Jack Parsons, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Babalon Working
The Mojave Desert strethes into four US states, including California, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah. Joshua Tree National Park (pictured) is in the California section of the Mojave. There are certainly worse places to hold a magick ritual.
Photo by the author, taken on Nov. 10, 2023.
The desert has always been a magic place, a sacred place. Religions have been founded in it, mystics wander in it, people go crazy in it. As Jesus says in Mark 6:31: “Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while.” The desert, ironically, is a place where the spirit goes to find nourishment.
The desert is also a place of science: archaeologists dig it up, botanists and biologists catalog it, and it’s home to some of the world’s best places to view the night sky. It’s also a great place for secret military bases. Deserts act as a bellwether – the proverbial canary in a coal mine – for the health of a region. It is a place, as such different peoples as the Hohokam of Arizona and the Moors of Al-Andulas (modern Spain and Portugal) knew well, that can be terraformed from wastelands to Eden.
The desert is a place of wonder as much as place to wander; the allure of it is as magical and it is scientific.
The desert then, is a prime example of how two seemingly disparate things can, through a kind of symbiosis, function together at the same time and place; how two things can be seen and experienced, when looked at through the lens of the weird, as two sides of the same coin. The desert is both a place for the mystic as much as it is for the learned.
The desert, then, is like history. Throughout history, science and magic have walked hand-in-hand. One of the more interesting and overt overlaps between the two occurred somewhere in the Mojave Desert in 1946.
It’s strange to think of something magical (or magickal in this case) occurring so close to the end of World War II – a global event that was, in itself, a prime example of a world obsessed with science to the point of nuclear annihilation.
One such acolyte of annihilation was Jack Parsons. Born Marvel Whiteside Parsons, Jack had juggled his dual interests of magic and science for years. During the bulk of the 1940’s the interest in science had been his day job: he worked at Caltech, co-founded both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Aerojet, and was an expert (if, at times, a dangerous one) in the nascent field of rocketry. He was also keenly interested in magic and the weird and, in 1939, had converted to Thelema – the occult philosophy founded by Aleister Crowley.
In 1944, he was ousted from both JPL and Aerojet. One reason for Parsons’ expulsion was down to his work safety ethics – specifically that he didn’t have any. According to a historian of the time, Parsons “still wanted to work in the same way as he’d done in his backyard, instinctive and without regard for safety.” But there was another reason: Parsons’ interest in the occult was just plain disreputable.
It was during this hectic, war-torn time that Parsons met and (quickly) befriended a young US Navy officer, and science-fiction writer, named L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard was also interested in the occult and it was in 1946 that he and Parsons hatched their scheme. The two sorcerers decided it was up to them to change the world and if they couldn’t do it with machines of war then they would do it with sex magick. Their project was called the Babalon Working.
The Babalon Working started in Parsons’ Pasadena home (named “The Parsonage”) sometime in January 1946. The project was an attempt to summon, bring into existence, or birth, the Thelemite goddess Babalon onto earth. The woman – dubbed the “Scarlet Woman” by Parsons – would then give birth to an entity called the “Moonchild.” The hope was to usher in a new, magical age for humanity. While Crowley had written about doing something like this, Parsons decided to turn the idea into praxis.
While Parsons had been steeped in the occult for years, Hubbard was a relative novice. His role, in Parsons’ words, was to be a “scribe.” Parsons felt Hubbard was acutely attuned to magical phenomena and even wrote to his friend Crowley, who was still alive, to say so. Although Hubbard had “no formal training in Magick he has an extraordinary amount of experience and understanding in the field,” wrote Parsons. “I deduce he is in direct touch with some higher intelligence, possibly his Guardian Angel [and that he] is the most Thelemic person I have ever met and is in complete accord with our own principles.” Hubbard would ultimately found Scientology, but that was still years away.
After holding numerous ceremonies in his Orange Grove home, it was time to finish the Working. The last ceremony occurred somewhere in the Mojave Desert in February or March 1946. It was, apparently, cut short by something and Parsons suddenly felt that Babalon Working had been completed.
When Parsons and Hubbard returned to The Parsonage (where Parsons and many of his occult friends all lived) he saw her: his “elemental manifestation,” his Babalon, his “Scarlet Woman.” She had appeared.
Of course, she didn’t know she was Babalon incarnate; she only knew herself as Marjorie Cameron.
As writer, and oracle of the weird, Ken Layne had this to say about their meeting:
[Cameron] enjoyed the bohemian scene at Parsons’ Pasadena lodge on [S.] Orange Grove Avenue, but was not originally aware that she had apparently been summoned by ritual magick. Only when she reported her sighting of a luminous disc – possibly the first sighting of the modern flying saucer era – did Parsons and Hubbard let her in on the secret: They had opened a hole in the sky; a hole in space and time. And something, or many things, had come through it.
Not that all of this mattered to anyone for very long. As mystical as things may have been, earthly affairs superceded. While Cameron soon married Parsons, the JPL founder and magician was fatally wounded during an explosion in his laboratory in 1952 – the war had ended and Parsons found himself making explosives for Hollywood films. Some said it was an accident, others a suicide, and a few that it was murder. Hubbard went on to swindle Parsons of most of his money (thus Parsons Hollywood gig) and then, a few years later, founded Scientology.
Cameron, for her part, desperately believed in Parson’s occult work – but not at first. She thought very little of Parsons’ Thelemic beliefs while he was alive. But, afterwards? Well, grief does strange things to people. After Parsons death Cameron became obsessed with the occult. She fled to the high deserts of central Mexico and, while there, performed blood rituals in the hopes of communicating with her dead husband. She read Parson’s occult writings, embraced Thelema, and even (finally) believed herself to be the incarnation of Babalon.
While neither Parsons, Hubbard, nor Cameron brought about the aims of their Babalon Working, they all left their blood, sweat, tears (and more) in the vast expanses of North America’s deserts. All three died in California and all three, too, were cremated. While Hubbard’s ashes were scattered in the ocean, Parsons and Cameron saw their ashes scattered somewhere in the Mojave Desert. The desert was where they fulfilled the solemn, needful mandate of Mark 6:31 and were finally at rest.
[This essay first appeared on Desert Dispatch on 12/29/2023.]
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