In this post we will dive deeper in the relationship between the three Rocketeers and the development of Scientology on the foundation of EVIL, and the birth of the Space Program on the foundation of pagan ritual, sacrifice and worship of demonic spirits. How the world was launched into the BEAST TECHNOLOGY that MOLDS AND COUNTROLS the World in which we live today.
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If you have not already viewed the following post, check it out:
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In 1941, Marvel Whiteside Parsons, a scientist, engineer and expert in explosives, who had legally changed his name from Marvel to John and was normally referred to as “Jack” Source
was known by other names as well…Scientists, aware of his tremendous 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 specialized arts call him Jack Parsons, the name he himself preferred; in some magick lodges they consider him second only to Aleister Crowley as a progenitor of the New Aeon. His best-known book, Freedom Is A Two-Edged Sword, which increasingly influences the libertarian and anarchist movements, gives his name as John Whiteside Parsons on the cover and title page. Source
“The one super-secret sentence that Scientology is built on is ‘Do as thou wilt—that is the whole of the law.’” The words belong to L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., not Sr.. Speaking of Scientology, the son added: “It came from the black magic, from Crowley.”
Hubbard Sr. was a confessed admirer of Crowley, calling him “my very good friend.” According to Hubbard Jr., his father prepared for his Philadelphia Doctorate Course lecture series, taped in 1952, by reading Crowley. Source
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Hubbard believed he was Satan incarnate!
L. Ron Hubbard Jr. Speaks On His Father
From an interview with L Ron Hubbard Jr.
Ron Jr. says that he remembers much of his childhood. He claims to recall, at six years, a vivid scene of his father performing an abortion ritual on his mother with a coat hanger.
Ron Hubbard Jr. remembers that when he was ten years old, his father, in an attempt to get his son in tune with his black magic worship, laced the young Hubbard’s bubble gum with Phenobarbital. According to Ron Jr. drugs were an important part of Ron Jr.’s growing up, as his father believed that they were the best way to get closer to Satan–the Antichrist of black magic.
“In my father’s private circle,” Ron Jr explains, “there were lots of mistresses. When I was younger, I participated in private orgies with him and three or four other women. His theory was that one has to open or crack a woman’s soul in order for the satanic power to pour through it and into him. It got kind of far out, culminating in a variety of sex acts. Dad also had an incredibly violent temper. He was into S & M and would beat his mistresses and shoot them full of drugs.”
When asked by a interviewer how this “soul-cracking” worked, L Ron Hubbard Jr said, “The explanation is sort of long and complicated. The basic rationale is that there are some powers in this universe that are pretty strong.
“As an example, Hitler was involved in the same black magic and the same occult practices that my father was. The identical ones. Which, as I have said, stem clear back to before Egyptian times. It’s a very secret thing. Very powerful and very workable and very dangerous.
Brainwashing is nothing compared to it. The proper term would be “soul cracking.”
“It’s like cracking open the soul, which then opens various doors to the power that exists, the satanic and demonic powers. Simply put, it’s like a tunnel or an avenue or a doorway. Pulling that power into yourself through another person–and using women, especially is incredibly insidious.
“It makes Dr. Fu Manchu look like a kindergarten student. It is the ultimate vampirism, the ultimate mind f**k. Instead of going for blood, you’re going for their soul. And you take drugs in order to reach that state where you can, quite literally, like a psychic hammer, break their soul, and pull the power through.
“He designed his Scientology Operating Thetan techniques (Scientology’s secret initiations) to do the same thing. But, of course, it takes a couple of hundred hours of auditing and mega thousands of dollars for the privilege of having your head turned into a glass Humpty Dumpty–shattered into a million pieces. It may sound like incredible gibberish, but it made my father a fortune.”
The materials of the Operating Thetan techniques [the Fishman documents] are the reason for the raids mentioned earlier.)
“… Also I’ve got to complete this by saying that he thought of himself as the Beast 666 Incarnate.” Interviewer: “The devil?” Ron Jr: “Yes. Aleister Crowley thought of himself as such. And when Crowley died in 1947 my father then decided that he should wear the cloak of the beast; and become the most powerful being in the universe.
“Scientology is black magic that is spread out over a long time period. To perform black magic generally takes a few hours or at most; a few weeks. But in Scientology it is stretched out over a lifetime and so you don’t see it. Black magic is the inner core of Scientology – and it is probably the only part of Scientology that really works.
“Also you’ve got to realize that my father did not worship Satan. He thought he was Satan. He was one with Satan. He had a direct pipeline of communication and power with him. My father wouldn’t have worshipped anything, I mean. When you think you’re the most powerful being in the universe, you have no respect for anything let alone worship.
“… The one super-secret sentence that Scientology is built on is: ‘Do as thou wilt. That is the whole of the law.’ It also comes from the black magic, from Aleister Crowley. It means that you are a law unto yourself, that you are above the law, that you create your own law. You are above any other human considerations.”
The following is from a piece, written by L. Ron Hubbard Jr. about his father in 1985 entitled “Philadelphia.”
“We were in Philadelphia. It was November 1952. Dianetics was all but forgotten; Scientology, a new science,’ had become the focus of attention. Every night, in the hotel, in preparation for the next day’s lecture, he’d pace the floor, exhilarated by this or that passage from Aleister Crowley’s writings. Just a month before, he had been in London, where he had finally been able to quench his thirst; to fill his cup with the true, raw, naked power of magic. The lust of centuries at his very fingertips.
“To stroke and taste the environs of the Great Beast, to fondle Crowley’s books, papers, and memorabilia had filled him with pure ecstasy! In London he had acquired, at last, the final keys; enabling him to take his place upon the Throne of the Beast,’ to which he firmly believed himself to be the rightful heir. The tech gushed forth and resulted in the Philadelphia Doctorate Course lectures.”
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The Sex-Cult ‘Antichrist’ Who Rocketed Us to Space: Part 1
Jack Parsons practiced the occult and led a sex cult. He was also one of history’s most important rocket scientists.
Jack Parsons was a brilliant rocket scientist, but he lived a wild lifestyle. With a devil-may-care attitude, he was pretty relaxed about safety and dabbled in drugs, occult practices, and sex-cult rituals. It would all eventually catch up to him though. Continue with Part 2 of this two-part series.
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The Sex-Cult ‘Antichrist’ Who Rocketed Us to Space: Part 2
Sam Kean continues the wild story of rocket scientist/devil worshipper Jack Parsons in the second episode of this two-part series.
Jack Parsons was a brilliant rocket scientist, but he lived a wild lifestyle. With a devil-may-care attitude, he was pretty relaxed about safety and dabbled in drugs, occult practices, and sex-cult rituals. It would all eventually catch up to him though.
When World War II ended, rocket scientist-slash-devil worshiper Jack Parsons was living with his occult friends in a commune in a grand mansion on Millionaire’s Row in Pasadena, California. And in August 1945, a fresh face showed up there—a former navy lieutenant named L. Ron Hubbard, the future founder of Scientology.
Parsons was immediately smitten. Parsons practiced a magick-based religion. It involved communing with gods and demons. And Hubbard was the most gifted, most natural magician Parsons ever met. Hubbard had an amazing gift for contacting otherworldly apparitions.
Parsons quickly welcomed Hubbard into his commune’s inner circle. And Hubbard repaid this generosity—by sleeping with Parsons’s young girlfriend, Betty. In fact, Betty soon ditched Parsons to date Hubbard full-time.
So did Parsons kick him out of the commune? Sock him in the teeth? No. Parsons was angry, but magick was a far higher priority, and he didn’t want to alienate Hubbard and his gifts.
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Strange Angels
‘There is nothing to match flying over LA by night’, said the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard; ‘only Hieronymous Bosch’s Hell can match the inferno effect.’
