Welcome to Unexplained Extra with me Richard McClean smith. For the weeks in between episodes, we look at the stories that, for one reason or other, didn't make it into the show. For the last episode, we Are the Witchcraft, we took an in depth look into the extraordinary life and death of pioneering rocket scientist and magician Jack Parsons. As a scientist, Parsons is perhaps best remembered as a founding member of
what would eventually evolve into Nassa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As a practitioner of ritualistic magic, it is with the Babylon Working that he is most synonymous his ambitious attempt to conjure the divine feminine essence into being. There has been much dispute about how exactly Parsons intended to do this, whether by literally producing a child incarnation of the Goddess or by summoning her into the body of a living woman, the body thereby acting as an avatar within which the
divine soul could emerge. From a feminist perspective, it is a somewhat complicated proposition, since, on the one hand, parsons Is working presents a genuine attempt to overthrow the dominant masculine and patriarchal order, which he considered repellent. Some have been critical, however, that it is yet another example of a man putting himself sent a stage as the savior and orchestrator. Ironically, such a view fails to recognize the
woman at the center of it all. Regularly positioned as little more than a muse, both professionally and as a plot point in the life of Jack Parsons, Marjorie Cameron was anything but. Cameron was born on April the twenty third, nineteen twenty two, in the small Midwestern town of Belle Plaine in Iowa, the first of four to her parents, Carrie and Hill. Her blue eyes and red hair, unlike any of her siblings, had been prophesied by her aunt Nell.
It was also Nell's belief that her young niece would dutifully follow a righteous Christian path and become a nun. But Cameron was never one to be so easily coerced. Even from a young age, she was tuning into different frequencies. Knights would be spent in restless fits of sleep, flooded with peculiar visions, one time waking up to witness four floating white horses passing her bedroom window, or later spent in solitary strolls through the town's Oak Hill Cemetery under
cover of moonlight. At fifteen, Cameron fell pregnant. Her mother is believed to have performed the abortion, though it is not quite clear how. Four years later, Cameron will make an unsuccessful attempt to take her own life, an early lesson in understanding those things you can escape and those things that you can't. Like many Bell Plane residents, Cameron's
father worked in the rail industry. The town itself was a railway terminus, being quite literally the end of the line, it was only a matter of time before Cameron set off to discover what lay at the other end of it. In nineteen forty three, she took the first opportunity she could to find out, enlisting in the Navy, serving as
part of the woman accepted for volunteer Emergency Service. She would eventually end up in Washington, d c. Cameron's burgeoning skills as an artist, in particular, her mastery of Lyne saw her employed as a cartographer, drafting military maps for
the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The only woman in the office years later, realizing that many had died in the South Pacific as a result to the maps she created, Cameron will be unable to shake the sense of a psychical thread connecting her to every death, denouncing war forever. After having participated in a mysterious covert homeland operation, Cameron is transferred to the Naval Photographic Laboratory to assist in
the making of propaganda films. When her brother, a tale gunner in the U. S. Air Force, is injured in battle, Cameron is denied her request to return home and visit him. Not one to be bound, she went home regardless, being court martialed immediately on her return, earned to duty. The following year, the war is over and Cameron moves back in with her parents, who had by now moved to Pasadena in California. Cameron intended to travel soon after to New York to meet up with someone she had been
seeing during her time in the Navy. One morning, however, while waiting in line at the unemployment office, she bumps into an old acquaintance from the Navy, Alva Rodgers. Alva had just recently taken a room at a large house on South Orange Grove Avenue, boarding with a mad scientist
she just had to meet. What happens next has been well documented in occult histories, with Cameron becoming a focal point of Jack Parson's Babylon working, the pair drawn inexorably together in love and lust in the realizing of their union. Where the Parsons as working could be said to have been successful or not, many speculated that in one way
or another, something had opened up. In March, after the Babylon Working is complete, Cameron took a seat on the back porch at ten zero three Orange Grove Avenue and witnessed of peculiar silver cigar shaped object moving through the sky.
This apparent sighting came a good year before civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed to have witnessed nine unidentified objects flying with calculated precision near Mount Rainier in Washington State, but when she mentions this sighting to Jack, he makes no comment. The following year, Cameron travels to Paris with the intention of continuing on to England to meet with Alister Crowley. On the day she is due to travel, she receives
word that he has died. Weeks later, while staying at a convent in Switzerland, Cameron takes a bath, and when she emerges, something inside has shifted. She feels changed. Facing the mirror, she crouches down and howls at the strange reflection, regarding herself as if for the first time. Restless and eager to understand this new self, Cameron leaves Jack and joins an artists colony in sam Miguel de Allende, Mexico,
where she meets artists Leonora Carrington and Renata Drukes. After a short relationship with a young bullfighter, which ends in tragedy after he falls ill and dies, Cameron returns to Los Angeles and reunites with Jack. Are you always taking care of your family? Do you often take care of others not yourself? Now it's time to take care of yourself,
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That's teladoc dot com slash Unexplained podcast. On that Fateful Day in June nineteen fifty two, after hearing the explosion coming from the direction of Parsons's laboratory at ten seventy one and a half Orange Grove Avenue, Cameron arrives to find journalists and photographers already wading through the rubble looking for anything peculiar to get their teeth into. Correctly, anticipating that her husband's unconventional personal life will be raked over
in the ensuing weeks. With attention inevitably turning to his surviving widow, Cameron has little choice but to flee as lurid headlines promised to reveal the secrets of the Pasadena Scientists sex Madness cult and black magic orgies. Cameron is already making her way to the Mexican border. In her possession are the contents of a strange black box that
had been discovered in Parsons laboratory by the police. The box was covered in magic charts and tables, and also bore the ominous note don't go further or you will lose your life. One friend subsequently tasked with looking after it, had cut his thumb on one of its hinges when he tried to open it for Cameron. There is no such issue. Inside, she discovers all of Jack's magical papers and learns for the first time of her involvement in
his Babylon working. If there had been any doubt before about his intentions with the ritual, to Cameron, at least now there was none. It all made sense that night in Switzerland, when she had felt changed, her body had been the vessel and Babylon had been received. She was the scarlet woman. Inside she also found copies of Jack's correspondence with Alister Crowley, in which he informs him of the peculiar object that Cameron had seen in the sky the first few days after the pair had met. It
was a sign after all. The next few months are a personal hell for Cameron as she struggles with the unceasing actuality of Jack's death, which will result in at least one suicide attempt, but through it all, a heightened awareness of something is growing inside. A few months after Jack's death, Cameron, now returned from Mexico, arrives to stay at the home of a friend in Pasadena, carrying with
her a brightly colored finch in a bird cage. Having left the house one morning, Cameron returns to find that her beloved bird has died. The devastating news sends her into a state of deep distress. Moments later, her housemates watch as she takes the bird from the cage and holds it in her hands, quietly stroking its bright feathers. After thirty minutes, they look on in astonishment as the bird's feet begin to twitch, its head starts to turn, and finally it jumps up in her hands, flapping its
wings and chirping into the air. Cameron returns the bird to its cage and says nothing. Over the next four decades, spurred on by her conviction that she was the divine goddess, Cameron will dedicate herself to her art and magic, living a singular life of transcendental exploration and forging a pioneering path which will later be celebrated and appropriated by the Beat movement and the counterculture of sixties America. But she
was the first among many. Needless to say, there is far more to Cameron than could be done justice in such a short space of time, But for anyone interested in learning more, her art is as good a place as any to start. Described by curator Yale Lipschutz as an exploration of female sexual power in relation to mysticism, you can find much of it collected online by the
Cameron Parsons Foundation at Cameron hyphen Parsons dot org. I can also recommend Spenser Cancer's biography Wormwood Star The Magical Life of Marjorie Cameron. If you enjoy listening to Unexplained and would like to help supporters, you can now go to Unexplained podcast dot com forward slash support. All donations, no matter how large or small, are massively appreciated. All elements of Unexplained are produced by me Richard McClain Smith.
Please subscribe and rate the show on iTunes and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can reach us online at Unexplained podcast dot com or on Twitter at Unexplained pod. Now. It's time to take care of yourself. To make time for you, teledoc gives you access to a licensed therapist to help you
get back to feeling your best. Speak to a licensed therapist by phone or video any time between seven a m. To nine pm local time, seven days a week. Teledoc Therapy is available through most insurance or employers. Download the app or visit teledoc dot com. Forward slash Unexplained Podcast Today to get started. That's t e l a d oc dot com slash Unexplained Podcast