Explosion: (1) A violent release of confined energy, usually accompanied by a loud sound and shock waves. (2) The act of emerging violently from limits or restraints. (3) A sudden violent expression, as of emotion.1
His name was Marvel. He was obsessed with probing speed and sound and stratosphere. Member and priest of one of the “weirdest cults of mystic potions, free love and exotic ritual ever uncovered in the Southland,” trained and corresponding with the British witch doctor Crowley himself—robes & torches, “chanting pagan poems.”2
A peripatetic loner, an employer once called him. A burning inner flame, reported his car dealer friend. The papers dubbed him mad scientist, in the lineage of Newton: “last of the magicians, last of the Babylonians and Sumerians.”3
His block-letter handwriting “indicate[d] a learning disorder.” He was possessed of, and buoyed by, a “child’s capacity to believe,” a hyperstitional naieveté, an “essential optimism, a confidence that if he believed in an endeavour enough, he would eventually gain the prize.”
By archetype, prophet: charismatic, manic in his enthusiasm, prone to “deep depressions and extreme mood swings” when his work went unrecognized, or “when events contradicted his self-created myth.” In other words, “the Dedalus-patented alternating current of ‘soaring in an air beyond the world’ and ‘Oh cripes, I’m drownded.’”4 Or what CEOs at tech startup call “the founder rollercoaster.” Or what priests call “crises of faith.”5 So that we can take what follows as pure aspiration to an exquisite science:
I height Don Quixote, I live on peyote,
Marihuana, morphine and cocaine,
I never know sadness, but only a madness
That burns at the heart and the brain.
His chosen field was not even a field—just a sci-fi fantasy. The phrase “science fiction” was not yet invented. No academic program, no grant allocations: “in established scientific circles, rockets were synonymous with the ridiculous, the far-fetched, the lunatic, as much a euphemism for ‘foolish’ as rocket scientist is now a byword for ‘genius.’”6 One of the few practical applications for such tech, at the start of his century, was firing whaling harpoons. But pulp offers fertile imaginaries, inspires the construction of daydreams, the will-made-real of a Crowleyan magick.
And it was “not the public will, but private fanaticism drove men to the moon.”7 By some accounts, that path to moonlanding begins with “Jack” Marvel Parsons’ Suicide Squad, an “Arthurian band of adventurers” dedicated to a laughed-at quest, dreaming the impossible dream.
Marvel’s L.A.? Was Raymond Chandler’s: a town where “evangelists like Aimee Semple McPherson” broadcast exorcisms to hundreds of thousands via radio—and Einstein, wintering at Caltech, attended séances hosted by “a dubious Polish count.” Stravinsky provided the soundtrack for Disney’s Fantasia and astronomer Edwin Hubble dined with Harpo Marx. It was an “Ozymandian kingdom built on a desert that had been transformed by the wonders of engineering into fertile land.” The 776-foot passenger dirigible Graf Zeppelin stopped, after circumnavigating the globe, in the city for a “glittering” banquet whose guests included governor, mayor, and William Randolph Hearst.
Once a stagnant pueblo on the far periphery, a backwater “Queen of the Cow Counties,” L.A. had transitioned to violent border town of “cowboys, gamblers, bandits and desperadoes,” what the missionary James Woods dubbed “Los Demonios”—its population booming with the “alchemical surge” of the ‘48 gold rush, and the various grifts that inevitably crop up around new wealth: thieves, cardsharps, ministers. Fifty years later, the gold mostly extracted, California became a health retreat, its climate touted as the “ultimate cure,” and a very different grift economy rose—what would one day become juices and wheatgrass and smoothies from Erewhon, vegan restaurants and the 70s’ Source Family, imported acupuncture and yogic retreats. It was “a place to redeem oneself, to return to the garden before the Fall, to sever all connections with the past.” It carried the same alchemical promise that drove Parsons: that geographically rooted belief that Angelanos, “like the resources of California itself, could be tapped and transformed from barren disappointments into verdant successes”—Mulholland pouring concrete for the city’s first aqueduct just as Parsons’ newlywed parents arrived in the Golden Garden State. What America had been to Europe, California was now to America.
