The following morning Olson found himself in the grips of an LSD-induced psychotic episode.² Several days later, in a fit of drug-triggered paranoia and despair, the agent leapt to his death from a 10th floor hotel window.²

It’s hard to think of a group of people less suited to tolerate the effects of acid than paranoid, McCarthy-era spies.

Yet tolerate they did—in quantities that would make even the most mildewy Bard sophomore recoil in disbelief. After all, this was Allen Dulles’ CIA here. The 50s incarnation of the venerable intelligence agency was secret agentry at its most swashbuckling. These noble agents would let nothing stand in the way of the truth, or rather, the development of a psychopharmacological serum to extract truth from unwilling subjects.

Artist's rendition of Frank Olson's suicide.

Villainous narcotics like pot, heroin, cocaine, speed, laughing gas, amyl nitrate, PCP, and goofballs were routinely tested by agency and army scientists as potential truth serum candidates.¹ No drug was too obscene, even LSD, which at the time was little more than a scientific curiosity, devoid of any mystico-religious overtones.¹

Today it seems a bit silly. Acid-trippers aren’t exactly known for their faithful adherence to literal facts. Yet there was something about the drug that captivated government spooks. ¹

Several thousand times more potent than mescaline, LSD could induce hour-long fits of psychosis with a mere dab on one’s skin.² The drug was colorless, tasteless, and odorless—powerful enough to dose entire cities, yet subtle enough to discredit that meddlesome leftist intellectual with a well-timed bout of insanity during a key speech.²

People in the CIA began to wonder, was this an interrogation drug they had on their hands—or something more outrageous? Could it be used as a torture device? A bioweapon? Or perhaps even as a brainwashing agent? Could they use acid to control the minds of entire populations? Were the Soviets already doing this?

And so it was, in a series of paralogical leaps not unlike those forged during a typical drug-fueled gabfest, the CIA went from studying truth serums, to investigating LSD mind control tactics.¹ They created their own super-secret program for overseeing such research (codenamed MKULTRA), and placed at its head today’s anti-hero, the club footed, folk-dancing biochemist Sidney Gottlieb.¹

CIA director Allen Dulles kinda looking like a badass.

Gottlieb’s LSD Research Initiative

The first phase of Gottlieb’s LSD research program was simply to have everyone of his staff members drop acid themselves.¹

Once self-experimentation proved too predicable, Gottlieb and his men moved on to the second phase: surprise acid tests. Like some sort of twisted Just For Laughs gag, agents would slip tabs of acid into their colleagues’ drinks at work, and hang around to record the effects.¹

While Gottlieb’s men started out just experimenting on each other, the operation quickly expanded. Soon any CIA official in the wrong place at the wrong time could find themselves victim of a covert drugging.¹

After all, agents were going to be deploying this drug in the field on people who probably hadn’t even heard of LSD. They needed to know how people would react when they truly had no idea what was coming. This is science people! You gotta control your variables!

Experimental rigor aside, most agents didn’t take kindly to being dosed in the name of national security.² What’s more, as Frank Olson’s suicide confirmed, surprise LSD testing really was dangerous.¹

Under pressure from his superiors, Gottlieb quit drugging his coworkers, and focused his efforts on the third phase of MKULTRA’s LSD research: blind acid tests on the general public.²

Highly ranked Google image search result for "bad acid trip."

Operation Midnight Climax

Operation Midnight Climax was a classic bait and switch maneuver.¹ Gottlieb employed prostitutes to lure men back to a CIA-financed cathouse in San Francisco.¹ The hooker would lure the unsuspecting john back to her pad, at which point she’d offer him an acid-laced refreshment. All the while a secret agent would be stationed on a portable toilet behind a two-way mirror, watching the sleazy action and recording the—um—scientific results.¹

Crazy as it may seem, government-backed bordellos formed the backbone of the CIA’s in-house LSD research initiative for the better part of a decade.²

As agents got comfortable with San Fran’s seedy underbelly, they branched out and began drugging people in public.² Gottlieb even had his men studying femme-fatale-style sexpionage tactics, seeing as they were spending so much time around prostitutes anyway.¹

So what exactly did the CIA glean from all this drug and sex research? Well—um—uhhhhh—gotta go!

