Who killed Jack Parsons?

Black ops, assassins and the aftermath of the Babalon Working

Star date June 17, 1952, 5:45, the explosion shakes the neighbourhood of millionaires row in a quiet suburb of Pasadena. If you were close enough you would have heard a double blast, which echoed up to Arroyo Seco and Devil’s Gate dam. Parson’s injuries were observably severe to the four witnesses at the scene who carried him from the building, though the newspaper reports how he methodically directed his rescuers while being loaded into the ambulance.

A pack of newsmen were there before the angular Cameron, picking through a wreckage of burned paper and broken glass. We are far later than them, sifting through their newsprint and archives and unreliable memories in turn, as if there is such a thing as a singular truth to be found.

The fictional detective Erik Lönnrot in Jorge Luis Borges’s Death and the Compass arrives at a murder scene, and rather than taking the obvious course, that of a bungled robbery, turns to the books of Kabbalah and the unfinished sentenced hammered out on a manual typewriter and sagely pronounces ‘I prefer a more rabbinical solution.’ Though I am not a historian or a biographer, I too am looking for signs, those entanglements, epiphanies and visions which a magician can never dismiss. Jack Parsons ends, mid sentence, and I believe his work can be completed from the fragments left behind and that such work is necessary to fulfil the promise of the Babalon Working.

The obvious conclusion is that it was a terrible accident, but as Simone DeBeauvoir wrote,

There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.

The death of Jack Parsons is just such a violation, a rupture of horror, violence and lost potential, which imprinted the lives of those nearest to him and subsequently the entire counterculture. The blood of the martyr, the blood of the saint, cries out for vengeance.

The 37-year-old Parsons took thirty-seven minutes to die. 37 is the 13th prime number and in Hebrew gematria has many entries which notably include:

Behold!
To be foolish
To set up a banner
Perished
Grew old
To grow great
Tenuity
Breath
Vanity; in vain
Flame
A glittering sword.

You may recognise with a chill how many of these terms appear in his Liber 49, The Book of Babalon.

Stricken with grief at the senseless loss, his widow Cameron searched for a cause. When you are relying on your witch-senses, there are no mere accidents. They had one foot out of the door, the car sat packed on the driveway, ready for Mexico and then Israel for a second chance at life and onwards to further revelations at Chorazin, the reputed birth place of Antichrist which Parsons had visited in the spirit vision during his abyssal initiation. The US security services had rescinded his security clearance for removing documents from the Hughes Aircraft Company and had trawled up the previous sex-cult allegations and communist connections which effectively banished him from rocketry in the States. We have the FBI file where Parsons insists to the spooks that Thelema is anti-fascist and anti-communist, to no avail. The file contains reports of a pregnant woman leaping through a fire, masked revels, and libertinage in the misremembered ‘Church of Thelema’ that took place at the now demolished mansion at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue. These were an affront to American values as McCarthyism tightened its grip at home. Even balmy Pasadena felt the chill of the nuclear threat as it hardened into the permafrost of the Cold War. Now, in the shadow of that lost property, the coachhouse with its makeshift lab had been gutted too, a terrible circle closed.   

Cameron was the first to ask who killed Jack Parsons, and she soon had a suspect with a clear motive: Captain Earl E. Kynette, whom Parsons had testified against at trial as an expert witness, and who was now out on parole. Kynette was an LAPD Police Officer under the bent administration of Chief James Edgar Davis. Kynette bombed the car of the gumshoe Harry Raymond who was investigating the corrupt LA Mayor Larry Shaw, who had appointed Chief Davis – or as we was known, ‘Two-gun’ Davis – as his enforcer. The dashing image of Parsons with the reconstructed pipe bomb was prominent in the press coverage from the trial, which gave fulsome praise for his testimony. He may have drawn on that experience in his untitled Don Quixote poem, where he wrote, ‘See ghouls cut their capers in daily newspapers and fiends in police courts hold sway.’

The LA Times was at war with the mayor, so Parsons had unwittingly placed himself in the crosshairs of a vengeful cop acting for a corrupt city. He was someone who ‘could have an accident,’ though to use a bombing, the same modus operandi, would be a little obvious. Even if you wanted to send a message, the trail would lead straight back to Kynette and the Mayor.

