Sex and Rockets Sex and Rockets ©2004, 1999 by John Car Ter and Feral House
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Sex and Rockets Sex And Rockets ©2004, 1999 by John Car ter and Feral House. All rights r eserved. ISBN 0-922915-97-0 Design by Linda Hayashi Cover design by Sean Tejaratchi 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 Feral House 1240 W. Sims Way Suite 124 Port Townsend, WA 98368 www.feralhouse.com Sex and Rockets The Occult World of Jack Parsons John Carter Introduction by Robert Anton Wilson feral house Contents Introduction by Rober t Anton Wilson vii Preface xxv one The Early Years: 1914–1936 1 ockets two Parsons at Caltech: 1936–1939 15 three A Short History of the OTO sex and r 37 iv four Parsons’ Double Life: 1940–1942 47 five The Return to South Orange Gr ove Ave.: 1942–1945 83 six An Introduction to Enochian Magic 109 seven The Babalon Working, Part 1: Januar y–February 1946 119 eight The Babalon Working, Part 2: March 1946 135 nine Parsons’ Final Years: 1946–1952 155 ten Death and Beyond 177 Afterword 200 Photo Section 204 v Appendix A Primary Bibliography 227 contents Appendix B Secondary Bibliography 228 Appendix C Additional References 230 Index 234 vi sex and rockets A Marvel Walked Among Us by Robert Anton Wilson “I seem to be living in a nation that simply does not know what freedom is.” —John Whiteside Parsons 1 This book tells the life story of a very strange, very brilliant, very funny, very tormented man who had at least thr ee major occupations (or v ocations); he also had no less than four names. He acted as scientist, as occultist, as political dissi- dent and often as a simple damned eejit (just lik e you and me). Scientists, a ware of his tr emendous contributions to space science , generally call him John Parsons, and they’ve even named a crater on the moon after him. Those occultists who know of his work in their very spe- vii cialized arts call him Jack P arsons, the name he himself pr eferred; in introduction some magick lodges the y consider him second only to Aleister Cr owley as a pr ogenitor of the Ne w Aeon. His best-kno wn book, Freedom Is A Two-Edged Swor d, which incr easingly influences the libertarian and anarchist movements, gives his name as John Whiteside P arsons on the cover and title page. And, as the present biography documents, this odd bird actually had the legal name Marv el Whiteside Parsons imposed on him at birth. Oh, well, if m y parents had named me “Marv el,” I w ould have changed my name, too, perhaps as often as Parsons did. For utmost scientific clarity about matter s usually left in m ystic murk or psychobabble, I shall use all four of Our Hero’s names: John Parsons for the scientist, John Whiteside P arsons for the libertarian philosopher, Jack P arsons for the occultist, and Marv el Parsons for the original template: an alienated and sometimes naiv e boy, a child of divorce, who tried to find and liberate what occultists call his True Self by creating the other thr ee Parsonspersons and permitting them 1. Freedom Is A Two-Edged Swor d, by John Whiteside Parsons, Falcon Pr ess, Las V egas, 1989, p 10. to fight brutal wars in the loneliness of his passionate br ain until all three became One. When endured helplessly by a truly fractured per- sonality, w e gener ally call this civil w ar in the ps yche Multiple Personality Disor der: when deliber ately pur sued as a path of Illumination leading through Hell and Pur gatory toward a vision (at least) of Paradise, we have no name for it in our curr ent culture but those few who, lik e Parsons, have taken the hermetic oath to Will and Dar e and Kno w and K eep Silence simply call it magick (pr o- nounced mage-ick, as in the Thr ee Magi). Marvel Parsons, born in 1914 in Los Angeles but r aised mostly in the nearb y to wn of P asadena, began life lik e all of us in what Tibetans call the V oid and the Chinese call wu-hsin (no mind). Gradually, out of the V oid, form emer ged. He made the distinction between Marv el and Ev erything Else; a glass w all then separ ated Marvel from Everything Else. He gradually identified various parts of Everything Else, as soon as he learned their names . Fatherless, Marvel had a conserv ative middle class mother who ockets loved him a bit too ar dently (she committed suicide within a fe w hours after his death, 17 June 1952). She also taught him to hate his absent father, a pr oven “adulterer.” (Horrors!) Developing an early sex and r interest in psychology, Marvel diagnosed himself as ha ving a classic viii Oedipus complex, a compulsiv e antipathy to “P atriarchy” (he used the word before the Feminists made it trendy) and an equally intense loathing for an y and all A uthority s ymbols, especially “God the Father.” But let us look at 19 14, the y ear of P arsons’ birth, mor e closely. Whatever you think of astrology, with its extraterrestrial bias, a “sec- ular horoscope” limited to Earthly portents always provides amusing insights. The terrestrial world that shaped Marvel Parsons looked like this: The First World War had started on July 28 that year; before 1914 ended the fir st aerial bombing of civilian populations occurr ed (Germany did it to F rance), and the bloody battles of the Marne , Tannerberg, Ghent and especially Ypres demonstrated that “civilized” modern humans could act even more inhumanely and insanely than any barbarians of the past. Police arr ested the legendary labor her o Joe Hill in Utah on January 13 for a murder he almost certainly did not commit, and the State executed him the follo wing year. His last w ords, “Don’t w eep for me , bo ys—organize!” became a mantr a to union member s for decades after. In Color ado, John D. R ockefeller’s hir ed goons killed 2 1 people (including 11 children) in a clash with other labor “radicals.” Leftists protested outside R ockefeller’s New York office and got arr ested for it: a court order banned any other people with signs or banners from parading in fr ont of that sacr osanct shrine of the Almighty Dollar . Novelist Upton Sinclair appear ed the ne xt da y with a blank sign, telling reporters that fr ee speech had died. Suffr agettes marched on Washington June 28, demanding equal rights for w omen. In England, Dubliners, the fir st book b y an Irish author named James Jo yce, appear ed; and in America Edgar Rice Burr oughs brought forth Tarzan of The Apes . Musically, we all acquir ed three major tr easures, “The Colonel Boge y Mar ch,” “Saint Louis Blues” and “12th Str eet Rag.” In film, D.W . Griffith’s The Mother and the Law rawly showed the abuse of women by “the Patriarchy.” Margaret Sanger intr oduced the term “birth contr ol” in The Woman Rebel and then fled to England to avoid imprisonment for the “crime” of publishing explicit details on contraception. Charles T aze R ussell, founder of the Jeho vah’s Witnesses , announced that the apocalypse w ould begin on October 2—coinci- dentally or synchronistically, the very day Marvel Whiteside Parsons [who w ould later , as Jack P arsons, call himself the AntiChrist] emerged from his mother’ s womb, or fr om even darker places, and ix began to investigate and meddle with this planet. introduction Going back to England again: also in 19 14, Aleister Cr owley (rhymes with “holy”) and his curr ent mistr ess, violinist Leila Waddell, staged something called “The Rites of Eleusis” in London—several nights of quasi-masonic ritual, music, poetry, bal- let and drama. On the first night, the actors informed the audience, Nietzsche-fashion, that “God is dead” and mourned and grie ved over the departed deity: things became even stranger after that, like the bardos in the Tibetan Book of the Dead , and on the last night the audience received “The Elixir of the Gods,” a wine containing a high dosage of the ps ychedelic drug mescaline . While the y willynilly enter ed Chaos and the V oid a chorus announced the dawning of a Ne w Aeon based on R abelais’ Law of Thelema—“Do What Thou Wilt” . And Doublemint chewing gum appeared on the market, produced by William Wrigley . All of this undeniably influenced Marv el as much as , or mor e than, an y distant star s or planets . The horr ors of W orld W ar imprinted him with a w ounded per ception of the dark side of “human nature”: some parts of Freedom Is A Two-Edged Sword sound as bitter as S wift or Twain at their most misanthr opic. Marvel also acquired a genuine sympathy for working people, and an awareness of the brute for ce behind Capitalism and Capitalist Go vernments never left him: although an ultr a-individualist himself. he had mor e than one Marxist friend (which got him virtually tarred and feathered during the McCarthy era). Standing there as big as life And smiling with those eyes: “What they forgot to kill,” said Joe “Went on to organize.” Margaret Sanger and the suffr agettes also left a mark: no male writer since John Stuart Mill in the 19th Century has sho wn more empathy for Feminism than John Whiteside Parsons.