QI The Book of the Dead

strange and frivolous fables or histories reported and told of me are true’. The king didn’t even bother to reply.
    The next year, plague swept though Manchester, pitilessly claiming the lives of Jane Dee, Theodore, Madimi and all of John Dee’s younger children. He returned sorrowfully to Mortlake with his surviving daughter Katherine. For the next four years, until his death aged eighty-two, he lived in desperate poverty, selling his books one by one in order to eat. His only solace was to get back in touch with the angelic domain through a new medium called Bartholomew Hickman. It was at this point, at the very end of his life, that Goody Faldo of Mortlake (the old ladywho described Dee to John Aubrey) met him when she was a young girl and fixed him forever as the white-bearded, black-gowned sage of legend. She told Aubrey he was the model for Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist but also sweetly said of him: ‘He was a great peacemaker; if any of the neighbours fell out, he would never let them alone till he had made them friends.’ Her final verdict was simple: ‘A mighty good man he was.’
    Posterity is a fickle thing. Had John Dee’s diary and his book of spirit conversations, A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits , not been discovered and published by an enterprising bookseller in 1659, it is possible he would have been mainly remembered as a pioneering scientist alongside his close contemporary Sir Francis Bacon. He might have been discussed as the man who used geometry to map the globe, or as the greatest book-collector of his age, rather than the wife-swapper who talked to angels, the inspiration for the esoteric excesses of generations of self-styled magicians and occultists.

     
    One such occultist, also a brilliant scientist, was born almost 400 years later. Jack Parsons (1914–52), the maverick pioneer of American rocket technology, invoked Satan for the first time when he was only thirteen. He was born in Los Angeles on 2 October 1914, on the exact date that the Jehovah’s Witnesses had predicted the Apocalypse. Named ‘Marvel’ by his father, Captain Marvel Whiteside Parsons of the US Army, his mother always called him John or Jack. She had caught his father having an affair while she was pregnant and he played very little further role in the boy’s upbringing. Jack had a lonely childhood. His onlyreal friend was Edward Forman, who shared his obsession with fireworks, science fiction and the arcane. Together they pored over old books of incantations, enacting spells to jinx older boys who bullied them at school.
    Jack and Edward dropped out of high school to join the Hercules Powder Company, a Californian armaments manufacturer. Jack’s unique talents as a self-taught explosives chemist soon got him a job with the ‘suicide squad’, a bunch of rocketobsessed misfits at Caltech’s Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory. By the outbreak of the Second World War this had evolved into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, backed by substantial military funding. Wernher von Braun later said it was not himself but Parsons who was the real father of the US space programme. Still only in his mid-twenties, Jack created solid fuels that would be used in the Apollo space missions, and liquid binders later employed in the propulsion of Polaris missiles. He was regularly called as an explosives expert at courtroom trials. In the meantime, still fascinated by the black arts, before each experiment he would invoke the spirit of Pan, the horned pagan god of fertility.
    When Parsons was twenty-eight, he and Forman and four colleagues formed their own rocket corporation, Aerojet Engineering. Parsons left after the war, selling his shares for just $11,000. Aerojet is still a major player in the industry, making the propulsion units on NASA’s space shuttle. Had Parsons kept his shares, he would have been a multimillionaire in less than a decade. Instead, he used the proceeds to start a laundromat chain, which failed.
    Parsons was never good with money and he was even less adept at managing his personal life. His relationship with his mother was intense and very probably incestuous. He was extremely good-looking, tall and promiscuous, working his waythrough the secretarial pool at Aerojet, even though he had a physiological disorder that caused him to sweat profusely. He dealt with the resultant chronic body odour by dousing himself liberally in strong-smelling