by John Carter
Parsons had begun his magical work with Betty, Helen's younger sister, after Helen had left with Smith. His encouragement of an open relationship, which demonstrated his evolution beyond petty human jealousy, was to backfire on him, however, as Betty readily agreed to take up other lovers and ended up with Hubbard. The relationship was to be a source of extreme aggravation for Parsons, who suddenly had more than he could bear.
Hubbard charmed Parsonage resident Alva Rogers, who, like Hubbard, was a redhead. Indeed, Hubbard confided his belief that all redheads descended from the Neanderthal rather than pure Homo sapiens. “Needless to say,” Rogers wrote, “I was fascinated.” The redhead-Neanderthal connection is interesting to keep in mind when reading Williamson's Darker Than You Think, the story of werewolves who return to their atavistic state. Rogers further wrote:
It all began on an otherwise undistinguished day in the late fall of 1945 when we got word that L. Ron Hubbard was planning to wait out his terminal leave from the Navy at “The Parsonage”…Short visits by such pro authors as Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton, Tony Boucher, and other were fairly frequent; but Ron was planning on an extended stay.
Ron arrived on a Sunday, driving an oldish Packard and hauling a house trailer which he parked on the grounds behind the house. He originally intended staying in the trailer, but within a few days someone moved out of the house and he moved in.
I liked Ron from the first. He was of medium build, red headed, wore horned rim glasses, and had a tremendously engaging personality. For several weeks he dominated the scene with his wit and inexhaustible fund of anecdotes. About the only thing he seemed to take seriously and be prideful of was his membership in the Explorers Club (of which he was the youngest member) which he had received after leading an expedition into the wilds of South America, or some such godforsaken place. Ron showed us scars on his body which he claimed were made by aboriginal arrows on this expedition…Unfortunately, Ron's reputation for spinning tall tales (both off and on the printed page) made for a certain degree of skepticism in the minds of his audience. At any rate, he told one hell of a good story…
Ron was a persuasive and unscrupulous charmer, not only in a social group, but with the ladies. He was so persuasive and charmingly unscrupulous that within a matter of a few weeks he brought the entire House of Parsons down around poor Jack's ears. He did this by the simple expedient of taking over Jack's girl for extended periods of time…Ron was supposedly his best friend, and this was more than Jack was willing to tolerate…
A reporter named Nieson Himmel also lived in the house, sharing a room with Hubbard, after the latter moved out of his trailer and into the house. Himmel wrote:
Parsons was a superb chemist. He had this big old house up in Pasadena, among some huge old mansions. It was built by some rich people at the turn of the century. The coach houses were still back there…His specialty was explosives. He was a follower of Aleister Crowley. He used to have meetings there. I knew him through science fiction, we had meetings of the science fiction society out there. They used to have these meetings come down the stairs in black robes. There were two pyramid sort of things where they held their services. He converted the place into apartments, about 19 of them. He put an ad in the paper, “Apartments for rent. (This was at the end of the war when no one could find a place to live.) Must not believe in God.”
There was an Englishman [Wilfred Smith] living in the coach house who was one of the original Crowley followers. Parsons made no secret that he was a follower. There were woodcuts in Crowley books and Parsons had some of the originals. There were two crowds out there—science fiction and Crowley…
Parsons was living with a beautiful girl called Betty Northrup who I understand came from a rich family. She was beautiful, just lovely. This girl did not get married. Hubbard came in, he was irresistible to women, swept girls off their feet. There were other girls living there with guys and he went through them one by one. Finally he fastened onto Betty. Parsons was desperately in love, but could not countenance marriage because of his beliefs. The atmosphere became very tense. You would sit at the table and the hostility between Hubbard and Parsons was tangible…Betty was not her name, Sara was her name. Everyone knew her as Betty, beautiful, sweet as nice could be, she had dropped out of school to be with Parsons…
There was a bunch of people there, 18–20 in the big house and 5–6 in the coach house. When he broke it up into apartments, I think there were about 19 of them. The atmosphere became so tense…Lou Goldstone, an artist, was living there and he was my entree to the place…
I think Lou Goldstone introduced Hubbard to the house. Although I think Parsons was an early science fiction fan.
Lou said he stumbled into a couple of meetings. I presume it was a black mass. People talked about it quite openly…
Betty was beautiful—the most gorgeous, intelligent, sweet, wonderful person. I was so much in love with her, but I knew she was a woman I could never have…Betty was a raving beauty.
Alva Rogers was my first roomer, then Ron.
Himmel went on to a long career in crime writing and personally knew several mob bosses, including Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen. He died in March 1999 at the age of 77.
Concerning Parsons’ growing resentment towards the Hubbard-Betty affair, Rogers wrote:
Although the three of them [Parsons, Hubbard, and Betty] continued to maintain a surface show of unchanged amicability, it was obvious that Jack was feeling the pangs of a hitherto unfelt passion.
As events progressed, Jack found it increasingly difficult to keep his mind on anything but the torrid affair going on between Ron and Betty and the atmosphere around the house became supercharged with tension…In the end, Jack reacted as any ordinary man would under similar circumstances.
