Jack Parsons
June 17th was the anniversary of the death of fabled rocket scientist occultist Jack Parsons. He is very much a current concern with the CBS TV series Strange Angel having first aired the previous week.
I was very pleased to be able to record another Rune Soup interview with Gordon White on June 17th and to now post it on the summer solstice.
Parsons is a subject I have covered at length in my Crowley book and also my video lecture on the Babalon Working so I was mindful of wanting to provide some fresh material. To that end, there is a typically odd personal story of how I came to feel so connected to the topic and also some thoughts on Jack and the Beat Generation. I also expound on my feeling s concerning the centrality of Gnosticism in understanding Jack’s magical life.
Just listened to and enjoyed the interview with Gordon on Parsons. I appreciate your knowledge and perspective on the man and the Era. Having gone through my own research of Jack & Cameron, I hypothesize that Hubbard was operating for Naval Intelligence with the goal of espionage and ultimately sabotage (even some Scientologists suggest this). Near the end of WWII there was much jockying of power positions… i.e. the creation of the US Security State (ABC agencies). Occultism in Los Angeles at that time was deemed as a threat to the powers that be especially as the Cold War began. The vice squad of the LAPD was actively harassing occult circles as they were considered hotbeds for Communists.
LRH did not come up with Dianetics but merely stole secrets/rituals from the Agape lodge and tweaked them with his own cosmology/mythology and turned into a corporate enterprise that became Scientology. I also sense that Marjorie was actually originally a part of this plot (she also worked in Naval Intelligence as a cartographer) and her “sudden magical appearance” was by design to further embroil Jack to LRH’s schemes. However, contrary to her mission she in fact accidentally fell in love with Jack and became the Babalon. In the bigger picture, it is evident (to me at least) that the mad genius and potential cultural influence of Jack Parsons was a dangerous liability to the emerging Military Industrial Complex and had to be dealt with accordingly. Again, with all this in mind, Hubbard is less of a creative genius and more of a tool of the powers that be essentially having spiritually assassinated Parsons (if not involved literally with his tragic demise) and completely undermined the Agape Lodge whose rituals and secrets now act as a powerful world wide mind control apparatus in Scientology.