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Jack Parsons was born Marvel Whiteside Parsons on 10/02/1914 in Los Angeles, CA. His father was a captain in the US Army. His name was also Marvel Parsons. That's right: his father was Captain Marvel. His son later changed his name to John, after his father left his mother subsequent to some unpleasantness over an adultery.
He once visited Europe with his mother in 1929, when he would have been about fifteen, but that was the extent of foreign travel for Jack Parsons. He graduated from University Highschool in Pasadena in 1933, but did not go on to college after that. He took some extension courses at UC and University of Southern California, but never obtained a degree.
He became involved with explosives and rocket technology at a very early age, even before his highschool graduation, working for the Hercules Powder Company in Los Angeles in 1932, before moving on to the Halifax Explosives Company in 1934 and finally winding up at GALCIT in 1936, at which time he was barely twenty-two.
The Halloween launch occurred that year.
Parsons inherited a large house in Pasadena after the death of his father, to which he invited a string of houseguests from the occult and science-fiction communities. His interest in occultism ran roughly parallel to his interest in rocket science, and von Karman wrote that Jack used to chant pagan hymns and stamp his feet on the ground in the Arroyo Seco, but that otherwise he was brilliant and a very hard worker, very conscientious, and totally focused on rocketry. Parsons and his childhood friend and fellow rocketeer Edward Foreman had been in regular communication with German and Russian rocket engineers, including the famous Willy Ley, as well as-according to some reports-Igor Sikorsky ( inventor of the Sikorsky helicopter ) and Arthur Young ( who developed the Bell helicopter ). At the age of 13, Parsons claimed he had tried to invoke Satan, but the experience frightened him, and he turned away from occultism for a while and devoted himself to pursuits of an even more.......explosive nature.
In 1939, we find Parsons married to Helen Northrup and joining a cult based in Los Angeles, the OTO or Ordo Templi Orientis. The OTO was one of several occult societies under the leadership of Aleister Crowley, the English magician who received a revelation in Cairo in 1904 which became the basis for a new religion, which Crowley called Thelema, the Greek word for "Will." The OTO was a German secret society that was designed to communicate Tantric and other Eastern sexual practices beneath the clean, white apron of Freemasonry. Crowley usurped leadership of the Order after the death of its previous Master, generating a three-way fight which left one version of the Order adhering to its original rites and purposes, another version-the Brotherhood of Saturn-peeling off to pursue a different dream, and Crowley's OTO becoming in the process the most famous of the three. ...............................................
Jack Parsons was born Marvel Whiteside Parsons on 10/02/1914 in Los Angeles, CA. His father was a captain in the US Army. His name was also Marvel Parsons. That's right: his father was Captain Marvel. His son later changed his name to John, after his father left his mother subsequent to some unpleasantness over an adultery.
He once visited Europe with his mother in 1929, when he would have been about fifteen, but that was the extent of foreign travel for Jack Parsons. He graduated from University Highschool in Pasadena in 1933, but did not go on to college after that. He took some extension courses at UC and University of Southern California, but never obtained a degree.
He became involved with explosives and rocket technology at a very early age, even before his highschool graduation, working for the Hercules Powder Company in Los Angeles in 1932, before moving on to the Halifax Explosives Company in 1934 and finally winding up at GALCIT in 1936, at which time he was barely twenty-two.
The Halloween launch occurred that year.
Parsons inherited a large house in Pasadena after the death of his father, to which he invited a string of houseguests from the occult and science-fiction communities. His interest in occultism ran roughly parallel to his interest in rocket science, and von Karman wrote that Jack used to chant pagan hymns and stamp his feet on the ground in the Arroyo Seco, but that otherwise he was brilliant and a very hard worker, very conscientious, and totally focused on rocketry. Parsons and his childhood friend and fellow rocketeer Edward Foreman had been in regular communication with German and Russian rocket engineers, including the famous Willy Ley, as well as-according to some reports-Igor Sikorsky ( inventor of the Sikorsky helicopter ) and Arthur Young ( who developed the Bell helicopter ). At the age of 13, Parsons claimed he had tried to invoke Satan, but the experience frightened him, and he turned away from occultism for a while and devoted himself to pursuits of an even more.......explosive nature.
In 1939, we find Parsons married to Helen Northrup and joining a cult based in Los Angeles, the OTO or Ordo Templi Orientis. The OTO was one of several occult societies under the leadership of Aleister Crowley, the English magician who received a revelation in Cairo in 1904 which became the basis for a new religion, which Crowley called Thelema, the Greek word for "Will." The OTO was a German secret society that was designed to communicate Tantric and other Eastern sexual practices beneath the clean, white apron of Freemasonry. Crowley usurped leadership of the Order after the death of its previous Master, generating a three-way fight which left one version of the Order adhering to its original rites and purposes, another version-the Brotherhood of Saturn-peeling off to pursue a different dream, and Crowley's OTO becoming in the process the most famous of the three. ...............................................
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