Strange Angel (36 page)

His peacetime stories were equally extravagant. He was a member of the famed Explorers' Club. Alva Rogers, writing of his time at 1003 for the fanzine
Lighthouse,
remembered Hubbard proudly displaying the scars he had received after being struck by “aboriginal arrows” on one expedition he led. He had written the screenplay for the 1938 Hollywood film
The Secret of Treasure Island,
based on his novel
Murder at Pirate Castle,
and he had also worked as a “balladeer” for a Washington, D.C., radio station, performing his own works on air while accompanying himself on the ukulele. It was little wonder, the residents of 1003 concurred, that the scientists at the British Museum who measured his skull declared it to be unique.

For the most part the housemates were delighted with their new guest's stories and his back-garden heroics, but a few failed to succumb to Hubbard's magnetism. Jack Williamson had heard Hubbard's naval tales before at meetings of the Mañana Literary Society. “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 believed,” said Williamson. “Not much.” Nieson Himmel enjoyed pointing out discrepancies in his stories, much to Hubbard's irritation. “I can't stand phoneys and he was so obviously a phoney. But he was not a dummy. He could charm the shit out of anybody.” Alice Cornog put her feelings more simply: “I thought he was a bastard, I disliked him thoroughly.” There was no denying, however, that, love him or hate him, believe him or doubt him, Hubbard “told one hell of a good story.”

It was not particularly surprising that the man who should fall most thoroughly under Hubbard's spell was Parsons. Enamored of Hubbard's life of adventure, he offered him a bed in the main building, sharing a room with the gadfly Himmel. Soon Hubbard was absorbed quite happily in the house's activities. When he was not writing, he spent much time in the company of Parsons, who excitedly explained to him the laws and sanctions of Thelema. Hubbard impressed Parsons with his immediate understanding of Crowley's work and with his insight—most likely garnered through his years of fantasy writing—into magic in general. Parsons wrote excitedly to Crowley to tell him about his new friend and prospect.

 

About 3 months ago I met Capt L Ron Hubbard, a writer and explorer of whom I had known for some time. He is a gentleman, red hair, green eyes, honest and intelligent and we have become great friends ... Although he has no formal training in Magick he has an extraordinary amount of experience and understanding in the field ... He is the most Thelemic person I have ever met and is in complete accord with our own principles.

 

Hubbard and Parsons liked to fence together in the large living room, perhaps occasionally competing with Heinlein, who was also a keen swordsman. When Heinlein visited 1003 to talk to Robert Cornog, Hubbard and Parsons would join them for discussions on science and science fiction, batting ideas back and forth between each other. Before long, however, the house residents realized that Hubbard's magnetism extended well beyond the genial. “He was irresistible to women, swept girls off their feet. There were other girls living there with guys and he went through them one by one,” remembered Himmel.

Hubbard had been at the house for little more than two months when Grady McMurtry arrived back from Europe, fresh from the war and from studying at the hoof of the Great Beast. Crowley and Germer had asked him to write a report on the activities of the Agape Lodge based on interviews with every OTO member. In the report, still in the OTO archives, McMurtry bears unwitting witness to the early stages of the disruption Hubbard would inflict on Parsons.

He described watching Parsons and Hubbard fence against each other one evening, as usual not wearing masks. “The light was very poor and they kept tangling with the rugs but, as both men know something of the sport, it was not exactly mortal combat.” Betty was watching from the sidelines, eyeing Hubbard and growing more restless by the minute. When Parsons offered her the chance to try her hand with his foil, she snatched at it and launched into a wild attack on Hubbard, lunging dangerously at Hubbard's unprotected face with a fierceness that shocked the watching McMurtry, who “thought someone was going to get killed.” Hubbard, regaining his composure after the initial ferocity of the attack, fought the formidable Betty back a few steps and stopped the assault by rapping her smartly across the nose with his foil.

