Jack Parsons
1914 to 1952
Who was Jack Parsons, and what is truly known of them?
What is known
American rocket chemist, born in Los Angeles, who held no degree. From 1936 he worked with Frank Malina’s group at the California Institute of Technology, which became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; in 1942 he devised the first castable solid rocket fuel and helped found the Aerojet company. In 1941 he joined the Agape Lodge of Aleister Crowley’s order, then in Hollywood and from 1942 in Pasadena, and soon led it. In 1946 he performed a series of rites with L. Ron Hubbard, his partner in a small business; Hubbard left with the firm’s money and with Parsons’s companion, and a Florida court dissolved the partnership that July. He died in an explosion in his home laboratory.
The teaching
Taught from his own writings, The Book of Babalon (1946) and the essays later gathered as Freedom Is a Two-Edged Sword.
The law as liberty
Parsons took Crowley's law as a charter of liberty. Each person's true will is sovereign, and no state, church, crowd or custom has the right to own it. In his essays freedom is a two-edged sword: it gives the individual their own life and asks them to bear it alone, against the herd, its fears and its comfortable morals. The free man or woman, in his teaching, is a danger to every order built on obedience, and that order fears them for it.
Babalon
The goddess of his work is Babalon, the Scarlet Woman of Crowley's system, who rides the beast of the Book of Revelation and holds the cup into which the adept pours out his life. For Parsons she is the free woman and the power of the feminine let loose upon the world: love, passion and the force that breaks the old moralities. His magic was an attempt, as he believed, to bring her from the inner world into the outer.
The working of 1946
In the first months of 1946, at his house in Pasadena, he performed a series of rites with L. Ron Hubbard as his scribe, drawing on the Enochian calls of Dee and Kelley and on the sexual magic of Crowley's order. The first aim was to call an elemental woman to be his partner in the work, and when the artist Marjorie Cameron came to the house soon afterwards he took her for the one called. The further aim, as he told it, was to bring Babalon to birth in the flesh. The house tells the working as his record gives it and teaches none of its means.
The Book of Babalon
In the course of the working, alone in the Mojave desert, he wrote down in the voice of Babalon a text he took to be dictated to him, and called it the fourth chapter of the Book of the Law. In it she speaks of her coming in the flesh, of the woman through whom she is to come, and of what she asks of the magician who serves her. He read it as a commission, and the rest of his short life as its working out.
The witchcraft
In his last years he wrote of witchcraft as the old religion of the free: the craft of the wise woman and the wise man, of nature and the body, which the churches of repression had hunted down. The witch, in his essay, is the woman who will not be owned, and the coming age, he held, would be hers. The feminine power he had sought in the rite of Babalon he found again in the figure of the witch.
What the house leaves aside
The working joined sexual magic to the calls of Dee, and in the years around it Parsons used drugs and kept explosives in his house. The house teaches none of this, and gives one plain caution: rites that strain body and mind, drugs and chemicals are dangerous quite apart from any magic.
Orders and memberships
Joined the Agape Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis in 1941, headed it from 1942 and resigned in 1946. Documented. No other order is recorded.
The legend
That the rites of 1946 opened a door that let something through, a tale tied to the flying-saucer reports of 1947; that his death was murder or suicide, though the police found an accident with mercury fulminate; and that the initials of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory stand for his name, which is a joke among engineers.
Their works
- GALCIT 53Invention, 1942
The first castable solid rocket fuel, a mix of asphalt and potassium perchlorate poured hot into the motor case, which he devised with the group at the California Institute of Technology. It powered the rockets that helped aircraft take off in the war. It is the work for which engineers remember him.
Ask the Oracle about it - The Book of BabalonBook, 1946
A short text he wrote during the rites of 1946 that he performed with L. Ron Hubbard, which he said was dictated to him. It speaks in the voice of the goddess Babalon of Crowley’s system. It survives in his papers and has been printed since.
He gave it as received, and that is his account of its source.
Ask the Oracle about it - Strange AngelBiography, 2005
The life of Parsons by George Pendle, joining his work as a rocket pioneer to his life in Crowley’s order and his partnership with Hubbard. It is drawn from letters, papers and records. It brought his story to many readers.
Ask the Oracle about it - Sex and RocketsBiography, 1999
The first full life of Parsons, by John Carter, telling of his rockets, his lodge and his death in the explosion in his home laboratory. It drew attention to his place in the history of rockets. It is a book about him, not by him.
Ask the Oracle about it
How the house tells a life
This life is told from the record, with what is documented, what is legend and what was forged kept apart. A membership in an order is stated only where documents show it. A person’s chart explains none of their deeds.
The arts it feeds
Lives near it in time
Lives and legends
Adolf HitlerDion FortuneManly P. HallIsrael RegardieFranz BardonHelen SchucmanRobert MonroePierre PlantardZecharia SitchinDoreen ValienteFulcanelliJane RobertsThe whole tree
