The Jack Parsons Archive
The summer thunder chatters in the west
As though
The ghost of Caesar’s iron legions go
Behind the hills.
The ancient oaks are shadowy and still,
The mistletoe
Subservient in the argent of the glow
Of moonlight, waits the golden sickle’s will.
The woods await the thaumaturgic tune
That called the old gods beneath a younger moon,
And will await until the gods come back.
I know
They will return, who, going, left the slow
Still circle broken and the altar black.
12. Feb. (fragment – Ed.)
Do not let my katabolistic moods upset you unduly – they are only antistrophe – the diastole. Perhaps this incarnation would not made [sic] to support the beatific vision, and I may have gone too far too fast. In any event, I do not regret it. The end is magnificent – and the means not unworthy.
Back to the gods – there must be an apotheosis with our own, irascible Jahveh, and it is all in Job – the destruction of the categories when God, having reduced man to abject misery, destroyed all his faith, speaks at last out of the whirlwind. “Gird up thy loins now like a man and declare thou unto me. Wilt thou also disannul my judgement? Wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be like God righteous? Hast thou an arm like God? Or canst thou thunder with a voice like Him? Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency: and array thyself with glory and beauty. Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold everyone that is proud and abase him.
Then I will also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.”
Why this arrogance? The answer is in Othin, the all-god’s song in the Edda.
I ween that I hung on a windy tree,
Hung there for nights full nine,
With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was
To Othin, myself to myself,
On the tree that none may ever know
What root beneath it runs.
In this vision, existence crucified for its own sake, in you, through you, for you. The awful question made known in the tumult of the hurricane – dare you know me, can you bear me – the ecstasy – the agony, and beyond that lies the vision of the ultimate light, that reduced Peter to an idiotic babbling about Tabernacles but that Dante faced calmly and serenely beyond the vision of the Triune God.
Naturally the essential force lives in all of us, but only in those rare times when the flesh is dissolved can we see it, and even then seldom see it and live. The Path, as Buddha said, is beyond good thoughts and good works, and evil thoughts and evil works. It is the Path of the unmoved mover, the “hid motive” of Lao Tze.
From that vision we are flung back across the abyss into the heaven – the vehicle, that our incarnation, tendencies, circumstances, provide. For Mahomet it was Geburah – Force. For Buddha, Chesed – mercy, compassion. But in any case this is simply a vehicle for something that is utterly beyond all tendencies, all dualities. That force is in you, the problem is to provide a suitable vehicle, empty it and let it flow in.
9 Feb 1950
Dear Candida
You will now have a part of Part 4 of Magick and I suggest your turning to the section on the Holy Graal which pertains to Babalon, and to the section called Astarte vel Berylli, which pertains to your method of work. Now hints on the nature of a god.
1. A god is a barrier. No unready person can pass (i.e. know) a god or his temple. Of course physical and mental contact is possible – but the spiritual – the essential part must remain outside until one has partaken somewhat of the nature of the god.
2. A god is a gateway. The conversation and knowledge of the god confers initiation – allows one to pass beyond all the opposites thereof that the god presents.
3. A god is a universe, i.e. the god includes, reconciles, and transcends all the classes of his class, and all the opposites thereof. He is therefore a complete cosmos, or the macrocosm expressed – as man. ‘A microcosm is a macrocosm implied.’
It is essential to grasp the dual nature of a god and its function. The good and evil, well and ill defined aspect, since it is the god’s position as reconciler that is most important. The terrible gods – Hitzilipoctly, Kali, Baal, Moloch and Jahve are intended to portray the diversity – the rightness – of the appearance of evil just as the good, mild gods portray and reconcile the other aspects. The reconciliation annihilates the split schizoid ego, which has divided the aspects of the parental image into a split, warring, and disastrous cosmos. The evil gods do not demand blood sacrifice – that is the grisly error of the partial soul.