In September 1945, Hubbard was declared unfit for service due to an ulcer and left the Parsonage to go to the hospital for a while to strengthen his disability claim. To his credit, Hubbard was sending what little he had to his wife and children, who were still living with his parents in Washington state.
In early December, Hubbard was “mustered out” of the Navy. The very next day he applied to the VA for his pension, claiming a sprained left knee, malaria, and other maladies. He told them he was a writer, that his income had been $650 per month before the war, and that now it was zero. Then he hopped into his Packard and pulled his small trailer to the Pasadena, returning to the Parsonage and resuming his affair with Betty.
Alva Rogers was one who realized the true pain hidden beneath Parsons’ cavalier front. He wrote of an accidental peek caught one night through the cracked-open door:
As events progressed, Jack found it increasingly difficult to keep his mind on anything else…the atmosphere around the house became supercharged with tension; Jack began to show more and more strain, and the effort to disguise his metamorphosis from an emotionless Crowleyite ‘superman’ to a jealousy-ridden human being became hopeless…
The final, desperate act on Jack's part to reverse events and salvage something of the past from the ruin that stared him in the face occurred in the still, early hours of a bleak morning in December. Our room was just across the hall from Jack's apartment, the largest in the house, which also doubled as a temple, or whatever, of the OTO. We were brought out of a sound sleep by some weird and disturbing noises seemingly coming from Jack's room which sounded for all the world as though someone were dying or at the very least were deathly ill. We went out into the hall to investigate the source of the noises and found that they came from Jack's partially open door. Perhaps we should have turned around and gone back to bed at this point, but we didn't. The noise—which, by this time, we could tell was a sort of chant—drew us inexorably to the door which we pushed open a little further in order to better see what was going on. What we saw I'll never forget, although I find it hard to describe in any detail. The room, in which I had been before, was decorated in a manner typical to any occultist's lair, with all the symbols and ap
purtenances essential to the proper practice of black magic. It was dimly lit and smoky from incense; Jack was draped in a black robe and stood with his back to us, his arms outstretched, in the center of a pentagram before some sort of altar affair on which several indistinguishable items stood.
His voice, which was actually not very loud, rose and fell in a rhythmic chant of gibberish which was delivered with such passionate intensity that its meaning was frighteningly obvious. After this brief and uninvited glimpse into the blackest and most secret center of a tortured man's soul, we quietly withdrew and returned to our room, where we spent the balance of the night discussing in whispers what we had just witnessed…
The ritual seems to have worked, at least temporarily. After Hubbard's return, Parsons wrote in his diary, “I have been suffered to pass through an ordeal of human love and jealousy…I have found a staunch companion and comrade in Ron…Ron and I are to continue with our plans for the Order.” They did so a few days later, on January 4, 1946. Parsons wrote to Crowley around this time:
Most Beloved Father,
About three months ago I met Capt. L. Ron Hubbard, a writer and explorer of whom I had known for some time…He is a gentleman; he has red hair, green eyes, is honest and intelligent, and we have become great friends. He moved in with me about two months ago, and although Betty and I are still friendly, she has transferred her sexual affections to him.
Although Ron has no formal training in Magick, he has an extraordinary amount of experience and understanding in the field. From some of his experiences I deduce he is in direct touch with some higher intelligence, possibly his Guardian Angel. He describes his Angel as a beautiful winged woman with red hair whom he calls the Empress, and who has guided him through his life and saved him many times…Recently, he says, because of some danger, she has called the Archangel Michael to guard us…Last night after invoking, I called him in, and he described Isis nude on the left, and a faint figure of past, partly mistaken operations on the right, and a rosewood box with a string of green beads, a string of pearls with a black cross suspended, and a rose…He is the most thelemic person I have ever met and is in complete accord with our own principles. He is also interested in establishing the New Aeon but for cogent reasons I have not introduced him to the Lodge.
We are pooling our resources in a partnership that will act as a limited company to control our business ventures. I think I have made a great gain, and as Betty and I are the best of friends there is little loss. I cared for her deeply but I have no desire to control her emotions, and I can, I hope, control my own.
I need a magical partner. I have many experiments in mind…The next time I tie up with a woman it will be on my own terms.
Thy son, John.
Even at 30, Parsons was still young enough and immature enough to be quite impressionable and vulnerable, despite the fact that he had gone through repeated upheavals during his short life. He was a romantic, a poet—not a businessman. Hubbard made a big impression on him, so much so that Parsons forgot his obligation and violated his oath to the Order, revealing to Hubbard the secrets of the highest grades of the OTO—grades which Parsons himself may not have actually held but merely had access to some of the documents associated with them. However, two of his letters refer to himself as holding this grade, so the matter is unclear. He may have been exaggerating again.
