Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 315: Jack Parsons - Do What Thou Wilt ft. Kurt Maloney

Episode Date: September 14, 2025

IT'S THE LAST EPISODE OF LA MONTH! Alex, Jesse and Mike are joined by DropOut TV Super Star, Kurt Maloney, and Alex tells us of the true story of a magical genius who brought us rocket fuel, Jack Parsons.  STICKERS: https://theyetee.com/collections/chilluminati/products/top-secret-stickers-vol-1 LA Month Laurel Canyon Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7Id1OSSEEJCKO4vn6ACP5h?si=943dab3890ec4d90 Thank you to - Factor - http://www.factormeals.com/chill50off Promo Code: chill50off All you lovely people at Patreon! HTTP://PATREON.COM/CHILLUMINATIPOD Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - http://www.youtube.com/user/superbeardbros Editor - DeanCutty http://www.twitter.com/deancutty Show art by - https://twitter.com/JetpackBraggin http://www.instagram.com/studio_melectro Kurt: https://www.tiktok.com/@kurtmaloney https://www.instagram.com/kurtmaloney/ https://www.dropout.tv/ REFERENCE LIST FOR FURTHER READING https://feralhouse.com/sex-and-rockets/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqprZIfcsTs https://archive.is/mT9AL https://allthatsinteresting.com/aleister-crowley https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-parsonage-jack-parson-s-burned-down-house-pasadena-california https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/bb/babalon210.htm https://archive.is/GNwin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxMJONFDw_E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/50959/pg50959-images.html https://archive.is/g37sn https://archive.is/j5ZRK https://www.californiacuriosities.com/devils-gate/

Hello, everybody and welcome back to the Chulamati podcast, episode 315, as always, I'm one of your host, Mike Martin, today joined by the League of Gentleman. That's good. From L.A. That's good. Alex. Not a high bar to pass. And Jesse, but I'm just going to let you take it from here, Alex.

Well, all right. I mean, I'm just, I like when he just steps aside. I just give up. You know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, here we go. Look, here we are, friends. With another week comes another episode of the Schluminati podcast. And though in many ways, it's just another week like any other here on the show.

I have two very special things to share with you. Firstly, today officially marks the end. of L.A. month here at Chulamati HQ, uh, in which 2025's short diversion into the realms of magic briefly synchronized all our topics around the canyons of our, my, your beloved city, Los Angeles. And we've learned about everything from murders to military secrets and how the music, film, and news media, uh, cloud that surrounds it in what some might even say was the first modern global culture cloud ever, only served to amplify the dark magic, the greed, the selfishness, and mystery at the core of what makes Los Angeles, California, America,

and even Western culture itself, tick ever closer to midnight, where most likely horrible missiles will one day rise at the height of the terrible water war and wipe us all out for good. or maybe we'll vote somebody else into office. But slowly but surely we'll turn into the United Federation of Planets, right? That's how it's going to turn out, hopefully. I would love that to be the case. But having lived in Texas for four years, I don't think that's happening anytime soon. I don't think that's where the Federation is based, by the way.

NASA is out here. Yeah, that's, well, that's true. That's true. That's NASA. I'm pretty sure in San Francisco. Also, as we all know, evidence of ancient life on Mars and a riverbed. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

And that's the only thing that happened today. But before we spent an hour or two finding out the surprising reason why the guy who invented the modern rocket engine considered himself the Antichrist and undertook his own mysterious black pilgrimage to become it

before blowing up in an explosion. Let's introduce the second theme thing I'm excited to share, which is the final surprise local guest for L.A. Month. He's an expert improviser. I read it in his bio. Stand-up host and comedy writer

who's appeared everywhere from sketches on Jimmy Kim Alive and Conan to writing for Disney Channel. He's also worked for many years making videos for all his own sketch groups, Bath Boys Comedy, as well as Smosh and Dropout TV, where he also wrote a bunch of bits and has been on, you know, you probably know him from that. He's got a lot of silly different headshots. He's got like 31 siblings. He loves them all. He's not super active on social media.

He's a good old friend of mine. He used to do comedy together a bunch. And one time many years ago, he was the main character of Bonner Police, the movie. Kurt Maloney, welcome to the show. Whoa. That what a great intro. Did I write that bio? Did I write an expert improviser?

I think it says that on your actual resume. Do you ever get so desperate for a job that you like overhyped yourself on your resume? In that same, in that same resume, you say that you have like seven dialects on lock from like different countries. Oh, and I don't. Oh, well, I'm sad. But if you hire me, I'll learn it, you know? Yeah, I love that. Yeah, that's good.

That's a classic 70s attitude. Where did you find that on IMDB? No, at your, I forget who it was with. It was like some agency that you are or were with had your, had your actual resume online and a bunch of little blurbs about you. And there's a UCB one, which is like, you're like, hi, mom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So how long have you known Alex? How long have you known Alex, Kirk?

I met Alex when I was 18 years old. Alex, you were probably, I think you're a year old. I was like 35 or 36 at that time. I was 18. We met on the comedy sports college team doing improv together. Did we join the same year? Did I join? I joined the same year as you,

but I'm just older than you because I like took it like took a couple years. So it always felt like we were in different years. But yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, I think you joined one year before me. And then I'm older than you. Yeah. Who's known Alex that long? Does Alex love Disney or L.A. more?

I'd say L.A. I mean, I don't know Alex to love Disney. Really? I like Disney land. I like Disney land. Yeah. What's the change in that time? It's not like Disney,

not like a Disney adult, but like the history and the Americana of Disney, particularly. I would have, that would have been tougher. Okay. The vitals of that or like maybe the building of, but like,

I don't know Alex to be like, you got to watch Coco. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. I loved it, but he's the end. Oh, it broke me, dude.

It's really good. We're going to. We're going to watch that. I'm on popcorn one day. No. I think that the reason I like Disneyland, though, is just because I like L.A. Right? Yeah.

Yeah. I feel like it. I like, I like like the 60s and the 70s and Los Angeles. And Disneyland's like, yeah, it's very particular to Disneyland, true. It's not Disney World so much. Yeah. If I want a recommendation for a restaurant in L.A., I'm going to Alex. Yeah, that's real.

And Alex is a superpower. I don't know if you've gone to lunch with him at a place that he's never tried, but he and look at the menu and be like that this is the best thing here. Even if it's a three page menu, he'll go, it's this thing. This is going to be the best thing here. And he'll always gets it right. And I have the opposite power, which I will find the worst thing. It's like ordering spaghetti at like a sushi restaurant or something. I'll get it wrong. It's whack. You got to, it's like you got to leave your own shit out of it. You know what I mean? You got to take your own shit at the equation. Uh, you tell like, three your own ideas to the restaurant. Yeah.

You go in and you go, like, I see the vibe of the restaurant. I see the people working here. I get their style. They're going to be good at like this like catfish dish. It's like meditating. Yeah. Yeah. Like, why would that be like, I love chicken nuggets.

And then. That's a good. Yeah. That's why it's usually my thing is like, I want chicken nuggets. It's all. I tried to get, I tried to get Mathis to do nuggets Chulam andasty style recently where he dips him in sweet and sour sauce and then rolls them in pop rocks.

But there was like a pop rocks mouthful. There was no pop pop rocks around me. Probably for good reason. I had no point in that sentence that I know where you were going with that. Yeah. Mathis to Chumalumani style max chicken tenders. Okay. I don't know what that means.

Were you dip it in pop rocks? Yeah. Yeah. Pretty good. Yeah. No pop rocks around me, but there are two stores where I can buy ammunition within 30 minutes. If you're dipping chicken tenders in a pop rocks, just do cocaine. that's actually the point of it's actually a performance art piece to get you to start on

cocaine yeah good oh is that that real gateway drug was chumadasty chlum nasty style macdonald's nuggies yeah uh check it out check it out so there's a question that we always ask everybody on everyone else every guess we have on we'll listen to what you have to say and be like that's the stupidest thing you've ever heard i'm glad i'm glad that's been across the board I've known them longer than either of you, and this is still how I, this is still how like people, like people react to me. So the question that we always ask everybody is goes along with the fact that I think the show works because Mathis is like Mulder, right? He has like, he believes. Jesse is like Scully and he like doesn't believe pretty much.

And I am like Tony Shalub and Galaxy Quest where I'm just kind of like having a good time. So the question that I ask everybody that we ever have on the show is like, where do you fall in that like Venn diagram? Like where do you? I never watched the first thing you're referencing. What is it called? X-Files? I'm not wrong.

I never watched that. I tried to watch it once with my older brother when I was a kid and I got way too scared. Scared to shit and I don't fly. But Galaxy Quest, I understand that reference. Like I know who Mulder and Scully are. like because of pop culture. Yeah, yeah, sure. But in Galaxy Quest, I am probably, uh, what's his name?

He's also in the Green Mile. Oh, I'm now. The red, he wears the, no, sorry, not the Green Mile. No, Sam Rockwell. Yeah, San Rockwell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You were thinking of eight mile. Yeah, eight mile.

He's the, he's the barbecue menu guy in Green Mile. Actually, you know what? Like, you being worried about your own. like death as like part of the situation is pretty good like yeah like i feel like we'll see that today i feel like i feel like that'll come into play today during our during our time i think i know you're i know you're getting that i'm already worried i'm doing the show wrong no and that's this is sam rockwell's vibe yeah this is the thing we're 300 episodes into this and never once have we ever prepped a guess as to like what you need to be ready for which is very unprofessional of us but

it's too late now i do i do i do i do a decent amount of prepping the the you do yeah but we don't prep our guess the thing the thing that i the thing that i also like want to know because i think this is like even if you don't believe necessarily in the paranormal or in government conspiracies i feel like everybody has like a story or like a friend's story like a family story of like something that you always go to when when people are swapping paranormal stories do you have that story i believe in the in paranormal i would say like 85%. There's like, oh, that's hard. I'm pretty in on that. I'm pretty in on like a traditional angle, would you say? Yeah, like the ghost are real and like I can get as heady as like, you know,

our eyeballs can only see so many frequencies, but like birds and insects are seeing different frequencies. So there might be just shit moving around us that we're not seeing that can affect in a way the world as we know it. And I would say I only allow myself to believe any consistent. Spear you see theory like 20%, but I actively seek them out because they're so interesting to me. But I can't, if I allow myself more than 20%, I'll get too weird. Do you know what I mean? I'd be like, yeah, it's actually, it's not smart enough.

Or do I have the like discipline to research and debunk it? So I have to watch it like I'm watching Avatar, The Last Airbender, where it's just, it's just entertainment and I love it. But it's not like I'm going to be like, and then I can air. bit do you don't want to accidentally gaslight yourself into like yeah I'm not yeah I don't have a discipline to be like this is why the earth's

not flat I'll be like no I know it's not flat because everyone else says that but like back in the day essay yeah like when it first was a Galileo that proved it was around who was it uh probably before that there were there were ancient cultures who said it was round just because like you know it is

yeah I'm the type of person that like if I was around when the scientists and the science came out and they were like actually it's around and the crowd was like fuck you let's kill this guy I would have been in that crowd you would be not as well what else are we going to do today

I don't want to be weird I want people to hang out with me so I don't want to be going against the current and that's the problem going further than 20% in a conspiracy theory it gets violent and if you go further than 40% it gets racist somehow almost every time I'm like into a new one

I got really into the the moon is hollow and I was like Right. And then it gets just, and actually it's just racism. It's just that's the Disney fandom too. Like when you get into like Marvel and Star Wars stuff, you're like, wait, are you trying to turn me racist? What is happening? Yeah, yeah. Wait a minute. I watched one movie that critiqued a show and why am I being served? What do you do? So what's your, what's your family ghost story? What's the one that you have one? I do. I do. I, so I, I, uh, my family ghost story is, uh, I saw a ghost. Um, I went, you saw one. I saw one. Um, or, I saw one. Um, or, or, or,

Or, I don't know, but also I was like, I think, like 10 or 11. So it's like, you know, mix that in with childhood memories and how I'm remembering the memory and how it changes. But I had found, my family had found out that we had an oldest brother, which is its own story. But very quickly, my mom and dad were married to each other. They had five kids. My stepmom and stepdad used to be married to each other. They had two kids. And then my parents swapped spouses.

and then the four of them raised eight of us. One more was added. We were like, there's eight of us. That's not even the ghost story part, but it's pre-fucked though. The way you said the oldest brother, like I just had in my mind. We didn't know. We thought our oldest brother was Kyle, my brother Kyle, cool guy. And then one day we get a phone call and at the, my oldest brother answers the phone.

