Early life: 1914–1934 Marvel Whiteside Parsons was born on October 2, 1914, at the
Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. His parents, Ruth Virginia Whiteside (
c. 1893–1952) and Marvel H. Parsons (
c. 1894–1947), had moved to California from Massachusetts the previous year, purchasing a house on Scarff Street in downtown Los Angeles. Their son was his father's namesake, but was known in the household as Jack. The marriage broke down soon after Jack's birth, when Ruth discovered that her husband was sexually involved with a prostitute. Ruth filed for divorce in March 1915. Jack's father returned to Massachusetts after being exposed as an adulterer, with Ruth forbidding him from having any contact with his infant son. Marvel Parsons later joined the U.S. Armed Forces, reaching the rank of major, and married a woman with whom he had a son, Charles, a half-brother Jack only met once. Although she retained her ex-husband's surname, Ruth started calling her son John, but many friends throughout his life knew him as Jack. Ruth's parents—Walter and Carrie Whiteside—moved to California to be with Jack and their daughter, purchasing an upscale house on Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena—known locally as "Millionaire's Mile"—where they could live together. Jack was surrounded by domestic servants. Having few friends, he lived a solitary childhood and spent much time reading; he took a particular interest in works of mythology,
Arthurian legend, and the
Arabian Nights. Through the works of
Jules Verne he became interested in
science fiction and a keen reader of
pulp magazines like
Amazing Stories, which led to his early interest in
rocketry. At age 12, Parsons began attending Washington Junior High School, where he performed poorly—which biographer
George Pendle attributed to undiagnosed
dyslexia—and was bullied for his upper-class status and perceived effeminacy. Although unpopular, he formed a strong friendship with
Edward Forman, a boy from a poor working-class family who defended him from bullies and shared his interest in science fiction and rocketry. In 1928 the pair—adopting the Latin motto
per aspera ad astra (
through hardship to the stars)—began engaging in homemade
gunpowder-based rocket experiments in the nearby
Arroyo Seco canyon, as well as the Parsons family's back garden, which left it pockmarked with craters from explosive test failures. They incorporated commonly available fireworks such as
cherry bombs into their rockets, and Parsons suggested using glue as a binding agent to increase the rocket fuel's stability. This research became more complex when they began using materials such as
aluminium foil to make the gunpowder easier to cast. Parsons had also begun to investigate
occultism, and performed a ritual intended to invoke the Devil into his bedroom; he worried that the invocation was successful and was frightened into ceasing these activities. In 1929, he began attending
John Muir High School, where he maintained an insular friendship with Forman and was a keen participant in
fencing and
archery. After he received poor school results, Parsons's mother sent him away to study at the Brown Military Academy for Boys, a private boarding school in
San Diego, but he was expelled for blowing up the toilets. The Parsons family spent mid-1929 touring Europe before returning to Pasadena, where they moved into a house on San Rafael Avenue. With the onset of the
Great Depression their fortune began to dwindle, and in July 1931 Jack's grandfather Walter died. Parsons began studying at the privately run University School, a liberal institution that took an unconventional approach to teaching. He flourished academically, becoming editor of the school newspaper,
El Universitano, and winning an award for literary excellence; teachers who had trained at the nearby
California Institute of Technology (Caltech) guided his attention to the study of chemistry. With the family's financial difficulties deepening, Parsons began working on weekends and school holidays at the
Hercules Powder Company, where he learned more about explosives and their potential use in rocket propulsion. He and Forman continued to independently explore the subject in their spare time, building and testing different rockets, sometimes with materials that Parsons had stolen from work. Parsons soon constructed a solid-fuel
rocket engine. Parsons graduated from University School in 1933, and moved with his mother and grandmother to a more modest house on St. John Avenue, where he continued to pursue his interests in literature and poetry. He enrolled in
Pasadena Junior College with the hope of earning an
associate degree in physics and chemistry, but dropped out after one term because of his financial situation and took up permanent employment at the Hercules Powder Company. His employers then sent him to work at their manufacturing plant in
Hercules, California on the
San Francisco Bay, where he earned a relatively high monthly wage of $100; he was plagued by headaches caused by exposure to
nitroglycerin. He saved money in hopes of continuing his academic studies and began a degree in chemistry at
Stanford University, but found the tuition unaffordable and returned to Pasadena.
