QI The Book of the Dead

Allied Enterprises, into which all three would pool their earnings. Parsons had already sunk most of his money into the lodge but put what was left – about $12,000 – into the new company. Hubbard invested $1,200 and promptly disappeared to Miami with Betty where he used all the Allied Ventures capital to buy a pair of yachts. Jack, with nothing in his bank account, had to take a job at a petrol station to pay for food. When he eventually tracked the couple down in Florida, they swiftly absconded on one of the boats. Furious, Parsons summoned up a storm (or so he claimed) at sea which forced them to return to port.
    Jack sued Hubbard, but only got part of his money back. He returned to Pasadena, resigned from the OTO and broke with Crowley. Crowley was indifferent. He had regarded Parsons’s and Hubbard’s Babalon ritual as ridiculous and wrote to a friend despairing of the ‘idiocy of these goats’. Parsons seemed equally disillusioned:

    Now it came to pass even as BABALON told me, for after receiving Her Book I fell away from Magick, and put away Her Book and all pertaining thereto. And I was stripped of my fortune (the sum of about $50,000) and my house, and all I Possessed. Then for a period of two years I worked in the world, recouping my fortune somewhat. But that was also taken from me, and my reputation, and my good name in my worldly work, that was in science .
     
    The last sentence refers to his investigation by the FBI where he was under suspicion, not only for occult activities, but also for associating with known communist sympathisers. This cost him his government clearance, which meant he could no longer work on official rocket projects. Financially ruined and pushed to the edge, he contemplated suicide but then, with Candida’s support, he decided he was ready to go beyond even Crowley. He took the Oath of the Abyss and declared himself the Antichrist.
    This sounds ludicrously overdramatic, but Parsons’s idea of the Apocalypse was different from the one in the Bible. In fact, it reads more like a vision of the counter-cultural movements that would sweep America in the 1960s.
    An end to the pretense and lying hypocrisy of Christianity. An end to the servile virtues, and superstitious restrictions. An end to the slave morality. An end to prudery and shame, to guilt and sin, for these are of the only evil under the sun, that is fear. An end to all authority that is not based on courage and manhood, to the authority of lying priests, conniving judges, blackmailing police, and an end to the servile flattery and cajolery of mods, the coronations of mediocrities, the ascension of dolts .
     

    Jack Parsons, ‘the James Dean of the Occult’, never got to see his satanic Utopia. By early 1952 he had begun to manufacture bootleg explosives at home. He and Candida planned to move down to Mexico to create one that was ‘more powerful than anything yet invented’. Before they left, on 17 June 1952, Parsons, sweaty-palmed as ever, accidentally dropped a phial of the extremely volatile compound known as fulminate of mercury. The explosion blew off his entire right forearm, broke his other arm and both legs, and ripped a hole in his jaw. It was heard over a mile away. Parsons died an hour later protesting: ‘I wasn’t done.’ Shortly after hearing the news, his mother committed suicide.
    Marjorie ‘Candida’ Cameron went on to become a successful painter and actress in avant-garde films. She is sometimes cited as the inspiration behind the Eagles song ‘Hotel California’. In recognition of his work on the space programme, Parsons had a crater named after him on the moon – on the dark side, naturally.

     
    In 1946 Parsons, a great believer in UFOs, claimed to have met a Venusian in the Mohave Desert. Venusians were very much in fashion at the time and it was only a couple of years since the death of the Serbian engineer Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), whom some believed had been sent from Venus to modernise earthly technology. Tesla was one of the great innovators of the modern age, often so far ahead of his time that he might as well have been from another planet. Honoured as ‘the man who invented the twentieth century’ and nicknamed ‘the patron saint of electricity’ for developing the alternating current system that underpins all today’s electrical networks, he held over 700 patents in his lifetime, for innovations in electro-magnetics, robotics, remotecontrol, radar, ballistics and