“Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the Will.”
― Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
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It is the afternoon of Halloween — October 31st, 1936.
In a desolate desert basin outside the City of Angels, beneath the San Gabriel Mountains and the looming rock formation ominously christened the Devil’s Gate, John Whiteside “Jack” Parsons prepares to test the volatile rocket fuel upon which the future of American rocketry would be birthed, a scene later mockingly referred to as the “Nativity.” Before firing the ignition, his colleagues — the original Suicide Squad — inspect the machinery and retreat to whatever distance prudence dictates. Parsons had been fascinated with the occult since childhood, though his serious involvement with ceremonial magick is still several years away: as such, it is an auspicious date for a test of this auspicious nature.
Though not recorded in the historical accounts of the day’s events, Parsons would come to recite Aleister Crowley’s Hymn to Pan prior to every significant launch:
Thrill with lissome lust of the light,
O man! My man!
Come careering out of the night
Of Pan! Io Pan!
An occasion drenched in symbolic significance would see the birth of American rocketry. Parsons would become one of Aleister Crowley’s most important American disciples, the dominant figure within California’s Agape Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), and a self-proclaimed Antichrist who believed he would usher in the incarnation of the scarlet goddess, the harlot, Babalon. He would by then be a hardcore occultist and committed practitioner of ceremonial magick. Through these and other connections we will soon explore, it is more than fair to describe the eccentric Jack Parsons as the most influential alchemist of the 20th century.
The influence of ancient mystery religions and their modern descendants — whether Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, or the O.T.O. — has been a constant focus of this publication. In Black Ops & Black Magick, we examined the occult foundations of the modern intelligence world. In Dancing with the Devil, we followed Crowley’s O.T.O. into the overlapping worlds of ritual abuse, psychology, and military experimentation. At the outset, it should be said that I put little stock in NASA’s green-screen shenanigans or its moon-landing narrative; our concern here is the inception of American rocketry and the machinery behind it: with Parsons, those separate lines of inquiry converge.
— John Whiteside “Jack” Parsons.
Across the Atlantic, the Third Reich had placed enormous resources behind its own rocket program. Before Germany’s populace was crushed betwixt East and West, the United States and the Soviet Union had already begun competing for possession of its scientists and military technology. As demonstrated throughout The Frankenstein Formula, that Cold War narrative cannot withstand serious scrutiny. The financial and business elite of Germany, the United States and the Soviet Union continued cooperating throughout the war, even while presenting their populations with the spectacle of an existential conflict.
The Cold War was (largely) an engineered conflict which allowed the latter two regimes to expand their militaries and discipline their populations for one world government through the permanent threat of annihilation. War is always good for such ghastly business. While not presented in that specific light, Professor Anthony Sutton’s work, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, presents an essential foray into the subject for those initially dubious of such a prospect: while seemingly paradoxical on its face, Capitalist oligarchs find ready allies in revolutionary Communism.
Don’t get me wrong, the conflict produced real corpses — so too does the present conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The fiction lies in the claim that the ruling interests behind these blocs were ever separated by the ideological gulf presented to the public.
— “Dr. von Braun began his association with Walt Disney in the 1950s when the rocket scientist appeared in three Disney television productions related to the exploration of space. Years later, Dr. von Braun invited Disney and his associates to tour the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama. This photograph is dated April 13, 1965. From left are R.J. Schwinghamer from the MSFC, Disney [33°], J D Bennight, and Dr. von Braun.” Source: Wikipedia.
The resulting American recruitment campaign of those Nazi scientists would become known as Operation Paperclip.
Publicly, the Second World War had been waged as a civilizational struggle against fascism. Privately, American officials and business interests — many of whom had never ceased doing business with the Third Reich — began deciding which servants of the Nazi state could be rehabilitated in the interest of the approaching “conflict” with the Soviet Union. As Patton famously quipped before his untimely death, “we defeated the wrong enemy.”
Though controversial even at the time, the scale of these relationships remained concealed for decades. Investigative researcher Annie Jacobsen writes:
In 1998, Congress passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, which required various U.S. government agencies to identify and release federal records relating to Nazi war criminals that had been kept classified for decades. … The documentation revealed a vast web of profitable relationships between hundreds of Nazi war criminals and U.S. military and intelligence agencies.
