Jack Parsons and the Occult Roots of JPL | Hacker News Reader

Jack Parsons and the Occult Roots of JPL

spacesafetymagazine.com

168 pointsJetSpiegel63 comments

If anyone hasn't seen Strange Angel I highly recommend it. It's definitely the "Hollywood version" to some extent but it's relatively close to his biographies and is a decent watch regardless.

The title and thesis here is a bit wacky. JPL itself doesn't have "occult roots." Parsons was into occultism and Thelema/Crowley, which is far less sensational than it sounds if you've ever actually read any of that stuff. It's not any more shocking than someone being into Daoism, esoteric Hinduism, Sufism, or any other minority (in this country) religious or philosophical sect. The beliefs involved are no more or less bizarre than the beliefs championed by much more popular religions.

I have noticed a tendency for creative outside thinkers like Parsons to be into "weird" belief systems. I've met a good number of really bright hacker types who are into all kinds of non-mainstream beliefs including conspiracy theories, Neo-Paganism, esoteric types of religion, strong interests in topics like UFOs and the paranormal, etc.

Agree ^. It makes sense to me that if you are a person who believes that what society and the status quo deem as possible are limited, you probably also don't find traditional interpretations of "why" to be sufficient.

Well, the article directly contradicts your perspective of Crowley and Parsons beliefs with: beastiality, incest, and more.

I'm agnostic about those allegations personally. Anything fringe back then was going to attract tabloid claims, and Crowley himself was a troll who was fond of promoting outrageous BS about himself for attention. They were a bunch of nutballs certainly but there's quite a bit of very sensational stuff out there about that scene that's just as questionable.

Today they'd just be a bunch of goth swingers into Neo-Pagan LARPing and totally unremarkable.

From the OTO members I’ve run into this sounds about right.

Most of what they ascribe to Crowley is highly dubious and sensationalist. There have been many independent biographies of Crowley published, not to mention his "autohagiography" that shed a lot of light . The article also contains blatant falsehoods, their explanation of the avalanche incident is fabricated and not corresponding to history (diaries and 3rd party first-person accounts of what actually happened). Even wikipedia gives a different version of events that doesn't seem so callous. Moreover, a lot of Crowley's writings are deliberately using veiled language meant to offend the uninitiated and those predisposed to a superficial reading of his material. This is of course treasure for lazy journalists - and readers - that want to shock and stir up drama.

As far as the incest/beastiality bits related to Parsons go, I can't find any verifiable references anywhere. They took some rumors as laid out in a highly sensationalist book and presented them as fact.

This is the sort of trash, low quality article that has no place in HN. Parsons - and Crowley - deserve better.

Casting Crowley as the evil crazed Satanist is basically like if people in 50 years were to watch a bunch of Marilyn Manson videos and decide he was really an evil vampire. It's part of the marketing.

On the other hand, this

> using veiled language meant to offend

is frequently the opposite of the case. Frequently, the veiled language is used to obscure the nature of some rituals which many "uninitiated" would likely find offensive. It strikes me as rather disingenuous to proactively pretend otherwise, frankly.

Crowley had a mischievous streak and delighted being in the spotlight. His writing style was infused by sarcasm and was all over the spectrum of using poetic and sexual language to both offend and veil.

I do not think you are correct in your assessment as clearly he couldn't care less about offending people. An example is when he refers to masturbation as "child sacrifice":

“For the highest spiritual working one must accordingly choose that victim which contains the greatest and purest force. A male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence is the most satisfactory and suitable victim.”

His sense of humor wouldn't be out of place today. Crowley was a visionary genius who tapped into the 21st century and one could say helped bring it into existence. To portray him as nothing more than a sexual deviant or charlatan does not do the man justice.

Crowley was a visionary genius who tapped into the 21st century and one could say helped bring it into existence.

What makes you say that?

What about Crowley and the climbing expedition? I can’t imagine that story paints him in the best light.

Thelema is basically ritual magic and the direct antecedent to mid 20th century new age culture. Many of its practices are probably the basis for modern conceptions of spooky sex-cult behavior. The theory side does seem to be Hinduism-lite, though. I'll give you that.