Kynette seems the one solid lead, but that melts under the physical evidence. The truth of the explosion was evinced on the body of a still conscious Parsons; his right forearm obliterated, his other arm and both legs broken, the bones of the jaw and his teeth visible through the flensed side of his face. Preparing a final batch of fulminate of mercury, a highly unstable explosive, he had dropped the coffee tin he was mixing it in and sustained his fatal injuries reaching after it; injuries compounded by a secondary explosion of the other chemicals and high explosives stored haphazardly in the lab in cardboard boxes. His last recorded words in the ambulance on the way to Huntingdon Memorial Hospital do not accuse an assassin, but are the tragic words of a man knowing that his death was assured: ‘I wasn’t done.’ Those words haunt us, being the inverse of Christ’s last words on the cross, ‘Tetelestai’ – the significance of which I explore in The Two Antichrists. The death certificate records: ‘Accident’, ‘Explosion at home due to chemicals’, and gives the cause of death as ‘Multiple injuries of entire body.’ The police report was backed by Ed Forman, Jack’s oldest friend and colleague, who had observed him many times handling volatile chemicals with sweaty hands.

The LA Times had initially not grokked who Jack Parsons was, but that double-life quickly ruptured across the media. ROCKET SCIENTIST KILLED IN PASADENA EXPLOSION became SLAIN SCIENTIST PRIEST IN BLACK MAGIC CULT, LINK LOCAL BLAST VICTIM WITH WEIRD CULT RITES, ‘SEX MADNESS’ CULT OF PASADENA SCIENTIST REVEALED and VENTURES INTO BLACK MAGIC BY BLAST VICTIM REVEALED. Next came POETRY OF MADNESS with a fragment of the Don Quixote poem, then MYSTERY ANGLE ENTERS SCIENTIST’S BLAST DEATH when chemical engineer George W. Santmyers, who had worked with Parsons at Bermite, suggested foul play. He observed that the disposal of chemicals at the scene was not what he expected of the ‘cautious’ and ‘brilliant’ Parsons. But Santmyers also said, ‘Jack was the kindest man I've ever known,’ and ‘He hadn't an enemy in the world.’ He is the source of the claim that Jack was working on developing a new kind of explosive. Such rumours flickered out as local police closed the case, finding no evidence of wrongdoing and no connection with what the scandal sheets called LA’S LUST CULT where ‘Wicked Black Magic Rites flourish in wealthy Pasadena.’

The body had not been identified, and it was a closed casket cremation. We enter the realm of fictions as soon as the casket closed, all the tales fled out like whispering spectres. There is no reason to assume a switch took place, that Jack survived and continued to work in a secret desert base, yet that too immediately becomes part of the folklore.

Jack was cremated, a second passing through the fire, to become like unto a white ash prepared by Hermes the Invisible. Cameron broadcast the ashes at a crossroads of powerlines in the desert. Highly likely it was same site where Jack had received the fatal communication of Liber 49. Cameron of course had not been there for the transmission, but they may well have returned subsequently together to the ritual site; a habit of lovers, serial killers and magicians alike. It was the location where the ash of desert-wandering Cameron would ultimately be sown.

The manner of death is significant when we look at Aleister Crowley’s Liber Cheth, where the adept offers everything to Babalon and passes beyond the abyss:

This is the secret of the Holy Graal, that is the sacred vessel of our Lady the Scarlet Woman, Babalon the Mother of Abominations, the bride of Chaos, that rideth upon our Lord the Beast.

Thou shalt drain out thy blood that is thy life into the golden cup of her fornication.
Thou shalt mingle thy life with the universal life.
Thou shalt keep not back one drop.
Then shall thy brain be dumb, and thy heart beat no more, and all thy life shall go from thee; and thou shalt be cast out upon the midden, and the birds of the air shall feast upon thy flesh, and thy bones shall whiten in the sun.

Then shall the winds gather themselves together, and bear thee up as it were a little heap of dust in a sheet that hath four corners, and they shall give it unto the guardians of the abyss.

When we consider the centrality of Liber Cheth to the mystery of Babalon in Thelema, and the stage Parsons had reached in his magical career with the Antichrist working, his death can be considered a final initiation; a conclusion that is made all the more bittersweet, in that he had lost all in his mundane life and was on the cusp of a transfiguration.   

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Soon stranger ideas began to circulate, all part of the mythology that accrues to any saint. There was a clamour of assassins and their champions.

One suggestion is that Howard Hughes ordered the hit, presumably through Robert Maheu whose off-book black ops were inspiration for Mission Impossible. Maheu is linked to the CIA assassination attempt on Fidel Castro and mind-controlled patsy Sirhan Sirhan’s hit on Bobby Kennedy. The source for this one, or at least its retelling, appears to be Kenneth Anger, who as we can deduce from Hollywood Babylon, loved a good story – and it is a good story. Parsons had worked for the Hughes Aircraft Company, from which he was dismissed for removing documents. If Howard Hughes was acting for the CIA, the likely motive is the American state not wanting to leak rocket technology to the Israelis. Why that would occasion a hit on Jack is difficult to imagine, unless you are willing to take several steps into fresh air. I am fully cognisant of the willingness of the American State to carry out extra-judicial killings, but this would be incredibly heavy-handed. It would have been easier to dragoon him into the already sprawling black state and use his talents, particularly if he was still able to produce the kind of breakthroughs in explosives and rocketry that he demonstrably could. Anger prefers a wilder version, with Hughes’s syphilis-riddled brain provoking him to commission a vengeful slaying.

