From New Dawn 204 (May-June 2024)
The religion of Thelema, founded by British occultist Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) last century, proclaimed a new “Aeon of Horus” based on “force and fire.” According to its ‘bible’, Liber Al vel Legis (The Book of the Law), it is a stellar or star-oriented religion.
In his introduction to Liber Al, Crowley states that Liber Al “explains the universe.” The Thelemic dictum, “every man and every woman is a star,” places humanity in a stellar context, with each ‘star’ having its own ‘orbit’ through which it expresses its own ‘will’ (Greek = Thelema). The opening lines of Liber Al proclaim Nuit, the Egyptian sky goddess representing space, “invoking the company of heaven.” Nuit is to be “invoked under the stars.”
Crowley claimed to have received his ‘revelation’ astrally from a ‘praeterhuman’ intelligence – Aiwass – representing the gods of a certain equinox. There are three aeons in Thelema based on three Egyptian gods: Isis (goddess worship), Osiris (dying and resurrected god – including Christianity), and Horus, the hawk-headed god that presides over the new (incoming) aeon.
While stellar references are used allegorically, Crowley wondered whether there is also “some real connection between a given persona and a given star.”
Among the sundry bohemians and intellectuals attracted to Thelema, including artists, poets, and academics, was one John (Jack) Whiteside Parsons (1914–1952), a seminal figure in setting humanity on the exploration of outer space.
As we will explore later, Parsons attempted to invoke Babalon, the ‘Scarlet Woman’ of Thelema, as the manifestation of Nuit. He also penned what he proclaimed to be the ‘fourth chapter’ of Liber Al (given to Crowley in three chapters), ushering the Aeon of Babalon.
Thelemic ‘War Machine’
The Aeon of Horus was to be ushered by cataclysmic events. As a sign of the times, Crowley referred to “war, the atrocities which occur on a daily basis and leave us unmoved and hardly worried.”
Book III of Liber Al, relating to the Aeon of Horus, is a martial doctrine that refers to Horus as “a god of war and of vengeance,” stating that he would deal harshly with his enemies. Next, a “war machine” is referred to as something to be given to Thelemites. Liber Al states, “With it ye shall smite the peoples; and none shall stand before you.”
Such apocalyptic visions of creating a “war machine” for Thelema would motivate Parsons.
Crowley refers to another aeon after that of Horus and the emergence of “another prophet” to assume Crowley’s “throne.” He refers to this new prophet who would “bring fresh fever from the skies.”
There were several claimants to this mantle while the current aeon and Crowley were still around. Parsons declared himself and that his aeon was Babalon. Crowley did not like the idea of a prophet emerging while he still lived. Crowley considered Parsons dangerously foolish, and Parsons broke with Crowley.
Both Crowley and Parsons based their magickal workings on Enochian. Beginning in 1581, Dr John Dee and his assistant Edward Kelley devised a system of astral communication with so-called ‘angels’ using a system of ‘Calls’, inscribed tablets, and the Enochian alphabet and language. The eighteen ‘Enochian Calls’ are full of fiery imagery. The ‘Tenth Call’ refers to the Earth “burning day and night, and vomit out the heads of scorpions, and live sulphur mingled with poison.”
In a magickal ritual performed in the Tunisian desert on 7 November 1923, Crowley “quizzed a discarnate intelligence about what The Book of the Law’s third chapter meant by a ‘war engine’, described as a gift of Ra Hoor Khuit, the Sun in its martial aspect.” In a note, Crowley wrote that the ritual brought a vision “not incongruous with my idea of the new Energy.”
Crowley sent the material drawn from the ritual to Thelemite mathematician Prof. Norman Mudd for interpretation. Crowley biographer Tobias Churton comments: “The notes show drawings, images, and algebraic concepts suggestive of nuclear fission. Extraordinarily striking for a North African vision in 1923, the notes, with hindsight, suggest the ‘war engine’ was nothing less than an atomic bomb.”