GALCIT Rocket Research Group and the Kynette trial: 1934–1938 colleagues in the
Arroyo Seco, Halloween 1936. JPL marks this experiment as its foundation. In hopes of gaining access to the state-of-the-art resources of Caltech for their rocketry research, Parsons and Forman attended a lecture on the work of Austrian rocket engineer
Eugen Sänger and hypothetical above-
stratospheric aircraft by the institute's
William Bollay—a PhD student specializing in
rocket-powered aircraft—and approached him to express their interest in designing a liquid-fuel rocket motor. Bollay redirected them to another PhD student,
Frank Malina, a mathematician and mechanical engineer writing a thesis on rocket propulsion who shared their interests and soon befriended them. Parsons, Forman, and Malina applied for funding from Caltech together; they did not mention that their ultimate objective was to develop rockets for space exploration, realizing that most of the scientific establishment then considered such ideas science fiction. Caltech's
Clark Blanchard Millikan immediately rebuffed them, but Malina's doctoral advisor
Theodore von Kármán saw more promise in their proposal and agreed to allow them to operate under the auspices of the university's
Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT). Naming themselves the GALCIT Rocket Research Group, they gained access to Caltech's specialist equipment, though the economics of the Great Depression left von Kármán unable to finance them. The trio focused their distinct skills on collaborative rocket development; Parsons was the chemist, Forman the machinist, and Malina the technical theoretician. Malina wrote in 1968 that the self-educated Parsons "lacked the discipline of a formal higher education, [but] had an uninhibited and fruitful imagination." Parsons and Forman who, as described by
Geoffrey A. Landis, "were eager to try whatever idea happened to spring to mind", contrasted with Malina, who insisted on scientific discipline as informed by von Kármán. Landis writes that their creativity "kept Malina focused toward building actual rocket engines, not just solving equations on paper". Parsons's biographer John Carter described the layout of the contraption as showing Three attempts to fire the rocket failed; on the fourth the oxygen line accidentally ignited and perilously billowed fire at the Group, but they viewed this experience as formative. They continued their experiments throughout the last quarter of 1936; after the final test was successfully completed in January 1937 von Kármán agreed that they could perform future experiments at an exclusive rocket testing facility on campus. used in the murder trial of police officer Captain
Earl Kynette In April 1937, Caltech mathematician
Qian Xuesen joined the Group. Several months later, Weld Arnold, a Caltech laboratory assistant who worked as the Group's official photographer, also joined. The main reason for Arnold's appointment to this position was his provision of a donation to the Group on behalf of an anonymous benefactor. They became well known on campus as the "Suicide Squad" for the dangerous nature of some of their experiments and attracted attention from the local press. Parsons himself gained further media publicity when he appeared as an expert explosives witness in the trial of Captain
Earl Kynette, the head of police intelligence in Los Angeles who was accused of conspiring to set a
car bomb in the attempted murder of private investigator Harry Raymond, a former LAPD detective who was fired after whistleblowing against police corruption. When Kynette was convicted largely on Parsons' testimony, which included his forensic reconstruction of the car bomb and its explosion, his identity as an expert scientist in the public eye was established despite his lack of a university education. While working at Caltech, Parsons was admitted to evening courses in chemistry at the
University of Southern California (USC), but distracted by his GALCIT workload he attended sporadically and received unexceptional grades. By early 1938, the Group had made their static rocket motor, which originally burned for three seconds, run for over a minute. In May that year, Parsons was invited by
Forrest J Ackerman to lecture on his rocketry work at Chapter Number 4 of the
Los Angeles Science Fiction League (LASFL). Although he never joined the society, he occasionally attended their talks, on one occasion conversing with a teenage
Ray Bradbury. Another scientist to become involved in the GALCIT project was
Sidney Weinbaum, a Jewish refugee from Europe who was a vocal Marxist; he led Parsons, Malina, and Qian in their creation of a largely secretive
communist discussion group at Caltech, which became known as Professional Unit 122 of the Pasadena Communist Party. Although Parsons subscribed to the ''
People's Daily World'' and joined the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he refused to join the
American Communist Party, causing a break in his and Weinbaum's friendship. This, coupled with the need to focus on paid employment, led to the disintegration of much of the Rocket Research Group, leaving only its three founding members by late 1938.
