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.
Weird science ping!................
Weird science and toss a smidgen of scientology on top.......
Got to feel sorry for American commies. Boo hoo. Atomic bomb blueprints sent to “Uncle Joe” Stalin, who cares?
Von Braun proved useful to the US. I don’t think he or his were any danger of providing secrets to the Soviets.
Ping
Parsons was a nasty piece of work.
Kind of a one-subject Edison, who was no prince either.
Left his initials on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, so they’re also left all over the surface of Mars, by the wheels of the Curiosity rover.
Robert Heinlein was part of his circle for a while. A Parsons-like character appears in several of Heinlein’s novels. Some think that Heinlein told the FBI about Parson’s antics, which is why they kept an eye on him. The government gave him (Parsons) a lot of money to develop rockets.
And evil....
Not sure about that, Delos D. Harriman is a decent person, just obsessed by a single goal. He loves his wife even though he doesn't treat her very well.
I was thinking of Clark Fries, the younger brother of the main character in Podkayne Of Mars, who is a science prodigy but completely amoral. Among other antics, Clark smuggles a small, home-made atomic bomb on a spaceship that carries the two of them, along with their grandfather, to Venus from Mars.
LOL!
Because OF COURSE he was involved.
Nutcases flock together like birds of a feather................
Supposedly, scientology grew out of a conversation involving Hubbard, Heinlein, and another SF writer I don't recall. Hubbard's thesis was that writing for a penny a word was no way to get rich; if you were serious about it, you'd start a religion. Which Hubbard proceeded to do ... and also write massive tomes, as though he was still getting paid a penny a word.
Yes, I’ve heard the versions of the story that had either Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke at the table when Hubbard said the way to get rich was by starting a religion.
I read a lot of Asimov, both science-fiction and his popularization of science. The latter includes The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science, and a single-topic book, The Neutrino.
I looked forward to hearing him speak at the University I attended. I was greatly disappointed as he was a conceited person. I stopped reading him.
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.
BTTT
Wut?
A little bit of weird history.....................
Yeah, he was pretty full of himself.
I think he was influenced by other scientific egomaniacs of his time, John von Neumann being one, but there were many others. Asimov considered himself a member of that club, at least as I understand him.
He was a leftist I'm quite sure. He definitely believed socialism was the future. In that, he was not alone; the obviousness of socialism's superiority was "obvious" to the intellectuals of that time, educated in the 1920s and 1930s, when socialism was new, bright, relatively untarnished by any encounter with reality.
Of course, if they had taken time to study history, they might have figured out that socialist experiments of the past had come to bitter ends. But they thought that science and technology had finally reached a point where socialism could be made to work. Wrong again, for the Nth time.
Other very conceited scientists of the time included Brian Josephson (winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics) and Francis Crick (winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine, along with James Watson). Both were almost insufferable, at least to me. They were brilliant though, really astonishingly so. So I guess one must make allowances.
Personally, I don't think Asimov really belonged in the same orbit as these people, but he thought he did.
I would be very much surprised if any of the people I named were other than left-wing in their views. Particularly after the advent of atomic weapons, the enlightened ones all believed that a form of international socialism and one-world government was the only way the human race could survive the knowledge they had generated.
[Personally, I don’t think Asimov really belonged in the same orbit as these people, but he thought he did.]
Yeah, but science is a much bigger deal than is science fiction.
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