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founded by Crowley. Parsons introduced Cameron to various esoteric practices, including kabbalah, tarot, astrology, and the I Ching, and following his mysterious death in 1952, she delved fully into her own explorations of magick and the occult. Cameron’s work as an actor, writer, and artist was greatly influential in the Los Angeles underground; she appeared in several seminal experimental films, including Kenneth Anger’s 1954 film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, and collaborated with Aya (Tarlow), Wallace Berman, George Herms, David Meltzer, and other members of the LA beatnik scene. Activated as visual conduits of Cameron’s own powerful practice as an occultist, her paintings and drawings are deeply influenced by themes of metamorphosis and myth, using line and form to reach into the depths of the psyche to explore “ideas of mystical transcendence.”1 The Lion Path series and Pluto Transiting the Twelfth House are works from later in Cameron’s life and provide glimpses into a kind of mapping of Cameron’s own psyche. In Pluto Transiting the Twelfth House, she specifically cites a position in the zodiac when one begins to reflect on death and past lives [PL. 29]. The Lion Path series references Egyptian astrology and reincarnation [PLS. 46–48]. Created under the spell of hypnosis and employing automatist techniques, both works are contingent with a different kind of consciousness linked to a transcendent transformation of the self. —MH 1
Michael Duncan, “Cameron,” the website of the Cameron-Parsons Foundation Inc., http://www.cameron-parsons.org/cameron.html.
Barbara Chase-Riboud b. 1939, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The representation of world-historical narrative—whether and how to present myth, fact, or feeling—can be seen throughout ChaseRiboud’s sprawling oeuvre, which encompasses both the literary and visual arts. Her six novels, published between 1979 and 2022, all begin with an event or person critical to the history of the Black diaspora. She was the first to write significantly about the 1839 revolt on the Amistad slavers’ ship (Echo of Lions, 1989) and her resurrection of the story of enslaved woman Sally Hemings (Sally Hemings: A Novel, 1979) utilized archival material to describe—against mainstream academic consensus—Hemings’s thirty-eight-year relationship with Thomas Jefferson. Historians disputed Chase-