They only demand the perception of eternity behind even the appearance of evil. The acceptance of trans- human and trans-logical values for the standards of impurity. The blood sacrifice in society is a national [cleavage?] of the split ego, but even Mars himself always offers the kindly alternative of a transcendent union wherein the god is otherwise – Mars Venemis (?), the God of the Wood.
When you visit a god on his appropriate plane (country) in the astral, you may find that the country is also the god. This is the experience of some rare types of nature mystics, who, adventuring in a familiar place come suddenly upon a landscape of Arcady, a brief intrusion of the upland meadows of forever in the plainer fields we know. The place is the God, the God is the place, the seen and the seer are one.
My dear, do not think you are alone. The legions are with you that tried and hoped, those now trying and typing – the unborn to come, dreaming of a world to be – all, all are with you. The gods themselves bend and whisper at your doorway, and your windows are portentous with the possible hour. I have heard Aldeberan speak to you of Rigel, and the Pleiades whisper your name that is to be. All that I have and all that I am am flared up in the birth fires that time and left me just three tasks: to guide in infancy, to counsel in adolescence, to renounce in maturity – to go onwards whence I came.
If I was the one you could love, yet it was needful for you to learn contempt and hatred, and to equilibrate those again with love. You have done it, and passed that fine passing. You have needed to know loneliness and terror and despair. You burn there, and it is passing. And now you come to the last unspeakable barrier, the ultimate thule, that you may labour long and painfully to kindle a small spark that will consume all you have – that will burn down the heavens as a torch until even the black stars burn with furious joy.
If you only knew the ache to dissolve, to pass away, to go, to be one – to drink utterly of the cup men call death or madness – to be away, at rest, at peace. But I will endure. I will do what must be done to the last [moment?] of putrefying flesh, to the last pulsation of the dying brain. Not for myself, not for you, but for the vision that I saw once – that is for ever.
One day my hands will fall away, and you will go alone into the regions that I cannot follow – take the sky in wings I have only known in dream.
God knows, it is not my body that now speaks to you, that is a tedious thing of days – of dim awareness in the half-shadow. It is my spirit – that spoke to you in the beginning, that speaks to you again now, that will always be with you, until we meet and fuse in the darkness of which light is a shadow.
Love, Jack
P.S. You can see that you must some time renounce all reliance upon me, that that is a critical point in the adventure. I do not mean that the time has come – but will you will know when it comes. In the great acts of creation and destruction, timing is of the essence. A teacher, like a god, must be surpassed. He is something to come up to, but who, for the adept in his critical moment steps aside, or is pushed aside, so that the initiate can go beyond – into the void. Once you are at that point, the problems are how to pass over into the deep world, how to dwell there, and how to return. Here the individual can only rely on his own supernatural [sic], it is a purely individual matter.
C.G. Jung has explained it all in great detail. As he himself says, he will not be understood for nearly 100 years. 40 years of the period has passed and the Bollingen Society has done much to hasten the day. Crowley’s hints on techniques and viewpoints are invaluable, and Joseph Campbell has done an excellent job of simplifying Jung’s concept of the nature and function of the hero- adept in the cosmic myths cycle.
However, it may be possible to know too much on these matters. The important thing is to get to work and find your own way. You will find the information you really need is usually available. Of course, there have been people – like Joan of Arc, Mary Baker Eddy, and even Aimee Semple Macpherson. But in these cases also the quality of the force and mentality was commensurate with the spiritual state. There is a balance that goes far deeper than appearances.
One trouble is understanding and explaining all this in the abstract quality of speech and thought. No speech or thought can describe or communicate the deep creative and destructive processes that go on within the organism, let alone the ultimate force that lies behind them both. Even objectively there is no description of the growth of a bean, much less a man. It is all by analogy – if we have felt the same we know what the other person means. But even the feeling is done with an unknown and indescribable organ or field of organs.
But some kinds of speed, actions, situations can touch the deep forces, and there you see the awesome spectacle of an individual or a group – or sometimes an entire race, moving in the supernal rhythms of a cosmic circle.
