Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

night. He believed, passionately, in the power of black magic, the existence of Satan, demons and
evil spirits, and the efficacy of spells to deal with his enemies.[2]
While still a student at the University of Southern California, he had become interested in the
writings of Aleister Crowley, the English sorcerer and Satanist known as 'The Beast 666', whose
dabblings in black magic had also earned him the title 'The Wickedest Man In The World'.
Crowley's The Book of the Law expounded a doctrine enshrined in a single sentence - 'Do what
thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law' - and Parsons was intrigued by the heady concept of a
creed that encouraged indulgence in forbidden pleasures.
In 1939, Parsons and his young wife, Helen, joined the OTO, Ordo Templi Orientis, an international
organization founded by Crowley to practise sexual magic.[3] A lodge had been set up in Los
Angeles and met in a suitably sequestered attic. Meetings were conducted by a priestess swathed
in diaphanous gauze, who climbed out of a coffin to perform mystic, and painstakingly
blasphemous, rites.[4] Parsons quickly rose to prominence in the OTO and by the early '40s he had
begun a regular correspondence with Crowley, always addressing him as 'Most Beloved Father'
and signing his letters 'Thy son, John'.
When Parson's father died, his son inherited a rambling mansion and adjoining coach-house on
South Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena. South Orange Grove was where the best people lived in
Pasadena in the '20s and '30s, and although its discreet gentility was fading by the end of the war,
most of the large houses in the area were still in single occupancy, the paintwork had yet to peel
and the lawns were regularly watered and manicured.
The residents of South Orange Grove Avenue did not welcome the arrival of young Jack Parsons,
for the elegant three-storey family mansion, shaded by huge palms and flowering magnolias and
set in its own grounds, was rapidly transformed, under his ownership, into a rooming-house of
dubious repute - the only way he could afford to keep the house was by renting rooms. This
mightnot have caused too much upset in the neighbourhood, except that when he advertized for
tenants in the local newspaper, he specified that only atheists and those of a Bohemian
disposition need apply. Thus were the myriad rooms at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue
occupied by an exotic, argumentative and peripatetic assortment of itinerants and ne'er-do-wells -
out-of-work actors and writers, anarchists and artists, musicians and dancers, all kinds of
questionable characters and their equally questionable friends of both sexes. Noisy parties
continued for days on end, guests slept on the floor when they could not find a bed and sometimes
they simply forgot to leave.
Understandably the neighbours were outraged, although they would undoubtedly have been even
more alarmed had they known that the house was also destined to become the headquarters of a
black magic group which practised deviant sexual rites. Parsons converted two large rooms into a
private apartment for himself and a temple for the OTO lodge. In his bedroom, the biggest room in
the house, there was an altar flanked by pyramidal pillars and hung with occult symbols. The other
room was a wood-panelled library lined with books devoted to the occult and dominated by a huge
signed portrait of Crowley hanging over the fireplace.
No one was allowed into these two rooms unless specifically invited by Parsons; when members
of the OTO turned up for a meeting, the doors remained firmly closed. Other residents sometimes
glimpsed Parsons or one of his followers moving about the house in black robes, but no one really
knew what went on in the 'temple'[5] On one occasion, two smirking policemen arrived at the front
door to investigate a complaint that the house was being used for black magic orgies. They had
been told, they said, something about a ceremony requiring a naked pregnant woman to leap nine