Tag Archives: Jack Parsons

THE ROCKET SCIENTIST & THE GURU – STARGATE 1946

Something more about the Babalon story:

“At about the same time that Parsons was trying to incarnate an extraterrestrial entity, he also claimed that he had met a Venusian in the desert of New Mexico – an odd foreshadowing of the claims of later ‘contactees’ such as George Adamski in the early 1950s.”
Jay Katz, Saucers of the Illuminati 1

THE so-called “Babalon Working” conducted by John Whiteside Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard between January 4 and March 4, 1946, has been the object of much speculation, mythologizing and wonder.

This speculation is due in part to the involvement of two charismatic and brilliant Bohemians of that period. Parsons (1914-1952) was a major force in the early development of solid fuel booster rockets, for which work the International Astronomical Union eventually named a Lunar Crater in his memory. He was an O.T.O. member from 1941, and served for a short period as Master of Agape Lodge O.T.O. in the 1940s. He died under mysterious circumstances in an explosion in 1952.

The other participant, pulp fiction author La Fayette Ron Hubbard (1911-1986), eventually founded the Church of Scientology and has been the center of stormy controversy in the decades since.

Both men were students of magick, especially the sexual magick of Aleister Crowley.

According to Bent Corydon, Hubbard once confided in his son, Ron Jr.,

“Secrets, techniques and powers I alone have refined, improved on, applied my engineering principles to. Science and logic. THE keys! My keys to the doorway of the Magick; my magick! THE power! NOT Scientology power! MY power! The real powers of Solomon…”

Hubbard Sr. made clear he was talking about the sex magick central to the OTO system, but with a unique twist:

“Sex by will, Love by will – no caring and no sharing – no feelings… Sex is the route to power. Scarlet women! They are the secret to the doorway. Use and consume. Feast. Drink the power through them. Waste and discard them.” 2

The idealist Jack Parsons could hardly have understood what sort of man he was dealing with here; he wrote Crowley in February, 1946:

“About three months ago I met Ron… He is a gentleman… He moved in with me about two months ago, and although Maggy and I are still friendly, she has transferred her sexual affections to Ron.” 3

1 In point of fact, Adamski had been trying to sell his Venusian story as science fiction several years earlier – that is, at about the same time as Parsons alleged experience in New Mexico.

2 Quoted from L. Ron Hubbard, Messiah or Madman? by Bent Corydon and L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. (Lyle Stuart, 1987) p. 307.

3 op.cit. pp. 255-56 . 

While Parsons was convinced that Hubbard, as he wrote Crowley, “…is in complete accord with our own principles” 4 and proceeded to enter into a joint financial venture with the future Father of Scientology, Crowley was writing his eventual successor as O.T.O. Grand Master, Karl Germer,

“From our brother’s account he has given away both his girl and his money – apparently it’s the ordinary confidence trick.” 5

Parson’s friend Alva Rogers, who witnessed these events as they unfolded, described Hubbard’s role in this way:

“Ron was a persuasive and unscrupulous charmer, not only in social groups, but with the ladies. He was so persuasive and charmingly unscrupulous that within a matter of a few weeks he brought the entire house of Parsons down around poor Jack’s ears. He did this by the simple expedient of taking over Jack’s girl for extended periods of time.” 6

It was against this background that Parsons and Hubbard embarked upon “The Babalon Working” – an elaborate sexual magick experiment designed to bring Babalon into physical manifestation.

The whole concept of the “Magical Child” has several distinct interpretations.

In the more orthodox and traditional view, sex magick is employed to Manifest, by an act of Pure Will, a magical being the material basis of which are the sexual fluids themselves. A more literal interpretation holds that magical ritual such as “The Star Sapphire” will produce a “Moon Child” – that is, a living child who serves as host to a super-being, that is, the child is an “avatar” in Eastern terms, or an Incarnation of the Divine in Western thought.

Yet a third interpretation is that sex magick is, simply, the “Yoga of Sex” and the “Magical Child” is the Transformed Sex Magician Himself!

Hubbard and Parsons were ostensibly aiming at the second, literal interpretation; to manifest a Scarlet Woman willing to conceive a child who would embody the transformative goddess-being Babalon.

Crowley wrote Germer:

“Apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is producing a moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts.” 7

The reaction was certainly excessive.

Crowley’s successor as Grand Master of the O.T.O. in the 1980s, Hymenaeus Beta, noted that an adequate chronicle of Parsons’,

“now – famous ‘Babalon Working’ of 1946 EV has yet to be published… Most published accounts focus on his friendship and falling-out with Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard without appraising the larger issues of what was actually being attempted, and why.” 8

4 op. cit. p. 256

5 op. cit. p. 258

6 op. cit. p. 259

7 op. cit. p. 257, but frequently quoted in various sources; See also Crowley’s novel Moonchild .

8 Freedom Is A Two Edged Sword by John W. Parsons (Falcon Press/O.T.O. 1989) introduction by Hymenaeus Beta, p. 7

Certainly, Parsons’ own description of the Working is based in the fundamentals of Ceremonial and Sexual Magick.

In “The Book of Babalon – January 4 – March 4, 1946 EV” Parsons outlines the entire experiment, including the reasons for it:

“The present age is under the influence of the force called, in magical terminology, Horus. This force relates to fire, Mars, and the Sun, that is, to power, violence and energy…

“This force is completely blind, depending upon the men and women in whom it manifests and who guide it…

“The catastrophic trend is due to our lack of understanding of our own natures. The hidden lusts, fears, and hatreds resulting from the warping of the love urge, which underlie the natures of all Western peoples, have taken a homicidal and suicidal direction.

“This impasse is broken by the incarnation of another sort of force, called BABALON. The nature of this force relates to love, understanding, and dionysian freedom, and is the necessary counterbalance or correspondence to the manifestation of Horus.”

Thus far, Parsons is reasoning in a sound manner.

Keep in mind, however, that he is working with his ‘friend’ Hubbard, then in the very process of making off with Parsons’ money and lover; a man who was to tell his son, Ron Jr., a few years later, to use and discard Scarlet Women. In what sense “scarlet?” the younger Hubbard asked.

“Scarlet,” the Scientology ‘Source’ replied, “the blood of their bodies; the blood of their souls… bend their bodies; bend their minds; bend their wills; beat back the past.” 9

This is the grossest perversion of Crowley’s teaching.

The latter merely observed in the same context,

“We do opine that it is better and easier that the other party should be in ignorance of the sacred character of the Office. It is enough if that assistant be formed by Nature signally for the physical task, robust, vigorous, eager, sensible, hot and healthy; flesh, nerve and blood being tense, quick, and lively, easily enflamed, and nigh inextinguishable.” 10

Crowley is telling us that a partner in sexual magick should, ideally, in his opinion, be involved for the sake of sensual pleasure, pure and simple.

Hubbard is telling his own son how to enslave minds, bodies and souls. Parsons, who wrote extensively on the subject of freedom, could have had no idea of what type of person he was engaged in High Magick with.

In any case, Parsons goes on to narrate that,

“In January 1946 I had been engaged in the study and practice of Magick for seven years, and in the supervision and operation of an occult lodge for four years 11, having been initiated into the Sanctuary of the Gnosis by the Beast 666, Fra. 132, and Fra. Saturnus 12. At this time I decided upon a Magical operation designed to obtain the assistance of an elemental mate.” 13


9 Corydon & Hubbard, op. cit. p. 307.

10 De Arte Magica.

11 Agape Lodge O.T.O.

12 This is a significant “crew” of initiators, indeed. The Sanctuary of the Gnosis refers to the Ninth Degree of the O.T.O. System, the most exalted of the regular initiatory degrees. The Initiators here mentioned are Aleister Crowley, the then Grand Master of the Order, W.T. Smith, the U.S. National Grand Master, and Karl Germer, who served after Crowley’s death as Grand Master until the early 1960s.

13 The Collected Writings of Jack Parsons, p. 2 Part One, The Book of Babalon, introduction, “Conception”

In a sense, deprived of his former lover, Parsons was ‘going for broke’ in looking for a partner to create a magical child with;

“All or nothing – I have no other terms,” as he put it to Crowley.14

Beginning on January 4, 1946 at 9:00 PM, Parsons and Hubbard employed the powerful Enochian Air Tablet, using an Air Dagger, parchment talisman, invocations, conjurations, Enochian Calls and invocations, and appropriate banishings 15.

According to Parsons, at various times over subsequent days, wind storms were raised, electrical power was disrupted (January 14), during which Hubbard allegedly had a candle knocked from his hand by Something; several witnesses saw a “brownish yellow light about seven feet high” 16 which Parsons banished.17

On January 18 Parsons and Hubbard were out in the Mojave Desert when Parsons suddenly had an epiphany, and realized the experiment was accomplished.18

“I returned home,” he tells us, “and found a young woman answering the requirements 19 waiting for me.”

For the next month he invoked BABALON with her as his partner, “as was proper to one of my grade” 20 – in other words, by the sexual Eucharist of the Mass of the Holy Ghost.

While his magical partner visited in New York, on February 28, Parsons returned to the Mojave, and received a “communication” he referred to as Liber 49, The Book of Babalon, which identifies its source as Babalon Herself. It should be noted that Hubbard was also away then.