Part of this promise lay in the city’s weather. The rest of America obeyed natural cycles of thawing and freezing. Southern California seemed to maintain sunshine year round. “While the rest of the country froze, Pasadena gloated over its natural abundance at the New Year’s Day Festival, better known as the Tournament of the Roses. Since 1890 the city had honored its floral glut in a truly Arcadian communal boast. Foot races were run, games were played, and chariots were raced. There was even a jousting match… But the day’s centerpiece was the parade of flower-bedecked carriages that wove through the city’s streets, ridden by Pasadena’s beaming beauties who threw flowers as they went.” These were different rituals from those “vegetation ceremonies” of decay and revival, death and resurrection, discussed by Frazer in The Golden Bough (a favorite of Marvel Parsons). Where plants in the northeast withered and died each year, the dead land ceding to lilacs in spring rain, California was a philosopher’s stone, somehow deathless. It became a gnostic, transhumanist focal point for those wishing to surpass the usual human limits, to find glory or God in ethereal heights. The clear skies drew both the aviation industry and the film crews to Hollywood, producing immortal images of men and women now long since passed, their features and expressions saved from death, their names memorialized in the coral-pink, brass-rimmed stars that run from Gower Street to La Brea Avenue, where the just beyond, tar pits oozing methane preserve the reliquum corpora of Ice Age megafauna.
With friends and fellow schemers, Parsons adopted the phrase Ad Astra per Aspera: through struggle to stars. He and Ed Forman, all through high school, worked on homemade rockets, launched from the desert-like wilderness of nearby Arroyo Seco; the pair “swiftly became inseparable as they drove each other on to create more complex and explosive sky-rockets, the balsa wood tubes growing larger, more aerodynamic, sprouting fins and nose cones just like the rockets pictured in pulps. “Powder monkeys,” classmate Marjorie Zisch called them. Parsons also pursued “solitary sports” with “an air of old-world romance” like fencing and archery. What can we make of this shared love of past and future, except an attitude of “anywhere but here”?
Then the economy crashed. “Within two years” of the Wall Street crash, the Parsons’ family fortune was depleted.8 His grandparents’ house, a decadent Xanadu overlooking the Arroyo, became witness to “seventy-nine despairing investors” who plunged from its Colorado Street Bridge to their death. So began Marvel’s Seven Labors. Awakened from the “dreamworld” of his well-off childhood, Parsons was forced to find work at the Hercules Powder Company, helping with the manufacture of “ammonium nitrate for coal stripping, nitroglycerine for ditch blasting, gelatine for shaft sinking, and ammonia dynamite for road building.”9 In letters home he described the desolate manufacturing plant as “a scene in Hell,” with “muddy molten slag flowing downward—fan-like flames reddening the sky.” The plant averaged one worker fatality per year; Parsons suffered splitting headaches from the inevitable absorption of nitroglycerine through the skin, which dilates the blood vessels. Here he picked up an encyclopedic knowledge of chemicals and explosives.
As he had progressed from blowing up the lavatories at the military academy to shooting off rockets, Parsons had learned to control explosions, to temper their bite, and to recognize their character. To him an explosion was not a violent and meaningless release of energy but a dance of expansion, one that could be studied as one might study a symphony.10
Let us compare, to draw out shared patterns, the trajectory of George Ellery Hale, hailed as “Priest of the Sun” by our Times:
While lying on the peak of Mount Wilson, Hale became convinced that this would be the perfect location for a new observatory, one which would forever change man’s perception of the universe. Like other newcomes to California, Hale was intent on translating his dreams into reality. By 1980 he had conjured up the funding and built a sixty-inch reflector telescope on the exact spot where he had lain… The mirror of Hale’s telescope was eight inches thick and weighed just under a ton… Along with the 150 tons of steel that made up its intricate mounting, it had been hauled to the mountaintop by man and mule, a task which took over a year to complete. Just below the telescope Hale had built lodging for astronomers hardy enough to make the nine-mile hike along a winding dusty footpath to the mile-high peak. Known as “The Monastery,” the building was embellished with mystic Egyptian symbols. On the opening night of the facility, Hale and his astronomical colleagues dedicated the building with pseudo-monastic rituals. Women were not allowed entry.