With the war ended and the business buyout, it seems Parsons had a lot of time on his hands and threw himself into the magical work, possibly also as a distraction from and remedy for his painful experience with Betty and Hubbard. The “magical partner” Parsons envisioned was to be his partner in a “working” of sexual magic—probably not a IX°, but one of his own devising that fell well outside the system of the OTO. Parsons was known to invoke spirits called elementals, so-called because of their association with the four elements of the ancients: Earth, Air, Water, Fire. The classical symbols associated with each are usually gnomes, sylphs, mermaids, and salamanders, respectively. These are, of course, just symbols, such that modern replacements for each could be found: For example, UFOs, perhaps, would be a good replacement for sylphs.
According to Crowley, to summon an elemental requires a large amount of magical energy, the kind said to be generated by an VIII° working, the VIII° being a solo sexual rite, i.e., masturbation. As Parsons once wrote, “The invocation of lesser forces (spirit, angel, demon, elemental) is exact, since love doesn't usually enter in so much, in one sense [it is] far more dangerous than invocation of Gods. In the higher work you are actually wooing the god—it is an act of art. In the lower you are compelling—it is an act of science.” (Whether Parsons actually followed the rites of the VIII° of the OTO is known only to initiates.)
There are several ways to go about doing what Parsons was attempting, and he wrote:
The primary methods are: 1. Goetia Daemonic, 2. Planetary Clavicle of Solomon, 3. Enochian Elemental and Aires, 4. Solar Guardian Angel. I have found the Enochian the best (although complicated). The Tarot corresponds to the Enochian system obtained by Dr. Dee—the Trumps to the Aires, the Court Cards to the Gods, Seniors and Angels, and the numbers to the lesser angels.
What it all boils down to is that Parsons experimented on his own with upper-degree OTO techniques usually characterized as “sex magic,” i.e., to affect or bring about events. In addition, he remains the best example in support of the OTO's policy of keeping these techniques secret.
* * *
6. From information on file in the Pasadena Centennial Room of the Pasadena Central Library.
7. It was Crowley's wife, Rose Kelley, however, who had picked out the stele—in a trance.
8. It was later said that this man founded the gay rights movement.
9. Bartley would later work with Parsons on special effects for the film industry.
six
An Introduction to Enochian Magic
From Parsons’ ritual references and other aspects of the occult world in which he so ardently participated, we can piece together the atmosphere surrounding his workings. For example, the Enochian system referred to by Parsons is a form of magic founded not by the prophet Enoch but by Dr. John Dee and Sir Edward Kelley in 16th-century England. Enochian magic is not necessarily sexual in nature; in fact, its Elizabethan originators deliberately refused injunctions towards sexual immorality.
John Dee was born July 13, 1527 in Mortlake, England, a small village on the Thames just outside of London. Dee was a bright boy, enrolling at the university at the age of 15. He began a large private library at his home and eventually became proficient in various sciences including mathematics, navigation (much of which he learned firsthand during his world travels), astronomy, optics, and cartography. He also studied the hermetic sciences and was appointed to be the Royal Astrologer to Elizabeth I.
Dee had been imprisoned by Queen Mary after drawing up an unfavorable horoscope for her (at her request). Elizabeth pardoned him, and in addition to his otherworldly duties he also acted as an agent of espionage, signing his secret communiqués to her “007.” He seems to have developed some sense of esoteric duty to Elizabeth's person or position, as there is evidence he idolized her as the Egyptian goddess Isis. Indeed, his “esoteric duty” may even have included an application of the famous INRI formula, the “key word” used in Crowley's magic, in one of its many variations.
Dee married relatively late, in 1574, at the age of 47. History does not record the name of the wife, who died the following year. He remarried, this time to a Jane Fromond, one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting. Dee's studies continued independently, and by 1581 he felt he had exhausted all known sources of worldly knowledge and that the only way to continue his quest for knowledge was to turn to the otherworldly.
A godly man, Dee was a good Christian and a member of the Church of England. He admired Enoch, the first man after the Fall said to have walked with God. According to tradition, Enoch was the author of several apocryphal books, in which he was said to
have recorded what he learned during these walks. These lost books were in fact pseudepigraphical, i.e., not written by Enoch, but Dee longed to find them and proposed to do it with the help of angels.
Addressing God, he prayed, “I have read often in Thy books & records, how Enoch often injoyed Thy favour & conversation; with Moses thou was familiar; And also that to Abraham, Issack & Jocob, Joshua, Gideon, Esdras, Daniel, Tobias & sundry others Thy good angels were sent by Thy disposition, to Instruct them, informe them, helpe them, yea in worldly and domestick affaires, yea and sometymes to satisfie their desires, doubtes & questions of Thy Secrete.”
In his quest, Dee acquired from various sources several magical “shewstones,” with the intent of taking up crystal-gazing. Try as he might, however, he couldn't do it, as he was just too logical a thinker and his rational brain resisted all attempts to impose a trance state upon it. He decided he needed a helper and enlisted the services of Edward Kelley, who had changed his name from Talbott. Kelley had a reputation as an alchemist; it was said he had produced gold once. It also seems he was something of a rogue. John Weever recorded the following adventure of Kelley's in the 16th-century Ancient Funerall Monuments, the spelling of which appears to have been somewhat modernized:
