Jack Parsons: Celebrating the Rocket-Powered Prophet of the Apocalypse
And ‘yes’ you can’t trust L. Ron Hubbard.
A few days ago (on the 17th June) we saw the 70th anniversary of the mysterious death of American space exploration pioneer and occultist Jack Parsons. Who Jack?
John Marvel Whiteside Parsons (1914–1952) universally known as Jack, was an American chemist, rocket engineer, and follower of the Thelema religious movement devised by Aleister Crowley.
Parsons was one of the principal founders of both Aerojet Engineering, later a major NASA contractor, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, now part of NASA, and in the 1930s and 1940s he pioneered the development of both liquid-fuel and solid-fuel rockets. His work at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) was so dangerous and involved so many explosions that Parsons and his colleagues were known as the ‘Suicide Squad’.
Scandals and the mysterious circumstances of his death would see Parsons written out of the history of rocketry but in later years his reputation was rehabilitated and he was described as one most important figures ‘in modern rocketry and the foundation of the American space program’. The crater Parsons on the dark side of the Moon was named after him in 1972.
Along with his scientific work, Parsons also had an interest in the occult, converting to Thelema and joining the Agape Lodge, the Californian branch of Crowley’s esoteric organisation the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO). By 1942 he was the leader of the lodge. Parsons’ view was humans were prevented from reaching their true potential because of fear, writing:
The Will must be freed of its fetters. The ruthless examination and destruction of taboos, complexes, frustrations, dislikes, fears and disgusts hostile to the Will is essential to progress.
By the mid-1940s Parsons’ private life started to implode: he had an an affair with his wife’s sister and she in turn had an affair with L. Ron Hubbard, then still a science fiction writer but later the founder of the Church of Scientology. Hubbard and Parsons would eventually fall out over an alleged fraud but at this time Hubbard was staying at Parsons’ home, known as the Parsonage, and helping Parsons with his magic rituals. To this day the official party line from Scientologists is that Hubbard was actually working as an undercover agent for the US Navy to destroy Parsons’ ‘black magic cult’.
It was at this time that Parsons began the Babalon Working, a series of magic rituals to invoke the manifestation of the Thelemic goddess Babalon, also known as the Scarlet Woman. Parsons was convinced the rituals had been performed correctly when on January 18, 1946 there was a crack of lightning outside the Parsonage.
When Parsons opened the front door Marjorie Cameron was standing there. With her distinctive red hair, Parsons was convinced Cameron was Babalon. It was love and lust at first sight and the couple would then spend the next two weeks together in bed. Cameron and Parsons married later that same year and stayed together in a somewhat turbulent and torrid open relationship until his death in 1952.
While all this was taking place, Parsons’ career was also in free-fall as the combination of the post-war McCarthyism, the ‘Red Scare’ and the investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee, his own flirtations Marxism in the 1930s while at Caltech, allegations of espionage by one of Howard Hughes’ companies, his support for the American Civil Liberties Union, and his alleged advocacy of ‘sexual perversion’ within the OTO, resulted in the FBI permanently revoking his security clearance for working on classified projects — which meant he could no longer work on rocketry in the United States.
Parsons had an offer to work on rocket projects in Israel and while he was pondering his options and reconciling with Cameron after one of their many separations, he set up a company making explosives and pyrotechnics for the movie industry. On June 17 1952, the day before he and Cameron were due to travel to Mexico for a few months vacation, he was killed in a massive explosion at his home laboratory.
The police investigation said it was an accident and closed the case. Others said it was suicide. And yet others, including Cameron, said it was murder. The list of suspects included: Howard Hughes because of the alleged espionage incident; the FBI or anti-Zionists not wanting him to move to Israel; the Los Angeles Police Department because Parsons had once given evidence against them in a corruption case; and the Russian secret services, who also didn’t want him to work for Israel. The cause of Jack Parsons’ death has never been definitively explained. The obituary published in a local Pasadena newspaper said:
John W. Parsons, handsome 37-year-old rocket scientist killed Tuesday in a chemical explosion, was one of the founders of a weird semi-religious cult that flourished here about 10 years ago. Old police reports yesterday pictured the former Caltech professor as a man who led a double existence — a down-to-earth explosives expert who dabbled in intellectual necromancy. Possibly he was trying to reconcile fundamental human urges with the inhuman, Buck Rogers type of innovations that sprang from his test tubes.
But at least he has a crater on the Moon named after him!