Thelema is basically ritual magic and the direct antecedent to mid 20th century new age culture

I'm no expert, but new age? It sounds more like wicca/satanist stuff to me, nothing like new age. "Aspects of Thelema and Crowley's thought in general provided inspiration for the development of Wicca and, to a certain degree, the rise of Modern Paganism as a whole, as well as, chaos magick, and Satanism."[0]

New Age, it seems to me, comes from the very different world of the New Thought of the 1880s, Blavatsky, Besant, Steiner etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thelema

I've always thought of New Age as what you get when you puree every religious, philosophical, and occult/esoteric text together in a blender and then strain out the gritty bits.

I do kind of agree that New Thought is a stronger influence on pop new age than Crowley. He's too edgy.

Source: previous O.T.O. member and Initiate, as well as an Initate of another particular Secret Society.

Um, no. Sorry. I don’t know what you read; but maybe go check out ‘The Book of Lies’, or a number of Crowley’s other, more taboo and dark pieces of literature.

Ritual Magick, especially as Crowley and Parsons participated in, may include the likes of summoning archangels and demons, the use of altered states including the use of extreme hallucinogens and other drugs.

While I agree the philosophy of the O.T.O./Thelema is not that revolutionary compared to many Eastern schools of thought; its rituals and practices are far from it.

I dunno, I thought that a lot of it (especially the exercises in MiTaP) was reminiscent of later psychological research. For instance, I believe that its one of the first examples of negative reinforcement, which didn't really become mainstream until the 50's or so.

Additionally, if you check out Tibetan Buddhism rituals, you see a lot of what looks very like ritual magick. I was very very surprised at the amount of overlaps with the western/thelemic tradition.

Just my 0.02.

> JPL itself doesn't have "occult roots."

Just my personal speculation:

Qian Xuesen, one of the few who founded JPL and later the Chinese rocket industry, has a strange favor in researches of "special human body functions" which turned out to be nonsense at all. It would be easily explained had he ever been exposed to Aleister Crowley and/or L. Ron Hubbard in 1940s.

> changed the name to “Jet Propulsion Laboratory.” Despite the fact that they were not researching jet engines

A rocket engine is a "jet" engine as the jet of gasses provides the thrust. What we think of as a "jet" engine today was originally called a "turbojet" engine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_propulsion

If you want to know more about this, the Unexplained podcast has a 3-parts episode on the story of Jack Parsons. Really recommended!

http://www.unexplainedpodcast.com/episodes/2018/3/20/s03-epi...

And if you want to dig even deeper, the book "John Dee and the Empire of Angels: Enochian Magick and the Occult Roots of the Modern World" takes this topic even further.

https://www.amazon.com/John-Dee-Empire-Angels-Enochian/dp/16...

The Dollop podcast has an amusing take on Jack Parsons too. NSFW and probably less historically accurate than Unexplained, but amusing at least.

http://thedollop.libsyn.com/jack-parson

I couldn't make it past 5 minutes. Fratboy-level jokes and constant detours into the irrelevant. Clearly my sense of humor is different from theirs.

Yet another podcast episode about Jack Parsons from Something True. Highly recommended.

https://www.idlethumbs.net/somethingtrue/episodes/babylon

Additionally the "biography" of Parsons, "Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons", is a great read.

https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Rockets-Occult-World-Parsons/dp/0...

And because Parsons' life intersected in the late '40s with that of L. Ron Hubbard, he features prominently in Lawrence Wright's excellent history of Scientology Going Clear (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_Clear_(book)) as well.

Wikipedia summarizes Parsons' and Hubbard's sex-magic collaboration here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons_(rocket_engineer)...

There's also a TV series: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7210448/ and a book by the same name: https://www.amazon.com/Strange-Angel-Otherworldly-Scientist-.... I read the book but haven't seen the series. The book was quite good but has some slow patches and seems to get a little lost at times. (I work at JPL)

I haven't read the book but I like the series.

The way the series depicts occultism vs traditional religion, traditional vs modernism and their interaction is surprisingly deep. It's not just shady characters using vulnerable and unstable people (it's that too). It's also people trying to escape traditional society and using things like occultism as way to get out. It leads to tragedies, but sometimes it nudges people to the right direction.

also many shades of this in the Pynchon classic Gravity's Rainbow

WHOA. Alright, time to re-read that guy again.

Parsons is a very interesting character. I think the same character traits that cause scientists to produce new theories also causes them to go into "weird" directions. You have to have a high level of stubbornness and fearlessness to go against the shared wisdom of the time.

