A follower of Thelema, the new religious movement established by the English occultist Aleister Crowley, she was married to rocket pioneer and fellow Thelemite Jack Parsons.

Born in Belle Plaine, Iowa, Cameron volunteered for service in the United States Navy during the Second World War, after which she settled in Pasadena, California.

There she met Parsons, who believed her to be the "elemental" woman that he had invoked in the early stages of a series of sex magic rituals called the Babalon Working.

Returning to Los Angeles, Cameron befriended the socialite Samson De Brier and established herself within the city's avant-garde artistic community.

From the late 1970s until her death from cancer in 1995, Cameron lived in a bungalow in West Hollywood, where she raised her daughter and grandchildren, pursued her interests in esotericism, and produced artwork and poetry.

Initially sent to a training camp at Iowa State Teachers College in Cedar Falls, she was subsequently posted to Washington, D.C., where she served as a cartographer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

[13] In Pasadena, Cameron ran into a former colleague, who invited her to visit the large American Craftsman-style house where he was currently lodging, 1003 Orange Grove Avenue, also known as "The Parsonage".

[14] Unbeknownst to Cameron, Parsons had just finished a series of rituals using Enochian magic with his friend and lodger L. Ron Hubbard, all with the intent of attracting an "elemental" woman to be his lover.

On October 19, 1946, he and Cameron married at the San Juan Capistrano courthouse in Orange County, in a service witnessed by his best friend Edward Forman.

[20] Having an aversion to all religion, Cameron initially took no interest in Parsons' Thelemite beliefs and occult practices, although he maintained that she had an important destiny, giving her the magical name of "Candida", often shortened to "Candy", which became her nickname.

[25] By March 1951, Parsons and Cameron had moved to the coach house at 1071 South Orange Grove, while he began work at the Bermite Powder Company, constructing explosives for the film industry.

[38] There is inconclusive evidence that she was institutionalized in a psychiatric ward during this period, before having a brief affair with African-American jazz player Leroy Booth, a relationship that would have been illegal at the time.

[39] At some point in this period, she stayed with the Thelemite Wilfred Talbot Smith and his wife,[40] although he thought that she had "bats in the belfry" and ignored what he described as her "Mad Mental Meanderings".

[44] Over time, many of Cameron's associates within The Children distanced themselves from her, in particular because of her increasingly apocalyptic pronouncements; she claimed that Mexico was about to conquer the U.S., that a race war was about to break out in the Old World, and that a comet would hit the Earth, and that a flying saucer would rescue her and her followers and take them to Mars.

[49] After using the Chinese divination text the I Ching, Cameron returned to Los Angeles, moving in with Booth until the duo were arrested for illegal drug possession.

[51] Released on bail, she moved into Druks' Malibu home, and through her joined the avant-garde artistic circle surrounding the socialite Samson De Brier.

[58] In autumn 1956, Cameron's first exhibition was held, at Walter Hopps's studio in Brentwood; several paintings were destroyed when the gallery caught fire.

[77] In the latter part of the 1960s, Cameron and her daughter moved to the pueblos of Santa Fe, New Mexico,[78] where she developed a friendship with sculptor John Chamberlain and appeared in his art movie, Thumb Suck, which was never released.

[82] From there she and her daughter moved to a small bungalow on North Genesee Avenue in the West Hollywood area of Los Angeles, which at the time had become impoverished and associated with crime, sex stores, and adult movie theatres; she remained there for the rest of her life.

[86] Cameron became a regular practitioner of Tai chi, took part in group sessions in Bronson Park under the tutelage of Marshall Ho'o, and earned a teaching certificate in the subject.

[89] As well as entertaining old friends who came to visit her in her home,[90] Cameron also met with younger occultists, such as the Thelemite William Breeze and the industrial musician Genesis P-Orridge.

It included a selection of her paintings and a screening of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and The Wormwood Star, while Cameron attended to provide a candle-lit reading of her poetry.

[94] She died at the age of 73 in the VA Medical Center on July 24, 1995,[95] and underwent the Thelemic last rites, carried out by a high priestess of Ordo Templi Orientis.

[97] The fashion writer Tim Blanks noted that Cameron was "a charismatic woman" active in the mid-20th century "macho art world", and that it was not surprising how "alluring and dangerous" she must have seemed to Hopper and Stockwell.

[103] According to Priscilla Frank, writing for The Huffington Post, Cameron's artwork merges "Crowley's occult with the surrealism and symbolism of French poets, yielding dark yet whimsical depictions buzzing with otherworldly power".

[104] The art curator Philippe Vergne described her work as being on "the edge of surrealism and psychedelia", embodying "an aspect of modernity that deeply doubts and defies cartesian logic at a moment in history when these values have shown their own limitations".

[104] Lunenfeld compared Cameron's black and white pen-and-ink drawings to those of the English artist Aubrey Beardsley, noting that she was capable of a "ferocious, paradoxical line work—simultaneously precise and seductively unrestrained—that functions as both figurative depiction and unabashed emotional talisman".

[105] He also discussed her lost multi-coloured watercolour paintings that were featured in Harrington's The Wormwood Star, suggesting that they were akin to a storyboard for an unrealised film by the director Alejandro Jodorowsky.

[98] Cameron's life was brought to wider attention through the publication of two biographies about Parsons: John Carter's Sex and Rockets and George Pendle's Strange Angel.

[118] Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Steffie Nelson noted that Kansa did "his due diligence tracking down Cameron's childhood acquaintances and friends" but at the same time was critical of the lack of sources or footnotes.