live music a fond memory of the distant past but there will come a time when Andrew goes back on tour. Andrew, like, most magicians could perform this invocation on his own, with his own energy. Andrew could put this song out for everyone else to sing along with and by extension, perform the invocation. But what happens when Andrew goes on tour and performs this in front of an audience that he has already whipped up into an ecstatic frenzy? I talked about this about in my old Andrew WK post that being at his show and getting caught up in the energy is one hundred percent a major shift in consciousness. Andrew leads the invocation in this setting. Everyone is already going nuts and their energy output is at a peak and they all start singing along with Andrew. The invocation is set to some seriously soaring music that is going to raise the vibe in the room to crazy levels. Now imagine that Andrew does this night after night at every stop on the tour. Whatever it is he's trying to do with this working is going to manifest in a crazy way and it'll likely bleed into the lives of every person that takes part in the ritual whether they know they're doing magic or not. Fuck me, man. This is awesome.

So what exactly is Andrew trying to express here? What is his intention with all of this? Let's take a look at that crazy-ass video.

This is obviously a riff on Michael Jackson's opening blurb from the Thriller video. Though, some time back around the time Andrew was touring his second record, The Wolf, I'd heard that he had been in some kind of car accident that resulted in a head injury. Now, it's impossible to know what's real and what's not when it comes to Andrew but it was right around this time that things started getting... weird for Andrew WK. The Wolf is more like a gigantic rock and roll pep talk where I Get Wet, the previous record, was a hymn to the party gods. The video features Andrew, frequently accompanied by a dummy dressed up to be him. Since the alleged car crash, this "other Andrew" has been a consistent theme explored in his music. Songs like I Want Your Face, the incredibly strange video for I'm A Vagabond - which features someone that looks like Andrew but isn't - and the video for Ever Again, where an Andrew lookalike rocks out.. Who is Kristine Williams? I have no idea. She's likely not a real person since Andrew is constantly playing with themes of opposites and it's hard to ignore her initials being WK backwards. A female persona of Andrew, maybe? I'd encountered my own feminine persona in pathworking rituals, after all.

Edit: After talking to one of the party dudes on the AWK discord, I learned that Babalon (and I’m In Heaven) video director, Phem C. Palmer is an acrostic for PCP and so is Personally Caused Psychological.

This detail stood out to me like Andrew just being a troll. When seen on the counter in the bathroom, the bottle is labeled Adrenochrome, but later on, the bottle is show in close-up and has the above label... which is an anagram for Adrenochrome. Qanon conspiracy nuts are going to run wild with that one. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and this could be Andrew trying to insert himself into the zeitgeist for a little press from the paranoid Christian right. Then again... Adrenochrome usage is -- it's not what those Pizzagate psychos think it is, but it is a real drug -- attributed to a psychological effect called derealization... which is also caused by head injuries.

3-D glasses play a role in the video, as do the colors red and blue. 3-D glasses provide the illusion that 2-D images on a screen have a quality of depth to them. These old stereoscopic glasses are lost to history in the face of new 3-D glasses which allow for images on a screen to appear to have gradients of depth, meaning that when they spring off the screen, they appear to have contour and shape where these old glasses simply gave the illusion of parallax 2-D planes being nearer and further to the viewer. They create an illusion that what you're looking at is more than it actually is. The thing that Andrew is most-often seen doing with these glasses in the video is taking them off. Andrew is taking off the glasses to see the illusion for what it is: This universe is a prison and by doing this, he's making the first overtures toward a cosmic prison-break. If we go back to my personal model of Babalon, by the point the divine emanations reach her, she's giving form and pattern to the emanation. But if Andrew is climbing the tree, his intention is reverse the process and disperse the form into the nebulous second stage of creation.

The red and blue leitmotif are doing double-duty here. Typically, when we consider the Hermetic poles, we think of them in terms of black and white. Boaz and Jachin, right? Franz Bardon does not. His primary Hermetic expression of opposites is in the red and blue. The electrical and magnetic "fluids" of his philosophy are best expressed in red and blue. Bardon is a bit a of deep cut but I honestly wouldn't put it past Andrew to have been taking in the work of that particular magus. Bardon's system of magic always struck me as needlessly complex. Magic is already pretty heady shit, but without a personal cosmology of any kind, ol' Frabato layered his crazy-abstract current onto an already abstract current. It's as though he looked at what A.A. was getting up to and declared them posers.

The other function, as will be seen, is that the blue and red colors are the typical expression of all things Hermetic having to do with the principles of fire and water. The two remaining elements, air and earth, are most-often repped by yellow and green, respectively, but the green of earth is often used as convenient shorthand for four colors: earthy tones or fallen versions of the three higher colors, so a sort of burnt orange, earthy green, mustard yellow, and black, as seen at the bottom of the traditional Rose Cross design.

Speaking of the rose cross, there it is. I'd also like to point out that in the press release for the video, as seen here, the video's conceptual direction is credited to Michael R.C. who, like Kristine Williams, likely doesn't exist and is an alias for Andrew or some being that Andrew channeled in order to gather the symbolism for the video. You know? Michael the Archangel and R.C., aka Rosae Crusis, the Rose Cross. In the video, we get a quick clip of Andrew sitting at the center of a representation of the Rose Cross, surrounded by large Lego bricks of their appropriate color.

