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helped invent a new form of solid jet fuel that, in years to come, helped NASA start the U.S. space program. There is a crater on the moon named after Parsons.
    Unbeknownst to most of his colleagues, Parsons was also an occultist; a devotee of the British writer and black magician Aleister Crowley, or the "Great Beast," as he liked to be known. Crowley was the founder of a school of esoteric thought he called Thelema. His most famous work, a lengthy prose poem entitled
The Book of the Law,
laid out its central, hedonistic doctrine: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."
    To disseminate Thelema, Crowley took over an already-existing mystical society called the Ordo Templi Orientis, or OTO, whose Los Angeles branch was known as the Agape Lodge. Parsons, who'd been inducted into the lodge in 1940, soon became OTO's Los Angeles leader.
    Parsons brought an air of glamour to the underground world of Thelema. Witty and sophisticated, he was a lover of music and poetry, a sexual libertine, and a ladies' man whose dark wavy hair and good looks lent him an air of danger. At his twenty-five-acre Pasadena estate, which became the Agape Lodge's home, Parsons hosted regular parties where he would discuss literature and mysticism while members of the lodge wandered the garden paths, consorting with a variety of free spirits: chemists, poets, artists, engineers, nuclear physicists, Caltech grad students. A large structure known as the Tea House became the site of secret rendezvous. Partner swapping and general sexual debauchery were the rule, as were all-night bacchanals in which Parsons, dressed in a three-piece suit, would engage his friends in fencing duels or recite Crowley's poem "Hymn to Pan."
    By 1944, Parsons had turned his eleven-bedroom home into a boarding house for the eccentrics of Los Angeles, placing an ad urging "artists, musicians, atheists, anarchists, or other exotic types" to apply for a room. Among those who won a spot were a professional fortuneteller, a onetime organist for Hollywood's great silent-movie palaces, and an aging courtesan. Other less flamboyant boarders at the Parsonage, as the house was known, included Nieson Himmel, then a twenty-three-year-old journalist who would later become one of the most prominent crime reporters at the
Los Angeles Times,
and the physicist Robert Cornog, chief engineer of the Manhattan Project's ordnance division and a creator of the atom bomb.
    One August day in 1945, Lieutenant Commander L. Ron Hubbard, on leave from the navy, came to lunch at the Parsonage as the guest of another boarder. Parsons had never met Hubbard, though as a dedicated science fiction fan he had read most of his stories in
Unknown
and
Astounding,
and was no doubt thrilled to have the writer at his table. After lunch, Parsons invited him to spend the rest of his leave at the Parsonage. Hubbard moved in that afternoon.
    Now sporting a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, Hubbard cut a dashing figure at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue. He'd arrived in full military regalia, his lieutenant's bars gleaming on the shoulders of his navy whites. Within a day or two, he was dominating the conversation around the communal dinner table, telling his housemates how he'd narrowly escaped from Japanese-occupied Java by making off on a raft after suffering bullet wounds and broken bones in his feet. He also claimed to have been involved in a variety of counterintelligence activities, * to have commanded ships in both the Atlantic and the Pacific theaters, to have battled a polar bear in the Aleutians, and, while in England, to have had his skull measured by scientists at the British Museum.
    "He was a fascinating storyteller," recalled Nieson Himmel, who was Hubbard's roommate at the Parsonage. "Everyone believed him." Himmel, however, recognized the polar bear story as an old folk legend and recalled the skull-measuring tale as part of a story by George Bernard Shaw. "He was so obviously a phony. But he was not a