Yet such is LA’s fallen angel charm that it has exercised a narcotic fascination on those seeking to transform themselves. In the first half of the 20th century the city acted as a doctrinal battleground: mystic cults sought to transfigure souls, scientists strove to liberate man from earth’s atmosphere, attaining a new, literally higher state of being, while in the verdant arena of Hollywood the studios were also seeking to displace human frailty with a mythical order of demi-gods – ‘the stars’. It was in this Babel of variegated virtue that a strange, Pynchonian network was formed, linking the Edwardian occultist Aleister Crowley, the brilliant young rocket scientist John Whiteside Parsons and the maverick genius of America’s cinematic avant-garde, Kenneth Anger.
If anyone could make himself feel comfortable in hell, you imagine it would be Crowley, aka ‘The Great Beast’, aka ‘The Wickedest Man on Earth’, aka ‘666’. Born in 1875, he was a poet, mountaineer, orientalist and experimenter with drugs. A consummate showman and avid self-promoter (he faked his own death to drum up interest in his first painting exhibition), he was most famous as a practitioner of the occult. Although Crowley travelled to Los Angeles only once, he exerted a considerable influence on the city’s inhabitants through his religion of Thelema (Greek for ‘will’), the central creed of which was: ‘Do what thou wilt’. In Los Angeles this sensual doctrine was adopted and promulgated by the Agape Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), originally a German occult order related to the Freemasons, which came under Crowley’s spell.
The intention behind Thelema was to raise man’s consciousness to a higher level, specifically through the use of sex and drugs. Indeed hedonistic pleasures were all-important factors in Crowley’s ‘magick’ rituals, allowing the magus to reach the recesses, or rather the outer limits, of his being. His ‘sex-magick’ was intended as the fuel to power man to a new state of being, out of the cage of his socially conditioned ego.
That such a radical creed of excess and chemically altered perception should have caught on in Los Angeles is not surprising; this was, after all, the city in which Aldous Huxley chose to open ‘the doors of perception’ to internal exploration. Crowley’s teachings accordingly attracted some of the most unusual admirers. Dr Alfred Kinsey, the sexual historian and author of the landmark Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948), was obsessed with both Crowley’s erotic writings and his ‘sex-magick’ practices. In 1955 he visited Crowley’s occult abbey on Sicily, where many rituals were enacted. (He took with him on this pilgrimage his admirer, and one of his many subjects, Kenneth Anger). And in the 1960s Dr Timothy Leary, conscious of his debt to Crowley, talked of a similar need to ‘re-imprint our reality tunnel’ through the use of hallucinogens.
Among those whom Crowley’s teachings had entranced, none was so thoroughly converted as John Whiteside Parsons, a brilliant young scientist dubbed the ‘James Dean of Cal Tech’. Parsons’ work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena had seen him heavily involved in the invention of solid rocket fuel, a breakthrough that would ultimately make space travel possible. Yet while his scientific work made him one of the most respected scientists in his field, his fascination with the occult was the presiding belief in his life.
Parsons joined the OTO lodge in Pasadena in 1939 and swiftly rose up the hierarchy. He was soon in constant communication with Crowley in Britain and eventually moved the lodge’s activities to his own house on Pasadena’s Millionaires’ Row, where he threw the doors open to ‘bohemians, artists, musicians, atheists, anarchists or other exotic types’. Stories of blasphemous and debauched rituals began to fill the neighbourhood.
With rocket travel still very much in the realm of science fiction at the time (Parsons was a huge sci-fi fan), one can see why a belief in occultism might not have been such a radical step for a scientist to take. Both the occult and Parsons’ rocket work placed the imagination, as well as ritualistic technical skills, at the forefront of their modus operandi. The will to believe that sees quantum physics stress the unseen and seemingly illogical physical realities of the universe can also be found in occultism’s talk of concealed and inconsistent psychic realities.
For Parsons the idea of science and the occult co-existing can hardly have seemed incongruous. Crowley himself had studied organic chemistry at Cambridge University, and even the presiding genius at Cal Tech at the time of Parsons’ tenure there, Theodore von Karman, often boasted of how one of his descendants had reputedly created a ‘golem’, an artificial human being with a special significance in Hebrew folklore. Nevertheless rumour soon spread that Parsons was the leader of a ‘black magic cult’ (the changing of his name to Belarion Armiluss All Dajjal Antichrist probably did not help). His security access to the appropriately named Devil’s Gate rocket test range was removed and, frustrated in his scientific career, he sank deeper into his occultist beliefs.
By the mid-1940s the success of the OTO lodge was spreading, and its members now included bankers, lawyers and the odd Hollywood actor. It had never seemed so normal to have naked virgins leaping through rings of fire in your backyard. Unfortunately this idyllic coven life was about to take a change for the worse through the appearance of one of the stranger Crowley devotees, a young naval officer and pulp sci-fi writer named L. Ron Hubbard. Having dazzled Parsons with his charisma, Hubbard moved into the mansion and aided in many of the sex-magick rituals that took place there (he is referred to in Parsons’ letters to Crowley as the comical ‘seer Ron’). However, Ron had other plans than simply playing with his magick wand. After a few months of working his way up the order’s hierarchy he quit the lodge, taking with him not only Parsons’ girlfriend but also $10,000 of Parsons’ money. Eventually Hubbard put the occult dramaturgy and incantatory skills he learned in Pasadena to more lucrative uses by founding the Church of Scientology, an unholy alliance of the West Coast’s favoured vices – psychotherapy, mysticism and science fiction.
Distraught at this betrayal, Parsons now took up with Marjorie Cameron, an artist and actress who shared lodgings with the up-and-coming actors Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell. (Cameron later became affiliated with many of the luminaries of the LA art scene, including George Herms, Bruce Connor and Wallace Berman, and also appeared in one film with Hopper: Curtis Harrington’s peculiar Night Tide (1961). Cameron wanders through this curio swathed in black, terrorizing the heroine, speaking her lines in an incomprehensible language.) Parsons, struck by Cameron’s red hair, green eyes and decidedly masculine features, excitedly believed her to be the ‘Whore of Babylon’. Indeed she became Parsons’ most intimate muse for the rest of his life, and provided a link with another devout follower of Crowley – the filmmaker Kenneth Anger.
Like Crowley, Anger was a supreme artificer of his own myth. As a child actor, he had played the role of the Changeling Prince in Max Reinhardt’s film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), and the themes of transformation and of other worlds lurking just out of sight would stay with him his entire life. Already famed for his homo-erotic dream vision Fireworks (1947), which had led him to be branded a new Cocteau, Anger discovered in Crowley’s writings the physicality of pagan religions and the aesthetic decadence of occultism. His first foray into the opulence and ritual of the occult was the Technicolor masquerade Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), in which Cameron appeared alongside Anaïs Nin.
Inauguration is, in the words of Bill Landis, ‘Anger’s version of a glittering MGM musical’. Ostensibly based on one of Crowley’s dramatic rituals, where people in the cult would assume the identity of a god or a goddess, the effect of Inauguration is more that of a visual elaboration of J.-K. Huysmans’ A rebours (Against Nature, 1884). Anger’s film begins as a sensuous, sometimes camp, cauldron of Kabbalistic gods and costume jewellery. Slow, sumptuous dissolves lead the film lazily along as hands are bedecked with ornate rings and bodies adorned with robes. This indolent stasis is abruptly broken as elixirs are drunk and joints smoked. The slow dissolves are replaced by slicing Eisensteinian montage as the ritual spins wildly out of control and colour drenches the screen. Many layers of superimposed images become visible on the film – occult symbols, talismans, a silent film version of Dante’s Inferno, pictures of Crowley himself. By the end hallucinogenic images slam into the viewer relentlessly, and whatever threads of narrative coherence there might have been are long gone; the vision has become overwhelming.