And someone's like, is Alan there? Alan's my stepdad. And we were trained to say no, because it was always. work calling to be like, you need to come in and close this car deal. And so we're like, no. And he was like, can you tell him his son called? And my brother looked at the dinner table and was like, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, you have the wrong number. And he went, no, this is his oldest son. And he went, no, I'm his oldest son. And Alan was like, who is it? And he was like, I don't know, who is this? And he was like,

AJ. And he's like, do you know, do you have a son named AJ? And AJ was, and then my dad started, my stepdad starts crying. He was like, yeah. That's how we found out. He had a first marriage previous to my stepmom before my mom before my stepmom he was married to a woman she passed away he didn't raise the kid he moved to california oh my god he was raised in missouri so we find out we have a new brother this is a long story i'll try to speed it up no no i'm enraptured keep going it's it's wild so we find out we have a new brother so we want to go meet him so we all go to missouri and we stay with him in missouri and while we're staying there they're like hey just So, you know, we think this place is haunted by AJ's mom.

She's, like, watching out. So if we're all sleeping, like, in the den, like the basement den, the kids are in. A little lower for you. And I'm, like, freaking out. And then they're like, if you hear creaky steps, it's just, it's just her. She's checking on the kids. She's harmless. And then I'm sleeping, and I do hear the creaky steps.

So that was, like, my intro to ghosts. And then the next night, we're talking about it. We're like, I heard it. It was so creepy, but, like, it's safe or whatever. And they're like, if you want to see a ghost, we can go see a ghost. We're like, what? And so then. This guy calls up his ghost.

Hang on, man. I'll just get him over here. He calls up Casper. He takes us to this like, we're in Missouri. So he takes us to this like old like plantation that's like no longer obviously in use because it was 2005 at this time. And we're just kind of walking around. And the theory is that you can walk by and you can hear like the ghosts of, of informer. former enslaved people like clanking or whatever.

Like what was happening? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's so traumatic that their soul stayed around because of imprint or whatever. Or whatever. And we don't hear anything. We're like nothing.

We're like walking along all the different houses and we don't hear anything. And then we're like giving up and we're leaving. And then we all kind of, I think my sister turns back and goes, and then we all turn around. And at the top of one of the houses was just a woman in a white dress, flowy white dress with black hair, almost like the ring lady standing. on the top of a, of like a single story shed. Oh, my God.

And we were like, and we went away. And we'd get to like this top of this little hill and we turned back, gone. And it wasn't like a thing replacing it. It wasn't like, actually it was a chimney and a bag. It was just nothing. Right. And then we were all like, do we all see the same thing?

And we all were like, yeah, it was this. It was this. And then we just went back to the house and we're like, let's just be around the ghosts we know. Yeah, yeah. That's crazy because it's almost like La Yerona a little bit. The white dress, long black hair. But how long do you do you think you like turned away from her before you looked back again?

I would. You were 10 or 11, so I know you're very, very fresh in your mind. The two like memories I have is like I probably looked at her for like three seconds and then ran. And then we probably were however long it takes to run like maybe 100 yards up a hill. So two, three, pretty far, you know, like minute. It's probably a minute. A minute, yeah. And then when we turned around, it was gone or she was gone.

It wasn't like not a thing that could move around, basically. Yeah. So, like, maybe it was high schoolers, ready to prank people show. And you know what I mean? Maybe there was time for like a person to go up and come down. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Like a white dress, long black hair, yeah. Good cinematic story as well. I like the, I like the setting. Also, there's like a very fun kind of solar system level twist here and that your family is like the solar system and AJ is Pluto. Like, kind of a brother, but not really, but kind of. It kind of went the other way where it was like he wasn't a planet and then he showed up into my life and was a planet. They were like, you know what, Pluto? Fuck it.

Fuck it. Yeah. There's like a trio of movies. It's like a family comedy, a family drama and then a horror movie. Yeah. That's like a Pixar. Yeah. The first script I ever wrote that, like, kind of got me some connections in the business was about my parents' wife swap story.

It was a family comedy call for the kids. And I think someday I will make it. I think some, it'll, it got, you should. It got shopped around for a little bit and then kind of went away. And I'm hoping someday someone will get excited about it again. Maybe the copyright on Wife Swap from reality TV will be let up and you can just have it. Just call it Wife Swap. Yeah, just call it Wife Swap.

It's a movie based on a true story. Yeah. Originally, it was called Frady Bunch, which stuck up for fucked-up Brady Bunch. Brady Bunch is still, like, kind of runs. It makes it sound like it's going to be like a skate video or something for some reason. I don't know why, but I like that. Yeah, Frady Bunch sounds like a guy's name who skates. Frady Bunch?

Like, I don't know. Like, I don't know. Like, I don't know. Before we move off of this, my last question to you is, what about aliens? Where do you stand on the alien? I was just going to ask that. For sure. They're here.

Yeah. They're here. Oh, you're just like, yeah. Welcome, you should be here. Have you ever heard the theory or, yeah, the theory that aliens are actually just future humans who are traveling back in time to watch specific events? Or warn us or, yeah. To warn us or like, I was talking about this with, sorry to name drop, Trevor Moore, rest of peace from white as kids. And an old friend of mine where we were talking to, I was, we were all kind of talking about like, maybe it's.

it's like school like field trips and like they're learning about like 9-11 in the future. It's like Doctor Who type shit happening. And they're like, let's just go back and see. And they're like supposed to be camouflage, but then sometimes the bus breaks down and they're like, shit, kids. I, you know. The more. The more. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever it is observing is definitely seeming to be what their main goal is just to kind of like watch whatever it is. fucking do you see the missile hit the plasma current well the what does that mean is that another yeah yesterday they had a uap hearing uh somebody came through like in 2017 remember the 2017 tic-tac video the black and white video that was dropped uh new york times covered it it was like the gimbled video of a drone of a like a tick-tack shape object over the

ocean zipping really fast oh yeah yeah yeah yeah there was more of that dropped yesterday much longer video and have two angles of it and it is uh a g3 hells cat drone or something that is tracking a UAP over the water off the coast of Yemen in 2024 and they get the green light to fire at it and from the top of the screen you see a missile come in and it's a hellfire missile and so it tracks and you see to readjust course collides with the UAP and then the UAP whether it's pieces of the missile or pieces of the UAP itself people the whistle the whistle the whistle the whistle just keeps going like it tumbles a little bit and it spins but then it just keeps going and anything uh i have people have said about hellfire missiles

like you hit aircraft with it even if the missile doesn't explode go the aircraft is going down like this thing what do you mean it was a direct collision the the the craft the uap the uap so the uap is like a pill shape as the missile's coming too you know the missile's coming earlier because it slowly rotates to have it's like long ways face the missile the missile comes in collides with it the missile goes off And the UAP continues to be tracked by the drone as it just keeps going over the ocean. The missile just like ricochets off. Yeah, I'll get you the video right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And we saw this yesterday. Yeah. Yesterday, yeah, it was right around. Yeah, it's crazy. It was like Superman getting hit with a bullet. Yes. Whoa. Like, but like if there was like a force, like a Magneto guy with a bullet.

Well, Magneto can hit with a bullet. That's what I'm saying, like, because he's got the field. Alex, Magneto can't get hit with bullets because they're metal. Can he control? All right. Alex, come on. All right. Neil from the Matrix.

He dodges them. I think we nailed it with Superman. Superman, but it's not, it's like if Superman was Guperman. We'll talk about this in the mini. We'll talk about this more in the, in the, in the minisode for Patreon, everybody,

but just for now, because Kurt won't be there. Kurt, there's a video. I put it in the chat. You can click on it. It's a 53 second long video. This is from the independent. You want to watch it.

now and you can just watch it yeah you can watch it yeah yeah i'm watching because it's yeah do it because uh it is well you know what i basically what i said it is uh i'll read the details of what is actually being watched but again it's that same military kind of like overlay of like a drone this is from october 30th 2024 an mq9 reaper allegedly tracking an orb off the coast of yemen they were given the green light to engage missile appears to be ineffective on the target uh that's so it's like i was an m q9 reaper drone that was a see I'm saying about Cooperman

it's like you see I was still like boom and then kind of just goes like Guperman it's weird this is weird this is the best official footage that we have that's wild it looks like a sperm going towards an egg and the egg being like no way bitch no not my baby no thank you

people say it looks like it passes through it but no it definitely looks like it's clips it yeah definitely looks like it hits yeah anyway yeah that's yesterday Who gave the green light to shoot at it? Whoever was in charge of the observation. That's a solid question. It was in 2024 at least.

So you know it wasn't like some fucking jokester at least. But I mean like what what country shot it? Us. Us. We did. Yeah. That's us tracking it off the coast of Yemen and giving the green lake to fire. But according to anybody who talks about this, that is not what we, that is not the first time we have done that.

And they shoot us back all the time. Yeah. According to that. Yeah. And it's not even a, it's no. contest with those guys they they it's like dealing with a scorpion to them you know like we're like oh there's a lot of you can get into this right now kurt but there's a lot of people in government right now are hooper hyper christian and think these are demonic things and so they are

like aggressive and so they're like let's shoot the devil what yeah like is there any proof that's what a demon i don't know dude when you call that's down fire missile maybe i've seen movies to know that does not word demons go like suck up the fire and they're like PD bro I've not seen that movie or read that comic and then actually actual final question for Kurt because I needed as a segue into the episode

what are your thoughts on like occult black magic as in like spells not tricks I think that yeah I think that there is some validity to it or there can be in the

in the sense that like like if we're in a matrix computer coding there are cheat codes and I think maybe black magic could be kind of thought of it is that we're like man like or dark magic or any sort of manifestation it works for people or and again it's sort of like a vibrational thing that you can kind of attune into I don't know

if people can like levitate things or like produce fire or that I've seen but I do think that like when I was going to protests I would have a witch friend, like, draw protection spells on me. Bless you. Yeah.

Because, like, I mean, we. I would say, like, 60% I believe it's real. And, and the other 40% is like, I'm, you know, I'm willing to be proven that it wrong, that it's not. But, like, why not believe in it? It's fun. It's my life. I should be able to believe in magic if I want to.

That's, that's fucking perfect. And also, like, there are monks that can, like, stay out and, like, ice cold and generate heat. That's just real. Like that's just real. Like they're undies. In their undies. Meundies.com slash Cox and Crendor.

I was going to say like meundees. com slash Crendor. Oh, get your discount today. Yeah, we don't have it here. But I mean, okay, that's actually perfect because today, regardless of whether you think that stuff is real or fake, John Parsons, the subject of today's episode believes.

Jack, John, John, Jack, we'll talk more about that in a minute. He believed it. And he's our guy today. So let's begin where the book that I used on him ends, which is at the convergence of dreams about science, magic, and whatever it is that comes next. Before we super dive in, so sorry. 100.