Liber 49 asserts, among other things,

“The working is of nine moons… And she shall wander in the witch-wood under the Night of Pan, and know the mysteries of the Goat and the Serpent, and of the children that are hidden away… I will provide the place and the material basis, thou the tears and blood… Thy tears, thy sweat, thy blood, thy semen, thy love, thy faith shall provide. Ah, I shall drain thee like the cup that is of me, Babalon 21

…Let me behold thee naked and lusting after me, calling upon my name… Let me receive all thy manhood within my Cup, climax upon climax, joy upon joy… Gather together in the covens as of old… Gather together in secret, be naked and shameless and rejoice in my name.” 22

14 Corydon & Hubbard, op. cit. p. 257

15 This is standard ceremonial magical ritual practice.

16 Book of Babalon, Parsons, p 6; also quoted by Corydon & Hubbard, op. cit. p. 256

17 These are common side effects in serious magical rituals.

18 This is, of course, the same area that the Adamski Orthon contact took place a few years latter, the area in which Dr. Wilhelm Reich, M.D. conducted his experiments with shooting down UFOs with Orgone Energy, and various other UFO-related events.

19 Marjorie Elizabeth Cameron (b. 1922 – d. 1995), or the future Ms. Parsons; see Freedom Is…op. cit. Also The Magical Link, Spring-Summer, 1995. “

20 Book of Babalon, op. cit, p. 4

21 After Liber Cheth, a Class A Holy Book of the Thelemic Canon.

22 Book of Babalon, op. cit. pp. 5-9

It is interesting that much of this anticipates the emergence of Wicca, at a time when Gerald Gardner in England was only beginning to formulate his ideas. Parsons spent much of the remainder of his short magical career writing on the subject of ‘witchcraft’ .

In any event, when Parsons communicated the Good News to Crowley, the old Magus was perplexed, or amused, or, conceivably both.

He wrote Parsons,

“You have me completely puzzled by your remarks. I thought I had a morbid imagination, as good as any man’s, but it seems I have not. I cannot form the slightest idea what you can possibly mean.”

Apparently undaunted, upon Hubbard’s return Parsons prepared to impregnate his magical partner, impressed by a vision Hubbard had “of a savage and beautiful woman riding naked on a great cat-like beast.”

According to Francis King’s account,

“Parsons was High Priest and had sexual intercourse with the girl, while Hubbard who was present acted as scryer, seer, or clairvoyant”.

This occurred on the first three days of March, 1946.

The aftermath is the subject of much rumor, and points out the high significance of sexual magick.

“This secret is the true Key to Magick,” said Crowley, “that is, by the right use of this secret man may impose his Will on Nature herself…”

Hubbard took off with Parsons’ former partner and the funds of their joint enterprise. Parsons caught up with Hubbard in July of 1946 in Miami, having to evoke Bartzabel 23 to raise a storm at sea, forcing Hubbard back to shore.

Ron Hubbard nevertheless married Parsons’ former lover the following month, and went on to write Dianetics – The Science of Mental Health and, eventually, to organize the Church of Scientology, built on a hidden mythos of a 75 million year old disaster in which the inhabitants of a 76 planet galactic federation were blown up by a dictator named Xenu.

This science fiction ‘space opera’ from Hubbard’s pulp fiction days forms a bizarre underpinning to an already bizarre story.24

For the rest of it, it depends entirely on whom you talk to. Was a “magical child” – conceived ritually March 4, 1946, born into this world as Babalon Incarnate on or about “nine moons” later, on or about December 4, 1946? Is such a being, a woman of about 50, alive today? Or was there a more ethereal ‘birth’ – perhaps, on a spiritual level, the true “birth date” of Gardnerian Wicca and its various descendent bodies, and on a more material level, the birth of modern ‘second wave’ feminism.

Surely, the timing of the Babalon Working and the arrival of the Post War Baby Boom is simultaneous in an eerie sort of way. UFO buffs have of late been touting a theory that Hubbard came to Parsons with a purpose more grandiose than “the ordinary confidence game”.

In pulp magazine circles, he had encountered any number of occultists and border occultists (Talbot Mundy, Col. Arthur Burks, Major Donald Keyhoe, Ray Palmer and Richard S. Shaver come to mind 25), and had already formulated the core of the “inner Scientology teaching” outlined above.


23 A powerful magical being.

24 Corydon & Hubbard, op. cit. p. 364

25 Except for Mundy, the present author has met with all of the pulp writers mentioned here. 

He wished to bring this other world into Manifestation, but lacked the technical knowledge to do so. So, he came to the innocent sex magician Jack Parsons. In this version, the Babalon Working, guided by Hubbard, had little to do with “Babalon” and more to do with the hideous Old Ones of the H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos.

“A door opened; something came through” is the essence of this thesis, and the appearance of the first “flying saucer” case the following year is considered, in this outré rumor, not coincidental at all.

The Babalon Working permanently alienated Parsons from Crowley, but the work of the ill-fated rocket scientist has more recently been reevaluated in a more favorable light by present day occultists and UFOlogists alike.

Memorabilia from Jack Parsons’ FBI file.

Source

BABALON & The Pleiades (III)

Babalon saga continues:

Encounter In The Pleiades: An Inside Look At UFOs
by Preston Nichols & Peter Moon

My trail to the Illuminati began during an intermission of the first lecture I heard about Montauk and the Philadelphia Experiment. Upon asking Preston how he became involved in all of this, he told me that in a previous life, he and Duncan Cameron had been twin brothers who were named Preston and Marcus Wilson. They had been the first manufacturers of crude scientific instruments in Great Britain and had formed a company with Aleister Crowley’s father which eventually became known as Thorne E.M.I., the same company which released the video cassette entitled The Philadelphia Experiment.

I subsequently searched for any references to the Wilson brothers in Crowley’s writings but could find none. I only found suspicious references to a Duncan Cameron and a trip Crowley had made to Montauk in 1918. Not much was said about either, but I began to encounter incredible synchronicities between the Cameron and Crowley families which are discussed in the book Montauk Revisited. Eventually, I would discover that the wife of Jack Parsons, L. Ron Hubbard’s former magical partner, was named Cameron. I thought this was too much to believe and I sought her out and encountered her under the most peculiar of circumstances which is described in Montauk Revisited.

The upshot of the synchronicities between the Camerons and Crowleys was best described by Cameron. She told me that her original name was Wilson (her father’s name was originally Wilson but he was adopted by his uncle Alexander Cameron and ended up using his surname) and that the Wilson clan had descended from the Cameron clan. Further, she told me that Hubbard was a Wilson, too. His father, Harry Ross Hubbard, had been adopted and was originally a Wilson.

A couple of years later, I would discover something about the Wilsons that not even Cameron knew. Researching into the genealogy of her husband’s family, I discovered that both the Parsons and Wilson families traced back to Catherine Parr. Parr evolved into Parrsons with the “r” eventually being dropped.

Jack Parsons was also a member of the Illuminati which is known in occult circles as the Order of the Silver Star, the silver star referring to Sirius. His father worked for President Woodrow Wilson, somewhat infamous for his role in World War I and for founding the League of Nations. He is also the president who helped give us the Federal Reserve.

If you read Freedom Is a Two-Edged Sword by Jack Parsons, you will find that Parsons believed the consciousness of the world was topsy turvy. Consequently, he took it upon himself to invoke the goddess Babalon, the mother of all creation. In keeping with the aforementioned theory of Excalibur, he recognized the true power of the universe to be encapsulated in the feminine energy of the universe. Parsons began a series of magical experiments which he called the Babalon Working, but he lacked one important element and that was a familiar. A familiar is a living creature that a magician or witch uses to carry out their spell or specific intention. It is usually a cat. As Parsons did not have a cat, he decided to use L. Ron Hubbard who also acted as scribe. After invoking the goddess Babalon for three days, Cameron suddenly showed up at his door. She fit the bill and became the sexual vehicle used in the experiment although she was not clued in on the full nature of what was going on.

At first glance, it might seem a little vague as to what the Babalon Working has to do with UFOS. If we consider that Babalon is the mother of all creation, we have to backtrack to what was said in Preston’s section of the book about quantum mechanics and chaos theory. Babalon opens the door to all possibilities in creation without discrimination. She welcomes all, and this means that everything that has been suppressed in the subconscious of mankind is going to come out of the woodwork. UFOs are a prime sample of the unknown. Hubbard’s work Excalibur was aimed at the same thing-. opening up the unconscious. This is the secret of the feminine energy.

It is no mere coincidence that all three players in this working came from the same Wilson stock. The answer to this secret lies in their particular genetic structure. Before we examine this angle, we will first consider the general nature of genetics.

Creation is a process of geometry. This is readily observable in chemistry and biology. If it weren’t, mathematics wouldn’t work at all. The DNA in each cell contains not only the complete blueprint for the human body, but the entire consciousness and manifestation of the universe itself. In psychological terms, DNA contains the potential for all archetypes and their potential interplays. In computer terms, DNA is coded just like a program and can ultimately manifest any aspect of existence.

When ritual sex is performed, it stimulates the creative processes on a biological level and this ignites the DNA’s creative potential. What translates to humans as the sexual urge is based on a biological program to combine one matrix with another so that the vast panorama of evolution can be created. It is all rather fascinating.

