Sex and Rockets Read online

  Sex And Rockets ©2004, 1999 by John Carter and Feral House. All rights reserved.

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-93259566-6

  Design by Linda Hayashi

  Cover design by Sean Tejaratchi

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  Feral House

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  Sex and Rockets

  The Occult World of Jack Parsons

  John Carter

  Introduction by Robert Anton Wilson

  Contents

  Introduction by Robert Anton Wilson

  Preface

  one

  The Early Years: 1914–1936

  two

  Parsons at Caltech: 1936–1939

  three

  A Short History of the OTO

  four

  Parsons’ Double Life: 1940–1942

  five

  The Return to South Orange Grove Ave.: 1942–1945

  six

  An Introduction to Enochian Magic

  seven

  The Babalon Working, Part 1: January–February 1946

  eight

  The Babalon Working, Part 2: March 1946

  nine

  Parsons’ Final Years: 1946–1952

  ten

  Death and Beyond

  Afterword

  Photo Section

  Appendix A

  Primary Bibliography

  Appendix B

  Secondary Bibliography

  Appendix C

  Additional References

  Index

  A Marvel Walked Among Us

  by Robert Anton Wilson

  “I seem to be living in a nation that simply does not know what freedom is.”

  —John Whiteside Parsons1

  This book tells the life story of a very strange, very brilliant, very funny, very tormented man who had at least three major occupations (or vocations); he also had no less than four names. He acted as scientist, as occultist, as political dissident and often as a simple damned eejit (just like you and me).

  Scientists, aware of his tremendous contributions to space science, generally call him John Parsons, and they've even named a crater on the moon after him. Those occultists who know of his work in their very specialized arts call him Jack Parsons, the name he himself preferred; in some magick lodges they consider him second only to Aleister Crowley as a progenitor of the New Aeon. His best-known book, Freedom Is A Two-Edged Sword, which increasingly influences the libertarian and anarchist movements, gives his name as John Whiteside Parsons on the cover and title page. And, as the present biography documents, this odd bird actually had the legal name Marvel Whiteside Parsons imposed on him at birth.

  Oh, well, if my parents had named me “Marvel,” I would have changed my name, too, perhaps as often as Parsons did.

  For utmost scientific clarity about matters usually left in mystic murk or psychobabble, I shall use all four of Our Hero's names: John Parsons for the scientist, John Whiteside Parsons for the libertarian philosopher, Jack Parsons for the occultist, and Marvel Parsons for the original template: an alienated and sometimes naive boy, a child of divorce, who tried to find and liberate what occultists call his True Self by creating the other three Parsonspersons and permitting them to fight brutal wars in the loneliness of his passionate brain until all three became One. When endured helplessly by a truly fractured personality, we generally call this civil war in the psyche Multiple Personality Disorder: when deliberately pursued as a path of Illumination leading through Hell and Purgatory toward a vision (at least) of Paradise, we have no name for it in our current culture but those few who, like Parsons, have taken the hermetic oath to Will and Dare and Know and Keep Silence simply call it magick (pronounced mage-ick, as in the Three Magi).

  Marvel Parsons, born in 1914 in Los Angeles but raised mostly in the nearby town of Pasadena, began life like all of us in what Tibetans call the Void and the Chinese call wu-hsin (no mind). Gradually, out of the Void, form emerged. He made the distinction between Marvel and Everything Else; a glass wall then separated Marvel from Everything Else. He gradually identified various parts of Everything Else, as soon as he learned their names.

  Fatherless, Marvel had a conservative middle class mother who loved him a bit too ardently (she committed suicide within a few hours after his death, 17 June 1952). She also taught him to hate his absent father, a proven “adulterer.” (Horrors!) Developing an early interest in psychology, Marvel diagnosed himself as having a classic Oedipus complex, a compulsive antipathy to “Patriarchy” (he used the word before the Feminists made it trendy) and an equally intense loathing for any and all Authority symbols, especially “God the Father.”