In 2005, in a final report to Congress, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, the Interagency Working Group determined that “[t]he notion that they [the U.S. military and the CIA] employed only a few ‘bad apples’ will not stand up to the new documentation.” In hindsight, wrote the Interagency Working Group, the government’s use of Nazis was a very bad idea, and “there was no compelling reason to begin the postwar era with the assistance of some of those associated with the worst crimes of the war.” And yet history now shows us that that is exactly what the American government did—and continued to do throughout the Cold War.
— Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Ch. 23)
It is a matter of public record that the American military and our so-called “intelligence” agencies knowingly employed hundreds of men intimately involved in machinery of the Third Reich, many of whom were war criminals. Operation Paperclip was only one component of a much broader postwar salvage operation.
Alongside its bureaucracy ran Vatican ratlines and clandestine Masonic networks through which these personnel were protected, transported, and put back to work.
“A more perfect agent for the devising and execution of conspiracies against church or state could scarcely have been conceived.”
― Charles Francis Adams, Letters & Addresses on Freemasonry (1875)
One of the central figures of Operation Gladio and a key enabler of the Nazi exodus to the Americas was the infamous Freemason, Licio Gelli.
In addition to his Masonic credentials as the Grand Master of the Propaganda Due (P2) Lodge, Gelli was a Blackshirt, an SS liason, an Allied counterintel asset, a Vatican intermediary, a confidant of Argentinian dictator Juan Perón, and a Knight of Malta. To understand how such a figure acquired so much influence, we must first examine Operation Gladio. Gladio was the name eventually applied to the clandestine “stay-behind” armies established throughout Western Europe during and after the Second World War. Their ostensible purpose was to organize resistance in the event of a Soviet invasion of Europe (an even more dubious prospect in hindsight.) Military officers and civilian recruits were trained to conduct sabotage, assassinations, and guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines. A fuller treatment of this decades-long operation is outside the scope of this essay, but its impact and the relationships created through it persist into the present day, even now shaping geopolitics.
Gladio units were assembled from former fascists, military intelligence officers, Catholic priests, mafiosos, and veterans of the defeated Axis armies. Funded and trained by American and British intelligence, protected from domestic scrutiny, Italy soon became the center of this operation. According to Catholic researcher Paul L. Williams, by 1955, a parallel network known as Catholic Gladio had been established under the supervision of Cardinal Giuseppe Siri and the Italian Episcopal Conference. The CIA provided tens of millions of dollars each year for covert operations in Italy. The Vatican Bank washed and distributed these funds to organizations which enjoyed papal approval.
Though the Catholic Church publicly maintains its ancient condemnation of Freemasonry, the Gladio network required secure meeting places, secrecy, and a chain of command. Masonry supplied all of the above (emphasis mine):
To protect the clandestine nature of Catholic Gladio and the other stay-behind units, meetings of the anti-Communist forces were conducted in Masonic lodges. Eventually, several “stay-behind” units in Italy evolved into covert Masonic organizations. One such unit became known as Propaganda Due, or P2. …
The revitalization of the lodge as Propaganda Due, or P2, met with the full approval of Allen Dulles, the CIA director and a thirty-third degree Mason, who realized that the split in the Italian Socialist Party, resulting in the creation of the Italian Social Democratic Party, was “entirely provoked by Freemasons in the United States and Italy” through orchestrated infiltration. The anti-Communist animus within the Grand Orient of Italy (the organization that governed the lodges) pulled Italian Freemasonry to the right. In the 1950s the lodges were able to provide ex-fascists with democratic cover and also gave them contacts in the American Masons who were ready to raise funds to address the Red Menace. Giordano Gamberini, the Grand Master of Italian Masons and a CIA operative, became known as the “traveling salesman of anti-Communism.” …
This transformation crystallized with the pope’s embrace of Licio Gelli — an avowed atheist and the Grand Master of P2 — who became a Knight of Malta, one of the favored sons of Holy Mother Church.
— Paul L. Williams, Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia (Ch. 5)
P2 originated with Propaganda Massonica, a lodge founded by members of the Italian nobility in Turin in 1877. (Italian Masonry and its foundational role in modern Italian history is discussed further in Crafting a Cartel, Part I.) As Gladio grew, so too did the Masonic influence within the Catholic Church.