A story was blowing around the Science Fiction scene, that Parsons had been trying to make a homunculus, but had instead summoned a fire demon which consumed him. Clearly nonsense, but is this a confused version of the Babalon Working constructed from hearsay, the fire demon being the Enochian elemental from the Air of Fire sub-angle that Parsons first sought. By the fire demon that consumed him, do they mean the Devil, Babalon, Cameron, or the Explosion? And where had the idea of the homunculus come from? Jack was trying to bring something to birth with magical powers, but not a homunculus, nor a mandrake. He anticipated a soterological woman who would transform the empires of the Earth within seven years. His manifesto definitively states this. But we have another account with the same odd details, and perhaps it is even the source of the rumour.

Renate Druks related to Nat Freedland, in his engaging but sloppy 1972 The Occult Explosion, that,

I have every reason to believe that Jack Parsons was working on some very strange experiments, trying to create what the old alchemists called a homunculus, a tiny artificial man with magic powers. I think that’s what he was working on when the accident happened.

Druks paints her picture well. We see Jack engaged in an alchemical work, parallel to the preparation of chemicals, using the same glasswork, stirrers and heat sources. One cannot but remark that the death and the alchemical operation are linked magically by the law of contagion, and imaginally by the way we create narratives. But there is no evidence to corroborate her claim. Perhaps the homunculus was destroyed alongside its God, or crawled out of the door into the endless Pasadena dusk towards the dark canyon of the Arroyo Seco.

Yet Druks’s story is important – not because she would briefly study Magick with Jane Wolfe, a Crowley disciple since the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù, Sicily – but because of who had informed her. The emphatic use of ‘every reason’ points us to a source.

You may not know who Renate Druks is, and why should you? An elegant Viennese artist who fled the Nazis for LA, she was one of the three witches of San Miguel de Allende; reposing there at the same time as Leonora Carrington and Cameron, whom she befriended. Cameron moved into Renate’s Malibu beach house for six months after Jack’s death. There she will have talked about Jack, smoking her way through her daily fifty cigarettes, plus the Mexican weed she smuggled back over the border. Did the idea of the homunculus form out of that haze and Cameron’s memories impressed upon Renate. Or Renate made it up, as everyone in that circle seems to have swum in and out of make-believe.

Kenneth Anger went back to the homunculus theory, aged 70, when he spectacularly crashed and then heckled his way through Curtis Harrington’s funeral. 

OH HE DID! I saw it. It held my hand. Its little hand, like a ten­tacle, wrapp­ed itself around my finger. There were 33 others in the crib, but not in full-fruit­ion like this one.

In a stroke Anger combines Masonry, Alchemy and Lovecraft, and the truth behind the story is forever out of reach.

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The triumvirate of Renate Druks, Paul Mathison and Cameron formed ‘The Children,’ a short-lived, mixed-race sex cult aimed at producing a magical child or ‘wormwood star.’ Cameron orchestrated the cross-matching and Renate inevitably fell pregnant with twins, named in utero Lilith and Lucifer, which she initially promised to hand over to Cameron but subsequently aborted.

By all accounts, Renate was a gadfly, the hostess of the notorious ‘come as your madness’ parties which are captured in Anger’s 1954 Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. Kenneth Anger and Curtis Harrington had been introduced to Renate and Cameron via Samson De Brier at whose lair the footage was shot. Renate played Lilith and her partner, the gay Paul Mathison played Pan, and also did the art direction for Curtis Harrington’s 1956 The Wormwood Star, which panned across a series of Cameron paintings (which she later destroyed), and ended with her transformation from her mauve drapery into the alchemical gold garments of her Holy Guardian Angel. Cameron would star again in Harrington’s mermaid horror, the 1961 Night Tide, as one of the sea people, alongside a young siren-lured Dennis Hopper.

If we consider what Jack meant by witchcraft, we must think of these independent female artists living on their own sexual and creative terms. To that list we should also add another friend of Renate, Anaïs Nin, whose memoir of their friendship, Portrait in Three Dimensions, has a cover collage by Druks that includes an iconic Cameron as Babalon from Pleasure Dome. In the text, Nin, who played Astarte, looks sidereally at Cameron, ‘the Satanic Woman’:

She is surrounded by an evil aura, which fascinates Paul, Curtis and Kenneth.

At first Astarte was illuminated in the film, shed her light, but Cameron became a stronger figure as evil, a hypnotic figure, and the mood of decadence and destruction won out.

