September 17

Rocket Woman: The Forgotten Magic of Barbara Canright

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Barbara Canright died in Seattle on September 17th, 1997, at the age of seventy-seven, having spent the better part of six decades as a genuinely forgotten figure in the history of American rocketry. In 1939, she became the first female mathematician employed at what would eventually become NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, calculating the thrust-to-weight ratios and propellant potential that helped turn a small Caltech experiment nicknamed the “Suicide Squad” into a serious national rocket program. She's remembered today, when she's remembered at all, largely through Nathalia Holt's magnificent and important 2016 book Rise of the Rocket Girls. What that book, and most retellings since, tend to underplay is the other institution Canright joined during those same working years, one considerably stranger than a government rocket lab.

Canright and her husband Richard, both early hires at the fledgling rocket program, were introduced to the Agape Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis by their own JPL colleague Jack Parsons, the same brilliant, volatile chemist whose own double life as rocket engineer and ceremonial magician has become one of the more famous stories in twentieth-century occultism. The Canrights weren't casual visitors; both were formally initiated into the Order at Agape Lodge on July 18th, 1942, according to Martin P. Starr’s documented history of the lodge, becoming genuine students of Thelema during the same period Barbara was calculating rocket propellant formulas by day. It's a detail that rarely makes it into popular retellings of either the JPL story or the Parsons story, and it deserves more attention than it usually gets: a working female mathematician, already breaking real professional ground in a field almost entirely closed to women, was simultaneously deep enough into ceremonial magic to undergo formal initiation.

Canright's JPL career ended in 1943, not by choice but by the plain absence of maternity leave; upon becoming pregnant with her first child, she had no option but to resign from a position she'd genuinely excelled in. Macie Roberts, who eventually took over supervising the JPL computing group, went on to build an all-female hiring policy specifically because she doubted any man she hired would treat female colleagues as equals, a policy shaped directly by watching what happened to women like Canright. Barbara and Richard divorced in 1964 after twenty-six years of marriage, and her own later life, like much of her earlier one, went largely undocumented until her daughter Patricia Canright Smith and Holt’s research began recovering it.

Canright's story deserves to be told in full: a woman who helped launch American rocketry as one of its first professional mathematicians, who simultaneously pursued a genuine, documented initiation into ceremonial magic alongside her JPL colleagues, and whose career was cut short not by any lack of ability but by an era with no real place for a pregnant scientist. Both halves of that life were real.

Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the same Agape Lodge current that connected Canright to Jack Parsons, we're recommending an anthology carrying Parsons’s own voice directly to readers.

Rebellion

With contributions by Aleister Crowley, Israel Regardie, Jack Parsons, Timothy Leary, William S. Burroughs, and Osho Rajneesh, introduction by Lon Milo DuQuette | New Falcon Publications

This anthology gathers original writing from a genuinely eclectic roster of twentieth-century countercultural and occult voices, Jack Parsons's own contribution included, organized around a shared theme of individual rebellion against inherited authority and convention. Reading Parsons directly, in his own words, alongside figures like Crowley and Regardie situates the Agape Lodge milieu Canright briefly entered as a genuine intellectual and spiritual current, not merely a strange footnote to her rocketry career. Lon Milo DuQuette's introduction helps frame the collection's genuinely wide range of contributors as a coherent conversation about individual will and resistance to convention, the same broad current of thought that drew serious, credentialed professionals like the Canrights toward formal occult initiation in the first place.

This is a multi-voice anthology rather than a dedicated history of Agape Lodge specifically, and readers wanting the fuller documented story of Canright, Parsons, and the lodge should pair it with a dedicated biographical source. But for readers of this magazine curious what actually drew a working rocket mathematician toward ceremonial magic, hearing directly from one of the men who brought her into it is a genuinely worthwhile place to start.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" 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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