Oh, you’re still here? Yes—um—well the truth is we don’t really know what they learned, because for ass-protecting reasons Gottlieb ordered his staff not to keep records of the testing.² MKULTRA was dismantled in the early 60s, and CIA director Richard Helms ordered all related documents destroyed in 1973.²

There were some Senate hearings in 1977, but an eerily well-timed fit of amnesia prevented Gottlieb from testifying to much of anything.¹ So what we’re left with is just a smattering of documents, and a couple great books.

LSD Mind Control in Practice

Certainly it became clear over the course of Gottlieb’s experimentation that acid was not an all-powerful mind control agent.² But I’d wager the CIA found at least some use for it during their 10+ years of research.

Gottlieb himself is probably best remembered for his (apocryphal?) plot to slip Castro an LSD-laced cigar, though this plan never materialized (I think). Other similarly weird conspiracies have slipped into popular lore—like the plot to make Castro’s beard fall out with thalium salts²—or the plot to drizzle poison onto Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba’s toothbruth. Who knows what bizarre schemes were actually deployed as a result of Gottlieb’s research?

“One leftist professor in a Latin American university who had opposed the CIA says that he was working alone in his office one day in 1974 when a strange woman entered and jabbed his wrist with a pin stuck in a small round object. Almost immediately, he become irrational, broke glasses, and threw water in colleagues’ faces. He says his students spotted an ambulance waiting for him out front. They spirited him out the back door and took him home, where he tripped (or had psychotic episodes) for more than a week. He calls the experience a mix of “heaven and hell,” and he shudders at the thought that he might have spent the time in a hospital “with nurses and straitjackets.” Although he eventually returned to his post at the university, he states that it took him several years to recover the credibility he lost the day he “went crazy at the office.” If the CIA was involved, it had neutralized a foe.”²

Ironically, the most obvious effect of the CIA’s acid program was that it put LSD firmly in the minds of the 60s countercultural elite. Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey were among the many influential hippies who experienced their first trips as subjects in government-funded drug experiments.² Even the august Aldrous Huxley dropped his first tab at the hand of government spook turned acid evangelical “Captain” Alfred M. Hubbard.¹

Actor and all around cool guy Cary Grant got into acid in his late 50s.

Dredging through hot muck in Congolese jungles, or slinking through the crowd at Central American political rallies, Sidney Gottlieb comes across today as less a real person than some kind of shadowy anti-figure of hippy enlightenment, irreparably disfigured by the acid he once sought to control.

Mad scientists, after all, are nothing but conduits of insanity in its purest form—insanity which seeks only to perpetuate its own existence. If Gottlieb’s bizarre LSD-laced machinations speak to the sickness of his own mind, they also inadvertently opened a door to even more extreme forms of drug-fueled mania.

The hippie madness of Bart Huges—the psychiatric crimes of Ewan Cameron and Harry Isbell—the sinister mind control applications of José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado—what daemons are unleashed upon humanity when already megalomaniacal scientists come face to face with the most powerful hallucinogen the world has ever known?!

Hippie Scientists.

1. Lee, M.A., & Shlain, B. (1985). Acid dreams, the complete social history of LSD: The CIA, the sixties, and beyond. New York, NY: Grove Press.
2. Marks, J. (1979). The search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and mind control. New York, NY: Times Books.
3. Ronson, J. (2005). The men who stare at goats. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

We don’t diminish the Wright’s legacy paying homage to the gliders, calamitous multiplanes, and giant man-lifting kites, that paved their way—but we do open a door to some pretty funky, Victorian-style derring-do.

Daedalus tests out his ill-fated ornithopter/son.

Much of what we take for granted in modern aircraft—their fixed wings, powered propellers, cockpits, and tails—originated around the turn of the 19th century, in the supple cortical folds of British engineer George Cayley.¹

Would-be flight craft powered by flapping wings have actually been around for much longer.² They’re called ornithopters, a pretty fancy term considering these “machines” are are mostly just some guy with bird feathers glued to his arms, hurtling off a cliff.²

Cayley’s flying machines were definitely a cut above glued bird feathers. The only issue was making them—um—fly. Engines were comically oversized throughout most of the 19th century, and engineers had no real grasp of that mysterious principle of aerodynamic lift.³

At the risk of belaboring a terrible pun, the whole winged flight project was up in the air before it even got off the ground—at least until Otto Lilienthal matriculated onto the scene in the 1870s. Lilienthal launched the first systematic study of wing lift and drag, which proved, among other things, that curved wings work a heck of a lot better than flat ones.⁴

Lilienthal takes off from his manmade hill near Berlin (click on these pictures to view them in their full-sized glory.)

