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Liber XXXII · Thelema

Liber XXXII · Thelema · Chapter V: Thelemic Orders

Jack Parsons and the Babalon Working: Rockets and Thelema

Jack Parsons and the Babalon Working of 1946: the rocket pioneer's Thelemic rites with L. Ron Hubbard, Marjorie Cameron, Liber 49 and what came after.

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The Babalon Working was a series of magical rites performed in Pasadena, California, and the nearby Mojave Desert between January and March 1946 by the rocket engineer John Whiteside "Jack" Parsons, then head of the Ordo Templi Orientis's Agape Lodge, assisted by the future founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. Its stated aim was to bring the Thelemic goddess Babalon into the world in human form. The episode, recorded in Parsons's own diaries and letters, has become one of the most retold stories of twentieth-century occultism, partly because its protagonists were so improbable and partly because the accounts of it disagree on almost everything except the dates.

Jack Parsons: Rocket Pioneer and Thelemite§

Parsons was born in Los Angeles on 2 October 1914 and grew up in Pasadena. He never completed a university degree, but a teenage passion for rockets and explosives made him an unusually skilled practical chemist. In 1936 he joined the Caltech graduate student Frank Malina and his friend Ed Forman in a rocket research project sponsored by the aerodynamicist Theodore von Kármán; their first motor test took place in the Arroyo Seco, a dry canyon above Pasadena, on 31 October that year. The group's wartime work on jet-assisted take-off for aircraft led to the founding of the Aerojet company in 1942 and to the laboratory that became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Parsons's most lasting technical contribution was a castable solid propellant that bound fuel and oxidiser in an asphalt matrix, an ancestor of the composite propellants used in later missiles and space rockets.

Alongside chemistry Parsons read poetry, mythology and occult literature. He encountered Crowley's writings in the late 1930s and, with his wife Helen, joined the Ordo Templi Orientis in 1941. The combination later fascinated biographers, but it was less strange in its own day than it sounds: rocketry was then a fringe pursuit associated with science fiction, and Parsons seems to have regarded both rockets and magic as ways of overcoming inherited limits. A crater on the far side of the Moon now bears his name.

Agape Lodge and the Parsonage in Pasadena§

The Agape Lodge, founded in Los Angeles under the English-born Wilfred Talbot Smith, was for years the only working lodge of Crowley's order, as described in our guide to Thelemic orders. It performed Crowley's Gnostic Mass publicly and was supervised, by letter and through Karl Germer, from Crowley in England. Internal quarrels, including Helen Parsons's relationship with Smith, led Crowley to remove Smith, and by 1942 Parsons had become the lodge's effective head.

Parsons rented a large Craftsman mansion on South Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena and let its rooms to lodge members, artists, writers and assorted bohemians; locals called it the Parsonage. Parsons himself formed a relationship with Helen's younger sister, Sara Northrup, known as Betty. In August 1945 a new lodger arrived: L. Ron Hubbard, a naval officer recently returned from the war and already a prolific writer of pulp fiction. Parsons was impressed by him, wrote to Crowley that Hubbard had a natural gift for magic though no formal training, and treated him as a partner in the work. Betty soon transferred her affections to Hubbard.

Babalon in Thelemic Doctrine§

To understand what Parsons was attempting, one has to understand Babalon. The name is Crowley's spelling, influenced by the "Babalond" (harlot) of the Enochian angelic language recorded by John Dee and Edward Kelley in the 1580s, and the figure is a deliberate revaluation of the Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelation. In Crowley's The Vision and the Voice, the record of his Enochian visions in the Algerian desert in 1909, and in the Book of the Law, she becomes the Scarlet Woman, the sacred feminine counterpart of the Beast, holding a cup into which adepts pour their life as a sign of self-surrender. On the Enochian system that Crowley adapted, and in Thelemic doctrine more broadly, she is both a cosmic principle of ecstatic, all-accepting love and an office that real women might fill.

Crowley had also written, in his novel Moonchild (published 1929), about an attempt to draw a superhuman soul into a child through magical conception. Parsons fused these ideas. He hoped first to attract an "elemental" partner and then, through rites of the kind discussed in our article on sex magick, to bring Babalon into incarnation, whether as a woman, a child or a new force in human affairs; his records can be read in more than one way.

The Babalon Working of 1946§

The working began in early January 1946. According to Parsons's diary, he first performed a series of invocations alone over eleven days, using Enochian material and the Enochian tablet of Air, with recorded music playing as an accompaniment. Hubbard joined him in mid-January, acting as scribe and as a seer who described what he claimed to perceive on the astral plane. The two recorded small incidents, such as a candle knocked from Hubbard's hand and a failure of the lights, as signs that the operation was taking effect.

