I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net

autobiographical sketch Analysis By A Master Of The Temple as a
"dangerous attachment" to his mother. In that same document, Parsons
perceptively notes that his "invocation of Babalon served to exteriorize the
Oedipus complex." (Sensation seeking biographers have since twisted this
aspect of the magician's psychosexual constitution to justify their unfounded
accusations of actual physical incest between Parsons and his mother, a
charge for which no supporting evidence exists.)
His search for a paternal figure, aggravated by his own father's early
abandonment of him, is made abundantly clear in the blind filial reverence he
showed to his magical mentors Wilfred Smith and Aleister Crowley, from
whom he eventually broke to forge his own way. All sex magicians of the
sinister current, to fully understand their relations with their sex partners and
with the esoteric forces of masculinity and femininity, should carefully
analyze the often hidden psychological dynamics of parental influence,
which so decisively shape one's ideas of male and female. Parsons' exacting
sexual self-analysis provides a useful prototype for this aspect of the lefthand
path adept's ongoing process of erotic understanding.
Many of those we interviewed verified Parsons's own analysis of
himself as one given to "romanticism, self-deception and reliance on others";
these traits manifested themselves disastrously in the appallingly bad
character judgment he demonstrated repeatedly in his brief life. From some
second-hand accounts, one would get the impression that Parsons' scientific
prowess made him into a magical Einstein. But it must also be said that some
of his scientific peers viewed him as a bright but self-educated pyromaniac
with no college education, an undisciplined idiot savant who got a reckless
kick out of danger and blowing things up. The phrase "mad scientist" came
easily to the lips of those who described their first-hand impressions of
Parsons to us. He had a capacity for hare-brained schemes that led him to flirt
with selling American aerospace secrets to foreign powers – this amateur
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espionage, along with his strident liberalism, brought him to the attention of
the FBI during the paranoid days of the cold war Red scare. Parsons, like
many magicians, was very much a man on the outside looking in; his
voyeuristic tendency to live through the lives of others is expressed in his
habit of collecting odd and colorful characters to examine. If the straight
arrow aerospace scientists he worked with considered him to be something of
a flake, the occult bohemians of the Hollywood and Pasadena O.T.O. were
impressed that he held down a real job with government security clearance.
Moving between two such disparate worlds, Parsons was an enigma to both
milieus.
With one foot firmly placed in the rigors of the scientific method,
Parsons had in many ways a more realistic and practical mind than the
average occultist, who is so often lost in sheer subjective fantasy. But a
passion for pulp science fiction and fantasy novels and the then-new fad
folklore of UFOs often led him into utopian flights of fancy. This capricious
tendency in Parsons was noted by Crowley in a letter to his student Jane
Wolfe: "Jack's trouble is his weakness, and his romantic side – the poet – is
at present a hindrance. He gets a kick from some magazine trash, or an
`occult' novel (if only he knew how they were concocted!) and dashes off in
wild pursuit." (Crowley knew well of what he spoke, having authored several
hastily composed occult novels of his own.) And yet Parsons must be
counted as a genuine visionary in at least one respect; even in the 1930s, he
earnestly believed that manned flight to the moon was possible.
Parsons' last years have often been described as a period of
encroaching madness. His decision to legally change his name to Belarion
Armiluss Al Dajjal Antichrist in 1948, upon taking the oath of a Magister
Templi, has been cited as the obvious act of a lunatic. One of the last letters
he ever wrote, in 1952, to his Thelemic colleague, Karl Germer, certainly