Searching for Jack Parsons' Ghost (Part 2)
Antichrist Superstar
Right from the beginning, a dark portent hovered over Jack Parsons. Parsons was born on October 2, 1914, to Ruth and Marvel Parsons. He was given the name Marvel Whiteside Parsons. Maybe it was coincidence or even, synchronicity, but the date of his birth is notable for being prophesied by Charles Taze Russell as being the date given for the start of the end times. Russell was the cofounder of the religious movement Jehovah’s Witness.
According to Jehovah’s Witness, humanity has been, since October 2, 1914, living in the period of the Last Days, marked by intensifying troubles, disease, war, earthquakes, famine and the degeneration of morality. This is all directly related to the Book of Revelations which speaks of the appearance of the Antichrist and Babylon the Great.
What are the chances that Jack Parsons would eventually refer to himself as the Antichrist and attempt to invoke, by means of occult rituals, the Whore of Babylon Herself?
Parsons grew up in the wealthy California suburb of Pasadena. His childhood home was in fact located on South Orange Grove Avenue, a.k.a. “Millionaire’s Mile.” From early in his youth, Parsons showed a penchant, or more like, an outright obsession, with blowing shit up.
He and his boyhood friend (and cofounder of JPL) Ed Forman shared an interest in science fiction novels and fireworks. The two would devise schemes to enhance their explosive output, such as using glue as a binder to hold together mixtures of gunpowder to set off their homemade rockets. Subsequently, Parsons backyard was noted to be littered with burn spots and holes from these experiments.
As a teenager, Parsons got s summer job at Hercules Powder Company, a chemical manufacturing plant. After high school, Parsons was accepted into the rocketry program at the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT). Funded by the Guggenheim family, GALCIT would later transform into NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
In 1926, Caltech recruited Theodore von Kármán to head GALCIT. Theodore von Kármán (1881–1963) was a well-known Hungarian aeronautics professor. Interesting side note, Von Kármán was a descendant of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague, who was reputed to have created a “golem,” known in Hebrew folklore as an artificial human being that has been endowed with life by its creator.
Von Kármán befriended Parsons whom he described as a “delightful screwball” and noted that Parsons “loved to recite pagan poetry to the sky while stamping his feet.” Sure enough, before each rocket test at JPL, Parsons would invoke Pan, the wild flute playing horned god of fertility, whilst reciting Crowley’s “Hymn to Pan” from memory.
In 1936, Von Kármán directed GALCIT to lease three acres of land from the city of Pasadena, in the shadow of Devil’s Gate Dam. It was here that the members of the “Group“ (Parsons, Malina and Forman) began testing their early iterations of solid and liquid jet fuels. In early 1937, Von Kármán invited the group to move out of the arroyo and into GALCIT lab buildings on-campus at Caltech in Pasadena.
Subsequent violent and loud explosions would rock the campus. Some close calls were had. On one occasion, a test motor exploded, filling the building with a cloud of nitrogen dioxide and methyl alcohol. This in turn formed a thin layer of rust on much of the lab’s valuable equipment. Nervous residents on campus began referring to the group as the “Suicide Squad.”
This of course was the original Suicide Squad, formed long before Harley Quinn hooked up with The Joker. And since we’re talking about the Marvel Universe, it is curious to note that Parsons’ father, who was also named Marvel, was an actual Captain in the U.S. Army, i.e. Captain Marvel. Was Stan Lee influenced by the Parsons mythos? That is an intriguing question and worthy of a deeper investigation, saved for another time.
Suffice to say, Parsons and the Suicide Squad continued their experiments at Caltech until another near-fatal explosion rocked the campus. A piece of steel embedded into the wall right where Frank Malina had been standing minutes before. As a result, the Suicide Squad was invited to leave the campus and so it was back to the Arroyo Seco they went.
For the next couple of years Parsons continued working at a feverish pace, writing and publishing numerous important scientific papers and advancing the science of rocketry into the modern world as we know it. There was no doubt that Parsons was a genius, but he had a particular quirk in his DNA strand that set him apart even in this regards, and that has to do with his mystical side.
In this regards, Parsons was quite similar to the alchemists of the Middle Ages who had a certain propensity toward both science and religion. Indeed, the alchemists of olden times saw the two fields not as separate but in fact, one and the same, intermeshing in the most sublime ways.
It so happened that on an occasion in late 1939 Parsons, whilst perusing books in Robert Rypinski’s library, made a discovery that would alter his life forever more. There he found a copy of Konx Om Pax, a book written by the occultist Aleister Crowley. Rypinksi himself remarked that this discovery for Parsons was “like real water to a thirsty man.”
It was a fateful occasion no doubt, for Parsons and, if some conspiracy theorists are correct, for all of mankind. It would unleash a series of events that, like a nuclear reaction, would eventually blow up in his face. Unfortunately for Parsons, this was a literal matter. But Parsons interest in the occult should not have come as any surprise to anyone who really knew him. Indeed, we are dealing with a person who admitted, when still just a boy of thirteen, to conjuring the devil himself inside his parents home. Ah, the whimsy of youth.
REFERENCES
Carter, John (2004). Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons (new ed.). Port Townsend, Washington: Feral House. ISBN 978-0-922915-97-2.
Anderson, Brian (October 29, 2012). "The Hell Portal Where NASA's Rocket King Divined Cosmic Rockets With L. Ron". Vice. Archived from the original on April 7, 2014. Retrieved December 31, 2022.
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