Embracing Thelema; advancing JATO and foundation of Aerojet: 1939–1942 (pictured in 1912), founder of
Thelema, was Parsons' spiritual mentor. was recruited into O.T.O. by Parsons. In January 1939, John and Frances Baxter, a brother and sister who had befriended Jack and Helen Parsons, took Jack to the Church of Thelema on Winona Boulevard, Hollywood, where he witnessed the performance of
The Gnostic Mass. Celebrants of the church had included Hollywood actor
John Carradine and gay rights activist
Harry Hay. Parsons was intrigued, having already heard of Thelema's founder and
Outer Head of Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.),
Aleister Crowley, after reading a copy of Crowley's text
Konx om Pax (1907). Parsons was introduced to leading members
Regina Kahl,
Jane Wolfe, and
Wilfred Talbot Smith at the mass. Feeling both "repulsion and attraction" for Smith, Parsons continued to sporadically attend the Church's events for a year. He continued to read Crowley's works, which increasingly interested him, and encouraged Helen to read them. Parsons came to believe in the reality of Thelemic
magick as a force that could be explained through
quantum physics. He tried to interest his friends and acquaintances in Thelema, taking science fiction writers
Jack Williamson and
Cleve Cartmill to a performance of The Gnostic Mass. Although they were unimpressed, Parsons was more successful with
Grady Louis McMurtry, a young Caltech student he had befriended, as well as McMurtry's fiancée Claire Palmer, and Helen's sister
Sara "Betty" Northrup. Jack and Helen were initiated into the
Agape Lodge, the renamed Church of Thelema, in February 1941. Parsons adopted the Thelemic motto of
Thelema Obtenteum Proedero Amoris Nuptiae, a Latin mistranslation of "The establishment of Thelema through the rituals of love". The initials of this motto spelled out T.O.P.A.N., also serving as the declaration "To Pan". Commenting on Parsons' errors of translation, in jest Crowley said that "the motto which you mention is couched in a language beyond my powers of understanding". Parsons also adopted the Thelemic title
Frater T.O.P.A.N—with
T.O.P.A.N represented in
Kabbalistic numerology as
210the name with which he frequently signed letters to occult associates—while Helen became known as
Soror Grimaud. Smith wrote to Crowley saying that Parsons was "a really excellent man ... He has an excellent mind and much better intellect than myself ... JP is going to be very valuable". Wolfe wrote to German O.T.O. representative
Karl Germer that Parsons was "an A1 man ... Crowleyesque in attainment as a matter of fact", and mooted Parsons as a potential successor to Crowley as Outer Head of the Order. Crowley concurred with such assessments, informing Smith that Parsons "is the most valued member of the whole Order, with no exception!" At von Kármán's suggestion,
Frank Malina approached the
National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Committee on Army Air Corps Research to request funding for research into what they referred to as "
jet propulsion", a term chosen to avoid the stigma attached to rocketry. The military were interested in jet propulsion as a means of getting aircraft quickly airborne where there was insufficient room for a full-length runway, and gave the Rocket Research Group $1,000 to put together a proposal on the feasibility of
Jet-Assisted Take Off (JATO) by June 1939, making Parsons et al. the first U.S. government-sanctioned rocket research group. Since their formation in 1934, they had also performed experiments involving model,
black powder motor-propelled
multistage rockets. In a research paper submitted to the
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), Parsons reported these rockets reaching exhaust velocities of 4,875 miles per hour, thereby demonstrating the potential of solid fuels to be more effective than the liquid types primarily preferred by researchers such as Goddard. In light of this progress, Caltech and the GALCIT Group received an additional $10,000 rocketry research grant from the AIAA. Although a quarter of their funding went to repairing damage to Caltech buildings caused by their experiments, in June 1940 they submitted a report to the NAS in which they showed the feasibility of the project for the development of JATO and requested $100,000 to continue; they received $22,000. Now known as GALCIT Project Number 1, they continued to be ostracized by other Caltech scientists who grew increasingly irritated by their accidents and noise pollution, and were forced to relocate their experiments back to the Arroyo Seco, at a site with unventilated, corrugated iron sheds that served as both research facilities and administrative offices. It was here that JPL would be founded. Parsons and Forman's rocket experiments were the cover story of the August 1940 edition of
Popular Mechanics, in which the pair discussed the prospect of rockets being able to ascend above Earth's atmosphere and orbit around it for research purposes, as well as reaching the Moon. For the JATO project, they were joined by Caltech mathematician
Martin Summerfield and 18 workers supplied by the
Works Progress Administration. Former colleagues like Qian were prevented from returning to the project by the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who ensured the secrecy of the operation and restricted the involvement of foreign nationals and political extremists. The FBI was satisfied that Parsons was not a Marxist but were concerned when Thelemite friend Paul Seckler used Parsons' gun in a drunken car hijacking, for which Seckler was imprisoned in
San Quentin State Prison for two years. Englishman George Emerson replaced Arnold as the Group's official photographer. The Group's aim was to find a replacement for black-powder rocket motors—units consisting of charcoal,