Around 18 January Marjorie Cameron, a young artist who had served in the navy, visited the house. Parsons concluded at once that she was the elemental woman he had invoked, and the two began a relationship. In late February he went alone into the Mojave Desert, where he believed he received a communication from Babalon herself. He wrote it down as Liber 49, presenting it as a fourth chapter of Crowley's Book of the Law. In early March, with Hubbard again as seer, he performed further rites intended to consummate the work. The surviving records describe a sequence of ritual and sexual acts with Cameron in the role of Babalon's vessel; Parsons regarded the outcome as an incarnation already set in motion.

These events coincided with a quieter landmark in the occult world: Dion Fortune, the most influential English occultist of the interwar period, died in London on 8 January 1946, while Parsons's first invocations were under way. Later writers in the Typhonian tradition of Kenneth Grant linked the Pasadena working with other events of the late 1940s, including the wave of flying-saucer reports in 1947, as signs that a "gateway" had been opened. Such interpretations belong to the history of the working's reception rather than to the evidence.

Hubbard, Crowley and the Aftermath§

Crowley, following events by letter from Hastings, was unimpressed. He complained to Germer that Parsons was being foolish and suspected that Hubbard was a confidence trickster. Events soon seemed to bear him out. Parsons, Hubbard and Betty formed a business partnership, Allied Enterprises, to buy and sell yachts, with Parsons supplying most of the capital. In mid-1946 Hubbard and Betty left for Florida with much of the money and bought boats there. Parsons followed, took legal action to recover his share, and later recorded that he had performed a ritual against the pair, after which a storm forced their boat back to harbour. Hubbard married Betty that summer, although he had not yet divorced his first wife.

The Church of Scientology later offered a different account, stating in 1969 that Hubbard had been sent to break up a black-magic group. No documentary support for this claim has been produced, and historians generally treat Parsons's contemporaneous papers as the more reliable record, while noting that they too reflect his own interpretation.

Parsons married Cameron in October 1946. In 1948 he took the magical oath of the Abyss and adopted the name Belarion, writing a short apocalyptic text, the Book of the Antichrist. His essays on liberty, collected after his death as Freedom Is a Two-Edged Sword, mix Thelemic individualism with a fierce anti-authoritarian politics. His professional life deteriorated: amid FBI investigations he lost his security clearance, and he was working on film explosives and freelance chemistry when he died in an explosion in his home laboratory in Pasadena on 17 June 1952. The death was ruled accidental, though rumour has never settled for that.

Legacy and Scholarly Interpretation§

For decades the Babalon Working was known mainly through hostile journalism about Hubbard. Since the 1990s it has been studied seriously. John Carter's Sex and Rockets and George Pendle's Strange Angel reconstructed Parsons's double career; Martin P. Starr documented the Agape Lodge from its archives; and Hugh Urban placed the working in the history of modern sexual magic and of Scientology's origins. Manon Hedenborg White has examined Babalon herself, showing how Parsons, Cameron and later practitioners used the goddess to work through changing ideas of femininity, desire and power.

Cameron, who outlived Parsons by more than forty years, became a significant artist in Los Angeles counterculture and appeared in Kenneth Anger's film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954). She continued to regard herself as bound up with Babalon's work. For Aleister Crowley's later followers Parsons became a cautionary figure and a romantic one: a gifted man whose magical ambitions outran his judgement, and whose story shows how Thelema took root in a very American landscape of laboratories, desert and Hollywood.

Frequently asked questions§

What was the purpose of the Babalon Working?§

Parsons intended to bring the Thelemic goddess Babalon into human incarnation. He first sought an "elemental" female partner, whom he identified with Marjorie Cameron, and then performed rites meant to open the way for Babalon to manifest. His notes leave open whether he expected a woman, a child or a more abstract force.

Was L. Ron Hubbard really involved?§

Yes. Parsons's diaries and letters, and Crowley's correspondence, show that Hubbard lived at the Pasadena house and acted as scribe and seer in the rites of January and March 1946. The Church of Scientology later said he had infiltrated the group to break it up, but this claim lacks documentary support.

What is Liber 49?§

Liber 49, also called the Book of Babalon, is a short text Parsons said he received in the Mojave Desert in February 1946. He regarded it as a fourth chapter of Crowley's Book of the Law. It is not accepted as scripture by the main Thelemic organisations.

How did Jack Parsons die?§

He died on 17 June 1952, aged 37, after an explosion in the laboratory at his home in Pasadena, where he had been handling unstable chemicals. The coroner ruled the death accidental. Various theories of suicide or murder have circulated since, without solid evidence.

Sources and further reading§