[CTRL] Parsons: The Magickal Scientist and His Circle

[earthman]

 -Caveat Lector-

>Excerpt from:
>
>The Fall of Babalon
>(c) 1995 by Crash Collusion Publishing
>P.O.B. 2237, Berkeley, CA 94702.
>$5.00 + $2.00 s/h payable to Wesley Nations.
>
>Which Appeared in:
>
>The Excluded Middle [#6]
>P.O.B. 1077
>Los Angeles, CA 90048
>
>
>
>Jack Parsons: The Magickal Scientist and His Circle
>
>[Aleister Crowley, Jack Parsons, L. Ron Hubbard and
> the Babalon Working]
>
>by Paul Rydeen
>
>
>"[The angel] carried my spirit away to the desert.  I saw the
> scarlet woman sitting on the beast with seven heads and ten  horns,
> covered with blasphemous names.  The woman was clothed in purple
> and scarlet, and glided with gold and precious stones and pearls,
> with a golden cup in her hand filled with the abominations and the
> unclean things of her fornication.  On her forehead a name had
> been written, 'A Mystery: Babalon the great, the mother of harlots
> and of the abominations of the earth.'  I saw the woman was drunk
> from the blood of the saints, and from the blood of the martyrs of
> Jesus.  Seeing her, I wondered greatly."
>
>-Revelation 17:3-6
>
>
>"I shall regard all phenomena as the particular dealing of God
> with my soul."  Analysis by a Master of the Temple
>
>I shall I write of the mystery and the terror, of the wonder and
>pity and splendor of the sevenfold star that is Babalon?  I shall
>tell of the tragic life of her most devoted disciple and beloved
>son, Jack Parsons.  In doing so, I will correct previous miscon-
>ceptions while correlating the known facts and wild legends that
>lie in several far-flung sources.
>
>Kenneth Grant gives a good description of Parsons in The Magical
>Revival:
>
>"Imbued with the idea of the Kingly Man, as that expression is
> understood in the Cult of Thelema [Crowley's invention], Parsons
> bent his not inconsiderable energies, physical and intellectual,
> to the discovery of his True Will.
>
>Born on October 2, 1914, in Los Angeles [descendant of a Hell-
>Fire Club founder, according to Michael Hoffman], he lived a
>lonely childhood, due in part to his parents' broken marriage.
>He spent a great deal of his youth reading and day-dreaming, and
>nurturing a growing resentment of all interference, especially of
>the kind posing as "authority."  He developed strong
>revolutionary tendencies and when he encountered Crowley's
>writings -- which he first did through Wilfred T. Smith -- he was
>instantly alive to the significance of Thelema.  He joined
>Smith's Agape Lodge [OTO], and, at the same time, became a
>Probationer, 1 = 10f, of the A.'. A.'.
>
>Smith was a member of Frater Achad's (Charles Stansfeld Jones)
>OTO lodge in Vancouver.  He met Crowley there in 1915.  Smith
>moved to California in 1930.  He immediately founded the Agape
>Lodge in Pasadena.  Frater Achad kept the Vancouver lodge open
>during this period, under a different name.  It would later
>close.  In "Alchemical Conspiracy and the Death of the West"
>Michael Hoffman writes of Parsons.  Hoffman tells us that the
>Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) had a temple on nearby Mount Palomar.
>The local Indians regarded the mountain as holy.  Hoffman says,
>"The O.T.O. believed that Palomar was the sexual chakra of the
>Earth."  Parsons commuted regularly between Palomar and Pasadena.
>The Mount Palomar Observatory opened in 1949.  Smith probably
>consecrated his temple on Palomar soon after his move to
>California in 1930, before the Observatory was planned.
>
>Palomar lies just minutes north of the 33rd parallel.  This is
>significant because 33 is an important number in masonic
>symbolism.  It is the number of the highest grade of the Scottish
>Rite.  It is also the number of years Christ walked on the earth.
>Hoffman mentions the 33 bones of the human spinal cord.  This
>brings to mind kundalini yoga.  Crowley's OTO was a quasi-masonic
>order.  The higher grades show esoteric Hindu influences of a
>sexual nature.
>
>Parsons first met Smith in 1939.  He joined the Agape Lodge in
>1941.  Parsons was to be its head during the turbid 1940s (ca.