In society, people tend to be somewhat particular in regard to whom they mate with. inbreeding is an example where people lower the quality of creation based upon their own incorrect DNA coded programs. The Nazi’s sought to increase the quality of life with their breeding programs, but this program ended up lowering the quality of life and resulted in conflict and destruction. For centuries, most people have just gone about their business and mated with the man or woman of their fate. More importantly, they seldom try to drastically alter the programming because they aren’t even aware of it.

Sexual magick is based upon the idea that you can alter the programming in the DNA through the will or projection of thought forms. It is a time honored practice, the entire procedures of which have been carefully guarded and relegated to secret societies. This is where the two major taboos of our society cross: sex and awareness. By themselves, sex and awareness are not all that easy to master in our society. If you try to create more awareness and direction for your own evolution and that of others through the practice of sex, you are walking on grounds that are even more taboo. While either manipulating or consciously influencing your own DNA and that of your partner might seem like a small scale act, sexual magick teaches the art of doing this on a grander scale. In other words, this is how secret societies try to influence the entire evolutionary program. It is a grand old game that has been going on for millennia. It is not unlike Democrats and Republicans raising signs and cards at a convention in order for their candidate to get the most attention and votes. Secret societies try to steer humanity and the rest of creation in different directions for their own specific agendas.

There is another fascinating aspect when you consider the DNA programming of sexual magick. Because DNA is based upon geometric designs, it is open to other realms or dimensions. If you consider a flat two dimensional checkerboard and realize that you can also have a cubic configuration that could serve as a playing field for three dimensional chess or checkers, you will understand there is a fourth dimensional possibility as well.

Cameron corroborated this view in my last conversation with her which was on her final birthday. Although she was very ill, she had been reading Pyramids of Montauk which describes the geometry I’m referring to here in further detail. She said that was what the Babalon Working was all about. Geometric visions had abounded in her consciousness at the time. These stayed with her for the rest of her life and it was expressed in her art work. She said that the book expressed in words what she had experienced in consciousness. My last conversation with her was a happy one. Cameron passed away on July 24, 1995.

If we consider the Wilson lineage, we have to realize that the DNA of this clan, or at least some of them, have a predisposition to the bizarre. This is not so bad in itself as it is the radical factor in mutations which makes new developments in evolution possible. When one of my friends whose surname is Wilson heard this story, he told me that he was received in a puzzling manner when he visited Scotland. Every time he told them his name, the natives looked at him strangely as if they wanted nothing to do with him, He is extremely personable, too.

The names “Wilson” and “Cameron” have popped up with outrageous synchronicity during my research of time travel and secret projects. Many other people have noticed this too. Robert Anton Wilson is a famous author who has written about the principles of synchronicity for some time. He says that once you reach the horizons of consciousness, you will encounter the principle of synchronicity. It bridges the consciousness of where we are in this fixated third dimensional existence to a possible escape route through which we can access the fourth dimension and beyond.

Flying saucers are fourth dimensional chess pieces and that is why Preston found that space went on and on when he walked aboard one. They are based upon geometrical configurations and a different sort of consciousness than what is considered typical “Earth think”.

When Jack Parsons (right) and L. Ron Hubbard (left) engaged in the Babalon Working, there was plenty of sexual excitement going on. Parsons was copulating with Cameron on the altar and Hubbard was scrying and tapping the energy. Geometric incantations were used along with symbols, not unlike what Hubbard referred to in the book I had discovered. They were deliberately working with the same energies and some of the protocols that John Dee and Edward Kelly had used during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Dee was her court astrologer). An earnest communication had been made with the territory known as the unconscious or the great unknown.

Many believe that the 1946 Babalon Working was responsible for or tied to the UFO phenomena which became so abundant after that period. This was confirmed for Cameron when she witnessed a UFO shortly after the Babalon Working. She said that the sight filled her with an insurmountable joy. Cameron and her brother were working at the jet Propulsion Laboratory during this period and had seen a UFO while taking a nature walk in the area. Although she warned her brother not to say a word about it, he blabbed and was ridiculed to the point where he had to leave his job due to embarrassment. He ended up working for the Ralph Parsons Corporation, a huge international conglomerate who builds underground railways and cities among many other things.

After this working, Hubbard founded the subjects of Dianetics and Scientology and proceeded to talk about some of the most far out stuff known to man. He spoke about Fifth Invader Force aliens who were insect-like in nature, and he talked about implants as well. He worked out a whole system designed to free mankind from the confines of three dimensional reality. His relative success or failure is an entirely different subject.

Parsons continued his magical work but was supposedly blown up in an accident in 1952. In a bizarre legal precedent, his next of kin (his wife, Cameron) was not consulted in order to identify the body. in fact, she was not allowed to see him in the ambulance or hospital. The newspaper stories were loaded with oddities. In fact, one of them was by Omar Garrison, a journalist who would later be contracted to be Hubbard’s biographer. He brought the house down on Hubbard as far as the courts were concerned. It is quite remarkable that he had also covered the Parsons incident some thirty years earlier.

A few short weeks after Parsons’ death, UFOs were spotted en masse over the Capitol. Ever since that time, Parsons has been associated with having some sort of hold on the UFO phenomena. When Cameron had Jack’s horoscope evaluated by some of the top astrologers in Los Angeles, she withheld the name connected to the chart. After a detailed analysis, they came back to her and indicated that this person would have to be the head of the CIA. Remember, I said earlier that Parsons was a member of the Illuminati.

Parsons was also a founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. To this day, people at NASA refer to it as “JPL: Jack Parson’s Laboratory“. There is a whole case to be made that he is currently in charge and controlling things from a secret location, but that is not the purpose of this book. If he were a leader of the Illuminati, it wouldn’t matter whether he was alive or dead, for these characters do not live by the rules of ordinary human existence. They regulate the space-time continuum through sex, death, taxes, implants, alien abductions and the like.

Jack Parsons may have been a leader of the Illuminati, but it was his idea to invoke Babalon and thereby change the world. It is my personal opinion that he got caught somewhere in between and that his soul will not be at rest until the goddess reigns supreme.

Cameron has also warned against people judging her husband. She once said very wisely that history can’t even begin to adequately evaluate a man until at least one hundred years after his death. The jury is still out.

The Babalon Working and its colorful characters continue to surface as a reference point to many different researchers who study UFO phenomena. The legend and mystique will only grow as time goes by.

Cameron also made another interesting comment to me in our last conversation. When I told her I was working on this book you are reading, she said that she had a very strong connection to the Pleiades.

It was all about the feminine energy that is also known as Babalon.

Source

The BABALON Working II

The Saga of Babalon Working continues…

THE BABALON WORKING
by Alexander Mitchell


John Whiteside Parsons, a brilliant Rocket fuel scientist, joined the American branch of Aleister Crowley‘s cult in 1939. He struck up an earnest correspondence with the Beast 666, as Crowley was known by his followers, and soon became his out- standing protégé in the United States. By January, 1946, Parsons was impatient to break new frontiers in the occult world. He decided to take the spirit of Babalon, the “Whore of Babalon,” and invest it in a human being.

But to carry out this intricate mission, Parsons needed a female sexual partner to create his child in the Astral (Spiritual) world. If this part of the fixture went successfully Parsons would be able to call down the spiritual baby & direct it into a human womb. When born, this child would incarnate the forces of Babalon. During his magical preparations for this incarnation Parsons found himself overwhelmed by assistance from a young novitiate named Ron Hubbard.

Parsons wrote to Crowley at the beginning of 1946.

“He (Hubbard) is a gentleman, red hair, green eyes, honest & intelligent and we have become great friends. Although he has no formal training in magic, he has an extraordinary amount of experience and under- standing in the field. Ron appears to have some sort of highly developed astral vision. He describes his angel as a beautiful winged woman with red hair whom he calls the Empress and who has guided him through many times in his life. He is in complete accord with our own principles. I have found a staunch companion and comrade in Ron.”

But within 3 months, the bonds of friendship were under some strain; Ron claimed Parsons wrote to Crowley,

“She has transferred her sexual affections to Ron. I cared for her rather deeply but I have no desire to control her emotions.”

As if to cement their loyalties, Parsons, Hubbard and Betty decided to pool their finances and form a business partnership.

Meanwhile, preparations for the mystical mission were well under way.

From January 4th to 15th, 1946, Parsons and Hubbard engaged in a nightly ritual of incantation, talisman-waving and other Black Magic, faithfully described in Parsons Diary as Conjuration of Air, Invocation of Wand, and Consecration of Air Dagger. With a Prokofiev violin concerto blaring away, the 2 of them pleaded with the spirits for “an elemental mate” — a girl willing to go through sexual rites to incarnate Babalon in the spirit world.

Parsons mentions that windstorms had occurred on a couple of nights and one night the power suddenly failed. But nothing seriously responsive until Jan. 14th when Ron was struck on the right shoulder and had a candle knocked out of his hand.

“He called me” Parsons wrote, “and we observed a brownish yellow light about 7 feet high. I brandished a magical sword and and it disappeared. Ron’s right arm was paralysed for the rest of the night”.

The following night was even more portentous. Hubbard apparently saw a vision of one of Parsons enemies. Parsons wrote,

“He attacked the figure and pinned it to the door with 4 throwing knives with which he is expert”. For 4 days, Parsons and Hubbard were in a state of tension. Then on Jan. 18th, Parsons turned to Ron and said “It is done.” He added, “I returned home and found a young woman answering the requirements waiting for me.”

