The Babalon Working

"[The angel] carried my spirit away to the desert. I saw the Scarlet Woman sitting on the Beast with seven heads and ten horns, covered with blasphemous names. The woman was clothed in purple and scarlet, and gilded with gold and precious stones and pearls, with a colden cup in her hand filled with the abominations and the unclean things of her fornication. On her forehead a name had been written, a mystery: Babalon the Great, the mother of harlots and of the abominations of the Earth. I saw the woman was drunk from the blood of the Saints, and from the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. Seeing her, I wondered greatly."

--Revelation 17: 3-6

There are few stories so salacious as the series of events that brought together Jack Parsons, Co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, L. Ron Hubbard, science fiction writer and founder of Scientology, and Aleistar Crowley, noted British mystic, often referred to as the Beast 666 and the "most evil man in the world".
John Whiteside Parsons was born in 1914 to a well to do Los Angeles family. By the 1930's he had grown into a brilliant and handsome man, as well as an integral member of the Suicide Squad. This a rag tag group of Cal Tech rocket enthusiasts, named thus for a 1937 misfire  in which a nitrogen dioxide/alcohol cloud caused a thin layer of rust to appear on much lab equipment. This test mishap had given Parsons an important breakthrough however and by 1940 he had completely revolutionized the field of rocket propellants. This opening the door for the eventual moon landing two and a half decades later.

The little gang of misfits evolved into the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. JPL has since far exceeded its humble origins. JPL has manufactured lunar landers and Mars landers, as well as...Voyager 1 and 2 and these days employs 5,500 scientists on an annual budget of $1.4 billion. Parsons designed new rocket fuel after rocket fuel, and eventually they succeeded in inventing jet-assisted take-off.

However by the latter half of the 1930's Parsons had a twin love and hobby, that being that of the occult. Parsons had come into contact with the Ordo Templi Orientis, the magickal fraternity founded by Aleistar Crowley. The Los Angeles lodge was under the leadership of Wilfred Talbot Smith. Parsons joined in 1941 and in very short order the brilliant scientist became Crowley's most favored and promising pupil. By 1943 Smith had been edged out and Parsons had assumed leadership of the OTO Los Angeles faction.

 

During this period Parsons had become aware of, and increasingly obsessed with, a ritual known as Babalon Working. The purpose of this ritual was in effect to summon an elemental, through which the sorcerer would father a child who would usher in a new utopian era. The method for achieving this was laid out by Crowley himself.
By 1946 Parsons met  L. Ron Hubbard, and had believed that he met the perfect confederate to help him achieve his magickal ambitions.

Parsons wrote to Crowley at the beginning of 1946:

"He (Hubbard) is a gentleman, red hair, green eyes, honest & intelligent and we have become great friends. Although he has no formal training in magic, he has an extraordinary amount of experience and under- standing in the field. Ron appears to have some sort of highly developed astral vision. He describes his angel as a beautiful winged woman with red hair whom he calls the Empress and who has guided him through many times in his life. He is in complete accord with our own principles. I have found a staunch companion and comrade in Ron."

Hubbard quickly moved into Parson home, ostensibly to begin preperations. Parsons, his live in girlfriend Betty, and Hubbard then formed a business partnership (with Parson putting up the lions share of the money, while Hubbard only putting forth a nominal amount) in the buying and selling yachts, to give legitimacy and camouflage to their actual aims.

  Friends and associates of Parsons at the time did not have such a positive view of Hubbard however. He was subsequently reffered to as "a confidence trickster who had wormed his way into the O.T.O. on the pretence of being interested in Magick." and "made wealthy and famous by a misuse of the secret knowledge which he had wormed out of Parsons."

In any case the happiness of the group home was shattered three months in when Betty decided  to take up with Hubbard instead.

Parsons wrote to Crowley, "She has transferred her sexual affections to Ron. I cared for her rather deeply but I have no desire to control her emotions."

Regardless,  Parsons would not be swayed from his mission. From January 4th to 15th, 1946, Parsons and Hubbard engaged in a nightly ritual of incantation, talisman-waving and other Black Magic, faithfully described in Parsons Diary as Conjuration of Air, Invocation of Wand, and Consecration of Air Dagger. With a Prokofiev violin concerto blaring away, the 2 of them pleaded with the spirits for "an elemental mate" -- a girl willing to go through sexual rites to incarnate Babalon in the spirit world.

During the initial days, windstorms sprang forth suddenly and there were power outages but nothing seriously responsive until Jan. 14th when Hubbard was struck on the right shoulder and had a candle knocked out of his hand.

 "He called me" Parsons wrote, "and we observed a brownish yellow light about 7 feet high. I brandished a magical sword and and it disappeared. Ron's right arm was paralyzed for the rest of the night".

 The following night was even more portentous. Hubbard apparently saw a vision of one of Parsons enemies. Parsons wrote, "He attacked the figure and pinned it to the door with 4 throwing knives with which he is expert"

Three days later, on January 18th Parsons returned home to find a woman by the name of Marjorie Cameron waiting for him. Parsons was convinced that she was The Scarlet Woman, the elemental made flesh. "I have my elemental! ...She has red hair and slant green eyes as specified", he wrote to Crowley.

The second part of the ritual began just under two months later. Parsons and Hubbard constructed an alter and Hubbard acted as high priest during a series of ceremonies in which Parsons and Cameron had sex. Hubbard wore a white robe and carried a lamp while Parsons was clocked in a black, hooded garment, carrying a cup and dagger. At Hubbard's suggestion, they played Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead as background music.

