King of
the Rocket Men
One of the founding fathers of American rocket-science
was a character strung between Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, and
the Devil himself. COLIN BENNETT considers the short but
remarkable life of a blazing star, Jack Parsons. Illustration by
KIERON DWYER.
John
Whiteside Parsons, born Marvel, known as Jack, writer, visionary,
dedicated occultist, and chemist of genius, was born in 1914 and
died in 1952 in a mysterious explosion whose cause has never been
fully explained. He was a tall handsome Californian, whose early
work on highly volatile rocket-motor fuels was regarded highly
enough for French scientists of a later generation to name a crater
on the moon after him. Parsons introduced into early American
rocketry a range of exotic solid and liquid fuels whose later forms
were eventually to help drive Apollo 11 to the Moon. He helped
create the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, now a major
industrial complex. In early colour footage from JPL archives, he
looks like a better-fed James Dean in some 1950s road movie. In the
manner of many mid-century heroes such as Dean, his life was more a
script than a life. Today, over fifty years later, we can run
Parsons in our heads, in torn jeans and greasy shirt as he off-loads
equipment from a hired pick-up truck in the baking dust of some
remote desert arroyo, and gets ready for one of his many pre-war
rocket experiments.
By August
1941, these tests had produced rockets stable enough to use as
bolt-on jet-assisted-take-off (JATO) [1] units for military
aircraft. Daring experiments, probably the first of their kind in
the world, were also made with no less than 12 of these
28lb/12-second thrust units fitted to an Ercoupe light aircraft.
With its propeller removed, the hobby-plane soared and landed. Thus
a mail-order aircraft became the first rocket aircraft of America,
and therefore the direct primitive ancestor of the air-launched Bell
X1 which Chuck Yeager took through the sound barrier in
1947.
Post-war,
these JATO "bottles" grew into the liquid-fuel Corporal rocket, and
the solid-fuelled Sergeant. The much-vaunted Germans were
surprisingly way behind in solid-fuel technology, which Parsons?
pioneered. From his work there arose a whole range of
first-generation American missiles, including the solid-fuelled
submarine-launched Polaris.
Parsons
was certainly ahead of his time in things other than rocketry.
Before each test launch, he was in the habit of invoking Aleister
Crowley's Hymn to Pan, the wild horned god of fertility. Parsons was
an active member of the California Agape Lodge of the sex magickal
group Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), and in letters addressed The Great
Beast as "Most Beloved Father". Out of the inspirations of fire,
dust, and grease came a visionary mystical writing formed out of
conflicts with what he saw as an increasingly oppressive society.
There are passages in his book, Freedom Is A Two-Edged Sword
[2] very similar to Timothy Leary?s much later seminal book, The
Politics of Ecstasy[3]. His style also predates the ?beat?
poetry of Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the New Age
views of Wilhem Reich. Parsons had the kind of hallucinatory
head-visions about spirit, magic, and human freedom which were to
rocket Californian culture headlong into the 1960s, causing a
world-revolution in thinking which, alas, Parsons was never to see.
Parsons'
home, 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena, was a vast old
pre-war mansion populated by his own Adams Family selection of the
free and the inspired, the mad and the lost. Local adverts for rooms
specified that only bohemians, musicians, artists, atheists and
anarchists need apply. Rumours of black magic, orgies and other
strange goings-on abounded. One evening in 1942, several police
appeared to investigate reports of a pregnant woman jumping naked
through a fire in the back yard. Ever the gentleman, Parsons
convinced the officers of his status as a respectable scientist and
the affair was laughed off.
As a
scientist, a prototype hippy poet-anarchist, and romantic occultist,
Parsons? beliefs appear sculpted out of the mysteries and conflicts
of the Californian landscape and the renowned scientific culture it
nourishes. In his experiments, like a desert prophet of old, he
performed miracles with strange mixes of explosive substances in
remote locations, often at risk to his life. Outside chemistry, he
was somewhat less sure-footed. He practised "sex magic" but was so
lacking in occult disciplines that his early "workings' more
resembled early free-love orgies than anything else. Outside of
these "religious" activities, Parsons was an incorrigible womaniser,
who also blithely styled himself the Antichrist. This title was
lightly assumed, compared with Crowley's earlier self-christening as
the Beast of Revelation. It was also an ambitious title for someone
who was, for the most part, far too nice a person for such an
exalted position in infernality. Like many enthusiasts before him,
Parsons failed to distinguish between Paganism and Satanism, and the
many tricks that sprite called the Unconscious plays with that pair
of duplicitous sirens. It was probably for such confusions that the
far more sophisticated and mature Crowley criticised Parsons,
probably causing Parson?s resignation from the OTO in
1946.