The incarnate Ritual set out in Parsons manuscript, The Book of Babalon, is difficult reading for the unconfirmed Spiritualist. Broadly interpreted, Parsons and Hubbard constructed an alter and Hubbard acted as high priest during a series of ceremonies in which Parsons and the girl shared sex. The owner of the documents, who is an expert on Crowley’s magic says that Parsons at this stage was completely under Hubbard’s domination. How else can one explain Hubbard’s role as high priest in the rites after only a few weeks in the trade?

For the first of the birth ceremonies which began on Mar. 1, Hubbard wore a white robe and carried a lamp while Parsons was clocked in a black, hooded garment, carrying a cup and dagger. At Hubbard’s suggestion, they played Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead as background music.

Parsons account of the start of the birth ritual is as follows:

“The Scribe (Hubbard) said, “The Year of Babalon is 4063. She is the flame of life, power of darkness, she destroys with a glance, she may take thy soul. She feeds upon the death of men. Beautiful-Horrible”. The Scribe, now pale and sweating, rested awhile then continued.”

There are 2 possible reasons why Hubbard showed anxiety at this stage of the ceremony, the owner of the papers says. He was either deeply moved by the spiritual depth of the ceremony or he couldn’t think what to say next.

Hubbard further instructed Parsons:

“Display thyself to our lady; dedicate thy organs to her; display thy mind to her; dedicate thy soul to her; for she shall absorb thee. Retire from human contact until noon tomorrow. Speak not of this Ritual. Discuss nothing of it. Consult no book but thine own mind. Thou Art a God. Behave at this Alter as one God before another.”

On the 3rd day, the ritual began 4 hours before dawn. Ron tells his companion,

“Lay out a white sheet. Place upon it blood of birth. Envision her approaching thee. Think upon the lewd, lascivious things thou coulds’t do. All is good to Babalon. All. Preserve the material basis. The lust is hers, the passion yours. Consider thou the Beast raping.”

These invocations along with other passages in the book indicate that Parsons had collected specimens of his own sperm and the girl’s menstrual fluid.

The climax of the ceremony occurred the following day with Ron at the alter working his 2 subjects into a sexual frenzy. Over Rachmaninoff he intoned such gems as:

“Her mouth is red and her breasts are fair, and her loins are full of fire.”

An exalted Parsons wrote the next day,

“Babalon is incarnate upon the earth today awaiting the proper hour of her manifestation. And in that day my work will be accomplished and I shall be blown away upon the breath of the father, even as it is written (in fact, Parsons was blown away in a rocket fuel explosion at his experimental labratory in Pasadena in 1952)

Unable to contain his joy, Parsons decided to tell Crowley what had happened. On March 6th he wrote:

“I can hardly tell you or decide how much to write. I am under command of extreme secrecy. I have had the most important devastating experience of my life.” Crowley was dumbfounded by the news of the incarnation ceremony. He wrote back, “You have me completely puzzled by your remarks. I cannot form the slightest idea of what you can possibly mean.”

With a distinct note of concern, he dashed off a letter on the same day to the head of his American Cult saying,

“Apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is producing a Moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts.” This acid rebuke comes from a man whose activities were once summed up by a judge like this: “I have never heard such horrible, dreadful blasphemous stuff as that which has been produced by the man who describes himself as the greatest living poet.”

By May the same year, Crowley was not only concerned about Parsons’ spiritual well-being. There was a small matter of certain monies. When the trio formed their business enterprise, Parsons is believed to have put in 17,000 dollars. Hubbard had about 10,000 dollars of the money, Hubbard and his newly acquired girlfriend Betty, bought a yacht. A report to the head of the American branch by another cult member says,

“Ron and Betty have their boat at Miami, Florida and are living the life of Riley while Brother John (Parsons) is living at rock bottom and I mean rock bottom.”

In a more sinister way, the report added,

“Let us consider this matter of the magical child which John Parsons is supposed to turn loose on the world in 9 months (now 7) Ron, the Seer, was the guy who laid down the main ideas, technic (sic) etc. of the operation.”

On reading Parsons’ accounts of the ceremony and from the reports from the branch HQ in the States, Crowley cabled his U.S. office on May 22nd.

“Suspect Ron playing confidence trick — John Parsons weak fool — obvious victim prowling swindlers” In a letter a few days later he said, “It seems to me on the information of our brethren in California that Parsons has got an illumination which he lost all his personal independence. From our brother’s account he has given away both his girl and his money. Apparently it is the ordinary confidence trick.”

A must chastened Parsons wrote to Crowley on July 5th.

“Here I am in Miami, pursuing the children of my folly. I have them well tied up. They cannot move without going to jail.”

“However, I am afraid that most of the money has already been spent. I will be lucky to salvage 3,000 to 5,000 dollars.” Just how Parsons managed to capture the errant lovers is in keeping with the other extraordinary chapters of this story. “Hubbard attempted to escape me” Parsons wrote, “by sailing at 5p.m. and performed a full invocation to Bartzabel within the circle at 8p.m. (a curse). At the same time however, his ship was struck by a sudden squall off his sails and forced him back to port where I took the boat in custody.”

Parsons recovered financially and possibly as a backlash to his experience with Hubbard he took the Oath of the Anti-Christ in 1948 and changed his name to Belarion Armiluss Al Dajjal Anti-Chirst. In his scientology publications, Hubbard says of the period,

“Crippled and blinded at the end of the war, I resumed my studies of philosophy and my discoveries recovered so fully that I was reclassified in 1949 for full combat duty.”

Hubbard claims that more than 2 dozen thinkers, prophets and psychologists influenced scientology (which was launched in 1951); everyone from Plato, Jesus, to Sigmund Freud whom he says he studied under in Vienna.

The record can now be righted with the inclusion of Aleister Crowley, the Beast 666

Source

The BABALON Working I

Here is a little saga called The BABALON Working. Here’s the first part:

According to tradition, the Sirians who originally settled in Sumeria had cat or lion like bodies. How many hybrids and just plain humans were absorbed into the ancient culture is not exactly known. What is known is that at some time they settled into the area of Cairo and called it Babalon or Babylon which meant Baby Lyon. This city was designated as one of the Sacred Places of the Lion and it was decided that a large repository of knowledge should be constructed nearby so as to preserve their collective wisdom. This construction project turned out to be what we know today as the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx. The Great Pyramid and its satellite pyramids were designed to serve as ancient time clocks that were in synchronization with the entire cyclic nature of the universe. The Sphinx represented the goddess in the form of Bast who was also known as Babalon and eventually Isis. To reiterate what was said earlier, the names Isis and Osiris were derived from Sirius.

In the Sphinx and Great Pyramid, the Sirians illustrated the two key principles of their religion. The two aspects were connected by sacred knowledge which could be found in the Hall of Records.

Aleister Crowley was schooled in all of this information. When he slept in the Great Pyramid prior to receiving The Book of the Law, he was seeking initiation with no strings attached. Projecting himself beyond his own understanding, he had a profound experience. He connected with forms of consciousness that were not only far beyond the norm, they knew the precise mathematics of the universe and this never ceased to amaze him. The resultant effect was that he spent the rest of his life trying to explain what had happened.

Earlier, we spoke of Tetragrammaton, the magical or alchemical formula that accompanied the “first tetrahedron” of existence. The first element in alchemy or the tarot is fire and is assigned to the first point of the tetrahedron of Tetragrammaton. As fire itself forms a wave, the actual pattern of that wave is reproduced to illustrate the vortex shape that resides in the tetrahedron of Stan Tenon‘s work. This is identical to the ram’ s horn and is also the basis of the Hebrew fire letters whereby all the letters of the alphabet could be perceived by rotating the shape within the tetrahedron. With this much symbolism encoded in one particular shape, it is easy to grasp that an energy stream of consciousness is emitted from within the geometric matrix that contains a tetrahedron or a pyramid. It is actually a conical spiral of energy which conforms to a precise mathematical formula known as the Fibonacci spiral. That this cone of energy can influx a mind with extra intelligence was illustrated in history by placing a dunce cap on a slow student. The cone on the head was supposed to make him smarter but evolved into a punishment style degradation of the student concerned. Although Crowley was not known to wear a dunce cap, he did use a magician’s hat for some occasions which is really the same thing.

The fire or primal energy of Tetragrammaton that exists in the Great Pyramid was linked to the fire and passion of the Sphinx through the passageway known as the Hall of Records. The Sphinx represents the lustful and unrestricted loins of Bast but also the intelligent female Virgo (known to the Romans as Diana, Goddess of the Moon) who transmutes the lower energies into the higher form. In other words, she could tap into the Hall of Records. When Crowley performed sexual magick, he was often trying to tap into the higher consciousness portrayed in the Hall of Records. He was using the lower energies to tap the higher.

