Sex and Rockets

by John Carter

  In fact, Kenneth Grant writes, “The [Babalon] Working began…just prior to the wave of unexplained aerial phenomena now recalled as the ‘Great Flying Saucer Flap.’ Parsons opened a door and something flew in.” Indeed, this notion has entered certain fringe areas of pop culture.

  Crowley sensationalizer Francis King mentions that Parsons felt flying saucers “would play a part in converting the world to Crowleyanity.” When Cameron later became obsessed with flying saucers she never whispered a word about Parsons’ interest. She believed saucers were not high-tech, but rather a “restoration of the elemental powers.”

  An unconfirmed statement attributed to conspiriologist John Judge claimed that Parsons may have flown with the pilot Kenneth Arnold, who in 1947 saw several silver disks over Mt. Rainier in Washington State and coined the term “flying saucer” to describe them.

  Another Aerojet employee, Daniel Fry, saw a saucer in 1950 and went on to become an active figure in 1950s contacteeism. Some wonderful footage of him in his final years is recorded in the film Farewell, Good Brothers. Still another occult-oriented employee in the aerospace engineering industry, the Californian Orfeo Angelucci, claimed to have been a contactee in the 1950s.

  Other momentous events were attributed to Parsons. Referring to the date of Parsons’ death, Arthur Lyons said, “It was 13 years later, the period of human maturation, that twins were born in San Francisco—the counterculture and the Church of Satan.” Gerald Suster, in his biography of Israel Regardie, credits Parsons with helping birth the sixties.

  After his death, Cameron continued Parsons’ work—not the Babalon Working, but that involving personal growth and exploration. She moved to the desert, living in an American artists’ colony in northern Mexico (San Miguel de Allende), next door to David Siquieros and Max Ernst's wife Lenora Carrington. Cameron and Soror Estai (Jane Wolfe) struck up a voluminous correspondence. Here's hoping that this potentially fascinating communication will be made public by the OTO or whomever has it.

  On December 15, 1952, Cameron wrote to Jane Wolfe, “Seven years ago, Jack began an operation which he referred to as the Babalon Work—and this set into motion the second part of a great force which was divided into three. Aleister Crowley began the first, three years before I was born [a possible reference to Frater Achad]. I never knew the man, yet his desire gave me birth. His paternity sings in my veins.” Cameron is saying that she is the third and final part of that “force”; she referred to her life as one of the “strangest and wildest voyages into the unknown that has ever been told.”

  Cameron declared that Babalon actually came to exist as her own self. This large claim comes despite the known fact that Parsons believed Cameron was an elemental who he hoped would later give “birth” to Babalon. He would not have predicted Babalon's physical manifestation to occur within seven years, as he did in 1949 in The Manifesto of the AntiChrist, if she were already on earth. After the three-day working of March 1946, Parsons proclaimed, “Babalon is incarnate upon the earth today, awaiting the proper hour of Her manifestation.” In 1949 Parsons revised this statement, perhaps anticipating Cameron's return. The year 1949 must have been significant to Parsons—the book that purportedly came from Babalon is titled Liber 49.

  Parsons’ Songs for the Witch Woman is dedicated to Cameron, “in whom She is incarnate.” But in “The Star of Babalon” Parsons says that Her spirit is within all women who proclaim their equality to men. If this is indeed the case, a billion women on planet Earth are now wearing Babalon's tiara.

  In 1953, Cameron wrote:

  For some months now I have been aware of the heightening intensity of what I call a third beam of hearing. I can describe it as the sound of a radio beam that one picks up on shortwave. It is independent of my normal hearing—if I close my eyes it is not affected in any way. There are moments when it is so intense that I can actually tune it in—by turning my body. It seems to be heightened in power by the presence of some other humans…I have the feeling that there is someone on the other end, or let me say that I have the feeling that the beam transcends time and space and that I am hearing the sound of my transmitter echoed in incredible places.

  While her auditory experiences were being inhumanly heightened, Cameron saw a flying saucer. In a letter to Jane Wolfe dated January 22, 1953, Cameron speculated the UFO was the “war-engine” mentioned in The Book of the Law III: 7-8 (“I will give you a war-engine. With it ye shall smite the peoples; and none shall stand before you.”) Eight years earlier Crowley wondered if the atomic bomb constituted this engine.