I suggest that the Druks and Anger set were volatilised by Jack’s sudden death, and the compelling figure of a mourning and unmoored Cameron. On first meeting her, Anger insisted he had waited a thousand years to encounter her, and went on to produce an idiosyncratic, hand-tinted form of Thelema, constellated about her. At this stage Anger was a dilettante; he had not read Crowley, and the Thelemic elements were added after the fact in post-production. Jane Wolfe, once herself a silent film star, could not fathom what the movie had to do with Thelema. Lady Frieda Harris would have a similar reaction, and a more public falling out with Kenneth Anger at the screening of Inauguration in England, which she described as ‘a sacrilege.’ Yet it is Anger who coronates and iconises Cameron: imperious stare, beauty spot, extravagantly lashed, helmeted with chemical red hair, her Joan of Arc angles triangulating down to a carmine mouth. Before we give Anger all the credit, we should note that Renate Druks, (who, incidentally, had acted as the female version of Jack in the Wormwood Star operations) had created Cameron’s spectacular maquillage.

As Cameron collided with the underground arts scene, its junkies and drop-outs, her ephemera produced more spectres, more mirrors. Cameron would continue to emit a corona of conspiracies until her own death in 1995. As late as the 1980s she told the beautifully monikered Dr Strawberry Gatts, the partner of her Tai Chi Chuan sifu, that Jack had been working for the government at a little house at Los Alamos where there had been a fire and a cover-up, with the body of Jack brought back to Pasadena; we know that cannot be true. In 1987 Cameron even mused to OTO Caliph William Breeze as to whether she was the spy originally sent into 1003, ‘Maybe I was sent in there, maybe I was an intelligence drone.’

It may be useful to meditate on that startlingly Philip K. Dickian conceit, and realise that Cameron’s truths are perhaps more mutable than those of any other witness.

Was it the destructive Cameron then, with the way she emotionally tortured the ever-patient Parsons, who should bear responsibility for his death? Here, it makes sense to first look at the theology of Thelema. The text I want to use to illuminate this point is Liber Aleph, a book of 208 teachings Crowley prepared for his magical son, Frater Achad, known amongst men as Charles Stansfeld Jones; a seemingly exemplary student who had rocketed through the AA syllabus, but fell from the path. Achad entered into increasingly bizarre Qabbalistic speculation, joined the Catholic Church, declared the Aeon of Maat and had a mental breakdown. As early as 1919 Crowley had begun to doubt Achad, and he was ultimately expelled from the order in 1936. With Achad gone, Jack Parsons considered himself to be the son who would fulfil the prophecies of Liber AL. Cameron huskily confirmed this in a BBC documentary:

Hubbard never got into Crowley that much. Ah, But Jack, Jack, knew Crowley’s work very well and considered himself Crowley’s magical son.

Cameron is mistaken about Hubbard, as she was late on the scene. Hubbard had in fact clandestinely pursued his interest in Crowley after she knew him.

In Chapter 100, On Sirens, The Great Wild Beast, To Mega Therion, writes:

In every great Initiation there is an Ordeal, wherein appeareth a Siren or Vampire appointed to destroy the candidate.

Does Cameron answer to the description as La Belle Dame sans Merci? Kenneth Anger seems to thinks so, in the same documentary he says:

Hubbard came into Jack’s life and ruined everything, and Hubbard was, what we technically call, an elemental demon. He had all the characteristics of a witch; and so did this woman that came into Jack’s life at the same time: Marjorie Cameron.

Though Anger and Cameron had fallen out at this point – indeed Anger seemed to fall out with everyone – it is significant that he connects these two red heads.

Crowley repeatedly used the motif of the destroying woman in his work, as he is in the lineage of the Decadent movement and an accursed poet, a poète maudit. But in Chapter 102 of Liber Aleph he asks:

Shall I not take this Vampire, if she be such, and master her, and turn her to the great End?

Crowley concludes that he must do so, ‘With Courage conquering Fear, I will approach Thee.’

Did Parsons read Liber Aleph and take these as missives destined for him? If so, it could only have been in manuscript form; the book was not published until 1962. The point I wish to make is that if Cameron is the fatal agent, Parsons had no choice but to proceed, as indeed Crowley did. Thelema is a philosophy of self-overcoming, of the mastery of fear, and of the mystery of Babalon. ‘Do what thou wilt’ places responsibility in one’s own hands. Cameron may have made those hands shake, but it was Parsons task to still his heart and complete the Work.

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The other rumours in LA at the time were of suicide. Previous Agape Lodge Master Wilfred Smith and Jack’s ex-wife Helen Parsons-Smith were of this opinion. Wilfred had seen Parsons at his most distraught, at his lowest ebb having lost his mansion, and gone from rocketeer to pumping gas, as well as witness Jack swear the Oath of the Abyss and declare himself Antichrist. Helen had never liked Cameron, for obvious reasons, though she and Wilfred put her up for a time after Jack’s death. They saw her as a terrible influence on Jack who had emotionally crucified him in the years after the Babalon Working. For them, Jack had taken a way out, his unconscious prompting the slip.