There are some other assorted symbols, which I thought were significant.

I realize that this next observation is a bit of a stretch, but hear me out. In a couple of spots in the video, codes of numbers of letters flash quickly and then are gone. I'm a web developer by trade, so these jumped out at me as likely Hex codes for colors. Color plays a large part in this video. So I put the CCCC00 and DDD000 into a color calculator and discovered that they're both Hex codes for different shades of yellow. The zeroes are either absent in the video to obscure their meaning or it symbolizes nothingness by way of zero in a Kabbalistic sense. It's also a hex code, so the string needs to be six-alphanumerics long. Also, what symbol is holy as fuck to people who work in the Western Esoteric Tradition? The Hexagram. The last two in the gallery you could be forgiven for thinking were dates. Did something significant happen in those years? Certainly. But to our point, if you add two trailing zeroes, you get two shades of green. The yellow code appears over Andrew's mouth, where air and sound comes forth. The green appears on the snare drum, a stand-in for the earth.

There is elemental harmony in all things natural. So, with all the red and blue in this video, Andrew would be performing this ritual in an incomplete state without representing the other two elements. Alchemically, water and fire symbolically combine to form the air element and those three elements coalesce into all of creation at the bottom of the rose cross. This color code for Earth also appears in Kabbalah in the Sephirah Malkuth, the symbolic end of the line for creative emanations from God.

Throughout the video, there's a dummy of Andrew (or is it? Sometimes he looks like a real dude). Andrew seems to struggle with it. It appears in the mirror, behind the mirror, sometimes he's fighting with it, other times it looks like he's jacking off with it. Could the dummy be a representation of the gnostic Lower Andrew? If you're down with what I'm up to, then you know what I'm talking about. The person writing this is the lower me. The person reading this is the lower you. We're the dumb-matter reflections of our perfect higher selves. In the video, Andrew places band-aids over his tattoos. Could it be a symbolic breaking of individualization? The tattoos set him apart. No one has them. Only him. By symbolically removing them, he seems to remove that thing which sets him apart from others. When living Andrew kills the dummy Andrew, is the higher-self destroying the lower and ascending to God? Again, who knows (WK)? Only Andrew, and he's not talking.

The video ends on this note. For a lot of us gnostics, we recognize that our individual consciousness, though a useful tool for making this life interesting and worthwhile, is ultimately a fallen thing and that our true place in the cosmos is out beyond Kether in the everlasting light. It's one of the reasons I chose the magical name Pera. Pera is a Greek word which means beyond. I don't belong here. None of us do. The reality that we experience, when compared to the purity of Ain Soph Aur is a fucking nightmare. The world is a beautiful thing. Don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those Cathar gnostics that sees all material stuff as the embodiment of evil. But let's face it. Life can be a real fucking nightmare even for those of us blessed with the easiest lives.

It has been brought to my attention that "Consciousness hasn't opened reality, only nightmares. Zone-out now." Is an acrostic which spells CHORONZON. This all dovetails cleanly with my hypothesis that this song -- and maybe even the entire forthcoming record -- are a working toward the crossing the abyss.

Chaos is a loaded word. A lot of folks recoil in horror at the thought. As though disorder is the worst thing imaginable. But chaos is the state of being before order is imposed upon it. In order for anything to manifest, it needs that order but in the span of time that it exists in a state of chaos, it exists in a state of pure possibility. Anything can happen depending on which way the wind blows. But for those of us trying to break free of Samsara, we want that dissolution. The video, to me, seems to be the material and symbolic components that Andrew needed to accompany the invocation of Babalon. He's taking the Oath of the Abyss here. By summoning her, he can destroy his ego and face Choronzon successfully. We, as fans, are all taking part in his quest to ascend to perfect gnosis.

I wish him luck.

It was also brought to my attention by a Redditor that the length of the video is 4:18 and I would be remiss in not pointing out that the Hebrew phrase, Abrahadabra, has a gematria value of 418.

It also occurred to me while listening to the lyrics in the second verse when Andrew invokes Persephone he says:

To err is divine

But that's not the phrase. The phrase is 'to err is human'. Andrew is a Crowley devotee, though, so let's consider for a moment the possibility that this is a play on words. Crowley was always going on like this. Dude wasn't a terribly great poet but his writing is occasionally peppered with funny turns of phrase and messages hidden otherwise innocuous phrases. For instance, the Ministry record, Psalm 69, had me puzzled forever. The way to succeed or the way to suck eggs isn't just some bonkers sentence. He's talking about 69-ing but you have to reconsider the word succeed and make it suck seed. Get it. I know. Edgy blue comedy in the age of tight British values wasn't terribly sophisticated but it follows that Andrew may not be referring to Persephone in this instance but the Greek goddess Eris, the goddess of disorder and chaos. This theory would certainly be consistent with the lyrics and notions of dispersal.

To Eris divine

It explains the appearance of a golden apple in the video. This thought occurred to me while listening to the Occult Confessions podcast episode about Discordians and The Church of the Subgenius.