page_title: Jack Parsons (rocket engineer)
section_title: Work for Israelis and espionage accusations: 1946–52
hierarchical_section_title: Jack Parsons (rocket engineer) / Biography / Work for Israelis and espionage accusations: 1946–52
caption_attribution_description: The launch of U.S. Air Force cruise missile Navaho in 1957. Even though it never reached operational status before cancellation in 1957, Navaho research development contributed to the aeronautical research program. The heavy Navaho vehicle weighed 136,000 kilograms, capable of Mach-3 speeds, and used an improved V-2 engine, was boosted into the air by three liquid-propellant rocket engines of 135,000 pounds of thrust each. Variants of these engines were developed for Army's Redstone and Jupiter rockets.
context_page_description: John Whiteside Parsons was an American rocket engineer and rocket propulsion researcher, chemist, and Thelemite occultist. Associated with the California Institute of Technology, Parsons was one of the principal founders of both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation. He invented the first rocket engine to use a castable, composite rocket propellant, and pioneered the advancement of both liquid-fuel and solid-fuel rockets.
  Born in Los Angeles, Parsons was raised by a wealthy family on Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena. Inspired by science fiction literature, he developed an interest in rocketry in his childhood and in 1928 began amateur rocket experiments with school friend Edward S. Forman. He dropped out of Pasadena Junior College and Stanford University due to financial difficulties during the Great Depression, and in 1934 he united with Forman and graduate student Frank Malina to form the Caltech-affiliated Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory Rocket Research Group, supported by GALCIT chairman Theodore von Kármán. In 1939 the GALCIT Group gained funding from the National Academy of Sciences to work on Jet-Assisted Take Off for the U.S. military.
context_section_description: Parsons was employed by North American Aviation at Inglewood, where he worked on the Navaho Missile Program. He and Cameron moved into a house in Manhattan Beach, where he instructed her in occultism and esotericism. When Cameron developed catalepsy, Parsons referred her to Sylvan Muldoon's books on astral projection, suggesting that she could manipulate her seizures to accomplish it. They were married on October 19, 1946, four days after his divorce from Helen was finalized, with Forman as their witness. Parsons continued to be seen as a specialist in rocketry; he acted as an expert consultant in numerous industrial tribunals and police and Army Ordnance investigations regarding explosions. In May 1947, Parsons gave a talk at the Pacific Rocket Society in which he predicted that rockets would take humans to the Moon. Although he had become distant from the now largely defunct O.T.O. and had sold much of his Crowleyan library, he continued to correspond with Crowley until the latter's death in December 1947.
  At the emergence of the Cold War, a Red Scare developed in the U.S. as the Congressional House Un-American Activities Committee began investigating and obstructing the careers of people with perceived communist sympathies. Many of Parsons' former colleagues lost their security clearances and jobs as a result, and eventually the FBI stripped Parsons of his clearance because of his "subversive" character, including his involvement in and advocacy of "sexual perversion" in the O.T.O. He speculated in a June 1949 letter to Germer that his clearance was revoked in response to his public dissemination of Crowley's Liber OZ, a 1941 tract summarizing the individualist moral principles of Thelema. Declassified FBI documents later revealed that the FBI's primary concern was Parsons' former connections to Marxists at Caltech and his membership of the also "subversive" ACLU. When they interviewed Parsons he denied communist sympathies but informed them of Sidney Weinbaum's "extreme communist views" and Frank Malina's involvement in Weinbaum's communist cell at Caltech, which resulted in Weinbaum's arrest for perjury since he had lied under oath by denying any involvement in communist groups. Malina's security clearance was withdrawn as well. In reaction to this hostile treatment, Parsons sought work in the rocket industry abroad. He sought advice to do so in correspondence with von Kármán; whose advice he followed by enrolling in an evening course in advanced mathematics at USC to bolster his employability in the field—but again he neglected attendance and failed the course. Parsons again resorted to bootlegging nitroglycerin for money, and managed to earn a wage as a car mechanic, a manual laborer at a gas station, and a hospital orderly; for two years he was also a faculty member at the USC Department of Pharmacology. Relations between Parsons and Cameron became strained; they agreed to a temporary separation and she moved to Mexico to join an artists' commune in San Miguel de Allende.
  Unable to pursue his scientific career, without his wife and devoid of friendship, Parsons decided to return to occultism and embarked on sexually based magical operations with prostitutes. He was intent, informally following the ritualistic practice of Thelemite organization the A∴A∴, on performing "the Crossing of the Abyss",  attaining union with the universal consciousness, or "All" as understood in Thelemic mysticism, and becoming the "Master of the Temple". Following his apparent success in doing so, Parsons recounted having an out-of-body experience invoked by Babalon, who astrally transported him to the biblical City of Chorazin, an experience he referred to as a "Black Pilgrimage". Accompanying Parsons' "Oath of the Abyss" was his own "Oath of the AntiChrist", which was witnessed by Wilfred Talbot Smith. In this oath, Parsons professed to embody an entity named Belarion Armillus Al Dajjal, the Antichrist "who am come to fulfill the law of the Beast 666 [Aleister Crowley]". Viewing these oaths as the completion of the Babalon Working, Pa
caption: Parsons worked on developing the SM-64 Navaho missile (pictured launching in 1957).
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