The Book of the Dead

by John Mitchinson

  Meanwhile, on their return to Mortlake, the Dees found their house had been ransacked: many books and instruments had been stolen and a maid had used a collection of Dee’s scientific papers to line pie tins. The queen’s enthusiasm for Dee had cooled, doubtless fanned by gossip from the Continent, and the best position she could offer him was the wardenship of Christ’s College, a religious institution in Manchester. Not only was his income much reduced, but he found his authority with the Fellows undermined by constant mutterings about his being a conjuror. In 1603 Elizabeth died, and was replaced by James I, a man famously averse to witchcraft in all its forms. The following year Dee wrote to him professing his loyalty and reassuring him that “none of all the great number of the very strange and frivolous fables or histories reported and told of me are true.” The king didn’t even bother to reply.

  The next year, plague swept though Manchester, pitilessly claiming the lives of Jane Dee, Theodore, Madimi, and all of John Dee’s younger children. He returned sorrowfully to Mortlake with his surviving daughter, Katherine. For the next four years, until his death, aged eighty-two, he lived in desperate poverty, selling his books one by one in order to eat. His only solace was to get back in touch with the angelic domain through a new medium called Bartholomew Hickman. It was at this point, at the very end of his life, that Goody Faldo of Mortlake (the old lady who described Dee to John Aubrey) met him when she was a young girl and fixed him forever as the white-bearded, black-gowned sage of legend. She told Aubrey he was the model for Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist but also sweetly said of him: “He was a great peacemaker; if any of the neighbours fell out, he would never let them alone till he had made them friends.” Her final verdict was simple: “A mighty good man he was.”

  Posterity is a fickle thing. Had John Dee’s diary and his book of spirit conversations, A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits, not been discovered and published by an enterprising bookseller in 1659, it is possible he would have been mainly remembered as a pioneering scientist alongside his close contemporary Sir Francis Bacon. He might have been discussed as the man who used geometry to map the globe, or as the greatest book collector of his age, rather than the wife swapper who talked to angels, the inspiration for the esoteric excesses of generations of self-styled magicians and occultists.

  One such occultist, also a brilliant scientist, was born almost four hundred years later. Jack Parsons (1914–52), the maverick pioneer of American rocket technology, invoked Satan for the first time when he was only thirteen. He was born in Los Angeles on October 2, 1914, on the exact date that the Jehovah’s Witnesses had predicted the Apocalypse. Named Marvel by his father, Captain Marvel Whiteside Parsons of the U.S. Army, his mother always called him John or Jack. She had caught his father having an affair while she was pregnant and he played very little further role in the boy’s upbringing. Jack had a lonely childhood. His only real friend was Edward Forman, who shared his obsession with fireworks, science fiction, and the arcane. Together they pored over old books of incantations, enacting spells to jinx older boys who bullied them at school.

  Jack and Edward dropped out of high school to join the Hercules Powder Company, a Californian armaments manufacturer. Jack’s unique talents as a self-taught explosives chemist soon got him a job with the “suicide squad,” a bunch of rocket-obsessed misfits at Caltech’s Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory. By the outbreak of World War II this had evolved into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, backed by substantial military funding. Wernher von Braun later said it was not himself but Parsons who was the real father of the U.S. space program. Still only in his midtwenties, Jack created solid fuels that would be used in the Apollo space missions, and liquid binders later employed in the propulsion of Polaris missiles. He was regularly called as an explosives expert at courtroom trials. In the meantime, still fascinated by the black arts, before each experiment he would invoke the spirit of Pan, the horned pagan god of fertility.

  When Parsons was twenty-eight, he and Forman and four colleagues formed their own rocket corporation, Aerojet Engineering. Parsons left after the war, selling his shares for just $11,000. Aerojet is still a major player in the industry, making the propulsion units on NASA’s space shuttle. Had Parsons kept his shares, he would have been a multimillionaire in less than a decade. Instead, he used the proceeds to start a Laundromat chain, which failed.

  Parsons was never good with money and he was even less adept at managing his personal life. His relationship with his mother was intense and very probably incestuous. He was extremely good-looking, tall, and promiscuous, working his way through the secretarial pool at Aerojet, even though he had a physiological disorder that caused him to sweat profusely. He dealt with the resultant chronic body odor by dousing himself liberally in strong-smelling cologne. Opinions about Jack were divided. To some he was the office clown, “a delightful screwball”; to others he was dangerous, possibly even psychotic.

  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 thelema, translated as “do what thou wilt.” In his magnum opus, The Book of the Law (1925), he is at pains to point out that the “wilt” in question does not refer to mere egotistical willpower, but to the dictates of the true or inner soul. According to Crowley, thelemic practice, or “magick” (the k is important to differentiate it from stage magic), was a path to spiritual development, not sensual indulgence. Having said that, for the philosophy to flourish, participants needed to “de-condition” themselves from restrictive social inhibitions to allow the subconscious mind to express itself—essentially by having prodigious quantities of wild, abandoned sex.

  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 enac
ting 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 the acclaim or the financial rewards his work should have commanded.

  He was born into a Serbian family in Smiljan, then part of Austro-Hungary, now in Croatia: It was his proud boast to be both Serbian and Croatian. The fourth of five children, he recalled his early years as exceptionally happy, growing up in the country surrounded by farm animals. Later in life he would tell how it was witnessing the sparks generated by stroking the family cat that made him want to understand what electricity was. “Eighty years have gone by since,” he wrote, “and I still ask the same question, unable to answer it.” The Teslas were a clever family, blessed with exceptional memories, and Tesla’s father, Milutin, a Serbian Orthodox priest and poet, devised mental exercises to keep his children’s minds supple and alert. He had an impressive library of books but said it wouldn’t matter if he lost them because he had memorized the classics by heart. Tesla’s mother Duka was barely able to read but could recite thousands of verses of Serb sagas and long passages from the Bible. Her needlework was famously intricate—using only her fingers, Tesla claimed, she could tie three knots in an eyelash. She also improvised ingenious labor-saving devices, even constructing her own mechanical eggbeater. “I must trace to my mother’s influence,” Tesla wrote, “whatever inventiveness I possess.”

  The great tragedy of Tesla’s youth was the death of his older brother, Dane, in a riding accident. Nikola was only five, but he had vivid nightmares about it for the rest of his childhood. A conscientious, sensitive boy, he felt his parents’ grief keenly, and no matter how hard he worked, he was conscious that he could never make up for the loss of his brilliant sibling. Dane and Nikola shared at least one outstanding talent: the ability to visualize things in precise, three-dimensional detail. Vivid images of memorable or traumatic events would return to Tesla at any time of night or day, often accompanied by flashes of light, and refuse to disappear. “Sometimes they would remain fixed in space even though I pushed my hand through them,” he recalled. Though distressing for a child, this pictorial clarity would be very useful to him as an inventor.

  Young Nikola was hopelessly accident-prone and had several brushes with death. He fell headlong into a kettle of boiling milk, nearly drowned afte
r swimming under a raft, was almost swept over a waterfall at one of the nearby dams, and suffered serious bouts of both malaria and cholera. These shocks provoked a general sense that the world was out to get him, and worsened the long list of obsessions he suffered from:

  I would not touch the hair of other people except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver. I would get a fever by looking at a peach and if a piece of camphor was anywhere in the house it caused me the keenest discomfort. I counted the steps in my walks and calculated the cubical contents of my soup plates, coffee cups and pieces of food, otherwise my meal was unenjoyable. All repeated acts or operations I performed had to be divisible by three and if I missed I felt impelled to do it all over again even if it took hours.

  At nineteen Tesla went to study electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz. He was an astonishing student, able to solve mathematical problems almost before his teachers had finished writing the formulas on the blackboard. In his spare time, he taught himself five languages, committed large chunks of Goethe and Shakespeare to memory, and plowed his way through the complete works of Voltaire. “I learned, to my dismay, that there were close on one hundred large volumes in small print which that monster had written while drinking seventy-two cups of black coffee per diem.” Like John Dee, he set himself a punishing work schedule, studying for up to twenty hours a day and sleeping less than three hours a night. He also indulged in more traditional student pursuits: drinking, smoking, gambling to excess, and, briefly, falling in love with a girl called Anna. This period of his life came to an abrupt end when he lost all the money his father had sent him for his studies in a card game. Deeply ashamed at what he had done, he gave up gambling and smoking for good and forswore all further contact with women.