Soon Hale expanded his ambition, founding Caltech through the funding of lumber tycoon Arthur Fleming. Intent on making Caltech a world-class institution within just a matter of years, Hale set out on a restless nationwide tour. Through letters and over dinners, through proxies or in person, Hale cajoled and flattered the great scientists of the day… He was unflagging in his enthusiasm and persistence until he had exhausted his targets into capitulation… He suffered a number of nervous breakdowns.”
The rocket, at some basic level, is a “crucible into which elements are thrown and set alight,” much like the internal combustion engine of a car, “powered by the explosion of gases in a cylinder.” But the motor must be sturdy enough to withstand these great pressures from within, and must channel these pressures in a single direction to obtain lift, without bursting itself apart into pieces. There must be an evenness to the burn, a steady release and ignition of fuel. The rocket must carry not just its own fuel, but its own oxygen with it, since it travels beyond the atmosphere, and therefore cannot draw on ambient resources. More lessons for an exquisite science.
There were just the right people, and just the right funds, at the right moment, to give Parsons the lift he so needed. Pasadena’s Caltech, a “scientific Athens among the orange groves,” with its “white terracotta classrooms and subterranean laboratories,” its “arcaded lawns” and gargoyle-guarded Romanesque revival cloisters became his new home, a sort of priesthood to science. He teamed up with grad student Frank Malina, who had become enthralled with rockets after reading Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon; they were a meeting of Game A and Game B. Malina preferred “to put theory before experimentation”; when the nascent Suicide Squad made its first proposals to Caltech’s Guggenheim-funded aeronautical laboratory, Malina downplayed the proposal’s ambition to avoid the scandals of Goddard. As for Parsons? Theodore von Kármán, an aeronautics pioneer who took the Squad under his wing, “felt that in a nascent science [like rocketry] and unorthodox mind-set was a valuable commodity to have”; and Malina, though noting Parsons’ lack of mathematical talent, was drawn to Parsons’ “flexibility” and “freewheeling brain.”
The group began meeting on Wednesdays at Parsons’ home, playing duets on piano and blasting phonograph records, drinking Parsons’ homemade absinthe and famed “poison punch,” or grabbing cheap seats for performances of Madame Butterfly. They were soon joined by Tsien Hsue-shen—descendent of the emperor Qian Liu Tsien, isolated in the student body for his aristocratic arrogance, and nicknamed “Son of Heaven”—as well as Apollo “Amo” Smith, son of a father “obsessed with the classics and piqued by his unexceptional surname." (Apollo's siblings including “sisters Diana and Athena, brothers Hermes and Orpheus, and the family dog Cerberus.”) Smith was notorious on campus for his eccentricity, for flying gliders, for working on oil rigs, and for “wearing a pith helmet to which he attached a ventilator and a weather vane” which kept his head cool in the Angelano summers.
Pynchon’s parabolic plot structure proceeds to its zenith in the California deserts:
The desert has always been a testing ground. It is a place where devils tempt morals, heat sears endurance, and sheer soundless magnitude confounds the sanity of the solitary man. But it is also fit for transcendence and communion: “There are places where humours and fluids become rarefied,” says Jean Baudrillard, “where the air is so pure that the influence of the stars descends direct from the constellations.” For Aleister Crowley the “beloved Sahara” embodied just such a spirit: elemental, ancient, silent, it was a stage facing out onto the universe on which he could act out his rituals and incantation.
The Mojave, though peppered with ochred cave paintings and yonnic carvings, had become more scientific than mystical—bombing ranges and airfields and explosive manufacturers, “an almighty backyard in which scorched earth and noise exploded out against the fossil silence.” (Over in Los Alamos, they were building an atom bomb.)
Here, the Suicide Squad chased their transhumanist aspirations with an aesthetics of limitlessness, space stretching to the horizon. Their task not just science but spectacle: selling the military investors meant putting on a show. Kármán, a sitting member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Army Air Corps Research, had brokered the Squad’s initial pitch nearly two years prior. The presentation never mentioned rockets—Malina and Kármán agreeing that its “poor reputation… in serious scientific circles”[15] would hurt their chances at funding. Instead, they told the Committee about "jet propulsors," which could assist the takeoff of heavy-laden bombers from combat zones, where lengthy runways were few and far between. Now, Bouschey, an army lieutenant and student under Kármán, would fly a 700lb Ercoupe monoplane with Parsons’ handpacked rockets strapped onto the wings. They were getting plenty of power but they struggled with stability: the powder fuel had to be densely pressed and compacted for an even burn; even the smallest air pockets could mean a fatal explosion for Bouschey.
Half a decade earlier Clark Millikan—son of Caltech’s executive chairman, and a professor of aeronautics for the college—had called Parsons’ astronautic aspirations a comic-book fantasy. Now, with the whiff of legitimacy in the dry desert air, he swoops in for press shots, his figure crowding out Parsons who is at that point slick with sweat and sleep-deprived, having stayed up through the night working to meet deadline. Standing on Millikan’s right side, Marvel tries to lean into the frame, but the camera fails to capture him. “Perhaps because of his lack of reverence, perhaps because he was not officially affiliated with Caltech, or perhaps because he just didn’t get there before the shutter closed, in this public relations photo, which is reprinted frequently in many of the staple textbooks on rocketry, Parsons has been cropped from view.” The Ercoupe takes off from the runway at an unprecedented fifty-degree angle, wheels clearing ground in half the usual, propeller-powered time. In early December, Pearl Harbor is bombed. The Squad receives a research grant from the NAS for $125,000.
But the black powder approaches, which had fuelled their desert spectacle for years, would no longer cut it. Parsons had tried dozens of different propellant mixtures, with subtle variations in preparation and ingredients. GALCIT 27, his twenty-seventh iteration, had been used for the Ercoupe tests; a few months later, Parsons was up to GALCIT 46. Engines were still regularly exploding, destabilized by temperature fluctuations while in storage. For the Ercoupe tests, Parsons had hand-packed units the morning before, just to prevent the inevitable degradation. But military-grade hardware required consistency. At last, after traveling the country scouting rival rocketry efforts, Parsons had his Eureka moment, triggered by the smell of asphalt and a memory of reading about Greek Fire. It was as if “all the various stuff that was in the back of Jack’s mind jelled,” Frank Malina would recall—all his life adding up towards one moment, the seemingly random walk of a life re-organized into telos. For GALCIT 53, roofing tar was melted down and supplemented by potassium perchlorate, then cast directly into the engine chambers, cooling without crack or fissure. This plasticized approach to solid-fuel rockets would end up used in ballistic missiles and space shuttles’ booster rockets, decades down the line.