British
culture, with its eternal hatred of clever folk, would have got rid
of Parsons if he had been born here. Like Alan Turing, he would have
been ritually crucified. But in brilliant people we should not look
for balance and democracy, for fairness and objectivity. If Parsons'
vital energies were confused, anachronistic, and hypocritical, he
nevertheless represents (and indeed so does Ron Hubbard, his partner
in magical rituals), that seething undertow of light-and-dark
contrast in American life which is connected in some vital formative
sense with the prototype aircraft that barrel down American runways.
This is the nightmare of every democrat and social psychologist:
take away the nut-cases and the anomalies the contradictions and
even the criminality, and nothing works any more. A glittering
madness is gone. True leadership and creation involves that higher
disturbance whose "products" vary from spaceships to schoolyard
shootings.
Parsons' chemistry, like its parent alchemy, is by nature
a thing very different to physics. It has colour, smell and taste,
and depends on character and relation rather than the
push-me-pull-you of nuclear forces. Chemistry therefore is linked
not to momentum, or gravity, those arriviste "objective" harpies,
but to a gentler world of homeopathy and pharmacy, to herbs,
colour-changes and smells. It has no need to reduce the world to a
cartoon in order to make the equations work out. The old alchemical
idea of "affinity" rather than "objectivity" between compounds and
elements suggests the operation of forces that the world well
understood before the so-called "enlightenment". In all likelihood,
Parsons used his somewhat cavalier attitude towards occultism to
activate those sympathies which got his early fuel combinations
right, astonishing colleagues such as Frank Malina. But he may have
found out too late that magic, once summoned, is far more volatile
than even the most dangerous rocket fuel.
Of
course, science as Mr Straight would have us believe that it has
swept away all such "subjective" elements, along with religion,
metaphysics, and mysticism. But deep inside any twentieth-century
product are schemes of product-agendas, those occult rituals of
which the cultural "successes" of science are but the masks.We have
only to scratch the paint off a twentieth-century bus-stop, and we
discover a conspiracy. The paint itself, the aluminium, the drilling
milling and casting - all these things are, like the bus-stop, a
temporary shelter in time, and finally vanish into that haze of
mysteries we like to call Causation, if only to help us get some
sleep at night. That old fraud called Official Reality would have us
believe that American rocket technology and space-science was
created by a bunch of apple-cheeked graduates tinkering with some
wartime scrap, but the face of that social-scientific conspiracy
which took us to the moon has the shape of that most occult of
geometrical configurations - the triangle.
The Nazis
were at one apex in Alabama (which is still the best place in
America to put Nazis if you don?t want them to come to any harm).
The doings in the arroyo, which became the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, occupied another apex. Frank Malina, a powerful figure
in GALCIT [4] and sometime friend of Parsons, was a secret communist
who sat at the third remaining apex, along with Dr. Hsue-shenTsien,
another fellow-traveller, who became Chairman Mao?s first Missile
Godfather, and produced the Silkworm missile for him. In the centre
of the triangle there is the winking eye of Aleister Crowley, and
providing comic interest was a character no less fantastic than
Crowley: namely L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology. After being
demobilised in 1945, he appears in this network of forces as the
Joker and only leaves the triangle after much occult, personal, and
legal intrigue (see panels below).
Jewish
light relief was provided by Von Karman, Head of GALCIT, who claimed
that his Rabbi father had actually created a golem, no less. Von
Karman was a legendary figure, the protagonist of swept-back wings,
a new technology in the early 1940s. Such was the regard of Von
Karman for Parsons, he named him as the third most vital influence
on space-science, and although Parsons did not have a degree, Von
Karman gave him the run of Caltech. While this produced success, on
at least two occasions Parsons and his equally part-qualified A-team
nearly blew the entire place to pieces, before being rapidly moved
back to the desert arroyo by popular request.
