He was an acolyte of Aleister Crowley, an employee of Howard Hughes, a victim of L. Ron Hubbard, and an enthusiastic phone buddy to Wernher Von Braun. He was an only child, his adulterous dad booted by his angry mom. In seeking father figures and brotherhood, he became a vital link in two mighty chains in human history: rocketry and ritual magic. His science was built on intuition, and his magic on experiment.
John Whiteside Parsons was born in 1914 and died in 1952. His short life is a fascinating case study in the limits and the contradictions of unbounded amateur enthusiasts, no matter how bold or brilliant. It limns both the conflicts and the codependency between freewheeling innovators and hidebound institutions, both governmental and private.
Read it all. Mr. Parsons was one of the figures featured in the NPR piece I posted yesterday morning about interesting figures in the past about whom we may not have known–KSH.
That infamous charlatan L. Ron Hubbard was involved with Parsons and Crowley. Hubbard’s second wife had been Parson’s girlfriend. Parson was married to Sarah Northrup’s sister. Quite a cozy circle in the OTO back in the day.
There is an excellent book on Hubbard titled “The Bare Faced Messiah” that chronicles Hubbard’s and Parson’s days in the OTO. There is a book about Parson and the occult “Sex and Rockets” which I have not read.
This is extremely creepy, as Crowley also became a deeply evil individual of whom it could reasonably be said his soul was bought by the devil. I had never heard of Parsons nor of those origins of JPL, though was well aware of von Braun’s NASA programs which followed after WWII when he was ‘imported’ and vast amounts of public funding for such research could be tapped. It all reminds me somewhat of Ted Taylor, the similarly non-educated, highly experimental developer of ‘suitcase bombs’ who worked with PhDs from the Manhattan Project days. Perhaps more needs to be done to shine light onto the alliances with real spiritual evil that seem to have characterized both some educated and non-educated individuals involved with breakthrough scientific developments from the Depression onwards.