Or we might compare Parsons’ father, Marvel Sr.:
In the immediate years after leaving Los Angeles, Marvel had lived a picaresque life. He had joined the army, becoming a champion shot, and had been part of the United States force that had chased the Mexican revolutionary Pancho villa across Mexico…
How it ends: Sr. suffers a heart attack, takes on a paranoid fantasy, is committed to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital (overlapping, for a year, with Ezra Pound), and “persists in the belief that his death was imminent… He showed considerable emotional instability, would cry very readily, had ideas of unworthiness, felt himself incapable of discharging his duties…”
Meanwhile, Parsons—hypnotized by Old World romance, and struck by parallels between quantum physics and Crowleyite philosophy (observer effects; non-locality) slowly falls under the spell of Aleister’s Canadian disciple, Wilfred T. Smith—a clerk at a SoCal utilities company, who had founded the Agape Lodge. Crowley’d had the foresight to cross-breed Eastern & Western traditions in a popular package, but he was also a bullshitter extraordinaire, racking up literal and figurative debt wherever he went, inventing new titles for himself, using his the powers of his “mesmeric personality” without much thought to the concomitant responsibilities. “Alcoholism and the asylum were not uncommon ends for those who had known him too well,” particularly women. But his fiery notion of magick as “Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will” was exactly the sort of hyperstitional transcendence of limits that'd always appealed to Parsons. Crowley had first come up and been initiated in the Golden Dawn, a hermetic order (to which Yeats had belonged) which held a transhumanist belief that “humans were only partway up the ladder of psychical evolution and that if, properly disciplined, the human will was capable of anything it wished.”
It was a New Age for Angelano religion, a spirituality trend arm-in-arm with its burgeoning, century-long health fad; many of these rising belief systems claimed scientific backing. The 19th Century’s Spiritualism, Christian Science, New Thought, and Theosophy gave way to Hindu mysticism, Buddhist imports, the Church of Light with its “Religion of the Stars,” the Tibetan-influenced Institute of Mentalphysics, the Sanskrit interests of the Vedanta Society, the Egyptian influences of the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, the Church of Divine Science, Mankind United, the New Thought Alliance, the Christ-Way College of Occult Science. Josephine Cox, known as Mother Trust in the Superet Light Doctrine Church she founded, had earlier gained a reputation as a miracle healer and psychic; now, she claimed to have rediscovered Christian metaphysics through her ability to perceive the “auras” and “vibrations” of atoms. Aimee Semple McPherson started the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel in Echo Park’s Angelus Temple, attracting tens of thousands of members by radio broadcast, but eventually breaking down in a “string of nervous breakdowns and unseemly divorces,” eventually faking her own kidnapping then dying of barbiturates.
For Parsons, half the appeal is family. “I was an only and lonely child, and it is a fine thing to inherit such a large and splendid family. I never knew a father, and it is nice to have one now,” Parsons wrote to Smith.[16] But Parsons’ charisma and drive was beginning to eclipse Smith’s own. His recruitment drives brought in friends and coworkers, poaching sci-fi writers from Heinlein’s Laurel Canyon Mañana Society—all of whom were loyal to Jack first and foremost. As his rocket work became more lucrative, he purchased Fleming’s old mansion on Orange Grove Boulevard and converted it into a group home for OTO11—another nostalgic return to his childhood. Soon the Son began to displace the Father—winning the favor not only of Lodge members, but of Crowley himself, the organization’s true Pater.
A similar displacement played out in Parsons’ love life. For years, his wife Helen had faithfully supported her husband’s alchemical ambitions, giving savings and pocket money so that he might continue purchasing rocketry supplies. Now, as those sacrifices finally began to pay off, Parsons invited Helen’s half-sister Betty Northrup into the Lodge and the pair began an affair. Helen returned from a holiday to find Betty living in her home, dressing in her clothes, and sleeping with her husband. With the “merciless candor” encouraged at OTO, Parsons told her bluntly that he preferred Betty sexually, a “fact” he could “do nothing about.” Helen’s jealousy was a “bestial piece of vanity,” (Parsons quoting Crowley on the destable “idiocy” of marriage). Aleister’s liturgies praised the pursuit of individual desire as highest good, anticipating Ayn Rand’s objectivism and hippy free love alike. Rules are recommendations: what you do when watched. Integrity (like monogamy) was a middle-class scam. Wife- and husband-swapping was common among the brotherly lovers.12 Helen began living with Wilfred Smith himself, avenging her slight by giving herself to Parsons’ mentor and father figure. Being herself displaced, she would displace Regina Kahl—Smith’s previous lover—in turn.[19] “[Kahl’s] tantrums reverberated through the house, especially when Smith revealed that Helen was to take over Kahl’s role as priestess in the weekly mass.” Kahl’s “drive and domineering forcefulness” had been integral to helping found the Agape Lodge, and preserving its charter during the depths of the Depression. Now “a new wind was blowing.”[20]
Rooms in the new Orange Grove mansion were distributed in accordance with Lodge hierarchy. Parsons and Betty received a two-room suite, Helen and Wilfred a master bedroom, and the attic’s servant quarters were left for “the less exulted and lower-rent-paying members” of the Lodge. Parsons fenced on the lawn and sampled his collection of fruit brandies, womanizing and practicing magic, a “lifestyle that echoed the Byronic heroes of the past, resounding to the ever present texture of myth.” Though he donated most of his paycheck to the house, the actual labor and upkeep fell to lower-ranking members. Utopian visions of commune living gave way to reality: “The elderly Jane Wolfe was left to do the shopping for the entire house, while [the widowed mother] Phyllis Seckler was expected to do all the cooking.” Avant-garde actor Frederic Mellinger shirked his watering duties in the garden, its plants withering and dying. “Meanwhile, many felt that Betty was shirking her share of the labor,” and the “incessant cries of members’ children added to the tension.”
What money Parsons did not pour into the Lodge, he sent to Crowley, financing the publication with Lady Frieda Harris of Aleister’s “Thoth” tarot deck. Organizing rituals, reading groups, and parties for OTO had become a second job—in addition to his grueling twelve-hour days at Arroyo Seco—and Parsons begins taking large doses of amphetamines to stay on top of it all. All was in flux, and full of potential. “Everything is going so far… that it is bewildering. The company will either be a wonderful success or a glorious flop, there won’t be any in between.” Parsons’ poetry from the time speaks of “madness” and ecstasy, of an enchanted and Quixotic worldview where each “wagon [was] a dragon, each beer mug a flag that brims with ambrosial wine.” Zenith: this is the meaning of the height before a crash. “The wind and the sky are ours, heaven and all its stars,” like wax-winged Icarus.
Or let us examine what becomes of Smith, continuing our constellate. Crowley, having lost faith in his former disciple, writes the a Lodge twelve-page letter—a “work of byzantine complexity,” an “abstruse mixture of cabbalistic calculation, omen telling, and oracle reading” all pointing to one, irrevocable conclusion: “Wilfred T. Smith is not a man at all; he is the Incarnation of some God.” He must leave the Lodge for good, tattoo his forehead “666,” and exile himself in the desert. Contact with Lodge members were strictly forbidden.
The members of Agape Lodge were struck dumb. No one could tell if the letter was a blessing or a curse. The calculations were precise, but one had to wonder whether the systems had been somewhat abused. Nevertheless, Crowley’s word was gospel.
In a private letter that year, Crowley had spoken to Prussian-born Lodge member Max Schneider, an astrologer and jeweler with whom he had long kept correspondence. “No doubt by this time you will have got my solution” to the problem of Smith, he conveyed. “His departure should clear things up considerably, although it will take a little time to get rid of the old influence.” Smith, in his own correspondence with Crowley, accepted his Damoclean fate: “Many times these many years I have speculated as to how and when my turn would come as it has so many others, and now it is here.” Helen Parsons in tow, Smith would travel to a turkey farm in the desert, to begin his magical retirement. Marvel was appointed Lodge Saladin and Protector; he soon switches to calling Crowley “father.”
