The Whore of Babylon

In the Collapsed Cosmos, the Whore of Babylon retreated to the Red Lion Inn like many other mythical or otherwise notable figures. When Jenny Everywhere and Glendalf entered the Inn, she saw the Whore of Babylon advertising her services to Irene Adler. (PROSE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere)

Behind the scenes

“The Whore of Babylon” is a phrase traditionally, but somewhat incorrectly, applied to a female figure in the Biblical Book of Revelation, where she is described as “Mystery, Babylon the Great, Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth”, and depicted as a beautiful woman dressed in golden and scarlet, riding the Great Beast or Devil.

Though the epithet of “Mother of Abominations” is reminiscent of popular depictions of Lilith, and there was of course a real city of some Biblical import called Babylon, it is generally understood that this allegorical figure represents neither an actual demonic entity nor the historical Babylon, nor indeed anything to do with real-life prostitution in any but the most general terms; instead, she is generally interpreted as an allegory the decadent Roman Empire, or more generally for any godless, materialistic human society. Protestant thinkers carried this over to viewing the character as an allegory for the corrupt Catholic Church.

The character's cameo in The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere turns most of this on its head by taking the “Whore of Babylon” as a literal sex worker. Assuming (though this is not explicitly stated) that Jeanne Morningstar's iteration of the figure is still female, it also makes her into a sapphic figure through her apparent pursuit of Irene Adler as a client; this is not the case in the Book of Revelations, where, staying within a literalist reading of the text, she is described as a whore to (male) Kings.

Another work which depicted “the Whore of Babylon” as a character and as a literal (rather than allegorical) prostitute was Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's comical depiction of the Apocalypse in Good Omens, where the seemingly unremarkable aging prostitute and medium “Madame Tracy” ends up present at the climactic scene alongside the Four Horsepeople of the Apocalypse, filling the prophesied part. However, beyond her exceedingly dubious talents as a medium, Madame Tracy is not a supernatural figure, whereas Morningstar's Whore of Babylon character, mentioned alongside such figures as Osiris and Morgan Le Fay, is implicitly a genuinely “mythical” entity.