By Andrew Laverdiere [Originally published on Economics for Human Beings]
While working out of the Lyndon LaRouche movement office in Los Angeles, I lived for a short time in Pasadena California, one of many places I lived in. A typical event was the gatherings at Mark Calney’s house in Altadena which were always a good time culminating in Mark giving a class on some subject he was working on. Spurred by this love of research, I started to look into some of the more unsavory aspects of Pasadena in addition to the various Franklin Roosevelt New Deal projects that are numerous in that area. Pasadena is most notably infamous for being a center of Eugenics research at the Human Betterment Foundation founded in 1928.
Another facinating topic I stumbled upon was the connection of satanism and the Devils Gate Dam near Jet Propulsion Labratory. Since the internet was very new, the only info I could find was an article in Penthouse magazine interviewing L. Ron Hubbards son and his admittance that L Ron was a practicing satanist. I spent my free time looking for the spot where Parsons and Hubbard used to perform rituals but that was cut short when the office closed, Mark Calney passed and I moved up to the Yosemite area. What follows is mostly random info that I came across on the internet and entries in the Occult Encyclopedia.
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“Devil’s Gate Dam was built in 1920, the oldest dam constructed by the Los Angeles County Flood Control District, to provide flood protection to the cities of Pasadena, South Pasadena, and Los Angeles.”
“The dam was built in the 1920s and named Devil’s Gate because of the rock formation’s resemblance to Satan. In the ‘40s, the area became a ritual magnet, attracting a group of occultists (led by L. Ron Hubbard and some early disciples of Aleister Crowley) who attempted to evoke an antichrist from within. The following decades brought reports of missing children in the area”
Devils Gate in the 1890’s
Devil’s Gate is so-named because of the natural rock feature at the site which resembles the Devil. The Tongva people were the earliest known inhabitants of the Pasadena area. They believed the location around Devil’s Gate Dam was highly spiritual and regarded it as a gateway between worlds. The Tongva thought the water passing over the rocks in the gorge mimicked the sound of a coyote spirit laughing and held the site as sacred, but also a place to be avoided due to the trickery of coyotes. A 1947 article in the Metropolitan Pasadena Star-News states that Devil’s Gate was named in 1858 by Judge B.S. Eaton because of “its resemblance to a point of that name on Sweetwater Creek.” Judge Eaton explained in a letter that he had seen the original point in 1850 when traveling along the old California trail with a team of oxen.
Early rocket-engine-testing began in the Arroyo Seco in 1936 and this led to the establishment of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) just north of Devil’s Gate Dam. During the 1950s, JPL was heavily involved in rocket testing, and the roar of rocket engines could be heard from the Arroyo Seco area for miles.
Occult activities
In the 1930s, possibly at the behest of Aleister Crowley, who believed the Devil’s Gate Dam was one of the seven portals to hell, physicist and occultist Jack Parsons began practicing ritual magic at the site. His early rituals were intended to invoke the nature god Pan, but he also performed experimental ritual evocations with L. Ron Hubbard.
It is thought that Parsons selected the site to build the Joint Propulsion Laboratory due to its proximity to the Devil’s Gate.
Occultist Travis McHenry used the dam site as a primary location for his unfinished horror film Cult of Cthulhu in 2016.
Biography
Born in Los Angeles, Parsons was raised by a wealthy family on Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena. Inspired by science fiction literature, he developed an interest in rocketry in his childhood and in 1928 began amateur rocket experiments with school friend Edward S. Forman.
He dropped out of Pasadena Junior College and Stanford University due to financial difficulties during the Great Depression, and in 1934 he united with Forman and graduate Frank Malina to form the Caltech-affiliated Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT) Rocket Research Group, supported by GALCIT chairman Theodore von Kármán. In 1939 the GALCIT Group gained funding from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to work on Jet-Assisted Take Off (JATO) for the U.S. military. After the U.S. entered World War II, they founded Aerojet in 1942 to develop and sell JATO technology; the GALCIT Group became JPL in 1943. The location of JPL, near the site of Devil’s Gate Dam in Pasadena, was supposedly selected by Parsons due to his belief that the location was a portal to Hell.
Following some brief involvement with Marxism in 1939, Parsons converted to Thelema, the new religious movement founded by the English occultist Aleister Crowley. Together with his first wife, Helen Northrup, Parsons joined the Agape Lodge, the Californian branch of the Thelemite Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) in 1941. At Crowley’s bidding, Parsons replaced Wilfred Talbot Smith as its leader in 1942 and ran the Lodge from his mansion on Orange Grove Boulevard. Parsons was expelled from JPL and Aerojet in 1944 owing to the Lodge’s infamous reputation and to his hazardous workplace conduct.
In 1945, Parsons separated from Helen, after having an affair with her sister Sara; when Sara left him for L. Ron Hubbard, Parsons conducted the Babalon Working, a series of rituals intended to invoke the Thelemic goddess Babalon on Earth. He and Hubbard continued the working with Marjorie Cameron, whom Parsons married in 1946. Parsons meanwhile had founded a company with Hubbard and Hubbard’s girlfriend Sara Northrup, Allied Enterprises, into which he invested his life savings. It became apparent that Hubbard was a confidence trickster, who tried to flee with Parsons’ money, resulting in the end of their friendship. After Hubbard and Sara defrauded him of his life savings, Parsons resigned from the O.T.O., then held various jobs while acting as a consultant for Israel’s rocket program. Amid McCarthyism, Parsons was accused of espionage and left unable to work in rocketry.
Death
In 1952 Parsons died at the age of 37 in a home laboratory explosion that attracted national media attention; the police ruled it an accident, but many associates suspected suicide or murder.
Writings
Parsons’s libertarian and occult writings were published posthumously. Historians of Western esoteric tradition cite him as one of the more prominent figures in propagating Thelema across North America. Although academic interest in his scientific career was negligible, historians have come to recognize Parsons’s contributions to rocket engineering. For these innovations, his advocacy of space exploration and human spaceflight, and his role in founding JPL and Aerojet, Parsons is regarded as among the most important figures in the history of the U.S. space program. He has been the subject of several biographies and fictionalized portrayals.