NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab traces to a man who literally did sex-magic rituals to summon a goddess, and the most uncomfortable part isn't the rituals. It's that he was right about the rockets. John Whiteside Parsons was a high-school-educated chemist with no formal degree, and the propellant chemistry he pioneered still echoes in the solid rocket boosters that have flown astronauts off the planet. He was also, simultaneously, a card-carrying disciple of Aleister Crowley who ran the Los Angeles lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis out of a mansion on Pasadena's Orange Grove Avenue. Both of those things are documented. Both are true at once.

Here is what actually happened. In the mid-1930s Parsons, Frank Malina, and Edward Forman were part of a small band of amateurs Caltech faculty nicknamed the 'Suicide Squad' for blowing things up testing rocket motors in the Arroyo Seco. Out of that work came the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory's rocket research group, the formal incorporation of Aerojet Engineering in 1942, and the entity that in 1943 became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Parsons' key technical contribution was a castable composite solid propellant — binding an oxidizer in an asphalt-like matrix — that solved the problem of solid fuel cracking and burning unevenly. JPL's own institutional histories acknowledge him as a founder. NASA's site names him. This is not fringe revisionism; it's the official record.

The occult side is just as well-attested, because Parsons wrote much of it down and Crowley's organization kept correspondence. By 1941 Parsons had taken over the Agape Lodge of the O.T.O. In late 1945 and early 1946 he conducted what he called the Babalon Working: a sequence of ritual operations, drawing on Crowley's Enochian system, intended to manifest the Thelemic goddess Babalon as a literal incarnate presence — a 'Moonchild.' His ritual partner and 'scribe' for part of this was a charismatic, broke young Navy veteran named L. Ron Hubbard, several years before Hubbard wrote Dianetics and founded Scientology. The rites involved chanting, ceremonial implements, and sex magic. Parsons believed the working had succeeded when a red-haired woman, Marjorie Cameron, appeared in his life.

The hard evidence here is unusually strong for an occult episode. Parsons' own ritual records and his magical-philosophical text 'The Book of Babalon' survive. Crowley's reaction survives too, and it is the most quotable footnote in the whole affair: from London, the aging Beast wrote to a colleague that he was 'fairly frantic' over what 'Frater 210' (Parsons' magical name) was up to, complaining that his California followers seemed to have lost their minds over a 'moonchild.' The Hubbard connection is corroborated from the other direction by Parsons himself, who wrote a 1946 telegram stating he suspected 'Ron is playing a confidence trick' after Hubbard ran off with Parsons' partner Sara Northrup and a chunk of his money in a yacht-purchase scheme.

Now the skeptical-but-fair reading, because Inverted World does not do hagiography. None of this means Parsons summoned anything. The 'success' of the Babalon Working is exactly the kind of claim that confirms itself: you decide a goddess will manifest, a striking woman shows up in a city of millions, and you call it proof. The Hubbard betrayal is a mundane grift, not sorcery. And the romantic legend that Parsons was hounded out of rocketry for his beliefs needs trimming. The documented sequence is messier: he sold most of his Aerojet stock in 1944, his security clearance was suspended amid the Red Scare partly over his unconventional associations, and his standing eroded as the field professionalized around credentialed engineers. He died in 1952 in an explosion in his home lab handling volatile chemicals — officially an accident, though associates whispered otherwise.

What is genuinely striking, and what the record really shows, is the institutional embarrassment. The people around Parsons did not regard his occultism as disqualifying because it was metaphysically false. They regarded it as disreputable — a public-relations liability for an organization angling for military contracts. The magic and the missiles ran on parallel tracks in the same man, and the establishment's objection was never 'this is unscientific.' It was 'this looks bad.'

So the unresolved question isn't whether a Thelemic goddess walks among us. It's why we find it so hard to sit with the fact that one of the founding minds of American spaceflight genuinely believed in ritual magic and was, in his day job, a first-rate empirical chemist. We want our origin stories clean. Parsons refused to provide one — and the lab that fired its rockets toward the planets has his fingerprints on the fuel.