Follow me here. New Zealand native pop-star Lorde is releasing her third album in 8 years. It’s called Solar Power. Her interview with the New York Times includes some interesting comments and commentary:
“‘If you’re looking for a savior,’ she warns, ‘ well that’s not me.’ But she offers a heady alternative: the sun.”
It COULD be that the album title is a clever play on words – “solar power” certainly could mean energy generated via photoelectric panels. It could also mean the Sun’s influence in the world as described via the Solar Phallic mysteries as exposited in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by people like Hargrave Jennings and Maria de Naglowska. I’ll state here that “Solar Phallicism” is a term as regrettable as “defunding” as it seems to imply mere pecker worship when the original authors took pains to explain that it referred to the creative, vivifying force as expressed by both the male and female beings.
Now in Thelemic theology, one of the embodiments of the concept involved is the Goddess Babalon, whose name is said to mean “the gate of the Sun.” Anyone who’s studied these mysteries will have their own theories as to the nature of this gate and what manifestations of life force enter it and proceed from it.
What’s the connection between this concept and Lorde? Well, there’s this album cover – which apparently appears in two versions, both featuring the solar orb behind her strategically aligned – one with a blaze of light both obscuring and expressing that line of transmission from Sun into the world . Hail Babalon!
Listen to the title track:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvsP_lzh2-8.
