"Tarot and the Moonchild: The Birthdays of A.E. Waite & Jack Parsons" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "The Two Antichrists"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
October 2
Tarot and the Moonchild: The Birthdays of A.E. Waite & Jack Parsons
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They were born forty-three years and
an ocean apart. On October 2, 1857, in Brooklyn, Arthur Edward Waite
came into the world, and he would spend a long life in London arguing that the
point of the Western mystery tradition was mysticism, not magic. On October 2,
1914, in Los Angeles, a boy named Marvel Whiteside Parsons
was born, and he would spend a very short one proving that a man could design
rocket propellant by day and conjure a goddess by night. Beyond a birthday,
Waite and Jack Parsons share a book, and it isn't one either of them wrote:
Aleister Crowley's 1917 novel Moonchild.
Waite is in it, as a villain. Parsons spent 1946 trying to live inside it. And the popular versions of both men have picked up a few errors along the way…
Waite is routinely called a British
mystic, and that's only half correct. He was born in Brooklyn to Captain
Charles F. Waite, who died at sea while Arthur was very young, and Emma Lovell,
an Englishwoman who took her son home, where he was raised in North London and
brought up Catholic. The death of his sister Frederika in 1874 turned him
toward psychical research, and from there the road ran through Spiritualism and
Theosophy to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which he joined in 1891 and
whose Second Order he entered in 1899, then on to Freemasonry in 1901 and the Societas
Rosicruciana in Anglia in 1902. By 1903 he'd founded an order of his own. His
biographer R.A. Gilbert credits him as the first writer to study Western
occultism's history systematically, as a spiritual tradition rather than a
protoscience or a pathology of religion.
Then there's the deck: The
Rider–Waite-Smith tarot was published in December 1909 by William Rider &
Son of London, and the 1910 date often attached to it belongs more properly to
Waite's companion volume, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot.
The name credits the publisher and the man who supplied the instructions, not
the woman who painted all seventy-eight cards. Pamela Colman Smith,
born in England to American parents and partly raised in Jamaica, received by
most accounts a flat fee rather than royalties or a credit on the cards, which
is why many readers now say Smith–Waite or Rider–Waite–Smith. She left her mark
anyway: her initials appear on the cards in monogram form.
You'll often read that it was the
first tarot with fully illustrated numbered cards, and that isn't true. The Sola
Busca deck, engraved in northern Italy around 1491, already gave every pip
card a scene, and photographs of it reached the British Museum around 1907, two
years before Smith went to work. Several of her minor arcana echo it closely,
and scholars suggest she saw it there. The evidence is resemblance and timing
rather than a signed confession, which is worth saying plainly, but as far as
anyone can tell, the credit for illustrated minors belongs to a Renaissance
deck, not to Rider, Waite, or Smith.
Crowley put Waite in fiction, only
adding to the legend. Moonchild was written in 1917 and not published
until 1929, a roman à clef about a magical war over an unborn child, and
Waite turns up in it as a thinly disguised villain called Arthwaite, the
unseen head of the inner circle to which Mathers' stand-in, SRMD, belongs. The
spelling wobbles between descriptions of the book, Arthwaite in some and Edwin
Arthwait in others, a small reminder of how much of this material travels by
secondhand summary.
Parsons enters through the same
novel. Known all his life as Jack, he never finished college, yet he became a
principal founder of both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Aerojet and
invented the first castable composite solid rocket propellant. Two popular
claims need trimming. He did not found NASA, which didn't exist until 1958; the
GALCIT rocket group he helped start became JPL in 1943. And the crater on the
far side of the Moon that bears his name, conferred by the International
Astronomical Union in 1972, is a real honor, not an occult legend. He joined
the Agape Lodge of Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis in 1941 with his first wife,
Helen, took over its leadership in 1942 at Crowley's direction, and ran it from
a mansion on Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena. By 1944 he was out at both JPL
and Aerojet, pushed by the lodge's reputation and his hazardous habits in the
workplace.
