June 17

The Death & Legacy of Jack Parsons

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He had a rush order of explosives to prepare for a Hollywood film and, on top of that, he and his wife, artist, Marjorie Cameron, were leaving for a vacation to Mexico the next morning.

It was the morning of June 17, 1952, and John Whiteside Parsons—rocket engineer, chemist, Thelemite, co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Aerojet (whose technology would eventually power the Space Shuttle)—was working alone in the laboratory he had built in the laundry room of his Pasadena coach house. Much was on his mind; if things worked out, Mexico would be only the first international trip that would lead to a planned move to Israel. With any luck, there, he could restart a rocketry career the U.S. government had methodically destroyed.

At approximately 5:00 PM, Parsons’ lab exploded—and its lone occupant fatally injured in the blast. He died thirty-seven minutes after the explosion at the age of thirty-seven.. That same evening, his mother Ruth took forty-five Nembutal tablets and died.

The investigation ruled the death accidental. Many of those who knew him best were not convinced.

The Rocketeer

Marvel Whiteside Parsons—known as “Jack” since childhood—was born on October 2, 1914 in Los Angeles, the son of a wealthy, “old money” family that collapsed almost immediately upon his birth. His father abandoned the family when Jack was an infant, leaving him to be raised by his mother, Ruth, and her parents “Millionaire's Mile”—Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena, in a household of domestic servants and largely absent adults. By all accounts, Parsons was a solitary child and was often left to his own devices, usually occupying himself through books and science-fiction stories that fueled his imagination.

But, as would be the story of his life, the combination of imagination and a boyish precociousness led him down a strange path: at only age thirteen years old, he performed a ritual intended to invoke the Devil in his bedroom. The following year, Parsons and his best friend, neighborhood chum Edward Forman, adopted a Latin motto: per aspera ad astra—“through hardship to the stars”—and began firing homemade rockets in the backyard and, later, Arroyo Seco canyon. Even as boys, the duo’s dynamic was set, with Forman as the machinist and Jack as the chemist. Before long, the family garden was peppered with craters from failed rocketry tests, and they were expelled from at least one school for blowing up the toilets. Notably, neither of them ever earned a university degree—and yet, they would go on to co-found two of the most significant aerospace institutions in American history.

Despite their adventurous natures (and lack of formal educations), within six years, Parsons and Forman got the attention of Caltech mathematician Frank Malina and the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory Rocket Research Group. Calling themselves the “Suicide Squad” (yup, they originated the term), and with ample justification: their experiments had a tendency to explode at inopportune moments, scorching facilities and terrifying their colleagues. Regardless, Caltech's aeronautics chairman, Theodore Von Kármán, saw something in them and provided them with office space and the resources to continue their work.

Despite modern NASA’s reluctance to fully embrace the controversial historical figure that Parsons ultimately became, his contributions to aerospace science can’t be overstated; working with liquid asphalt as a binding agent and potassium perchlorate as oxidizer, he single-handedly invented the first castable composite solid rocket propellant—“GALCIT-53”—which proved significantly more stable, powerful, and storable than anything that had come before it. This single invention, as his biographer John Carter has accurately noted, “changed the future of rocket technology.” In fact, plasticized variants of Parsons' original designs were later used in the Space Shuttle's solid rocket boosters—as well as in Polaris, Poseidon, and Minuteman ballistic missiles.

Soon, Parsons and company founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory [JPL] in the Arroyo Seco canyon, right where he and Foreman started their journey as children years earlier. Yet, Parsons’ extracurricular activities were soon becoming more than a curiosity to his friends and co-workers; he was working with the U.S. military now, after all. Unknown to those outside his inner social circle, Parsons was already devouring the works of Aleister Crowley with as much enthusiasm as he did the science-fiction pulps, with a particular love of Konx om Pax. During rocket tests at Caltech, Parsons was known to dramatically recite Crowley's “Hymn to Pan”—an extension of his evolving belief that rocketry and ceremonial magic were not two separate pursuits but, rather, two expressions of the same fundamental drive: the human refusal to accept the boundaries of the material world. His behavior began to attract notice…

The Agape Lodge

In January 1939, a friend took Parsons to the Church of Thelema on Winona Boulevard in Hollywood—run by Wilfred Talbot Smith. There, he witnessed his first Gnostic Mass and, in February of 1941, he and his wife, Helen, were initiated into the Agape Lodge of the O.T.O.; true to his boundless ambition, within a year, Parsons had replaced Smith, and was running it.

What could have been viewed as form of spiritual mutiny instead was, surprisingly, accepted by all involved; the orders had come from Aleister Crowley himself. Upon Parsons’ initial initiation into the Agape Lodge, Crowley had written to Smith from London that Parsons was “the most valued member of the whole Order, with no exception.” One of the Lodge’s founders, actress and experienced Thelemite Jane Wolfe even mooted him as a potential successor as Outer Head of the Order. (Wolfe’s was not false flattery: Parsons had thrown himself into the work with the same energy and focus with which he approached his chemistry and rocketry, giving almost his entire salary to the Lodge, and proactively recruiting new members—and financing Crowley in London.

