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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jack Parsons | 14/16 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T04:32:07.745794+00:00 | kb-cron |
Parsons adhered to the occult philosophy of Thelema, which had been founded in 1904 by the English occultist Aleister Crowley following a spiritual revelation that he had in Cairo, Egypt, when—according to Crowley's accounts—a spirit being known as Aiwass dictated to him a prophetic text known as The Book of the Law. Prior to becoming aware of Thelema and Crowley, Parsons' interest in esotericism was developed through his reading of The Golden Bough (1890), a work in comparative mythology by Scottish social anthropologist James George Frazer. Parsons had also attended lectures on Theosophy by philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti with his first wife Helen, but disliked the belief system's sentiment of "the good and the true". During rocket tests, Parsons often recited Crowley's poem "Hymn to Pan" as a good luck charm. He took to addressing Crowley as his "Most Beloved Father" and signed off to him as "thy son, John". In July 1945, Parsons gave a speech to the Agape Lodge, in which he attempted to explain how he felt that The Book of the Law could be made relevant to "modern life". In this speech, which was subsequently published under the title of "Doing Your Will", he examined the Thelemite concept of True Will, writing that:
The mainspring of an individual is his creative Will. This Will is the sum of his tendencies, his destiny, his inner truth. It is one with the force that makes the birds sing and flowers bloom; as inevitable as gravity, as implicit as a bowel movement, it informs alike atoms and men and suns. To the man who knows this Will, there is no why or why not, no can or cannot; he is! There is no known force that can turn an apple into an alley cat; there is no known force that can turn a man from his Will. This is the triumph of genius; that, surviving the centuries, enlightens the world.
This force burns in every man. Parsons identified four obstacles that prevented humans from achieving and performing their True Will, all of which he connected with fear: the fear of incompetence, the fear of the opinion of others, the fear of hurting others, and the fear of insecurity. He insisted that these must be overcome, writing that "The Will must be freed of its fetters. The ruthless examination and destruction of taboos, complexes, frustrations, dislikes, fears and disgusts hostile to the Will is essential to progress." Though Parsons was a lifelong devotee to Thelema, he grew weary of and eventually left Ordo Templi Orientis—the religious organization that began propagating Thelema under Crowley's leadership from the 1910s—which Parsons viewed, despite the disagreement of Crowley himself, as excessively hierarchical and impeding upon the rigorous spiritual and philosophical practice of True Will, describing O.T.O. as "an excellent training school for adepts, but hardly an appropriate Order for the manifestation of Thelema". In this sense Parsons was described by Carter as an "almost fundamentalist" Thelemite who placed The Book of the Law's dogma above all other doctrine.
=== Politics ===
From early on in his career, Parsons took an interest in socialism and communism, views that he shared with his friend Frank Malina. Under the influence of another friend, Sidney Weinbaum, the two joined a communist group in the late 1930s, with Parsons reading Marxist literature, but he remained unconvinced and refused to join the American Communist Party. Malina asserted that this was because Parsons was a "political romantic", whose attitude was more anti-authoritarian than anti-capitalist. Parsons later became critical of the Marxist–Leninist government of the Soviet Union led by Joseph Stalin, sarcastically commenting that
The dictatorship of the proletariat is merely temporary — the state will eventually wither away like a snark hunter, leaving us all free as birds. Meanwhile, it may be necessary to kill, torture and imprison a few million people, but whose fault is it if they get in the way of progress? During the era of McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare in the early 1950s, Parsons was questioned regarding his former links to the communist movement, by which time he denied any connection to it, instead describing himself as "an individualist" who was both anti-communist and anti-fascist. In reaction to the McCarthyite red-baiting of scientists, he expressed disdain that
[s]cience, that was going to save the world in H. G. Wells' time is regimented, straight-jacked, [and] scared shitless, its universal language diminished to one word, security. Parsons was politically influenced by Thelema, which holds to the ethical code of "Do what thou wilt". In his essay, "Freedom is a Lonely Star", Parsons equated this principle to the libertarian views of a number of the Founding Fathers of the United States. By his own time, he wrote, these values had been "sold out by America, and for that reason the heart of America is sick and the soul of America is dead." He proceeded to criticize many aspects of contemporary U.S. society, particularly the police force ("[t]he police mind is usually of a sadistic and homicidal trend") and note they carried out the "ruthless punishment of symbolic scapegoats" such as African-Americans, prostitutes, alcoholics, homeless people and sociopolitical radicals, under the pretense of a country that upheld "liberty and justice for all." To bring about a freer future, Parsons believed in liberalizing attitudes to sexual morality stating that, in his belief, the publication of the Kinsey Reports and development of the psychonautical sciences had as significant an influence on Western society as the creation of the atomic bomb and the development of nuclear physics. He believed that in the future the restrictions on sexual morality within society should be abolished in order to bring about greater freedom and individuality. Parsons concluded that