Jack Parsons: Magician of the Nuclear Age │Part One

Jack Parsons: Rocket scientist, alchemist, occultist, and Godfather of the space program – critical in founding the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, advancing the early rocketry that laid the groundwork for NASA’s space program – has been all but erased from his proper place in official history. The truth is always much stranger than fiction.

Parsons was a visionary, brilliant, but also a bit of a sperg. He was an ardent follower of Aleister Crowley’s “Thelema,” blending magic with science. He was a magician of the nuclear age. Parson's influence is still felt today, from space and missile technology to the esoteric and new age and UFO movements.

Parsons really was the one who popularized Thelema in America, inspiring modern occultists, neo-pagans, wiccans, and chaos magicians. His fusion of science and mysticism and use of psychedelics prefigured the psychedelic and esoteric revival of the 1960s, and a line can be drawn to the modern technocrats today who are going on ayahuasca retreats and taking DMT and talking to the techno elves.

In order to really make sense of the world today, it is important to understand the past—our true history, not the sanitized version presented by official history. This story gets very strange, is definitely not child-friendly, and is certainly a cautionary tale.