Anger’s later films became ever more drenched in occult symbols, flashed subliminally at the audience in manic montages. The iconic Scorpio Rising (1962), as well as firmly establishing the homo-erotic cult of the biker and revelling in the crass pop ritual of Americana, also incorporates themes direct from Crowley’s writings. For Anger the crashing motorcyclist seen at the end of the film is not just an individual speeding to an inexorable hedonistic fate (‘Thanatos in chrome, black leather, and bursting jeans’), but acts as the symbol for the death of the age of Christendom, a sacrifice, an epoch-changing vision direct from Crowley’s philosophy. In his most blatantly Crowleyian work, Invocation to My Demon Brother (1969), a manic, speeded-up Anger is seen performing one of Crowley’s magick rites on film.
Yet Anger did not just use the occult’s imagery and rituals for depictions of an internal state. He intended his films to be more than just treats for the delectation of the passive viewer; for him the aesthetic endeavour was a category of magick. As Simon Dwyer suggests in his essay The Plague Yard (1990), Anger’s later films are themselves rituals ‘and quite literally cast a spell on his audience’. Theme and style became irrevocably fused as one, pushing the viewer through a magical catharsis. Anger had transmuted himself into a self-confessed ‘filmmaker-magician’, a magus-director.
Crowley died in 1947, his last words reputedly being the less than assured ‘I am perplexed’. John Parsons died in 1952, at the age of 37, when a mysterious explosion ripped through his home laboratory. Clumsiness and assassination have both been posited as reasons for the blast (Anger suggests the tycoon Howard Hughes had Parsons murdered), but the most intriguing, and Lovecraftian, suggestion proposes that he was vaporized while trying to summon a demonic homunculus from the ether. Kenneth Anger has continued to make his Crowley-inspired films, culminating in the grim pageant of Lucifer Rising (1980). His next project, long in the preparation, is said to be about Crowley himself.
As for the alchemical ley lines that once ran through LA, they are now a pale reflection of what they once were. Crowley’s teachings have become diluted into a thousand self-help mantras and New Age cults. The Hollywood system of creating demi-gods was destroyed, partly by Anger, whose gaudy books Hollywood Babylon I and II (1958 and 1984) viciously portrayed a phenomenology of broken gods addicted to morphine, booze and sex. But while the space race has long been relegated to history, its promise of new worlds refuses to die.
One of Parsons’ pulp sci-fi friends, Robert Anson Heinlein, wrote in his novel Waldo and Magic, Inc. (1942) of a time when all the arts of magic will have gained scientific acceptance and become technologies used in daily life. In fact, the reverse has come true. Science, or rather pseudo-science, has become the new occultism.
The more we know of science the more it seems to transcend us, disappearing into a maelstrom of quarks, superstring theory and uncertainty. Such imponderables have allowed the hereticism of science fiction to fill the void with readily understandable dogma. If we are seeking forbidden knowledge, we are now told to look to the skies, not to the pentagram. ‘Extra-terrestrial’ rather than ‘other-dimensional’ is the watchword. Witness the Heaven’s Gate cult and their fatal Flash Gordon longing for redemption on the tail of a comet. Captain Kirk’s mission statement, ‘To boldly go where no man has gone before’, has begun to take on sinister connotations; indeed it could well be mistaken for a Crowleyian proclamation of debauched intent. Did Anger embrace this link when in Lucifer Rising (1980) a glorious flying saucer is seen appearing over the sphinx in the film’s last scenes?
With the recent news of the first cloning of a human embryo, such an interbreeding between the disciplines of science, art and magic takes on a terrible resonance. From Sir Isaac Newton’s lifelong devotion to alchemical studies through to Thomas Edison spending his final years designing an apparatus for contacting the dead, science and the occult have been anything but mutually exclusive.
‘Any sufficiently advanced technology’, said Arthur C. Clarke in his Profiles of the Future (1962), ‘is indistinguishable from magic’. Indeed one wonders whether Parsons would have had better luck if he had tried to conjure up his demon in a Petri dish rather than a chalk circle. Such a thought has been eerily foreshadowed by works ranging from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which first used the scientist as occultist theme, to The Boys from Brazil (1978), which envisioned the consequences if Hitler had been cloned. A generation raised on Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Omen (1976) can all too easily imagine the possibilities.
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Casting into the Cosmos: Magic and Ritual in Human Spaceflight (Part 1)
Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Taylor R. Genovese.
Field Notes – September 8, 2016 (Cape Canaveral, Florida):
I see the light and smoke first. The radiant fuel pours out of the rocket’s engines and the glow is absolutely blinding—like the brilliant ball of light at the end of a welding tool. I have to squint and look away from the base of the rocket as if I am staring directly into the sun. Then the sound comes. Roaring ripples of sound, reflecting off the Banana River and ricocheting off of buildings before finally kicking me square in the chest. The reverberations rock through my body as this asteroid-interceptor spacecraft, nestled on top of a cylinder of explosives begins to pick up speed—punching through the thick atmosphere of our planet. Within a few seconds, it is nothing but a small point of light high in the eastern sky—in a few more seconds, it has vanished.
I walk down the observation gantry and sit in the cool grass while other spectators begin to file out of the enclosure. I look up into the reverent afterglow of the rocket’s exhaust—the contrails swirling and slithering into sublimely beautiful colored shapes in the high winds of the stratosphere.
A mother and her son walk by. The mother asks her child what he thought of the launch. Clutching a toy rocket, he looks up at his mother and replies unabashedly and honestly:
“I have never seen quite a beautiful sight.”
These were my initial thoughts and feelings while experiencing my first rocket launch last summer. I scribbled these words down quickly and haphazardly, like the furious sketches of an artist attempting to capture a street scene that is moving quicker than their hand ever could. My hurried writing defiantly disobeyed the straight lines in my notebook; I didn’t want to look away from the rocket’s splendor. This was the first time I felt I had participated in a magical or religious encounter. In this two-part post, I would like to engage with magic, witchcraft, and ritual in human spaceflight—not only in a reflexive manner from my own field experience (Part 1), but also by historically and anthropologically analyzing the recorded rituals of astronauts and cosmonauts (Part 2).
Before I get into that, however, I feel that it is important to disclose that the terms “magic” and “witchcraft” are loaded with colonial baggage, as well as Western suppositions about what these terms mean within the dominant Judeo-Christian theology. In these posts, I do not mean to appropriate or dilute the intensely real experiences that blossom out of what some anthropologists in the past labeled as magic and witchcraft (and sometimes these labels were accompanied by a skeptical sneer). In fact, I hope for the opposite: to show that even those steeped heavily in the scientific method—a perceived objective practice supposedly removed from magical actions—are participating in what anthropologists have outlined as ritualistic behavior.
But first—to the eastern coast of Florida in the beginning of September . . .
I watch as a bead of sweat slips slowly down off the tip of my nose and spirals wildly—its death throes—until the poor, salty little pearl impacts the ground. I stare down at its resting place among the wilted blades of grass in which I’m sitting cross-legged. God, it’s hot. Actually, as a native Arizonan, I’m used to the heat. It’s the damn humidity that’s the culprit. I feel like I’m encapsulated in cellophane. Like I have a plastic grocery bag over my head and tied around my neck—humidity’s executioner hood. After a big sigh, I squint painfully through the sting of sweat on my eyelids down the line. Next to me in the grass, stretching back hundreds of feet, are at least two hundred fellow space enthusiasts, waiting to board the buses to take us to the exclusive LC-39 Observation Gantry. Months prior, I sat at my computer, waiting for the LC-39 tickets to go on sale. The LC-39 site is the closest you can get to a rocket when it launches from Cape Canaveral—as such, the tickets are highly sought after. In fact, the tickets sold out in two hours, but I managed to secure one. However, the only thing that mattered now was that I get into that air-conditioned bus as fast as I could. As the line surged forward, my obsession to arrive early to everything paid off as I boarded the first bus and was greeted by that familiar blast of artificially cool air.