Knickers
without mystique are no knickers at all. Similarly, with rockets,
there has to be mystique, and the quietly imported Nazis formed the
televisual part of our space-triangle. Like Hitler's Armament
Minister, Albert Speer (the acceptable face of Nazi bourgeois
intelligentsia if ever there was one), the legendary Wernher Von
Braun [5] looked good even on the low-definition television of John
Parson's last days. As the world rapidly became pure media in the
decades succeeding 1945, it was looking good that was beginning to
count. Von Braun's glowing features lapped it up as the prime-time
interviewers of the 1950 and 1960s just forgot to mention that he
joined the SS in 1940 and had personally ordered the public hanging
of 12 slave-workers at Nordhausen in 1945 [6].
Those
historians of rational causation who look at costs and economies may
have to get rid of every idea of what constitutes a life-form, never
mind an economy. Our strange geometry, trailing twilight characters
and full of advertising-concentrate, dropped into the right cultural
bio-soup, opened like a Chinese flower in water, and became the
great American Space Adventure.
Towards
the end of 1943, the Von Karman group joined forces with U.S. Army
Ordnance and the resulting project ORDCIT built the solid-fuelled
Private A with a range of 54000 feet. This in turn evolved through
Private F and Sergeant to become the WAC Corporal (still essentially
a Parsons-type rocket). The Corporal was the first American
ballistic missile to go into production and reach field deployment.
While it could hardly match the V2, nevertheless, on September 26th,
1945, a Corporal reached a height of 42 miles above the Army's new
testing grounds at White Sands New Mexico.
Finally,
our occult triangle became a pyramid, on the tip of which sat a
Corporal rocket seated in turn on top of a modified V2 (the
combination was called the Bumper-WAC). In February 1949, this
hybrid soared 250 miles above the earth. In 1958, six years after
Parsons' death, this marriage of German and American ideas, occult
and mechanical, ideological and political, good and evil, had given
birth to America's first satellite, Explorer 1.
Not that
after 1945 Parsons took much notice of these developments. Like many
people after the war, he seemed to come apart, talking about
investing in washing machines and fireworks. He was a hopeless
businessman, and taking part-time jobs with various explosive and
pyrotechnic companies, he became ever more deeply involved with
occultism.
Like all
dedicated occultists, he looked for bigger things than objective
science. For those who wish to look for them, the rejected and
abandoned systems of the Ancient World still lie about 20th century
consciousness like the ruins of Rome. Put them together again like
old car parts, and with a cough and splutter, they all still work,
if with somewhat less efficiency than the latest glistening
metaphor-game in the showroom.
A
character like Parsons could hardly avoid the FBI. From the early
1940s he was watched because of suspected communist affiliations,
though we are left to speculate on what a communist occultist would
sound like. A further FBI investigation of 1951 shows him still
under investigation, this time for alleged espionage. While working
for Hughes Aircraft, it was found he had taken some 17 technical
papers from research files. According to Sex and Rockets author John
Carter, their titles are still censored from the FBI files. Carter
suggests that Parsons used jargon associated with the Manhattan
Project. At this time Parsons had formed strong sympathetic contacts
with the new-found state of Israel, the implication being that he
could have been the target of a covert effort to help Israel build a
nuclear weapon.
Parsons'
security clearance was never reinstated. This, combined with several
past investigations into his magical and sexual activities, two
other separate charges of having taken classified documents, an
investigation into alleged communist activities, and a previous loss
of clearance, hastened his sad decline, though now he was re-united
with Cameron. Reduced to working at a filling station and designing
explosive effects for films, he wrote to Germer, Crowley's successor
at the OTO, of his "depressing melancholy stupor".
On
Tuesday, 17 June, at 5:45 PM, Parsons died after two mysterious
explosions devastated his home. He was consumed with flame, just as
Hubbard's "channelling" had prophesied some six years previous: "She
(Babalon) is the flame of life...She shall absorb thee, and thou
shalt become living flame before She incarnates"[6].
A few
hours after Parsons' death, his mother Ruth killed herself with a
fatal overdose of Nembutal. Carter reports that according to Police
investigator Donald Harding, and George Santmyer, a close working
colleague of Parsons, a box was found on the Parsons' property which
contained a film showing Parsons and his mother Ruth having sex. If
this circumstantial evidence is true, we can now rest assured that
American Space Science rests on good classical
foundations.
The
dynamic transforms of Jack Parsons' life had taken on the evolving
character of the rocket: a dangerous, explosive, pagan thing, hot
from hell, and stinking of the sulphurous essence of gloriously bad
behaviour, suggesting that even freedom, progress and enlightenment
must go through a violent struggle for birth. Like the V2, a thing
born in blood, violence and Faustian hubris - with not a little fun
along the way.