>1942-1947).  Smith was known in the Lodge as Frater Velle Omnia
>Velle Nihil (aka Fra. 132).  He was an expatriate Englishman.
>Smith had a reputation for womanizing that equalled Crowley's.
>Parsons saw Smith as a second father.  The two stayed close
>throughout their lives.
>
>Smith wrote to Crowley in March, 1941, "I think I have at long
>last a really excellent man, John Parsons.  And starting next
>Tuesday he begins a course of talks with a view to enlarging our
>scope.  He has an excellent mind and much better intellect than
>myself...John Parsons is going to be valuable."
>
>Soror Estai (actress Jane Wolfe) had been with Crowley at Cefalu
>[Italian island where Crowley had previously set up residence
>before being kicked out by the local authorities] before coming
>to California.  She recorded her first impression of Parsons in
>her Magical Record for December, 1940:
>
>"Unknown to me, John Whiteside Parsons, a newcomer, began astral
> travels.  This knowledge decided Regina [Kahl] to undertake
> similar work.  All of which I learned after making my own
> decision.  So the time must be propitious.  Incidentally, I take
> Jack Parsons to be the child who 'shall behold them all' [i.e.,
> the Mysteries.  See the Book of the Law I: 54-55].
>
>"26 years of age, 6'2", vital, potentially bisexual at the very
> least, University of the State of California and Cal. Tech., now
> engaged in Cal Tech chemical laboratories developing 'bigger and
> better' explosives for Uncle Sam.  Travels under sealed orders
> from the government.  Writes poetry -- 'sensuous only', he says.
> Lover of music, which he seems to know thoroughly.  I see him as
> the real successor of Therion [Crowley].  Passionate; and has
> made the vilest analyses result in a species of exaltation after
> the event.  Has had mystical experiences which gave him a sense
> of equality all round, although he is hierarchical in feeling and
> in the established order."
>
>Parsons' father died in 1942.  He left his son a mansion in an
>expensive part of Pasadena.  This may have been his way of making
>up to his son for his childhood.  Parsons shocked the staid
>residents of this well manicured neighborhood when he started
>renting out rooms to less-than-desirable tenants.  "Only atheists
>and those of a Bohemian disposition," his newspaper ad stated.
>The frequent visitors, noisy parties, and questionable goings-on
>raised many eyebrows.  Parsons needed the extra income these
>renters paid.  His progress with rockets had yet to yield any
>success.
>
>Alva Rogers was a long-time resident of the Parsons house on
>Orange Street.  Rogers became associated with the house after
>attending several science fiction meetings there.  Parsons held
>these informal meetings regularly on weekends.  Rogers wrote,
>"Mundane souls were unceremoniously rejected as tenants.  There
>was a professional fortune teller and seer who always wore
>appropriate dresses and decorated her apartment with symbols and
>artifacts of arcane lore.  There was a lady, well past middle age
>but still strikingly beautiful, who claimed to have been at
>various times the mistress of half the famous men in France.
>There was a man who had been a renowned organist in the great
>movie palaces of the silent era.  They were characters all.
>[From the rent they paid] Jack admitted that he was one of
>Crowley's main sources of money in America."
>
>At one point local police came to investigate an alleged backyard
>ceremony.  A pregnant woman had reportedly jumped nude through a
>fire nine times.  The police made it clear how absurd they
>thought the claim was.  Parsons easily assured them of his
>community standing.  He was an important rocket scientist with a
>professional reputation to uphold.
>
>Burton Wolfe writes of a sixteen-year-old boy who reported
>Parsons to the police.  He told them that Parsons' followers had
>forcibly sodomized him during a Black Mass at the house.  The
>police investigated.  They found Parsons' cult to be little more
>than an organization dedicated to religious and philosophical
>speculation, with respectable members such as a Pasadena bank
>president, doctors, lawyers, and Hollywood actors."  At one point
>the FBI became involved after receiving some anonymous letters.
>One bore the signature, "An American Soldier."  The police again
>cleared Parsons of all charges.  They would later stand by their
>findings when further accusations arose.
>
>Wilfred Smith's mistress of many years was Regina Kahl.  She was
>also his High Priestess of the Gnostic Mass.  Separate photos of
>her and Smith are in The Equinox Vol. III, no. 10.  Smith had a
>charming personality, a strong affinity for the opposite sex, and
>what Grant calls "something more than an aptitude for magick."
