The Rocket Man Who Summoned a Goddess
A self-taught chemist with no college degree helped invent the fuel that let rockets leave the ground — then spent his evenings trying to conjure a living goddess in his own living room.
In the autumn of 1936, a handful of young men gathered on a dry stretch of scrubland next to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, to test a rocket motor. They were not official guests of the California Institute of Technology, exactly, though some of them were Caltech students and the group used the campus’s name. Professional engineers at the time regarded rocketry as a joke — fit for pulp magazine covers, not serious science — and Caltech’s administration was embarrassed enough by the association that it eventually made the group move its experiments off-campus altogether, after one too many small explosions and scorched patches of lawn. The students themselves, half-joking, started calling their own operation the “Suicide Squad.”
One of the squad’s central members had no business being there by any conventional measure. John Whiteside Parsons — known to almost everyone as Jack — had never finished a college degree. He’d dropped out of Pasadena Junior College and later took a handful of classes at Caltech and USC without completing a program at either. What he had instead was an obsessive, largely self-taught command of chemistry, an appetite for risk that alarmed even his fellow amateur rocketeers, and a genuine gift for solving the specific, nasty problem that was keeping rockets on the ground: fuel.
Liquid rocket propellants of the 1930s and 40s were powerful but difficult and dangerous to handle — volatile, often unstable, requiring complex pumps and plumbing. Solid fuels were simpler and safer in principle, but the mixtures then available burned too fast, too unevenly, or cracked under their own weight once cast into a usable shape. Parsons is widely credited, by his own colleagues and by later historians at Caltech, with the key insight that solved this: binding an oxidizer into asphalt, the same black, viscous material used to pave roads. According to accounts repeated by Caltech itself, the idea reportedly came to him while watching roofers pour hot tar — he realized the same material, mixed with the right oxidizing compound, could be poured into a rocket casing like candle wax, left to cool and solidify into a stable, storable, castable rocket fuel. It would still burn in a controlled, predictable way once ignited.
That breakthrough, refined through further work with his colleague Frank Malina and the rest of the group, became the basis for a working Jet-Assisted Take-Off, or JATO, unit — a strap-on rocket booster that could shorten a heavily loaded aircraft’s takeoff run. The U.S. Army tested the first JATO flight at March Field, California, in August 1941, and the technology proved itself quickly enough that it moved from experimental curiosity to a program the military wanted built at scale. To manufacture it, several members of the Suicide Squad — Parsons among the founders — incorporated a company in 1942 that they first called Aerojet Engineering. The looser research group they’d belonged to at Caltech, the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory’s rocket section, was formalized the following year into what is still, today, one of NASA’s premier research centers: the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
It is a genuinely strange thing to say about a man with no degree: Jack Parsons helped found JPL, and the castable composite propellant principle he helped pioneer became a direct ancestor of the solid rocket fuel still used in spacecraft boosters generations later. By the standards of almost anyone’s career, that would be the whole story — a scrappy, self-made chemist who talked his way into the room where rocketry was invented, and helped invent some of it himself.
It was not, however, remotely the whole story of Jack Parsons.
While he was helping build the institutions that would eventually put American satellites and astronauts into orbit, Parsons was living an entirely separate life just a few miles away, one that had nothing to do with aerospace engineering at all. In 1939, Parsons and his wife, Helen Northrup, were introduced to Thelema, the occult religious movement founded decades earlier by the English writer and ceremonial magician Aleister Crowley. Parsons didn’t dabble. He joined the Agape Lodge, the Thelemite group’s branch in Pasadena, rose quickly within it, and before long was effectively running the lodge out of his own home — a rambling, decaying mansion on South Orange Grove Avenue known locally as “the Parsonage.” He filled it with tenants drawn from the local bohemian and science-fiction-fan scene, many of whom were also drawn, one way or another, into the lodge’s rituals.
By the mid-1940s, Parsons had separated from Helen and taken up with her younger half-sister, Sara “Betty” Northrup, who moved into the Parsonage and became deeply involved in the lodge’s activities alongside him. It was around this time, in 1944, that Parsons was also pushed out of both Aerojet and JPL — accounts differ on the precise reasoning, but his colleagues had grown openly uneasy about his personal conduct and his casual attitude toward safety procedures around dangerous chemicals, concerns that would resurface, fatally, years later. He kept a financial stake in Aerojet for a time, but his hands-on career in American rocketry, for all practical purposes, was over before the decade that produced it had even ended.
It was also at the Parsonage, in 1945, that Parsons met a young, charismatic Navy veteran and aspiring science-fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard — the same man who would, less than a decade later, found Scientology. Parsons was, by multiple contemporary accounts including his own writings, instantly taken with Hubbard, describing him in letters to Crowley as a remarkable man and inviting him to move into the Parsonage. Crowley, reading about the new arrival from across the Atlantic, was reportedly far less impressed, warning Parsons by letter that he seemed to be the victim of a confidence trick.
Crowley’s instincts proved sound. In January 1946, Parsons and Hubbard together conducted a prolonged magical ritual that Parsons called the “Babalon Working” — an attempt, rooted in Thelemic and Enochian ceremonial magic, to invoke an elemental female spirit or goddess figure named Babalon, with the stated goal of producing a magical child who would help usher in a new spiritual age. Parsons performed the central invocations; Hubbard, by his own later account, served as the ritual’s “scribe,” recording what the pair believed were the communications coming through during the sessions. Soon after, Betty Northrup — who both men came to regard as the fulfillment, or at least a central participant, in the ritual’s intent — became deeply entangled with Hubbard rather than with Parsons.
What followed was not mystical so much as mundane, and considerably more damaging to Parsons personally. In 1946, Parsons, Betty, and Hubbard formed a business partnership intending to buy yachts cheaply on the East Coast, sail them to California, and sell them at a profit. Parsons put the great bulk of the money into the venture; Hubbard’s contribution was a small fraction of that. Hubbard and Betty then sailed off with one of the boats without Parsons, prompting him — according to his own later written account — to perform an emergency magical ritual invoking the god Bartzabel to summon a storm and force the pair back to port, which a storm then duly did, battering the boat badly enough that Hubbard and Betty were forced to return it. Whatever role ceremonial magic played in the weather, Parsons chased the pair down in Florida in person, recovered what remained of the damaged vessel, and ultimately lost most of his investment; a later legal settlement left him only partially compensated. Hubbard would go on, within a few years, to publish Dianetics and found the Church of Scientology — a lineage that historians of both occultism and new religious movements have since traced back, in some part, through his time at the Parsonage.
Parsons spent the final years of his career and life rebuilding, unsuccessfully, from the wreckage of both the rocket business and the boat scheme. He picked up freelance consulting work producing pyrotechnic and special-effects compounds for Hollywood films, and at various points worked ordinary jobs, including at a gas station, to make ends meet, all while continuing his chemistry experiments and his occult studies privately. His past brush with the Communist Party in the 1930s — a common enough affiliation among politically engaged young scientists and engineers of that Depression-era generation — came back to haunt him during the early Cold War’s loyalty purges. In January 1952, the Munitions Board formally revoked the Top Secret security clearance Parsons had held since 1949, citing his past associations. A related, more serious accusation — that he had improperly taken classified documents, in one version of events connected to a foreign contract — was investigated and did not result in any criminal conviction, but it finished what remained of his standing in the aerospace industry for good. At thirty-seven years old, the man who had helped found one of the most important rocketry institutions in the country could no longer get cleared to work anywhere near it.
By the spring of 1952, Parsons had decided to leave the United States. He had accepted an offer to go to Mexico to help establish an explosives and special-effects manufacturing operation there, a fresh professional start on a continent where his American security file wouldn’t follow him. He was packing and preparing shipments of chemical samples for the move, working as he often did in a makeshift laboratory he kept in a converted coach house behind his current residence on Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena — the kind of home-based, improvised, insufficiently cautious chemistry setup that had worried his old Aerojet and JPL colleagues years earlier.
On the afternoon of June 17, 1952, something in that coach-house laboratory detonated. Investigators and biographers generally believe Parsons was handling fulminate of mercury, a notoriously unstable and sensitive explosive compound sometimes used as a detonator or primer, and that he dropped a container of it, or otherwise disturbed it badly enough to set it off — though no one who has written about the case since claims full certainty about exactly what happened in that room in the seconds before the blast. The explosion tore through the building. Parsons’s mother, Ruth Virginia Parsons, was elsewhere in the main house at the time and was reportedly uninjured by the blast itself, but her son was gravely wounded — his right arm was severely mangled in the explosion, along with extensive injuries to his face and chest. He died from those injuries that same day, at thirty-seven years old.
Los Angeles County investigators treated the death as an accident, consistent with Parsons’s own well-documented history of working carelessly around dangerous chemicals, and no criminal investigation followed. That has not stopped decades of speculation, much of it circulating in books and articles about Parsons written long after his death, suggesting the explosion was something other than a simple accident — a suicide, in the view of some who point to the ruin of his career and finances; a murder, in the view of others, who note that his right arm was reportedly never recovered or fully accounted for in the aftermath, a detail some writers have treated as suspicious and others have waved off as an unremarkable consequence of the blast’s force. No official investigation ever substantiated either theory, and no credible evidence of foul play has surfaced in the more than seventy years since. The accidental explanation remains, by far, the one most historians and biographers accept, even as the alternative theories persist in the retelling of his story.
The explosion claimed one more victim that day, in a different sense. Within hours of learning that her son had died, Ruth Virginia Parsons took her own life.
What makes Jack Parsons’s story land as something more than a cautionary tale about mixing chemistry and magic is the afterlife his scientific work had, almost entirely separate from the lurid circumstances of his death. The castable composite solid-fuel principle he helped establish became a foundational technique in American solid-rocket propulsion, used in various forms for decades of military and space launch vehicles that followed. In 1972, twenty years after his death, the International Astronomical Union named a crater on the far side of the Moon — a place permanently turned away from Earth — in his honor: Parsons crater, cited for his contributions to rocket propulsion. It is a serious, lasting honor from the scientific community, for a man whose Caltech colleagues, by the end of his life, mostly wanted nothing more to do with him.
Jack Parsons never went to space, and he never set foot anywhere near the Moon. He left behind a scorched coach house, a grieving and then dead mother, a tangled occult legacy that historians still trace into the founding of one of the twentieth century’s most controversial new religions, and a technical contribution to rocketry solid enough that it is still, in its basic principle, carrying things off the ground today. Both of those legacies are, by every available record, entirely real. Very few people’s lives manage to earn them both.