The Great Pyramid itself is a very curious structure for many different reasons. One of its more intriguing features is that it is not a symmetrical polygon. In other words, if you consider the Great Pyramid to be the upper half of an octahedron, you would expect two angles at the base of each triangular surface to measure 60′ each. This is not the case. The angles at the base of each triangle are 51.51′. This means that the pyramid has been squashed. In other words, you would get the same result if you took a perfectly symmetrical octahedron and pushed the top and bottom towards the center. The angles would shift under the force exerted. The reason for this is that the Earth itself is not a perfect sphere. It is a spheroid, i. e. it looks like a tangerine. What this is telling us is that the matrix lines which make up the blueprint for the Earth are not perfectly symmetrical either. They may have been in their original condition, but whenever the Earth was squashed into a spheroid or otherwise assumed that particular shape, the corresponding grid lines assumed the shape of the Earth and were distorted accordingly. The 51.51′ angles of the Great Pyramid correspond exactly to the geometric distortion of the Earth from a sphere to its current shape. What this means is that whoever built the Great Pyramid knew the exact shape of the Earth’s grid.

There is another interesting aspect when you consider the angles of the Great Pyramid. When it was in its heyday, the pyramid was encased in limestone which is really just calcium carbonate. If you put this chemical under a microscope and apply a protractor to what you see, you will discover that calcium carbonate also consists of two 51.51′ angles at the base of each triangular molecule. In other words, the molecules in the limestone facing of the pyramid were mirroring the very shape of the Great Pyramid which mimics the Earth’s grid itself. Taking this a step further, calcium carbonate is what human bones are made of. This is why the dead bones of the Montauks were so important to tapping into the grid. The geometry of the bones was in complete resonance to the pyramidal structure of the grid. Of course, all human bones have this property. They resonate energy which can include consciousness as well. And if you don’ t believe that bones can influence consciousness, try scaring the living daylights out of somebody through the use of a skeleton. Actually, you shouldn’t. It works only too well.

In his different works, Crowley hints that he knew these various aspects of the Great Pyramid and its energies. Using this, along with his other knowledge which included an extensive study of the Sumerians, he created specific rituals that were designed not only to reach other planes of consciousness but to communicate with unseen worlds by every conceivable means. This was very much intended to include aliens.

In 1918, Crowley began a sexual magick operation with a lady in New York by the name of Roddie Minor. It was known as the Amalantrah Working and was done just a few months before he spent the summer at Montauk Point. One of the main features in this working was the symbolism of the egg. They were told, “it’ s all in the egg”. This corresponds exactly to the sacred geometry precepts given earlier in this book. The egg is the first sphere of existence and all the potential that unfolds thereafter. The entity contacted was LAM and an artistic rendering of him by Crowley looks hauntingly familiar to the gray aliens we have all heard so much about. LAM‘s bulbous head has the shape of an egg.

Documents of the OTO indicate that LAM is the Tibetan word for Way or Path and that a LAMA is “He who Goeth”. The Tibetan connection appearing in Crowley’s work just before he traveled to Montauk is interesting and should be noted. Earlier, we defined the Tibetan word “mantak” as clarity or understanding. In the Amalantrah Working, Crowley was told “Thou art to go this Way”. It is easy to associate LAM with Montauk although the connection warrants further research. But it is certain that Montauk does connect to Tibet, not only through the word “mantak” but by virtue of the German connection mentioned earlier in this book.

Of additional interest concerning LAM is that it is a Celtic word for door jam and implies a stop on the path as opposed to a pathway. There is also an ancient land in present day Iraq that was known as Elam. It is located on the northeast banks of the Tigris River at the beginning of the Persian Gulf. The language spoken in Elam was a curiosity as it had no known relationship with any other language.

There is also current interest in LAM today. The OTO has founded a Cult of Lam for their members who are drawn to this entity and want to use the egg as an astral space-capsule for traveling to LAM’s domain and for tantric time traveling.

The main point concerning LAM is that Crowley was contacting an extraterrestrial entity who had links to almost every aspect we’ ve studied. The idea that Crowley continued to function in some aspect of LAM after his death in 1947 is a possibility especially when you consider that is the year when the rash of UFO sightings began.

The year 1947 has an amazing correspondence in itself and that has to do with a major grid point that has been found to exist on different planets. It was discovered that Cydonia, the region of Mars that houses the face and the pyramids, rests at 19.47′ from the equator. The same can be said for the whirling red spot on Jupiter and a similar area found on Neptune. On our planet Earth, pyramids are exact at 19.47′ north of the equator on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. I have also been informed by someone who just recently visited the island of Hawaii that pyramids have been found there but are covered with jungle vegetation. They are at 19.47′ north of the equator as well.

None of this proves that Aleister Crowley or his death in 1947 is responsible for the UFO sightings since that time period, but many people have noticed and commented upon it along with the UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico that occurred in the same year. Actually, Crowley’s death occurred on December 1st which was well after the Roswell incident. Of course, we could argue that he was weak and dying and that was why the military in New Mexico were able to shoot down “his” flying saucers with their SAGE Radar. That is an unlikely scenario, but whatever the case is with Crowley, it is undeniable that he deeply influenced another magician who has been inextricably linked to aliens, the CIA and Montauk. That man is Jack Parsons and his grand experiment was in 1946.

Jack Parsons was described in Montauk Revisited as having conducted a sexual magick experiment that has been hailed by some as the magical experiment of the century. This activity was done in conjunction with two magicians who were part of the Wilson Clan: Marjorie Cameron and L. Ron Hubbard. The experiment was called the Babalon Working and was designed to invoke the Mother Goddess in her crowning glory: she who is called Babalon.

I have done a considerable amount of research into Jack Parsons since Montauk Revisited was published. He deserves an entire book and only a very brief summary of what I’ve found can be included here.

Jack was a cofounder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and his innovations in rocketry made our space program a reality. He died officially on June 17, 1952 as the result of a chemical explosion in his laboratory, but a search through all the newspapers and a talk with his wife and a friend revealed mysterious circumstances. His wife, Marjorie Cameron, arrived after the explosion but before the ambulance had left. The attendants would not let her ride in the ambulance nor was she allowed to see him in the hospital. What is most outrageous is that the police violated standard procedure when they omitted asking her to identify the body. She was Jack’s next of kin as his mother was declared dead from suicide after hearing the report that Jack had died. Neither Cameron nor George Frey, who took care of Jack’s cremation, saw the actual dead body. Further, the newspaper accounts are filled with suspicious characters and accounts. The death of Virginia Parsons, Jack’s mother, had equally bizarre circumstances surrounding it.

I asked the Pasadena police department if I could look at the file for the case. They said it was old and that I should write to the microfiche department. If it wasn’t sealed, I should be able to review it. I wrote them a letter requesting permission to review the relevant files and after a long delay, I was told that the file was purged from their system. I do know that the FBI watched his every move. Maybe somebody will provide that file someday.

While the circumstances surrounding Jack’s death are a mystery, his magical career is not so murky. He was perhaps more passionate and dedicated to the Mother Goddess than any popular magician of the century. Crowley and Jack did not see eye to eve about the Babalon Working. Crowley was at the end of his life and Jack was playing the part of the wayward and rebellious son. According to reports, Crowley wrote him off as a failure, but he did leave a door open. He said that he hadn’t received an expected report from Parsons and that a final conclusion would have to remain open.

When Jack conducted the Babalon Working in 1946, he invoked the goddess Babalon and sought to bring an end to the tyranny which had dominated mankind during the dark yuga. That he at least had an idea of what he was doing can be seen by virtue of the yantra he used. A yantra is a two dimensional glyph that is designed to evoke a fourth dimensional experience. It is a common device in magick, yoga and other meditative arts. The yantra that was used for the Babalon Working was the seven pointed star and has been reproduced on the following page.

Note that the seven letters of Babalon fit into the triangles. In this glyph, all the angles are designed to be 51.51′. These are the same angles of the Great Pyramid of Giza which found their numerical value as a result of the pyramid being structured so as to be in harmony with the Earth’s grid. If you multiply 51.51 by seven, you get 360.57, the approximate length of an ancient calendar year. It was by this means that the Babalon workers (Jack, Ron and Cameron) were plugging into the consciousness of the time line. What happened to the participants after they entered their altered states of consciousness is still anyone’s guess. But, they did project themselves out of this reality and the consequent result and synchronicity of the act has led in no small part to the writing of this book.

Cameron has said that the operation changed Jack and Ron Hubbard forever. They were never quite the same. After recovering from a paralysis on his right side (as a result of the working), Hubbard eventually accessed incredible genius and a considerable amount of energy. Most of this was channeled into the Dianetics and Scientology movement. He had people doing regressions on alien implants forty years before it became vogue.

Parsons took a different route. Always considered a security risk by the military industrial complex, he continued his pursuit of magick. He had completed the Babalon Working ritual itself, but the consequent chain reactions and results still had to reach their appointed conclusions.

Concerning the Babalon Working, Jack wrote a statement to the effect that he would be consumed by the fire. Whether he meant this in an allegorical or real sense, we don’t know. It was said in honor of Babalon and he was willing to serve as the supreme sacrifice. Just a few months before his reported death, he foresaw that some kind of end was near. He knew that this end could mean physical death and he didn’t rule it out.

There is yet a greater mystery that has been overlooked by many. Although Jack was on the outs with the OTO after the Babalon Working, he had obtained the Ninth Degree in the order. In order to progress beyond that grade, one has to give up their identity. There is no question that this was accomplished. Whether he assumed a secret identity within the confines of the secret government or simply died is not known. That he might have died physically is rather insignificant in the higher scheme of things. But, he did change his identity. Jack Parsons has been legally dead for forty years.