  But let us look at 1914, the year of Parsons’ birth, more closely. Whatever you think of astrology, with its extraterrestrial bias, a “secular horoscope” limited to Earthly portents always provides amusing insights. The terrestrial world that shaped Marvel Parsons looked like this:

  The First World War had started on July 28 that year; before 1914 ended the first aerial bombing of civilian populations occurred (Germany did it to France), and the bloody battles of the Marne, Tannerberg, Ghent and especially Ypres demonstrated that “civilized” modern humans could act even more inhumanely and insanely than any barbarians of the past.

  Police arrested the legendary labor hero Joe Hill in Utah on January 13 for a murder he almost certainly did not commit, and the State executed him the following year. His last words, “Don't weep for me, boys—organize!” became a mantra to union members for decades after.

  In Colorado, John D. Rockefeller's hired goons killed 21 people (including 11 children) in a clash with other labor “radicals.” Leftists protested outside Rockefeller's New York office and got arrested for it: a court order banned any other people with signs or banners from parading in front of that sacrosanct shrine of the Almighty Dollar. Novelist Upton Sinclair appeared the next day with a blank sign, telling reporters that free speech had died. Suffragettes marched on Washington June 28, demanding equal rights for women.

  In England, Dubliners, the first book by an Irish author named James Joyce, appeared; and in America Edgar Rice Burroughs brought forth Tarzan of The Apes. Musically, we all acquired three major treasures, “The Colonel Bogey March,” “Saint Louis Blues” and “12th Street Rag.” In film, D.W. Griffith's The Mother and the Law rawly showed the abuse of women by “the Patriarchy.”

  Margaret Sanger introduced the term “birth control” in The Woman Rebel and then fled to England to avoid imprisonment for the “crime” of publishing explicit details on contraception.

  Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Jehovah's Witnesses, announced that the apocalypse would begin on October 2—coincidentally or synchronistically, the very day Marvel Whiteside Parsons [who would later, as Jack Parsons, call himself the AntiChrist] emerged from his mother's womb, or from even darker places, and began to investigate and meddle with this planet.

  Going back to England again: also in 1914, Aleister Crowley (rhymes with “holy”) and his current mistress, violinist Leila Waddell, staged something called “The Rites of Eleusis” in London—several nights of quasi-masonic ritual, music, poetry, ballet and drama. On the first night, the actors informed the audience, Nietzsche-fashion, that “God is dead” and mourned and grieved over the departed deity: things became even stranger after that, like the bardos in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and on the last night the audience received “The Elixir of the Gods,” a wine containing a high dosage of the psychedelic drug mescaline. While they willynilly entered Chaos and the Void a chorus announced the dawning of a New Aeon based on Rabelais’ Law of Thelema—“Do What Thou Wilt”…

  And Dou
blemint chewing gum appeared on the market, produced by William Wrigley…

  All of this undeniably influenced Marvel as much as, or more than, any distant stars or planets. The horrors of World War imprinted him with a wounded perception of the dark side of “human nature”: some parts of Freedom Is A Two-Edged Sword sound as bitter as Swift or Twain at their most misanthropic. Marvel also acquired a genuine sympathy for working people, and an awareness of the brute force behind Capitalism and Capitalist Governments never left him: although an ultra-individualist himself. he had more than one Marxist friend (which got him virtually tarred and feathered during the McCarthy era).

  Standing there as big as life

  And smiling with those eyes:

  “What they forgot to kill,” said Joe

  “Went on to organize.”

  Margaret Sanger and the suffragettes also left a mark: no male writer since John Stuart Mill in the 19th Century has shown more empathy for Feminism than John Whiteside Parsons.

  “Saint Louis Blues” helped create the Jazz Age in which Marvel began to evolve from boy to man. And, like Russell and the Jehovah's Witnesses, he grew up convinced that the world had entered a life-and-death battle between Cosmic (or at least Archetypal) Forces—but he enlisted on the side of the rebels, since he hated what we now call the logophallocentrism of “God the Father” even more than our current crop of Feminist theologians do. Although (as noted) he could see the Oedipal roots of this bias, he also perceived/conceived it as a decision for Light and Liberty against Tyranny and Superstition.