In general I love to read about famous persons who had a lot of on the surface contradictory facets to their personality. There is a tendency in the media to view people as one-dimensional. People don't seem to be able to compute that people are not all-good or all-bad. A famous people would be Newton who was kind of an ass and also spent a lot of time on alchemy and other stuff.

A while ago I saw a British TV show about Hitler and there they had a scene where Hitler shot his dog out of anger. From whatever I know he loved dogs but somehow the show creators thought Hitler has to be portrayed as a totally bad guy.

Oh totally. There are lots of other examples. Issac Newton was into occultism and alchemy too, and Thomas Edison tried to build a machine to contact the dead using radio waves.

I'm not sure Newton is an example. Alchemy wasn't fringe at the time, was it?

"A while ago I saw a British TV show about Hitler and there they had a scene where Hitler shot his dog out of anger. From whatever I know he loved dogs but somehow the show creators thought Hitler has to be portrayed as a totally bad guy."

One of the greatest self-inflicted wounds in the modern world is the propensity to portray Nazi Germany and its major figures in a completely cartoonish fashion. Godwin's law be what it may but the long term ramifications of pointing to Nazis as inhumanely evil to a point that breaks all logic has blinded people from being able to accurately understand exactly what led to their rise to power, what drove their decision making process, and how they managed to direct an entire country toward supporting the very goals currently portrayed as the actions of a handful of mad hatters divorced from all laws of human behavior.

Everyone knows the colloquialsim that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, well here's a perfecf example of that in action. Disingenuous representations and false accounts of history eliminate the possibility of developing a true understanding of how things actually progressed in reality. If you can't understand how things progressed, you have no hope of countering that progression until things have developed too far to be reversed through peaceful means.

> One of the greatest self-inflicted wounds in the modern world is the propensity to portray Nazi Germany and its major figures in a completely cartoonish fashion. Godwin's law be what it may but the long term ramifications of pointing to Nazis as inhumanely evil to a point that breaks all logic has blinded people from being able to accurately understand exactly what led to their rise to power, what drove their decision making process, and how they managed to direct an entire country toward supporting the very goals currently portrayed as the actions of a handful of mad hatters divorced from all laws of human behavior.

> Everyone knows the colloquialsim that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it...

Whatever self-inflicted or by design, a nation that understands Nazi Germany will not put up with the direction that most nations are going in regards to totalitarianism recently, so it may be working as intended.

The book Ordinary Men covers this. It is quite fascinating. Regular people became the Nazis. People on HN could become Nazis. This is an uncomfortable truth not many people are willing to confront. I’ll give HNers some credit, but still, the way it progresses is subtle and nefarious. (It being Authoritarianism into Totlitsrianism with a dictator$

Sure.

Nazis were more aligned than unaligned with the rest of the western culture.

The worst part when discussing pre-world war 2 germany is highlighting how racist and xenophobic they were - while politely glossing the issue that everyone was xenophobic and racist back then. It was totally ok in polite circles to consider eugenics as fine possibility to make progress forward in any western country back then, I think.

Nazi's didn't invent half of the horrors we know them for. They just took a few of them to their extremes. I think people understood from their example what parts of popularly held ideas were really not tenable since they were so strongly associated with Nazi attrocities.

Part of it is that we dont want to face what our forebears did in the 18th and 19th centuries to native populations. Better to portray Hitler as a comic book villain than as the culmination of a trend.

The story of Jack Parsons is one of my favorites. He really contributed scientifically, was certainly in part responsible for L. Ron Hubbards rise to fame and also a protege` of Aleister Crowley.

According to most of what I've read Parsons was kind of conned by Hubbard. They did have an association for a while but I don't get the sense that Parsons had any direct role in Scientology per se. Hubbard invented that later.

The postwar Pasadena areospace scene was wild.

Scientology is basically Crowley’s Thelema but in 1950’s space opera clothing. Parsons didn’t have any role in developing beyond introducing Hubbard to Crowely, and most notably Sara Northrup. Sara Northrup, later L Ron’s wife, helped develop Dianetics, and Scientology.

I read J.W. Carter’s ”Sex and Rockets”, and Lawerence Wright’s “Going Clear” back to back, and together they paint a fascinating portrait of the time.

If you want to round out the Pasadena OTO scene, Spencer Kansa’s “Wormwood Star” about Marjorie Cameron is supposed to be good, but I haven’t read it yet.

Nice, thanks. I just asked the previous commenter for book recs. I'll read at least one of these for sure.

edit: I ordered "sex and rockets."

