17: THE ROCKET SCIENTIST & THE GURU -- STARGATE 1946“At about the same time that Parsons was trying to incarnate an extraterrestrial entity, he also claimed that he had met a Venusian in the desert of New Mexico -- an odd foreshadowing of the claims of later ‘contactees’ such as George Adamski in the early 1950s.”
-- Jay Katz, Saucers of the Illuminati [4]
THE so-called “Babalon Working” conducted by John Whiteside Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard between January 4 and March 4, 1946, has been the object of much speculation, mythologizing and wonder.
This speculation is due in part to the involvement of two charismatic and brilliant Bohemians of that period. Parsons (1914-1952) was a major force in the early development of solid fuel booster rockets, for which work the International Astronomical Union eventually named a Lunar Crater in his memory. He was an O.T.O. member from 1941, and served for a short period as Master of Agape Lodge O.T.O. in the 1940s. He died under mysterious circumstances in an explosion in 1952.
The other participant, pulp fiction author La Fayette Ron Hubbard (1911-1986), eventually founded the Church of Scientology and has been the center of stormy controversy in the decades since.
Both men were students of magick, especially the sexual magick of Aleister Crowley.
According to Bent Corydon, Hubbard once confided in his son, Ron Jr.,
“Secrets, techniques and powers I alone have refined, improved on, applied my engineering principles to. Science and logic. THE keys! My keys to the doorway of the Magick; my magick! THE power! NOT Scientology power! MY power! The real powers of Solomon…”
Then, in 1955, I went to work in the Scientology office in London. I noticed a woman in the office doing strange things with strange people in the office, so I investigated her. I found out she was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. I got very angry at her and broke into her apartment, where I found dozens of little code pads. They looked like little milk pads with a whole mess of letters and numbers on them. I had people follow her to the Russian Embassy. I finally wrote a long report to my father about her. He was furious. He told me not to investigate anymore, not to write anymore, not to tell anyone what I had found out, to destroy all my evidence. I yelled at him, "The goddamn Russians are running around the office and doing God knows what." He yelled back. "I want 'em there!" He told me that she was placed there by the KGB with his knowledge and consent. This really bothered me. My grandfather, who was a lieutenant commander in the navy, had impressed me with his red-white-and-blue honor and integrity. He was an officer of the old school. 180 degrees different from my father, in fact, I credit him a great deal with my ability to get rid of Scientology and get my head straightened out, because his patriotism had gotten through to me and made me sour on what my father was doing in dealing with the Russians.
Penthouse: Was this why you became disenchanted with Scientology?
Hubbard: It was the beginning. I began to see that my father was a sick, sadistic, vicious man. I saw more and more parallels between his behavior and what I read about the way Hitler thought and acted. I was realizing that my father really wanted to destroy his enemies and take over the world. Whoever was perceived as his enemy had to be destroyed, including me. This [was the] "fair game" policy since the beginning. The organization couldn't exist without it. It keeps people very quiet.
Penthouse: Do you mean killed?
Hubbard: Well, he didn't really want people killed, because how could you really destroy them if you just killed them? What he wanted to do was to destroy their lives, their families, their reputations, their jobs, their money, everything. My father was the type of person who, when it came to destruction, wanted to keep you alive for as long as possible, to torture you, punish you. If he chose to destroy you, he would love to see you lying in the gutter, strung out on booze and drugs, rolling in your own vomit, with your wife and children gone forever: no job, no money. He'd enjoy walking by and kicking you and saying to other people, "Look what I did to this man!" He's the kind of man who would pull the wings off flies and watch them stumble around. You see, this fits in with his Scientology beliefs, also. He felt that if you just died, your spirit would go out and get another body to live in. By destroying an enemy that way, you'd be doing him a favor. You were letting him out from under the thumb of L. Ron. Hubbard, you see?
Penthouse: It's been said that many Scientologists have similar philosophies.
Hubbard: Yes. Many are sadistic, just like he was. Very Teutonic, very Gestapo.
Penthouse: Do you think they would stop at murder?
Hubbard: Many wouldn't. The one super-secret sentence that Scientology is built on is: "Do as thou wilt." That is the whole of the law. It also comes from the black magic, from Alistair Crowley. It means that you are a law unto yourself, that you are above the law, that you create your own law. You are above any other human considerations. Since you came into being by an act of will, you can do anything you will. If you decide to go out and kill somebody -- bam! -- that's it. An act of will. Not connected to any emotions or feelings, not governed by any ethics or morality or law. They are very vicious people. Totally into attack. Most people think these people are so insane and wild and berserk and unpredictable. Not to me. Insane people are very predictable, because they're trapped on the same mental and spiritual merry-go-round and all they can do is go round and round. For years I've been able to counter them -- to stay alive -- simply because I was one of them. I had a helluva good teacher.
