It was this darker side of his character that led him to fall in with the OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis), the so- called Templars of the East, a Masonic-style organization under the leadership of the mesmeric necromancer Aleister Crowley. Variously known as the Beast, 666, Frater Perdurabo, and Master Therion, Crowley claimed to be the reincarnation of John Dee, among many others. He had taken over the English-speaking arm of the order in 1912, when he discovered they already practiced some of the ancient Hindu “sex magick” rituals he was keen to revive. The essence of Crowley’s philosophy was the notion of
Crowley had come to California in the early years of the war. He was almost seventy, broke, and addicted to heroin, and dependent on the generosity of wealthy young acolytes like Parsons, who embraced Crowley’s teachings wholeheartedly. In 1941 Jack and his wife, Helen, joined the Agape Lodge of the Order. The master of the lodge was an expatriate Englishman, Wilfred Smith, another legendary womanizer. He wrote to Crowley full of excitement about his new recruit: “I think I have at long last a really excellent man…. He has an excellent mind and much better intellect than myself.” Crowley agreed, and within a year he had installed Parsons himself as lodge master.
In 1942 Jack’s father died, leaving him a large house in one of the wealthiest suburbs in Pasadena. He and Helen moved in and turned it into a center for lodge activities, much to the annoyance of the neighbors. Parsons loved to play classical music at a very high volume and throw noisy parties. He would place advertisements in local newspapers offering rooms to “Bohemian types,” adding the requirement “Must not believe in God.” Police were called to the home on a number of occasions to investigate allegations of backyard rituals and sex orgies, but Parsons always managed to talk them down, reminding them of his place in the community as an eminent rocket scientist.
As they became more deeply involved in the cult, Jack and Helen agreed to divorce. She was having an affair with the former lodge master Wilfred Smith, and Jack had taken up with Helen’s eighteen-year-old sister, Sara, whom he renamed Betty. Jack encouraged Betty to take other lovers, as he did himself, claiming that as “superhumans,” they were above petty jealousy. One of Betty’s lovers was a young science-fiction writer called L. Ron Hubbard, who later went on to found the most successful alternative religion of all, Scientology. By early 1946 Ron Hubbard had moved in with Parsons and been fully initiated into the order. Parsons enlisted his help in enacting the most extreme of Crowley’s rituals, the birth of a “magickal child,” or Thelemic Messiah, who would usher in a new apocalyptic age. First, using the “Enochian” language recorded by John Dee and Edward Kelley, they had to summon up Babalon, the Goddess of Pleasure, so that she would incarnate before them as “the Scarlet Woman.” Over eleven nights Parsons invoked the goddess by masturbating furiously (“manipulating his magickal wand”) as Hubbard performed the role of scribe, recording the ritual in precise detail. A day after its completion, Marjorie Cameron, a beautiful redheaded artist, appeared on Parsons’s doorstep. “I have found my elemental,” Jack wrote exultantly to Crowley. He renamed her Candida (meaning “white” or “pure”) and she was initiated into the order and agreed to help Cameron produce his “moonchild.” They married soon after.
Meanwhile, Betty and L. Ron Hubbard talked Parsons into setting up a joint venture, Allied Enterprises, into which all three would pool their earnings. Parsons had already sunk most of his money into the lodge but put what was left—about $12,000—into the new company. Hubbard invested $1,200 and promptly disappeared with Betty to Miami, where he used all the Allied Enterprises capital to buy a pair of yachts. Jack, with nothing in his bank account, had to take a job at a gas station to pay for food. When he eventually tracked the couple down in Florida, they swiftly absconded on one of the boats. Furious, Parsons summoned up a storm (or so he claimed) at sea that forced them to return to port.
Jack sued Hubbard but got only part of his money back. He returned to Pasadena, resigned from the OTO, and broke with Crowley. Crowley was indifferent. He had regarded Parsons and Hubbard’s Babalon ritual as ridiculous and wrote to a friend despairing of the “idiocy of these goats.” Parsons seemed equally disillusioned:
Now it came to pass even as BABALON told me, for after receiving Her Book I fell away from Magick, and put away Her Book and all pertaining thereto. And I was stripped of my fortune (the sum of about $50,000) and my house, and all I Possessed. Then for a period of two years I worked in the world, recouping my fortune somewhat. But that was also taken from me, and my reputation, and my good name in my worldly work, that was in science.
The last sentence refers to his investigation by the FBI when he was under suspicion, not only for occult activities but also for associating with known communist sympathizers. This cost him his government clearance, which meant he could no longer work on official rocket projects. Financially ruined and pushed to the edge, he contemplated suicide, but then, with Candida’s support, he decided he was ready to go beyond even Crowley. He took the Oath of the Abyss and declared himself the Antichrist.
This sounds ludicrously overdramatic, but Parsons’s idea of the Apocalypse was different from the one in the Bible. In fact, it reads more like a vision of the countercultural movements that would sweep America in the 1960s.
An end to the pretense and lying hypocrisy of Christianity. An end to the servile virtues, and superstitious restrictions. An end to the slave morality. An end to prudery and shame, to guilt and sin, for these are of the only evil under the sun, that is fear. An end to all authority that is not based on courage and manhood, to the authority of lying priests, conniving judges, blackmailing police, and an end to the servile flattery and cajolery of mods, the coronations of mediocrities, the ascension of dolts.
Jack Parsons, “the James Dean of the Occult,” never got to see his satanic Utopia. By early 1952 he had begun to manufacture bootleg explosives at home. He and Candida planned to move down to Mexico to create one that was “more powerful than anything yet invented.” Before they left, on June 17, 1952, Parsons, sweaty-palmed as ever, accidentally dropped a vial of the extremely volatile compound known as fulminate of mercury. The explosion blew off his entire right forearm, broke his other arm and both legs, and ripped a hole in his jaw. It was heard more than a mile away. Parsons died an hour later, protesting: “I wasn’t done.” Shortly after hearing the news, his mother committed suicide.
Marjorie “Candida” Cameron went on to become a successful painter and actress in avant-garde films. She is sometimes cited as the inspiration behind the Eagles song “Hotel California.” In recognition of his work on the space program, Parsons had a crater named after him on the moon—on the dark side, naturally.
In 1946 Parsons, a great believer in UFOs, claimed to have met a Venusian in the Mohave Desert. Venusians were very much in fashion at the time and it was only a couple of years since the death of the Serbian engineer Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), who some believed had been sent from Venus to modernize earthly technology. Tesla was one of the great innovators of the modern age, often so far ahead of his time that he might as well have been from another planet. Honored as “the man who invented the twentieth century” and nicknamed “the patron saint of electricity” for developing the alternating current system that underpins all today’s electrical networks, he held more than seven hundred patents in his lifetime, for innovations in electromagnetics, robotics, remote control, radar, ballistics, and nuclear physics. He invented the Tesla coil, which gave us radio, X-ray tubes, and fluorescent light. Some of his ideas were so advanced that science has still not caught up with them, and his almost extraterrestrial gifts as a scientist were matched by a strange and otherworldly personality. If John Dee and Jack Parsons fall into the category of madly brilliant eccentrics, Nikola Tesla is in a class of his own.
Were he born today he would be diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum, with a severe case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. But those labels weren’t available in the mid-nineteenth century. Mental illness was put down to “nerves” or “hysteria,” and real oddities were either tolerated or committed to the asylum. Tesla’s peculiarities meant that the scientific community would never truly come to accept him, nor did he receive either