Founding of Jet Propulsion Laboratory
In 1945, Crowley wrote to the novelist Louis Umfraville Wilkinson, a Thelemite, that “The Atomic Bomb is interesting, not only because of Liber Al, chapter III, verses 7 and 8, but because one of the men who were working on it was for some time at the Abbey in Cefalu.” For a period, Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema (in Cefalu, Sicily) was where his community of disciples practised the doctrines of Thelema and performed magickal rituals.
In 1936, Dr. Theodore von Kármán, director of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT), founded the Aerojet rocket motor company with Frank Malina, a Communist sympathiser, and Jack Parsons. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) emerged from GALCIT in 1943 after the project came under the auspices of the US military.
Kármán was a descendant of the famous Hasidic (Cabalistic) Rabbi Yehuda Loew ben Bezalel, the 16th century ‘Exalted’ Rabbi of Prague, astronomer, and, according to Jewish legend, creator of the ‘Golem of Prague’. Kármán was the great-grandson of Moses ben Menachem Mendel Kuntitz, a scholar of the Zohar, the main body of Cabalistic mysticism.
Parsons, Malina and several others became known as the ‘Suicide Squad’ for their dangerous use of explosives and were subsequently moved from the CALTECH campus. From 1941, the US military lavished funding on GALCIT, and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation was founded in 1942 to meet its expanding requirements.
Parsons’ contributions to solid propellant rocketry led to the development of the solid motors on the Space Shuttle and the motors in the Minuteman missile. A crater on the Moon’s dark side is named in his honour. After World War II, the work that Parsons undertook on liquid and solid-state fuel led directly to the US space programme.
Liber 49
Parsons became a devotee of Crowley in 1939. He joined Agape Lodge, the Los Angeles branch of Crowley’s organisation, Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), and was initiated in 1941. After his first wife left him for the lodge’s head, Wilfred Smith, he assumed leadership in 1943. The OTO temple was moved to Parsons’ mansion in Pasadena.
When Parsons undertook his ‘Babalon Working’ in 1946, Crowley responded by stating, “I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these goats.” With artist, poet and actress Marjorie Cameron as his ‘Scarlet Woman’, they intended to evoke Babalon to worldly manifestation by creating a magickal child, although Parsons later considered Cameron to be that incarnation.
According to Kenneth Grant, Crowley “wrote Parsons off as yet another failure,” and Parsons resigned from the OTO in August 1946.
As a result of the Babalon Working, Parsons proclaimed himself “Belarion Antichrist” and issued a new revelation, Liber 49 – a fourth chapter of Crowley’s Liber Al – ushering the Age of Babalon.
Like the ‘Enochian Calls’, Liber 49 is reminiscent of the Apocalypse of St. John. While John’s Revelation announces the return of Christ after an apocalypse, Parsons believed that an apocalypse would bring forth a New Aeon of the Antichrist and Babalon.
In martial spirit, continuing the legacy of Horus, Babalon proclaims that she will come via her daughter as a “penelous (sic) flame,” “a trumpet in judgement halls,” “a banner before armies,” to “judge nations” with “force and fire.” Those who resist will be destroyed: “None shall resist thee, whom I lovest. Though they call thee harlot and whore, shameless, false, evil, these words shall be blood in their mouths, and dust thereafter.”
Parsons, as Antichrist, had undertaken his “black pilgrimage” in the Mojave Desert on Babalon’s command. He swore that he would fulfil Babalon’s rule on Earth and published his manifesto: “And in my name BELARION shall they work miracles, and confound our enemies, and none shall stand before us.”
Enochian
The occult scholar Donald Tyson writes of the Enochian workings that John Dee believed the ‘angels’ he was evoking were servants of God, whereas Edward Kelley thought they might be deceivers. Tyson says these ‘angels’, by fooling Dee, used him to introduce a ritual working that would usher the Apocalypse. The working was aimed at opening the gates of the Watchtowers that guard against the intrusion of satanic powers into this universe. Tyson states that Dee was blind as to the true function of the ‘Enochian Keys’. He also claims Crowley failed to complete the entire apocalyptic Enochian Working despite his exuberance for the subject and his claim to be the Antichrist.