Civilization is an […], the animal is in the culture – he is the culture. Touch that and he moves. But all the intellectual – the reasonable approaches elicit no more response than would sucking on a rubber prick.
27 Jan 50
Dear Candida
I have suffered some vicious astral attacks lately and my skryings indicate that they relate to a fruition of one aspect of the Babalon working, and this because I have willfully and knowingly accepted the counter charge. It is now four years since I saw the words of destiny in blood and fire, and transcribed to my own disaster. I should have died that time, what lived has had one purpose, to teach and to transmit.
Crowley is dead, Max Schneider dead of a stroke, Roy Leffingwell paralyzed with a stroke, Jones insane – you see – this is a strong magic – and Germer and Smith both old and in bad health. I do not know who else stirs in Her womb, but you are the only hope I know. If you only had with you an image of Kali – or could spend some time with Ixcunia[?] in Mexico City – to comprehend the intolerable self – the vile, frightful aspects of the mother that yet lifts up the upholding hand in the immemorial gesture of – peace, child, all is well.
It is in the passage of the barrier that lies just one inch beyond the possible that the attainment is made – the going down of the ego between the adamant or malefic back [black?] sides of the gods, that the fusion of infinity takes place.
To go deep you must reject each phenomenon, each illumination, each ecstasy, going ever downward, until you reach the last avatars of the symbols that are also the racial archetypes. In this sacrifice to the abysmal gods is the apotheosis that transmutes them to the beauty and power that is your eternity, and the redemption of mankind.
Neurosis and initiation are the same thing, except that neurosis stops short of apotheosis, and the tremendous forces that mold all life are encysted – short circuited and turned poisonous. Psychoanalysis transforms the false ego symbols – it is a confusion of conformity and cure in terms of group behavior. But initiation must go on until the barrier is passed, the misty bastions of infantile Trawenfells in to the rocks and crags of eternity, the garden of Klingsor in to the City of God.
The apotheosis is in short the translation of good and evil in terms of the father and mother Imago into Isis and Christ, Swa and Panita [?] and duad beyond duality and causality, above the abyss – and these in turn to the One that is beyond speech and sight and knowledge.
Tragedy is diurnal, comedy annual [?], the laughter and dance of the great year, where all crucifixions are only birthday parties of the Gods. Change and death are the song of the immortal, incarnate spirit, and the triple flame of greed, lust and hate no more than its mortal vestment.
But we are here all diurnal, tragedy to us, however hysterical, is real. That is why we must for ever have the message, ever old, ever new, that we are portions of eternity. We must have it as a sacrament from the great noble ego that goes down to its own crucifixion and returns an immortal spirit with celestial song. You, Cinderella of the Wastelands, have chosen the way of the hero – and the gods alone may guess the end of your path. You are, as Bolitho [?] says, “Camped out with Mystery” with only Karma-Maya and the archetypes for your companions. All the eyes of the secret world are on you, wondering and hoping. May you win through.
Love, Jack
P.S. Do you fully understand the nature of your magical relation with Freya?
P.P.S. Your show had some short press notices, which I thought I sent you, but perhaps didn’t. I haven’t written about it probably because I felt badly at the time. I don’t think that Tato’s [?] is a very good place to show – or the Coast at all.
Re the divorce. I would have preferred that you get it, but it seemed important to take decisive action in order to clear up the loose ends of the past. My lawyer says it would help if you furnished a letter stating that you are in accord with the divorce proceedings. Can you do this?
There is some literature and MSS that you should have. If you wish, I will list and tell you how to get them.
93 93/93 J.
[Hotel Raleigh, Washington, D.C. letterhead] Jan. 15 [1950?]
Dear Candida
93.
I am enclosing the 7th Aire. Copy it into a permanent note book along with any other rituals you intend to use. You should have the plan in detail, order of rituals, layout of temple, procedure etc. I will send you the ritual of the Bornless One, probably in a small Goetia, since it is rather long to copy. It is a very ancient, potent & dangerous ritual, often used by bold magicians in the Guardian Angel Working. It is useful as a preliminary in almost any sort of work, causing a tremendous concentration of force. It is, however, liable to produce dangerous side phenomena and sometimes permanent haunting in an area where it is repeated, & is for this reason often avoided. Never do it without banishing & opening the temple, then closing and banishing again. I’m tired from the trip and will myself close now.