  In another letter Cameron wrote about:

  [Mars], which I believe, is somehow my home. Earth will explode in a collision with the two Star Islands which are reported now moving towards each other in the heavens [reference uncertain]. And resulting therefrom, my star, the great Seven-pointed Star of Babalon, shall be born in the heavens. [Marginalia scribed by Gerald Yorke in 1969 on a copy of Liber 49 states Cameron is “nutty as can be.”]

  In order to contact her “Holy Guardian Angel,” Cameron began to illustrate Songs of the Witch Woman with her “desire.” We don't have any record of Cameron contacting her Guardian Angel, but soon we will have Cameron's illustrations of Parsons’ poem in print, or so it is said by their current owner, Carl Abrahamsson.

  The fateful year of 1953 also saw the death of Mark M. Mills, Parsons’ former associate, in a helicopter crash at an Eniwetok atomic bomb test site. Mills holds some of the solid fuel patents with Parsons and also co-authored some once-classified papers on solid fuel.

  Next year Cameron played both the Scarlet Woman and Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, in Kenneth Anger's short film, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. Notorious for his underground films and authorship of the Hollywood Babylon books, Anger is also known for rescuing Crowley's paintings and ephemera in the Sicilian “Abbey of Thelema,” from which Crowley and company were tossed by Benito Mussolini in 1932. In a letter to Wolfe, Cameron said that rituals acted out in Anger's film helped bring down Babalon.

  The widowed Cameron married a man named Sharif Kimmel. With some bikers on Catalina Island in 1955, she destroyed the black box from the Babalon Working. Cameron had a daughter, Crystal, as well as grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Wilfred Smith, with whom she had lost contact, died in 1957. Jane Wolfe died a few months later, in 1958.

  In 1957, a drawing by Cameron in Wallace Berman's Semina magazine prompted a raid on the Ferus Gallery by the police and an obscenity trial, after which Berman served a few days in jail. Dean Stockwell paid his bail. The picture showed a sun-headed man penetrating a woman from the rear. A photo of Cameron was on the cover. Cameron the painter was also involved in the L.A. art scene of the 1960s, with George Herms, Bruce Connor and Wallace Berman, and continued showing her work well into the 1980s.

  The American actors Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell are said to have been Cameron's roommates. In fact, Cameron appeared with Hopper in the 1961 Curtis Harrington horror film Night Tide, playing a Lovecraftian “Deep One”—her few lines spoken in “R'lyehian.” Harrington appeared in Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome as well; his film Wormwood Star is an impressionistic profile of Cameron.

  Ithell Colquhoun's The Sword of Wisdom, written in 1975, mentions an “OTO Lunar Lodge” with which Cameron was supposedly working around 1960, somewhere in California. However, it does not seem to have been chartered, and those who knew Cameron say there was no lodge at all.

  On Halloween 1968, JPL honored the 32nd anniversary of its nativity by dedicating a plaque behind its visitors’ center. During the dedication, JPL held a large celebration, even going so far as to invite wives and ex-girlfriends who had been present during the tests. But they did not invite Ed Forman or Rudolph Schott, both of whom were still alive and living in the area. Nonetheless, Forman donated an old rocket and papers he had saved from the original tests, all of which have since been lost.

  In 1969, the London Sunday Times ran an article on L. Ron Hubbar
d's early involvement with magick. The Church of Scientology protested, and in return the paper printed verbatim the Church's statement concerning Hubbard's involvement with Parsons.

  Hubbard broke up black magic in America: Dr. Jack Parsons of Pasadena, California, was America's Number One solid fuel rocket expert. He was involved with the infamous English black magician Aleister Crowley who called himself ‘The Beast 666.’ Crowley ran an organization called the Order of Templars Orientalis over the world which had savage and bestial rites. Dr. Parsons was head of the American branch located at 100 Orange Grove Avenue, Pasadena, California. This was a huge old house which had paying guests who were the U.A.S. nuclear physicists working at Cal. tech. Certain agencies objected to nuclear physicists being housed under the same roof.

  L. Ron Hubbard was still an officer of the U.S. Navy [and] because he was well known as a writer and philosopher and had friends among the physicists, he was sent in to handle the situation. He went to live at the house and investigated the black magic rites and the general situation and found them very bad.

