Chemical Wedding

Jack Parsons was a brilliant chemist and inventor of the rocket fuel used for the US space flight to the moon. He was also a fanatical believer in the Magic of Aleister Crowley the aging occultist who considered himself 'The Beast' incarnate. In 1947 Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard were performing Crowley's mystic rituals in a house in Pasadena, California. Parsons wrote excitedly to his occult leader, Crowley. 'I have had the most devastating experience of my life. I have been in direct touch with One who is most Holy and Beautiful as mentioned in your 'Book of the Law'. First instructions were received through Lafayette Ron Hubbard the seer. I have followed them to the letter. There was a desire for incarnation. I am to act as an instructor, guardian, guide for nine months; then it will be loosed on the world...'

Crowley wrote despairingly to a disciple about Parsons: It appears that he has given away both his girl and his money to this writer of science fiction and is now invoking the ritual to produce a MOONCHILD. I am fairly frantic...' Nine months later while being visited by two students from Cambridge, Crowley died of cardiac degeneration. Missing from his personal possessions was his pocket-watch.

His funeral took place in the Chapel of the Brighton Crematorium. The final rites were performed by the novelist Louis Marlowe reading extracts from Crowley's 'Book of the Law'. The Brighton Echo denounced the whole ceremony as a Black Mass. In 1952 Jack Parsons was blown up in his laboratory in Pasadena.

L. Ron Hubbard died on his yacht as leader of the controversial Church of Scientology. But did the issue end with these three deaths? Would Crowley, as he claimed, ever return from death to rule the world? Why did US astronauts name a crater on the moon after Jack Parsons? Is L. Ron Hubbard really dead? What had been generated by the ceremony in California that seemed to signal Crowley's demise? And what happened to the missing pocket-watch?

Unanswered questions till, late in the twentieth century, when Dr. Joshua Mathers brought a 'state of the art' interactive suit from Cal Tech California to Cambridge in England to be hitched up to the Z93, the biggest super-cooled, super-conductive computer in the world.