Another fact about Jack that is often overlooked or not mentioned is that he was not only a member of the OTO but was a member of the A:.A:. No mention is ever made of him having ever fallen out of grace with that particular order which is, of course, the Illuminati. What is of further interest in this regard is that Cameron once told me that she gave Jack’s birth time to some of the top astrologers in Southern California. They told her his chart indicated he was or could be the real head of the CIA.

As Crowley and Parsons were both members of the Illuminati, we have to take a look at what the organization is and what it actually represents. From what has been said already, we know that it is related to Sirius. There are also countless books and conspiracy theories on the subjects According to the dictionary, the Illuminati refers to those of a secret society who profess to have special intellectual or spiritual enlightenment.

Let us next consider what happens when someone achieves a brilliant illumination and transcends all experience known. He goes into another dimension and basically understands the entire picture of creation. This is sometimes referred to as a kundalini experience or tapping into the universal consciousness. There are, of course, many types and variations of illuminations. I am referring to a particularly grand one. When one achieves such a state, he is still left with the predicament of relating to the Earth plane which has its share of imperfection and turmoil. If one person achieves such a state, it does not automatically transfer to the entire human race.

All of this catapults us right into the war of consciousness. There are those of us who want to be more aware and expand the consciousness across the entire parameters of existence. There are also those who want to limit such activity. Splendorous and gigantic scenarios can be recognized or imagined that pit various secret groups against one another.

Most important to our investigation, Aleister Crowley and Jack Parsons were plugged into a tradition that identified with the Illuminati and sought to expand consciousness. Whether their activities were good or bad is not the point. Both of their writings reflect the fact that they were warriors for consciousness. Those who decried them seemed to be on the other side of the coin.

Aleister Crowley’s goal was to set occult forces in motion that would result in the illumination of all by the end of this century. Jack Parsons followed in the same tradition but the circumstances of his death at a young age leave a different enigma. We are forced to consider whether he lived and has orchestrated forces in a super secret capacity or whether he died and did the same thing from the spirit world. The bottom line is that his magick has reverberated and created effects beyond his own ordinary mortal means. Both men encountered dark forces in their work and neither were afraid to deal with them. They have also chosen dark vehicles by which to communicate. But, ultimately, what did they communicate? That all creation manifests from the light, also defined as the electromagnetic spectrum which is just another word for Mother Nature.

Crowley offered us all a clue when he announced he wouldn’t officially assume the name “Phoenix” until the work was completed. In this regard, the true Phoenix Project would be to redeem mankind by purging the forces of ignorance and oppression that have ruled during the last 13,000 years.

Armageddon awaits us all, but not in the sense it has been perpetrated on us by the merchants of fear and those with ulterior motives. For each of us, it will be a personal encounter, if it hasn’t been encountered already. In one corner will be the Christ with all the angelic forces he can muster. In the other, will be the Antichrist with his demons.

Source

Jack Parsons – Sorcerous Scientist

Now we start a serie, which tell you about black magick and persons around it. Here’s a very interesting person called Jack Parsons a close friend of Aleister Crowley:

Excerpted from:
Jack Parsons: Sorcerous Scientist
1990 by Douglas Chapman
Strange Magazine #6, ISSN 0894-8968
P.O. Box 2246, Rockville, MD 20847
(301) 881-3530

“The [Babalon] Working began in 1945-46, a few months before Crowley’s death in 1947, and just prior to the wave of unexplained aerial phenomena now recalled as the ‘Great Flying Saucer Flap’… Parsons opened a door and something flew in.

“A Gateway for the Great Old Ones has already been established — and opened — by members of the O.T.O. who are en rapport with this entity [Lam, an extra- terrestrial being whom Crowley supposedly contacted while in America in 1919].”

Kenneth Grant, O.T.O.


The Sorcerous Scientist

“I hight Don Quixote, I live on peyote, marijuana, morphine and cocaine, I never know sadness, but only a madness that burns at the 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.” (1)

-John Whiteside (Jack”) Parsons (1943)

The preceding poem is the most famous written work of John Whiteside Parsons (1914-1952). He helped make science fiction into fact, yet this dark and handsome man, born of a well-to-do Los Angeles family, made his private life “visionary” in a different way, being as involved with ceremonial magic outside of working hours as he was with rocketry research during the day. In the mid-to-late 1940s, his major accomplishments behind him, magic came to obsess him all the more.

Frank Malina, one of his colleagues at Caltech (California Institute of Technology) in Pasadena, has chronicled John (Jack) Parsons’ contributions to rocketry. (2) In 1936, Parsons and Edward S. Forman came upon a report of a GALCIT (Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory-Caltech) lecture concerning the idea of a rocket-powered airplane. Parsons, though a self-trained chemist, had powers of imagination that proved to be invaluable in all of his pursuits (whether scientific or magical). He and Forman (a mechanic) bad together been making small black-powder rockets.

They wanted to experiment with a liquid propellant rocket motor, so (lacking the funds) they approached Caltech. As a result, Malina (in 1936) came up with a proposal for his doctoral thesis on rocket propulsion and performance in-flight. Theodore von Karman (who headed GALCIT) gave Malina permission to collaborate with Forman and Parsons, even though the latter two were neither students nor staff members of the institute.

Even so, funds were scarce, and the three experimenters chipped in necessary funds for the materials. They conducted the tests at Arroyo Seco, behind the Devil’s Gate Dam in Pasadena (very near the present-day Jet Propulsion Laboratory), a site that, unbeknownst to them, had previously been used by rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard. (Forteans should make special note of the ‘Devil’s Gate‘ place-name.)

 

The “Suicide Squad”

Weld Arnold and Hsue Shen Tsien soon joined GALCIT rocket research, completing the well-remembered team. The group became known as the ‘suicide squad” because of a 1937 test misfire in which a nitrogen dioxide/alcohol cloud caused a thin layer of rust to appear on much lab equipment. Henceforth, the small scale rocket motor responsible was moved from the building. The failed experiment, providentially, gave Parsons an important idea (to be recounted shortly).


In the summer of 1938, the staff decreased, leaving Malina, Forman and Parsons as remaining core members. A few months later, the National Academy of Science (NAS) Committee on Army Air Corps Research commenced study with the GALCIT rocket research group, with the express interest of finding ways to assist the takeoffs of heavily-laden aircraft by using rocketry.

A $10,000 contract was thus awarded by the NAS to Caltech to develop “jet” (actually rocket) propulsion to be used to provide “super-performance” for propeller aircraft. Liquid and solid propellant rocket engines were part of this research. Von Karman took charge, with Malina, Parsons and Forman being the major members of his staff. In 1940, Parsons was able to show the Air Corps that red-fuming nitric acid was a better oxidizer than liquid oxygen (making use of knowledge gained from the 1937 misfire). (3) This led to important later developments.

As can be seen, Parsons was already invaluable to the development of the technology that eventually got America into outer space.

 

The Secret Parsons

But he had a secret life, which appeared totally at odds with his public one, and it came to further dominate his life as the ’40s progressed.

Jack Parsons and his wife Helen bad come into contact with the Agape lodge of the O.T.O. (Ordo Templi Orientis international magical fraternity) in Los Angeles in 1939, and had joined it in 1941. It was under the leadership of Wilfred Talbot Smith, a Britisher who had founded this particular lodge about a decade earlier, circa 1930.

 

Smith and Parsons’ wife hit it off nicely and he was soon not much in evidence around the house and the O.T.O. Gnostic Mass temple in the attic. This latter space was fully fitted out, and even had a copy of the Egyptian ‘Stele of Revealing,’ venerated by followers of the famous magician Aleister Crowley. It was the only such temple in the world at that time which was properly functioning.

Crowley, the world head of the O.T.O., took action that increased Parsons’ stature in the Order. Circa 1943-44, he convinced Smith, via a paper entitled ‘Is Smith a God?’ that astrological research had shown that Smith was not a man, but actually an incarnation of some deity. Taking the hint that Crowley wanted him out, the “god” went into private magical practice, eventually with reportedly rewarding results, remaining head of the lodge in name only.

 

Parsons became acting master of the lodge. (4) Why did Crowley in effect kick Smith upstairs? The ostensible reason seemed to be the danger that the man was turning the Order into (as Crowley put it) ‘that slimy abomination, a love cult’.” (5)

Actually, Crowley, who was unable to emigrate to the United States, was isolated from the only successful O.T.O. lodge in the world. Because of this frustration, bad blood resulted, despite the fact that Smith was probably the best field commander Crowley ever had.

Parsons had lost his wife to Smith, yet remained on good terms with her. He was kept busy by Order activities, one of the most important of which was the sending of money to Crowley, for both the old man’s minimal upkeep and the O.T.O. publishing fund. A good percentage came from Parsons’ own pocket.” (6)

 

Crowley, who brought actual fame to the O.T.O. (which was already well-known in Masonic circles), was one of Parsons’ major inspirations in life. The elderly man’s accomplishments had been many: as a poet, publisher, mountain climber, chess master, and bisexual practitioner of sexual magic (or “Magick,” as he termed it). Made famous by yellow journalists as the “Wickedest Man in the World,” he considered his central identity to be the “Great Beast 666” as referred to in the book of “Revelation” in the Bible, though he was not leaning on that work particularly in his religious ideas.

