Jerry Mathers
Was it me?
Occult Will, Elite Formation, and Psychological Power
The connective thread among Aleister Crowley, Jack Parsons, L. Ron Hubbard, and Michael A. Aquino is a shared preoccupation with will, transformation, symbolic power, and the deliberate remaking of human consciousness. Each treated belief, ritual, language, and disciplined self-fashioning as forces capable of producing real effects in individuals and societies. Their link is ideological as well as biographical: Crowley supplied a major occult grammar; Parsons carried it into the rocket age; Hubbard helped enact one of Parsons’s most consequential rituals before building a mass system of psychological and spiritual advancement; and Aquino fused a Left-Hand-Path doctrine of self-deification with a professional interest in military psychological operations.Crowley’s Thelema provided the central premise: “True Will” was not mere desire, but an individual’s supposedly deeper destiny, discovered through initiation, ritual, ordeal, and transgression. Thelema was anti-conformist, hierarchical, and esoteric. It proposed that ordinary social morality could obscure a person’s real nature, while ceremonial magic could reveal and empower it. Crowley’s public persona also made theater into a weapon: scandal, inversion of religious symbols, coded writing, and mythic self-presentation created authority through mystery. His wartime political activity in the United States placed that talent for symbolic provocation near British intelligence and propaganda work during World War I.
Jack Parsons was Crowley’s most consequential American disciple because he joined Thelemic magic to technological modernity. Parsons led the O.T.O.’s Agapé Lodge in Pasadena while participating in the Caltech rocket circle that became central to American propulsion research. The same man who pursued ritual invocation at home also helped develop rocket motors for an Army-funded jet-assisted-takeoff project; NASA’s own history identifies Parsons among the early rocketry group and notes the Army Air Corps funding connection.
For Parsons, occultism and science were not opposing worlds. Both were experimental systems for exceeding inherited human limits. Rocketry promised escape from Earth; Thelema promised escape from religious, sexual, and political constraint. His 1946 Babalon Working expressed this synthesis. Drawing on Crowley’s Thelemic cosmology, Parsons sought the manifestation of Babalon: a figure of liberated femininity, sacred sexuality, destruction of old moral forms, and the birth of a new spiritual order. Scholarly research describes the operation as a series of rituals involving Parsons, Marjorie Cameron, and L. Ron Hubbard, directed toward manifesting Babalon on Earth.
Hubbard’s connection is therefore not incidental. He entered Parsons’s Thelemic milieu, participated in the Babalon Working, and became involved in the highly charged atmosphere of ritual experiment, sexual liberation, initiation, and apocalyptic expectation around the Pasadena lodge. Crowley was corresponding with Parsons during this period, so Hubbard’s ritual involvement placed him within a living Crowleyan chain of transmission: Crowley’s doctrine → Parsons’s experiment → Hubbard’s participation. Aavalonlibrary.net
Hubbard later converted several related occult concerns into a different kind of institution. Scientology emphasized hidden causes behind ordinary suffering, specialized techniques for recovering personal power, graded advancement, confidential teachings, intensive verbal procedures, and an increasingly disciplined internal hierarchy. Its language was more technological and therapeutic than Crowley’s ritual magic, but the underlying ambition remained recognizable: to transform the person through a method available only to those who undertake a structured initiatory path. Parsons imagined a new aeon through magic and technology; Hubbard built an organization that promised systematic spiritual and psychological ascent.
Michael A. Aquino—presumably the “Thomas Aquino” meant in the question—extends this current into the world of late Cold War military psychology. Aquino founded the Temple of Set in 1975 after leaving Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. Its core concept, Xeper, means a process of “coming into being”: the deliberate creation of an autonomous, intensified self. This resembles Crowley’s True Will and Parsons’s vision of spiritual revolution, though Aquino framed it in a more explicitly individualist and philosophical Left-Hand-Path form. The common ideological premise is that the human being is not fixed: identity can be deliberately engineered through knowledge, ordeal, symbols, and will.
Aquino’s military career gave this premise a second arena. He worked in Army psychological operations and helped draft the 1980 paper From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory with Col. Paul Vallely, then commander of the 7th Psychological Operations Group. The paper argued for psychological conflict aimed not simply at enemy troops but at broader political and social consciousness: morale, perception, belief, and the public’s sense of reality.
anationbeguiled.wordpress.comThat is where the occult–military connection becomes clearest. Occult practice and psychological warfare are not identical, but they share an interest in the same human materials:
- Symbols: flags, uniforms, sigils, sacred texts, emblems, visual shock.
- Myth: stories of destiny, national rebirth, hidden enemies, heroes, traitors, and apocalypse.
- Ritual: repeated forms that establish belonging, obedience, confidence, or altered states.
- Initiation and secrecy: restricted knowledge creates hierarchy and reinforces commitment.
- Emotional direction: fear, awe, pride, disgust, hope, and humiliation can be politically mobilized.
- Identity transformation: both the initiate and the soldier are remade through a controlled process of language, discipline, and group loyalty.
Taken together, Crowley, Parsons, Hubbard, and Aquino form a lineage of modern esoteric thought centered on the production of powerful selves and powerful beliefs. Crowley formulated the magical philosophy of Will; Parsons joined it to aerospace modernity and revolutionary myth; Hubbard developed a scalable system of mental and spiritual training; Aquino explicitly stood at the intersection of occult self-creation and military psychological doctrine. Their common subject was the same: how human beings can be changed—and how changed human beings can change the world.
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