sulfur and
potassium nitrate with a
binding agent. The mixture was unstable and there were frequent explosions damaging military aircraft. The solid JATO fuel invented by Parsons consisted of
amide,
corn starch, and
ammonium nitrate bound together in the JATO unit with glue and blotting paper. It was codenamed GALCIT-27, implying the previous invention of 26 new fuels. The first JATO tests using an
ERCO Ercoupe plane took place in late July 1941; though they aided propulsion, the units frequently exploded and damaged the aircraft. Parsons theorized that this was because the ammonium nitrate became dangerously combustible following overnight storage, during which temperature and consistency changes had resulted in a chemical imbalance. Parsons and Malina accordingly devised a method in which they would fill the JATOs with the fuel in the early mornings shortly before the tests, enduring sleep deprivation to do so. On August 21, 1941, Navy Captain
Homer J. Boushey, Jr.—watched by Clark Millikan and
William F. Durand—piloted the JATO-equipped Ercoupe at
March Air Force Base in
Moreno Valley, California. It proved a success and reduced takeoff distance by 30%, but one of the JATOs partially exploded. Over the following weeks 62 further tests took place, and the NAS increased their grant to $125,000. During a series of static experiments, an exploding JATO did significant damage to the rear fuselage of an Ercoupe; one observer optimistically noted that "at least it wasn't a big hole", but necessary repairs delayed their efforts. The military ordered a flight test using liquid rather than solid fuel in early 1942. Upon the United States' entry into the Second World War in December 1941, the Group realized they could be drafted directly into military service if they failed to provide viable JATO technology for the military. Informed by their left-wing politics, aiding the war effort against
Nazi Germany and the
Axis powers was as much of a moral vocation to Parsons, Forman and Malina as it was a practical one. Parsons, Summerfield and the GALCIT workers focused on the task and found success with a combination of
gasoline with
red fuming nitric acid as its
oxidizer; the latter, suggested by Parsons, was an effective substitute for
liquid oxygen. The testing of this fuel resulted in another calamity, when the testing rocket motor exploded; the fire, containing iron shed fragments and shrapnel, inexplicably left the experimenters unscathed. Malina solved the problem by replacing the gasoline with
aniline, resulting in a successful test launch of a JATO-equipped
A-20A plane at the Muroc Auxiliary Air Field in the
Mojave Desert. It provided five times more thrust than GALCIT-27, and again reduced takeoff distance by 30%; Malina wrote to his parents that "We now have something that really works and we should be able to help give the Fascists hell!" fitted with a
GALCIT developed solid propellant
JATO booster The Group then agreed to produce and sell 60 JATO engines to the
United States Army Air Corps. To do so they formed the Aerojet Engineering Corporation in March 1942, in which Parsons, Forman, Malina, von Kármán, and Summerfield each invested $250, opening their offices on
Colorado Boulevard and bringing in Amo Smith as their engineer.
Andrew G. Haley was recruited by von Kármán as their lawyer and treasurer. Although Aerojet was a for-profit operation that provided technology for military means, the founders' mentality was rooted in the ideal of using rockets for peaceful space exploration. As Haley recounted von Kármán requesting: "we will make the rockets—you must make the corporation and obtain the money. Later on you will have to see that we all behave well in outer space." Despite these successes, Parsons, the
project engineer of Aerojet's Solid Fuel Department, remained motivated to address the malfunctions observed during the Ercoupe tests. In June 1942, assisted by Mills and Miller, he focused his attention on developing an effective method of restricted burning when using solid rocket fuel, as the military demanded JATOs that could provide over 100 pounds of thrust without any risk of exploding. Although solid fuels such as GALCIT-27 were more storable than their liquid counterparts, they were disfavored for military JATO use as they provided less immediate thrust and did not have the versatility of being turned on and off mid-flight. Parsons tried to resolve GALCIT-27's stability issue with GALCIT-46, which replaced the former's ammonium nitrate with
guanidine nitrate. To avoid the problems seen with ammonium nitrate, he had GALCIT-46 cooled and then heated prior to testing. When it failed the test, he realized that the fuel's binding black powders rather than the oxidizers had resulted in their instability, and in June that year had the idea of using liquid
asphalt as an appropriate binding agent with
potassium perchlorate as oxidizer. Malina recounted that Parsons was inspired to use asphalt by the ancient incendiary weapon
Greek fire; in a 1982 talk for the
International Association of Astronomical Artists Captain Boushey stated that Parsons experienced an epiphany after watching workers using molten asphalt to fix tiles onto a roof. Known as GALCIT-53, this fuel proved to be significantly more stable than the Group's earlier concoctions, fulfilling Parsons' aim of creating a restricted-burn rocket fuel inside a castable container, and providing a thrust 427% more powerful than that of GALCIT-27. This set a precedent which according to his biographer John Carter "changed the future of rocket technology": the
thermoplastic asphalt
casting was durable in all climates, allowing for mass production and indefinite storage and transforming solid-fuel agents into a safe and viable form of rocket propulsion.