The
Babalon Workings
In August 1945, on leave from his less than
spectacular naval career, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard was
introduced to Parsons. Jack was impressed by Ron's exuberance and
energy and wrote in a letter to Crowley: "I deduced that he is in
direct touch with some higher intelligence. He is the most Thelemic
(Crowley's branch of magic) person I have ever met and is in
complete accord with our own principles". Hubbard moved in and
promptly gained the affections of Parsons' main squeeze, 19-year-old
Betty Northrop. He was soon initiated into the secrets of the OTO
and made Parsons' magical partner.
In
January 1946, the two commenced a long and complex magical ritual
called the "Babalon Working" (sic). This was intended to create
nothing less than an elemental being. As far as Parsons? was
concerned, the invocation worked. The elemental turned up two weeks
later in the form of the beautiful blue-eyed, red-haired Marjorie
Elizabeth Cameron, who became, after Parsons' death, the star of
Kenneth Anger's 1965 cult-film Inauguration of the Pleasure
Dome, friend of Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell, and prototype
witch-biker. It is interesting to note that Cameron?s two brothers,
her sister and also her father were to work at JPL, as if Project
and People were knit by associations. As John Carter says in Sex
and Rockets, Cameron was "sprung from Parsons' head like Sophia
from the Godhead or Pallas Athena from Zeus". On February 26th,
Parsons wrote to Crowley: "I have my elemental!"
In April
1946, Parsons, Cameron, and Hubbard, acting as scribe, attempted the
second part of the Babalon Working, which was intended to raise a
"moonchild" in the manner described in Crowley?s novel of the same
name, with Cameron the vessel for Parsons' magical seed. The mundane
world intruded however, and the tricky Hubbard, despite his intense
and apparently sincere involvement with the Babalon working,
vanished with $10,000 of Parsons' money and Betty, who was no doubt
peeved at Parsons' involvement with Cameron. Parsons eventually
located the fleeing pair at sea, rented a room in Florida, and cast
a spell upon them, whereupon Hubbard and Betty were nearly drowned
in a storm. In 1955, the widowed Cameron, in the company of a group
of bikers, severed her ties to the past and destroyed the Black Box
of the Babalon Working that Parsons believed had brought her to
him.
Wizards of the Coast:
Amongst the many areas
in which Parsons' influence was felt, and one that further cemented
the bond between him and Hubbard, was the burgeoning West Coast
science fiction scene. Many key SF writers could be found gathered
at the Parsons household in the early '40s, including Jack
Williamson, A.E. Van Vogt (who would become head of the Los Angeles
Dianetics Foundation), Robert Heinlein, Alva Rogers and Forrest J.
Ackerman. Ackerman ran the LA SF Society, where Parsons also met Ray
Bradbury who professed to being fascinated by "his ideas about the
future". Parsons was particularly fascinated by Williamson's
Darker Than You Think, the tale of an ancient lycanthropic
race who seek to regain power amongst men through the birth of a
magical child, "The Child of Night". It has also been suggested that
Parsons' ideas influenced Heinlein in writing Stranger in a
Strange Land.
Further
Reading:
Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack
Parsons, Feral House, 2000
Further
Surfing:
Babalon.net - dedicated to
Parsons and his work
Transcript of the
Babalon working
Notes:
1.
The Germans developed the JATO bottles quite independently (they
were used on the heavy Gigant transport and the Arado 234 jet
bomber), but apparently they were crude efforts compared to Parsons'
units.
2.
The Oriflamme Number 1 (Ordo Templi Orientis in association with
Falcon Press Las Vegas, 1989)
3.
Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, California Institute of
Technology.
4. UFO Magazine (Sep/Oct 1999, p 71), carries a report
by Michael Lindemann, Head of CNI News, on NASA UFO whistle-blower
Clark C. McClelland, who claims that Von Braun "confirmed" that an
alien spacecraft crashed at Roswell. In this ever-thickening plot,
it is pertinent to mention that John Carter claims that Parsons told
Jacque Vallée (author of the classic Passport to Magonia), that he
had met a Venusian in the Mojave desert in 1946. This is most
interesting, considering that George Adamski was only 100 miles SE
of the Mojave at this time.
5.
See X Factor magazine 70, p.1941
6.
Carter, Sex and Rockets, Feral House, February 2000
p.177.