Penthouse: Was your father violent in his behavior with his family?
Hubbard: Not to me. But he beat up a lot of women very badly. Blood, black eyes, busted teeth, the whole thing. He beat the holy hell out of women. His rages were incredible. I've read reports of the kinds of rages Hitler used to have, and they sound just like my father's. He was especially touchy about food. He would always have somebody else at the table sample everything on the table before he'd eat it. I've seen him pick up an entire dinner table and throw it against the wall if he didn't like the food or thought it was suspicious. He got very strange in the fifties. He had to have his clothes washed and washed and washed. He would take showers half a dozen times a day. I have often wondered if all of this might have been caused by the massive amounts of drugs and medication he took.
Penthouse: Did your father take a lot of drugs?
Hubbard: Yes. Since he was sixteen. You see, drugs are very important in the application of heavy black magic. The personal use of drugs expands one's conscious ability to break open the doors to the realm of the deep.
Penthouse: What kind of drugs did he generally use?
Hubbard: At various times, just about everything, because he was quite a hypochondriac. Cocaine, peyote, amphetamines, barbiturates. It would be shorter to list what he didn't take.
Penthouse: Did he encourage you to do drugs?
Hubbard: Well, he used them with me. He was a real night person. We used to sit around all night, sit around his office or home, get loaded up, and talk. He had a pretty liquid tongue. He loved to talk. And of course, in the fifties, he decided that I was the heir apparent, so he wanted to teach me everything he knew. He started me out by mixing phenobarbital into my bubble gum, when I was ten years old. This was to induce deeper trances in order to practice the black magic and to get an avenue to power.
Penthouse: How exactly would this work?
Hubbard: The explanation is sort of long and complicated. The basic rationale is that there are some powers in this universe that are pretty strong. As an example, Hitler was involved in the same black magic and the same occult practices that my father was. The identical ones. Which, as I have said, stem clear back to before Egyptian times. It's a very secret thing. Very powerful and very workable and very dangerous. Brainwashing is nothing compared to it. The proper term would be "soul cracking." It's like cracking open the soul, which then opens various doors to the power that exists, the satanic and demonic powers. Simply put, it's like a tunnel or an avenue or a doorway. Pulling that power into yourself through another person -- and using women, especially -- is incredibly insidious. It makes Dr. Fu Manchu look like a kindergarten student. It is the ultimate vampirism, the ultimate mind-fuck, instead of going for blood, you're going for their soul. And you take drugs in order to reach that state where you can, quite literally, like a psychic hammer, break their soul, and pull the power through. He designed his Scientology Operating Thetan techniques to do the same thing. But, of course, it takes a couple of hundred hours of auditing and mega-thousands of dollars for the privilege of having your head turned into a glass Humpty Dumpty -- shattered into a million pieces. It may sound like incredible gibberish, but it made my father a fortune.
--
Inside the Church of Scientology: An Exclusive Interview with L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., by Penthouse
Hubbard Sr. made clear he was talking about the sex magick central to the OTO system, but with a unique twist:
“Sex by will, Love by will -- no caring and no sharing -- no feelings… Sex is the route to power. Scarlet women! They are the secret to the doorway. Use and consume. Feast. Drink the power through them. Waste and discard them.” [5]
The idealist Jack Parsons could hardly have understood what sort of man he was dealing with here; he wrote Crowley in February, 1946:
“About three months ago I met Ron… He is a gentleman… He moved in with me about two months ago, and although Maggy and I are still friendly, she has transferred her sexual affections to Ron.” [6]
While Parsons was convinced that Hubbard, as he wrote Crowley, “…is in complete accord with our own principles” [7] and proceeded to enter into a joint financial venture with the future Father of Scientology, Crowley was writing his eventual successor as O.T.O. Grand Master, Karl Germer,
“From our brother’s account he has given away both his girl and his money -- apparently it’s the ordinary confidence trick.” [8]
Parson’s friend Alva Rogers, who witnessed these events as they unfolded, described Hubbard’s role in this way:
“Ron was a persuasive and unscrupulous charmer, not only in social groups, but with the ladies. He was so persuasive and charmingly unscrupulous that within a matter of a few weeks he brought the entire house of Parsons down around poor Jack’s ears. He did this by the simple expedient of taking over Jack’s girl for extended periods of time.” [9]
It was against this background that Parsons and Hubbard embarked upon “The Babalon Working” -- an elaborate sexual magick experiment designed to bring Babalon into physical manifestation.