In 1943, Gelli avoided incarceration by volunteering his services to the American Army. Williams describes this transitional period where Gelli worked with some of the titans of the American deep state (emphasis mine):
Upon his return to Italy, [Gelli] became the key liaison officer to the elite SS Division under Field Marshall Hermann Göring. During the Allied occupation in 1943, he escaped incarceration by volunteering to serve with the Counter Intelligence Corps of the Fifth Army. In this capacity, he worked in close contact with William Colby, the OSS agent in France, and Allen Dulles, the OSS director, in the establishment of the Office of Reserve Affairs. This shadowy agency, located on Rome’s Via Sicilia, was manned by a secret force of the carabinieri (the Italian national police) under the command of Federico Umberto D’Amato, a former member of Decima MAS. …
Through Colby, a devout Roman Catholic, Gelli gained entry to the Vatican, where he united with Fr. Krunoslav Draganović, a Franciscan monk and member of the Ustashi (a Croatian fascist group during World War II), to set up the ratlines by which war criminals, including members of the Nazi High Command, could escape to South America and other havens of refuge. Many of the escapees were issued Vatican passports and traveled to their new hiding places in clerical garb.
— Paul L. Williams, Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia (Ch. 5)
By the time Gelli assumed control, P2 included the commanders of the Italian armed forces, the heads of the country’s intelligence services, generals, admirals, magistrates, financiers, newspaper editors, television executives, cabinet ministers, police chiefs, and leading Italian businessmen. Its international branches extended throughout the Americas and Europe to Argentina, Venezuela, Paraguay, Bolivia, France, Portugal, Nicaragua, West Germany, England, and the United States.
When the Italian police raided Gelli’s properties in March of 1981, they discovered a list containing nearly a thousand P2 members, along with hundreds of surveillance files concerning prominent Italian officials and classified government reports. The list included politicians such as future prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. (That Berlusconi was involved in similar blackmail-style parties as Epstein is a coincidence not lost on this author.)
The Lodge had become a parallel state operating inside the visible one.
— Licio Gelli, Grand Master of the P2 Lodge and Knight of Malta, adorned in Masonic regalia.
“Official policy would follow, one version for the public and another for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A headless monster called Operation Paperclip would emerge.”
— Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Ch. 5)
Paperclip provided the official bureaucracy through which these scientists and technicians could be brought into American military research. At the same time that Jack Parsons’s very public occult beliefs and personal associations were making him a liability to the establishment, men with far darker records were being protected and placed back into positions of influence (emphasis mine):
By the early 1950s, [Argentina] was swarming with Nazi criminals, including Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer responsible for carrying out “the final solution to the Jewish problem.” The situation caused US Ambassador Spruille Braden to say, “There is no country in the world where the Nazis find themselves in such a strong position as Argentina.” Thanks in part to Gelli, over sixteen hundred Nazi scientists and their dependents made their way to the United States to inaugurate the space age. Many of these Nazis ended up working as aircraft designers and engineers at the Glenn L. Martin Company (later the Lockheed Martin Corporation) and Republic Aviation.
— Paul L. Williams, Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia (Ch. 5)
American officials knowingly recruited members of the Nazi Party then altered or suppressed records which might have prevented their employment. Wernher von Braun was transformed into the smiling prophet of the space age while Kurt Debus, formerly a member of the Nazi Party and the SA, became the first director of NASA’s Launch Operations Center.
German Fascism had subordinated science and industry to a centralized system of production while granting extraordinary authority to the “experts.” The American technocracy retained much of this machinery, but replaced the language of race and national destiny: Hitlerism was not defeated so much as rebranded for international consumption.
Silicon Valley became one of the principal laboratories of the postwar military technocracy. Despite the voluminous amounts of propaganda painting the Valley as a beacon of self-reliance and ingenuity, CORE Magazine, a publication of the Computer History Museum, credits the military and intelligence agencies with having “primed the pump” for the Valley’s development:
For 20 years, Stanford University students knew Fred Terman as a kindly professor who helped William Hewlett and David Packard start a company, Hewlett-Packard. Fewer people knew Terman as the ultimate Cold War warrior. He was, in fact, the father of electronic warfare and electronic and signals intelligence and a leader in partnering with the NSA and CIA to transform Stanford into an integral part of the U.S. intelligence community.
He also happened to invent the culture of entrepreneurship at Stanford and Silicon Valley.
— The Secret History of Silicon Valley, CORE Magazine (2009)
Peter Thiel, a man with his own odd fascination with the Antichrist, emerges from this same milieu. Thiel spent part of his childhood in Swakopmund, an apartheid-era German enclave which maintained a public nostalgia for the Third Reich decades after its collapse. As we have discussed previously, Thiel eventually returned to California, attended Stanford, and built Palantir with early assistance from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture-capital arm.