  Aleister Crowley and his New Aeon would later transform Marvel into Jack Parsons.

  I don't know how Wrigley's Doublemint gum fits into this list of terrestrial Signs and Omens surrounding the genesis of Marvel Parsons. But I feel sure some student of Crowleyana will write to me and explain it after this book appears.

  Then another major influence mutated Marvel Parsons into John Parsons and John Whiteside Parsons and Jack Parsons: in his teens he discovered a despised and disreputable genre of pulp literature confusingly known (at the time) as either science-fiction or science-fantasy. Seen from the present, the sci-fi crowd of that age look like closet surrealists who had re-invented the Novel Of Ideas and tailored it for magazines with names like Thrilling Wonder Tales. The uncertainty about what to call their product typified the age of accelerated change in which Parsons and this literature both matured: after Jules Verne's “fantasy” submarine appeared in the world's real seas, nobody with more brain cells than a chimpanzee or a Fundamentalist felt totally secure about the differences between the probable, the improbable and the totally impossible.

  If Verne's submarine could become materialized, why not his rocket to the moon? The question excited a lot of other boys besides Marvel Parsons: but, unlike most of them, he did something about it. He became John Parsons, almost certainly (as this book documents) the one single individual who contributed the most to rocket science. Two of the institutions he helped organize, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena and the Aerojet Corporation, still play large roles in space exploration.

  You will learn more about John Parsons’ acknowledged scientific achievements in the text to follow: I will concentrate on his other, still controversial labors. Just remember that when he started building rockets they seemed as “wacko” to most people as anything else he did. Yet his careful scientific experiments and theories liberated humanity from Terracentrism and showed us the path to a starry destiny.

  Rocket engineer John Parsons also became friendly with the leading “fantasy” and “sci-fi” writers in the Los Angeles/Pasadena area and entered a subculture in which no idea seemed too crazy to discuss: a world where established science, fringe science, pseudo-science, philosophic speculation and visionary imagination all ran wild—in short, a world which anticipated and helped generate most of the “weird and kooky” ideas which have now infiltrated every aspect of our culture, except for the most reactionary Stone Age enclaves of Mississippi and the U.S. Congress.

  It did not require much of a jump, then or now, to move from the Futurist-Fantasist world into Sex, Drugs and Magick. If you really enjoyed the Star Trek and Star Wars movies; or if you ever, even in fun, told a friend “Live long and prosper” or “May the Force be with you”; or played Dungeons and Dragons, smoked a joint now and again, participated to any degree in the New Age and/or the Neo-Pagan revival—two popularized (diluted) aspects of Crowley's New Aeon—or even if you ever wanted to get the government off our fronts (sexual freedom) as well as off our backs (market freedom)—you have received part of the huge legacy of Jack Parsons and his merry crew of science buffs, sorcerers and subversives.

  Look at it this way: in John Parsons’ 1930s–1940s sci-fantasy world, everybody he knew had already started discussing the possible “humanity” and “human rights” of extraterrestrials and robots; they created alternate societies much more rational and adventurous than most “normal” people of that time could possibly imagine; they assumed (partly due to the influence of Alfred Korzybski and General Semantics) that information and technology would further accelerate their synergetic accelerations even faster than they had in the previous century (Parsons’ friend, sci-fi-psi author A.E. van Vogt had studied with Korzybski personally); they created Alternative Worlds where anything currently considered goofy—from new economic systems to long-suppressed Gnostic doctrines—might function as efficiently as the pencil sharpener.

  Robert Anson Heinlein, another friend of Parsons, wrote a novel, Waldo, in which all the arts of magick have not only won scientific acceptance but have become technologies used daily by everybody. Heinlein also wrote, a bit later, Stranger In A Strange Land, the first sci-fi novel to reach the New York Times bestseller list, and some still say Jack Parsons’ magick/libertarian ideas permeate every page of it—pax, Mr. Carter!