The Suicide Squad had become an offshoot of GALCIT, then incorporated as Aerojet, and finally reorganized as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with Malina as its president. The administrative role meant he was zoomed out, “aware of more and more research activities but in less and less detail.” Dozens of traditionally trained engineers and scientists were becoming involved, the California startup bureaucratizing, the “old familial atmosphere” disappearing, and soon there was little place for a man like Parsons. The prophets were being pushed out by priests. “Aerojet was transforming itself into a regular business which demanded regular personalities willing to carry out regular jobs.” He and Forman were persuaded to sell their stock for a meager $11k. By the 1960s, the shares would be valued at $12m. Even Parsons’ bitter nemesis Fritz Zwicky characterized the deal as robbery.
During the war years, many of the original OTO members had moved out, and were replaced by bohemians and fortune tellers, pulp authors and nuclear scientists. One of the new residents was L. Ron Hubbard, model for Anthony Boucher’s character Vance D. Wimpole—“charismatic seducer and primer murder suspect”—in Rocket to the Morgue. It is Parsons’ turn to be displaced.
Hubbard is the most magickal person Parsons has ever met. He tells fantastical stories of escaping Japanese-occupied Java on a raft “with bullet wounds and broken feet,” of lassoing polar bears in the Aleutians, and sinking subs with depth charges in the open Pacific. He tells Lodge members that scientists at the British Museum have measured his skull and declared it unique. Sci-fi editor Jack Williamson recalls “his eyes, the wary light-blue eyes that I somehow associate with the gunmen of the old West, watching me sharply as he talked as if to see how much I believed.”
Hubbard moves through the young women of the lodge one by one. Robert Cornog, a physicist fresh off the Manhattan Project, stumbled into Parsons’ room one night to see Hubbard wrapped around Betty “like a starfish on a clam.” Nonchalant on the surface, a stressed Parsons throws himself fully into ever-blacker magic, attempting to summon demonic entities, perhaps with the aim of sabotaging Hubbard. He neglects his OTO duties, drawing pentagrams and reciting Enochian chant all hours of the day. Crowley writes him with reprimands, but Parsons is so fully under Hubbard’s spell that he resigns as Saladin, sells the 1003 Orange Grove mansion, and invests all the proceeds in a rash business scheme of Hubbard’s. Hubbard and Betty fly off with his money, joyboat yachts on the East Coast, and get married. Then Hubbard invents dianetics, expands it into Scientology, and succeeds where Crowley failed, building a worldwide religion with nearly ten million members and raking in $300m of income a year. By way of mystical experience, Hubbard cites “the shamans of North Borneo, Sioux medicine men,” and the “cults of Los Angeles” in promotional materials. Dianetics’ central claim—taking advantage of “the twentieth century’s childlike trust in scientific knowledge” plus “the Californian desire for self-improvement”—is the unblocking of traumas so as to liberate the “optimum computing machine” within from its “aberrative circuits.” As part of this process of sweeping-away, patients must undergo a ten-day audit, revealing to auditors their most traumatic moments, which are recorded and kept on file, in part to serve as future blackmail.
Without a role or purpose, “indolence set in.” Parsons takes to spending hours in the bathtub, playing with toy boats. The thick smog-haze of pollution settles around Pasadena, most of the old Orange Grove mansions sold off and torn down for apartments and condominiums, the neighborhood becoming less and less distinct, more and more a part of metropolitan sprawl.
When the war had ended, V-2 missiles were carted into the Pasadena train station, shipped across the world from their origin in Germany’s Harz Mountains, “where [they’d] been manufactured by slave labor.” As the decade progressed, anti-Communist blacklists circulate, the faintest whisper of Red association sufficient to rescind the security clearance of every Suicide Squad member save Apollo. Parsons moves to Manhattan Beach, living in a “concrete castle,” and is briefly forced to pump gas at filling stations to pay the bills. Malina has his U.S. passport revoked, his “strong moral sense… offended as he watched the German V-2 scientists, led by Wernher von Braun—war criminals in his eyes—welcomed to his home country [to] spearhead the postwar United States missile and space program.” He retires on his JPL stock, and spends the rest of his life painting kinetic art. The “Son of Heaven,” Tsien Hsue-shen, is kept on a kind of house arrest, endlessly harassed by the authorities, prevented from working and prevented from leaving the country, so as not to share technological secrets with Communist China. After five years he’s deported, receiving a hero’s welcome and going on to build China’s ICBM program, “becoming a national icon in the process,” and serving, for a time, as a tutor to Mao.