But I want to leave LA behind, and let time turn another seventeen times around the Sun from Jack Parson’s Greater Feast – or as another system would say, to go forward on the timetrack – to consider that other participant in the Babalon Working. I will scry the events through America’s greatest writer, living at this moment, in damp and dreary London.

William Burroughs takes out his great slab-faced scissors, a shrike’s knuckleduster, as he studies The Sunday Times of October 5, 1969. He is engaged in the practice of magic, has always been engaged in the practice of magic, ever since he learned the Curse of the Blinding Worm from his Irish nanny who would lure him into the woods to be sexually abused by her boyfriend. It was the first terrible intrusion of the Ugly Spirit who he would seek refuge from in a dark triad of heroin, boys and Scientology.

Yet Burroughs is not cutting up a headline to permute, he is patiently severing the head of a man, handsome even in the punched black smear of newsprint. He looks up Byronically from under his brow, and smiles at thin-lipped Bill.

The newspaper has made its cut too; we do not see the full image, the booth in which he is squeezed with two elegantly dressed women, one who is only indicated by a feathered hat and her manicured hands tapping a cigarette into a glass ashtray amongst the drinks and blotted napkins, (perhaps Renate Druks?), the other whose lips glisten with fresh lipstick as she too smiles and shows her teeth. The red headed beauty of Belle Plain Iowa is one Marjorie Cameron, just Cameron to her friends. I have not managed to locate the bar, but imagine that it belongs to the lost Los Angeles of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, the stucco world of heart-throbs and starlets that perhaps only survives in Frank and Musso’s or the Chateau Marmont. The picture is on the day of their marriage, celebrated in the San Juan Capistrano courthouse, all Mars red sandstone set on a grey granite plinth, this is the wedding reception before the greater celebration of the amoris nuptae.

There is a caption to the picture in the paper, and Burroughs cuts carefully around that too. It states in capital letters PARSONS, and then quarantined between quotation marks “the AntiChrist.” Burroughs studies the face for a moment, turns it face down on the table and selects his next tool. He writes, in his oracular vulture script, four sparse words – ‘A dream come true.’ The fragile artefact is tucked into a manila envelope and survives, hidden away in the sprawling archives of arguably America’s greatest modern writer. At the end of this tale we will loop the tape and clear this engram.

The Sunday Times article is a crucial document, personally for Burroughs, as he struggled with his realisation that Scientology, which had once been so important to him was in fact a con, another system of control. He was to openly go against the cult a year later in the Los Angeles Free Press in the duelling article, ‘I, William Burroughs, challenge you, L Ron Hubbard.’ Burroughs did not doubt the efficacy of the method, but the way in which it was being operated.

Culturally, the Sunday Times article was important in that it told the story of the Babalon Working to the Great British public. The article made explicit the centrality to the opus of the afore-mentioned Lafayette Ron Hubbard and did not spare the lurid details. Given the timing, and the rise of the counter-culture, many aspiring English occultists will have first come across the story of Jack Parsons here. Crowley had begun to appear in Oz Magazine and International Times articles, but Kenneth Grant’s crucially important Magical Revival was still to be published, some three years later in 1972. Grant will write that Hubbard,

is still at large, having grown wealthy and famous by a misuse of the secret knowledge which he had wormed out of Parsons.

The supposition is that Hubbard is utilising the secret of the IXº.

Hubbard is indeed a wealthy man, as a result of his new religious movement, regardless of his esoteric activities. He is shown in the article opposite a picture of Crowley, one turbaned and garbed in Eastern manner, clutching a curved dagger, the other dressed as Commodore in a Navy of his own devising. Perhaps a case of guilt by association? A classic smear campaign? A continuation of the John Bull articles which pronounced Crowley as ‘a man we would like to hang’?

The publication may have fuelled Hubbard’s paranoia, who wrote of Scientology in 1969 that, ‘Whole governments have crushed down on me to halt it. I do not exaggerate.’

Certainly the cult had began its internal inquisitions under the heading of ETHICS, with transgressors being stripped of their uniforms and marked out by a dirty grey rag tied to their left arm; a trend that has only become worse over time, with allegations of abuse, imprisonment and violence meted out. Hubbard was a vindictive man, those who wish to know more can look up the concept of ‘Fair Game’ and the doctrine of ‘Suppressive Persons.’

In the same year, LRH founded the Guardian’s Office, an intelligence agency or secret service, under the nominal command of his then wife Mary Sue Hubbard, which would pursue heretics and defectors and was ultimately responsible for Operation Snow White, an infiltration of the IRS that included wire-tapping, burglary and document destruction. Espionage on such a scale is more akin to the action of a foreign state than a religious cult trying to evade paying taxes. Regardless, Scientology brought the entire IRS to its knees, gaining tax exempt status as a religion in October 1993 after a long and bitterly litigious campaign.