Plasticized variants of Parsons' solid-fuel design invented by JPL's
Charles Bartley were later used by
NASA in
Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters and by the
Strategic Air Command in
Polaris,
Poseidon and
Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Foundation of JPL and leading the Agape Lodge: 1942–1944 unit manufactured by
Aerojet at the
National Air and Space Museum Aerojet's first two contracts were from the U.S. Navy; the
Bureau of Aeronautics requested a solid-fuel JATO and
Wilbur Wright Field requested a liquid-fuel unit. The Air Corps had requested two thousand JATOs from Aerojet by late 1943, committing $256,000 toward Parsons' solid-fuel type. Despite this drastically increased turnover, the company continued to operate informally and remained intertwined with the GALCIT project. Caltech astronomer
Fritz Zwicky was brought in as head of the company's research department. Haley replaced von Kármán as Aerojet chairman and imposed payroll cuts instead of reducing JATO output; the alternative was to cut staff numbers while maintaining more generous salaries, but Haley's priority was Aerojet's contribution to the war effort. Company heads including Parsons were exempted from this austerity, drawing the ire of many personnel. Parsons' newfound credentials and financial security gave him the opportunity to travel more widely throughout the U.S. as an ambassador for Aerojet, meeting with other rocket enthusiasts. In New York he met with Karl Germer, the head of O.T.O. in North America and in
Washington, D.C. he met Poet Laureate
Joseph Auslander, donating some of Crowley's poetry books to the
Library of Congress. He also became a regular at the
Mañana Literary Society, which met in
Laurel Canyon at the home of Parsons' friend
Robert A. Heinlein and included science fiction writers including Cleve Cartmill, Jack Williamson, and
Anthony Boucher. Among Parsons' favorite works of fiction was Williamson's
Darker Than You Think, a novelette published in the fantasy magazine
Unknown in 1940, which inspired his later occult workings. Boucher used Parsons as a partial basis for the character of Hugo Chantrelle in his murder mystery
Rocket to the Morgue (1942). Helen went away for a period in June 1941, during which Parsons, encouraged to do so by the sexually permissive attitude of O.T.O., began a sexual relationship with her 17-year-old sister, Sara. Upon Helen's return, Sara asserted that she was Parsons' new wife, and Parsons himself admitted that he found Sara more sexually attractive than Helen. Conflicted in her feelings, Helen sought comfort in Wilfred Talbot Smith and began a relationship with him that lasted for the rest of his life; the four remained friends. The two couples, along with a number of other Thelemites (some of whom with their children), moved to 1003 South Orange Grove Boulevard, an
American Craftsman-style mansion. They all contributed to the rent of $100 a month and lived communally in what replaced Winona Boulevard as the new base of the Agape Lodge, maintaining an allotment and slaughtering their own livestock for meat as well as blood rituals. Parsons decorated his new room with a copy of the
Stele of Revealing, a statue of
Pan, and his collection of swords and daggers. He converted the garage and laundry room into a chemical laboratory and often held science fiction discussion meetings in the kitchen, and entertained the children with hunts for fairies in the 25-acre garden. Although there were arguments among the commune members, Parsons remained dedicated to Thelema. He gave almost all of his salary to O.T.O. while actively seeking out new membersrecruiting JPL mathematician
Barbara Canrightand financially supported Crowley in London through Germer. Parsons' enthusiasm for the Lodge quickly began to impact on his professional life. He frequently appeared at Aerojet hungover and sleep-deprived from late nights of Lodge activities, and invited many of his colleagues to them, drawing the ire of staff who previously tolerated Parsons' occultism as harmless eccentricity; known to von Kármán as a "delightful screwball", he was frequently observed reciting Crowley's poem "Hymn to Pan" in an ecstatic manner compared to the preaching of
Billy Graham during rocket testsand on request at parties to their great amusement. They disapproved of his hesitancy to separate his vocations; Parsons became more rigorously engaged in Aerojet's day-to-day business in an effort to resolve this wariness, but the Agape Lodge soon came under investigation by both the
Pasadena Police Department and the FBI. Both had received allegations of a "
black magic cult" involved in sexual orgies; one complainant was a 16-year-old boy who said that he was raped by lodge members, while neighbors reported a ritual involving a naked pregnant woman jumping through fire. After Parsons explained that the Lodge was simply "an organization dedicated to religious and philosophical speculation", neither agency found evidence of illegal activity and came to the conclusion that the Lodge constituted no threat to national security. Having been a long-term heavy user of alcohol and marijuana, Parsons now habitually used
cocaine,
amphetamines,
peyote,
mescaline, and
opiates as well. Parsons demonstrated the efficacy of the newer JATOs to solve this issue by equipping a
Grumman plane with solid-fuel units; its assisted takeoff from the
USS Charger was successful, but produced smoke containing a noxious, yellow-colored residue. The Navy guaranteed Parsons a contract on the condition that this residue was removed; this led to the invention of
Aeroplex, a technology for smokeless
vapor trails developed at Aerojet by Parsons. As the U.S. became aware that Nazi Germany had developed the
V-2 rocket, the military—following recommendations from von Kármán based upon research using British intelligence—placed a renewed impetus on its own rocket research, reinstating Qian to the GALCIT project. They gave the Group a $3 million grant to develop rocket-based weapons, and the Group was expanded and renamed the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). By this point the Navy were ordering 20,000 JATOs a month from Aerojet, and in December 1944 Haley negotiated for the company to sell 51% of its stock to the