The whole concept of the “Magical Child” has several distinct interpretations.
In the more orthodox and traditional view, sex magick is employed to Manifest, by an act of Pure Will, a magical being the material basis of which are the sexual fluids themselves. A more literal interpretation holds that magical ritual such as “The Star Sapphire” will produce a “Moon Child” -- that is, a living child who serves as host to a super-being, that is, the child is an “avatar” in Eastern terms, or an Incarnation of the Divine in Western thought.
Yet a third interpretation is that sex magick is, simply, the “Yoga of Sex” and the “Magical Child” is the Transformed Sex Magician Himself!
Hubbard and Parsons were ostensibly aiming at the second, literal interpretation; to manifest a Scarlet Woman willing to conceive a child who would embody the transformative goddess-being Babalon.
Crowley wrote Germer:
“Apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is producing a moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts.” [10]
The reaction was certainly excessive.
Crowley’s successor as Grand Master of the O.T.O. in the 1980s, Hymenaeus Beta, noted that an adequate chronicle of Parsons’,
“now -- famous ‘Babalon Working’ of 1946 EV has yet to be published… Most published accounts focus on his friendship and falling-out with Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard without appraising the larger issues of what was actually being attempted, and why.” [11]
Certainly, Parsons’ own description of the Working is based in the fundamentals of Ceremonial and Sexual Magick.
In “The Book of Babalon -- January 4 - March 4, 1946 EV” Parsons outlines the entire experiment, including the reasons for it:
“The present age is under the influence of the force called, in magical terminology, Horus. This force relates to fire, Mars, and the Sun, that is, to power, violence and energy…
“This force is completely blind, depending upon the men and women in whom it manifests and who guide it…
“The catastrophic trend is due to our lack of understanding of our own natures. The hidden lusts, fears, and hatreds resulting from the warping of the love urge, which underlie the natures of all Western peoples, have taken a homicidal and suicidal direction.
“This impasse is broken by the incarnation of another sort of force, called BABALON. The nature of this force relates to love, understanding, and dionysian freedom, and is the necessary counterbalance or correspondence to the manifestation of Horus.”
Thus far, Parsons is reasoning in a sound manner.
Keep in mind, however, that he is working with his ‘friend’ Hubbard, then in the very process of making off with Parsons’ money and lover; a man who was to tell his son, Ron Jr., a few years later, to use and discard Scarlet Women. In what sense “scarlet?” the younger Hubbard asked.
“Scarlet,” the Scientology ‘Source’ replied, “the blood of their bodies; the blood of their souls… bend their bodies; bend their minds; bend their wills; beat back the past.” [12]
This is the grossest perversion of Crowley’s teaching.
Nature is cruel; but I too am a Sadist.... The word "Sadist" is taken from
the famous Marquis de Sade, who gave supreme literary form to the joys of torture.
-- The Book of Lies, by Aleister Crowley
Best of all are fluids and secretions, notably blood and one other of supreme importance to the continuity of life. When you can get these still alive to their function, it is best of all. That is why it is not so highly recommended to tear out and devour the heart and liver of your next-door neighbour; you have gone far to destroy just that which is of most importance to you to keep alive.
-- Magick Without Tears, by Aleister Crowley
One last word on this subject. There is a Magical Operation of maximum importance: the Initiation of a New Aeon. When it becomes necessary to utter a Word, the whole Planet must be bathed in blood. Before man is ready to accept the Law of Thelema, the Great War must be fought. This Bloody Sacrifice is the critical point of the World-Ceremony of the Proclamation of Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child, as Lord of the Aeon. The whole matter is prophesied in The Book of the Law itself; let the student take note, and enter the ranks of the Host of the Sun.
