Posted on 05/09/2023 7:27:31 AM PDT by Red Badger
Jack Parsons via Wikimedia Commons
John “Jack” Whiteside Parsons’s life seems too improbable to be believed. But it’s all there in the biographies, Sex and Rockets and Strange Angel (the basis of a TV series of the same name), among other places, including a streaming series based on Strange Angel.
Born in 1914, Parsons died in 1952 while working on an explosive special effect for a movie in his home laboratory. The explosion has been called an accident, a suicide, or an assassination, depending on the source. An obituary in the Pasadena Independent described Parsons as “a down-to-earth explosives expert who dabbled in necromancy.” More recently, the New York Post went with: “this sex-crazed cultist was the father of modern rocketry.”
Well, not the only father. And, as all this happened in southern California, surely not the only sex-crazed cultist.
Swedish professor of religious studies Henrik Bogdan explores what Parsons was up to in January 1946, when he attempted to conjure up “Babalon,” the Thelemic goddess of female sexuality.
The Church says that Hubbard was acting undercover to subvert Parsons’s black magic and rescue a “girl,” Sara “Betty” Northrup, from Parson’s clutches.
Parsons’s partner for what he called the “Babalon Working” was his housemate, a science fiction writer and fellow occultist named Ron Hubbard. Yes, that L. Ron Hubbard, who was still several years away from founding the Church of Scientology. The Church says that Hubbard was acting undercover to subvert Parsons’s black magic and rescue a “girl,” Sara “Betty” Northrup, from Parson’s clutches. Northrup, Parson’s sister-in-law and lover, became Hubbard’s second wife.
Spoiler alert: the Babalon Working didn’t re-order the universe, though Parsons spent the next five weeks in bed with his new lover, an ex-Navy WAVES member named Marjorie Cameron, in an effort to spawn the goddess. Cameron and Parson wed in late 1946, and after his death, she “would identify herself with Babalon for the rest of her life.”
Seated left to right: Rudolph Schott, Apollo Milton Olin Smith, Frank Malina (white shirt, dark pants), Ed Forman and Jack Parsons (right, foreground), in the Arroyo Seco,1936 via Wikimedia Commons
Born amidst Pasadena’s elite, Parsons’s material advantages were vanquished by the Crash. He couldn’t afford college, but he taught himself chemistry and hooked up with the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. There he and his fellow rocket boys, known as the “suicide squad” because of their dangerous work, blasted things into the sky from remote arroyos.
At the age of twenty-three, Parsons became a minor celebrity as an expert witness at a murder trial. A captain of the LAPD’s intelligence unit was convicted largely on the basis of Parsons’s testimony about a car bomb that killed a police whistleblower.
Parsons was also one of the founders of Aerojet Engineering, now Aerojet Rocketdyne, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Ironically, JPL, which continues to play an important role in American space exploration, wasn’t called the Rocket Propulsion Laboratory because “rocket” smacked of Buck Rogers…and boys who blew things up in arroyos.
Parsons was clearly too unconventional for the academic-military-industrial-space-complex. He was eased out of both JPL and Aerojet even before the Babalon thingamajig. If he’d lasted a little longer at Aerojet, he might have made a fortune from all the federal dollars pumped into military and space research.
But the appeal of the astral plane proved stronger than the pull of outer space. Parsons was even master of the Agape Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis, the Los Angeles headquarters of English occultist Aleister Crowley’s religion of Thelema—at least until Crowley “lost faith in Parsons” and had him removed as master.
With his occult fascinations, drug use, and his relationships with those who had communist connections in the 1930s, Parson’s FBI file marked him as one red hot potato. There was no chance he’d get back in the space race. His fellow “suicide squad” member Frank Malina was in fact Red-baited right out of the country. Meanwhile, former Nazi Party member Wernher von Braun became one of the leaders of the effort to put Americans on the Moon, his connections to slave labor and mass murder swept under the rocket’s red glare.
War criminals, perfectly acceptable; Reds and warlocks, not so much.