Parsons took on that mantle, broke with Crowley, and aimed to bring forth the Apocalypse by more direct means. Parsons is said to have recited Crowley’s poem ‘Hymn to Pan’ and danced at the launching of rockets by the JPL. It seems that he regarded each rocket launch as a ritual working.
Babalon
An academic study has been written on Babalon. Manon Hedenborg White references the Enochian magickal working of Crowley and Victor Neuburg in the Algerian desert in 1909, in which Crowley had a vision of the apocalyptic Whore of Babylon. He rendered this as “Babalon,” and incorporated it into Thelema as the primary goddess, who had been prophesied in Liber Al five years previously. In origin, Babalon is a generic name for ‘wicked’ in Enochian and related to the word ‘babalond’ meaning ‘harlot’. Apparently, she also communicated through her ‘daughter’ in the form of “a spirit called Madimi” to Dee and Kelley.
Chapter 5 of White’s study is devoted to Parsons’ interpretation of Babalon. After rituals with Cameron during January and February, Parsons went alone into the Mojave Desert, where he evoked Babalon and transcribed Liber 49 as the fourth chapter of Liber Al. Of course, Crowley had already disowned Parsons.
While the Aeon of Babalon was intended to balance the “force and fire” of the martial Aeon of Horus, Parsons’ conception of Babalon nonetheless gloried in the biblical image of the Great Whore of Babylon foretold in the Revelation of John, “drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs.”
Where the biblical Whore of Babylon is generally considered to describe a corrupt system, to Crowley and Parsons, Babylon rendered as Babalon describes a terrible goddess bringing apocalyptic desolation to the world before ushering a new aeon. Hence, Parsons describes Babalon as “the dark mother of anarchy and abominations,” which he compares to Kali and Lilith.
Parsons & Israel
Parsons drew the attention of the FBI. He was noted as a bohemian living with various other suspect characters, indulging in orgies and black magic rites at his mansion.
In September 1950, Parsons was identified as having removed restricted, confidential and classified documents on jet propulsion motors and rocket propellants from Hughes Aircraft Company, California. Parsons had worked there since 1949 as “group leader” in charge of propellants, propulsion and launching systems. In a statement to the FBI dated 27 September 1950, Parsons declared that he had taken the classified material for the purpose of preparing proposals for work in Israel.
In his astral visions, Parsons “arrived at Chorazin in the dominion of the Antichrist.” Manon Hedenborg White writes that in Parsons’ astral vision, he emerges as the Antichrist at Chorazin.
Located near the Seas of Galilee in present-day Israel and now in ruins, Chorazin is mentioned in the Bible as one of three villages cursed by Jesus for failing to accept his teachings. Some medieval theologians believed that the Antichrist might come to be born in Chorazin. This notion clearly influenced Parsons, who explicitly calls the location “the city of the Anti-Christ” and believed that his astral journey marked his transition into the figure.
Here, we begin to see why the State of Israel might have assumed central importance in Parsons’ belief he was the Antichrist at the inauguration of the Aeon of Babalon.
The FBI files state that Parsons had read in technical magazines about research in Israel. In September or October 1949, that is to say, the year of his assumption to the role of Antichrist, he made contact with an Israeli agent who requested him to prepare a proposal “regarding the building of an explosives plant in Israel and data concerning rockets and other armaments which Parsons would be able to conduct research work on in Israel.” In August 1950, he was asked to submit costs for “a jet propulsion development program on which Parsons could do research work in Israel.” The initial contact with what Parsons said to the FBI was a “business consultant,” whom the FBI identified as “a representative of the Israeli Government” living in North Hollywood, came through the American Technion Society.
The FBI report states that the Technion Society was designated officially by both the Israeli Government and Israeli industry as the “American body” through which the latest in US technology was conveyed to Israel. The Technion Society was another name for the “American Society for the Advancement of the Hebrew Institute of Technology in Haifa, Palestine, Inc.” (Los Angeles File, a-27-49). The file states that “this organisation publishes the Technion Yearbook and the society is also known as the ‘American Technion Society’.” A statement dated 2 December 1950 in the FBI files mentions that Dr. Theodore von Kármán had recommended Parsons contact what seems to be (the words are blacked out) the American Technion Society. It seems that Kármán, Parsons’ mentor and one of the most distinguished names in rocket science, had facilitated his communication with Israel for the purposes of espionage.