Yeah, no, go ahead. Jack Parsons is a person I've ever heard of, so I'm just going to replace him with Jim Parsons in my head. Just for now? Yeah. If you want to imagine Jim Parsons, just put like a little Walt Disney mustache on him and like a little sinister vibe.

pretty solid but like if you look up a picture of him that's pretty good thank you so much to factor for sponsoring today's video and listen it's the end of summer which means busy schedules again especially if you've got little ones and that means a lot less time to plan your meals and sometimes all you get is a couple minutes and i know that's what like for me quite often and i have no children that helps me eat smarter with tasty chef prep meals that are dietitian approved and delivered directly to my door and now with more than 65 weekly meals made for how you me everybody lives and what i like to eat i've gotten even more ways to fit in a real meal wherever the day takes me man the two big things for me are the variety

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purchase. Thank you again to Factor for sponsoring today's episode. believed it. And he's our guy today. Let's begin with the bookends. Like I said, convergence of dreams, science, magic, whatever it is that comes next, compared to what we've been covering these past few weeks. This episode is going to be relatively tame, light, but still contains a few instances of violence, gore, sexual assault, incest, and animal cruelty. And you've been warned. If you're over-concerned with what your kids are listening to, the point that they won't have any safe place to get some kind of processable context for the horrors of

reality trapping them forever in the glass cage of anxiety about going outside you better get him out of the room now before they learn something that they might ask you questions about also and this is just like a teaser to like what alster crowley is going to be like because that's his entire life dude yes also you have to imagine uh elron hubbard having sex at some points today which i'm sorry there's nothing we can do about that it's just what happened also i want to say i'm not an expert silly i'm a comedian we try your best here on the show to give you a nice good accurate survey of the subjects we cover but sometimes we make mistakes and for that i'm sorry also we're going to say some funny jokes right now about some serious stuff we probably already have done that

that is the show i'm not as sorry about that part honestly uh really sometimes i am at night but not all the time but also you probably knew what you signed up for before you got here and now that i said this bit if you still somehow find yourself feeling like they shouldn't be laughing this is serious this is supposed to be twisted and gothic and like the snider cut not fun at least I did my best. Four by three. At least I did my best. You feel uncomfortable.

Let's say you're writing in a road trip and the person driving put on this podcast and you didn't know about it. Your safe word is Bazinga. Jim Parsons is Basinga. Jim Parsons will get you right out of it. And the person driving you have to turn it off. Okay. Yeah. We should sell it.

We should sell a shirt that says Bazinga. At least I did my best in all caps. You should sell a shirt that says Bazing ghost and make it a hot. Oh, my God. Also, speaking of merch, please buy our new top secret six stickers. We show off up and coming artists by making five surprise stickers

based off specific Chulminati episode topics. We split the profits within 50-50 this month. That artist is the wonderful Dory's Doodles. And to get there and see some of her radical art, which actually is super sick, you can follow the link to our shop at chluminati pod.fm. But as I was saying, this episode is based heavily off the book, Sex.

Rockets, The Occult World of Jack Parsons by John Carter, but also a few YouTube videos, some articles from Motherboard, Atlas Obscira, all that's interesting in Wikipedia. And you can find links to read and watch all of that and buy this very actually interesting, but also very like almost insanely detailed book in the description below, a book that I would actually say would be an enjoyable read to the average interested person if you actually wanted to read it. If you can deal with some, if you can deal with some extremely vital, but extremely extended sequences that are spent describing bizarre sex magic rituals it's been an exercise

in not purposefully but frustrating jesse of how imperative unfortunately to history all this magic is what you were saying is magic is not magic that's fair you're just calling things magic and it drives be crazy but they but the people who were doing it believed it was magic right so in their context of them achieving the things they achieve that fix history forever more like we will learn about jet fuel today in their mind it was magic yeah and this man didn't go to college for any of the shit he just fucking yeah like we'll learn Alex is going to take it away but that's what I'm saying is like we're gonna with Alistair Crowley and even like in some people's minds the earth is flat it doesn't make it real but it does make it that's fair logic but the people believe it's shay we're too

Shee. If people believing the earth was flat, led to somebody inventing a new type of jet fuel to prove themselves wrong, then does it fucking matter? Like, if they still, like, you know, that's like the question. And speaking of magic changing the world, here is Mathis to start us off with a quote from the extremely short story, end as a world by F.L. Wallace, which was published in the third galaxy reader edited by our own agent H. H.L. Gold, Chulmanade agent, originally written in 195. about people waiting for the end of the world to come here you go i turned and rushed out to join the others i couldn't miss it there were still minutes to go but suppose there had been a miscalculation i knew what that would mean but even so i had to be there i would almost die too now we're all looking up all over the world people were i suppose all over the world people were i suppose

it was quiet you could hear them breathing and and then it came a flash across the sky a silver streak. The biggest vapor trail there ever was. It went from the side to that side in no time. It split the sky and was gone before the shock blast hit us. Nobody said anything. We stood there and shivered and straightened up after the rumbling sound passed. But there was the vapor trail that stretched farther than anyone could see. It would go around the world at least once before it came to an end somewhere in the desert. I saw my science teacher. He was trying to smile but couldn't. And then there was the pharmacist who had wanted to be a research chemist but wasn't good enough. In front of me, old Fred Butler, who drives the bus to Orange Point

and King City cracked his knuckles. He did it, he whispered, all the way to Marsenbach, safe and right on schedule. He jumped up in the air and kept jumping up. He hadn't been that high off the ground in several years. He never would be again unless he took an elevator. And I knew he hated elevators. Factory whistles started blowing. They sounded louder than Gabriel. I wonder if he heard them. I grabbed a hold of the nearest person and started hugging. I didn't know it was the snooty girl from the next block until she hugged back and began kissing me. We yelled louder than the factory whistles. We had a right. It was just like the paper said. This was the day the world ended and the universe began. Yeah. So it wasn't the end of the world in a bad way. It was the end of the

world as a structure for understanding existence and expanding it to a bigger one beyond the boundaries of what we once thought was possible. And first things first, I just want to say, Jack Parsons, the subject of today's episode, is literally the son of Captain Marvel. And what I mean by that is Marvel Parsons from Boston and Ruth Whiteside from Ohio met in Los Angeles in 1914 and gave birth to their son Marvel Jr. that same year. Hell yeah. On October 2nd, the same day, coincidentally, that the Jehovah's Witnesses predicted to be the beginning of the end of the world, when the Antichrist appears along with the harlot, Babylon, the Great. Have you ever known a lot of Jehovah's Witness? What?

Personal. Have you ever known or been a friender was the Jehovah's Witness personally? Yeah. Yeah. Me too. I was, anytime, I felt so bad when it was like Christmas or whatever, and I couldn't give them gifts. They were like, no, we don't celebrate. Yeah.

Yeah. Unfortunate. That's all. That's all I wanted to say. I was just a sad anecdote that's hardcore that's hardcore mode that's like when you turn on like hunger and thirst and fallout new Vegas yeah yeah yeah yeah it's like when you turn on a few months no birthdays and Christmas on hardcore fall into Vegas you don't get hungry thirsty but you don't get birthday presents and that's hard you know that's hardcore yeah that's

hard it's hard to just know that that's true uh even if you never see anyone anyway within a few months, however, Marvel Senior cheats on Ruth. And Ruth, as a free thinker way ahead of her time, fucking divorces his sorry ass and moves back in with her parents in Pasadena in a large house in an area called

Millionaire's Mile in South Orange Grove Avenue. What are we in again? Early, like 1915, I would say. And Marvel goes off, joins the army a year before the end of World War I in 1917 and becomes a captain, hence Captain Marvel, or

Possibly even a major, though that's less confirmed. Major Marvel. Yeah, Major Marvel, Captain Marvel Jr., Mary Marvel, Taki, Tani, any of those guys. For the same reason, maybe the divorce wasn't necessarily legal or whatever, but for some reason, Ruth still kept the last name Parsons for both her and her son, even though her last name, her maiden name was Whiteside. But since her ex Marvel had cheated on her and it genuinely heard her so bad, like in her heart, she slowly started calling. Marvel Jr. John and Jack interchangeably instead of his real name until it stuck

just because she couldn't stand hearing Marvel's name all the damn time. And strangely, depending on how you knew him throughout his whole life, you'd actually probably call Parsons by one of those two names instead of by Marvel. And so to illustrate this symbolically during our readings today, Kurt,

our guest here, will be the voice of Wild Jack Parsons, who is an occultist, and our very own Jesse Cox will voice the put-together professional mathematician John Parsons, who is a scientist and a man of reason. And also, not to be forgotten, meanwhile, Mathis will be the ensemble, mainly playing the part of Alistair Crowley, which this book demands, I say rhymes with holy, though I've heard it many other ways, but also playing the part of et al for us today. So that's going to be Mathis.

And anyway, to start us off, here is a quote from Jack Parsons, which he wrote about himself, and also in a different way to himself, 34 years later, in a piece called Analysis by a Master of the Temple. And you'll see what I mean about that later. Here is Kurt as Jack, again, writing about himself to himself. I chose this constellation, Libra, in order that you might have an innate sense of balance

and ultimate justice, responsive and unattractive nature, a bountiful environment and sense of royalty and LaGreece, whatever that word is. Strength. Largesse. What is it? It's large as. A sense of royalty and largesse.

Strength, courage, and power combined with cunning and intelligence. Saturn was bound. An example. The planet was at Aphelion in order that you might not easily formulate a lower will, which would have satisfied and overwhelmed you with its spectacular success. That's what Jackson. sounds like in my head. That's pretty good. He's a real spooky man that everybody thinks is quite spooky. He answers the door sometimes with a snake around his neck. Now, that's actually

real. Now, let's break down exactly what he's saying there for a second, just so we can understand to imagine why somebody would need to tell themselves this about themselves, like what scenario would require that type of information. I think that this means that he basically sees himself as like the classic manifestation of like a masculine power fantasy, right? He's like innate sense of balance, responsive and attractive nature, bountiful environment, sense of royalty, sense of largesse, right? And I think that he is also saying, though, but luckily I chose to be born at this exact time when Saturn was in this exact point in space where I wouldn't want to give in to all the

advantages that I've been given, even though I would be good at. getting pussy and getting a lot of power if I wanted to. But actually, I'm really wise. Yeah, that was me in high school. Yeah, that was you walk through the graveyard with their D&D books in the vampire cape. Yep, yeah, exactly. The cops patting me down.

I'm like, I'm really wise. That's punk, to be honest. Yeah. And also, as Mathis has kind of mentioned already, he's going to be jumping right into a huge Alistair Crowley piece right after this. So Jack Parsons will be a huge part of a section of that whole story. So it's fascinating as the man is. It's fascinating.

as he is. And he does appear in this story as a major character. I'm just going to like pretend that everybody here knows like three sentences of information about the guy. Or maybe you can go skim his wiki if you want or something. Or really, if you have any questions, I would just say wait. Because like seven days, Mathis is going to go deeper

than you ever wanted him to go. Specifically on the subject of Al. I love Crowley. Alster the beast. What are you going to say, Chris? I say this reads to me like, you ever smoked too much weed and then you have to like tell yourself you chose this. that's what this sounds like he's a bit that's exactly what it's a little bit like going too deep he's

like a little too high and he's like a little he's like instead of freaking out he's like i chose this strain and he's got lost in the bit have an innate sense of balance and ultimate justice he's just reminding himself that he wanted this yeah yeah yeah and math is going to stay in there all deep in he's going to stay deep in the beast for like weeks guys yeah yeah we have to be proudly is a fascinating individual who is equally like genius and in his performance art and fucking insane. Yeah. It's great.