The bus surged forward after a few minutes. I began to listen to the conversations happening around me and I heard a variety of different languages and dialects of English: British, Australian, German, Dutch, Russian. Did they all come to the United States just for this rocket launch? Is this a technoscientific pilgrimage? I was sitting on a bus with 50 other people—behind us, there were five other buses to cart the rest of us—all to witness a fleeting moment of awe together.
The bus drove over the Banana River on human-made causeways built to support NASA’s infrastructure. It drove past the press areas with leering reporters scribbling in their notebooks and holding cameras with massive lenses. It drove past the enormous crawler-transporters that were used to carry the Saturn V moon rockets and Space Shuttles from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the launchpads. Sitting behind barbed wire fences amidst piles of trash, these machines looked like sad, lethargic prisoners—colossal dormant monsters that may have made an admirable foe for Don Quixote before their imprisonment.
We finally reached the LC-39 Observation Gantry. We disembarked from the bus and were greeted with a large banner hanging down off of the gantry advertising SpaceX—the new gods, the new religion—as we walked into the exclusive area, the shrine we had all waited to get to. Inside, there was a feast for the hungry pilgrims—a spread of fruit, vegetables, hot dogs, hamburgers, sodas, water. I grabbed a bottle of water and skipped the food, opting to fast for this experience—my first time witnessing a rocket launch in person. I climbed the gantry and claimed my space on Level 3 in the stairwell. Straight ahead of me was the launch pad—wisps of water vapor streamed off the rocket like ghostly tendrils trying to cling to the thick air. My heart was racing.
A man set up his camera tripod next to me. He told me he lives nearby and tries to photograph every launch he can. I told him I’m a poor graduate student pilgrim here for my first launch. He didn’t seem to understand me and ordered his wife to fetch him several hot dogs—no ketchup. We cannot all be pious in the illustrative majesty of rocket technoscience.
Suddenly, I heard cries from down below.
“Here we go!”
“Quick! Look!”
Across the river, smoke and vapor began to erupt from the base of the rocket. The rocket started to rise from the ground atop a brilliant flame. Television cameras and photographs cannot capture the blinding brilliance of rocket’s fire. It hurt my eyes and I had to avert them from the rocket’s image—looking just the left or right of the tortured missile as it began to pick up speed. The pilgrims began cheering and clapping—the only noise that could be heard—we hadn’t been hit by the sound yet. Then the deafening roar of the rocket slams into us. The sound modulated as it bounced off the river and the buildings. It sounded like waves—deep and ripping, tearing the atmosphere apart. It only took half-a-minute for the rocket to become a point of light in the sky—the sound began to dampen.
Suddenly, I realized that my mouth was hanging open and I had tears in my eyes. I had transitioned beyond the limen; I was different from this experience, this ritual, this rite of passage. I never had a religious or spiritual experience before in my life, but I think that I had just experienced my first. I walked down from the gantry slowly, and watched everyone begin to line up to leave on the buses—the experience was over, now it was time to get back to the “real world.” Like the pilgrims shuffling back to their “real world,” Part 2 will take us away from my reflexive account of an uncrewed rocket launch and into the “real world” of crewed astronautics. In the next post, I will discuss some of the magical and ritualistic behaviors performed by astronauts, cosmonauts, and the scientific community.
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Martin Pfeiffer and Ryan Anderson for reading drafts of this two-parter and providing vital feedback. I would also like to thank Michael Oman-Reagan, Grant W. Trent, Lisa Messeri, Alice Gorman, Dick Powis and Bree Blakeman for the excellent Twitter brainstorming sessions that led me to some of my conclusions. My thanks also to Fritz Lampe for guiding me through the incredible world of the anthropologies of symbol, myth, and ritual.
Casting into the Cosmos: Magic and Ritual in Human Spaceflight (Part 2)
In Part 1, I wrote a gonzo ethnography about my experience at a rocket launch in Florida. For Part 2, I will be utilizing historical records, museum didactic text, and astronaut testimony to illustrate that magical and ritualistic practice is heavily engaged with in spaceflight operations. One may speculate that with the extreme emphasis on the (perceived) empiricism of Western science in the realm of outer space affairs, there would be no room for the subjective—let alone magic, ritual, and religion. However, one of the themes that became apparent to me throughout my research is that there exists an enormous amount of mysticism within the field of human spaceflight. Some rituals are performed within the confines of accepted Western religious dogmas, while some fall into the realm of how some anthropologists understand magic and witchcraft.1 The first mystical component to human spaceflight is what writer Frank White has coined “the overview effect.” The term refers to the spiritual oneness that many astronauts report feeling after reaching outer space and seeing our planet from orbiting altitude, with many developing environmental and social justice viewpoints.2 Furthermore, many astronauts report that their time in space was filled with spiritual experiences, including temporal shifts, floods of emotion, and feelings of being a part of something larger than themselves. For a recent example, take what astronaut Ron Garan reports in the beginning of his autobiography:
As I approached the top of this [orbital] arc, it was as if time stood still, and I was flooded with both emotion and awareness. But as I looked down at the Earth—this stunning, fragile oasis, this island that has been given to us, and that has protected all life from the harshness of space—a sadness came over me, and I was hit in the gut with an undeniable, sobering contradiction. In spite of the overwhelming beauty of this scene, serious inequity exists on the apparent paradise we have been given. I couldn’t help thinking of the nearly one billion people who don’t have clean water to drink, the countless number who go to bed hungry every night, the social injustice, conflicts, and poverty that remain pervasive across the planet.
However, astronaut engagements with moments of cosmic sublime go beyond spiritual experiences and approach the realm of ritualized behaviors that would seem familiar to Malinowski and other anthropologists that study symbol, myth, and ritual. Many of these ritual forms of magic come from the ancestors of spaceflight. For American astronauts on launch day, the entire crew must complete a series of rituals before proceeding to the launch pad. First, they must eat a meal of steak and eggs, theMercury astronaut’sfood of choice before a mission. Many contemporary astronauts report that they only pick at the hearty meal due to nerves, but it is never refused for fear that it will jinx the mission. After the meal, the crew participates in a simple card game and must continue playing until the crew’s commander loses.
Malinowski—in his seminal work Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays— argued that people usually engaged in magical and ritualized behaviors when they were placed in stressful situations, or found themselves with limited control over situations. Despite his colonial generalizations, if we apply these criteria to human spaceflight, I do not believe it is too far-fetched to assert that those who ride automated rockets into the vacuum of outer space are engaging with magic and ritual in order to grasp at a certain amount of control absent within the launch itself.
Magical and ritualized behavior in spaceflight is not only restricted to American astronauts; Soviet—and now Russian—cosmonauts also participate(d) in ritual prior to launching into outer space. On April 12, 1961, as Yuri Gagarin was being driven to the launchpad prior to his mission, he was overcome with a human urge that often manifests itself when one is nervous—or drinks too much coffee. Gagarin charged the driver to pull to the side of the road where he relieved himself on the rear passenger bus tire before re-boarding and rocketing his way into the history books. Due to his mission being successful—and for fear of being jinxed should they not perform the same ritual—every cosmonaut after Gagarin has also had the bus driver pull over so that they may micturate on the rear passenger bus tire prior to launch; women are not exempt from this, carrying vials of their own urine to splash on the bus wheel (Weibel and Swanson 2006). Cosmonauts and NASA astronauts launching on Soyuz to the International Space Station today still perform this ritualized urination. Furthermore, all those who wish to board a Russian spacecraft must watch the 1969 Soviet film Белое солнце пустыни (Beloye solntse pustyni—White Sun of the Desert) the night before launch.