Parsons had his security clearance suspended in 1948 because of his involvement with a “cult” and associating with an “alleged Communist Party member.” This suspension was removed the following year. US Assistant Attorney General McEachen declined to prosecute due to a lack of evidence that taking classified documents for use by Israel was “injurious to the USA or to the advantage of another nation,” but Parsons’ security clearance was again revoked on 9 January 1952.
As the self-declared Antichrist who would usher the Apocalypse, Parsons was uniquely positioned to do so as one of the fathers of US rocketry. It is significant that he intended to settle in Israel and sought to persuade the Israelis that he could establish a missile programme. In his role as Antichrist, it seems credible that Parsons envisaged settling in Israel at the location where the Apocalypse is supposed to unfold from the battle of Armageddon.
It also seems likely that Parsons saw a vision of nuclear devastation in the fiery Apocalypse described by St John in The Revelation. One of the world’s most eminent experts in rocket chemistry, someone with such a mission as Parsons, was uniquely placed to complete the Enochian Working with the benefits of modern apocalyptic science that he helped in large measure to create.
Parsons’ hopes of going to Israel did not eventuate. It is debated as to whether the enormous explosion that killed Parsons on 17 June 1952 when he was handling chemicals on his property was an accident, murder, or suicide.
Or perhaps it was a self-immolation rite to Babalon, a final fiery embrace intended as a sacrifice to inaugurate the Aeon?
Footnotes
1. Crowley, Liber Al (York Beach, Maine, 1976), 1: 1-3.
2. Ibid., 1: 57.
3. Aleister Crowley, The Law is for All (Arizona: Falcon Press, 1985), 72-73.
4. Crowley, Introduction to Liber Al, IV: The New Aeon, 13.
5. Ibid., 3: 6-8, 39.
6. Ibid., 3: 34, 42-43.
7. Donald C. Laycock, The Complete Enochian Dictionary (London: Askin Publishers, 1978), The Tenth Call, 257.
8. Tobias Churton, Aleister Crowley: The Biography (London: Watkins Publishing, 2011), 274.
9. Ibid.
10. Crowley to Wilkinson, 7 August 1945, cited by Kenneth Grant, Cults of the Shadow (London: Frederick Muller, 1975), 115.
11. S. Goldstein, ‘Theodore von Kármán’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, Vol. 12, November 1966, 334-365.
13. Kenneth Grant, The Magical Revival (London: Frederick Muller, 1972), 166.
12. Henrik Bogdan, The Babalon Working 1946: L. Ron Hubbard, Jack Whiteside Parsons, and the Practice of Enochian Magic, Numen, No. 63, 2016, 28.
14. Jack Parsons, Liber 49, The Book of Babalon (1946) v. 10, sacred-texts.com/oto/lib49.htm
15. Ibid., v. 40.
16. Ibid., v. 41.
17. Jack Parsons, Liber 49, Part II: The Manifesto of the Antichrist.
18. Donald Tyson, The Enochian Apocalypse, Gnosis Magazine, Summer 1996, bibliotecapleyades.net/bb/bluebook418.htm
19. Geoffrey Landis, The Three Rocketeers, American Scientist, July-August 2005, americanscientist.org/article/the-three-rocketeers
20. Manon Hedenborg White, The Eloquent Blood: The Goddess Babalon & the Construction of Femininities in Western Esotericism (Oxford University Press, 2020)
21. Donald C. Laycock, 83.
22. Revelation 17:6.
23. Manon Hedenborg White, 136.
24. Manon Hedenborg White, 138.
25. Ibid., 139.
26. ‘John Whitside Parsons’, FBI File No. 65-59589, 2 November 1950, ia902704.us.archive.org/27/items/marvel-whiteside-parsons/John%20Parsons%2001_text.pdf
27. Ibid., 29 September 1950.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., McEachen to Parsons, 13 November 1951.
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