>One of Smith's conquests was Soror Grimaud, aka Helen Northrup.
>She was Parsons' first wife.
>
>Helen bore Smith a child in 1943.  Crowley decided that was
>enough of Smith's sexual infidelity.  His affairs were a
>detriment to the Order.  Crowley expelled him through an
>ingenious means.  Crowley drew up a horoscope for Smith based on
>the unusual circumstance of his birth.  Smith's horoscope had a
>complex of eight planets.  One could interpret this horoscope as
>if Smith were an avatar of some god.  This was something Crowley
>had found in only one other instance, that of Shakespeare.
>
>Crowley sent Smith on a Grand Magical Retirement to find the god
>within himself.  Crowley wrote Liber Apotheoosis (aka Liber 132)
>for Smith to use as his guide.  Smith's Retirement took place on
>Temple Hill at Rancho Royale, not Mount Palomar.  Helen
>accompanied him.  Crowley formally expelled Smith in late 1943.
>Parsons then became Acting Head of the Lodge.  Regina Kahl would
>die during Smith's Magical Retirement, in late 1945 or early
>1946.  Her untimely death deeply depressed him.
>
>Parsons divorced Helen in 1943.  In the meantime he struck up a
>relationship with her younger sister Betty.  Like Helen, Betty
>acted as Parsons' priestess at the Gnostic Mass.  She was also
>his partner in the performance of 9th Degree magic.  This is the
>magic of inducing altered states through prolonged sexual
>ecstasy.  At Parsons' urging the teenage Betty left the
>University of Southern California (USC), to her parents' chagrin.
>
>Enter "Frater H."  Grant refers to him as "a confidence trickster
>who had wormed his way into the O.T.O. on the pretense of being
>interested in Magick."  He was "still at large [1972], having
>grown wealthy and famous by a misuse of the secret knowledge
>which he had wormed out of Parsons."  Other writers refer to him
>merely as "Frater X."  The late Frater X's identity is now
>clearly a matter of public record.  I see no reason to do
>anything other than call him by name.  He was L. Ron Hubbard:
>philosopher, world traveller, science fiction author, and founder
>of Scientology.
>
>Parsons was young and impressionable.  He had gone through
>repeated upheavals during his short life.  He was vulnerable.
>Hubbard made a big impression on him.  Parsons forgot his
>obligation and violated his oath to the Order.  He revealed to
>Hubbard the secrets of the highest grades of the OTO.
>
>Parsons wrote to Crowley in July, 1945, "About three months ago I
>met [Hubbard], a writer and explorer of whom I had known for some
>time [because he wrote science fiction]...He moved in with me
>about two months ago, and although Betty and I are still
>friendly, she has transferred her sexual affections to him...We
>are pooling our resources in a partnership that will act as a
>limited company to control our business ventures.  I think I have
>made a great gain, and as Betty and I are the best of friends
>there is little loss...I need a magical partner.  I have many
>experiments in mind..."
>
>The magical partner Parsons envisioned was to be his partner in a
>9th Degree working.  Grant writes, "Having lost confidence in
>women, Parsons decided to attract an Elemental Spirit to take
>Betty's place..."  These spirits are called Elementals because of
>their association with the four elements of the ancients.  To
>summon one requires a large amount of magical energy, the kind
>generated by an 8th Degree working.  The practice of the 8th
>Degree is a solo sexual rite.
>
>Says Grant, "The instructions that accompany the eighth Degree of
>the O.T.O. contain methods for evoking an Elemental, or familiar
>spirit.  It is said to be an easy matter to attract such a spirit
>because the souls of the elements desire constantly to be
>absorbed into the cycle of human evolution, this being the only
>way in which they can achieve salvation and perpetuity of
>existence.  On being appropriated by a human organism, the
>elemental finally becomes absorbed in the immortal principle in
>man."  Compare Jim Morrison's remark to an interviewer that the
>air around us is full of spirits.  "They know we exist, and envy
>us our bodies."
>
>Grant quotes from the instructions for the 8th Degree, written
>about the adept desirous of performing such an operation:
>
>"(1) That he choose wisely a reasonable soul, docile, apt,
> beautiful, and in all ways worthy of love.
>
>"(2) That he fall not away from love of the Great Goddess into
> love of this inferior, but give only as a master and of his
> mercy, knowing that this also is service to the Goddess.