Poster, 1975The most prominent cosmonaut atheist was Gherman Titov, whose flight in August 1961 followed Yuri Gagarin’s that April. In 1962, he told an audience at the Seattle world’s fair that he had seen no gods or angels in space, and that he believed in mankind’s strength and reason. This poster – titled There Is No God! –commemorates him |
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Further afield, during the Space Race, there was also a battle between the two superpowers over the predominantly Christian United States and the state-atheism of the Soviet Union. One prominent Soviet propaganda poster after Gagarin’s flight featured a grinning cosmonaut on a spacewalk, orbiting above a Catholic church, a Russian Orthodox church, and a mosque, with two bold words separating the spacewalker and the houses of worship: бога нет! (boga nyet—There is no god!). Conversely, United States astronauts on Apollo 8 read from the Book of Genesis after becoming the first humans to circle around the moon. Furthermore, after Apollo 11 successfully landed on the surface of the moon, Buzz Aldrin asked for a moment of silence so that he might partake in the ritual consumption of bread and wine. Communion, therefore, became the first food and drink consumed by humans on another celestial body (Weibel and Swanson 2006).
Lastly, there exists many Earthly and extra-planetary memorials and ritualistic remembrances of those who have lost their lives in the name of space travel, including one on the moon. On Mars, the Pathfinder spacecraft—which brought Sojourner, the first rover on Mars—was renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station after it had landed. In popular culture, Carl Sagan’s son helped write an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise in which the crew visits the Memorial Station, which was imagined as being inscribed with a quote from Sagan: “Whatever the reason you’re on Mars, I’m glad you’re there, and I wish I was with you.”
APOLLO 15 fallen astronaut memorial on the moon.
Magic and ritual is deeply engrained in both the practice and imaginaries of technoscientific endeavors. The more that anthropologists shift their gaze toward the so-called “hard” sciences—as well as the scientists that perform their duties—the more we can reveal the illusion of pure objectivity within laboratory sciences. Perhaps when science is viewed as a human practice—wrapped up with all the imperfections inherent within any human endeavor—as opposed to some outside force able to impart supernatural objectivity upon an expert class, we can begin to leverage science as an exercise for liberation and mutual aid rather than a practice that today tends to first benefit the forces of colonialism and imperialism.
Further reading & cited:
Weibel, Deana L., and Glen E. Swanson. 2006. “Malinowski In Orbit: ‘Magical Thinking’ in Human Spaceflight.” Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly 13 (3): 53–61.
Here’s a photo of me in 1980, standing in front of the enormous Vehicle Assembly Building that’s still being used today. Also below is a photo I took from a tour bus — I wasn’t able to recreate the exact photo, sadly:
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There’s so much that’s fascinating about a visit to the Kennedy Space Center. Some of the lessons are very somber — from the Challenger and Columbia disasters, both of which were arguably avoidable if managers had listened to engineers.
But, one humorous example was from a display about pre-launch traditions.
Many organizations essentially have traditions — “the way we’ve always done it.” Through that force of habit, practices are often kept around even though nobody really remembers why. Our practice of Lean is often built upon challenging “the way we’ve always done it” in the process of finding better ways to do things.
We can work to do things better… or sometimes we need to stop doing things that no longer have a purpose (or no longer add value to the customer).
One example from the KSC, with the text to follow:
“Call them traditions, rituals, or superstitions, but there are some things astronauts feel they MUST do on launch day. Breakfast, for instance, is always steak and eggs, a tradition that started on the first American manned space flight.
Before boarding the Astrovan, the astronauts played a simple game of cards. The crew could not leave for the launch pad until the crew’s commander lost.”
The punch line to the story:
“We play that card game every time. I have no idea why. I don’t know anyone who does know why.”
— Astronaut Winston Scott
How funny. Now, this is a harmless tradition — well, maybe harmless unless it delayed a launch. It doesn’t say what card game it is, but maybe it’s possible for the commander to throw the game and lose on purpose.
Actually, here is a 1998 Chicago Tribune article about the game.
The same astronaut is quoted there:
“Said NASA astronaut Winston Scott, who grew up in South Florida: “We do it mostly for fun, but you can bet we do it all. And every single time.”
The article talks about the steak-and-eggs breakfast and another tradition that has lost its meaning:
“The Mission Cake: For an unknown reason, every crew is presented with a fully iced sheet cake during the prelaunch breakfast. The cake is decorated with the crew’s self-designed mission patch. But it never, ever is eaten…
“Of course we don’t eat the cake,” Scott said, as though that would be self-evident. “I assume it’s there for ceremonial purposes. I guess the original person who first got a cake didn’t eat it and now we can’t either.“
About the card game:
“Each crew member gets five cards; the person with the lowest card total loses. They cannot leave for the launch pad until the crew’s commander loses. In this case, that would be Curt Brown.”
It seems like a game that you can’t intentionally lose. Winston Scott says the same thing that’s quoted on the NASA display.
The Wickedest Man in the World. The Beast of Boleskine
The Best of Boleskine sparked decades of speculation about the occult·
Imagine what it would feel like if William Butler Yeats wrote a poem about you. Now imagine that poem described you as a “rough beast” slouching towards Bethlehem.
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Though the interpretation is far the consensus, some believe that the line referred to a singular man named Aleister Crowley, who was known as the “Beast of Boleskine” (for reasons I’ll explain below). Nicknamed “the wickedest man in the world” for his bisexuality and exploration of the occult, Crowley’s life bridged two centuries and half a dozen worlds. He came of age as the 19th century rolled over into the 20th, watching as the Victorian era ended and shifting balances of power in Europe shaped his native England, and the world.
In 1899, at the age of twenty-five, Crowley purchased Boleskine House, a cottage perched near Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands. In the 10th century, a church had stood on the site — until, according to myth, it somehow caught on fire, fatally trapping the entire congregation inside.
Crowley believed that the house’s secluded location (and perhaps its gruesome history) made it the ideal setting to perform rituals from the Book of Abramelin. If you’re not familiar with that text, you’re not alone: Crowley founded a religion he called Thelema, which has a persistent following to this day. At Boleskine House, Crowley spent months performing a ritual with a small group of followers in an effort to make contact with his guardian angel — but had to abandon the project before it was complete. The full story is perhaps best told by Richard MacLean Smith in an episode (“Who Was Aiwass?”) of his podcast, Unexplained.
Beyond the religious dimensions of his legacy, Crowley’s cultural impact is almost unbelievable. His American protege Jack Parsons went on to develop the jet propulsion system. Crowley’s influence trickled through Parsons to L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. He also socialized with Aldous Huxley, Roald Dahl, and Ian Fleming, who surely heard rumors that Crowley was a double agent during WWI. William S. Burroughs, David Bowie, and Timothy Leary were also aware of Crowley’s work, and he is mentioned in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s memoir of his time in Paris. If you’re a fan of The X Files, you might even remember Crowley High School from S2, which features a group of devil-worshipping teachers, a reanimated fetal pig, and a deeply creepy science teacher named Mrs. Paddock.
As for Boleskine House: It was purchased by Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page in the 1990s, and ultimately — perhaps mysteriously — burned down in 2015.
Scavenger is a weekly weird history newsletter with an affection for the mundane. Subscribe to receive a new story every Wednesday morning. Illustrations by Anna Doherty.
A trailblazing rocket scientist led a double life as an Aleister Crowley acolyte, jumping headfirst into the OTO after reading one of the famed occultist’s books in 1939. Jack Parsons was always daring and unorthodox — how could he be part of Caltech’s “Suicide Squad” if not? — and his forays into magick were no less extreme. Parsons rearranged his life and marriage in accordance with Thelemic teachings, turning his Pasadena mansion into the hotspot of the American OTO.
Parcasters, we have exciting news! Our first book hits bookshelves July 12th and is based on this very show. If you love the Cults podcast, you won’t want to miss this chilling summer read. Grab your copy at www.parcast.com/cults!