General Tire and Rubber Company to cope with the increased demand. Aerojet's Caltech-linked employees—including Zwicky, Malina and Summerfield—would only agree to the sale on the condition that Parsons and Forman were removed from the company, viewing their occult activities as disreputable. JPL historian
Erik M. Conway also attributes Parsons' expulsion to more practical concerns: he "still wanted to work in the same way as he'd done in his backyard, instinctive and without regard for safety". Despite this ignorance and her skepticism about Parsons' magic, Cameron reported her sighting of a
UFO to Parsons, who secretly recorded the sighting as a materialization of Babalon. Inspired by Crowley's novel
Moonchild (1917), Parsons and Hubbard aimed to magically fertilize a "magical child" through
Immaculate Conception, which when born to a woman somewhere on Earth nine months following the working's completion would become the Thelemic messiah embodying Babalon. To quote Metzger, the purpose of the Babalon Working was "a daring attempt to shatter the boundaries of space and time" facilitating, according to Parsons, the emergence of Thelema's
Æon of Horus. When Cameron departed for a trip to New York, Parsons retreated to the desert, where he believed that a
preternatural entity
psychographically provided him with
Liber 49, which represented a fourth part of Crowley's
The Book of the Law, the primary sacred text of Thelema, as well as part of a new sacred text he called the
Book of Babalon. Crowley was bewildered and concerned by the endeavor, complaining to Germer of being "fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts!" Believing the Babalon Working was accomplished, Parsons sold the Parsonage to developers for $25,000 under the condition that he and Cameron could continue to live in the coach house, and he appointed Roy Leffingwell to head the Agape Lodge, which would now have to meet elsewhere for its rituals. Parsons co-founded a company called Allied Enterprises with Hubbard and Sara, into which Parsons invested his life savings of $20,970. Hubbard suggested that with this money they travel to
Miami to purchase three yachts, which they would then sail through the
Panama Canal to the West Coast, where they could sell them on for a profit. Parsons agreed, but many of his friends thought it was a bad idea. Hubbard had secretly requested permission from the U.S. Navy to sail to China and South and Central America on a mission to "collect writing material"; his real plans were for a world cruise. Left "flat broke" by this defrauding, Parsons was incensed when he discovered that Hubbard and Sara had left for Miami with $10,000 of the money; he suspected a scam but was placated by a telephone call from Hubbard and agreed to remain business partners. When Crowley, in a telegram to Germer, dismissed Parsons as a "weak fool" and victim to Hubbard and Sara's obvious confidence trick, Parsons changed his mind, flew to Miami and placed a temporary injunction and restraining order on them. Upon tracking them down to a harbor in
County Causeway, Parsons discovered that the couple had purchased three yachts as planned; they tried to flee aboard one but hit a squall and were forced to return to port. Parsons was convinced that he had brought them to shore through a
lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram containing an astrological,
geomantic invocation of
Bartzabela vengeful spirit of
Mars. Allied Enterprises was dissolved and in a court settlement Hubbard was required to promise to reimburse Parsons. Parsons was discouraged from taking further action by Sara, who threatened to report him for
statutory rape since their sexual relationship took place when she was under California's
age of consent of 18. Parsons was ultimately compensated with only $2,900. Hubbard, already married to
Margaret Grubb,
bigamously married Sara and went on to found
Dianetics and
Scientology.
The Sunday Times published an article about Hubbard's involvement with O.T.O. and Parsons' occult activities in December 1969. In response, the
Church of Scientology released an unsubstantiated press statement which said that Hubbard had been sent as an undercover agent by the U.S. Navy to intercept and destroy Parsons' "black magic cult", and save Sara from its influence. The Church also stated that Robert A. Heinlein was the clandestine Navy operative who "sent in" Hubbard to undertake this operation. Returning to California, Parsons completed the sale of the Parsonage, which was then demolished, and resigned from O.T.O. He wrote in his letter to Crowley that he did not believe that "as an autocratic organization, [the O.T.O.] constitutes a true and proper medium for the expression and attainment" of Thelema.
Loss of FBI clearance, Red Scare Marxist and espionage accusations and acquittal: 1946–1952 missile (pictured launching in 1957). Parsons was employed by
North American Aviation at
Inglewood, where he worked on the
Navaho Missile Program. He and Cameron moved into a house in
Manhattan Beach, where he instructed her in occultism and esotericism. When Cameron developed
catalepsy, Parsons referred her to
Sylvan Muldoon's books on
astral projection, suggesting that she could manipulate her seizures to accomplish it. They were married on October 19, 1946, four days after his divorce from Helen was finalized, with Forman as their witness. Parsons continued to be seen as a specialist in rocketry; he acted as an expert consultant in numerous industrial tribunals and police and
Army Ordnance investigations regarding explosions. In May 1947, Parsons gave a talk at the
Pacific Rocket Society in which he predicted that rockets would take humans to the Moon. Although he had become distant from the now largely defunct O.T.O. and had sold much of his Crowleyan library, he continued to correspond with Crowley until the latter's death in December 1947. At the emergence of the
Cold War, a
Red Scare developed in the U.S. as the Congressional