>
>"(3) That of such familiar spirits he have but four [one for
> each element?].  And let him regulate their service, appointing
> hours for each.
>
>"(4) That he treat them with kindness and firmness, being on his
> guard against their tricks.
>
>"This being said, it is enough; for to have them is but the
> pains to call them forth from their homes.  And the Spirits of
> the Elemental Tablets given by Dr. Dee and Sir Kelley are the
> best..."
>
>In 1943 Parsons published a brief poem in the Oriflamme, an OTO
>publication.  At this point it bears repeating: "I hight don
>Quixote, I life on peyote, marijuana, morphine and cocaine, I
>never know sadness, but only a madness that burns at tle heart
>and the brain.  I see each charwoman, ecstatic, inhuman, angelic,
>demonic, divine.  Each wagon a dragon, each beer mug a flagon
>that brims with ambrosial wine."
>
>Symonds and Wilson have documented that narcotics and
>hallucinogens were a basic staple of Crowley's magical diet.  It
>is easier to induce astral vision when one alternately dulls and
>excites the senses by chemical means.  One cannot underemphasize
>the role of drugs here.  I suspect they were a part of the
>Babalon Working.  Combined with sex magick, this makes a powerful
>tool.
>
>Using the "Angelick" language channelled by Elizabethan
>astrologer John Dee and his scribe Edward Kelley, Parsons began
>his operation.  He recited the Seventh Aire (or Aethyr) in the
>original Enochian.  Per Crowley's advice, he kept diligent
>records.  Parsons would later compare some of the curious results
>to Kelley's own criminal life.  The surviving fragments of
>Parsons' Babalon Working are now the property of the OTO.
>Parsons' second wife Marjorie Cameron holds the copyright to
>Freedom Is A Two-Edged Sword.
>
>The preliminaries began January 4, 1946 at 9 pm.  Prokofiev's
>Violin Concerto played loudly on the phonograph.  The formal
>working would begin the following evening.  Russell Miller refers
>to it as eleven nights of "talisman waving."  Later that month
>Parsons would write Crowley describing his progress.  He noted a
>spontaneous windstorm as a curious side-effect.  It began the
>second day and lasted throughout the Babalon Working.  Parsons
>awoke on the sixth day of the Working, January 10.  He heard nine
>loud, unexplainable knocks.  I note a similarity to the nine
>regular knocks that Whitley Strieber felt confirmed the existence
>of his Visitors [interesting correlation here, no? -d4]. Parsons
>got out of bed.  He noticed a lamp lay smashed on the floor.
>The knocks were repeated on the 15th.
>
>January 15 was the eleventh and final day.  Hubbard perceived a
>spirit "clad in a black robe and having an evil pasty [grey? -d4]
>face."  Grant says this was Smith, who had failed to identify the
>god within himself.  Grant says Smith astrally attacked Parsons
>in revenge.  The electricity went out as they began invoking and
>some- thing struck Hubbard on the right shoulder.  It knocked a
>candle from his hand.  "He called me," Parsons wrote, "and we
>observed a brownish-yellow light about seven feet high.  I
>brandished a magical sword, and it disappeared.  Ron's right arm
>was paralyzed for the rest of the night."  Parsons awakened later
>that night after hearing a "buzzing, metallic" voice.  The voice
>cried, "Let me go free!"  Parsons sleepily performed the brief
>magical operation (nonsexual) known as the License to Depart.
>It is in the Goetia, or Lesser Key of Solomon.  Smith's spirit
>was free to return to his body.
>
>Parsons wrote Crowley, "I have diligently followed the VIIIth
>Degree instructions as (a) creation of new orders of beings with
>consecrated talismanic images.  Possible connective result:
>increase in writing output; (b) Invocation of Mother Goddess,
>using Priest's call in mass and silver cup as talisman; sometimes
>using suitable poetry such as Venus.  Possible connective result:
>loss of Betty's affections as preliminary to (c) Invocation of
>Air Elemental Kerub [Cherub]...in Enochian Air Tablet."  The rite
>ended with Parsons commanding the spirit to appear in human form.
>On January 18 they went into the Mojave Desert to recuperate.
>Parsons turned to Hubbard at the end of the trip and said simply,
>"It is done."