Needless to say, Crowley felt that the Bible had misconstrued the meaning of the Beast and the Whore of Babylon necessary elements of the succession to the Aeon of Horus, the Aeon of the Crowned and Conquering Child.

 

Crowley synopsized human development thusly:

“Within the memory of man we have had the Pagan period, the worship of Nature, of Isis, of the Mother, of the Past; the Christian period, the worship of Man, of Osiris, of the Present. The first period is simple, quiet, easy, and pleasant; the material ignores the spiritual; the second is of suffering and death: the spiritual strives to ignore the material…. The new Aeon is the worship of the spiritual made one with the material, of Horus, of the Child, of the Future.” (7)

Renowned as the most noted master of the occult of the last century, Crowley’s work is still influential (his books are sometimes stocked even in New Age bookstores).

According to most accounts, when Parsons’ father died (circa the early ’40s), Parsons inherited a mansion and coach-house at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena, California. To the shock of the neighbors, the place became a haven for Bohemians and atheists, who were the sort of people to whom Parsons liked to rent out rooms.

The lodge headquarters was moved to this location, making use of two rooms in the house: the bedroom (which became a properly decorated temple), and a wood-paneled library dominated by an enormous portrait of Crowley.

According to a story told by L. Sprague DeCamp (most recently appearing in the June 24, 1990 Los Angeles Times, p. A35), at one point the police — who had heard neighbors’ reports of a ritual in which a nude pregnant woman jumped nine times through a fire in the yard — came to investigate, but Parsons put them off by emphasizing his scientific credentials.

His Career Rockets


Returning to the events of 1940, the explosions of many of Parsons’ rockets on the test stand caused second thoughts among many involved in the government-financed project. After work by Von Karman and Malina on the differential equations involved on the theoretical side, Parsons was given permission to keep on with his tests, and a few months later the earliest “jet-assisted takeoff” rockets were created. These were the direct forerunners of the modern large solid-propellant engines.


The first American rocket-assisted takeoff (August 12,1941) made use of a Parsons-developed solid-propellant (GALCIT 27 — which provided a 28 lb. maximum thrust for 12 seconds). But tests showed that GALCIT 27 would explode when stored for long periods, so Parsons, Mark M. Mills and Fred S. Miller came up with a more stable fuel (GALCIT 53) in June 1942.

At the same time, others were working with Parsons’ idea for a red-fuming nitric acid-gasoline engine (a liquid propellant rocket). On April 15, 1942, the first American flight of an aircraft making use of such rocket engines to assist takeoff was accomplished.

The previous month, Malina, Parsons and Forman, with the advice of von Karman’s attorney, had set up the Aerojet Engineering Corporation in March 1942, for the express purpose of properly exploiting the developments that they had been making. Jack Parsons was one of the vice-presidents at the time of incorporation and helped supervise the changeover to full-scale production.” (8)


Parsons’ High Ideals


Also a science fiction enthusiast, Parsons met fellow fan Alva Rogers, who romanced another resident of Parsons’ house.

“I always found Jack’s insistence that he believed in, and practiced, magic hard to reconcile with his educational and cultural background,” Rogers opined.

He originally thought that Parsons was just doing it to shock his friends until he saw letters from Crowley, and evidences of Parsons’ funding of the guru. (9)


Parsons‘ magical idealism becomes clear if one peruses his writings. In the 1946 essay “Freedom is a Two Edged Sword” (newly reprinted in an anthology of the same title, published by Falcon Press) he writes of the deeper meanings of his quest:

“[The individual] must go down like Moses, into his unknown self …into the labyrinths of the dark land. There he will meet the Mother and hear her final question, which is not a silly riddle but the most wonderful and terrible of all questions: ‘what is man?’


“And thereafter …he may find the Graal, ultimate consciousness …For it is he, wonderful monster, embryo god, that has swum in the fish….peered from the eyes of serpents, swung with the ape, and shaken the earth with the tramp of the tyrannosaurus hoof. It is he who has cried out on all crosses, ruled on all thrones, grubbed in all gutters. It is he whose face is reflected and distorted in all heavens and hells, he, the child of the stars, the son of the ocean, this creature of dust, this wonder and terror called man.” (10)

After having lost Helen Parsons to Smith in 1944, Parsons soon fell for her younger sister, Sara Northrup (a.k.a. Betty), who was 18 year old and a student at USC. Parsons encouraged her to drop out of school and come live with him (not exactly thrilling her parents). She joined the O.T.O. and was not monogamous, since she agreed with Parsons that jealousy was a base emotion not fit for the illuminated.

Delineating such beliefs, he once wrote that,

“…by debasing the mother image into a demon-virgin-angel, it has denied each daughter the possibility of her fulfillment,” and that “…by imputing the concepts of nastiness, dirt, shamefulness, guilt, indecency and obscenity to the entire sexual process, it has poisoned the life force at its source.” (11)

He tried his hardest to live up to his philosophy, but events put him to the extremist possible test, leading as they did to his eventual estrangement from Betty.

During this period, also (circa 1945), Parsons became friends with science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, with whom he shared many interests. Details of their friendship can be found in the biographies of Hubbard.

The Scarlet Woman


Parsons and an associate attempted to bring about some sort of incarnation of the goddess Babalon. To understand Parsons’ attitude towards Babalon, one can refer to his “Freedom…” essay:

“She will come girt with the sword of freedom, and before her kings and priests will tremble and cities and empires will fall, and she will be called BABALON, the scarlet woman….And women will respond to her war cry, and throw off their shackles and chains, and men will respond to her challenge, forsaking the foolish ways and the little ways, and she will shine as the ruddy evening star in the bloody sunset of Gotterdamerung, will shine as a morning star when the night has passed, and a new dawn breaks over the garden of Pan” (12)

Parsons performed rituals (reportedly to the background music of Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff records) for 11 days in a process known as the “Babalon Working.” On the second and third days he got an unwanted result, writing to Crowley that “the wind storm is very interesting, but that is not what I asked for.” (13)

On the seventh day of the Working, Parsons was awakened by seven loud knocks. Getting up, he soon discovered a smashed table lamp.

Other phenomena occurred on subsequent nights, including an (alleged) attack by an entity against one of their group which knocked a candle out of the man’s hand and paralyzed his right arm overnight. Parsons banished – by gesturing at it with a magical sword – what they took to be a seven-foot-tall, brownish-yellow light. It is rumored that he thought the apparition to be Wilfred T. Smith. (14)

On January 18, 1946, Parsons returned from a magical undertaking, finding the needed “Scarlet Woman” (Marjorie Cameron) waiting for him at the house. Parsons was overjoyed and wrote to Crowley:

“I have my elemental! …She has red hair and slant green eyes as specified.” (15)

Parsons, on February 28, 1946, went out into the Mojave Desert in order to invoke Babalon, thus taking down 77 clauses of what came to be known as his Book of Babalon.

Further work at the home temple produced more instructions for an imminent ritual, the directions for which were supposedly emanating from the astral plane.

The rituals (whose objective was to produce a magical child, “mightier than all the kings of the earth”) continued for two days. Parsons was confident of their effectiveness, and wrote an exultant letter to Crowley, whose response was not what would have been wished. Parsons was upset by his mentor’s lack of comprehension. Crowley immediately wrote a letter to Karl Germer (who was the head of the O.T.O. in the U.S. at that time) stating that,

“Apparently Parsons…or somebody is producing a Moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts.” (16)

Crowley reorganized the lodge on the basis of these actions removing Parsons from power.

Stormy Relationships


Parsons, Betty, and a key magical associate activated Allied Enterprises (a yacht business of theirs), the intent of which was to buy boats in the East in order to sail them to California — where they could command a higher price.


The business had been founded some time earlier. But, as it eventually worked out, Parsons was undergoing financial hardship in the West, and went after his partners to find out why they had not shown up in California. They were nowhere to be found. He soon discovered that they were out at sea. From within a Miami, Florida hotel room, Parsons invoked Bartzabel (the spirit of Mars and war). A squall forced his associates back to port. (17)

Dade County, Florida court records reveal that Parsons filed a lawsuit. (18) The result: Parsons got two of the boats back and made an arrangement with his partners, so that they could pay him off for the third. He never saw them again. Betty continued to think well of Parsons (despite their estrangement), calling him a “truly great man.” Even so, she married the other business partner. One can easily imagine Parsons’ feelings about this turn of events. Both had been key people in his personal, magical and business lives.

Because of the O.T.O. disaster, Parsons changed his magical emphases to “the Witchcraft.” (19)

He sold the main house at South Orange Grove, moving (with Marjorie Cameron – whom he later married) into the coach-house on the property.

Several of the original incorporators of Aerojet sold out their stock in the company to General Tire in 1952. Frank Malina did not do so, and became, as a result, very rich. (20) It is rumored that Jack Parsons had sold his shares in the mid-1940s.

In 1949, with, surprisingly, Wilfred T. Smith as witness, Parsons took the Oath of the Abyss, to unite himself with the Universal consciousness, taking the magical name of Belarion Armiluss Al Dajjal AntiChrist. John Symonds, a biographer of Crowley, has stated that Parsons had by now become psychotic (21) (but it should be kept in mind that Symonds is a man of generally harsh judgments). On the contrary, Parsons’ writings from the late 1940s and early 1950s show a sparkling lucidity.

