Jack Parsons in Kenneth Grant’s “Outside the Circles of Time”

The following are excerpts regarding Jack Parsons from Kenneth Grant’s book “Outside the Circles of Time” – the fifth book in his Typhonian Trilogies. 

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[Pages 49-51]

The work of Achad and of Parsons (14) exhibited profound awareness of a cosmic unfoldment that may not always be recognized even by those who are able ‘unconsciously’ to pick up and express aspects of the Current. How complex the pattern is may be appreciated by the fact that when Parsons received Liber 49 (The Book of Babalon), which he proclaimed to be the fourth chapter of AL, it was in magical concert with L.R. Hubbard (15) that extra-terrestrial contact was established. It remains to be seen what part of the puzzle Hubbard may manifest, but that he clutched at it through the door opened by Parsons is shown by the circumstances attendant upon the Babalon Working, for an account of which see The Magical Revival. The Working began in 1945-6, a few months before Crowley’s death in 1947, and just prior to the wave of unexpected arial phenomena now recalled as ‘The Great Flying Saucer Flap’. Parsons opened a door and something flew in; he supposed it was Babalon and the fourth chapter of AL; others have supposed other things but all are agreed that something unusual, something inexplicable by mundane laws, occurred around that time. Both Crowley’s and Achad’s prolonged initiations led up to this phenomenon which charged the ‘forties with the atmosphere of menace adumbrated in 1904 (in AL. III. 46) (16) and which fulminated in Hiroshima in preparing the way for the ‘eighties that cower before me and are abased’ (AL. III. 46).

Various writers have suggested that extra-mundane intelligences are apprehensive about nuclear disturbances originating on earth. The ‘UFO flap’ that commenced after Hiroshima was considered by some to be part of an investigation of what is, perhaps, after all, merely an experiment in human evolution. It will not be the first time that such an experiment has failed. (17) On the other hand man likes to feel, no doubt, that his puny activities could disturb remote galaxies; he may hazard extinction, even, for the sake of exalting his ego in such a manner. Man’s thinking is determined by the mass media to a larger extent than he is prepared to admit, he therefore tends to interpret ‘occult’ phenomena in terms of ‘extra-terrestrials’, space-craft constructed on principles he will one day himself understand and use, ‘planetary and inter-planetary wars,’ and so on. To the occultist, however, a quite different interpretation suggests itself. For example, the word ‘abased’ in the above quotation is, by gematria, equivalent to the word Alalia which Frater Achad ‘discovered’ in 1943. Both are forms of the number 73. Alalia conceals a magical formula of the 73 Current which works through the ‘feminine aspect of Chokmah (18) in his phallic function! (19) Chokmah is the Wise One who appears as GML (also 73), ‘the Priestess of the Silver Star’, who is the female hierophant in the form of the moon. Chokmah is therefor the logos whose word is AL AL IA.

The word ‘cower’ is equal to 237, which is that of Ur-He,Ka, the Great Magick Power of ShPhChH (Sefekh), the Goddess 393. 237 is also the number of Aossic, spelt in a certain manner, an extra-terrestrial entity whose name has had particular significance since the year 1945, the year in which Parsons ‘opened the door’.

(14) John Whiteside Parsons (1914-1952). One time head of a lodge of the O.T.O. in California. He was a scientis who worked on jet propulsion techniques. He finally blew himself to pieces in a laboratory accident and has since had the rare distinction of having named after him a mountain on the moon.
(15) It is here of interest to note another strange ramification of the web, for according to Frank B. Long, Hubbard met – years before his collaboration with Parsons – the man whose name will always be associated with extra-terrestrials and alien life-forms – H.P. Lovecraft. See Howard Phillip Lovecraft by Frank Belknap Long. Arkham House, 1975.
(16)  46 is the number of Mu, the City of the Vulture (of Maat), and the Key of the Mysteries
(17)  See the Book of Dzyan; the Berosian account of Creation, & c.
(18)  Chokmah (Wisdom) is the name of the Second Sephira. It is represented astronomically by the Sphere of the Fixed Stars and is the secret zone of the Temple of Starry Wisdom.
(19)  A type of magical vibration represented by the god Mercury.

 

Jack Parsons in Kenneth Grant’s “Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God”

The following are excerpts regarding Jack Parsons from Kenneth Grant’s book “Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God” – the second book in his Typhonian Trilogies. 

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[Page 28, Footnote 18]

In a letter to J. W. Parsons, who was operating a Lodge of the O.T.O. in California in 1945, Crowley wrote: “it is all right to initiate one’s mistress, but to reverse the process is severely forbidden.”

[Page 42]

In the letter to John W. Parsons quoted in Chapter Two (footnote quoted above – Ed.), Crowley was presumably referring to an occult tradition which he does not specify and which I have been unable to discover. Dion Fortune, on the contrary, perhaps because she was herself a woman, advocated initiation by women; her novels are based almost entirely upon this theme, and Austin Spare, himself an Adept, was inducted into the Mysteries by a woman.

[Page 51, footnote 15]

Marjorie Cameron claimed to be an avatar of Babalon whom Parsons evoked by means of Enochian magick. Parsons was, at the time, the head of Agape Lodge, the Californian branch of the O.T.O. (For further details, see The Magical Revival, Chapter 9.)

[Page 73]

One of the earliest positive manifestations of the new O.T.O. occurred, appropriately enough, in the New World, in the latter half of the 1940s, at the Californian Lodge of the Order headed by John W. Parsons (Frater 210). Working with the formulae of Thelemic magick, Parsons established contact with extraterrestrial beings of the order of Aiwass. Unfortunately, he lost control of the entities he evoked and one of them, obsessing the woman with whom he worked, drove him to self-destruction. This magical partner claimed to be the incarnation of the Scarlet Woman, and she whose Word is Life, Love, Liberty and Light proved too much for Parsons, who found in her a devouring flame. During this period of sex-magical Operations Parsons was engaged in nuclear research and, in 1952, blew himself to pieces when he dropped a phial of fulminate of mercury. Enemies of the Order used the incident as proof of Crowley’s satanic influence, though Crowley himself had repeatedly warned Parsons not to engage in traffic with entities whose credentials were suspect.

For all his mistakes, Parsons made inroads on the unseen worlds; he was one of those who paved the way for the present-day passion for things strange and occult, for drugs, UFOs, black sex, mutations and the probability (as against the mere possibility) of man’s communicating with supra-mundane Intelligences capable of transforming life on this planet, a phenomenon which Crowley had spent a lifetime trying to demonstrate.

[Page 188]

The political programme of the New Aeon was stated succinctly by Crowley in Liber Oz41 Questioned about his political aims, he replied: “I have no time at all to write politics. Our programme is stated clearly in Liber Oz, and it should be always kept in mind that this is very much the same thing in principle as old style American Republican individualism. I use the word ‘Republic’ in its widest sense. The existence of a Monarch would not interfere with it.”

-From a letter to Frater 210 (John W. Parsons) of California, 12 May 1945.

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