If you want to bring up ego-maniacs, I nominate Carl Sagan. He was bad enough with his TV show “The Cosmos” but I sat through one of his lectures on astrophysics once at Bell Labs in New Jersey. His condescension and sneering smile of derision to his audience was entirely inappropriate behavior on his part,
especially since there were two Nobel Prize winners and numerous patent holders of sophisticated electronic devices in the seats. He was a rabid atheist and in a round table on nuclear disarmament, when challenged by another participant to explain an obvious flaw in his advocacy of complete elimination of nuclear weapons, he completely lost his cool, obviously enraged that some “peasant” would dare to question him.
Nice anecdote, thanks. I certainly consider Carl Sagan one of the great ego-maniacs of science. I talked to a surgeon who cared for him as he came to the end of his life, at Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, NY. Of course I had no idea he was there. I guess he lived in Ithaca until the end of his days.
The story of his talk at Bell Labs comes as no surprise at all, and as you say is especially noteworthy given the remarkable people and accomplishments that were sitting in the audience in front of him.
As I understand it, he was a man of few notable scientific accomplishments (something about the temperature of the atmosphere of Venus, IIRC). His position as a public figure gave him immense fame and prestige. I guess he was a clear speaker and to some extent writer, although I think his books were largely ghost-written. He was photogenic, and looked the part of "a Scientist." I guess his huge ego was a part of his "Famous Scientist" costume.
On the other end of the spectrum was Richard Feynman, who to the best of my knowledge never lorded his immense intelligence and accomplishments over anyone. He liked to talk about physics and enjoy life, and that was pretty much it. I'm sure he had an ego, but it was much more under control than that of the others we've mentioned.
What an experience it must have been to work at Bell Labs back then. Lucky you!
“I suspect that if I were to re-read his Foundation books, I would seem them in a new light. “Guiding” humanity along sounds socialistic to me now.”
Yep. I discovered Asimov when I was a teenager and enamored of centralized world government and social engineering ideas. I read the last of his foundation books when I was in my 20s and had taken a much more libertarian way of thinking and was a lot less enthralled by his vision of the future.
There was a dark side to Feynman. I’ve heard this enough from credible sources that I give it some credence. Apparently, if you were one of his grad students, married and he took a fancy to your wife, and you did want to pass the oral part of your PhD defense. You had to let him partake of your wife’s charms.
That’s really disturbing and disheartening.
I think he got killed making or testing some rocket fuel/oxidizer combo. He was brilliant, yet stone crazy. I notice there's Von Braun bashing in the text.
[Yeah, but science is a much bigger deal than is science fiction.]
Now that he’s dead, I wonder if Sagan is still an atheist.
I have read all Azimov’s Foundation books, not just the original Trilogy, there were prequels and sequels, and not written in chronological order.
I have also read all of Herbert’s Dune series, the originals and the prequels and sequels written by the son and Kevin Anderson.
They are quite similar in their eventual outcomes.
Azimov’s robots were very avuncular, except for the ones on Solaria, but Herbert’s robots were very dangerous and would kill you for no good reason.
But both were guiding humanity along for tens of thousands of years.
Azimov’s robots were developing Galaxia, a galaxy-wide Gaia-like entity where everything, living or inert was connected to each other and could be used as a ‘force’ (is this where Star Wars got its idea?).
Herbert’s robots were trying to eliminate humanity and become the only ‘intelligent’ beings in the universe. Except for one robot, Erasmus, who had his own plans, of creating a universe where humans and robots were co-dependent.................
There is a new cult-like philosophy called Longtermism/Effective Altruism that is similar and very popular among tech tycoons.
It mixes in a lot of words about goodness, but what it boils down to is that they are the smartest and therefore must have absolute power over humanity.
That fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried was one of the disciples. Elon Musk is also involved in these circles.
Here is one article describing it - https://netzpolitik.org/2023/longtermism-an-odd-and-peculiar-ideology/
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