71 years ago today, having completed a series of rituals he referred to as the “Babalon Working” to summon an Elemental to be his magical partner, rocket scientist and Thelemite Jack Parsons came home to find Marjorie Cameron waiting for him and decided that she was said partner. It should be pointed out that this was not Cameron’s first visit to Parsons’ home, which he had dubbed “The Parsonage.”
Vice ran a nice essay by George Pendle a couple years ago that reads in part:
“It’s hard to find as weird and tragic a tale in the annals of science as that of John Whiteside Parsons. Born 100 years ago, Parsons seemed devoted to reconciling opposites, smashing together the technical and the spiritual, the white lab coat and the black robe, fact and fiction, science and magic…
“But Parsons’ scientific legacy is impossible to ignore. He forced the United States government to explore a science it had previously mocked, and laid the foundation for the rockets that carried man into outer space. He was one of America’s greatest space pioneers. He just happened to also be one of its greatest occultists…
“By the late 1930s, he had begun frequenting nightly meetings of the Ordo Templi Orientis, an occult society that met in nearby Los Angeles. The OTO, as it is known, was created by the English occultist Aleister Crowley, a heroin-addicted, sexually adventuresome, God-profaning master of the dark arts, who the tabloids had christened ‘The Wickedest Man in the World‘…
“In 1941, Parsons and the Suicide Squad founded the Aerojet Engineering Corporation to sell their rockets to the military. Scientists who had previously derided Parsons’ work now queued up to join this boom industry. In 1943, with the need for advanced research into rockets growing exponentially, Parsons co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to continue the study of his one-time backyard playthings. At the same time as he was reaching his professional peak, he also found himself moving up the ranks of the OTO, corresponding with the aged Crowley in England, and eventually becoming the group’s leader on the West Coast.”
Read the entire piece here: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-last-of-the-magicians?trk_source=homepage-lede
At the Cameron-Parsons Foundation, Marjorie “Cameron” (her maiden name) Parsons is described as “A maverick follower of the esoteric mysticism of Aleister Crowley and his philosophical group, the O.T.O. (Ordo Ternpli Orientis), Cameron was also an accomplished painter and draftsman and mentor to younger artists and poets such as Wallace Berman, George Herms, David Meltzer, and Aya.”
After Parsons’ death in 1952, she retreated to the desert of Beaumont, California living in an abandoned canyon without water or power devoting herself to art and magick, doing extensive astral work and completing 21 drawings for the book of poetry and art that she’d worked on with Jack during his lifetime. Her time in Beaumont is, in part documented, in extensive correspondence with Jane Wolfe. Upon her return to Los Angeles in 1953, she became an active participant in the avant-garde arts scene starting with a series of paintings called the Parchments. You can read a fuller account here: http://www.cameron-parsons.org/cameron.html.
She also acted in a series of early avant garde films including Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and Curtis Harrington’s Wormwood Star (named after a mystical child she concieved psychically with Jack from beyond the grave while she was in Beaumont), which was a study of her art (much of it subsequently destroyed on purpose by Cameron) and magical practice. You can view it here:
