Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons

This new edition should make more readers aware of this weird and forgotten part of our history. Carter pulls no punches and has little sentiment for anyone but Parsons, who he paints as a sort of tragic hero, equally obsessed with ritual occultism and rocket science. It is a testament to his inner will that Parsons worked with and was respected by some of the most brilliant scientists of his time--even though he had little formal training in science. He was instrumental in founding the modern era of space flight, and was honored by having a crater on the moon named after him (appropriately enough on the "dark" side.) All this while using his new-found wealth to open up a sort of bohemian paradise in his home on "millionaire's row" in the conservative Pasadena of the 1930s. Carter reveals all this and more in this fascinating book. Don't miss it.

Most people today have never heard of Parsons, and many who do underestimate the importance of his work. Parsons was a brilliant individual who led a colorful and offbeat life. Until now, however, very little information has been made available about him. This book is a much needed and very absorbing piece of little-known American history. It was well written and kept me reading non-stop. My only complaint is that it wasn't longer and more in-depth, but the author did a great job with the sources he was able to dig up. One of my favorite bios!

Sex And Rockets: The Occult World Of Jack Parsons is the engaging, highly recommended biography of John Whiteside (Jack) Parsons, a primary architect of modern rocket science and co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Parsons (who had a crater on the dark side of the moon named for him) had dark, secretive interests which overshadowed his outstanding public career for Parsons underwrote Aleister Crowley's "Book of the Law", held numerous soirees celebrating science fiction, and performed weird black magic rituals under the eyes of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. After being investigated by the FBI and become estranged with the United States government, Parsons met his death when a mysterious explosion leveled his home. Sex And Rockets is riveting reading, enhanced with Parson's never-before-printed writings and period photographs.

Jack Parsons is probably one of the most important men in human history and yet few know of him except hard boiled Occultists and Aerospace Professionals. This book offers food for thought as to why this may have been. It is astonishing to learn in this book that Parsons, (perhaps the most important contributor to space travel), never completed a formal college education and yet went on to transform the universe ...literally. So why would so brilliant and gifted a man lead such a self-destructive life? One possible reason found within this book is Parsons painful relationship, (or lack of one), with his father, and his life-long search to find a substitute for one...in all the wrong places. The pain of a wounded soul can produce either a Saint, Monster or Victim and Parsons might have been a little of all three. The book is eloquent testimony that the inability to let go of pain, disappointment and hatred, (such as Parsons adolescent tirades against Christianity and "God the Father"), and the lush indulging of pain and hatred via Occult practice leads only to destruction. (One has to wonder if Parsons' clumsiness and lack of safety consciousness in handling dangerous chemicals was, to one degree or another, a sign of self-loathing.) Yet, in spite of his tragic ending, the most enduring legacy of Parsons is the ability of Humankind to travel into space thanks to his brilliant work in rocketry. And Parsons has left us another legacy...what unresolved hatred leads to and the exacerbation of that hatred by indulging in the "Occult". It's a fine line between being a courageous innovator and metaphysician and merely being a tormented demagogue. It's sobering to think that of all the forces and powers Parsons thought he could conjure, he was so unable to exorcise his soul of it's own demons.

Formulated by British humorist Stephen Potter circa 1950, thedoctrine of one-upmanship states quite simply that it is the businessof every intelligent man, no matter what situation he finds himself in, to be "one up" on the other chap. It is a philosophy that Jack Parsons, who died some two years later, would have benefited immensely by adopting. For a brilliant scientist Parsons was capable of remarkable naivete and as Gerald Suster delicately puts it, often had ideas "in excess of his ability to deal with them." In addition to being a rotten judge of character he wasn't conspicuously overburdened with common sense and had a knack amounting almost to genius for placing himself "one down" in relation to what Aleister Crowley called "our Brethren in California." Chief among these "Brethren in California" was of course Scientology founder Lafayette Ron Hubbard, who bamboozled Parsons with a series of "inspired" messages relating to the incarnation of Babalon, which he claimed to receive straight from the horse's mouth. Nowadays most sensible people associate Hubbard with the other end of the horse, but in the early Forties he was still an unknown quantity and seemingly had no trouble in swindling Parsons out of his money, his wife and his credibility in Crowley's eyes. ("It is the ordinary confidence trick.") Parsons was a potent but wildly erratic writer whose surviving material veers from elegiac beauty to surpassing daftness. If any constant can be traced through his work, good, bad or indifferent, it is that of schoolboy rebellion against "all authority not based on courage and manhood." Among other qualities, he shared with Crowley a conviction that "the key of joy is disobedience," and "conjured up" Marjorie Cameron to help him live it to the full. "I have my elemental," he exulted in February 1946, taking a characteristically rose-colored view of a magical operation which, while it was undoubtedly successful, ultimately proved to be a two-edged sword. For magical purposes Cameron chose to call herself Candida, the name of a parasitic fungal infection more commonly known as thrush. With her help Parsons attempted to conceive a Moonchild, thus provoking Crowley's ire ("I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts") and effectively sealing his own fate. From then on the die was cast. In 1948 Parsons had an attack of the existential heebie jeebies and restyled himself Belarion Armillus Al Dajjal AntiChrist. Further bizarre events followed in rapid succession until, ripped off, conned and cuckolded by all and sundry, he blew himself to smithereens with fulminate of mercury. His death was neither murder (as some authors have rather fancifully suggested) nor a magical ricochet effect, but merely the natural culmination of a life dogged by disaster. Parsons has been profiled in several recent books, notably Montauk Revisited by Preston Nichols and Peter Moon, a turgid 250-page validation of John Grant's dictum that most