This is a very long article so I snipped pertinent parts out.

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Born 100 years ago, Jack Parsons seemed devoted to reconciling opposites, smashing together the technical and the spiritual.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the world leader in space exploration. JPL scientists have put robots on Mars, sent probes into interstellar space, and collected dust from the tails of comets. But what if the real purpose behind its mission was something darker?

What if the lab was less interested in exploring outer space than the depths of the void? What if its researchers huddled around their computer screens in search of paranormal entities or dark gods crawling clear of the event horizons of nearby black holes?

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"Slain Scientist Priest in Black Magic Cult" read one headline after the death of John Whiteside Parsons on June 17, 1952.

"John W Parsons, handsome 37 year old rocket scientist killed Tuesday in a chemical explosion, was one of the founders of a weird semi-religious cult that flourished here about 10 years ago," read a report.

The rhetoric got more lavish as the days went by.

"Often an enigma to his friends [he] actually led two lives….In one he probed deep into the scientific fields of speed and sound and stratosphere—and in another he sought the cosmos which man has strived throughout the ages to attain; to weld science and philosophy and religion into a Utopian existence," wrote one paper.

Soon the newspapers were at fever pitch with talk of "sexual perversion," "black robes," "sacred fire," and "intellectual necromancy." At the heart of every story was one simple question: Who the hell was this guy?

It's hard to find as weird and tragic a tale in the annals of science as that of John Whiteside Parsons. Born 100 years ago, Parsons seemed devoted to reconciling opposites, smashing together the technical and the spiritual, the white lab coat and the black robe, fact and fiction, science and magic.

When he died in a mysterious explosion at his home laboratory, the tabloids weren't the only ones to label him a mad scientist. So too did the scientific establishment. The story of Parsons was locked in the attic, hidden in the footnotes, swept under the launchpad of the US space program.

But Parsons' scientific legacy is impossible to ignore. He forced the United States government to explore a science ​it had previously mocked, and laid the foundation for the rockets that carried man into outer space. He was one of America's greatest space pioneers. He just happened to also be one of its greatest occultists.

Parsons made this fact even clearer when he started to develop a growing interest in magic and the supernatural. By the late 1930s, he had begun frequenting nightly meetings of the Ordo Templi Orientis, an occult society that met in nearby Los Angeles. The OTO, as it is known, was created by the English occultist Aleister Crowley, a heroin-addicted, sexually adventuresome, God-profaning master of the dark arts, who the tabloids had christened "The Wickedest Man in the World."

At these gatherings Parsons watched as strange rituals were performed, most notably the 'Gnostic Mass', a weird take on the Catholic mass. On a black and white stage stood an altar embossed with hieroglyphic patterns, a host of candles and an upright coffin covered with a gauze curtain out of which the group's caped leader would appear. Poetry was read, swords were drawn, breasts kissed, and lances stroked. It was a highly charged sexual atmosphere. Wine was drunk and cakes made out of blood were consumed.

It was here that Crowley's philosophy of Thelema was propounded. Thelema was a type of religious libertarianism that spoke of radical individualism and self-fulfillment. Its creed was "Do What Thou Wilt." Parsons was immediately hooked. He became especially intrigued by Crowley's belief that sex could be an intrinsic component of magical rituals, lifting the practitioner onto a higher plane of consciousness. What 24-year-old wouldn't be?

While some of his Suicide Squad colleagues saw Parsons' incipient occultism as kooky—communism was the preferred diversion of most Caltech students in the 1930s, according to period stories from school newspaper The California Tech—it did not prevent them from recognizing his genius at manufacturing rocket fuels. At the group's testing ground Parsons could be heard chanting Crowley's pagan 'Hymn to Pan' prior to igniting his rockets. And the scorching flames and frequent explosions added a suitably infernal backdrop to his interests in the supernatural.

In 1941, Parsons and the Suicide Squad founded the Aerojet Engineering Corporation to sell their rockets to the military. Scientists who had previously derided Parsons' work now queued up to join this boom industry. In 1943, with the need for advanced research into rockets growing exponentially, Parsons co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to continue the study of his one-time backyard playthings. At the same time as he was reaching his professional peak, he also found himself moving up the ranks of the OTO, corresponding with the aged Crowley in England, and eventually becoming the group's leader on the West Coast.