  To leave the heady and trippy environment of chaps like van Vogt and Heinlein, and to encounter and endure the Official Reality of the U.S. of those days probably seemed to Parsons like time travel back to the Dark Ages.

  In that Official Reality, Christian piety and Capitalist predation co-existed as equally sacred Idols, even though they totally contradict each other. Stupidity, superstition and intolerance imprisoned most Americans in medieval squalor, both mental and economic: many humans did not have the “humanity” or “human rights” that Parsons’ friends would grant to technically sophisticated robots (e.g. all those humans who had darker complexions than Snow White ranked as non or-sub-human in popular opinion and in law. We actually fought a war against fascism with a racially segregated army.) Almost all rational or adventurous ideas encountered blind bigotry and often violent persecution; contraception, divorce and abortion still remained illegal either locally or federally; homosexuality and bisexuality did not exist, or at least nobody in the major media could admit that they did exist; sex in general seemed so “dirty” that in the films of that time even married couples slept in separate beds, lest anyone suspect that they might occasionally fuck each other; all of the other delights of love enjoyed by most spouses remained illegal with penalties ranging as high as 20 years imprisonment; religious nutcases similar to Falwell and Robertson not only peddled hatred and intolerance to a gullible public, but nobody dared to fight back or even make cynical jokes about them; when the first scientific report on human sexuality appeared, its author, Dr. Alfred Kinsey, got hit with everything but flying monkey-shit—according to his research associate, Dr. Pomeroy, Kinsey literally died prematurely from the abuse he suffered.

  Of course, irrational fear and superstition still stalk this nation; but in those days, they totally dominated it.

  Parsons could only conclude that Americans, who claimed to love freedom, actually feared it, hated it and wanted to smother it with more and more tyrannical laws. They had willingly surrendered their liberty to “lying priests, conniving judges, blackmailing police” and other servitors of tyranny, as he wrote in 1946.

  But Joh
n Parsons, jet propulsion pioneer, had by then become Jack Parsons, sex-magician—after he discovered and joined the Ordo Templi Orientis.

  The Ordo Templi Orientis alleges that it descends directly from the 18th Century Illuminati of Bavaria. Let us look into that for a moment.

  WHO PUT THE LIGHT IN EN-LIGHT-ENMENT?

  “I need not add that freedom is a dangerous thing. But it is hardly possible that we are all cowards.”

  —John Whiteside Parsons2

  Amid endless controversy about them, all agree that the Bavarian Illuminati began on May 1, 1776, in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, created by a Freemason (and former Jesuit) named Adam Weishaupt. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Illuminati managed to influence many masonic lodges and gained “a commanding position” in the movement of anti-royalist, anti-Papist and pro-democratic “secular humanism.” They attracted such literary men as Goethe and Herder but the whole movement came to an end when the Bavarian government banned the Illuminati in 1785. So says the standard reference.

  Many conspiracy hunters have more faith in the decidedly paranoid Memoirs Of Jacobinism of Abbe Augustin Barruel, who believed that the Illuminati merely regrouped under other front names after 1785, masterminded the French Revolution and still continued until the time he wrote (1806). Modern anti-Illuminists think it still continues today, although they often disagree as to whether the Illuminati really promotes secular humanism. Most Fundamtalists think they do, but others with livelier fantasies suspect them of unleashing Jazz, Rock ‘n’ Roll, communism, fascism, anarchism, Satanism, international banking, ritual child abuse, or some combination thereof.

  According to masonic historian Albert G. Mackey, the Illuminati at its peak had only 2000 members in masonic lodges in France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, and Italy. Mackey emphasizes that Baron Knigge, one of the most powerful and active members of the Illuminati, remained a devout Christian all his life and would not have worked so hard for the order if it really intended, as Abbe Barruel and others claim, the abolition of Christianity.