The Church responded to the Sunday Times article in a statement given in December 1969, that Hubbard had ‘Broken up a black magic ring, and rescued a girl.’ A statement likely written by Hubbard himself, and doubled down on as recently as 2008 by the Church of Scientology with the additional detail that science fiction author Robert Heinlein was Hubbard’s handler. These claims are demonstrably false. We can ascertain that Heinlein was broadly pro-Thelema from his attested friendship with Jack, his own reminiscences, and a careful reading of his important novel, Stranger in a Strange Land.

The Jack Parsons escapade does not feature in Hubbard’s latest lavish seventeen volume biography, which has time to show him connecting tomato plants to E-Meters, posing as a great artist and lauded as a poet. Ironically, these are the same kind of blustering oversell that Aleister Crowley engaged in. Jack Parsons has simply vanished from the official Church record, other than in two brief mentions, once in the 8th American Advanced Clinical Courses lecture HYPNOSIS, given on 27 October 1954, and again in a lecture given in Professional Auditor’s Bulletin (PAB) #110, April 1957, referring to him as a ‘good pal’ and only talking about him in terms of rocketry and chemistry. Magick and Babalon are nowhere to be seen.

Yet Scientology cannot put clear water between LRH and Jack Parsons. As I reveal in The Two Antichrists, LRH was not only a protagonist in the most famous magical operation of the New Age, but saw himself as the sole heir to the mantle of Aleister Crowley and directly identified himself as Antichrist at the very pinnacle of his spiritual career.

Cameron had indeed caught Hubbard apparently going through Jack’s trash at South Orange Grove Avenue, which is standard private detective or intelligence procedure. However, he could just as easily have been searching for magical jottings or, more prosaically, a signature or bank details for personal gain. So let us deal with the facts to understand what kind of spook Hubbard was. Hubbard did have a brief stint at the ONI, the Office of Naval Intelligence, but his Navy records do not match the embroidered versions Scientology have produced. His career was in reality a debacle, a catalogue of misadventure, and both real and psychosomatic illnesses. It was the thesis of Dianetics that the sicknesses of the body can be cured by the mind, and Hubbard allegedly engaged in experiments on service men and prisoners of war at Oak Knoll Naval hospital that apparently confirmed that supposition. Hubbard further alleges that on 27 May 1950 the ONI in Washington D.C. sent, ‘a very high-ranking officer, a very very very high-ranking officer. You know brass, BRASS, brass…scrambled eggs, you know, gilt on the cape edge, you know.’

The intention was to put him into civilian service in the government to continue his research. The officer, whom we can identify as Rear Admiral Thorvald Solberg, previously of the Nuclear Manhattan Project and the 1946 Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll, where he positioned the naval ships on which US personnel received their fatal dose of radiation. He went on to join Project Bluebird, which became the CIA’s LSD mind-control Project Artichoke, with the aim of creating mind-controlled assassins. Solberg said that if he refused, Hubbard would be ordered back to active duty, since his naval commission has not been terminated. Hubbard immediately resigned his commission, putting Dianetics and Scientology out of the reach and beyond the control of the US government. Hubbard discusses the black project in his 1951 Science of Survival, the follow up to Dianetics, and draws a line that he will not cross:

This form of hypnotism has been a carefully guarded secret of certain military and intelligence organizations. It is a vicious war weapon and may be of more use in conquering a society than the atom bomb. Pain-drug-hypnosis is a wicked extension of narco-synthesis, the drug hypnosis used in America only during and since the last war. But pain-drug-hypnosis, due mainly to the intent of the operator, is a much more vicious procedure. The Foundation undertook some tests with regard to the effectiveness of pain-drug-hypnosis and found it so appallingly destructive to the personality… Pain-drug-hypnosis is so effectively destructive that the Foundation has ceased experimentation along this line, having already learned enough and refusing to endanger the sanity of individuals.

The opposition to psychiatry, and implicitly the whole MKUltra project, is the one thing we can credit LRH with being on the right side of, other than telling Scientologists not to vote for Nixon. It does suggest that his paranoia had some basis.

They didn’t want to prevent Dianetics. They didn’t want to prevent Scientology, the publications of books. All they wanted to do was get a piece of research done which they in their tyrannical fashion had decided was far more important than any other research that could be done. They wanted ME to work on a project to make men more suggestible. Can you imagine me working on such a project? You can imagine me working on admirals to make them more suggestible, but not on people.