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But for Parsons it didn't seem strange at all. He treated magic and rocketry as different sides of the same coin—both had been disparaged, both derided as impossible, but because of this both presented themselves as challenges to be conquered.

Rocketry postulated that we should no longer see ourselves as creatures chained to the Earth, but as beings capable of exploring the universe. Similarly, magic suggested there were unseen metaphysical worlds that existed and could be explored with the right knowledge. Both were rebellions against the very limits of human existence; in striving for one he could not help but strive for the other.

Three years before his death he wrote of his unusual position in terms that would have astounded any of his backers in the US military, but which for him seemed totally sane.
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"It has seemed to me that if I had the genius to found the jet propulsion field in the US, and found a multimillion dollar corporation and a world renowned research laboratory, then I should also be able to apply this genius in the magical field," he wrote in a letter to a fellow OTO member. He was shooting for the Moon.

With the money he had earned from Aerojet's booming rocketry business, Parsons bought a mansion on Pasadena's Millionaire's Row and moved the OTO's operations into it. "It was a huge wooden house," remembered Liljan Wunderman, Frank Malina's wife, in an interview years later. "A big, big thing, full of people. Some of them had masks on, some had costumes on, women were weirdly dressed. It was like walking into a Fellini movie. Women were walking around in diaphanous togas and weird make-up, some dressed up like animals, like a costume party."

A young Ray Bradbury, still years from writing Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, recalled Parsons as being "wonderful" and dazzled him with his descriptions of space rockets. Sprague de Camp, author of over a hundred fantasy and sci-fi books, declared him, "an authentic mad genius if ever I met one."

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In 1943 Parsons was gently squeezed out of the very science he had created. He was offered $20,000 for his shares in Aerojet and, feeling the cold shoulder from the increasing number of scientists involved in rocketry, decided to leave. He was 30 years old.

He threw himself into his magic—not just Crowley's magic, but strange new rituals of his own creation. Ever the scientist, he strived for physical proof that his magic was working by straining to obtain visitations, phenomena, and manifestations.

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His fortunes were not helped by the arrival at his house of a hugely charismatic young science fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard was a teller of exceptional tall tales, which he insisted his audience believe. His fellow sci-fi writers viewed him with suspicion.

"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," recalled Jack Williamson. "Not much." But Parsons, who was always more than willing to believe, fell under his spell.

They fenced together, discussed magic together, and even performed magical rituals together. Hubbard moved into Parsons' mansion and, taking to the air of free love like a fish to water, worked his way through the denizens' girlfriends, wooing them and wowing them in equal measure. Whether you were an OTO member or a sci-fi writer, no wife or girlfriend was safe from Hubbard's seductive pull. Not even Parsons'.

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But Hubbard made up for it by helping Parsons on the grandest magical working he had yet attempted. This was ​known as the Babalon Working, an attempt by Parsons to incarnate an actual goddess on Earth. For weeks the two of them engaged in ritual chanting, drawing occult symbols in the air with swords, dripping animal blood on runes, and masturbating in order to 'impregnate' magical tablets.

When news got to Crowley in England he was appalled. On May 22, 1946, he wrote a telegram to one of the OTO's other members: "Suspect Ron playing confidence trick—Jack Parsons weak fool—obvious victim prowling swindlers."
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At the end of it Parsons believed the magical working had been a success, declaring it the greatest achievement of his life. But Crowley was right about Hubbard. In a July 1946 letter to Crowley, Parsons wrote that, under the guise of investing in a business venture, Hubbard had run off with Parsons's girlfriend and $20,000 of his money, sending Parsons into a spiral of doubt and depression.

He managed to obtain some consulting work on rockets, but was swept up in in the Red Scare of the post-war years. He was accused of consorting with communists in the pre-war years and of being involved in what the FBI termed was a "love-cult." He had his security clearance stripped from him. He was forced to pump gas, fix cars, and eventually ended up using his incredible scientific knowledge to make explosive squibs for Hollywood movies. Throughout it all he was insistent that his magical works were as real as his rocketry work.

On June 17, 1952, a huge explosion ripped through his home laboratory. Arriving police found Parsons still alive, although half his face had been ripped off, exposing the skull beneath. His right arm was missing. Surrounding him were rocketry papers and pentagrams, occult drawings and chemical formulae. He died shortly afterwards. He was just 37 years old.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vvbxgm/the-last-of-the-magicians