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Carter rightly devotes much of the 229-page book to Parsons' career as a rocket scientist. Parsons attended Pasadena City College in the early '30s with his friend Ed Forman, although he never graduated. The two young men shared a fascination with rocketry and shared test results with American rocket pioneer Robert Goddard. Parsons and Forman soon joined the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology. GALCIT, as it was known, was under the direction of Hungarian-born scientist and rocketry giant Theodore von Karman (1881-1963). Von Karman would later write that Parsons was one of the three most important figures in American rocketry.

Parsons, Forman and their GALCIT colleagues Frank Malina, Rudolph Schott and Arno Smith conducted a famous test firing on Halloween 1936 in the nearby Arroyo Seco Canyon that marked the birth of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A photograph showing the men in a sandy pit preparing for the liquid fuel rocket test was used to construct a "nativity scene" -- a reconstruction of the scene using figurines in the likeness of the scientists -- for the JPL's 50th anniversary.

Just a few years later Parsons was instrumental in developing jet-assisted take-off (JATO) rockets for military aircraft. In the early years of World War II, these rockets were used to reduce by more than 30 percent the distance required to get military aircraft off the ground. Parsons and other GALCIT team members used the JATO breakthrough and the ensuing military contracts to start AeroJet Corp. -- where Parsons came to regularly invoke the spirit of Pan before test-firings. By the end of the war, Parsons sold his interest in AeroJet to General Tire.

Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons By John Carter Feral House 236 pages Buy Sex and Rockets

Flush with funds, he immersed himself in the philosophy of his mentor, English occultist Crowley --the bald guy in the back row on the cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band. The latter chapters of Carter's book jump back and forth from the arcana of solid propellants and rocketry design to the esoterica of the Ordo Templi Orientis, the "quasi-Masonic" organization that Crowley headed, and the infamous 1946 ritual known as the "Babalon [sic] Working."

Parsons' partners in the metaphysical "Babalon" adventure were his ex-wife's sister, Betty, and a pre-Dianetics Hubbard. Hubbard, later discharged from the Navy on medical grounds, assisted Parsons as a "scribe" during a "sex magick" ceremony in which the "whore of Babylon" was invoked to attract an "elemental" with whom Parsons could conceive a "moonchild" to usher in a new age.

Carter's description is based on incomplete records, but it seems that the ceremony involved annointing objects with menstrual blood, invoking spells and incantations, and Parsons' act of masturbating (using his "magic wand"). The "elemental" arrived soon after in the form of a woman named Marjorie Cameron, who would later become Parsons' second wife and an underground figure in her own right.

Parsons and Cameron were unable to conceive a "moonchild" -- or any children at all, and Parsons' remaining years were a rapid descent into chaos and failure. Hubbard, who later founded the Church of Scientology, absconded to Miami with Betty and most of Parsons' money, which they apparently used to buy a boat. Parsons pursued the pair only to find that Hubbard had already set sail.

Here Carter's narrative slips into high comedy. Parsons returned to his hotel room and "consecrated a circle." As he described it in a letter to Crowley: "Hubbard attempted to escape me by sailing at 5 p.m., and I performed a full invocation to Bartzabel [a form of Mars] within the Circle at 8 p.m. At the same time ... his ship was struck by a sudden squall off the coast, which ripped off his sails and forced him back to port ..."

Flat broke, tormented by what he saw as his failure as a magus, Parsons' occult activities caught up with him in the late '40s. He was investigated by the FBI and local authorities for establishing a "sex cult" and lost his government security clearance as a consequence. At one point the co-founder of JPL was reduced to working in a gas station. Eventually, he found work as a consultant on explosives projects.

On June 17, 1952, Parsons was preparing for a trip to Mexico when he was killed in a powerful explosion in his laboratory in Pasadena -- also on Orange Grove Avenue, not far from where he grew up. He was known as being a very meticulous chemist and yet there were some very unstable chemicals found in a trash can at his lab. His fiery death is fuel for conspiracy theorists to this day, though the generally sympathetic Carter concludes the explosion was probably accidental.

Carter does report the unconfirmed rumor that investigators later discovered films of Parsons "exteriorizing" his Oedipal fixation -- having sex with his mother. But no one has been able to resolve the question, as Parsons' mother committed suicide within hours of hearing of her son's death.

Carter leaves the gossipmongers to make what they will of Parsons' life; his own conclusions are neatly summed up: "Historians of rocketry and the space program seem to have underestimated [Parsons'] contributions to the field [of rocketry]," Carter writes, "while writers on the occult have romanticized him as some sort of great sorcerer." Carter has spent a good half of the book detailing Parsons' pioneering years as a rocket scientist and seems to be intent on bringing some balance to Parsons' sometimes overlooked contributions to American rocketry. So it is not surprising to read his assessment of Parsons' occult practices: "As a magician," Carter writes, Parsons "was essentially a failure."

Regardless of where your sympathies lie, however, the book -- thanks to its fantastically esoteric protagonist -- is a success.
salon.com | Feb. 15, 2000

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