“Jack Is One Hell of a Nice Guy”
The complex, tormented, and strangely inspiring magickal career of Jack Parsons
With usual restraint, a New York Post headline of June 19, 2018, announced: “This sex-crazed cultist was the father of modern rocketry.” The occasion was a TV series dramatizing the life of pioneering rocket scientist Jack Parsons (1914–1952).
Parsons, cofounder of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory — some say its initials JPL mythically stand for Jack Parsons Lives — was among the brightest intellects in rocketry in the immediate post-war era. He was handsome, deeply read, and well liked. “Jack is one hell of a nice guy and a number-one rocket engineer,” science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein wrote in a 1949 letter. [1]
Parsons was also a dedicated occultist who collaborated with figures from British magician Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) to Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986). Jack’s heterodoxy placed him on the wrong side of the nation’s defense establishment, which sidelined the energetic scientist and denied him coveted security clearances.
Although obscure when he blew himself up at age 37 in his Pasadena home laboratory while mixing pyrotechnics for a Hollywood special effects company, Parsons and his wife, artist and occultist Marjorie Cameron (1922–1995) — who…