——
Jan. 16
Method of invoking
1. Banishing pentagram
2. Opening Hexagram
3. Ritual (may be preceded by Bornless One, or other preliminary invocation).
Then, for a superior force (god)
a. Supplication of the force
b. Description of the Force
c. Identification (or union) with the Force.
For a lesser force (spirit, angel, demon, elemental)
a. Supplication of a superior force (appropriate god)
b. Description of a superior force.
c. Identification with superior force.
d. As superior force, invocation and command of lesser force.
4. Closing Hexagram
5. Banishing pentagram.
For gods, an appropriate altar is used. For the rest, the magician stands within an appropriate circle, and invokes the force into a triangle. In any case the appropriate weapons, perfume, colors, should be used, the names and signs of the appropriate angels, planets should be drawn or written on talismans.
The magician should be robed and wear the sign or talisman of the highest force appropriate to the invocation. He should exhibit this when it is necessary to command, and (except in the case of Gods to whom it is inappropriate) a sword which he should not hesitate to use on anything or anyone who threatens to intrude or break the ritual. Once started, a ritual must not be stopped for any reason. It should be done in a secluded place, and no one should enter who has not been tested and consecrated by the magician.
The invocation of Gods (which pertains to a higher magic) is subtle and subject to individual variation and personal composition.
The invocation of lesser forces is exact, and, since love does not usually enter in so much, in one sense far more dangerous. In the higher work you are actually wooing the god – it is an act of art. In the lower you are compelling, it is an act of science.
The state in a proper working is indescribable but unmistakable. It is essential that everything be prepared and learned properly well in advance, since when things start to happen much of the work will have to go on automatically.
The primary methods are:
1. Goetia (Demonic)
2. Planetary (Clavicle)
3. Enochian (Elementals and Aires)
4. Solar (Guardian Angel)
I have found the Enochian the best (although complicated). The Tarot corresponds to the Enochian system obtained by Dr. Dee – the Trumps to the Aires and the courts to the Gods, Seniors and Angels and the numbers to the lesser angels.
Probably you can use the Tarot alone if you follow the following steps.
1. Consecrate the appropriate weapons to Earth, Air, Fire and Water. (The Sword also to Mars and Bartzabel.)
2. Consecrate the appropriate card as a talisman.
3. Construct the entire ritual. Invoke the card down from the appropriate trumps, and across by the appropriate correspondences. Don’t forget the material link and vital fluid. Blood will do in a pinch.
4. Fast, for the day before starting.
5. Consult the cards first to see if the ritual is appropriate and correct.
6. Remember that the Tarot is a great and sacred arcanum – its abuse is an obscenity in the inner and a folly in the outer. It is intended for quite other purposes than to determine when the tall dark man will meet the fair rich widow.
But the master don’t give a shit for that. He will tell the yokels fortunes till the cows come home, if it suits his purposes.
93 93/93
Love, Jack
Note: The transcripts of these letters were sourced from the now-defunct babalon.net (viewable via webarchive.org) and contain the citation:
CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN JACK PARSONS
and His “Elemental”, Marjorie Cameron
Edited by Cameron and Hymenaeus Beta (Fra. Superior, OTO) ©1989 Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel Revision 2
The typed manuscript notes are given a title page:
Letters of Jack Parsons to his wife Marjorie Cameron Parsons 5 Oct 1949 to 12 Feb 1950 (Typed by Jane Wolfe (Soror Estai) from the holographs in the possession of M C Parsons in 1954 and recopied from the typescript here in 1954)
Handwritten notations: “Letter #2 Admirable” ( 22 Jan 1950 assumed – Ed.) and below, “Are Extremely good“