The story of Jack Parsons--the Southern California rocket scientist-cum-sex magician who co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and did Thelemic rituals with L. Ron Hubbard--features a charismatic blend of sex, sorcery, technology and death. The tale haunts a dark crossroads of the SoCal mindscape, scrawling a prophetic glyph in the wet pavement of postwar America. In this essay, I explore an unremarked aspect of Parsons’ life and thought, what I will call his magickal feminism. In his 1946 text "Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword," Parsons issued a call for women to take up the spiritual, sexual, and political sword—a libertarian cry for female autonomy that also eerily anticipated the militant witchcraft that would finnd historical expression in California over twenty years later.
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