So for today, just to give you a basic idea, Alster Crowley, super dramatic, real life British dark sorcerer, horny guy, does heroin, writes lots of books that are like spell books and like ritual books and also just like novels. Tellma is his thing. He kind of made up the whole vibe of modern occultism while also making up Thelma. And he represents a lot of the very traditional. sort of backwards looking old world charm that magic has which chaos magic which math has taught us about a little while ago kind of sees itself as the opposite of in a lot of ways

then shrugs off a lot of those sort of old world chains but this is very much no this is the fucking legit this is the magic that goes back to the ancient egyptians in mesopotamia that's what he's doing that's what he's saying to solomon i'm connected straight to solomon is a book worth like if you care enough about this shit to like be interested even if it's just the history. Kea Solomon's a book worth grabbing and reading. Yeah, that's exactly correct. So that'll work for now. Next week, Mathis presents Krollgasm

Part 1, which is not a Nick Kroll thing. It's an Alastair Crowley thing. And anything else, does there anything else basic that they need to know? Did I cover it? Do you think? I think you're fine. Yeah. Okay. So let's forget about that now. Because besides, what could that possibly have to do with someone as important

to modern rocket science as Marvel John Whiteside Parsons? Like, wasn't he the guy who made America care? about jet engines, even though they ridiculed them and didn't think they were worth studying at first? Weren't his fuel breakthroughs and rocket technologies the basis for like all solid and liquid fuels that we still use today to like get up to fucking space? Didn't he bridge the gap between rocket science as practical explosives and special

effects engineering and rocket science as like a groundbreaking, era-defining physics wizardry discipline? Like, isn't that Jack Parsons? Well, like we said, there are actually two Jack Parsons, one light and one dark, one of science and one of magic with a K. But in all other ways, they were exactly the same. They just wanted to make something happen. That was the whole point. And also, though, according to Jack, there was a conspiracy within his own family to make him hate the father that he never met, Captain Marvel.

And here's Kurt again as Jack again, writing to himself about himself. Your father separated from your mother in order that you might grow up with a child. the hatred of authority and a spirit of revolution necessary to my work. The Oedipus complex was needed to formulate the love of witchcraft, which would lead you to magic, with the influence of your grandfather active to prevent two complete an identification with your mother. Yeah.

So do you guys know what the Oedipus complex is? You want to fuck your mom? No, Alex, tell us. What is it? It's definitely oversimplifying it to say this, but it's based off an old Greek myth or possibly the really popular play version by Sophocles.

It basically means you want to kill your dad and fuck your mom if you're the son. And if you're the daughter, you want to kill your mom and fuck your dad. It's the opposite. How did that work out? Do you know how that ended up? Oh, yes, I do.

Oh, yes, I do. And let me tell you something. Did he live to see the end? Etypice? No. Nobody. Nobody lives. Nobody lives.

Nobody lives to see the end. Everyone dies. did anyone see the edge yeah i'd look i don't want to i don't want to i don't want to i don't want to i don't want to weigh in on this yet uh but you'll see what i mean uh that's for later but i guess let it color the vibes as we go forward i guess actually i don't know like i don't know just don't think about edipus too much but keep him in the back of your mind no i'm only thinking about edipus he said he needed it to find magic that's pretty different i would say and anyway later in life parson says that when he was 13 years old he invoked

satan and satan actually appeared and it scared the shit out of him and he wrote this in a book about himself uh that he wrote again a lot later in life called the book of antichrist um but i however have a different theory about this satan encounter based of another quote from jack which kurt will read for you now again about himself this guy writes a lot about himself yeah and to himself which is pretty nuts at the same time which is just a wrong way to write i would say Your isolation as a child developed the necessary background of literature and scholarship and the unfortunate experiences with other children developed their requisite contempt for the crowd and for the group moors.

You will note that these factors developed the needful hatred for Christianity without explaining a Christian guilt sense at an extremely early age. Yeah, and as somebody who sat through catechism at church and received some education through my church. I can imagine why he'd fantasize about summoning the devil. But I don't know. Mathis, do you think the devil actually showed up for Parsons?

He didn't for me. So fuck if he did. Fuck him. Because I'm screwed. I love your bitter hatred of the devil because he's like, too good for you. I gave him my soul at a young prime age. He could have done so much.

What did you want exactly in return? Power Ranger Powers. Yeah. So I wanted to be power. And I felt like I could. Yeah, because in my young mind, I could do more good than losing my soul would be, you know, worth. So, like, well, I lose my soul, but then I can just be, I can go, like, save people for 50 years until you die. What ranger did you want a ranger?

What color ranger? Oh, obviously, obviously the white ranger. Yikes. Hey, yikes. That's like the Jack Parsons. Hold on. That's the Lron. The one time period was this.

Was this, like, post movie white ranger where he was like a tiger? No. No. Yeah. Like he was, oh, no. Because the green ranger became the white ranger. Yeah, this is like the green ranger had like a Godzilla kind of zord. Yeah, no, no, this is the line.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because like the Green Ranger was kind of bad, kind of good depending. After the two-parter where he was revealed to be the White Ranger. Right. And then they got their ninja power. You asked the Charlie Rose question just now, Kurt. The Green Ranger only became the White Ranger in American Power Rangers. But in Japan, the Green Ranger dies, right?

Yo, do you think that's how you got deviled? do you think that was like yes i shall make you the ranger because he was like the japanese ranger the monkey ball curls and you're like oh i didn't realize you didn't realize satan was going to be like into the japanese sentai yeah exactly there's your first mistake it was the 90s i didn't know there was a japanese version of the time that's not fair anyway anyway power rangers aside uh speaking of being that age

It is also around that time in eighth grade when he meets his best friend for life, Edward S. Foreman, who stays friends with Parsons through everything as his loyal fabricator and machinist, like all through the time that he spends doing rocketry. They meet because they both get bullied in school for reading science fiction. And it was Jules Verne and Amazing Stories Magazine. They start building their own rockets at home in 1928. And over the next few years, Parsons and foreman get deeper into their hobby. And as Kurt will read for us, Jack now dabbles both in the sciences and magics. He will try and fuse into one for the rest of his life. Early adolescence continued the development of the necessary combinations. The awakening

interest in chemistry and science prepared the counterbalance for the coming magical awakening, the means of obtaining prestige and livelihood in the formative period and the scientific method necessary for my manifestation. The magical fiasque. shows at the age of 16 was needful to keep you away from magic until you were sufficiently matured. Yeah. So I don't know exactly what the magical fiasco is. By the way, like, no, yeah, nobody's sure what exactly it is.

But curiously, it seems to sync up with the death of his grandfather Walter, who, as you remember from the previous quote, was the only thing apparently holding him in check at one point. And shortly after this in the early 1930s, Parsons, graduates high school, the university school. He gets a job working at a Hercules powder company, which makes, like, explosives. And both him and Foreman attend Pasadena Junior College and a little USC classes, but alas, no degrees. They don't have any money.

It's like the fucking depression, though they do spend time, like, exchanging letters with all the rocket geniuses of Germany and Russia who didn't have, like, embarrassing occult histories. like Robert Goddard and Herman Oberth only to find that really nobody's figured out shit. They don't really feel like working together because they don't trust anyone and honestly might seem more interested in pumping them for information

than anything like sharing anything that they're going on. No, I know. It's in the natural espionage, it's okay, get down. Don't worry about it. I know. Sound the alarm.

Sound the alarm. It was a long time ago. Here, I'm going to close the window. Hold on. they're basically just pumping them for information they don't know like anything they haven't they haven't figured out anything beyond what parsons informant have figured out even though they're like the most foremost people in the field uh then mars then parsons meets marries his wife helen by 1935 they buy a house together uh and so does his mother and grandmother who are like together

by a house now that the grandpa is dead and his mom is a widow apparently because i guess um Captain Marvel died in the war and never appeared again in the story. And that same year, Parsons and Ed Foreman are going around looking for rocket funding. And eventually they find Caltech graduate student, Frake J. Molina, who had also grown up reading Jules Verne. And they connect over that and was able to see that even though they didn't have degrees, John and Ed had the practical experience to get out there and do this shit, which is like a pretty hard thing to do to build rockets that go. and the imagination also available to them to be valuable teammates in a pretty crazy venture

and they get the famous Hungarian rocketry professor, Theodore von Carmen to sign off on their experiments even though John and Ed aren't even fucking students and at this point actual real working rockets were still only a thing from sci-fi.

The idea of flying as a person was made up at this point. Yeah. And I mean, there was airplanes yet, At this point, we had the right brothers, but just the notion of like flying in a rocket going up, going up. Like that was only like 10 years ago, like 20 years ago or something like that. I don't know what I mean?

Like this is all fresh for them. Like the note like in the cowboy times, somebody flying was like, no. Like it's just crazy to think about. And before them. People were alive. It's crazy to think how much happened in such a short few decades that people lived through only having horses to seeing planes to seeing rockets all the way to like in less than a hundred. years of like the 80s to 60s. On a, if you think about it, like, yeah, but also two major world wars where everyone's

whole objective was to murder the other person as efficiently as possible. And like, oh, they have this. Well, let's make this. And they have this. Let's make this. And then it continued after World War II with the Cold War where it was like, let's make even bigger bomb. Like, it was just an arms race that led to some interesting stuff.

Like, we got Velcro out of it. But, like, also, in my perspective, like, the people living at the time weren't, I doubt we're noticing it in the same way that, like, we lived pre-internet, all four of us. And now we've seen AI and that the jump from that, VR, AI, like, in our lifetime, we're going to be uploaded to the computer. Yeah. We're going to make a thousand more matrixes. And we're back to the matrix theory. 1900 to, like, 1975 is literally the old West with business clothes on and cool outfits. and cars and

wouldn't it be tight Neofil Matrix is the coolest guy that's wouldn't be tight to like have a whiskey at lunch at work do you know what I mean? Like smoke cigar and take five yeah it's in your office in a giant globe that costs $7,000 that you just bought with your salary because you can afford it

but with the social conscience that we have now and like more fairness and no get rid of the racism and the sexism but let's all wear suits and drink whiskey at lunch. Yeah, it's not because those weren't cool things to do that that stopped happening. I think it's because capitalism, but we'll get, we'll get into that.

Yeah, the four of them at this point, working on these rockets, began something there at Caltech in that research at Galsit that was very much the birth of modern rocketry, as we know today. And it's like the most, it's the first time that it was like legitimately pursued, like, with any sort of success. And all of them are on the short list, even today, of the most important people ever in the field to do anything. And eventually, the group slowly grew as more and more prize-winning scientists joined their ranks. And they really were kind of like mad scientists, the way that they were just erratically doing things. They weren't even really keeping the best records. And eventually, after some particularly outlandish experiments involving unexpected

explosions, very close to people who explicitly did not sign up for this, they, even earn themselves the name the Suicide Squad way before John Ostrander used it to make a cool superhero team. And in 1937, John Parsons publishes, like, his only paper ever, which is titled A Consideration of the Practicality of Various Substances as Fuel for Jet Propulsion, and Jesse is going to read a bit of that paper for you now as John Parsons. In considering the practicality of various fuels and oxidizers for rockets, certain criteria apply, which are not met with an ordinary internal combustion motor problems. Since rocket performance is influenced by the ratio of fuel weight to total weight, and since

the rocket must carry all the oxidizer necessary for combustion, the ratio of total weight of fuel and oxidizer to the available energy is of utmost importance. Since mass per unit flow is also important, a high specific gravity is preferred. in addition ordinary considerations of safety availability cost and convenient physical state should not be neglected and now this is just like basic stuff from rocketry nowadays i think but in this context at this time what this shows is a very confident and practice expert on this topic who is now the established like uh like theoretician the what are you pronounce I don't know, you probably get into it, but like, he was very much ostracized for this shit.

Oh, well, we'll get into it. He was thought of a laughing stock for even trying. There was a, there's a guy, Professor's Wiki, who literally was like, you idiots, rockets will never go out of the atmosphere. That's not how it works. And he was just like, if you want to know how little people understand this, not even a week ago, I came across this guy's TikTok video, where's one of those conspiracy ones where he showed a big tank of fuel.

