Many years ago, like an amateur rock-climber who impulsively decides to take on a mountain, I tried to read Thomas Pynchon's masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow (referred to by the 1974 Pulitzer Prize jury as "unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and obscene"). I only made it through about 100 pages, but the challenge whetted my appetite. I enjoy literary puzzles, experiments and challenges, and learning the lessons encrypted in this book became a holy grail for me. I made two more attempts before I finally read the entire novel. I have since read it two more times, the last time with the aid of the invaluable Gravity's Rainbow Companion. Like Huckleberry Finn or Illuminatus!, Gravity's Rainbow is a book that grows with you and rewards your life experience and intellectual expansion. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this novel is the creation of rocket mythology, something Pynchon does with enormous insight inspired, in part, by Jacob Grimm's (of the Brothers Grimm) 4-volume masterpiece, Teutonic Mythology. This is carried out with complexity that falls beyond the scope of this blog, though it is worth mentioning that GR's anti-hero, Tyrone Slothrop (anagram for "sloth or entropy"), while on clandestine assignment in recently liberated France, assumes the identity of Rocketman, complete with a costume of white Zoot suit and conical hat. Among his other heroic duties, he liberates a cache of hash and engages in a pie fight in a hot air balloon. His destiny is bound with the emergent mythology of the rocket and a strange, secret ritual involving rocket 0000 and its payload.
Which brings me to another celebrated rocketman, the scientist/ occultist John Whiteside Parsons featured in "John Carter's" Sex and Rockets (Feral House, 2000). This meticulous study could well stand as a non-fiction sequel to Gravity's Rainbow, concerned as it is with rocket science, alchemy and the crossroads between the two disciplines. While this is plainly a journeyman effort, with uneven though enjoyable writing, the subject is fascinating and the book is exhaustive in telling its tale. The first half of the book concerns itself mainly with John/ Jack Parsons (born under the name Marvel) and his importance to the American rocket program, specifically with reference to the development of solid rocket fuel and JATO (Jet Assisted Take Off) technology that may have helped the allies prevail in WWII. He was also instrumental in the founding of Jet Propulsion Laboratories and a founding partner in Aerojet.
Carter argues convincingly that Parsons is the most important figure in American rocketry, and largely self-taught, at that. Simultaneously, his significance to the occult, specifically the Ordo Templi Orientis that was reconfigured by Aleister Crowley, is denigrated, depicting Parsons as a failed magician whose endeavor to bring about the incarnation of BABALON, the Great Whore of Biblical infamy, also revealed by John Dee in his Enochian workings, was undermined by ego and hubris. That Parsons attempted this with L. Ron Hubbard as his scryer makes the story irresistably juicy, packed with occult melodrama. That Parsons' fame was greater than his accomplishment, at least in the occult realm, is well-argued. However, one is left to wonder at the results of his Great Work. There is speculation that Parsons' BABALON working resulted in the advent of UFOs or the birth of the 1960s counter-culture. That Parsons was apparently swindled by L. Ron Hubbard, identified in Crowley's correspondence as a "confidence trickster," adds elements of sensationalism to the story. Hubbard reportedly took off for Florida with Parsons' girlfriend Betty and a lump sum of his cash, which was to be used to establish a business partnership between the three. Sex & Rockets reprints an explanation from the Church of Scientology alleging that Hubbard was employed to bust up America's hotbed of black magick, bringing Naval Intelligence expertise to the matter. In the end, Parsons is largely undone and in debt. Disillusioned with the OTO as the chariot of Thelema (Crowley's Hermetic philosophy summarized, "Do what Thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the Law, Love under Will") he quit the order, while remaining a student of the more secretive A.:A.:. Ultimately, he illegitimately took credit for the grade of Magister Templi. Having lived an incredibly full life, Parsons was killed by a mysterious explosion in 1952, followed by his mother's suicide by sleeping pill overdose mere hours later. Later, rather unsavory details are alleged concerning an incestuous relationship that existed between Parsons, his mother and her dog.
Much of the fun of this book is reading about the many notable figures who passed in and out of Parsons' life and his rooming house for eccentrics and free love, that also accommodated the Agape Lodge of the OTO for a time. Actor John Carradine is said to have read poetry at the opening of this Lodge, something missing in the details of the recently reviewed Hollywood's Hellfire Club (also Feral House). L. Ron Hubbard's pre-Scientology role is provocative and mysterious. A Who's Who of American rocket scientists is featured. The politics, trickery and melodrama of the Agape Lodge is diverting. And the book does a wonderful job of following Parsons' partner, "elemental" Marjorie Cameron, through a burgeoning counterculture, featuring cameos from Kenneth Anger to Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell.
In the end, the reader is left with several questions and the sense that the story has many holes left to be filled. The connection between Parsons' innovations in rocketry and his occult/ alchemical enthusiasms remains largely unexplored, though hinted at here and there. His legacy seems to be primarily literary and should remain safe with the publication of the concisely stated essay "Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword," which considers Crowley's magickal philosophy of Thelema as the vehicle for radical anarcho-libertarianism. His enceavors to bring about the incarnation of BABALON are discounted by Crowley, though, and Carter concludes that magically, Parsons was an egotistical failure who offers an object lesson for aspiring occultists. At the same time, though, he is credited with working harder than most at his occult work.
This is a fascinating study, amply documented (sometimes distractingly so), that carries a strange cargo of hard science and deep esotericism, much as Gravity's Rainbow does in its fictional framework. In the end, the failures of Parsons are as interesting as his successes. And his legacy seems to be a missing chapter of the rocket mythology painstakingingly created/ depicted by Pynchon. In closing, Carter offers a fitting epigraph from a science fiction story to the effect that Parsons was instrumental in bringing about the end of the world but the beginning of the galaxy. For me, the story is one best closed with the lyrics of the '70s band Jigsaw:
You, You've Blown It All Sky High
Our Love Had Wings To Fly
We Could Have Touched The Sky
You've Blown It All Sky High
Up Round I've Flown
Then Down Down Like a Stone
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