Table of Contents
A Marvel Walked Among Us
by Robert Anton Wilson
I seem to be living in a nation that simply does not know what freedom is.
John Whiteside Parsons
This book tells the life story of a very strange, very brilliant, very funny, very tormented man who had at least three major occupations (or v ocations); he also had no less than four names. He acted as scientist, as occultist, as political dissident and often as a simple damned eejit (just lik e you and me).
Scientists, a ware of his tr emendous contributions to space science , generally call him John Parsons, and theyve even named a crater on the moon after him. Those occultists who know of his work in their very specialized arts call him Jack P arsons, the name he himself pr eferred; in some magick lodges the y consider him second only to Aleister Cr owley as a pr ogenitor of the Ne w Aeon. His best-kno wn book, Freedom Is A Two-Edged Swor d, which incr easingly influences the libertarian and anarchist movements, gives his name as John Whiteside P arsons on the cover and title page. And, as the present biography documents, this odd bird actually had the legal name Marv el Whiteside Parsons imposed on him at birth.
Oh, well, if my parents had named me Marv el, I w ould have changed my name, too, perhaps as often as Parsons did.
For utmost scientific clarity about matter s usually left in m ystic murk or psychobabble, I shall use all four of Our Heros names: John Parsons for the scientist, John Whiteside P arsons for the libertarian philosopher, Jack P arsons for the occultist, and Marv el Parsons for the original template: an alienated and sometimes naiv e boy, a child of divorce, who tried to find and liberate what occultists call his True Self by creating the other three Parsonspersons and permitting them to fight brutal wars in the loneliness of his passionate br ain until all three became One. When endured helplessly by a truly fractured personality, w e gener ally call this civil w ar in the ps yche Multiple Personality Disor der: when deliber ately pur sued as a path of Illumination leading through Hell and Purgatory toward a vision (at least) of Paradise, we have no name for it in our curr ent culture but those few who, lik e Parsons, have taken the hermetic oath to Will and Dar e and Kno w and K eep Silence simply call it magick (pr onounced mage-ick, as in the Three Magi).
Marvel Parsons, born in 1914 in Los Angeles but r aised mostly in the nearb y to wn of P asadena, began life lik e all of us in what Tibetans call the V oid and the Chinese call wu-hsin (no mind). Gradually, out of the V oid, form emer ged. He made the distinction between Marv el and Ev erything Else; a glass w all then separ ated Marvel from Everything Else. He gradually identified various parts of Everything Else, as soon as he learned their names.
Fatherless, Marvel had a conserv ative middle class mother who loved him a bit too ar dently (she committed suicide within a fe w hours after his death, 17 June 1952). She also taught him to hate his absent father, a pr oven adulterer. (Horrors!) Developing an early interest in psychology, Marvel diagnosed himself as having a classic Oedipus complex, a compulsiv e antipathy to P atriarchy (he used the word before the Feminists made it trendy) and an equally intense loathing for an y and all A uthority s ymbols, especially God the Father.
But let us look at 19 14, the year of Parsons birth, more closely. Whatever you think of astrology, with its extraterrestrial bias, a secular horoscope limited to Earthly portents always provides amusing insights. The terrestrial world that shaped Marvel Parsons looked like this:
The First World War had started on July 28 that year; before 1914 ended the fir st aerial bombing of civilian populations occurr ed (Germany did it to F rance), and the bloody battles of the Marne , Tannerberg, Ghent and especially Ypres demonstrated that civilized modern humans could act even more inhumanely and insanely than any barbarians of the past.
Police arr ested the legendary labor her o Joe Hill in Utah on January 13 for a murder he almost certainly did not commit, and the State executed him the follo wing year. His last w ords, Dont w eep for me , bo ysorganize! became a mantr a to union member s for decades after.
In Colorado, John D. R ockefellers hired goons killed 2 1 people (including 11 children) in a clash with other labor radicals. Leftists protested outside R ockefellers New York office and got arr ested for it: a court order banned any other people with signs or banners from parading in fr ont of that sacr osanct shrine of the Almighty Dollar . Novelist Upton Sinclair appear ed the ne xt da y with a blank sign, telling reporters that free speech had died. Suffr agettes marched on Washington June 28, demanding equal rights for w omen.
In England, Dubliners, the fir st book b y an Irish author named James Jo yce, appear ed; and in America Edgar Rice Burr oughs brought forth Tarzan of The Apes . Musically, w e all acquir ed three major treasures, The Colonel Boge y Mar ch, Saint Louis Blues and 12th Str eet R ag. In film, D.W . Griffith s The Mother and the Law rawly showed the abuse of women by the Patriarchy.
Margaret Sanger intr oduced the term birth contr ol in The Woman Rebel and then fled to England to avoid imprisonment for the crime of publishing explicit details on contraception.
Charles T aze R ussell, founder of the Jeho vahs Witnesses , announced that the apocalypse w ould begin on October 2coincidentally or synchronistically, the very day Marvel Whiteside Parsons [who w ould later , as Jack Parsons, call himself the AntiChrist] emerged from his mother s womb, or from even darker places, and began to investigate and meddle with this planet.
Going back to England again: also in 19 14, Aleister Cr owley (rhymes with holy) and his curr ent mistr ess, violinist Leila Waddell, staged something called The Rites of Eleusis in Londonseveral nights of quasi-masonic ritual, music, poetry, ballet and drama. On the first night, the actors informed the audience, Nietzsche-fashion, that God is dead and mourned and grie ved over the departed deity: things became even stranger after that, like the bardos in the Tibetan Book of the Dead , and on the last night the audience received The Elixir of the Gods, a wine containing a high dosage of the ps ychedelic drug mescaline . While the y willynilly enter ed Chaos and the V oid a chorus announced the dawning of a New Aeon based on R abelais Law of ThelemaDo What Thou Wilt...
And Doublemint chewing gum appeared on the market, produced by William Wrigley...
All of this undeniably influenced Marv el as much as , or mor e than, an y distant star s or planets . The horr ors of W orld W ar imprinted him with a wounded perception of the dark side of human nature: some parts of Freedom Is A Two-Edged Sword sound as bitter as S wift or Twain at their most misanthr opic. Marvel also acquired a genuine sympathy for working people, and an awareness of the brute for ce behind Capitalism and Capitalist Go vernments never left him: although an ultr a-individualist himself. he had mor e than one Marxist friend (which got him virtually tarred and feathered during the McCarthy era).
Standing there as big as life
And smiling with those eyes:
What they forgot to kill, said Joe
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