And then he showed a plane. they showed a rocket and he was like how is this all the same amount of fuel it makes no sense wouldn't have and it's like a clear misunderstanding of what rocket fuel is yeah and I was vastly different from the fuel you put in your car yeah and the fact that he's trying to make the case that like the size it makes no sense not a jet engine in a car yeah it's like it's a totally different type of fuel it's designed to be lightweight and get you to space you can't put a like the whole point was we can't have a bunch of fuel underneath a dude sitting in a rocket he'd explode and so it again even now people don't quite understand what this man just said yeah but even even as it

is like yeah basics today like it's building blocks today curbel space program did a lot to teach people about rock yeah actually that's exactly what what what uh parsons was doing but just with no game uh yeah a little tiny green man yeah yeah yeah he had the guys but he didn't have the he didn't have the game. But yeah, like I said, he's he's the guy who's the idea guy at this point for the whole program. And at this point, the history of Parsons kind of ends and the timeline of events, true events begins. Parsons basically shows up on the stage of this story fully formed as a man who knows exactly what he wants, almost to the degree that it blinds him like Icarus. And honestly, it's the exact same obsessive drive that gets him up out of the atmosphere that

eventually shoots his crazy ass directly into the sun. And just to give you an idea of what I mean, in between launching rockets, Malina and Parsons were also sort of working on a 38-page outline for their anti-capitalist anti-war novel, fictional novel, which was about a group of rocket scientists based on themselves and their friends, who all happen to be philosophical geniuses in the story. And it's a sexy romance about real men who fight against capitalism and unchecked industry and all their nasty little cronies. And so here's Jesse with an excerpt from the description of the character that is based off John Parsons.

He based it off himself, which again, isn't based squarely in fact, but is more of like how he likes to see himself. So this is. So he made it, all right, I'll read it. But I'm curious if he made it seem like the Jack persona. Yeah, it's like, it's an interesting guy. He's like he's a very definitely a hero persona. Okay. Oh, boy.

Great name also. Theophile? Is that how we're saying this? I think so. Theophily. Theophily, that's how I'm saying. Theophily Belvedere is a tall, slightly stooped, rosy-cheeked man with a face whose lines continuously change from those of joy to those of misery. Shortly before the story opens, he has been defrocked from the Franciscan order upon

his own suggestion. Oh, okay. In the monastery, he has pursued a study of a strong. a subject also of interest to the abbot. A small telescope has been built at the corner of the monastery enclosure, where Belvedere spent many nights gazing at the stars. The monastery is located on a hill overlooking a small town of Spanish atmosphere, of Spanish atmosphere.

Once each year, a fiesta is held in the town, and for many years the monks have watched through niches in the enclosure, the parade that took place on the clemen. closing night. On this night, Belvedere, as usual, entered the space between the observatory in the corner of the enclosure. He is suddenly surprised by a young woman in pajamas, who in her disarray clutches his arm. The next day, Belvedere goes to the abbot and confesses his temptation and decides that he will leave the order. He learns the young woman is the daughter of the abbot's brother who has been visiting the monastery. Delvedere returns.

to Rock, Pasadena, where he finds his fanatically religious mother being abused by her drunken husband. The family is on relief. Belvedere, having an MS degree, Master of Science in Science, applies for a public school teaching position in the Rock High School. He is accepted and becomes a teacher of general science. Yeah, amazingly, in this same story, Theophile Belvedere eventually blows himself up in his lab trying to stop an experiment also, which you should remember from later. I thought we set it on Thalophily. Oh, sorry. Theophily Belvedere,

the guy who definitely has that name, blew himself up in his lab. He was a godly man until he was so hot. An ex-priest. He had to fuck. Left the order. And not only is a godly man, but he is he's got a masters in science.

So he's a genius. Right. But not smart enough to stop. to get his mom to leave his drunk dad. Right. And the girl that he's fucking is his is his brother of the abbot. And he, uh, yeah, he took all of his knowledge and went to go teach general sciences. Not even like a specific science, astronomy or anything, just general science.

He's also lovely because he's a high school teacher. So he's charming. Right. He's helping the kids. So he's perfect in God. He's perfect in science. But he's a common man who is a science teacher at a school. A little bit of an altruist.

Yeah, yeah. Indiana Jones. To a T. But with the set of history, it's science. Cool. Yeah, literally, yes. But also in real life, as his ventures in rocketry matured into the founding of companies like JPL and Airojet and Jet assisted takeoff engines of his creation using both physical, like solid fuels and liquid fuels and weaponized rockets are invested in and purchased and employed by the U.S. military. So too did he rise up the social ladder in local and even international occult

circles, so much so that by the end of the 1930s, Parsons was heavily involved with the local Los Angeles, a gape lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis, which is an occult society headed by Alistair Crowley himself, where he would often attend Gnostic Mass, which was kind of like what a lot of Christians think of as a mass, especially Catholics, which is what I I remember as mass. That's what I know. Except the stage is stark black and white. And there's a coffin with a little curtain over it on stage that the like leader comes out of in a cape.

And there's like way too many candles, like a fire hazard amount of candles. It's already way better than a Catholic mass. And there's ancient symbols everywhere from all these thousands-year-old religions. And here's a quote about it from a motherboard article for Mathis to read that I thought would be kind of fun just to give you an idea of these masses. I'll look. Poetry was read, swords were drawn, breasts were kissed, and lances stroked. It was a highly charged, what the fuck? It was a highly, sorry, I had a big ping on my computer. It was a highly charged sexual atmosphere. Wine was drunk and cakes were made out of menstrual blood were consumed. It was here that Crowley's philosophy of Thelma was propounded.

And, you know, speaking of Thelma, just so we understand how Parsons saw it, without getting too far into it, I'd say the vibe of Thelma is pretty libertarian in its inception, self-centered, and like all sort of about fetishizing your own will is kind of what the idea is. And the famous sort of motto about it is that everybody says is do what thou wilt, which is also the subtitle of today's episode. So I just wanted to put to Mathis, who is studying Crowley at this time since he's going deep next week. But really, the whole group as well. What do you guys think, do what thou will? Wilt means when it comes to, like, magic and Thelma. And why does it remind me of Assassin?

That's so funny. It reminds me of Obi-1 before he fucks up Anakin. But instead he says, I will do what I must. Do what thou wilt. But it's almost like he's going like, you do what you're going to do. I'm going to do it. Do with thou wilt.

I will do what I must, which is tight. I think that's a good way of looking at it, actually. Yeah. I think it means that, like, It's like, I don't know, I have a hat that says, like, be kind, don't take no shit or something like that. It's like, do what you want to do and just do it. Like, you, you, you just do what you do. Everything else will, like, work itself out because everybody's there together in the mush together.

So you just, you know, you don't need to like let a bunch of like weird complexes and structure stop you from enacting your will. You know, you can still follow the structure of society and stuff if you need to to get the thing that you want, you know. But the whole point is. is to sort of lionize you as a person and as an individual and as a unique motivation and not as part of a team or a group, right? I think that's what that wilt means. It's to me it rings as like less American rustic individualism of like get yours. And more like a sociopath.

Everyone involved. Sure. I promise you was in the upper echelons of society. It's like dudes that have. it's a little better off for them. So them saying, get yours, do what you want. Like, I don't think there was a group of like, you know, factory workers secretly doing this same thing.

You know what I mean? It's definitely bills to pay, man. This feels a little bit like, like, you know, when most cults have that elite vibe, it has that where it's, we shall do whatever we want because who's going to stop us? Get yours, baby. I'd say that just like Christianity, there is like a legit reading of this type of philosophy that is like kind of. of close to a religion, we're kind of close to a belief system that is actually not about privilege

and is about, you know, just what I said, you know, but at this time, you know, when it comes to Crowley in particular, like, that's very, he's, he's more about the, it's less about the elitism and more about the indulgence of the ego. But the people he's surrounded with aren't, no, because, you know, one of his, one of his average man, believe, no, one of the people that flocked to him. So him saying, hey, do what you want is a lot of people with a lot of money feel. Like, what are you going to do? What do you stop me? One of his apprentices was the creator of chaos magic who was penniless and died in a basement surrounded by cats.

Like he wasn't just like surrounding himself with just the rich of fame. What we'll talk about more, but obviously this is later. But Crowley, what he liked more than anything else was people that looked up to him and paid attention to him. It doesn't matter where they came from. It was more like having people that were under him. It's kind of like saying there's no reason not to more than anything. Or maybe like it's kind of like giving yourself permission. Giving yourself the agency to change your life or to pursue the things that you want to pursue.

Yeah. Obviously the most powerful magicians ascend to the leadership positions because of that reason of like that power begets like status and stuff like that. I understand the message of what it is and the idea that. like, hey, you know, if you want something, you have to go out there and get it. You have to make the choice. But the thing, the choices being made aren't like, you know what? I'm going to ask for that race. The choices being made are like, I will have sex with those four women.

Yes. I will have this weird car happen in my home and like burned down at church. Like, I will do weird things. It isn't like, you know what? I will turn my life around and stop smoking. That's like what it's for. That's like what it's for, but yes, you're right. In reality, what's happening is people are just using it to.

justify absurd behavior. Crowley and Parsons themselves both justified extreme indulgence and things that they could finance and have access to because of their status. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they weren't just exactly following. It just means that they had some crazy resources to tie to their will, which, whoa, like, whoa. I mean, everything in moderation, even self-improvement. I mean, like, there's a, or it's going to what you want.

You can't have everything. manual pervert. Yeah. Yes, exactly. And that's the secret. That's the secret. But it's that type of thinking that really gets Parsons' wheels turning at the time. And I don't know if you could maybe clock this from his various descriptions of himself,

but he also loved the sex magic element of the proceedings in which kind of like math has explained in the chaos magic series, but also kind of differently, the dick is kind of seen as the wand or like the focus point of your will and the sort of hyperfocus, but also like blank mind state that you go into. to from an orgasm is a great place for doing and performing high-level magic. And so in a low-rosis, yeah, in like lower orders, lower degrees, you like focus mostly on masturbation, but as you ascend to the higher orders and you're doing higher and more potent magics, you start to engage with a sex partner and do sex magic.

All right, real quickly, I understand what you're saying about like the clear mind, this, but like, we can all, we can all just admit this is the shit you say. of people will get them to fuck you. He was 25 years old dog. He was 25, bro. Dude, you know, this is a shit you say to people like, the only way I can practice my magic is if I get laid. Like, you know that's what this is.

Like, yeah, okay. The cult was Polly definitely because it makes people come to the cult. You'll get into that aspect much more in the next couple weeks. It just, it's like, there's a little bit of a scam there. You may be able to like, there is a clarity. It's definitely abusive. It's definitely abuse of power.

Al Ron Hubbard took fucking notes from the guy. Yes, it was absolutely cold. You know, we're just like, come on, well, this is. Okay. These people, like, these cult leaders wouldn't exist without these people having existed first is completely true. You're saying that it was pervasive to be like, hey, sex with me is magic?

Yeah, that sounds right. Literally, literally, yeah, literally that. Well, especially when you turn into an actual ritual. We can make beautiful magic together, baby. Trying to bring on the crimson daughter. It almost has a little, it's almost a little pathetic. You're like, no, no, for my magic, I need it, though.

