Wormwood Star

In the first-ever biography written about her, Wormwood Star traces the extraordinary life of the enigmatic artist Marjorie Cameron, one of the most fascinating figures to emerge from the American underground art world and film scene.

Born in Belle Plaine, Iowa, in 1922, Cameron’s uniqueness and talent as a natural-born artist were evident to many of those around her early on in life. During World War II, she served in the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) and worked in Washington, D.C. as an aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and at the Naval Research Laboratory. But it was after the war that her life really took off when she met her first husband, Jack Parsons. By day, Parsons was a brilliant rocket scientist. By night, he was Master of the Agape Lodge, a fraternal magickal order whose head was the most famous magus of the 20th century... Aleister Crowley.

Gradually, through the course of their marriage, Parsons initiated Cameron into the occult sciences, and the biography offers a fresh perspective on her role in the infamous Babalon Working Enochian rituals Parsons conducted with the future founder of Scientology, L Ron Hubbard. Following Parsons’ death in 1952 from a chemical explosion, Cameron inherited her husband’s magickal mantle and embarked on a lifelong spiritual quest, a journey reflected in the otherworldly images she depicted, many drawn from the Elemental Kingdom and astral plane.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Cameron became a celebrated personality in California’s underground art world and film scene. In 1954, she starred in Kenneth Anger’s visual masterwork Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, stealing the show from her co-star Anais Nin. The director Curtis Harrington was so taken with Cameron he made a film study dedicated to her artwork entitled The Wormwood Star. He then brought her powerful and mysterious presence to bear on his evocative noir thriller Night Tide, casting her alongside a young Dennis Hopper.

Cameron was an inspirational figure to the many artists and poets who congregated around Wallace Berman’s Semina scene and, in 1957, the authorities shut down a group show held at the Ferus Gallery due to the sexually charged nature of one of her drawings. Undaunted, she continued to carve a unique and brilliant path, although wider recognition only came in the latter part of her life.

A retrospective of Cameron’s work, The Pearl of Reprisal, was held at L.A.’s Barnsdall Art Park in 1989, and following her death, some of her most admired pieces were featured in the Reflections of a New Aeon Exhibition at the Eleven Seven Gallery in Long Beach, California. Cameron’s famous Peyote Vision line drawing made its way into the Beat Culture and the New America retrospective held at the Whitney Museum in 1995; and, in 2006, selections of her work were included in the touring Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle show. The following year a survey dedicated exclusively to her own work was held at the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York.

With so much of her life and artistry shrouded in mystery, Wormwood Star sheds new light on this most remarkable artist and elusive occult icon