His table of lift and drag coefficients for various wing types made Lilienthal something of a household name (at least within the vanishingly small subset of households engaged in groundbreaking aeronautical research).⁴ They also paved the way for the cooler, more insane stage of his career as a hotshot glider impresario.

Between 1891 and 1896, Lilienthal piloted nearly 2000 successful flights on a variety of homebuilt glider aircraft.⁴ The trips were brief, only 12-15 seconds apiece,⁴ but they added up. Within no time the man had accrued more hours in winged flight than anyone before him in history.⁵

As news of “The Winged Prussian” spread far and (presumably) wide, Lilienthal and his then obscure field of heavier-than-air flight were thrust into the international spotlight. For a parasol-twirling, late Victorian public, and for a budding generation of flight researchers, the airplane began to seem like more than just a castle in the decidedly human-free sky.⁴

Lilienthal hoped the public would overlook the glaring safety deficiencies inherent in his design and join in on the fun.

Sweet air bro!

Lilienthal either preparing to launch or fanning some gigantic, unseen beast.

Two wings now? You scamp!

The idea of signing your kids up for flying lessons at the local flying rink may seem reckless, but this is precisely the sort of trend old Lily hoped to spark. He hoped to turn his death-defying glider experimentation into a national pass time, and thereby entice a more general population of “sport-loving men” to test and improve upon his designs.⁶

“The air is the freest element; it admits of the most unfettered movement, and the motion through it affords the greatest delight not only to the person flying, but also to those looking on. It is with astonishment and admiration that we follow the air gymnast swinging himself from trapeze to trapeze; but what are these tiny springs as compared to the powerful bound which the sailer in the air is able to take from the top of the hill, and which carries him over the ground for hundreds of yards?”⁶

—Otto Lilienthal

Sometimes photos weren't enough.

He makes a pretty compelling case actually, but we’ll never know what might’ve come of it. In 1896 a glider crash left our crazed visionary with a broken spine and possible intracranial hematoma.⁷ Lilienthal died the next day, but not before reportedly uttering his famous last words: “Sacrifices must be made!”⁸

The Wright brothers often cited Lilienthal’s sacrificial flight/grizzly death as the event that inspired them to tackle the airplane,⁴

Yet while Lilienthal’s aerodynamic research quickly galvanized the development of powered aircraft, the gliders he helped invent dropped out of the popular consciousness for the better part of the next century.

In 1971, flight enthusiasts Jack Lambie and Richard Miller held their very first hang gliding “happening” along the acid soaked hills of late Hippie Orange County. Picked up on by Popular Mechanics and National Geographic, among others, the so-called “Otto Lilienthal Meet” witnessed the birth of the modern sport of hang gliding.⁹

Hang gliding maven Richard Miller takes his "Bamboo Butterfly" for a spin.

Aided by aluminium alloys, Dacron sails, and MacReady speed rings, today’s gliders boast stats that would make Lilienthal’s jaw drop (were it not firmly affixed to his maxillofacial musculature). Cross-country pilots can soar from thermal to thermal for hundreds of miles on end whilst battling such arcane dangers as gust fronts and cloud suck. Mysterious polar vortices have even been known to propel sailplane gliders well into the stratosphere, and perhaps someday, to space.

Next time you see someone hurling themselves off a cliff, strapped to what looks like a glorified kite, remember that some German guy was doing the same thing more than a 100 years earlier, with a smattering of sticks and cloth, and even less regard for his own safety. A true mad scientist of the choleric variety, Otto Lilienthal ought to fit right in here on the illustrious, seldom-updated pages of Mad Scientist Blog.