Like, I really hate this. You'll see how pathetic it can really get in just a few seconds. It was around this time also that Parsons started attending science fiction meetings. Because science fiction, much like rockets and stuff, was kind of like not cool. It was like the original nerd subject matter before comic books had superheroes. It was like, you know, Jules Verne type sci-fi was like the real nerd shit. And people would go to these meetings to like just talk about. it and hang out and people come around to each other's houses. And eventually in 1941,

he gets to meet the author Jack Williamson, who wrote Parsons' favorite story, which is called Darker Than You Think, which is about a family of werewolves who revive the old gods through the prodigious birth of a magical, quote unquote, child of the night who will lead their kind back to greatness. And Jack Williamson, when he met Parsons, he had this to say about him. He said, quote, I met John Parsons, an odd enigma to me. He was a rocket engineer with unexpected leanings toward the occult. He wanted to meet me because I'd written darker than you think. A good many people have taken it more seriously than I ever did, which is now and then have taken me for a fellow Wiccan. Parsons belonged to the OTO, an underground order founded, I think, by the Satanist Alastair Crowley. One night, Cleave Cartmill and I were allowed to climb after him into an attic to attend a secret meeting. The ritual was disappointingly tame. There was no nude virgin. on the altar. Satan was not invoked, yet the priest impressed me. He was a lean, dynamic little man with bright, light blue eyes driven by a virulent hatred of God. Talking to him after the ceremony, I found that he was the son of a British clergyman who must have been the real

target of that savage animosity. So that was Williamson's impression of the vibe that Parsons was giving off. And later, through the Manana Literary Society, which as I mentioned last week in Laurel Canyon, uh, featured regular appearances by both Parsons and his decently close friend, uh, the author of Stranger was in a strange land, loved by Manson, loved by many people in the canyon, uh, Robert A. Heinlin. Um, there was another book that was called Rocket to the Morg that was written by William A.H. White, uh, who also weirdly publishes books under the name H.H. Holmes sometimes when he's writing mysteries. What a, what a terror. I mean, you know, it's like being like, love Jack the Ripper. It's like really, yeah.

weird thing to do. But this book is another book that's about a, like a fictional book that involves murder that is about rocket scientists and sci-fi authors, and also features a character inspired by Parsons, along with characters based on other Moniana people like Heinlein and Williamson and El Ron Hubbard. And White had this to say about Parsons character, quote, an eccentric scientist. In working hours at the California Institute of Technology, he was an uninspired routine laboratory man, but on his own time, he devoted himself to those peripheral aspects of science which the scientific purists dams as mumbo-jumbo. Those new alchemies and astrologies out of which the race may in time construct unsurmised wonders of chemistry and astronomy.

The rocketry of Pendray, the time dreams of Dunn, the extrasensary perception of Rhine, the sea serpents of Gould. All these held his interests far more than any research conducted by the Institute. He was inevitably a member of the Fortian Society of America and had his own file of unbelievable incidents eventually to be published as a supplement to the works of Charles Fort. It must be added in his favor that his scientific training automatically preserved him from the errors of the master. His file was carefully authenticated and often embellished with firsthand reports. So in this he's like, again, science Indiana Jones, like X-Files meets Indiana Jones. But also, in contrast to those accounts,

counts. Here's Mathis now with a quote about Parsons at this time in his life from someone within his circle who was a fellow OTO member and larger than life silent film actress named Jane Wolfe from such actual real hit movies as men, women and money, the woman next door and behold my wife. And honestly, all real. And honestly, as you listen, it kind of becomes clear she kind of sees him as the chosen one. So this is from Matt. Behold my wife. I have to see. I have to see that movie. This is a quote about, this is a quote from her, who is she's in the OTO, writing to Crowley. Unknown to me, John Whiteside Parsons, a newcomer, began astral travels, of all of which I learned after making my own decision.

So the time must be propitious, propitious, propitious. Incidentally, I take Jack Parsons to be the child who, quote, shall behold them all. 26 years of age, 6-2, vital, potentially bisexual, at the very least, University of the state of California and Caltech now engaged in Caltech chemical laboratories developing bigger and better explosives for Uncle Sam. Travels under sealed orders from the government writes poetry, sensuous only, he says. Lover of music, which he seems to know thoroughly, I see him as the real successor to Therion, also known as Crowley, passionate and has made the vilest analyses result in a species of exaltation after the event, has had mystical experiences which gave him a

sense of equality all around, although he is hierarchical in feeling and in the established order. Yeah. So even as, as Miss Wolfe takes care to note, Parsons was just absolutely smashing it in the world of rockets. But this other strange side of him was never too far away, and he definitely did not hide this part of him. And he treated his magic, like, sort of dalliances as his real religion in his real life, just like anybody would, you know, say a quick prayer for dinner or whatever. And just to give you an idea of what I mean, he had a famous habit of actually chanting Alistair Crowley's hymn to Pan before every rocket launch that he ever did. And here, actually, to give you a vibe on that hymn is Kurt as Jack Parsons with a little

excerpt from it. So there you go. Thrill with listen lust of the light, oh man, my man, come careening out of the night of pan low pan lo pan come over the sea from sicily and from arcady roaming as boochus with fons and pards and nymphs and saders for the guards on a milk white ass come over the sea to me to me creepy so that's so that's the uh so that's the that's in the background crowley's just quietly like jerking off he's getting ready to launch off i can rock it bro everybody's around I said Crowsy, Crowley's in the background. Yeah, he's in the background.

Just like, also shout to Lopan, big trouble in Little China. Lopan. It actually, I think it's, it actually might be yo. It might be yo, it might be yo pen. I.O. instead of L.O. It's like I.O. maybe.

Yeah. And that wasn't even the only cosmic supernatural collision surrounding those rockets, uh, involving Pan. As within the OTO, Jack took the name freighter to Pan or, freighter 2-10, but as you know, I love, let's do some numerology. So first things first, Topan, T-O-P-A-N, apparently directly is a like abbreviation for Thelamom-O-T-U-T-A, which translates from poorly pronounced Latin to, quote, the obtainment of Phelma or will through the nuptials of love. So T-O-P-A-N, that's exactly what that means. It means fucking to do magic, basically. But then also

just so you know who his daddy is, T-O-P-A-N literally also spells out two pan, aka Hale-Pan, which in Greek would be yo-pan, E-O-Pan, I-O-Pan, just like in the hymn. And in Hebrew, the enumeration for I-O-P-A-N is 210, which is also the sum of the numbers 1 through 20, so it's a pretty powerful little name. And if you thought we were done, we are not, because the numeric value of every Sephiroth of the Kabbalistic tree of life also adds up to 210. which we learned from the Red Stone Saga. And in his book, 777,

Alistair Crowley says the true secret meaning of the number 210 is literally too holy to share. That's how powerful it is. And that's why Parsons chose it as his name. But also, I don't think that Parsons had anything to do with the fact that the freeway leading straight from his house in Pasadena to JPL was the 210 freeway, did he?

That's just a coincidence, right? I think that's just a coincidence. Or the fact that the land he did test launches on at Arroyo Seco were just above the Devil's Gate Dam in La Cagnata Flint Ridge, where even the indigenous Tongva people would avoid the area because they believe they could see the devil's face in the rocks. That's a coincidence, right? Or perhaps, Jesse, it may be something that I like to call chaos magic. Just kidding. Just kidding. By the way, that's what my Minnesota article is going to be about. It's about the devil's gate dam. Listen to it right after you're done with this at

patreon.com slash Tulumati pod. Ask me how. But let's keep going. And anyway, Fast forward a few years, and like I said, the suicide squad grows into Aerojet Engineering Corp and Jet Propulsion Labs, JPL, as they go into business with the military, even though their novel versions of themselves that they wrote years ago were so hardcore anti-war and anti-capitalist. And as the people who used to make fun of rockets as a concept, started to apply at Parsons companies for jobs now, like just literally eating humble pie and just trying to get a job, he literally starts writing now back and forth very regularly with Alistair, Crowley and ended up taking over the Los Angeles branch of the OTO order himself. Because after all,

what were magic and rockets besides a way of crossing from one world to the next anyway? And in fact, here's a quote for Jesse to read from a letter between him and a fellow OTO member. I chose Jesse here because specifically instead of Kurt to show his kind of strange same minds about these things, because I felt like the message has more of a John tone than a jack tone. But this is Jesse reading the words of John Parsons. It seemed to me that if I had the genius to found the Jet Propulsion Field in the U.S. And found a multi-million dollar corporation and a world-renowned research laboratory, then I should also be able to apply this genius to the magical field.

And so he took his big rocket money and he went back to Millionaires Row again on Orange Grove Avenue and he bought a big giant wooden house and moved a bunch of interesting people into it with him. And he made his giant cavernous bedroom, the new OTO temple where rituals and masses were held. And just in case you think I'm exaggerating, here's Mathis again with a quote about the house, which he ended up calling the parsonage, by the way, which is like a pun. And this is originally from the fanzine dark house from 1962. So this is Mathis reading. In the ads placed in the local paper, Jack specified that only bohemians, artists, musicians, atheists,

or other exotic types need apply for rooms. any mundane soul would be unceremoniously rejected. This ad, needless to say, caused quite a flap in Pasadena when it appeared. There was a fine selection of on, uh, there was a fine selection of handpicked tenants, characters all. A few examples. The professional fortune teller and seer who always wore appropriate dresses and decorated her apartment with symbols and artifacts of arcane lore.

A lady, well past middle age, but still strikingly beautiful, thank God, uh, who claimed to have been at various times the mistress of the half famous men in France. a man who had been renowned, a renowned organist from most of the great movie palaces of the silent era. Jack's library, a large wood-paneled room, graced with a comfortable leather couch and a couple of leather chairs, was lined with books devouted almost exclusively to the occult and to the published works of Alistair Crowley. Dominating the room was a large photo portrait of Crowley affectionately inscribed to Jack. He also had a voluminous correspondence with Crowley in the library, some of which he showed. showed me. I remember in particular, one letter from Crowley, which praised and encouraged him

for the fine work he was doing in America, and also casually thanked him for his latest donation and intimidated that, or intimated, rather, that more would be shortly needed. Jack admitted that he was one of Crowley's main sources of money in America. You know, the perfect setting for a vampire the masquerade campaign. Yeah, absolutely. To outsiders, however, it just felt like an improper satanic costume party, which most people either just fully checked out of and did not want to be concerned with or, like, witnessed and were just silently, deeply disturbed by it. And though Parsons' genius was undeniable at this point, and sometimes it would feel fun and he'd answer the door, like I said, with a snake around his shoulder, and you'd chill for a bit

and get fucked up and do some drugs or whatever, get somebody to touch your dick, whatever. Sometimes things got kind of crazy, as you will see in this account that Kurt is going to read for us from Frank Molina now about one of the boys from the shop who visited the parsonage one night in 1941. Here we go. He was a mechanic working with Jack and it seemed that he had gone to Parsons' house. They had a seance. What they were doing, I don't know. Anyway, he had a gun and he found a car on the street that was parked nearby. There was a couple necking in it. He forced them out at the point of the gun, took the car, drove to Hollywood, evidently not quite knowing what he was going to do. And then, after a certain amount of time, he drove back to Pasadena. When he arrived at the

flagpole by the Colorado Avenue, Bridge, the police were waiting for him. He went to jail to talk to the fellow and asked him what exactly made him do a stupid thing like that. Well, he was very vague, and I couldn't get anything out of Parsons or Foreman as to why this had happened. It then became quite evident that whatever it was that Parsons and Foreman were playing with had certain worry some aspects. So yeah, somebody like did some fucking drugs and like freaked out and stole a car and at gunpoint and got arrested. And that's just part for the course.

I'm pretty soon Parsons professional reputation begins to sour as he's known to regularly seduce Arrowjet secretaries take him back to his house, get him fucked up and then like go fire dancing or whatever the fuck, Val Wilt. And then show up at work the next day, beat to shit and crash out together and just treat the whole place like this dorm. And also around this time, Parsons starts a relationship with his wife, Helen's 17-year-old sister Betty

after discovering that Helen was performing sex magic and having a relationship with another member of the lodge, Wilfred Talbot Smith. So that's another thing that's going on as he's fucking his underage wife's sister. And one day while Helen is away, Betty, the sister, shoots her shot, moves in to replace Helen.

And when Helen comes back, Betty tells Helen that actually, look at me, look at me, she is the wife, now. And in a weird, like, incestual trip that was absolutely intentional. Parsons is absolutely loving this shit because she basically made one of his sickest dreams come true. And Betty was like probably his most emotionally involved romantic relationship for that reason, by my own estimation, just based on the tone of how everybody talks about their relationship in first-hand accounts. He seems like he was genuinely happy to be with her. And as he started to do more erratic

things and more and more people started to see Parsons as dangerous and unsurious and total unpredictable. He would get like into pistol duels with Ed Foreman on the test range and they'd like shoot at each other's feet and think it was hilarious and play try not to flinch. And another time one scientist even accused Parsons of quote, blowing up half the business seemingly just because he wanted to destroy a stockpile of rocket fuel ingredients that he wasn't interested in running tests on anymore, even though people were asking him to because he already like knew it wasn't going to work. And so he just blew it up so they wouldn't have to answer questions. And you know, you fuck around with

weird explosives and shit long enough, and pretty soon the FBI comes snooping around. And so by 1943, things are so tense and he kind of feels done anyway. So he takes a $20,000 buyout for his Aerojet shares at age 30. And suddenly, without the hobby of literally inventing rocket science to take up his time anymore, he starts to invent his own new kinds of magic instead and new philosophies and new rituals. And pretty soon he seems to get into a self-fulfilling prophecy loop with intention and results that basically just convinces him that everything he wants to do is exactly the right thing for him to be doing. As we can see in this second quote from actress Jane Wolfe, which Mathis will weed for us now.