House Un-American Activities Committee began investigating and obstructing the careers of people with perceived communist sympathies. Many of Parsons' former colleagues lost their security clearances and jobs as a result, and eventually the FBI stripped Parsons of his clearance because of his "subversive" character, including his involvement in and advocacy of "sexual perversion" in O.T.O. He speculated in a June 1949 letter to Germer that his clearance was revoked in response to his public dissemination of Crowley's
Liber OZ, a 1941 tract summarizing the individualist moral principles of Thelema. Declassified FBI documents later revealed that the FBI's primary concern was Parsons' former connections to Marxists at Caltech and his membership of the also "subversive" ACLU. When they interviewed Parsons, he denied communist sympathies but informed them of Sidney Weinbaum's "extreme communist views" and
Frank Malina's involvement in Weinbaum's communist cell at Caltech, which resulted in Weinbaum's arrest for perjury since he had lied under oath by denying any involvement in communist groups. Malina's security clearance was withdrawn as well. In reaction to this hostile treatment, Parsons sought work in the rocket industry abroad. He sought advice to do so in correspondence with von Kármán; whose advice he followed by enrolling in an evening course in advanced mathematics at USC to bolster his employability in the field—but again he neglected attendance and failed the course. Parsons again resorted to bootlegging nitroglycerin for money, and managed to earn a wage as a car mechanic, a manual laborer at a gas station, and a hospital orderly; for two years he was also a faculty member at the USC Department of Pharmacology. Relations between Parsons and Cameron became strained; they agreed to a temporary separation and she moved to Mexico to join an artists' commune in
San Miguel de Allende. Unable to pursue his scientific career, without his wife and devoid of friendship, Parsons decided to return to occultism and embarked on sexually based magical operations with prostitutes. He was intent, informally following the ritualistic practice of Thelemite organization the
A∴A∴, on performing "the Crossing of the
Abyss", attaining union with the
universal consciousness, or "All" as understood in the context of the
Great Work, and becoming the "
Master of the Temple". Following his apparent success in doing so, Parsons recounted having an
out-of-body experience invoked by Babalon, who astrally transported him to the biblical
City of Chorazin, an experience he referred to as a "Black Pilgrimage". Accompanying Parsons' "Oath of the Abyss" was his own "Oath of the AntiChrist", which was witnessed by Wilfred Talbot Smith. In this oath, Parsons professed to embody an entity named
Belarion Armillus Al Dajjal, the
Antichrist "who am come to fulfill the law of the Beast 666 [Aleister Crowley]". Viewing these oaths as the completion of the Babalon Working, Parsons wrote an
illeist autobiography titled
Analysis by a Master of the Temple and an occult text titled
The Book of AntiChrist. In the latter work, Parsons (writing as
Belarion) prophesied that within nine years Babalon would manifest on Earth and supersede the dominance of the
Abrahamic religions. During this period, Parsons also wrote an essay on his individualist philosophy and politics—which he described as standing for "
liberalism and liberal principles"—titled "Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword", in which he condemned the authoritarianism, censorship, corruption,
antisexualism and racism he saw as prevalent in American society. None of these works were published in his lifetime. Through Heinlein, Parsons received a visit from writer
L. Sprague de Camp, with whom he discussed magic and science fiction, and disclosed that Hubbard had sent a letter offering him Sara back. De Camp later referred to Parsons as "An authentic mad genius if I ever met one", and based the character Courtney James on him in his time travel short story "
A Gun for Dinosaur" (1956). Parsons was also visited by Jane Wolfe, who unsuccessfully appealed for him to rejoin the dilapidated O.T.O. He entered a brief relationship with an Irishwoman named Gladis Gohan; they moved to a house in
Redondo Beach, a building known by them as the "Concrete Castle". Cameron returned to Redondo Beach from San Miguel de Allende and violently argued with Parsons upon discovering his infidelity, before she again left for Mexico. Parsons responded by initiating divorce proceedings against her on the grounds of "extreme cruelty". synopsis of espionage allegations against Parsons Parsons testified to a closed federal court that the moral philosophy of Thelema was both anti-fascist and anti-communist, emphasizing his belief in individualism. This along with references from his scientific colleagues resulted in his security clearance being reinstated by the
Industrial Employment Review Board, which ruled that there was insufficient evidence that he had ever had communist sympathies. This allowed Parsons to obtain a contract in designing and constructing a chemical plant for the
Hughes Aircraft Company in
Culver City. Von Kármán put Parsons in touch with
Herbert T. Rosenfeld, President of the Southern Californian chapter of the
American Technion Societya
Zionist group dedicated to supporting the newly created State of Israel. Rosenfeld offered Parsons a job with the Israeli rocket program and hired him to produce technical reports for them. In November 1950, as the Red Scare intensified, Parsons decided to migrate to Israel to pursue Rosenfeld's offer, but a Hughes secretary whom Parsons had asked to type up a portfolio of technical documents reported him to the FBI. She accused Parsons of espionage and attempted theft of classified company documents on the basis of some of the reports that he had sought to submit to the Technion Society. Parsons was immediately fired from Hughes; the FBI investigated the complaint and were suspicious that Parsons was spying for the Israeli government. Parsons denied the allegations when interrogated; he insisted that his intentions were peaceful and that he had suffered an error of judgment in procuring the documents. Some of Parsons' scientific colleagues rallied to his defense, but the case against him worsened when the FBI investigated Rosenfeld for being linked to Soviet