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The “Babalon Working” ran from January to March 1946, and it's often retold as an attempt to birth the Antichrist. Parsons' own Book of Babalon opens more modestly: after seven years of practicing magic, he decided on an operation to obtain an elemental mate, using the Enochian Air Tablet of Dee and Kelley, with L. Ron Hubbard serving as scribe. The larger goal, the incarnation of Babalon and ultimately the moonchild of Crowley's novel, came in stages. Marjorie Cameron, a red-haired artist and former Navy WAVE, arrived at his door soon after, and Parsons took her for the answer. He married her that year.
Crowley was not impressed, to put it
mildly. In a June 14, 1946, letter to Grady McMurtry, he called Hubbard a con
man, said Parsons was acting insanely and dishonorably, and grumbled that
Parsons, Ron, or somebody was producing a moonchild. The line everyone
remembers comes next: he gets fairly frantic contemplating “the idiocy of these
goats,” and then apologizes to goats. You'll also see that line quoted with
louts in place of goats. Copies of the McMurtry letter read goats, while the
louts version is attributed to an April 1946 letter to Karl Germer, and I
haven't seen that letter's wording independently confirmed. Either Crowley said
it twice or the quotation drifted, and it's worth knowing which version you're
repeating.
Parsons died on June 17, 1952, at
thirty-seven, in an explosion in his home laboratory in Pasadena. Police ruled
it an accident, and the standard account has him dropping a vial of fulminate
of mercury, fulminate from the Latin for lightning, mercury the metal named for
Hermes' Roman counterpart. But he'd been accused of espionage during the
McCarthy years and shut out of rocketry, and suicide and assassination theories
have circulated ever since. The record can't settle them, and the honest answer
is that nobody knows.
Set the two men side by side and the
pattern is oddly complementary. Waite, who drifted from ceremonial magic toward
Christian mysticism, was caricatured as a villain in a magician's novel and
remembered for a deck whose painter went uncredited. Parsons, who took that
same novel literally, is remembered for the ritual more than for the rocketry
that earned him a lunar crater. Each is more interesting than the legend that's
grown around him, and neither needed the embellishment. One got written into
Crowley's book, and the other tried to get his ritual out of it.
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 birthday boy who took a novel literally, we're recommending a book that takes his story more seriously than most…
By
Peter Grey | Scarlet Imprint
Peter Grey's The Two Antichrists,
published by Scarlet Imprint in 2021, is a 128-page monograph that returns to
the “Babalon Working” of Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard and reads it against a
shelf of little-examined material Grey calls the Babalon Apocrypha: science
fiction, and texts from the outer fringes of Scientology. Grey, who co-founded
Scarlet Imprint and wrote The Red Goddess and Apocalyptic Witchcraft, is a
practitioner-scholar rather than a neutral biographer, and the book's shape
says so. It opens with the future of witchcraft and its relation to radical
ecology, moves through chapters that set Parsons and Hubbard against each other
as rival figures of Antichrist, and closes with appendices offering revised
Antichrist rites for the working magician.
What makes it worth owning alongside
today's post is how it complicates the story most of us know. The familiar
version, the rocket scientist, the con man, the stolen girlfriend and the
vanished savings, is entertaining and mostly accurate as far as it goes. Grey's
contribution is to ask what else was happening: what Parsons was writing in his
later years, what became of his short-lived fellowship The Witchcraft, and how
the Working lingered in the science fiction and Scientology-adjacent writing
that grew up around it. Out of that he sketches what he calls an emergent space
witchcraft, an odd but genuinely thought-provoking idea for a tradition that
has mostly looked backward.
A few honest cautions. This is a
ritual-magic monograph with a visionary agenda, not a biography, and readers
who want the straight life should start with George Pendle's Strange Angel.
Parsons’ own Book of Babalon is freely available online through the
Hermetic Library, and it's worth reading before, or alongside, Grey, so you can
judge his readings against the source. Scarlet Imprint issued the book in
several editions, including limited hardbacks and a digital edition, so check
the publisher's site for what's currently on offer. And for the loop that ties
both halves of today's post together, keep Crowley's Moonchild open
beside it: read the novel that mocked Waite and inspired Parsons, then read
what a contemporary witch makes of the results.
(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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