It's like an update to how Parsons is doing. There's something strange going on. Our own Jack is enamored of witchcraft, the home fort voodoo from the start. He always wanted to evoke something no matter what. I am inclined to think so long as he got a result. Exactly. So he was just doing whatever the fuck now, as long as it tickled his fancy for a moment. Which is literally chaos magic by definition.

Exactly. You're using belief systems until one works and then you move on. But he's not doing it consciously. He's like doing it like ADD style just. Oh, which brings up I was like this guy rings, especially with his two mindsets of like you could see the logic versus like the desire to believe in magic is like he's to me like he's odd ADHD. Autistic and ADHD. He's like that. Obsessing mix of the two where he's obsessed.

But the logic brain wants to break it all down. But he desperately wants to like believe in. It's like, yeah. He wants it to be a system. in a belief system that's like, there is no system. Yes, yes, he's exactly correct. And so the final thing really quickly, before you continue, I don't want to make this incredibly lame. But the more you describe him and the way he interacts with people and who he is, like, he's Elon Musk.

My friend. Like he really, he's in Elon Musk's character. He's so full of his own, like, what people have told him how important he is that he's like up his own butt with the whole. thing and the way he does stuff like I'm gonna blow it up because that's hilarious is so I'm actually going to blow up this yeah it's like not cool it's kind of lame and you're like

dude what are you doing I think Jack Parsons is who Elon Musk wants to be because Jack Parsons was also kind of inherently genius he was smart sure I'm not saying Elon's coasted oh yeah no you're right but like he didn't create any of the shit that the rockets are doing he just bought but vibe wise very like

man child's esk mentality wise yeah probably even closer to Crowley than to Parsons even, except for that Parsons has the fucking weird company. It's so weird. But the final nail in the coffin comes with the true arrival of El Ron Hubbard, who was a famed sci-fi author at the time that Parsons likely met him through the Manjana Society with Heinlein in the Laurel Canyon, and who eventually went on to found one of the scariest and most depressingly evil organizations that still is out there today, especially in Los Angeles,

the cult of Scientology, for which in 2025 there are still literally giant billboards up on some of the most expensive advertising real estate in town for, curious, still today. And already, his contemporaries were smelling a rat, like Parsons' fave author, Jack Williamson, who said about Hubbard, quote, I recall his eyes, the wary light blue eyes that I somehow associate with the gunmen of the Old West, watching me sharply as he talked, as if to see how much I believe. not much. And unfortunately, for Parsons, however, he didn't quite catch the vibe with Hubbard right away. And the two became really good friends, really fast.

And Hubbard moved in to one of the rooms at the Parsonage House, even though he was married with a family elsewhere, apparently. He just was like, yeah, I live here now. And they would fence together, and they would, like, wax poetic about the philosophies of magic and science and sex. And Hubbard, in his own little game, would also just, like, in the background, kind of sneak around and fuck everybody's girlfriend whenever he patriarchyed himself into the opportunity to do so a dirty dirty dude the dirty as fucking dude in the world but like he wasn't even like a good

writer but he was very prolific he was cranking out like the an insane amount of books hoping anything hit and he also would go on and like change his history yeah and tell lies about like his uncle who like took him on so far as none of that happened like he would build a fake past his military history then he would then contradict later with another fake past that was like it's all fucking weird they're all weird and they all come together if you ever watch the master uh that film you should uh if you're listening to this it's really fucking interesting and kind of explains how somebody like hubbard could take power uh one day we'll do him too but eventually hubbard is exactly what happens with jack's girlfriend wife slash sister-in-law person betty and even though so everybody says

they're cool with free love and open relationships and shit in the OTO and that's one of the main things that brings people in, especially Parsons and Betty, you know, it's like the early 40s Parsons is attached as fuck and he's like obsessive personality. He sees Betty almost as his muse. He has a considerable pride still about him to be wounded. And it does get wounded because Hubbard fucks the shit out of this girl. And you know, he starts to get really kind of stewy mad and jealous of Ron and Betty, even as Elron Hubbard himself is the one who is talking Jack through it and through his own feelings, gently cucking him and then alternately cradling him in turn, and eventually plans for obtaining a new lover for Parsons through carrying out the steps of a new occult ritual

of his own devising come to fruition for some reason. Can't imagine why. So separately, from anything else that was going on between him and Betty, Parsons, the problem was Parsons genuinely believe that Elron Hubbard was actually psychically powerful and capable of channeling voices and energies from beyond this plane, like Hubbard convinced Parsons of this. So for that rare and in-demand skill, which he believed that only somebody like Hubbard had, he still, even though this was what was going on with Hubbard and Betty, he still had Hubbard come in to join him in December of 1945 as he begins the first of many rituals, which he describes, as the Babylon working in a re-spelling of Babylon with no why, just Babylon B-A-B-A-A-Lon.

That's the Thelamite version of Babylon, which is intended to bring the Thelamite goddess Babylon into the earthly plane and a human vessel in an earthly body, but which mostly just involves them kind of like mystically improvising together in a room using old-timey words and vibes and just reciting select pieces of pre-memorized writings as Parsons like turns up a record of Sergei Prokofiev's second violin. Chertoe way too loud and jacks off

onto some tablets so that's basically what's going on there crazy but at this point Alex we've improvised so much together and if you ever had sex

with my girlfriend we wouldn't improvise anymore oh you wait oh wait wait yes and yeah through the magic

yeah jack poisons gets cucked very very what's so interesting about this is that it's like if you just look it on the surface you ignore all the magic stuff

it is the tail of dudes who could not get laid coming up with a scheme to get laid then other guys seeing that scheme and being like yo that works swooping in scheming on the schemers taking their girls and the schemers are getting upset and it's like a multi-level pyramid scheme of tricking people into sex because of drugs and magic is really what's happening here and it's hilarious because they're taking it all so personally. Instead of just, like, developing a sense of humor. Yes. Yes. So Crowley has this idea called the scarlet woman.

She's kind of like the avatar for Babylon, a bit deep into that in a minute. It's sort of a thalemic avatar of the goddess Babylon from his religion. She kind of represents all of femininity, but also she's like a super muse and super sex magic partner for Crowley. And this is something that up to this point was kind of like a Crowley only thing that he did and had a couple lovers that he said was his scarlet woman. But that is now exactly the same thing that Parsons is looking for. And he finishes one of the big rituals of his Babylon working in the Mojave Desert in late February of 1946. And suddenly when he gets back home, amazed that his apparent results, he writes this letter directly to Alistair Crowley, which I will have Kurt read a bit for us now.

I have my elemental. She turned up one night after the conclusion of the operation and has been with me. since. Although she goes back to New York next week, she has red hair and slant green eyes as specified. She is an artist, strong-minded and determined, with strong, masculine characteristics and a fanatical independence. If she returns, she will be dedicated as I am dedicated. Yeah. And her name was Marjorie Elizabeth Cameron, and she did actually show up while he was away doing this ritual out of nowhere. Seriously. Unemployed ex-Navy illustrator with just the desire to be there. So pretty crazy for him.

She literally showed up. She just showed up. They were doing the ritual to summon this woman. The scarlet woman. And when they were doing it, she showed up at their door. We will talk about this in the Alistair series. But like, I'm trying to like speed over it so I don't go too deep into it. She literally shows up. This is where I'm just, the parts

of this. I'm just like, what? So a month later, a month later, she goes to New York, gets her shit. Wait. They were doing the spell and she went, they were going circle, circle, circle. dot dot now I got the kudy shot triangle triangle triangle square yes yes yes yes dude that's exactly what happened fucking insane but yeah yeah so she so she immediately moves in they immediately start doing sex rituals together and because of his special powers hubbard who is somehow still around despite

the most heinous possible vibes ever would serve as a sort of medium slash scribe for these rituals and reported visions of beautiful naked women riding on giant muscular cats. And with that imagery, which harkened back to that story he liked, darker than you think, about the werewolf people. Parsons was ecstatic. He believed himself to be invoking Babylon for real with Cameron as his scarlet woman. But Crowley, however, feels differently in these two letters from him that I've knitted together for Mathis to read in his voice right now.

I don't know if you heard him. He's just, he's very typical like, like, as he talks. I don't have to do that if you don't want to say, how is he something? Yeah, well, hang on, I'll do it. It's like Morse code. I am particularly interested in what you have written me about the elemental Cameron, because for some little time past, I have been endeavoring to intervene personally on your behalf.

I would, however, have you recall Elephus, Levi's advice that the love of the maggis for such things as elementals is insensate and may destroy. destroy him. 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 overestimate. 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 are being as sensitive as you are. it behooves you to be more on your guard than would be the case with the majority of people.

And like, he's kind of also not wrong. Pretty solid roast. Yeah, pretty valid roast of, of Parsons. Because Parsons does get taken by his whims of like what he believes. It's that ADHD magic pursuit. Stop being a sensitive bitch. Yeah, exactly. Basically what he's trying to say also like kind of through between the lines is that he doesn't

love all this new weird shit that Parsons is doing. And he feels like it probably besmirches his legacy and his life. if Parsons is going to be like a leader after fucking Crowley dies because he's like a fucking heroin addict at this point and he's like fucking dying. And Parsons' feelings are kind of hurt when he gets this letter back. And we'll kind of see that in his writing, which Kurt's going to read first now that he wrote back to Crowley in response to that letter, which is this. You have got me completely puzzled by your remarks about the elemental, the danger of discussing or copying anything. I thought I had a most morbid imagination as good as any man's.

but it seems I have not. I cannot form the slightest idea what you can possibly mean. Totally butt hurt. But Crowley, on the other hand, thought that Parsons should know very well what he meant, as Mathis will read for us now. In this excerpt, a short excerpt from a letter from Crowley

to his stateside OTO associate, Carl Germmer. Here you go. Apparently he, or Hubbard or somebody, is producing a moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these goats. Yeah, and this idea of a moonchild, or homunculus or like little enchanted blessed being, again, is kind of like the child of the night that brings back the old gods in the old way from the story darker than you think

by Jack Williamson. And this trope hasn't been like done to death in horror movies yet at this point and still seemed possible and slightly realistic. So you know Jack Parsons was all over this, though we're not going to go into it too much because I'm pretty sure Mathis has homunculi and moon children covered coming up pretty soon. But it's like the promised child. It's like Satan's baby kind of vibes. however also while all this was going on hubbard and parsons wife's sister sex friend betty are forming

this like weird company where hubbard puts up jesse's call he wants to be part of whoa whoa whoa this sounds like a lot this is way too much work my call wouldn't have this many levels of nonsense listen to this plan listen to this plan they form a company where hubbard puts up a grand betty puts up nothing parson puts up 20 grand but they split everything evenly three ways and they're going apparently go use that money to buy boats on the East Coast and then sail them around to the West Coast and sell them there. But then after the second, after the second ritual of the Babylon working, Ron and Ron Hubbard and Betty take off with half of the money to the tune of 10 grand. And at first, Parsons is like feeling tricked and pissed. And then somehow Hubbard calls him on the

phone and talks him down. And Jack ends up actually thanking him at the end of the call. And this guy Lewis Culling, who's an OTO guy who hears the call from like, you know, overhears it, says it was like such a loser's sad response to the situation that it made him cringe. But obviously, despite whatever Hubbard said to Parsons that night, it turned out that the whole boat scam was a bad deal all around. Betty and Hubbard actually did end up buying a boat or three. And pretty soon, Crowley writes Germer back as Mathis will now read for us again with a slight concern about the things that are going on.