Parsons account of the start of the birth ritual is as follows:

"The Scribe (Hubbard) said, "The Year of Babalon is 4063. She is the flame of life, power of darkness, she destroys with a glance, she may take thy soul. She feeds upon the death of men. Beautiful-Horrible".  The Scribe, now pale and sweating, rested awhile then continued.

Hubbard further instructed Parsons:

"Display thyself to our lady; dedicate thy organs to her; display thy mind to her; dedicate thy soul to her; for she shall absorb thee. Retire from human contact until noon tomorrow. Speak not of this Ritual. Discuss nothing of it. Consult no book but thine own mind. Thou Art a God. Behave at this Alter as one God before another."
On the 3rd day, the ritual began 4 hours before dawn. Ron tells his companion,

"Lay out a white sheet. Place upon it blood of birth. Envision her approaching thee. Think upon the lewd, lascivious things thou coulds't do. All is good to Babalon. All. Preserve the material basis. The lust is hers, the passion yours. Consider thou the Beast raping."
These invocations along with other passages in the book indicate that Parsons had collected specimens of his own sperm and the girl's menstrual fluid.The climax of the ceremony occurred the following day with Ron at the alter working his 2 subjects into a sexual frenzy. Over Rachmaninoff he intoned such gems as: "Her mouth is red and her breasts are fair, and her loins are full of fire."

An exalted Parsons wrote the next day,

"Babalon is incarnate upon the earth today awaiting the proper hour of her manifestation. And in that day my work will be accomplished and I shall be blown away upon the breath of the father, even as it is written"

Parsons was confident of their effectiveness, unable to contain his joy, he wrote an exultant letter to Crowley.

"I can hardly tell you or decide how much to write. I am under command of extreme secrecy. I have had the most important devastating experience of my life."

Crowley's response was not quite what Parsons would have liked however.  With a distinct note of concern, he dashed off a letter on the same day to the head of his American Cult saying, "Apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is producing a Moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts." This acid rebuke comes from a man whose activities were once summed up by a judge like this: "I have never heard such horrible, dreadful blasphemous stuff as that which has been produced by the man who describes himself as the greatest living poet."

By the next month Hubbard and Betty had skipped town to Miami, taking with them most of Parsons money. They intended to leave Florida by way of the yacht Parsons had purchased for their business enterprise. Parsons left in hot pursuit, notifying the authorities to keep the couple in port. Hubbard and Betty managed to slip away, at which point Parsons claims he conjured a storm to drive them back to the harbor.

"Hubbard attempted to escape me" Parsons wrote, "by sailing at 5p.m. and performed a full invocation to Bartzabel within the circle at 8p.m. (a curse). At the same time however, his ship was struck by a sudden squall off his sails and forced him back to port where I took the boat in custody."

Parsons was able to regain custody of the yacht, but not his money.  On reading Parsons' accounts of the ceremony and from the reports from the branch HQ in the States, Crowley cabled his U.S. office on May 22nd.

"Suspect Ron playing confidence trick -- John Parsons weak fool -- obvious victim prowling swindlers" In a letter a few days later he said, "It seems to me on the information of our brethren in California that Parsons has got an illumination which he lost all his personal independence. From our brother's account he has given away both his girl and his money. Apparently it is the ordinary confidence trick."
Crowley then removed Parsons from leadership within the OTA Los Angeles lodge.

As the '40s wound down Parsons was stripped of his security clearance and almost prosecuted for treason for slipping classified documents from his then-employer, Hughes Aircraft, to the nascent Israeli government, with whom he was negotiating for a rocket guru gig. During his last days Parsons was reduced to working for Hollywood movies, making tiny explosive squibs that mimicked a man being shot. This from a man who once dreamed of blasting man into outer space.

On June 20, 1952, Parsons was working in the private experimental laboratory in his garage. At 5:08 p.m., the place exploded. The general opinion was that he had dropped fulminate of mercury . His shattered body lay within the destroyed edifice.

It has been rumored that this was the end result of building psychological pressures. Otherwise, why would he have dropped what he was said to have, when a trash can containing cordite and wrappers of fulminate of mercury was nearby? Especially since he was about to travel to Mexico to test a new explosive he had devised, which was "more powerful than anything yet invented." George Santmeyers, who had worked with him for five years on industrial projects did not think an accident plausible, considering Parsons' technical knowledge.

But there were other theories. In Nat Freedland's book The Occult Explosion, Renate Druks, an artist and educational filmmaker (who once, at her Malibu beach house, hosted Marjorie Cameron) related an alternate version:

"I have every reason to believe that Jack Parsons was working on some very strange experiments, trying to create what the old alchemists called a homunculus, a tiny artificial man with magic powers. I think that's what he was working on when the accident happened."

Roky Erickson & the Aliens/ I Think Of Demons

Guided By Voices/ Land Of Danger

Ravi Shankar & Ali Akbar Khan/ Raga Malika

Diamanda Galas/ Double-Barrel Prayer

Roxy Music/ The Thrill of It All

 

“I hight Don Quixote, I live on peyote,
marijuana, morphine and cocaine,
I never know sadness, but only a madness
that burns at the heart and the brain.
I see each charwoman, ecstatic, inhuman,
angelic, demonic, divine.
Each wagon a dragon, each beer mug a flagon
that brims with ambrosial wine."

--John Whiteside Parsons