Jack Parsons

Rocket pioneer by day, magician by night. His Babalon Working preceded the saucers.

Imagine a man who helped invent the technology that would one day carry humanity to the Moon, and who, in the very same years, was performing occult rituals in the California desert to summon a goddess. You'd assume that's fiction. It isn't. His name was Jack Parsons, and every strange word of what follows is a matter of record. John Whiteside Parsons was born in 1914 in Los Angeles. As a boy he was obsessed with rockets at a time when serious scientists considered rocketry a joke, the stuff of pulp magazines. But Parsons and a small group of friends at Caltech, a band so prone to explosions they were nicknamed the 'Suicide Squad,' kept at it. Their experiments in the arroyo above Pasadena became the seed of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the JPL, your neighbor on this map, today one of NASA's crown jewels. Parsons also co-founded Aerojet, and his breakthroughs in solid rocket propellant were genuinely important. There is a crater on the far side of the Moon named Parsons in his honor. So here's where it gets strange. Parsons led a double life, and he didn't much hide it. He was a devoted follower of Aleister Crowley's religion of Thelema, and he ran the Agape Lodge, the American branch of Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis, another neighbor here. He corresponded with Crowley himself, who addressed him warmly and then, privately, worried he was being fleeced. And in 1946 came the episode that made Parsons a legend: the Babalon Working. Over several weeks, Parsons performed an elaborate series of rituals intended to invoke a divine feminine force, the goddess Babalon, into the world. His partner in these ceremonies was a charismatic young Navy veteran and science-fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard, the same man who would later found the Church of Scientology. The two of them drove into the Mojave; Parsons recorded the results in his diaries. He believed, sincerely, that he had opened a door. Now, whether anything supernatural occurred is not something history can settle, and this record won't pretend it can. What's documented is the man: the ritual took place, the diaries exist, Hubbard was there, and Parsons believed it utterly. His end was as sudden as his life was strange. On June 17th, 1952, an explosion tore through the home laboratory where he was handling volatile chemicals. Jack Parsons was dead at thirty-seven. Because he lived in the mythic dawn of the flying-saucer age, folklore has ever since tried to tether him to that era's mysteries, and you'll find his name whispered near tales like Roswell, your neighbor on this map, though no factual link ties him there. So place Parsons at the center of a crossroads. One road runs uphill to the JPL and the stars. Another runs to the lodge of the O.T.O. and Crowley. A third trails off into desert legend toward Roswell. Jack Parsons stands where all of them meet, one foot in the laboratory, one foot in the temple.