These are very public statements, aimed at both his converts, and any intelligence assets who were keeping tabs on him. Hubbard is creating an enemy, equivalent to Crowley’s ‘Black Brothers,’ whom he called ‘the psychiatrist-psychologist-psychoanalyst clique' and who, with the American Medical Association, shade into the MKUltra world and will use the IRS, and other means, to pursue and destroy Scientology. There is some truth to this, but it soon became part of a nest of lies. In 1955 Hubbard published a pamphlet, Brain-Washing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics, a blatant forgery that pretends to come from the ‘Lenin University,’when no such institution exists. It includes that strange phrase ‘pain-drug-hypnosis’ once more, and proposes that the Communists are using psychiatry to destroy America. It is only Scientology, and strangely, Christian Science which oppose them. He defines Psychopolitics for us:  

Psychopolitics is the art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals, officers, bureaux, and masses, and the effecting of the conquest of enemy nations through “mental healing.”

I note here that ‘art and science’ is a lift from Crowley’s famous definition of Magick as ‘the science and art of causing change in conformity with Will,’ leading me to believe that Hubbard was indeed reading and thinking about Crowley at this date.

By creating a conspiracy of psychiatrists and communists, Hubbard hoped to set the cold monster of McCarthyism against his enemies, and potentially come out on top with his new science of the human mind; one which did not require repeated insulin comas, mescaline spiking, or LSD administered by prostitutes to clients who were observed from behind two-way mirrors. The land of the free had set off down a very dark path indeed.

Hubbard tried a similar tactic with the FBI, writing to them in 1951 to set them on Sara Northrup,

I believe this woman to be under heavy duress. She was born into a criminal atmosphere, her father having a criminal record. Her half-sister was an inmate of an insane asylum. She was part of a free love colony in Pasadena. She had attached herself to a Jack Parsons, the rocket expert, during the war and when she left him he was a wreck. Further, through Parsons, she was strangely intimate with many scientists of Los Alamo Gordos [Alamogordo in New Mexico was where the first atomic bomb was tested]. I did not know or realize these things until I myself investigated the matter. She may have a record …

He writes again on July 11 1955, to finger supposed Communists, including the science fiction writer and his one time friend, A.E. van Vogt. If he was an intelligence operative, and had cut a deal with a shadowy figure like Solberg, surely these letters would have gone directly to his superior officer or handler. On his previous letters to the FBI they had scrawled their verdict ‘appears mental.’ It seems more than likely that Hubbard was indeed dismissed as a crank.

The very next year, 1956, Hubbard embraced the Siberia USA conspiracy, which claimed that Alaska was to be turned into a psychiatric gulag for a million Americans. His crazy Russian pamphlet was used as evidence, and worse still, the Far Right produced their own modified version of the text which still circulates in conspiracy circles today. It is the equivalent of Leo Taxil’s Masonic Baphomet hoax.

But what was Hubbard’s own method? The case can be made that Dianetics is a form of hypnosis but without the ‘pain-drug’ prefix. It has been mistakenly suggested that Hubbard learned hypnosis from Jack Parsons, when we have on record that he hypnotised almost everyone in the LA Science Fiction club. Van Vogt recalls, ‘There were certain people he could hypnotize instantly.’ He also used post-hypnotic suggestion to great effect. It is conceivable that Hubbard used these techniques on an entranced Parsons in the course of the Babalon Working. The powerful phrases, ‘She is flame of life, power of darkness, she destroys with a glance, she may take thy soul. She feeds upon the death of men,’ and ‘Flame is Our Lady, flame is Her hair. I am flame’ may have been sunk into the depths of his unconscious, waiting for the launch code.

LRH and Scientology made it onto Richard Nixon’s White House Enemies List in 1958, and were flagged up again in 1970 and investigated by the FDA. So it may well be that the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation, which was concerned with cults and youth movements, was involved in the Sunday Times story at some level.

As The Sunday Times is very much an organ of the establishment, we can infer that British Intelligence was increasingly concerned with the goings on at Saint Hill in East Grinstead, the sprawling and somewhat grotty manor that Hubbard had bought from the Maharajah of Jaipur in a London Casino to clear a gambling debt. The conjecture is that MI5 were primarily concerned about Saint Hill as a possible site of KGB infiltration, given that auditing is essentially a huge data collection operation.  Incidentally, Saint Hill Manor is where, according to high society magazine Tatler, Tom Cruise spent the Covid lockdown.

In my opinion the writer of the article, the Australian Alexander Mitchell was informed by Gerald Yorke, who was certainly involved with intelligence circles, was a one-time disciple of Crowley and wrote the biography King of the Shadow Realm. It is his collection of documents concerning the Babalon Working, including photographs and a copy of Liber 49, which are preserved at the Warburg Institute in London.

Yet Hubbard had fled both England and the US in 1968, a year earlier, and taken to the high seas in a rag tag navy. He was to spend the rest of his life essentially on the run.

