QI The Book of the Dead

cologne. Opinions about Jack were divided; to some he was the office clown, ‘a delightful screwball’, to others he was dangerous, possibly even psychotic.
    It was this darker side of his character that led him to fall in with the OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis), the so-called Templars of the East, a Masonic-style organisation under the leadership of the mesmeric necromancer Aleister Crowley. Variously known as the Beast, 666, Frater Perdurabo and Master Therion, Crowley claimed to be the reincarnation of John Dee, among many others. He had taken over the English-speaking arm of the Order in 1912, when he discovered they already practised some of the ancient Hindu ‘sex magick’ rituals he was keen to revive. The essence of Crowley’s philosophy was the notion of thelema , translated as ‘do what thou wilt’. In his magnum opus, The Book of the Law (1925), he is at pains to point out that the ‘wilt’ in question does not refer to mere egotistical willpower, but to the dictates of the true or inner soul. According to Crowley, thelemic practice or ‘magick’ (the ‘k’ is important to differentiate it from stage magic) was a path to spiritual development, not sensual indulgence. Having said that, for the philosophy to flourish participants needed to ‘de-condition’ themselves from restrictive social inhibitions to allow the subconscious mind to express itself – essentially by having prodigious quantities of wild, abandoned sex.
    Crowley had come to California in the early years of the war. He was almost seventy, broke and addicted to heroin, dependent on the generosity of wealthy young acolytes like Parsons, who embraced Crowley’s teachings whole-heartedly. In 1941 Jack andhis wife Helen joined the Agape Lodge of the Order. The master of the lodge was an expatriate Englishman, Wilfred Smith, another legendary womaniser. He wrote to Crowley full of excitement about his new recruit: ‘I think I have at long last a really excellent man … He has an excellent mind and much better intellect than myself.’ Crowley agreed, and within a year he had installed Parsons himself as lodge-master.
    In 1942 Jack’s father died, leaving him a large house in one of the wealthiest suburbs in Pasadena. He and Helen moved in and turned it into a centre for lodge activities, much to the annoyance of the neighbours. Parsons loved to play classical music at a very high volume and throw noisy parties. He would place advertisements in local newspapers offering rooms to ‘Bohemian types’, adding the requirement, ‘Must not believe in God.’ Police were called to the home on a number of occasions to investigate allegations of backyard rituals and sex orgies, but Parsons always managed to talk them down, reminding them of his place in the community as an eminent rocket scientist.
    As they became more deeply involved in the cult, Jack and Helen agreed to divorce. She was having an affair with the former lodge-master Wilfred Smith, and Jack had taken up with Helen’s eighteen-year-old sister Sara, whom he renamed ‘Betty’. Jack encouraged Betty to take other lovers, as he did himself, claiming that, as ‘superhumans’, they were above petty jealousy. One of Betty’s lovers was a young science-fiction writer called L. Ron Hubbard, who later went on to found the most successful alternative religion of all, Scientology. By early 1946 Ron Hubbard had moved in with Parsons and been fully initiated into the order. Parsons enlisted his help in enacting the most extreme of Crowley’s rituals, the birth of a ‘magickal child’ or ‘ThelemicMessiah’, who would usher in a new apocalyptic age. First, using the ‘Enochian’ language recorded by John Dee and Edward Kelley, they had to summon up Babalon, the Goddess of Pleasure, so that she would incarnate before them as ‘the Scarlet Woman’. Over eleven nights Parsons invoked the goddess by masturbating furiously (‘manipulating his magickal wand’) as Hubbard performed the role of scribe, recording the ritual in precise detail. A day after its completion, Marjorie Cameron, a beautiful redheaded artist, appeared on Parsons’s doorstep. ‘I have found my elemental,’ Jack wrote exultantly to Crowley. He renamed her ‘Candida’ (meaning ‘white’ or ‘pure’) and she was initiated into the Order and agreed to help Cameron produce his ‘moonchild’. They married soon after.
    Meanwhile, Betty and L. Ron Hubbard talked Parsons into setting up a joint venture,