It seemed more like foreplay than fun and games. And in fact, Hubbard “soon fastened on to Betty,” remembered Himmel. Bob Cornog remembered stumbling into Parsons' room one morning to find Hubbard and Betty entwined, “like a starfish on a clam.” Now all eyes turned to Parsons, whose devotion to Betty had been absolute, to see how he would react.

In the manner of a true follower of Thelema, Parsons had always prided himself on his ability to renounce jealousy. One needed only to look at the remnants of his first marriage to see how successfully he had managed this. Up until now, he had been quite comfortable with Betty's amorous adventures, always confident that she would come back to him in the end. But he was disturbed by the intensity of her relationship with Hubbard. This was no mere dalliance. Parsons put on a grand show of remaining friends with her. They hugged and talked as before, and he accompanied Betty and Hubbard on trips as “the genial elder brother,” but when nighttime came, Parsons was excluded from her bed. For Alva Rogers, as for the rest of the house, it was obvious that “Jack was feeling the pangs of a hitherto unfelt passion, jealousy.”

There were other houseguests who were more than willing to fill Betty's place, but Parsons was enveloped in emotions which he could not, for once, conquer. The loss of Betty was not made easier by the loose sexual lifestyle Parsons had encouraged at the lodge. To the shock of the non-OTO members, soon Hubbard was “making out with her right in front of Parsons.” Group meals were no longer quite the frivolous affairs they had once been. “The hostility between Hubbard and Parsons was tangible,” remembered Himmel.

Driven to distraction by the loss of Betty and without the incessant work of wartime rocket research to absorb his attention, Parsons threw himself into the only other part of his life he could control: his magic. He had been turning his interests to the more perverse branches of occultism in his quest to conjure up actual spiritual phenomena. As far back as 1943, Crowley had warned Parsons, “I don't like at all what you say about witch-craft. All this black magic stuff is 75% nonsense and the rest plain dirt. There is not even any point to it.” Black magic was traditionally recognized as a form of ritual magic practiced for evil or harmful purposes. Although the press frequently accused Crowley of being a “black magician,” he envisioned his magick as a discipline designed to aid in the individual's mental and mystical development. Ever since Parsons had been a boy, however, the dark side of magic had captivated him. “I know that witchcraft is mostly nonsense, except where it is a blind,” he wrote to Crowley in 1943, “but I am so nauseated by Christian and Theosophical guff about the ‘good and the true' that I prefer the appearance of evil to that of good.”

Parsons was now forgoing his OTO colleagues and enacting rituals with his old friend, Ed Forman. Despite his doubts about the reality of Crowley's magick, Forman was always willing to help out with what he saw as Parsons' hobby. As with the pair's scientific work, their occult methods leaned toward the unorthodox. “They thought, ‘Let's work on the heavier stuff at the end of the magic book without doing any of the simpler stuff',” remembered Forman's wife, Jeanne. “They were tinkering with magic spells as they had with their rockets.” On one such occasion their frivolousness had such a dramatic and unsettling psychological effect on Ed Forman that his family still discusses the story to this day. It seems that Forman was returning to his bedroom late one night following the performance of a ritual, when he felt the whole house shake. At the same time he heard a piercing scream coming from outside his window and looking out of it, he would recall, he saw a number of horrible entities floating outside his window, what he recognized as banshees—female spirits whose wailing warns of a death in the house. With the sound of their screams filling his ears he rushed downstairs to ask the other members of the house if they, too, could hear it, but nobody could. “Up until then he had not believed in Jack's hobby,” remembered Jeanne. “Now he was absolutely terrified.” The events of that night would unsettle Forman for the rest of his life.

Forman was not the only one suffering from Parsons' devil-may-care attitude. A worried Jane Wolfe now wrote to Karl Germer about Parsons' new pursuits. “There is something strange going on,” she said. “Our own Jack is enamored of witchcraft, the houmfort, 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.” Parsons claimed to be impregnating statuettes with “a vital force” by magical invocation and then selling them, leading many of the OTO to worry about the demonic forces he might unleash upon 1003. A form of group hysteria suddenly gripped the OTO members in the house, and they began performing “banishing rituals”—those intended to clear the psychic atmosphere—on a regular basis. Meeka Aldrich, an OTO member who had recently moved into the house, believed that something “alien and inimical” lurked in the house's wood paneling. Others sensed the presence of “troublesome spirits,” especially on the third floor.