  Parsons wrote to Crowley in England about Hubbard. Crowley “the Beast 666” evidently detected an enemy and warned Parsons. This was all proven by the correspondence unearthed by the [London] Sunday Times. Hubbard's mission was successful far beyond anyone's expectations. The house was torn down. Hubbard rescued a girl they were using. The black magic group was dispersed and never recovered. The physicists included many of the sixty-four top U.S. scientists who were later declared insecure and dismissed from government service with so much publicity.34

  Despite the vilification and brouhaha, in 1972 the International Astronomical Union in France honored Parsons by naming a crater on the moon after him. “Parsons Crater” is at 370 N latitude, 1710 W longitude, and, appropriately enough, on the dark side of the moon. Due to the Ranger survey, the first to photograph the dark side and reveal hundreds of new craters in need of names, NASA turned to its own past to provide them. Parsons was the only GALCIT scientist to earn this honor, in which Frank Malina, now living in France, may have had a hand.

  Parsons’ buddy, Ed Forman, died in 1973 of heart trouble while employed by Lockheed in El Segundo. Despite his lifelong closeness with Parsons, Forman never joined the OTO. (Parsons’ mother, Ruth, also worked at Lockheed during the war.)

  It is evident that Parsons was considered an important if dangerous figure by the authorities. His FBI file, which was requested prior to the Freedom of Information Act as part of a JPL history project, is heavily censored. Although FOIA rules have since changed, when one requests the file one normally gets a photocopy of the file that has already been processed. There have been no updates, simply because the FBI hasn't noticed or doesn't want to bother with it.

  Among the many reasons Parsons was investigated was not only the “black magic” but also his association with communist sympathizers. Fellow GALCIT group member, Frank Malina, whose efforts served the U.S. quite effectively, was also a victim of the Communist witchhunts. After the war, Malina had become head of the scientific research division of UNESCO in France, a post he held until his political beliefs and longstanding membership in the Communist Party were discovered. He resigned and turned to a successful career in “kinetic art.” Several of his pieces are still on display in England, and the art/science journal he founded, Leonardo, is still published by MIT. Malina died in France in 1981.

  It may have been Malina who first introduced the late John Parsons to the UFO-researcher and debunker, Jacques Vallee, who was the role model for the French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Vallee suggests that JPL would deny Parsons ever existed; but, as evidenced by a memorial plaque on JPL grounds (and numerous conversations with the staff of JPL) the opposite is actually the case.

  After the war, group leader and rocket scientist von Kármán was invited to Germany to inspect various Nazi research installations like the one at Peenemünde. This visit occurred at the invitation of Hap Arnold and his other old friends in Washington. Von Kármán's autobiography, The Wind and Beyond, contains pictures from his trip to Germany, including one shot of him interrogating a German scientist. As previously noted, von Kármán worked in Germany during the decade following World War I. After World War II, he was instrumental in recruiting Nazi scientists to the United States. Declassified documents refer to this effort as “Operation Paperclip.” Some of Parsons’ letters to Cameron are from Alabama, where Paperclip rocket scientist Wernher von Braun was a prisoner of war, and it is possible the two had met. Von Kármán spent the next two decades engaged in various aeronautics research projects and died in 1963, a giant among men.

  GALCIT member and alleged spy Hsue-shen Tsien had an interesting if troubled life after the war ended. Evidently he was accused of being a Communist simply because he was Chinese, as, years later, Malina's widow told an interviewer, “We never saw him at any of the cell meetings.” This incident embarrassed Tsien so much he decided to return to China—something he thought he'd never do. However, immigration stopped him at the docks and detained him for five years, by which time, the authorities figured, anything he knew would be obsolete. Then they deported him, and subsequently he singlehandedly built the Chinese missile program from scratch using what he had learned at GALCIT. Tsien's fascinating life is recounted in Iris Chang's biography, Thread of the Silk Worm.

  In 1989, a collection of Parsons’ unpublished essays, Freedom Is A Two-Edged Sword, appeared and renewed interest in the man, which has surged with the advent of the World Wide Web. The book includes Parsons’ commentary on the “Red Scare.” Much of the other material reproduced in Freedom Is A Two-Edged Sword deals with two of Parsons’ post-OTO projects: The Gnosis and The Witchcraft. The former was an attempt to set up a regular form of worship for Parsons and for whomever would follow.