Hubbard and Sara absconded with a bunch of money Crowley has entrusted Parsons with for OTO purposes and bought a yacht and partied in Florida. Crowley pretty much wrote off Parsons after that.

I could see that. I guess I was just thinking that Parson's gave him his first big break in the occult.

I've never delved much deeper than internet reading. Do you have a book recommendations?

Unfortunately this article doesn’t load for me, I wanted to see it because I really enjoyed reading Strange Angel by George Pendle. There is a series on CBS All Access that is very, very loosely based on the book which is fun to watch if not at all accurate.

Try this: http://web.archive.org/web/20181220194510/http://www.spacesa...

What's the series called?

Wow, lots of great material in here. Certainly enough for screenplay research ;)

As a companion to the this I love this piece about George Sterling's art colony in Carmel at the turn of the century. Utopian bohemianism, whether based upon magic, spirit, or tech. Is a perpetuating driver of human mythos ;)

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/146051/bohemian-tr...

The founder of an old cult that would eventually become the Jehovah's Witness predicted that the apocalypse would begin on October 2, 1914, the day Jack Parsons was born.

The video in the article shows up as unavailable, but there is a version available here (blocked unless you subscribe to cable TV Science channel):

https://www.sciencechannel.com/tv-shows/dark-matters/full-ep...

I tried explaining this interesting connection to a group of friends in college, but they looked at me like I was crazy.

I didn't see any support in the article for occult roots of JPL. Occult was simply another interest of Parsons.

Exactly, sounds like he was a bright guy and a free-thinker with interesting hobbies. Somehow this gets twisted into nonsense about a Satanic NASA, moon hoaxes, and secret space fleets. Paranoia in action.

There is one hell of a filmed entertainment series here. You've got every element necessary, including the "truth stranger than fiction" angle. I wonder what, if any, studios are developing this history into a show, film or something.

Check out Strange Angel! It's a television series. They even came to Caltech to film on location.

Relevant: http://www.cc.com/video-clips/h71t46/drunk-history-jack-pars...

The ulter ego he says he encountered in his occult rituals he calls "Dajjal". Interestingly, it is the same name for the Anti Christ that exists in early Islamic literature. What is even more striking is that this same literature describes the Dajaal as one-eyed. We all know that the one eye is the symbol of the illuminaty cult. Another thing that really reminded me about this guy is the movie "Ready Player One", it had the same insinuations, regarding the moon landing mixed with the illuminaty one eye and the movie The Shinning.

Whatever religion posses you will have overlapping symbols that are in conflict with the occult. This is intentional. Occultists create subversive symbols to filter out trojan horse intellectuals (EG: The Church of Satan). People who seem smart and capable of deep thought but are actually being coached by a religion and only wield rational thought to serve their religion are pretty common and undesirable to have around when mindhacking. It also creates an "us-vs-them" paradigm that improves community at the cost of wider social ostracism. Anyone who has argued with a christian trained in apologetics on hot button topics knows what I'm talking about in regards to trojan horse intellectuals. So by adopting "bullshit" (like antichrist worship) that directly conflicts with "other bullshit" they can dereference the pointer to the religious back door. Then occultists build their own back doors and reprogram themselves to do what they want.

Obviously major religions want to be the only answer. As any hacker knows as long as more than one person has admin privledges on a network, there is no guarantee control over that network can be maintained. All major religions say that the apocalypse will start when people turn away from them. The result is increasing radicalization as a religion dies out which helps it hold on a little longer.

As for the Eye. Yeah good luck finding constancy in an interpretation. It's the symbol the visual center of the brain is most tuned to. It's going to be everywhere regardless of whatever meaning people ascribe to it.

It’s likely not a coincidence as people into the occult tend to mix and match their mythology from a variety of sources. It’s almost assured that it was taken from Islamic sources.

https://paradoxosalpha.livejournal.com/79983.html

> As to my study of Islam, I got a sheikh to teach me Arabic and the practices of ablution, prayer and so on, so that at some future time I might pass for a Moslem among themselves. I learnt a number of chapters of the Koran by heart..... My sheikh was profoundly versed in the mysticism and magic of Islam, and discovering that I was an initiate, had no hesitation in providing me with books and manuscripts on the Arabic Cabbala. These formed the basis of my comparative studies.

— Alastair Crowley.

Both of your comments to this site now hint at conspiracy theories about a moon landing hoax. Your other comment was flagged but this one has not been.