-- Magick Without Tears, by Aleister Crowley
Akbar Pasha came here for blood: a drop of your blood, my dear; Cyril's and mine are not in his power -- you saw how contemptuously the boy played up to his trick! So I persisted in offering him salt, and nothing but salt...."If he accepts salt it limits his powers to injure the house where he accepts it, or its inmates; and it exposes him to a terrible riposte. Why he should want your blood -- that is another question, and a very serious one. Unfortunately, it implies that he knows who you are, and what we purpose for you. If he had it, he could influence you to do his will; we only wish that you should be free to do your own. I won't insult you by telling you that you can go scatheless by the simple process of returning to your ordinary life. I've been watching you, and I know you would despise me for suggesting it. I know that you are ignorant of what may lie before you, but that you judge it to be formidable; and that you embrace the adventure with both hands."
-- MoonChild, by Aleister Crowley
Thus also Iliel's stagnant mind bred fearsome things. Hour after hour, the pageant of diseased thoughts passed through the shadowy gulfs of her chaotic spirit. Actual phantoms took shape for her, some seductive, some menacing; but even the most hideous and cruel symbols had a fierce fascination for her. There was a stag-beetle, with flaming eyes, a creature as big as an elephant, with claws in constant motion, that threatened her continually. Horribly as this frightened her, she gloated on it, pictured its sudden plunge with those ghastly mandibles upon her flanks. Her own fatness was a source of curious perverse pleasure to her; one of her favourite reveries was to imagine herself the centre of a group of cannibals, watch them chop off great lumps from her body, and seethe them in the pot, or roast them on a spear, hissing and dripping blood and grease, upon the fire. In some insane or atavistic confusion of mind this dream was always recognized as being a dream of love. And she understood, in some sub-current of thought, why Suffragettes forced men to use violence upon them; it is but a repressed sexual instinct breaking out in race-remembrance of marriage by capture.
-- MoonChild, by Aleister Crowley
A very convenient doctrine: all this -- I wish one could teach it to the English wife, for ever on the groan as she is that she is neglected, and then crying out again when one gets her with child. The solution of the sex-problem is given in the Arab proverb, "Women for children, and boys for pleasure." I strongly advocate the putting of women in their proper sphere; they should breed, nurse, educate, and perform those physical tasks for which their coarser nervous system and lack of intelligence fit them. But no woman is a fit companion for a man; she of necessity degrades him. Luckily, in the case of the best men, she disgusts him. How many women have left any mark on history, save by the excess of their impudicities and whoredoms? We must exclude those born to queendom. I can think of but one, Jeanne d'Arc, an example of the opposite abnormality, frigidity.
--
The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz, by Ordo Templi Orientis
The latter merely observed in the same context,
“We do opine that it is better and easier that the other party should be in ignorance of the sacred character of the Office. It is enough if that assistant be formed by Nature signally for the physical task, robust, vigorous, eager, sensible, hot and healthy; flesh, nerve and blood being tense, quick, and lively, easily enflamed, and nigh inextinguishable.” [13]
Crowley is telling us that a partner in sexual magick should, ideally, in his opinion, be involved for the sake of sensual pleasure, pure and simple.
Hubbard is telling his own son how to enslave minds, bodies and souls. Parsons, who wrote extensively on the subject of freedom, could have had no idea of what type of person he was engaged in High Magick with.
In any case, Parsons goes on to narrate that,
“In January 1946 I had been engaged in the study and practice of Magick for seven years, and in the supervision and operation of an occult lodge for four years [14], having been initiated into the Sanctuary of the Gnosis by the Beast 666, Fra. 132, and Fra. Saturnus [15]. At this time I decided upon a Magical operation designed to obtain the assistance of an elemental mate.” [16]
In a sense, deprived of his former lover, Parsons was ‘going for broke’ in looking for a partner to create a magical child with;
“All or nothing -- I have no other terms,” as he put it to Crowley. [17]
Beginning on January 4, 1946 at 9:00 PM, Parsons and Hubbard employed the powerful Enochian Air Tablet, using an Air Dagger, parchment talisman, invocations, conjurations, Enochian Calls and invocations, and appropriate banishings. [18]
According to Parsons, at various times over subsequent days, wind storms were raised, electrical power was disrupted (January 14), during which Hubbard allegedly had a candle knocked from his hand by Something; several witnesses saw a “brownish yellow light about seven feet high” [19] which Parsons banished. [20]
On January 18 Parsons and Hubbard were out in the Mojave Desert when Parsons suddenly had an epiphany, and realized the experiment was accomplished. [21]
“I returned home,” he tells us, “and found a young woman answering the requirements [22] waiting for me.”
