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As the hugely successful biopic Oppenheimer demonstrates, scientists aren’t always nerdy, lab-coated types solely obsessed with scribbling equations on blackboards. J Robert Oppenheimer was a man of wide, and sometimes weird, interests. When he quoted the Bhagavad Gita as the Trinity test bomb mushroomed into the New Mexico sky, he was doing so because he had read it in the original Sanskrit. Oppenheimer’s close colleague Isidor Rabi said of him, that he “was overeducated in those fields which lie outside the scientific tradition, such as his interest in religion, in the Hindu religion in particular”.
But Oppenheimer was far from the only American scientist in the 1940s with an obsession with esoterica. One of the founders of what is now the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena had extra-curricular interests that make Oppenheimer look like a buttoned-down Sunday school teacher.
John “Jack” Whiteside Parsons wasn’t just one of the founders of American rocketry and space exploration, but, in the words of his obituary in the Pasadena Independent, “a down-to-earth explosives expert who dabbled in necromancy”. Or, as the New York Post more recently put it, a “sex-crazed cultist”.
Who just happened to be a self-taught chemist and rocketry pioneer.
Did I mention that he was also roomies with a fellow occultist and science fiction writer by the name of L Ron Hubbard?
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.
Frankly, all are equally credible.
Parsons was born into wealthy Pasadena society, but the Wall Street Crash of ’29 torpedoed the family’s finances.
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.
The “Babalon thingamajig” in question was an attempt, in January 1946, to conjure up “Babalon”, the incarnation of female sexuality in the Thelemic occult belief. If you have even a rudimentary knowledge of occultism, those names will surely ring a bell.
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 […]
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 […]
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.”
The Church of Scientology today explains away the embarrassing involvement of its founder as that he was “acting undercover to subvert Parsons’s black magic and rescue a ‘girl’, Sara ‘Betty’ Northrup, from Parson’s clutches”. Northrup was, in fact, Parson’s sister-in-law and lover. She was ‘rescued’ so successfully that she became Hubbard’s second wife and played a major role in the creation of Dianetics.
Before all that, though, Parsons’ work in rocketry encompassed building and testing rockets, including a solid-fuel rocket he constructed. Parsons was also in regular correspondence with other, more famous names in rocketry, such as Robert H Goddard, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Willy Ley. He also engaged in lengthy telephone correspondence with a German scientist by the name of Wernher von Braun.
In fact, von Braun once asserted that it was Parsons, not he, who deserved the title of “Father of Rocket Science”.
But, while the post-War American establishment was willing to overlook von Braun’s less than salubrious past, Parsons’ was another thing entirely.
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.
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Banging ex Navy gals in black magic rituals, on the other hand, was just going too far.