  Parsons christianized his Gnosis by having Sophia, the incarnation of wisdom, play the role of the daughter of God, equating her with the Holy Ghost. In Parsons’ version, Sophia's union with Christ was equal to God. In “traditional” Gnosticism, Sophia was usually the mother of God, and Christ the savior of both. Only in Parsons’ work do we find the alternative formula, to which end Parsons wrote “On Magick,” “The Gnostic Creed,” and “The Gnostic Doctrine.”

  Parsons’ other project was The Witchcraft, a course on magick for the layman. Surviving documents include “Basic Magick: Fundamental Theory and Practice,” “Manifesto of The Witchcraft,” and a few chapters of a book called The Cup, the Sword and the Crux Ansata. Parsons wrote the manifesto June 15, 1950, but he still thought enough of Babalon to note this as the year 4000. However, the date is inconsistent with previous Babalon-influenced dates. In 1946, Hubbard proclaimed the year Babalon 4063, and in 1949 Parsons dated The Book of AntiChrist 4066. The year 4000 may indicate a change of his numbering system; it is not a misprint.

  Parsons’ purpose in creating these texts was clear: To Cameron he wrote, “Simplicity has been the key to victory in all the idea wars and, at present, Magick does not have it. There is the skeleton in the Rights of Man [Crowley's Liber OZ], and the coverings in the main literature. But the true body has never been shown forth.”

  In addition, short outlines on “General Field Theory” that Parsons left unfinished could almost be taken as precursors of the late Rupert Sheldrake's “morphogenetic field theory.” Notes on Wagner's The Ring take us to the final chapter of Freedom: it is “The Star of Babalon,” already mentioned. Part of Parsons’ The Book of Babalon, this chapter consists of instructions received from Babalon herself for the Magical Child. Much like the magical letter in the beautiful gnostic “Hymn of the Pearl,” these instructions would serve to effect an anamnesis (awakening) on the child's part, to further her mission on Earth. This text serves as further evidence that it was not Cameron who was to become Babalon, but someone as yet unknown.

  As noted, Cameron occasionally showed her art, but she never sold it. In fact, much of her early work she destroyed. The rest remains in
private collections, although several showings have been held, such as at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1989. Cameron was included posthumously in the “Beat Generation” show at the Whitney Museum in New York in late 1995. Near the end of her life she requested permission from JPL to give her grandson Silver a tour, wanting him to see where his “grandfather” had worked, a request that was granted. Cameron died of cancer on July 24, 1995, aged 73.

  Having reviewed the life of John Parsons in more depth than most writers, I have come to the conclusion that he has been misunderstood—even misrepresented. Historians of rocketry and the space program seem to have underestimated his contributions to the field, while writers on the occult have romanticized him as some sort of great sorcerer. Without his contributions to both solid and liquid fuels, the American space program would not be where it is today. In less than five years, Parsons accomplished what Robert Goddard could not do in a lifetime. The list concerning the top leaders in the world of rocketry contained in von Kármán's 1958 letter, written the same year as the solid-fueled Explorer I, was self-aggrandizing, as von Kármán himself admitted. To wit, Malina had written to von Kármán concerning opinion on who were the top 10 Americans who had contributed to the program. “Starting, of course, with ourselves, the list is of the following,” von Kármán replied. Parsons name was at the top.

  While one cannot take von Kármán's name off the top of that list, there is justification for placing Parsons’ name above Malina's, as Parsons is the individual who persevered in the face of repeated failures, and Parsons and the others funded their own research until someone (Hap Arnold) finally took notice. Furthermore, Parsons was the one in the field blowing up rocket after rocket until he found just the right combination that worked. Von Kármán encouraged him, but Parsons did the difficult and extremely hazardous work. Everything today in the field of solid fuel rockets is essentially Parsons’ work, if slightly modified. Obviously, it cannot be said that Parsons singlehandedly won the war, but his JATOs were deployed in several areas for its last three years. In addition, the global company Aerojet was founded upon Parsons’ innovations with solid fuels, and nothing else.