>
>On February 23, 1946 Parsons triumphantly wrote to Crowley, "I
>have my elemental!  She turned up one night after the conclusion
>of the Operation, and has been with me since."  The Elemental was
>Marjorie Cameron, sprung from Parsons' head like Sophia from the
>Godhead or Pallas Athena from Zeus.  She adopted the magical name
>"Candida," [candida -- a vaginal and occasionally intestinal
>parasitic yeast -d4] calling herself "Candy" for short.  Soon she
>married Parsons, and helped him with his magick.
>
>Crowley sent Parsons an admonishment about Cameron.  He reminded
>him of Eliphas Levi's advice that, "The love of the Magus for
>such things [Elementals] is insensate and may destroy him."  Be
>aware that Crowley considered himself to be the reincarnation of
>Levi.  Crowley also claimed to have intervened personally on
>Parsons' behalf, presumably on the astral plane.  He does not
>say.  It is possible Crowley knew someone who could send a girl
>like Cameron to Parsons.  Cameron was from New York, though she
>had been born in Iowa and raised in the "Cthulhu Country" of
>Wisconsin.  Crowley had spent some time in New York during World
>War I.  Cameron spent most of her February back in New York
>visiting her mother.  Hubbard was out of town on business.
>
>On February 28, Parsons made a solo trip back to the desert and
>received Liber 49 in an unexplained manner.  Jacques Vallee says
>Parsons claimed to have met a Venusian there in 1945 or 1946.
>Without the exact date, one cannot tell if the Venusian was the
>implied source of Liber 49.  Parsons took this to be an
>affirmation of the need to produce a magickal child.  When
>Hubbard returned he channelled a message from a red-haired,
>green-eyed angel ordering them to "Light first flame at 10pm,
>March 2, 1946.  The year of Babalon is 4063."  That would be 2118
>BC, the significance of which I have not determined.  Cameron
>returned from New York and moved in with Parsons.  She was now to
>be an integral part of the Babalon Working.  After Parsons'
>initial contact with the Beyond, Hubbard began acting as seer.
>Parsons called him Scribe in his notes.  I do not know whether
>Hubbard actually participated in the higher workings of the OTO.
>Based on other sources I will discuss shortly it is clear he was
>present when Parsons did.
>
>The operation began as directed on March 2.  That evening a fire
>started in Parsons' chimney.  Later he decided it had occurred
>when he had smashed an image of Pan as a sacrifice.  The idol had
>been a favorite personal possession.  The papers containing the
>Seventh Aire that he burned may have had something to do with the
>fire as well.  Parsons expressed his confidence, but wrote, "Now
>I can do no more than pray and wait."
>
>Between the second and fourth of March, 1946, Parsons recorded in
>a letter to Crowley what he described as "the most devastating
>experience of my life.  I believe it was the result of the IXth
>Degree working with the girl who answered my elemental summons.
>I have been in direct communication with one who is most Holy and
>beautiful, mentioned in The Book of the Law.  I cannot write the
>name at present."  Secretly he did write her name.  He called her
>Babalon.  [Hence the latter-day "BVM" apparitions of Fatima,
>Lourdes and Medjugorje (read: strife-torn Bosnia) which, though
>ostensibly benign, caused "the most devastating experience of
>Parson's life" and ushered in the current wave of "UFO/ET"
>phenomenology via the soon afterward Roswell crash and Ken Arnold
>sightings -- giving birth to the modern "UFO" mythos.  All of
>this from the biblical apocalyptic "great whore of Babylon." -d4]
>The one identified in The Book of the Law is the Egyptian goddess
>Nuit.  In Liber 49 Babalon says she is the incestuous daughter of
>Nuit and Horus.  Her avatar on earth is the Scarlet Woman.
>Babalon is not mentioned in The Book of the Law.  The Scarlet
>Woman is.
>
>Parsons documented the working in The Book of Babalon, of which a
>little survives.  Liber 49 he came to see as a heretical fourth
>chapter of The Book of the Law.  There are only three.  He saw
>the four chapters as corresponding to the four letters of the
>ineffable name of God: YHWH, the Hebrew Yod He Vau He.  He
>assigned one chapter to each letter and to what each letter
>represented.  Unknown to Parsons, Frater Achad would proclaim the
>Aeon of another goddess in Vancouver, the Egyptian Maat.
>Crowley expelled Achad from the Order as well.



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