Parsons soon converted his entire mansion into the new Lodge, playfully renaming it “the Parsonage,” and inviting his fellow members to live communally on the grounds. He decorated it with a copy of the Stele of Revealing, a statue of Pan, and his own personal collection of swords and daggers. Science fiction writers, aerospace engineers, bohemians, occultists, and the occasional FBI informant moved through its rooms. In late 1945, a significantly more memorable visitor arrived, heralding what would become the end of Parsons’ reign: L. Ron Hubbard—science fiction writer, U.S. Navy officer, and one of the most accomplished con men of the twentieth century—moved into the Parsonage. Parsons, with his bounding love of both the esoteric and of fantasy fiction, welcomed him with open arms; he wrote to Crowley that Hubbard had “an extraordinary amount of experience and understanding in the field” of magick and was, by nature, “the most Thelemic person” he had ever met. Only a few months later, the two undertook what Parsons called the “Babalon Working”—an extended series of Enochian magical operations aimed at the incarnation of Babalon (viewed, in Thelema, as the goddess of freedom and liberation in human form, thus inaugurating the Aeon of Horus.) During the intricate ritual, Hubbard served as “scribe,” calling out visions from the astral plane while Parsons performed the sexually-charged workings. The final ritual took place in the Mojave Desert in late February 1946 and, when Parsons returned to Pasadena, he found that a red-haired woman named Marjorie Cameron, an accomplished artist, waiting for him at the front door. He was immediately convinced that the ritual had been a complete success, and viewed

With Cameron at his side, Parsons now had his next magical partner and, early in 1946, the two of them performed a series of sex magic workings together. By that ritual’s conclusion, Parsons believed his Babylon Working to be completed, and received what he claimed was a channeled text, which he entitled, Liber 49, a fourth chapter of Crowley’s The Book of the Law. Back in London, however, Crowley was both bewildered and alarmed at the younger man’s bold hubris. “I am fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts!” he wrote to O.T.O. representative Karl Germer. Hubbard, meanwhile, had absconded to Miami with Sara Northrup—Parsons' former girlfriend—and $10,000 of Parsons' life savings. When it finally dawned on him that he’d been swindled, Parsons flew to Florida and, according to his own account, called Hubbard's yacht back to port through a Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram invoking Bartzabel, the spirit of Mars. He was only able to recover $2,900 of the $20,970 he had invested in his and Hubbard’s jointly-founded used yacht sales company and, ultimately, returned to Los Angeles nearly destitute. (Hubbard, of course, went on to found Dianetics and Scientology, which later claimed that Hubbard had been sent Los Angeles to “infiltrate and destroy Parsons' ‘black magic cult’” as a covert Navy operative.

The Tower

Parsons’ final years were like a train wreck in slow motion: he was dismissed from both the JPL and Aerojet on the insistence of colleagues who considered his occult activities professionally incompatible with his government work (as well as being a rumored Communist sympathizer), and his security clearance was revoked by the FBI, without which he was banned from working in government rocketry research. Although a successful and happy marriage to fellow occultist Cameron gave Parsons a bit of hope, the loss of his mansion and Lodge proved personally devastating. To make ends meet, he brewed absinthe, manufactured pyrotechnics for Hollywood, worked as a car mechanic, and a hospital orderly.

However, Parsons never abandoned his spiritual beliefs. In his final year of his life, he finally completed the Oath of the Abyss, and wrote an accompanying “Oath of the Antichrist,” witnessed by Wilfred Talbot Smith (now married to Parson’s ex-wife, Helen), in which he declared himself “Belarion Armillus Al Dajjal,” the Antichrist who comes to fulfill the law of the Beast. He wrote The Book of AntiChrist, prophesying that within nine years Babalon would manifest on Earth and supersede the dominance of the Abrahamic religions. Remaining politically engaged, he also wrote “Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword,” an essay condemning American authoritarianism, censorship, and antisexualism. However, none of Parsons’ writing was published in his lifetime.

The morning of his death, Parsons was alone in the laboratory when the massive explosion destroyed the bottom level of the new home he shared with Cameron. Amid the rubble, a witness later reported that Parsons’ final words were, “I wasn't finished.” The inquest examined several theories: accident—a dropped canister of fulminate of mercury, which would explain the localized nature of the initial blast; suicide—though those who knew him most closely rejected this, while Cameron, who knew him better than anyone, said flatly that he would not have done it, and was optimistic about their plans for an international move; and murder—the FBI had been watching him, Israeli intelligence was interested in him. However, the inquest ruled it an accidental death and Parsons file was swiftly closed.

Today, a crater on the Moon is named for Parsons, and the JLP still occupies sixty-one acres in the hills above Pasadena. The Space Shuttle's solid rocket boosters burn fuel whose design descends directly from GALCIT-53, and every American intercontinental ballistic missile carries a debt to his chemistry. However, none of these posthumous achievements were what Jack Parsons was really trying to do.

He was just trying to reach the stars.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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