1. Ackroyd, J. A. D. (2002). Sir George Cayley, the father of aeronautics part 1. The invention of the aeroplane. Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 56(2), 167-181.
2. Hart, C. (1985). The Prehistory of Flight. Berkeley, CA: UC Press.
3. Ackroyd, J. A. D. (2002). Sir George Cayley, the father of aeronautics part 2. Cayley’s aeroplanes. Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 56(3), 333-348.
4. Jakab, P. L. (1997). Otto Lilienthal: “The greatest of the precursors.” AIAA Journal, 35(4), 601-607.
5. Stever, H. G., & Haggerty, J. J. (1971). Flight. New York, NY: Time-Life Books.
6. Lilienthal, O. (1895). Flying: Sports and practice. Fliegesport und Fliegepraxis, 4. Retrieved from: http://www.lilienthal-museum.de/olma/el2058.htm
7. Langewiesche, W. (2010). Aloft: Thoughts on the experience of flight. New York, NY: Vintage.
8. Harsch, V., Bardrum, B., & Illig, P. (2008). Lilienthal’s fatal glider crash in 1896: Evidence regarding the cause of death. Aviation, Space, and Evnironmental Medicine, 79(10), 993-994.
9. Wills, M. (1981). Manbirds: Hang gliders and hang gliding. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Check out the Otto Lilienthal Museum website for more info: http://www.lilienthal-museum.de/olma/ehome.htm

Fateful apple falls from a tree and bonks young Isaac Newton on the head. Newton has an epiphany (and presumably a heart-healthy snack).

Why, he wonders, should objects always fall down. Why not up? Or sideways? Or in some crazy, unrealistic corkscrew fashion? Then it hits him: Maybe the apple didn’t just fall. Maybe it was drawn down, by an invisible force emanating from our Earth. Bouyed by the fruit’s anticarcinogens and glucose-regulating phytonutrients, he then proceeds to sketch the foundations of the theory of universal gravity, differential calculus, and classical mechanics, unwittingly kick-starting the Enlightenment.

We all know the legend, but is there any truth to it? Is Newton’s apple a handy metaphor for serendipitous innovation? Or is it rather, a trick, designed to draw attention away from Sir Isaac’s true inspiration? A source so cultish, so cripplingly obscure, no grade school science teacher would dare speak its name.

Sotheby’s, 1936. A secret hoard of unpublished Newtonian manuscripts are put to auction, and for the first time made available for serious study. The papers would give historians a glimpse into a Newton few knew existed—one obsessed with biblical prophecy,² occult magic, and alchemy.¹

Rendering of an alchemical laboratory by 17th century Flemish artist David Teniers.

This post assumes a basic, deep understanding of alchemical symbology, practice, and lore. But in case you’ve been living under a rock throughout the 13th – 17th centuries, we’ll start with a brief refresher:

First, you gotta know your metals. For alchemists, metal grows like a plant. It begins in its most impure form, lead, then progressively matures into tin, copper, iron, silver, and finally gold. Because solid metal kind of looks mercury when you melt it, a special type of mercury was thought to remain hidden in all metal.¹

If the alchemist could only distill this abstract, “philosophick” mercury, he could engineer a device that could effectively morph cheapo metal into serious bling. Armed with this contraption, the so-called “philosopher’s stone,” he could turn lead into gold.¹ What’s more, he (and it was pretty much just guys here) would have at his disposal the coolest, most awesomest, most indestructible self-improvement gadget in the history of the universe.³

Alchemical engravings transmit secret messages.

Think of it as the original get rich quick scheme, if getting rich also entailed getting smarter, living forever, curing all disease, and becoming just a really awesome all-around great person.⁴

But forging the stone was not a simple matter of following a recipe. Alchemists spoke in code. They hid their chemical reactions in elaborate symbolism and cryptic imagery designed to ferret out the unworthy.¹ Rather than baldly instruct initiates to mix two substances over a fire, the dickish alchemist would likely offer some mysterious allegory (i.e. “Let the red dragon devour the white eagle.”)⁵

Like all great alchemists, Newton went to outrageous lengths to obtain his own recipe for philosophick mercury. When the standard literature proved wanting, he began to seek out progressively more arcane texts.¹ Ancient myths became coded recipes to be tested in the laboratory.¹ Biblical scripture was viewed as evidence for alchemical processes.³ No source was too obscure, too ancient to potentially contain serious Da Vinci Code style shit.

It appears Sir Isaac was successful too, because in one manuscript we find this:

…I have in the fire manifold glasses with gold and this mercury. They grow in these glasses in the form of a tree, and by a continued circulation the trees are dissolved again with the work into a new mercury. I have such a vessel in the fire with gold thus dissolved, where the gold was visibly not dissolved through a corrosive into atoms, but extrinsically and intrinsically into a mercury as living and mobile as any mercury found in the world. For it makes gold begin to swell, to be swollen, and to putrefy, and to spring forth into sprouts and branches, changing colors daily, the appearances of which fascinate me every day. I recon this is a great secret in alchemy.¹

Is this nothing less than true philosophick mercury?! Blood of metals?! Most precious of all things?!! The detailed instructions that adorn the rest of the manuscript suggest it is.