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Did Jack Parsons Really See Something in the Arroyo Triangle Connecting the Colorado Street Bridge, Cobb Estate, and Devil’s Gate Dam?
Pasadena is one of the most popular areas to live in the Greater Los Angeles area. When you look at its suburban splendor, you’d never guess that it hides at least one tale of cosmic horror to rival any true story you’ve ever heard. Pasadena’s occult history can be traced back to one man who built a cutting edge facility at the edge of an alleged place of power called the Arroyo Triangle. Connecting the dots of Devil’s Gate Dam, the Suicide Bridge, and the Cobb Estate, you’ll find the Jet Propulsion Laboratory nearby. Legend has it that this is no coincidence. And though the main character of this story, Jack Parsons, has only one known link to a point in the Arroyo Triangle, it continues to be one of the city’s most enthralling legends of genius, obsession, and the occult.
Arroyo Triangle Point #1: The Cobb Estate
The Cobb Estate as seen in Phantasm (Photo credit: New Breed Productions Inc.)
Before the Cobb Estate served as an alleged point on the Arroyo Triangle, the forests of the foothills north of Pasadena were often referred to as “the haunted forest.” Undeterred by the name, Charles Cobb, who had made a fortune in the lumber industry, decided it was the perfect spot for his retirement mansion. So, in 1918, he completed construction on a Spanish-themed property that would be known as the Cobb Estate. We can only assume Cobb was happy enough with his decision. He continued living in the massive home until his death in 1939. At the direction of his last will, the local chapter of Masons inherited all 107 acres of his land.
The Fruitless Marx Era of the Cobb Estate
The Marx Brothers famously purchased the estate in 1956 which is when urban legends about the property began to arise. Whatever plans the legendary comedians had for the mansion were never to be. Three years later, they had the structure razed and the land sat vacant, slowly reclaimed by nature. Or the spirits, depending on who you ask.
During this period, several plans were proposed, including utilizing the land as a cemetery. But the idea of a graveyard in an allegedly haunted forest didn’t sit too well with the neighbors who were clutching their home values at the thought. Ultimately, it was a large donation from an anonymous source that allowed the city of Pasadena to purchase the remnants of the Cobb Estate. They summarily handed ownership off to the U.S. Forest Service.
Hiking Through the Cobb Estate’s Ghost
These days, hikers can challenge themselves to traverse the natural terrain that has mostly overtaken the last vestiges of the structure. But by night, the haunted forest seems to live up to its name. Believers claim the majority of the paranormal activity happens near the crumbling steps leading up to the mansion that no longer exists. Yet, nocturnal visitors report strange laughter, blood curdling screams, and eerie lights populating the impenetrable darkness of the surrounding forest.
Many visitors don’t actually make it beyond the still-standing front gates of the Cobb Estate. They’re spooky enough on their own; so much so that they were used prominently in the classic 1978 horror film Phantasm.
Arroyo Triangle Point #2: The Suicide Bridge
The next point of the Arroyo Triangle is significantly more sinister. The Cobb Estate may be spooky, but it doesn’t have much of a death toll. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of the Colorado Street Bridge, more notoriously known as the Suicide Bridge. In the early 1900s, the bridge earned its nickname by being a particularly hot spot to leap to your death. By 1929, dozens of people had already plunged into oblivion off its balustrades. One unfortunate worker even lost his balance during the bridge’s construction, falling to his demise in the ravine below. The Great Depression further contributed to the Suicide Bridge’s notoriety, inspiring a suicide spike.
The Colorado Street Bridge (Photo credit: Kleaphotographer)
One of the most enduring legends of the Suicide Bridge purports that a young mother mounted the ominous arches of the looming bridge, her baby clutched to her. Prior to diving into the great beyond, she threw the baby over the edge. Miraculously, the baby survived the drop, a tangle of tree limbs managing to break its fall early enough. On the other hand, the mother found the death she so desperately sought at the bottom of the 150-foot fall.
The Modern Era of the Colorado Street Bridge
Proving that suicide isn’t a passing fad, people have continued throwing themselves from the Colorado Street Bridge over the decades. In more recent years, Pasadena has tried to prevent suicides at the site. But where there’s a will, there’s often a way. Despite the city installing an eight foot high barrier, model and reality television personality Sam Sarpong still managed to take his life in 2015 in one of the bridge’s more publicized suicides.
The city made additional efforts by installing a 10 foot tall chain link fence in 2016 to deter jumpers from the bridge’s seating alcoves. Over the years, the alcoves had proven to be a depressingly popular launching point for jumpers. The following year, nine suicides were reported at the site. After a harrowing 13 hour negotiation in which Pasadena police successfully talked a potential jumper down, the fences were extended to cover the entirety of the bridge.
The Colorado Street Bridge (Photo credit: Cody)
But the Suicide Bridge continues to be a sadly attractive beacon for those wanting to end it all. Just last month, Pasadena police negotiated with a woman to climb down from the bridge’s ledge. If you visit the bridge yourself, you’ll find melted candles amidst photos of those who lost their will to go on and memorials old and new locked to the fences. Currently, Pasadena is finalizing the design for permanent barriers in the hopes they will overcome the tragic call of the bridge once and for all.
The Enigmatic Duality of Jack Parsons
Before we visit the final, and arguably most disturbing, of the Arroyo Triangle’s points, we must introduce a man whose achievements, ambition, and thirst for esoteric knowledge illuminated the area in all its potential paranormal power. Jack Parsons was a man of science in a way that few could ever hope to match. Yet, despite the technological strides he shared with the world, he held a fixation on the occult that transcended obsession. Under the teachings of his mentor, Aleister Crowley, he adhered to the philosophy that every individual holds a “True Will.” And, to ascend to that driving purpose in life, it was man’s responsibility to adopt whatever means necessary to achieve it. For Parsons, this meant looking beyond science and ego and into the occult art of magick.
The average person has a tendency to get dismissive whenever the “M” word enters the equation. But Parsons wasn’t some garden variety kook. In his time, he was actually one of the most inspiring and daring minds in a relatively new field known as “rocket science.” And who knows where America’s space program would be today without Parsons’ contributions? Yet, you could be forgiven if you’d never heard of him. The legendary Jet Propulsion Laboratory that he founded, still famously operating today out of Pasadena, doesn’t like to get much into their history with Parsons. That’s because the story of an occultist with a penchant for drug use and sex magick doesn’t really fit the narrative of America’s bold scientific push to the moon and beyond. Unfortunately for those looking for a clean story, Parsons was brilliant.
The Founding of Jack Parsons’ Jet Propulsion Laboratory
It was 1933 when 29-year-old Jack Parsons built the first ever solid-fuel rocket engine. Yet, it wasn’t until 1938 that he got significant attention from the scientific community, after he and a couple of close colleagues ran a test of a static motor rocket that could sustain for over a minute. This trio was regularly referred to as “The Suicide Squad” for their unconventional, often life-threatening methods of testing that flagrantly flew in the face of safe and ethical scientific processes.
Yet, Parsons’ results were too significant to be ignored. So, at the prompting of CalTech and supported by government funding, Parsons moved his operations to the Arroyo Seco in Pasadena. The objective? Investigate the potential for Jet-Assisted Take Off (JATO). And it was with that mission that the earliest incarnation of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was founded after an initial successful rocket test on Halloween night in 1936. And, no, the date probably wasn’t a coincidence.
Through the modern lens, it’s tempting to consider Parsons the Elon Musk of his time. But while Parsons had been raised in wealth, the Great Depression had considerably stripped his family resources. Parsons made do with what he could get, often scavenging for parts and creating astounding scientific feats with the bare minimum. By all accounts, he had more in common with the Professor from Gilligan’s Island, crafting radios from coconuts and palm fronds. Under sparse conditions, Parsons and his crew still managed to develop the first rocket engine in history to utilize castable composite propellant, changing what was possible for humankind. For the first time ever, people could feasibly visit space.