agents, and more accounts of his occult and sexually permissive activities at the Parsonage came to light. In October 1951, the U.S. attorney decided that because the contents of the reports did not constitute state secrets, Parsons was not guilty of espionage. The Review Board still considered Parsons a liability because of his historical Marxist affiliations and investigations by the FBI, and in January 1952 they permanently reinstated their ban on his working for classified projects, effectively prohibiting him from working in rocketry. To make a living he founded the Parsons Chemical Manufacturing Company, which was based in North Hollywood and created pyrotechnics and explosives such as fog effects and imitation gunshot wounds for the film industry, and he also returned to chemical manufacturing at the Bermite Powder Company in Saugus. Parsons reconciled with Cameron, and they resumed their relationship and moved into a former coach house on Orange Grove Boulevard. Parsons converted its large, first-floor laundry room into a home laboratory to work on his chemical and pyrotechnic projects, homebrew
absinthe and stockpile his materials. They let out the upstairs bedrooms and began holding parties that were attended largely by bohemians and members of the
Beat Generation, along with old friends including Forman, Malina and Cornog. They also congregated at the home of Andrew Haley, who lived on the same street. Though Parsons in his mid-thirties was a "prewar relic" to the younger attendees, the raucous socials often lasted until dawn and frequently attracted police attention. Parsons also founded a new Thelemite group known as "the Witchcraft", whose beliefs revolved around a simplified version of Crowley's Thelema and Parsons' own Babalon prophecies. He offered a course in its teachings for a ten-dollar fee, which included a new Thelemic belief system called "the Gnosis", a version of
Christian Gnosticism with
Sophia as its godhead and the Christian God as its
demiurge. He also collaborated with Cameron on
Songs for the Witch Woman, a collection of poems which she illustrated that was published in 2014.
Death: 1952 Parsons and Cameron decided to travel to Mexico for a few months, both for a vacation and for Parsons to take up a job opportunity establishing an explosives factory for the Mexican government. They hoped that this would facilitate a move to Israel, where they could start a family, and where Parsons could bypass the U.S. government to recommence his rocketry career. He was particularly disturbed by the presence of the FBI, convinced that they were spying on him. On June 17, 1952, a day before their planned departure, Parsons received a rush order of explosives for a film set and began to work on it in his home laboratory. An explosion destroyed the lower part of the building, during which Parsons sustained mortal wounds. His right forearm was severed, his legs and left arm were broken, and a hole was torn in the right side of his face. Despite these critical injuries, Parsons was found conscious by the upstairs lodgers. He tried to communicate with the arriving ambulance workers, who rushed him to the
Huntington Memorial Hospital, where he was declared dead approximately thirty-seven minutes after the explosion. When his mother, Ruth, learned of his death, she immediately took a fatal overdose of
barbiturates. Pasadena Police Department criminologist Don Harding led the official investigation; he concluded that Parsons had been mixing
fulminate of mercury in a coffee can when he dropped it on the floor, causing an initial explosion that triggered a larger blast among other chemicals in the room. Forman considered this likely, stating that Parsons often had sweaty hands and could easily have dropped the can. Some of Parsons' colleagues rejected this explanation, saying that he was very attentive about safety. Two colleagues from the Bermite Powder Company described Parsons' work habits as "scrupulously neat" and "exceptionally cautious". The latter statement—from chemical engineer George Santymers—insisted that the explosion must have come from beneath the floorboards, implying an organized plot to kill Parsons. Harding accepted that these inconsistencies were "incongruous" but described the manner in which Parsons had stored his chemicals as "criminally negligent", and noted that Parsons had previously been investigated by the police for illegally storing chemicals at the Parsonage. He also found a morphine-filled syringe at the scene, suggesting that Parsons had been under the influence of narcotics. The police saw insufficient evidence to continue the investigation and closed the case as an accidental death. Both Wolfe and Smith suggested that Parsons' death had been suicide, stating that he had suffered from depression for some time. Others theorized that the explosion was an assassination planned by
Howard Hughes in response to Parsons' suspected theft of Hughes Aircraft Company documents. Cameron became convinced that Parsons had been murdered either by police officers seeking vengeance for his role in the conviction of Earl Kynette or by
anti-Zionists opposed to his work for Israel. One of Cameron's friends, the artist
Renate Druks, later stated her belief that Parsons had died in a rite designed to create a
homunculus. His death has never been definitively explained. The immediate aftermath of the explosion attracted the interest of the U.S. media, making headline news in the
Los Angeles Times. These initial reports focused on Parsons' prominence in rocketry but neglected to mention his occult interests. When asked for comment, Aerojet secretary-treasurer T.E. Beehan said that Parsons "liked to wander, but he was one of the top men in the field". Within a few days, journalists had discovered his involvement in Thelema and emphasized this in their reports. A private prayer service was held for Parsons at the funeral home where his body was cremated. Cameron scattered his ashes in the Mojave Desert, before burning most of his possessions. She later tried to perform astral projection to commune with him. O.T.O. also held a memorial service—with attendees including Helen and Sara—at which Smith led the Gnostic Mass. ==Personal life==