— “Hermann Oberth (forefront) with officials of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Huntsville, Alabama in 1956. Left to right around Oberth: Ernst Stuhlinger (seated), Major General Holger Toftoy, Commanding Officer responsible for "Project Paperclip", Wernher von Braun, Director, Development Operations Division, Robert Lusser, a Project Paperclip engineer.” Source: Wikipedia.
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Long before Palantir, another institution of German origin had embedded itself within the scientific circles of Southern California:
The Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) was founded before World War I in Germany by a group of Freemasons who shared an interest in Theosophy, Occultism, and Rosicrucianism. The leader of this group, Theodor Reuss (1855–1923), envisioned the OTO as a sort of masonic academy that would unite a wide range of masonic high-degree systems into one order. Reuss claimed that the true secret of Freemasonry had been lost, but that it would be restored through the formation of the OTO, which possessed the “key” to Freemasonry, namely, sex magic. The open claim to possess the secrets of sexual magic, in combination with the fact that the OTO admitted both men and women, set it apart from other forms of Freemasonry, including those of a more esoteric bent. In 1912, Aleister Crowley — who was already established as an esoteric teacher and leader of an occult organization, the A∴ A∴ — was appointed by Reuss as the head of the British section of the OTO. The teachings of sexual magic were congenial with Crowley’s own occult/religious system of Thelema, of which he saw himself as the prophet.
— Dr. Henrik Bogdan, The Babalon Working 1946: L. Ron Hubbard, John Whiteside Parsons, and the Practice of Enochian Magic
Parsons and his wife Helen were initiated into the Agape Lodge in 1941. The following year he moved its operations into his new mansion at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue, where occultists, artists, science-fiction writers, explosives experts, and military researchers lived beneath the same roof. By 1943, Crowley had appointed Parsons head of the lodge. The man developing rocket propellants for the American military had become the dominant figure within Crowley’s principal American coven.
Historian Richard B. Spence writes of the period following the war during which Crowley sought reentrance into America (emphasis mine):
Had Crowley made it to America, the intention of McMurtry and friends was, as noted, to settle him in California. This brings us back to the Agape Lodge, which had been formed in the early 1930s by Crowley’s acolyte, Wilfred T. Smith. By the early 1940s, the dominant figure in the Lodge was the man who had initiated McMurtry, a Cal Tech rocket scientist, explosives expert, and student of the occult, John Whiteside “Jack” Parsons. To no surprise, suspicions of espionage attached to Parsons as well.
— Richard B. Spence, Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult (Epilogue)
The FBI found no evidence that Parsons was a foreign agent, although his Leftist politics and open occultism made him an obvious target for investigation.
In 1945, as his scientific career first began to unravel, a former naval intelligence officer and science-fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard entered Parsons’s Orange Grove mansion. The future founder of Scientology would become Parsons’ magical partner, acting as seer and scribe during a series of Enochian and sexual-magickal rituals beginning in January of 1946. Their stated objective was to summon the Scarlet Woman who would assist Parsons in producing a Thelemic messiah, an Antichrist to usher in the Æon of Horus.
That operation would become known as the Babalon Working.
Concluded in Part II …
— Dark Side I, digital art, 2026.
“3 So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.
4 And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication:
5 And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon The Great, The Mother Of Harlots And Abominations Of The Earth.”
— Apocalypsis 17:3–5 (KJV)
Get Scipio’s latest book, The Empire of Lies: the American Empire unmasked.
Hit the Tip Jar and help spread the message!
This post contains affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission or affiliate fee for purchases made through these links.
Meet Scipio & get practical tools for wellness and preparedness at the Sovereign Health Summit — save 5% with promo code SCIPIO.
Unlock the mysteries of Biblical cosmology and enrich your faith with some of the top rated Christian reads at BooksOnline.club.
Click the image below and be sure to use promo code SCIPIO for 10% off your order at HeavensHarvest.com: your one stop shop for emergency food, heirloom seeds and survival supplies.
Further Research
Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons – A Portrait of the JPL Founder: Genius, Rocketry, and the Occult by George Pendle
Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons by John Carter & Robert Anton Wilson
Aleister Crowley in America: Art, Espionage, and Sex Magick in the New World by Tobias Churton
Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult by Richard B. Spence
Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia by Paul L. Williams
some people believe that this motley crew opened up an inter dimensional portal on Pasadena’s Millionaire’s Row.
So interesting, Scipio, thanks for this! Having known some (insignificant) players in the Scientology, etc., saga in California, your excellent compilation puts everything into perspective.