Jack Parsons’ Ascension Through the Ordo Templi Orientis
Parsons obviously had a passion (and a gift) for rocket science. But it wasn’t his only passion. Nor was it his greatest passion. And this calls into question what he believed his “True Will” to actually be. Perhaps rockets simply served as vehicles to transcend the boundaries imposed on mankind. And ultimately, Parsons’ great passions could all be boiled down to a desire to rid himself of any semblance of restraint.
To that point, during the early years of JPL, Parsons was also renting out the rooms of his Orange Avenue property to a gallery of like minded bohemians. And though he was making strides in the scientific community, he was committing himself even more to his occult studies. As a devout student of Crowley, Parsons believed in the philosophies expressed by a religious movement called Thelema. More specifically, he was a member of California’s Thelemic chapter, the Ordo Templi Orientis (or OTO). Taking a particular interest in highly potent sex magick, he rapidly ascended through the ranks of the OTO.
It’s important to recognize that Thelema was Parsons’ religion. When a choice needed to be made between his studies at the University of Southern California and the occult, he unequivocally chose the occult. He actively recruited new Thelemites, including co-workers and his then-wife Helen Northrup. And he donated the vast majority of his money to Thelema.
Arroyo Triangle Point #3: Devil’s Gate Dam
The future site of Devil’s Gate Dam (Photo credit: Magi Media)
During his time in Pasadena, Parsons became convinced that a certain area just south of JPL held an immense spiritual power. Enter the final and most notorious point of the Arroyo Triangle: the Devil’s Gate Dam. Strategically built in 1920 at the point when the Arroyo Seco is at its most narrow, the Devil’s Gate Dam was Los Angeles County’s first flood control dam. It earned its name from a distinctive rock formation said to resemble Satan in a brooding profile.
Rumor has it that the Native American tribes indigenous to the area went out of their way to avoid this section of the Arroyo Seco. Allegedly, they feared it was a gateway to a world beyond this one. Then, there are those who claim that Devil’s Gate Dam was just like any other dam… until Parsons took an interest in it. He was known to visit Devil’s Gate Dam, often performing rituals in its shadows to give JPL’s rocket tests a cosmically auspicious influence.
Thelema Above All
While Parsons continued to thrive in the OTO, his life outside of religion was becoming increasingly erratic. Under the OTO’s encouragement, he was liberally experimenting with opiates, methamphetamines, and cocaine. His marriage to Helen Northrup was in tatters. After several OTO-sanctioned extramarital affairs, he left Helen for her 17-year-old sister, Sara. And though his brilliance in the field of rocket science never dimmed, his interest in following safety protocol was plummeting to new lows. In 1944, JPL pushed its eccentric founder out, pressuring him to sell any stock he had remaining in the company. At every opportunity, Parsons had wholeheartedly chosen Thelema. And in his darkest moments, his faith was stronger than ever.
Aleister Crowley, noted occultist and founder of Thelema (Photo credit: Public Domain)
Using the money he’d gained from his stocks, Parsons purchased property in Pasadena at 1003 Orange Grove Avenue. Under this roof, he continued his pursuit of both rocket science and the occult with abandon… and without oversight. It became a beacon for aspiring artists and musicians alongside nihilists and anarchists. Parsons’ bohemian Pleasure Island eventually attracted an ex-naval officer and aspiring science fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard. Yes, that L. Ron Hubbard. And the two formed a fast friendship that found them encouraging one another to breach new heights (or new lows, depending on your perspective).
Jack Parsons Orchestrates the Moonchild of Babalon
At Parsons’ urging, Hubbard and even Crowley himself became convinced that the Devil’s Gate Dam offered a gateway to great energy and power. Together, the three initiated a Thelemic program entitled “Babalon Working”. The objective? Use the portal at Devil’s Gate Dam to summon the Thelemic goddess Babalon and immaculately impregnate her so that she would give birth to the “Moonchild”, a sort of Antichrist figure that would bring an end to Judeo-Christian dominance on earth. Some have even hypothesized that the strange essence at the heart of the dam had inspired Parsons’ placement of JPL from the very beginning.
As 1945 became 1946, Parsons and Hubbard took a trip to the desert to visit a nexus point of spiritual energy. Amidst their rituals, Parsons was seduced by a vision of a fiery-haired woman riding astride a great beast. He referred to her as “Lady Babalon” and was convinced he was meant to conjure her and serve as her consort. Parsons and Hubbard remained in the desert for three days attempting to conjure the physical manifestation of Babalon to no avail.
Perhaps discouraged by these results, Hubbard fled Pasadena for Miami upon their return from the desert. He took along $10,000 of Parsons’ money, not to mention Parsons’ then-lover, Sara. Of course, Hubbard would leave Thelema and go on to found Scientology, but that’s another story.
Rising Stars and a Setting Moons
Parsons didn’t have much time to grieve the loss of his wife, his friend, and his money. Because as soon as he returned from the desert, he was greeted by a fiery-haired woman at his Orange Grove Avenue address. She was looking for a room. Marjorie Cameron would go on to become his muse, his wife, and ultimately his own personal Babalon. While his relationship with Cameron wasn’t picture-perfect, they enjoyed many days and nights hazardously exploring rocket science, sex magick, and even absinthe infusion.
However, he would never conceive his Moonchild with her. On June 17, 1952, while feverishly attempting to fulfill an order of film explosives, an explosion consumed the entire lower level of Parsons’ residence. An excruciating 37 minutes later (one minute for each year of his life), he was pronounced dead at the scene.
The Darkest Years of Devil’s Gate Dam
In the years following Parsons’ death, the story of the Devil’s Gate Dam became much darker. Attempts to conjure a Moonchild or perform Thelemic rituals remain in the realm of theology. But between 1956 to 1960, events took a turn for the tragically concrete.
It was during this brief stretch of time that four children disappeared. Each of them were visiting Devil’s Gate Dam at the times of their disappearances. It wasn’t until 1970 that convicted serial killer Mack Ray Edwards confessed to the kidnap and murder of two of these children. Their bodies were never found and are believed to be encased in the concrete of LA’s freeways. The other two disappearances remain unsolved.
Jack Parsons’ Invisible, Silent Legacy
JPL opens its doors to the public on occasion. Now owned and operated by NASA, the facility’s tour guides tend to skirt questions about Parsons’ involvement in JPL’s early days. Over the decades, the compound and its staff have been instrumental in some of our country’s landmark moments in space exploration. Missions such as Voyager 1, Voyager 2, and Mars Rover Curiosity all arose from the efforts of JPL. If some sinister force lingers over the JPL campus, you’d be hard-pressed to find it. Even deer graze and bound on its verdant lawns regularly.
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Devil’s Gate Dam
Where is the entrance to hell located? I may just be hidden near a dam in the heart of Pasadena, California.
Devil’s Gate Dam is easily visible and accessible from the I-210 Freeway. In fact, thousands of people drive right past this haunted structure every day, and many do not even know it’s dark story. The dam was built in the 1920s to help control seasonal flooding along the Arroyo Seco River. Built at the narrowest point in the river, the dam was named for a sharp outcropping of rocks that seemed to resemble the face of the devil.
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In the 1940s, a group of occultists held rituals inside the dam intended to open up a gateway to hell. Jack Parsons, a co-founder of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion laboratory along with Aleister Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, were among the group. It is uncertain if they were successful in their efforts to open a hell gateway, and in the 1950s, Jack Parsons was killed in an accidental explosion. In the years following, several children went missing near the dam, some while they were biking in the canyon, some allegedly seeming to disappear into thin air right in front of their parents. Among these were Tommy Bowman and Bruce Kremen. |
Although the gorge is now dammed up, the Arroyo Seco still has a decent flow of water running though it during the rainy season. It was reported by early settlers that the rapids flowing through the gorge made a laughing sound, which they attributed to the river’s relationship with the coyote spirit.
