Strange Angel (37 page)

He performed the ritual repeatedly over the following week, so thirsty for results that soon he was invoking his elemental twice each day. He liked to play Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto on his gramophone as an accompaniment. He started using his own blood instead of semen, and, his mind sensitive with anticipation, he began to record any phenomena he thought were related to his actions. A violent windstorm followed the first ritual. On another night he was awakened by a series of loud and rapid knocks, and a table lamp across from his bed was thrown violently to the floor, even though the windstorm had died out. In a letter to Crowley he announced, “I have been extremely careful and conscientious in this ritual, lending all my will and scientific training to its precision and preparation. Yet nothing seems to have happened ... The wind storm is very interesting but that's not what I asked for.”

A few days later he performed the ritual twice more and observed further unexplained phenomena. At around 9:00
P.M.
the electricity failed, and Hubbard, who was in the kitchen at the time, called out to Parsons, saying he had been “struck strongly on the right shoulder.” Parsons hurried to Hubbard's side and, in Parsons' words, the two observed “a brownish yellow light about seven feet high in the kitchen.” Parsons ran back to his bedroom, grabbed one of the swords hanging from the wall, and hurried back to the kitchen to perform a banishing ritual, burning sulphur and tobacco to aid him in his task. The figure “seemed to diminish” and Parsons followed it into the library, all the while drawing pentagrams in the air with his sword. Finally, the form dwindled into nothing. Parsons diligently noted that Hubbard's right arm remained paralyzed for the rest of the night.

Parsons was already impressed by Hubbard's grasp of Crowley's teachings, but now he became convinced of Hubbard's supreme magical sensitivity. The distress Parsons felt about Hubbard's relationship with Betty was quickly overcome by his remarkable will to believe. He invited Hubbard to sit in on his future rituals and the visions continued to appear. On one occasion Hubbard said that he saw an apparition of Wilfred Smith materialize behind Parsons; before Parsons knew what was happening, Hubbard “pinned it to the door with four throwing knives, with which he [was] expert.” Later, in his room, Parsons heard the strange raps again and “a buzzing metallic voice crying, ‘Let me go free'.”

Were these really spirits speaking to him, conjured up by his rituals, or was someone else providing Parsons with the phenomena he so desperately wanted? Hubbard had taken over Smith's old bedroom across the hall, so he and Betty would have been ideally positioned to stage “supernatural occurrences,” especially with the help of the house's secret passageways. If Hubbard was using his imaginative skills to give Parsons satisfaction, then Parsons was all too willing to accept the gift.

However, Parsons did not care to speculate about any underhanded tactics. Instead he wrote in his record, “I felt a great pressure and tension in the house that night, which was also noticed by the other occupants.” The tension might, of course, just as easily have been caused by Parsons' insistence on burning sulphur in the kitchen and swinging a sword through the living room, not to mention the twice daily rituals chanted loudly in the Enochian tongue.

After two weeks Parsons and Hubbard traveled into the Mojave Desert together. It had been some time since Parsons had come out here for his rocket experiments. More recently he had escaped to the desert for seclusion in which to meditate and practice his magic. His favorite place was marked by the intersection of two massive power lines, their source and goal lost in both horizons. The sagging cables emitted an ominous, enveloping drone, as if they were the antennae of an almighty cicada buried deep beneath the ground. At sunset the two men stood beneath them and suddenly Parsons felt the tension snap. “I turned to him and said ‘It is done', in absolute certainty that the operation was accomplished. I returned home, and found a young woman answering the requirements waiting for me.” Parsons had summoned his elemental.

 

Little did Marjorie Cameron know what she was getting herself into when she arrived at 1003 on the January 18, 1946. Like everybody in Pasadena, she had heard the stories about what went on in the house, but they had not disturbed her. Twenty-three years old, she was known as Candy; she stood five feet five inches tall and had a fair, freckled complexion. Her slant blue eyes, “giant red lips” and burning red hair made her the center of attention wherever she went. Born in Belle Plain, Iowa, her childhood had been far from innocent; she told stories of train hopping and midnight trysts. Robert Cornog remembered her unsettling reminiscences: “Girls had crushes on her and had committed suicide [over her] in her home town.” During the war she enlisted as a Wave, a woman serving in the United States Navy, and was assigned to the map room of the Navy Chief of Staff in Washington, D.C. She soon went AWOL and was discharged from the service. She had since returned to her family home in Pasadena where her father and brothers worked as electricians and mechanics at Caltech.

Candy was now living as an artist, supplementing her unemployment benefits by drawing fashion illustrations for ladies' magazines. She had visited 1003 the previous year in the company of one of the house's other residents and caught a momentary glimpse of the house's “mad scientist” owner. The two had not spoken, but in the days after her visit, Parsons had asked after her. By January she had been persuaded to return, following a chance encounter with one of 1003's residents. She was enticed by Parsons' interest in her and also by the rumors of intrigue that she was now informed of: “All the things that were going on with he and Hubbard, and the war that was on with Smith ... I just couldn't wait to get there.”

Her arrival coincided exactly with Parsons' return from the Mojave. He was overwhelmed by the magnetism between the two of them. In a letter to Crowley, Parsons declared, “I have my elemental!” describing her as “fiery and subtle, determined and obstinate, sincere and perverse, with extraordinary personality and intelligence.”

He immediately began performing sex magick rituals with her, a strange but not atypical welcome for a new member of the household. “I am to invoke continually, this now being possible and easy,” he wrote to Crowley. As for Candy she cared little about the mystical dimension of their bedroom antics. “I didn't know very much [about] Jack's magical work. In fact, I probably derided it,” she recalled. Nevertheless, for the next two weeks the couple barely left Parsons' room.

The “magical working” he now began was his most ambitious yet. He believed he could incarnate an actual goddess on earth, a female messiah named Babalon. The goddess Babalon (its spelling “corrected” by Crowley from
Babylon
to provide it with a more auspicious cabbalistic number) first appears as a character in literature in the Revelation, where she is described as a scarlet woman riding on the back of the Great Beast. Parsons believed that his Babalon would also ride on the back of the Beast—Crowley—and augment Crowley's teachings. He hoped that this “Babalon Working” would resound his own name through the ages like the name of a William Bolitho hero.

His companions in the OTO had little idea of what Parsons was trying to achieve. Jane Wolfe, writing to Crowley, admitted his magical work was “much too personal for me, and beyond most of my actual knowledge.” Crowley was intrigued by Parsons' undertaking, but he also wondered about his pupil's extreme enthusiasms. “It seems to me that there is a danger of your sensitiveness upsetting your balance. Any experience that comes your way you have a tendency to over-estimate. The first fine careless rapture wears off in a month or so, and some other experience comes along and carries you off on its back. Meanwhile you have neglected and bewildered those who are dependent on you, either from above or from below ... At the same time, you being sensitive as you are, it behoves you to be more on your guard than would be the case with the majority of people.”

Parsons paid no heed to this warning. He immersed himself deeper and deeper in his magic with an excitement that bordered on mania. His letters and notes from the time reveal his exaggerated self-esteem, racing thoughts, persistent agitation, and, in the case of Hubbard's visions, poor judgment—all could have been signs of some form of manic episode. His letters to Crowley came at a more furious pace than ever before, and they were full of feverish, staccato sentences and biblical exaltation. “Thrice blessed, I stand beyond pity or passion, my heart in the light, my eyes turned to the highest. Glory, I cry, Glory unto the Beast and unto Babalon, and Hail to the Crowned and Conquering CHILD.”

When Cameron embarked on a brief trip to New York, Parsons went out into the desert once more. There he heard a voice speaking to him, dictating to him just as a spirit had dictated Crowley's own
Book of the Law.
Sitting in the desert, Parsons began writing down a long list of lamentations, declarations, and ritual instructions to form what he called the
Book of Babalon.
Parsons intended his divinely inspired book to be a fourth additional part to Crowley's own volume. But Parsons' book is a jumble of archaisms and colloquialisms, its sole coherent thread the repeated references to flame and madness. It lacks the cohesion of Crowley's work, the grim biblical authority; the text proceeds as a whirlwind stream-of-consciousness rant straight from the darker, sensual regions of Parsons' mind. “Yea it is even I BABALON and I SHALL BE FREE. Thou fool, be thou also free of sentimentality. Am I thy village queen and thou a sophomore, that thou shouldst have thy nose in my buttocks?...It is I, BABALON ye fools. My time is come, and this my book that my adept prepares is the book of BABALON.”

