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The occult religious history behind NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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https://www.supercluster.com/editorial/t...aboratory/

EXCERPT: Jack Parsons was one of the most influential figures in the history of the American space program. He was also a Marxist, stood accused of espionage, and held a deep fascination with the occult. His interest in the supernatural went far beyond vaudeville magicians and astrology. By 1939, Parsons and his wife Helen Parsons-Smith had fully embraced the teachings of the Ordo Templis Orientis, a central hub for Aleister Crowley’s spiritual and religious philosophy — Thelema.

Aleister Crowley taught that a Thelemite’s central ambition was to achieve a higher state of existence by embracing one’s “True Will,” or one’s ultimate purpose beyond selfishness or ego. In pursuit of that goal, many aspects of Parsons’s life blurred the boundaries between science and mysticism. As a Thelemite, he performed ritual magic, including banishing impure elements with pentagrams, invocating the power of the “Holy Guardian Angel,” and offering daily adorations to the sun.

All while pushing the limits in the nascent field of rocket science. [...] By 1933, Parsons had constructed his first solid-fuel rocket engine. He was only 29 years old. His boyhood interest in magic and the supernatural only grew stronger as he delved further into rocket science. That same year, Parsons turned his Orange Avenue estate into a bohemian haven, renting rooms out to artists, occultists, and dropouts galore.

In 1934, Jack Parsons and Edward Forman met PhD candidate Frank Malina at a public CalTech lecture. The trio soon managed to impress Malina’s supervising professor Dr. Theodore van Kármán enough that he allowed the young engineers to conduct experiments at the university’s Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory—GALCIT. With access to CalTech’s resources and equipment, the trio formed the GALCIT Rocket Research Group. Thus, the blueprint for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab was born. What resulted was a bachelor pad for rocket pioneers.

[...] Parsons’ own religious and scientific pursuits have proven screen worthy. His life has recently been adapted in the CBS All Access series, Strange Angel, based on the biography Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons by George Pendle. Supercluster sat down with Pendle and show creator, producer, and writer Mark Heyman for exclusive interviews about the life of this rocket-scientist-genius-occultist-playboy.

“I first came across a mention of him in reading that book Going Clear, which you know is about L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology. It was a fascinating moment in that book, and I sort of just filed it away,” says Heyman. The occult is no real shock to one of the minds behind Academy Award-nominated Black Swan. “I grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and my parents were involved in a sort of new-age religion that some people would call a cult. I always felt like it was more cult-ish, but it wasn’t like a full-blown cult. So I’d always been interested in those sorts of organizations and groups, which is why I was reading “Going Clear” in the first place. A year or two after that, I was sent the book for Strange Angel by a producer. It was my first real deep dive into who Jack Parsons was and my first introduction to him, and it blew my mind on multiple levels.”

“We tend to think of the 30s and 40s as a more buttoned-down time, a more conservative time, but they were as wild and crazy as anything that happened in the 60s and 70s. And then, there was this sort of intersection of that with the sciences, and the birth of this new fangled science—rocket science. Which, back then, was not taken seriously at all and was considered just as fringe and out there as some of [Parsons’] religious preferences.”

[...] Heyman thinks it’s obvious why we don’t hear more about Jack: “Drug use and orgies is just a hard thing to fold into NASA’s official story.” “As someone who works in storytelling, I was like, guys, don’t you see it? He makes you guys look cool! He was like a punk rocker scientist. Why wouldn’t you want to own that and bring all sorts of people into the fold who aren’t necessarily drawn to dry, academic scientists?”

“It allowed him to see anything as being possible,” says Pendle of Parsons’ off-beat mindset, “From an early age, he wrote about wanting to go to the Moon. Up until then, going to the Moon was what you said when somebody was crazy. Lunatic, the very word, comes from luna, the Moon."

Bucking the establishment is what got Jack Parsons, rocket science, and "Strange Angel" off the ground in the first place. “Being a writer, being a creative person, you are always coming up against the constraints of reality. You are always being told ‘no’ far more often than yes,” says Heyman, “We got no’s from like every possible network in town but still went forward, like really believing in this thing and still being invested in it. And lo and behold, there was this brand new streamer. Now, everyone has a streamer. Back then, we went like, ‘Wait, what? What is this?’ No one knew what that meant, for CBS to have a streaming service. It felt a little bit like reality sort of bending to my will. I think even this show coming into existence is a testament to the spirit of determination and pushing against constraints that Jack Parsons sort of embodies.” (MORE - details)
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