Newton used raw antimony ore to draw in vivifying energies from space. These energies were then used to "actuate" regular mercury, turing it into the philosophick variety. In alchemy-speak, he let the greene lyon devour the sun.¹

Now all of this might sound perilously insane, but for a learned man of the 17th century an interest in alchemy wasn’t such a big deal.¹ A little outré, perhaps, but certainly nothing to be scoffed at (scoffing being the preferred method of registering disapproval at the time). For many 17th century Europeans, this stuff was totally legit. So it’d be hard to fault a guy for mixing mercury in his spare time.

Thing is, Newton wasn’t just some 17th century guy. He was Newton, forefather of the enlightenment, the first to gaze upon the world in its true form, free of ghosts, aethers, and occult influences. If his worldview was colored by his belief in alchemy, might the entire Newtonian worldview he engendered be tainted as well?

Wuzza?

The answer is, amazingly, yes! For Newton scholar Betty Jo Dobbs, who’s spent as much time investigating Sir Isaac’s occult researches as anyone, Newton’s theory of gravity exhibits markings of a decidedly alchemical genesis.³

At the very least, a theory as game-changing as gravity could never have come out of the prevailing mechanical philosophy of the day. Seventeenth century mechanical philosophers believed ordinary matter was fundamentally inert.¹ Any motion you saw was either caused by living creatures, or by God (by way of an immaterial aether set in motion at the dawn of time).¹ Lifeless matter didn’t do anything, and it certainly didn’t tug at other bits of lifeless matter across great distances.

To many, gravity’s suggestion, the idea that matter has its own intrisnic force that operates mysteriously across unfathomable voids, stank heavily of the occult.³ And they’d be forgiven for thinking so, since Newton never really explained how this attractive principle operates. Even today we have no friggin’ clue how gravity actually works.

So where then, did Newton get the ganas to pursue such an outlandish idea?

According to Dobbs, the answer lies in alchemy, not apples. While matter for the mechanists was nothing more than a soulless lump, alchemical “matter” is alive with spiritual energy.³ “All matter duly formed is,” in Newton’s words, “attended with signes of life”—a mystical essence which the alchemist seeks to harness for his own arcane purposes.³ Newton’s own recipe for philosophick mercury relies heavily on the action of such supernatural powers.¹ By drawing celestial influences from the cosmos, he is literally able to bring dead metal to life.¹

Hey guys hold up a sec?

For Dobbs, and many other historians as well, it seems almost certain that Newton applied his working knowledge of material spirituality to his budding theory of universal gravity.³ The notion of self-attracting bodies starts to make a lot more sense if we take for granted that all matter is infused with occult energy. Far from being a radical break in tradition, gravity, viewed in the context of Newton’s alchemy, is simply a rational explanation for perceived phenomena. If the philosopher’s stone can really turn lead into gold, who’s to say two rocks can’t exert a slight pull on one another?

Evangelical scientists? Robotic space probes?! This guy?!!

I hope now a more confusing picture of Newton’s apple is beginning to emerge. The tree of knowledge does not yield her truths willingly to the idle thinker. Her fruit is little more than a rosy ruse to draw you from the glorious secrets hidden at her roots—in the grimoires, tabulae, and cryptic alchemical footnotes Sir Isaac so eagerly devoured.

Perhaps if we’re to discern any truth in this myth, we must force it through the very same alchemical transformations to which Newton subjected his mercury. Only once it has putrified, purified, and imbibed the spirit of the cosmos will Newton’s apple reveal its true meaning. At this point, it will be very much like the philosopher’s stone—phoenix red and wise beyond any earthly measures of knowledge—a coded message from an unfathomable beyond.

This famous logo was inspired by Newton's apple, not by Alan Turing's suicide (via cyanide-laced apple) as some have suspected.