In recent meetings of the Agape Lodge, Parsons had read aloud from British author William Bolitho's book
Twelve Against the Gods.
It was a metaphor-laden treatise on the “adventurer,” the person—such as Alexander the Great, Casanova, or the prophet Mohammed—who sets himself on an unalterable path to a grand destiny. “The adventurer is an individualist and an egotist, a truant from obligations. His road is solitary, there is no room for company on it. What he does, he does for himself ... The adventurer is within us, and he contests for our favour with the social man we are obliged to be.”

Parsons now embarked on an adventure that he hoped would allow him to enter the ranks of Bolitho's heroes. He planned a series of magical rituals—a magical working—more ambitious than any he had attempted before. He would later call it the defining work in his life.

 

Alva Rogers remembered being awakened on a bleak morning in December “by some weird and disturbing noises seemingly coming from Jack's room which sounded for all the world as though someone were dying or at the very least were deathly ill.” He went on:

 

We went out in to the hall to investigate the source of the noises and found that they came from Jack's partially open door. Perhaps we should have turned around and gone back to the bed at this point, but we didn't. The noise—which by this time, we could tell was a sort of chant—drew us inexorably to the door which we pushed open a little further in order to better see what was going on. What we saw I'll never forget, although I find it hard to describe in any detail. The room, in which I had been before, was decorated in a manner typical to an occultist's lair, with all the symbols and appurtenances essential to the proper practice of black magic. It was dimly lit and smoky from a pungent incense; Jack was draped in a black robe and stood with his back to us, his arms outstretched, in the center of a pentagram before some sort of an altar affair on which several indistinguishable items stood. His voice—which was not actually very loud—rose and fell in a rhythmic chant of gibberish which was delivered with such passionate intensity that its meaning was frighteningly obvious. After this brief and uninvited glimpse into the blackest and most secret center of a tortured man's soul, we quietly withdrew and returned to our room.

 

Rogers believed that Parsons was trying to conjure a demon to dispatch Hubbard, his rival in love. He was not completely wrong. Parsons
was
trying to conjure up a magical being, not to avenge the loss of Betty, but to replace her. “In December 1945,” wrote Parsons later, “I performed certain operations to obtain an Elemental mate.”

Parsons generally kept poor records of his life, but he documented the next three months in extravagant detail. He was to keep comprehensive records of each day's rituals, rather as if he were working on a rocket experiment. But instead of straining to catch gauge readings, Parsons would be attuning his mind to less predictable phenomena. In order to summon his elemental, Parsons used an old magical system known as Enochian Magic that had been devised by Dr. John Dee, the royal astrologer to Elizabeth I, and that came highly recommended by Crowley. Dressed in robes and possibly under the influence of a narcotic, Parsons carefully consecrated one of his daggers for an operation as complicated and dangerous in his mind as mixing rocket fuel or firing a rocket. He began by tracing five pointed stars in the air and reciting ancient invocations in both English and Enochian, the strange singsong language that Dee thought was passed down to him from angels. Strewn around him on the floor were paper “tablets” covered with arcane symbols and languages. He recited line after line of ominous and obscure scripture: “Dear Thou Me, for I am the Angel of Paphro Osor-ronophris; this is Thy True Name, handed down to the Prophets of Ishrael.” The ritual called for focused masturbation—what
The Golden Bough
would have recognized as “sympathetic magic”—as Parsons tried to “fertilize” the magical tablets around him and bring his elemental to life. Finally, he performed the banishing rites, a symbolic erasing of all the previous rituals, by retracing in reverse all the pentagrams and hexagrams he had drawn in the air. The entire process took some two hours, and it invariably left Parsons both physically and mentally exhausted.