Going to the Moon with Magic

Jack Parsons, the rocket pioneer, is a fascinating character. He played a major role in developing America’s rocket program, ultimately helping humanity reach the moon. He was a no-nonsense engineer and chemist. But then…he was also a total weirdo. As a convert to Aleister Crowley’s religion Thelema, he was deeply into things like occult ceremonies, sex magic orgies, casting spells, and invoking the goddess Babalon to visit Earth.

For a long time, I’ve had conflicting views rattling in my brain about this.

• View 1: Magic is lame, primitive, and embarrassing to take seriously.

• View 2: Jack Parsons is a fascinating figure and his attachment to Thelema only adds to his allure.

The same holds true for a number of other larger-than-life champions of industry, including Steve Jobs, who, till the day he died, was fascinated by spiritual gurus and Eastern mysticism.

• View 1: Overly obsessing over Eastern mysticism is cringe, particularly if you’re a California hippy like Jobs.

• View 2: Jobs is a genius and his unironic fascination with meditation and spirituality only adds to his image as the iconic tech titan.

Somewhat subconsciously, I’ve always kept an eye on the topic of magic—without ever doing much direct research into it—in hopes of one day understanding how magic could be taken seriously by ultra-accomplished, worldly people like Parsons and Jobs. I never really expected to resolve the View 1 vs. View 2 tension, but…

I may finally have something. I was recently listening to Katherine Dee’s podcast The Computer Room. On the episode “Demons of TikTok,” her guest, Chaweon Koo, presented an explanation for magic that actually made sense to me. It may not fully account for the experiences of Parsons and Jobs, but it’s relevant for resolving the tension I’ve described.

Koo, notably, is an atheist and a materialist. Despite her magical practices, she doesn’t believe anything supernatural. So what does she believe?

In brief, she believes that practicing magic—casting spells! performing rituals!—is like watching a movie. When you’re engaged in the activity, you withhold judgement, suspend disbelief. Just as you might buy into the goofiest movie premise—e.g. a guy is bitten by a spider and gains fantastic powers to become Spider Man—so too she will buy into the wildest promises of magic while performing some ritual.

It's through this process that real-world learning can happen. When you step out of a movie theater or set down a finished novel, you feel something. You just had an experience. You took something away. Some new way or looking at the world, or at life. Perhaps you gained a new sense of optimism or a new sense of possibility. Maybe you felt the confidence of playing the hero in an epic battle against a seemingly omnipotent adversary. And you think, “Maybe I can hang onto a little bit of that confidence when I go into work tomorrow and give that presentation.” Or, if you’re Jack Parsons, maybe you think, “That’s the kind of confidence I need to further my vision of taking humanity into fucking space.”

When viewed from this perspective, there’s really only one main difference between practicing magic and watching a movie: while watching a movie is passive, practicing magic is active. It’s like playing a leading role in a stage play. This, undoubtedly, is what makes it seem excruciatingly cringe-worthy to me (pretending to be an actor with no stage set up and no cameras rolling is…come on…pretty cringy). But it’s also, undoubtedly, what makes it so potent, in terms of taking lessons away from the experience.

Jack Parsons and Steve Jobs were both complex characters with—for all I know—any number of anti-materialist beliefs. But I’ve got to think that this characterization of magic is partly what drew them to seeking out magical/spiritual experiences.

Beyond Parsons and Jobs, I keep thinking about all the artists who are drawn to mysticism. Alejandro Jodorowsky, for example, was big-time into spiritual goofiness. And his films, as a result, gush with a sense of profundity. Arguably, to make art seriously, like Jodorowsky, you’ve got to be some kind of a mystic, channeling things that don’t really exist, but which you feel to exist nonetheless.

In his book Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy, Jodorowsky writes: “One does not go to the theater to escape from himself, but to reestablish contact with the mystery that we all are.”

No doubt Chaweon Koo would say the same about performing magic rituals. You do magic to reestablish contact with the mystery that we all are. And if you’re Jack Parsons, you channel that mystery into a rocket fuel to quite literally take us to the stars.