Take, for example, this again-timely comment from “Freedom…”:

“Religious groups, backed by a publicity conscious press, are constantly campaigning for the prohibition of art and literature which, as if by divine prerogative, they term, ‘indecent,’ immoral or dangerous.


“It would seem that all organizations are devoted to one common purpose, the suppression of freedom. Nor is their sincerity any excuse. History is a bloody testament that sincerity can achieve atrocities which cynicism could never conceive.” (22)

In a 1950 Introduction to the essay, he writes: “We are one nation, and one world….We cannot suppress our brothers’ liberty without murdering ourselves. We will stand together, as men, for human freedom and human dignity, or we will fall together, simians all, back to the swamp.” (23)

Parsons’ answer to the dilemma was magick, discussed in his essay “On Magick.”

“It may be stated,” he writes, “that magick is the method of training individuals towards total consciousness by the stimulation of various centers of the mind and by the cultivation of field thinking. The object of this training is the manifestation of initiated leadership towards a more conscious, better integrated, and more interesting and significant social culture. In short the object of magick is the unfoldment of the individual in all the ways of love; and the enlightenment of society to accept all the commitments of this unfoldment as the necessary conditions of progress.” (24)

If these are the writings of a madman, then many people are mad, including a number of those promoting the New Age way of life.

Sorcery And Science: An Explosive Combination


On June 20, 1952, Parsons was working in the private experimental laboratory in his garage. At 5:08 p.m., the place exploded. The general opinion was that he had dropped fulminate of mercury (25). His shattered body lay within the destroyed edifice.

The Homunculous
a tiny artificial man with magic powers

It has been rumored that this was the end result of building psychological pressures. Otherwise, why would he have dropped what he was said to have, when a trash can containing cordite and wrappers of fulminate of mercury was nearby? Especially since he was about to travel to Mexico to test a new explosive he had devised, which was “more powerful than anything yet invented.” George Santmeyers, who had worked with him for five years on industrial projects (and did not believe in the rumors of his magical activities) did not think an accident plausible, considering Parsons’ technical knowledge. (26)

But there were other theories. In Nat Freedland‘s book The Occult Explosion, Renate Druks, an artist and educational filmmaker (who once, at her Malibu beach house, hosted Marjorie Cameron) related an alternate version:

“I have every reason to believe that Jack Parsons was working on some very strange experiments, trying to create what the old alchemists called a homunculus, a tiny artificial man with magic powers. I think that’s what he was working on when the accident happened.” (27)

As magical work does not usually lead to explosions, nor deal with explosives, this seems unlikely. Having lost his security clearance because of providing Israel some secrets of his wartime work, Parsons was doing movie special effects work at this time, but of the explosive variety, not the fantastical. (28)

There were rumors of self-inflicted death or even murder connected with Parsons’ demise. Sources close to Parsons have suggested that there was not just one explosion, but two. It is said that Parsons and Cameron would mix dynamite and other explosives in the many vats in the lab. Why then, it has been asked, was the first explosion supposedly from under the floorboards?

This would seem to hint that a bomb bad been planted there. There has been some speculation that the rumored perpetrator was neither a friend nor associate of Parson’s, but rather an individual who must have bad a strong motive such as revenge.

Nevertheless, if Parsons‘ death was not a suicide, it becomes even sadder. He and Cameron had many plans for the future, having intended to travel to Mexico-and next perhaps to Spain or Israel, according to what Cameron told others. (29)

Whatever actually caused Parsons’ death, and whether there was any public distortion of the truth or not, in regard to what happened next there has been no dispute. His mother, Ruth Virginia Parsons, after hearing the tragic news, committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping tablets, in front of a frightened, crippled friend who could not move to help her. (30)

Many men of genius have behaved quirkily in their private lives. Parsons’ tragedy was that his brand of idealism was often ‘rewarded’ by betrayal. Yet, while his delvings into magic may not have been as beneficial to society as his rocketry research, they have left us with some points to consider. Frater H.H.D. introduced his contribution thusly:

“By applying to occultism the scientific acumen so intrinsic to his professional research, he anticipated the ontological implications of current quantum physics concerning the nature of reality.” (31)

While this claim may be debatable (and similar ones have been advanced towards other modern mystics), Parsons did keep careful records of his magical work, thus allowing the generations that follow to have some chance of evaluating his magick experiments, designed to make use of alleged unknown aspects of reality.

Some have tried to make sense of it already. Kenneth Grant, a British magician, has made some — to say the least — astounding inferences about Parsons’ Babalon Working. He writes that:

‘The Working began in 1945-46, a few months before Crowley’s death in 1947, and just prior to the wave of unexplained aerial phenomena now recalled as the “Great Flying Saucer Flap.” Parsons opened a door and something flew in….” (32)

Crowley’s 1919 Portrait of LAM


Grant’s associates have kept busy in this regard. Grant states that:

“A Gateway for the Great Old Ones has already been established — and opened — by members of the O.T.O. [an English splinter group] who are en rapport with this entity [Lam, an extra-terrestrial being whom Crowley supposedly contacted while in America in 1919 – click image right].

Crowley’s portrait of Lam has been reproduced in [Grant’s] The Magical Revival….(33) Crowley’s rendition, by the way, resembles the typical representation of an UFO entity.

If these suggestively “Lovecraftian” details turn out to have any merit, Parsons may have helped us contact outer space in more ways than one. At the present time, however, such ideas seem highly debatable. Certainly, neither Crowley nor Parsons were of the opinion that their work concerned extraterrestrials of the Lovecraftian or the UFO varieties (though Cameron once sighted a UFO). (34)

Yet, having turned what had been termed “science fiction” into science fact, is it conceivable that Parsons’ work may someday do the same for elements of “fantasy?”

His imaginative powers had solved tricky scientific problems and thus paved the way for space travel. Yet, perhaps because of his lack of accredited training, and the fact that the scientific papers to which he contributed were often unpublished (due to wartime secrecy), his name is not to be found in the scientific “who’s who” (though a crater on the moon — 37′ N. 171′ W. was in 1972 named for him). But his name has often been noted in the histories of magic.

Will further examination of the full extent of his work make him more of a name to conjure with-a man who led the way to inner as well as outer space?

Some corrections and clarifications by OTO’s Bill Heidrick


Footnotes:

  1. John W. Parsons, from a poem printed in the Oriflamme, Journal of the O.T.O., 21 February 1943.
  2. Frank J. Malina, “Origins and First Decade of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,” in The History of Rocket Technology, ed. Eugene Morlock Emme. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1964), pp. 46-59.
  3. Ibid., pp. 46-54.
  4. Francis King and Isabel Sutherland, The Rebirth of Magic (London: Corgi Books, 1982), p. 180; and Hymenaeus Beta, in 22 July 1990 telephone conversation with Mark Chorvinsky and Douglas Chapman.
  5. John Symonds, The Great Beast (Frogmore, St. Albans, Herts: Mayflower Books, Ltd., 1973), p. 445.
  6. lbid; and Hymenaeus Beta, 22 July 1990.
  7. Aleister Crowley, “Synopsis,” The Holy Books of Thelema (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1983), p. xxxi.
  8. Malina, pp. 54-59.
  9. Alva Rogers, Darkhouse, 1962.
  10. Jack Parsons, “Freedom is a Two Edged Sword,” in Freedom is a Two Edged Sword, ed. Cameron and Hymenaeus Beta. (Las Vegas: Falcon Press, 1989), p. 35.
  11. Jack Parsons, “On Magick,” in Freedom is a Two Edged Sword, ed. Cameron and Hymenaeus Beta. (Las Vegas: Falcon Press, 1989), p. 48.
  12. Parsons, “Freedom,” pp. 43-44.
  13. Symonds, p. 447.
  14. Hymenaeus Beta, 22 July 1990.
  15. Symonds, p. 447.
  16. Ibid., p. 448.
  17. King and Sutherland, p. 181.
  18. Case No. 101634, Circuit Court, Dade County, Florida.
  19. King and Sutherland, p. 182.
  20. The Frank J. Malina Collection at the California Institute of Technology — Guide to a Microfiche Edition, ed. Judith R. Goodstein and Carol H. Bugd. (Pasadena, CA: Institute Archives, Robert A. Millikan Memorial Library, California Institute of Technology, 1986), p. 17.
  21. Symonds, p. 449.
  22. Parsons, “Freedom,” p. 18.
  23. Ibid., p. 10.
  24. Parsons, “On Magick,” p. 47.
  25. Symonds, p. 449.
  26. Nat Freedland, The Occult Explosion (New York: Berkley, 1972), pp. 163-164.
  27. Ibid., p. 164.
  28. Hymenaeus Beta, 22 July 1990.
  29. Ibid.
  30. Pasadena Star News, 21 June 1952 and 5 July 1952.
  31. Magick, Gnosticism and the Witchcraft. Ed. Fra. H.H.D. (South Stukely, Quebec: 93 Publishing, 1979).
  32. Kenneth Grant, Outside the Circles of Time (London: Frederick Muller Limited, 1980), p. 50.
  33. Ibid., p. 228. [Grant also reproduces this picture on Plate 13 of this book.]
  34. Hymenaeus Beta, 22 July 1990.

Source