In 1967 he formed the infamous Sea Org, a paramilitary organisation whose members sign billion-year contracts. The year after, he created the Commodore’s Messengers, a squad of liveried teenage girls in knee socks and white hotpants. They enforced his rule of terror aboard the Apollo, mimicking his voice as they relayed his commands, and attending to him 24 hours a day, lighting his cigarettes, dressing him and obsessively washing his clothes, rinsing them up to 13 times so that he never caught a hint of the smell of soap on his pristine naval whites.

The Sea Org was ready and waiting for the global collapse of governments, potentially in a nuclear war, and would rebuild society when disaster struck. All very Helter-Skelter, and Manson as we know had some Scientology under his belt. Even today, the writings of LRH are etched on 1.8 million stainless steel discs in three separate nuclear bunkers in New Mexico and California, with a fourth under construction.

Rather than being part of naval intelligence, LRH had formed his own navy and was engaged in his own cold war. It would be foolish to discount Hubbard having ongoing entanglements with government agencies, but I want you to observe how Hubbard takes and remakes, repurposing for his own ends, structures, institutions and ideas. Scientology had its own disinformation network, private investigators, detention centres, an assassination protocol, and allegations would surface that it had tried to create Manchurian Candidate killers; one of whom, Steven Fishman, breached the secrets of the highest OT grades and provided the documentary evidence of Hubbard’s self identification as Antichrist under oath.

But did Hubbard kill Parsons? Having stolen his girl, his fortune, his dreams, and his identity, we could claim that Hubbard pushed Parsons further towards his fatal crisis. However, here I shall return to the magical vision of William Burroughs, that great patron of assassins for whom Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted.

And I will say again, there is no such thing as a natural death.

Folio 93, Item 108 a single leaf bearing the blue ink imprint of the William S. Burroughs Archive.

93, the cardinal number of Thelema; 108, the number of beads on a mala, the sacred number of Yoga, in Crowley’s 777, To force, do wrong to, to love very much, to shut up, to obstruct, and Azael, the lust of GOD.

The dream goes like this:

Lands End 3 November 29, Sunday, 1970… I attend Hubbard’s funeral in a simple Scientology chapel not very well attended people moving up the side aisles. Half way up the aisle I remember to take my hat off looking dubiously at the casket which seems much too small to accomodate his big fat carcass. Probably another betrayal. Born Tilden Nebraska, alledgedly March 13, 1912, died Lands End 1, 1970…

There he is looking as if he were alive and had just sold the widow a fraudulent peach orchard. What were the actual circumstances of his life behind the tissue of lies and false degrees? Hard to say. He claims to be the son of naval officer or a diplomat to have spent his early life wandering in the east to have spent his early life on a ranch in Montana which was owned by his very rich family. After the war turns up as an unsuccessful science fiction writer and hits the jack pot with Dianetics. R-n45 his assassination process perfected with H Jack Parsons was it not? Rachmoninoff’s Isle of the Dead and whore of Babylon riding naked on a black panther. I remember the fear that crawled out of his slimy con man voice. Is he really in that casket? To be nobody to stay absent.

Hubbard is being fingered for the hit. A dream come true.

Lacking familiarity with the cult, R-n45 could be passed over as a Burroughsian contrivance. Yet I have found the routine: Number 45 in The Creation of Human Ability, the only entry left blank in the index. It can be read on page an hundred and fifty and six, and it states:

An enormously effective process for exteriorisation but its use is frowned upon by this society at this time.

Routine #2-45 refers to the act of shooting someone in the head with a Colt 45, it is the execution procedure in Scientology. When he first demonstrated it, Hubbard shot a Colt 45 revolver through the floor of the stage he was lecturing from. This is not a joke; in a document called Racket Exposed, Hubbard did in fact order thirteen people to be shot on sight.

In the dream logic of Burroughs, the double report of the revolver shots is the double explosion at Parsons’ lab. Hubbard cannot escape his complicity in and betrayal of Thelema. Burroughs, the Scientology apostate has made sure of that.

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Finally, I want to unmask my own question as a ruse, (for the readers of Borges’s Death and the Compass, referenced at the start of my tale, I am Red Scharlach and never was Erik Lönnrot). By asking the question, Who killed Jack Parsons? I invited you into a strange house of stairways, corridors and mirrors.

In the process I have given a glimpse of the occult world that emerged from the Second World War, and shown the Babalon Working as a splinter of light emitted between the Bomb and Roswell. Parsons’s death unsealed many black worlds to the light. The unreliable witnesses caught on 16mm film, newsprint and FBI files self-authored their gospels that have contributed to our own unreliable canon.

It is for us to create a new vision of our starry futures, powered by the erotic force, the rebellious exuberant force of life that Jack called Babalon.

Ad Babalonis Amorem Do Dedico Omnia Nihilo

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