For the next month he invoked BABALON with her as his partner, “as was proper to one of my grade” [23] -- in other words, by the sexual Eucharist of the Mass of the Holy Ghost.
While his magical partner visited in New York, on February 28, Parsons returned to the Mojave, and received a “communication” he referred to as Liber 49, The Book of Babalon, which identifies its source as Babalon Herself. It should be noted that Hubbard was also away then.
Liber 49 asserts, among other things,
“The working is of nine moons… And she shall wander in the witch-wood under the Night of Pan, and know the mysteries of the Goat and the Serpent, and of the children that are hidden away… I will provide the place and the material basis, thou the tears and blood… Thy tears, thy sweat, thy blood, thy semen, thy love, thy faith shall provide. Ah, I shall drain thee like the cup that is of me, Babalon [24]
…Let me behold thee naked and lusting after me, calling upon my name… Let me receive all thy manhood within my Cup, climax upon climax, joy upon joy… Gather together in the covens as of old… Gather together in secret, be naked and shameless and rejoice in my name.” [25]
It is interesting that much of this anticipates the emergence of Wicca, at a time when Gerald Gardner in England was only beginning to formulate his ideas. Parsons spent much of the remainder of his short magical career writing on the subject of ‘witchcraft’ .
In any event, when Parsons communicated the Good News to Crowley, the old Magus was perplexed, or amused, or, conceivably both.
He wrote Parsons,
“You have me completely puzzled by your remarks. I thought I had a morbid imagination, as good as any man’s, but it seems I have not. I cannot form the slightest idea what you can possibly mean.”
Apparently undaunted, upon Hubbard’s return Parsons prepared to impregnate his magical partner, impressed by a vision Hubbard had “of a savage and beautiful woman riding naked on a great cat-like beast.”
According to Francis King’s account,
“Parsons was High Priest and had sexual intercourse with the girl, while Hubbard who was present acted as scryer, seer, or clairvoyant”.
This occurred on the first three days of March, 1946.
The aftermath is the subject of much rumor, and points out the high significance of sexual magick.
“This secret is the true Key to Magick,” said Crowley, “that is, by the right use of this secret man may impose his Will on Nature herself…”
Hubbard took off with Parsons’ former partner and the funds of their joint enterprise. Parsons caught up with Hubbard in July of 1946 in Miami, having to evoke Bartzabel [26] to raise a storm at sea, forcing Hubbard back to shore.
Ron Hubbard nevertheless married Parsons’ former lover the following month, and went on to write Dianetics -- The Science of Mental Health and, eventually, to organize the Church of Scientology, built on a hidden mythos of a 75 million year old disaster in which the inhabitants of a 76 planet galactic federation were blown up by a dictator named Xenu.
This science fiction ‘space opera’ from Hubbard’s pulp fiction days forms a bizarre underpinning to an already bizarre story. [27]
For the rest of it, it depends entirely on whom you talk to. Was a “magical child” -- conceived ritually March 4, 1946, born into this world as Babalon Incarnate on or about “nine moons” later, on or about December 4, 1946? Is such a being, a woman of about 50, alive today? Or was there a more ethereal ‘birth’ -- perhaps, on a spiritual level, the true “birth date” of Gardnerian Wicca and its various descendent bodies, and on a more material level, the birth of modern ‘second wave’ feminism.
Surely, the timing of the Babalon Working and the arrival of the Post War Baby Boom is simultaneous in an eerie sort of way. UFO buffs have of late been touting a theory that Hubbard came to Parsons with a purpose more grandiose than “the ordinary confidence game”.
In pulp magazine circles, he had encountered any number of occultists and border occultists (Talbot Mundy, Col. Arthur Burks, Major Donald Keyhoe, Ray Palmer and Richard S. Shaver come to mind [28] and had already formulated the core of the “inner Scientology teaching” outlined above.
He wished to bring this other world into Manifestation, but lacked the technical knowledge to do so. So, he came to the innocent sex magician Jack Parsons. In this version, the Babalon Working, guided by Hubbard, had little to do with “Babalon” and more to do with the hideous Old Ones of the H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos.
“A door opened; something came through” is the essence of this thesis, and the appearance of the first “flying saucer” case the following year is considered, in this outré rumor, not coincidental at all.
The Babalon Working permanently alienated Parsons from Crowley, but the work of the ill-fated rocket scientist has more recently been reevaluated in a more favorable light by present day occultists and UFOlogists alike.
Memorabilia from Jack Parsons’ FBI file.