Yeah, Crowley's not happy about any of this shit. Suspect Ron playing confidence trick, John Parsons' weak fool, obvious victim, prowling swindlers. He's got a miraculous illumination which rhymes with nothing, and he has apparently lost all his personal independence. From our brother's, Lewis Culling's account, he is given away both his girl and his money. Apparently, it is the ordinary confidence trick. Of course, I must suspend judgment until I have heard his side of the story, but he promised me quite a long while ago to write me a full explanation, and to date, I have received nothing from him. Yeah, so he just, like, leaves him on red for a long-ass time,

but then, like, a month later, as Jesse will now read for us, John Parsons writes back with his tail between his legs, but also admittedly with a fairly crazy story to tell, which is absolutely true, according to all records. Here I am in Miami, pursuing the children of my folly. Hubbard attempted to escape me by sailing at 5 p.m., and I performed a full invocation, to Bart Zabel, a form of Mars, within the circle at 8 p.m.

At the same time, so far as I can check, his ship was struck by a sudden squall off the coast, which ripped off his sail and forced him back to port, where I took the boat in custody. I have them well tied up. They cannot move without going to jail. However, I'm afraid that most of the money has already been dissipated. I will be lucky to salvage three to five,

thousand dollars in the interim i have been flat broke yeah so he chases them all the way to fucking miami they try to get away in one of the boats he summons a storm which fucks the boat up and they have to come back to shore and so he gets them and eventually parsons gets his shit together sues the shit out of that's just what people think he did he did and the storm really happened and there was a storm that they also ran into afterward he went circle circle dot dot now i got the cutie shot triangle, triangle, square. Let's put a store right there. Yeah, yeah.

Crazy. And, yeah, so he gets a shit together. He sues them. He gets his money back. He gets two of the boats back of the three boats that they ended up with. But also, somehow amidst whisperings of Betty threatening Parsons with statutory rape charges for starting a relationship with her when she was 17, Hubbard ends up keeping the other boat somehow as long as he pays Parsons legal fees.

and then they disappeared from his life, and Parsons never heard from either of them personally ever again. And even though Hubbard, like I said, already had a wife, he somehow also married Betty, too, in a like binogamous relationship. And then he went off and became his own type of God incarnate somewhere else with his own strange, misguided followers bearing the brunt of his unchecked will, even as he melt them all for everything they were worth. And that's another story for another time. In the fallout of that sort of life upsetting few months, Parsons finally wraps up his marriage with Helen Legit, marries Marjorie Cameron Legit, and kept doing consulting work on rocketry, even making a decent living doing it, until his anti-war,

anti-capitalism attitudes in the early days and his connections that he had made through his weird witchcraft house to weird communists and art people and stuff. That came to get him during the Red Scare, and his government clearance was revoked, and he was kind of blacklisted out of the job and forced to start bootlegging nitroglycerin for money out of his house. And then to top it all off, yeah, there's all real. And then to top it all off, thinking she's seeing the writing on the wall, his wife Cameron asks for a temporary separation, moves to Mexico to live in an artist colony for a while on her own. And now alone without a wife or a scarlet woman, and now unemployed and spiraling, and we're getting a gas station, Parsons dives even deeper into the occult, attempts, but likely fails an absolutely harrowing high. I level Crowley in crossing of the abyss ritual, which when completed, took Crowley 40 days

or more to do. But nevertheless, declares himself a master of the temple anyway without anybody's authority or blessing, which just pisses Crowley off. He hears him to, Crowley hears him tell all these stories, taking the black pilgrimage to Chorazin on the astral plane and creating his new oath, the oath of the Antichrist and declaring himself, Belerion, which, which rhymes with Therian, by the way, Balerian Armilis Al-Dajal, the Antichrist, who, quote, M. Come to fulfill the Law of the Beast 666, Alistair Crowley. And Prerlings would have been like the annoying person to play Dungeons and Dragons. Yes. He's, no, no, not that. Crowley just thinks it's all stupid, even though in Parsons mind he thinks it's like finally finished his Babylon working and it's

his greatest achievement in his entire life so far. And it reaffirms his belief in himself, even as he loses the faith of more and more people around him who once saw so much promise in him as a magician and rocket scientist. And this is when he writes the book about himself to himself, as well as something called the book of Antichrist, like the anti-life equation, I think is how Antichrist is supposed to be read there. That's that where D.C. got it? No, which said that if he was still alive in nine years, Babylon would manifest on Earth and a nation would arise who embraces Thelma and dominate the world. But he didn't live nine years. But eventually, riding this wave, Parson gets another job with Hughes Aircraft Company where he's going to design some stuff.

They were building in Culver City, some kind of chemical factory there. But I guess one day, a secretary at Hughes sees him working on some kind of shady contract with like Zionists in America and the Israeli rocket program. And it could be above board, but there's something shady about it. And nobody's really clear what's going on. So she just out of caution, reports him to the FBI. He is immediately fired. but lucky for him, though he goes through a trial for possible espionage, he's found not guilty, but he is banned from working on classified shit ever again.

So instead, he founds a company in North Hollywood in the early 50s that makes all kinds of on-set special effects for movies like fire and fog and squibs and shit like that, just as a means of surviving. He makes it all by hand himself. And eventually Marjorie comes back from Mexico and his life almost looks stable again and he moves into yet another house on Millionaire's Row on Orange Grove Ave, which he again turns into a bohemian fuck mansion. And he lives in it for a while he makes his own version of the magic, which is called the witchcraft and his own new belief system, which he calls the nosis. And then a few months later in June of 1952, while they were all set and packed for a huge trip to Mexico the next day, possibly to spend some serious time there starting a business in secret, which is another reason maybe the government was after him.

Parsons gets an order for some onset explosives for his company, heads back home to make him in his lab. And nobody knows exactly what happened, but the most likely scenario is that something slipped out of his hands and he bent down to catch it because it blew his right arm off, broke the rest of his limbs, ripped a big hole through the right side of his face. And apparently the explosion was large enough

that if the building he was in wasn't made of like the heaviest timber known to man, it probably would have leveled my house. It probably would have leveled almost any building that that could have happened in. However, he was still alive when he was found somehow and dragged out from under like an old-timey bathtub. And he was rushed to the hospital. But sadly, he was pronounced dead on arrival with his last words reportedly being, as Jesse will read for us now. Three simple words. I wasn't done.

That's right. He was just 37 years old, my age right now. and neither the witchcraft or the nosis were complete. He was 37? Yeah. Yeah. When he died, I thought,

I can live a very short explosive life. Like, he started like 11,000 businesses. He married 65,000 women. He got cucked by 25 different men. And he did all that in 37 short years. Probably in like 17 years. Yeah.

Yeah, let's say 15, 7, like, year somewhere on there. Yeah, because he definitely wasn't like a kid doing that. So yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It happened all in his 20s and doves into death. So earlier that March, mysteriously, Kurt will read for this now, read this first

now. Parsons wrote this in his notes, which is interesting to think about after the fact. And in that day, the manifestation of Babylon, my work will be accomplished and I shall be blown away upon the breath of the father. Something he wrote, which is pretty strange. Also, there was that book where he like broke that he blew up in an explosion. That night, as Jack's mother, Ruth. learned of her son's death, she said, quote, I can't stand to live without him. I adored him. And she got absolutely wasted. And then she swallowed between 23 and 50 sleeping pills. That night? Yeah, that night,

same night. And she was found slumped over dead in her living room chair around 9 p.m. And it's hard at a time like this, thinking about these things for the mind not to drift to that weird thing, Parson said that one time about needing an edible complex to find magic. So for you, a few more crumbs along those lines, perhaps more than you probably wanted. But nevertheless, here you go. And amongst the wreckage that night, a piece of note was recovered, which seemed to be from some sort of personal diary, not scientific stuff. Jesse will read that for us now.

It goes like this. Let me know thy misery totally. And spare not and be not spared. Sacrament and crucifixion. Oh, my passions and shame, mothers, sisters. And just in case, it's not clear what he probably meant by that. I'll first remind you that his first great joy in his romantic life was having sex with his wife's 17-year-old sister. And then secondly, I'll have Mathis read what, quote,

amateur rocket advocate Harold Chambers had been told on more than one separate occasion after the death of Jack Parsons, which is that, quote, An odd, bizarre, fairly big box decorated with snakes and dragons was found in a trailer at Parsons' residence. The odd box was found to contain home movies of Parsons and his mother having sex. Not only with each other, but also with Ruth's Big Dog. According to reports from Pasadena Police passed down to their friend Harold Chambers, we now have circumstantial evidence that John Parsons indeed fulfilled his goal to, quote, exteriorize his Oedipus Complex.

Ruth Parsons' big dog also made it difficult for police to attend to her suicide scene. After being attacked by Ruth's agitated beast, Pasadena officers shot the dog in the the head pretty insane stuff i didn't want to bring this up door i mean now that we're here i want to but i didn't want to bring this up during the whole like talking about the background and everything yes but the more you talked about the way all these guys operated in this space i was going to say it's a little epsteiny yes yes now that we're here i'm like no it fool on is this is oh yeah yeah the way they like write to each other and talk it's like that damn book they just released all the photos from. Yes. Yes.

The birthday are like, yo, these guys had issues. Dude, they all knew each other. They all like touch tips. It was weird. Two years later, an Akrolean slash Phthalamite inspired film by eventual Bobby Boseley collaborator Kenneth Enger, who we've met before

in this story, called inauguration of the Pleasuredome. Marjorie Cameron actually appears on screen as a character called The Scarlet Woman. And in the years following, she had said that the film version of her as this object of Parsons' intent was something like what a chaos magician like Grant Morrison might call a hyper-sigil, which was intended by Cameron to be the push

finally needed to finish the Babylon working once and for all, and that finally, years later, upon the release of that film, as it won awards and stuff and reached a grand public, Babylon, as written in the book of Antichrist by Jack Parsons, was in fact personified in her to her satisfaction. Then she moved to the desert and got really into UFO. Bose, but hey, that's a story for another time. Kurt, thank you so much for joining us today as we learned the story of Jack Parsons. What a pleasure to have you on for the final episode of L.A. month. Please let the people know where they can find more Kurt if they want it or point them

to some kind of cool thing you're into or want to promote at this time. First off, what a fucking nightmare guy this guy was. Holy shit. Yeah. Truly terrifying. I get why Christian conservatives hate science now. I see the Venn diagram, clearly. I understand.

It's a gateway drug. I guess so. Holy shit. You can find me at Kurt Maloney on TikTok and Instagram. If you are listening to this and you're in Australia or in the UK, Dropout Improv Live is going on tour next summer. So come check out a show. If not, most of the stuff I do is at dropout.com. Great. Thank you guys out there for listening. Please go to our website and buy our top secret stickers featuring the very excellent art of Dori's Doodles. Five crazy stickers about an episode of Chulamana. You don't get to see which one, but the stickers are sick. Link in the description. Thank you all so much for being part of this wonderful L.A. month experiment here on the show. Thanks to all the guests. Thanks to all the cool things that we got to do. Back to your regularly scheduled programming next week. Mathis, take me away.

Off to do a Minnesota Patreon.com slash Luminati Pod. Thank you again. Curran is wonderful to have you. We love you. Appreciate you, everybody. Goodbye. Bye. Anyway, me and my wife were sitting outside indulging on our porch one night and enjoying ourselves.

I needed to go to the bathroom, so I stepped back inside. And after a few moments, I hear my wife go, holy shit, get out here. So I quickly dash back outside. She's looking up in the sky in the fall. I look up too, and there's a perfect line of dozen lights traveling across the sky. You know, I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.