How it ends: “The man who had done so much to establish the science of rocketry in America…" now works "making special effects for Hollywood film companies.” His specialty is the “squib,” a tiny explosive placed beneath an actor or film extra’s clothes, simulating the impact of a bullet in flesh.
How it ends: broken glass scattered about the floor from vials, flasks, test tubes; reams of paper wafting around the room, with chemical formulas and molecular sketches, pentagrams and cabalistic charts. The press starts taking photos with flash, and some of the unbroken bottles of chemicals need to be covered, so light-sensitive chemicals won’t ignite.
Marvel'd tried to escape to Mexico, packed up a trailer with paints and canvases, phonographs and archery equipment and fencing foils. They were supposed to leave, the day he died. Instead, the skin under his eyes has vanished, exposing the bleach-white bones beneath, “Parsons’ searching right arm and right side of his face” having “borne the full brunt of the blast.”
He is cremated and scattered in the Mojave, at the junction of “two massive, whirring power lines.” A wind sweeps his ashes into the air, like smoke.
And the JPL-manufactured Voyagers 1 and 2 continue their one-way path from home, out of the solar system and into the stars. On the far side of the moon—the dark side of the moon—a forty-kilometer crater is named “Parsons.”
Roget’s Thesaurus, cited in Pendle’s Strange Angel.
All unmarked quotations from Pendle.
John Maynard Keynes, on Newton.
Pseudopodium.
This oscillation plays out the usual three-tiered world structure, of profane earth sandwiched by an underworld hell, and an ethereal heavens. David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art, writes: “As do other shamanistic peoples throughout the world, the San [or “bushmen”] believe in a realm above and another below the surface of the world on which they live… Shamanistic flight is… as widely reported as underground journeys.”
The New York Times, in “a woefully misinformed editorial,” ridiculed rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard for lacking a basic high school understanding of physics, claiming that physics had demonstrated the impossibility of propulsion with a vacuum. The editorial’s author, Pendle writes, “failed to understand the critical third law of motion, the one even the twelve-year-old Parsons had grasped: ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.’”
William Bainbridge
A similar fate also befell the Pynchon family in the Great Depression, Thomas being born in the mid-30s, two decades younger than Parsons, and eventually working for Boeing in exactly that rocket industry which Parsons had helped found.
“There had been a strong powder industry in California ever since its mining heyday”; Hercules had become “the largest TNT production plant in America during the First World War,” producing over seven million pounds per month.
This, in a description of Parsons’ forensic work in the trial of LAPD captain Earl Kynette, head of police intelligence. Kynette was charged with the attempted-murder-by-car-bombing of a retired LAPD officer Harry Raymond, who had begun working as a PI for the anti-corruption reformer Clifford Clinton. Parsons, playing star witness, “read not just the mangled car and tattered wall but the exploded casing of the bomb itself, as clearly as a book”; analyzing the fragments, he built a convincing replica, blew up a junkyard Chrysler with it, and then compared the ruined casing from his own experiment with those found at the crime scene. Kynette was found guilt; the trial would eventually bring down the city’s mayor Frank Shaw—heavily speculated to have been involved in the bombing—in a rare recall vote.” Parsons left the stand with his head held high, his standing as an ‘expert’ confirmed.”
Ordo Templi Orientis.
Parsons would invite close friend, the science fiction writer Grady McMurtry, into OTO and then immediately sleep with McMurtry’s wife Claire and then hand her off to Smith, the couple’s marriage disintegrating “as Claire gave herself over to the licentiousness of the Lodge.” When she discovered she was pregnant, Parsons then financed her abortion.