Transhumanism: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Livingstone David

Author:Livingstone, David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2015-09-02T07:00:00+00:00

The Church of Satan

Agape Lodge

As Michael Rossman wrote in The Wedding Within the War, his memoir of the 1960s, it seemed that the energy unleashed at Berkeley was beginning to turn, not right or left, “but into… something else, without a name.”[695] Behind the hippies’ seemingly benign calls for “peace & love” lurked the dark influences of the occult. An excellent online article by David McGowan, titled “Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation,” has shown the bands who signaled the birth of the folk rock phenomenon were all associated with a network of groups located in Laurel Canyon, involved in occult activities, all with ties to military intelligence, Aleister Crowley’s OTO, Charles Manson’s “Family” and the Church of Satan.

Charles Stansfeld Jones, or Frater Achad by his occult name, started a lodge of the OTO in Vancouver. Crowley considered Jones his “magical son” and the “one” prophesied in the Book of the Law, and Theodor Reuss made Jones Grand Master (X°) for North America. Jones’ initiate W.T. Smith and his wife Jane Wolfe founded an incorporated Church of Thelema,which gave weekly public performances of the Gnostic Mass from their home in Hollywood. Notable attendees of the church included Hollywood actor John Carradine, and Jack Parsons, the creator of solid rocket propellant fuel, who went on to become one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Houston and the Aerojet Corporation. Prior to the World War II, Parsons had been in contact with Wernher von Braun, the central figure in the Nazis’ rocket development program, responsible for the design and realization of the V-2 combat rocket, after which he was hired through Operation Paperclip to head NASA’s space program. Von Braun, who was nicknamed “The Father of Rocket Science,” once argued that Parsons was more deserving of the name.[696]

W.T. Smith started his own group, Agape Lodge, in California in the 1930s. Smith wrote to Crowley claiming that Parsons was “a really excellent man… He has an excellent mind and much better intellect than myself… JP is going to be very valuable.”[697] Wolfe wrote to German OTO representative Karl Germer that Parsons was “an A1 man… Crowleyesque in attainment as a matter of fact,” and proposed Parsons as a potential successor to Crowley himself as Outer Head of the Order.[698] Crowley concurred with such assessments, informing Smith that Parsons “is the most valued member of the whole Order, with no exception!”[699] At Crowley’s bidding, Parsons replaced Smith as the leader in 1942 and ran the Lodge from his mansion on Orange Grove Avenue, Pasadena.

The Agape Lodge soon came under investigation by both the Pasadena Police Department and the FBI. Both had received allegations of a “black magic cult” involved in sexual orgies. One complainant, a sixteen-year-old boy, claimed that he was raped by lodge members. Neighbors also reported a ritual involving a naked pregnant woman jumping through fire. After Parsons explained that the Lodge was simply “an organization

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