Parsons returned from the desert driven to perform the rituals he had been “given,” and Hubbard began seeing visions once more. Hubbard was a master storyteller and a quick thinker, but he had now been performing magic with Parsons for nearly two months. According to Parsons' record of the time, Hubbard was exhausted and often left pale and sweating from his exertions. Finally, a fatigued Hubbard saw a vision calling an end to the working. In a fragment from his writings, Parsons, exhausted and exultant, declared his work a success. He believed that Babalon, in the manner of the Immaculate Conception, was due to be born to a woman somewhere on earth in nine months time. “Babalon is incarnate upon the earth today, awaiting the proper hour for her manifestation,” he wrote. “And in that day my work will be accomplished, and I shall be blown away upon the Breath of the father.”

 

Feeling the wide-eyed exhaustion of the desert prophet, Parsons declared that he had to return to reality. He would need to distance himself from the OTO if he was ever to get his affairs in order, explaining to Crowley, “I must put the Lodge in [other] hands; prepare a suitable place and carry on my business to provide the suitable material means [money].”

On March 16, 1946, Parsons wrote a group letter to all the members of the OTO, alluding cryptically to the Babalon working he had just performed, “In the coming months the world approaches one of its greatest crises, and Agape Lodge may well have a basic role in this history. I hope and trust that your own part will help to make this role possible, in the time when the Lodge and the world needs you most.” This new aeon, paradoxically, was to start with the end of an era. He announced that he planned to sell the house at 1003 and that anyone living there would have to move out by June 1.

The extraordinary group of scientists and occultists, writers and pulp fiction fans, who had been living at 1003, slowly began to disperse. As a condition of the sale (for which he would receive some $25,000), Parsons arranged to move into the old coach house in the grounds. He handed the running of the now homeless Agape Lodge over to a baffled Roy Leffingwell and asked that he be allowed time to recuperate from his magical ordeal. He planned to get his new explosives business off the ground.

While the Babalon working had been taking place, Parsons had been persuaded to forgo Ad Astra and his old friend Ed Forman and to enter a new business partnership with Hubbard and Betty. The aim was similar to that of Ad Astra: “To pool and accumulate earnings and profits of any nature whatsoever, coming from any source whatsoever, and flowing from the capabilities and craft of each of the partners.” Thus, any and all profits from their various works—Hubbard's writing, Parsons' Vulcan Powder Corporation—should go towards what they called “Allied Enterprises.”

Parsons' attachment to Hubbard, despite the loss of Betty, had only been intensified by the central role Hubbard played throughout his magical workings. This new venture would cement the ménage with Hubbard and Betty and, Parsons hoped, create some much needed stability in his life. He invested close to his entire savings—$20,970.80, largely gained from the house sale—into the company. Hubbard did the same, although his savings, at $1,183.91, were considerably less. Betty contributed nothing. Parsons' financial role in the OTO had long ago proven his generosity, but this new undertaking also seemed tinged with desperation: Despite Candy's presence he still wanted to win back Betty's affections. As he wrote to Crowley, “I think I have made a great gain, and as Betty and I are the best of friends, there is little loss.” He was soon proved entirely wrong.

Hubbard came up with a proposal for the new company. He and Betty would travel to Miami to buy three yachts. Once they found crews, they would sail the yachts back through the Panama Canal and sell them on the West Coast at a much higher price. As told by Hubbard, with his naval background, the plan sounded both eminently practical and glamorously adventurous, and Parsons was easily persuaded by his friend's confidence and by Betty's entreaties. Not everyone bought Hubbard's plan, especially not the OTO members who remained at 1003. They feared that their one-time “Rich Man of the West” risked making himself poor very quickly. Grady McMurtry, now based in San Francisco but keeping an eye on Agape Lodge, warned, “It would seem more of an adventure than a business proposition.” Jane Wolfe joined in the chorus of dissatisfaction. “I am wondering,” she wrote to Germer, “if Ron is another Smith?”