Many dark stories surround the Devil’s Gate Dam. Are they true, or just the works of active imaginations over the years?
DEMONS, ROCKETS AND DEVIL’S GATE DAM
By
TUFFY CANYONS, Belize — I have never felt closer to the sky than when I was 170 feet under the ocean here.
It happened on Easter morning. A half-dozen of us slipped out of a boat on the barrier reef here and followed our dive master, Michael, into a canyon, dropping through jagged openings past profusions of coral waving like wheat in the wind. There were clouds of fish, turtles and the occasional shark.
Then the ocean floor suddenly fell away. We were hovering like unharnessed window washers on a vast wall of rock and coral, the outermost edge of the second-longest barrier reef in the world, the boundary of the big deep.
We were looking for a pod of dolphins that had graced these parts the day before. But I wasn’t prepared for infinity.
I’ve been diving on and off for about 11 years. I got my certificate the day the space shuttle Columbia burned up over Texas with seven astronauts aboard, effectively ending the shuttle era.
I climbed out of the water that day and went to my cottage on the island of Dominica and stared up at Orion, recalling my boyhood dreams of space travel and saying goodbye to them. The stars would never be my destination.
I’m no marine biologist. I dive for the childish joy of flying, zooming up and down like Superman, and for the Zen joy of being surrounded by colorful fish you can’t catch, like errant thoughts you can’t follow.
But the cosmos has a way of catching me. All the aspirations of the sky are concentrated down below. Inner space and outer space, yinning and yanging together. The sea is its own cosmos, but it is inextricably linked to the vast invisible ocean around us. The hydrogen in its water molecules was made in the Big Bang, the oxygen in them was made in a star — a marriage made literally in heaven.
The electrons that glue those molecules together attained their masses and glueyness during a subtle shift in the properties of the vacuum, when the Higgs field and its famous particle, the Higgs boson, kicked in a trillionth of a second after the universe was born.
Whatever meaning we can ascribe to the universe arose in these depths and those mysterious processes. All the logic of outer space, its vistas and apocalypses concentrated in this blue caldron of creativity and possibility, the restless sifting of chance, adaptation, survival and extinction. Life began percolating somewhere hereabout 3.5 billion years ago, crawling out into a new oxygenated atmosphere three billion years after that.
Indeed the seas are a gene soup, according to the biologist J. Craig Venter, who has spent the last few years trawling for microbes in his yacht Sorcerer II and has discovered at least six million new genes. What they do is anyone’s guess.
Inevitably as you hang in the blue void, you wonder if this magic has occurred anywhere else. I’ve spent my share of time gazing up at the Milky Way from campfires or my old backyard on summer evenings in the Catskills, wondering if anyone is, was or will be out there, or how we would ever know or meet them in the confounding depths of space and time.
It always makes me feel lonely.
For the last two decades, NASA’s mantra in the search for life out there has been “follow the water.”
And last month NASA requested ideas for a robot mission to Jupiter’s most enigmatic moon, Europa, whose sheath of ice is thought to encase an ocean with more water than is contained on the oceans of Earth. John M. Grunsfeld, the former astronaut who heads NASA’s space science directorate, said, “Europa is one of the most interesting sites in our solar system in the search for life beyond Earth.”
At least for now, the plans don’t include landing on Europa or drilling through the ice with a fishing pole or something more sophisticated, but one priority is to look for future landing sites on the moon. The agency’s managers are looking for ideas that would cost less than $1 billion. Congress has already appropriated almost $100 million over the next two years to start developing technology for the trip. If that doesn’t work, there is always Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which apparently also has a hidden ocean and is spurting water and who knows what else from cracks known as “tiger stripes” near its South Pole. So there is some hope of yet discovering company in the form of pond slime or better in the solar system before the end of the century.
Perhaps it is the fate of cold, dark matter to be the cradle for warm, wet matter — at least in this universe.
We don’t know if this is a lucky universe or whether life is inevitable in some sense, or — for that matter — what life is. Most astrobiologists I know say they will recognize it when they see it.
In the meantime there is life down there, and it’s hard not to feel connected when you are in the womb, so to speak. It’s one place I’m never lonely.
There is a certain pose you associate with dive masters, swimming backward, legs akimbo as if in a Barcalounger, encouraging you onward. After a few minutes on the wall, Michael beckoned, thumbs upward, and we began the long slow ascent, keeping our eyes out for those dolphins, which did not appear again.
Back to the sunny surface. Back to cosmic loneliness.
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150 years of science for sea and space
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Space Is an Ocean | Proceedings – January 1999 Volume …
Space Is an Ocean
Space is an ocean—and I’m not speaking metaphorically. Ocean defines both “the entire body of salt water that covers approximately 72% of earth’s surface,” and any “great expanse.”
Early civilizations believed that the ocean and the stars above were linked inextricably. In the age of exploration, the ocean represented the ultimate unknown whose guideposts were the heavens. Earlier in this century, science fiction writers—our prophets of the medium—referred to the cosmos as “ocean space,” whose conquest would inevitably be done by “space ships.” Gene Roddenberry, creator of the television series “Star Trek,” was right on the money when he made the Starship Enterprise a naval vessel.
For Americans about to enter the next millennium, the coming age of space will be an era of exploitation as well as exploration, and the nation requires a philosophical approach to the use, exploration, and—if need be—defense of space that is best suited for the ocean-like cosmic environment. That philosophy is inherently naval in tone and tradition.
A naval philosophy of space—the application of naval organizations and traditions to the use of space—would permit full integration of efforts from sea and land into the heavens. Under this philosophy, we would think in terms of voyages rather than missions. A team-oriented concept of crew would prevail, not the lone eagle approach that shaped the conquest of the air, but led to organizational schisms. More important, we would exploit space not as a separate region, but as a continuation of the spectrum of media—from the ocean depths to the heavens above—in which mankind can live and explore for extended periods in a mutually supportive fashion.
As regards defense, requiring a naval tone is not a nuance. Underlying the Navy’s efforts to ensure mastery of the seas is the realization that the ultimate purpose of such mastery is to affect directly events on the land. Inherent in the natural jointness of the naval approach shared by the Navy and Marine Corps, is the history of integration of forces capable of acting throughout the earthly spectrum of land, sea and air. Thus it is natural for naval forces to view such wartime missions as close air support as integral to, not separate from, the range of missions conducted by naval air forces.
A naval philosophy toward spacefaring and space defense would ensure that “close space support” would not become an orphaned mission in any battle for the outer reaches. At the same time, the core competencies of the expeditionary naval services could be applied to extended deployments in space during peace and times of potential conflict.
Space is not just an extension of the air. Space is an ocean, and oceans are where navies go.
Commander Tangredi is Head of the Strategy and Concepts Branch, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations.
Ocean Worlds: Water in the Solar System and Beyond
The story of oceans is the story of life. Life as we know it requires three ingredients: energy, organic molecules, and liquid water. Our search for life beyond Earth is, in part, a search for planets and moons that harbor substantial liquid water. We call these places “ocean worlds,” and we’re learning that they could be ubiquitous in the galaxy.
Oceans define our home planet, covering the majority of Earth’s surface and driving the water cycle that dominates our land and atmosphere. But more profound still, the story of our oceans places our home in a far larger context that reaches deep into the universe and places us in a rich family of ocean worlds that span our solar system and beyond.
Tucker: UFOS Are “Supernatural” Not Alien
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Aliens are Demons/Project Bluebeam
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REAL ALIENS COMING – When Do The Real Aliens (Satan’s Demons) Start to Invade Earth?
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