1. Dobbs, B. J. T. (1975). The foundations of Newton’s alchemy or “the hunting of the greene lyon.” New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
2. Snobelen, S. D. (1999). Isaac Newton, heretic: the strategies of a Nicodemite. The British Journal for the History of Science, 32(4), 381-419.
3. Dobbs, B. J. T. (1991). The Janus faces of genius: The role of alchemy in Newton’s thought. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
4. Ragai, J. (1992). The philosopher’s stone: alchemy and chemistry. Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 12, 58-77.
5. CENonline (2011). Alchemists Kept Lab Notebooks that Read Like Spellbooks [Video]. Retrieved Sept 17, 2011 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDMw69uWRRc

On the 14th day, Parsons sensed the working was complete. He returned to his home in Pasadena to find his future wife Marjorie Cameron waiting for him. Together, the pair would attempt to incarnate a living vessel for BABALON herself. It was Parsons’ conviction that, if they succeeded, the spirit of female lust and Dionysian freedom would walk the Earth, and the blind Aeon of Horus would be redeemed.²

Oddly enough, this wasn’t the first time Parsons’ would crazily attempt to shape the future of humanity. Less than a decade earlier, this occult priest of the Ordo Templi Orientis pioneered a similarly far-flung set of experiments in rocketry. His research, though to this day obscure, led directly to the founding of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and set the stage for the era of spaceflight.

Soviet rocket from the early 30s.

Today, rocket scientists are seen as paragons of genius, but in the 1930s they were little more than a fringe sect. Robert Goddard was lampooned by the press³ and ignored by scientists⁴ when he published what is now regarded as one of the field’s foundational texts: A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. The most advanced “spacecraft” were developed by amateur enthusiast groups like the American Interplanetary Society, or the German Society for Space Ship Travel, as government funded agencies like NASA were still decades away.⁵

One of the big problems with rockets in those days was their tendency to just blow up. The black powder⁵ and liquid fuel⁶ mixtures employed were highly unstable, and prone to igniting all at once.

It was an issue Jack Parsons, Ed Forman and Frank Malina knew all too well when they were contracted by the U.S. government to design rocket-powered airplanes for the war effort. While Parsons was only 25 at the time, and lacked a college education, he was already one of the leading rocket propulsion experts in the country.⁵ The military grant marked the first time the U.S. government had ever funded rocket research,⁷ and the trio, cautiously dubbed the “Suicide Squad,” was anxious to deliver.

The first rocket powered airplane launch in the U.S. Pasedena California, 1941. Parsons and colleagues watch from the foreground.

After months of explosive dead ends, Parsons, inspired by an obscure Byzantine naval weapon known as Greek Fire, got it in his head to concoct a rock-solid fuel from asphalt and potassium perchlorate.⁵ His hunch turned out to be spot on.

“Castable” solid propellants, so called because they need to be melted and poured into place, were much safer and more practical than any known alternative.⁵ They would go on to power the Space Shuttle, as well as the Poseidon and Minuteman ballistic missiles.⁵

More immediately however, Parsons’ asphalt engines led to an avalanche of government funded rocketry research.⁵ Now that practical propulsion systems could be produced safely and en masse, the military finally had a use for them. Universities quickly began to offer courses, and then degrees in aerospace engineering. The Suicide Squad’s original grant ballooned into a full-scale, federally funded research program…the JPL.⁵

But it’s a sad story really. The U.S. government, as much as they love their mad scientists, had no real use for an amateur space-enthusiast with a quirky passion for the occult. By the mid 40s, the JPL was firmly enshrined in the military-industrial complex, and Parsons found himself adrift in a sea of joblessness, magick, L. Ron Hubbards, and oh pretty much right back where we started.⁵

Gnostic Mass being led by I believe Wilfred T. Smith. Parsons would go on to succeed Smith as head of this particular chapter of the Ordo Templi Orientis. Though a falling out with spiritual leader Aleister Crowley would lead to Parsons excommunication from the church.¹

Speaking of which, just what do we make of Jack’s dual interest in rocketry and the occult?

Parsons’ colleague and close friend Frank Malina doesn’t seem to think there’s much of a connection between these two pursuits: “as far as I can remember talking to him about calculations on rocket design, there was no input from what you might say alchemy or magic.”⁵

Obviously, Malina knows the guy about a million times better than we ever will. But the inquisitive student of science madness would do well to question an assumption like this.

Aleister Crowley, aka Frater Perdurabo, aka The Beast 666, aka To Mega Therion, once thought very highly of Parsons. There was talk of even naming the kid as Crowley's successor. However, The Beast also worried the Parsons' romantic side - his tendency to get caught up in magic just for the thrill of it - could get the better of him. He felt betrayed when Parsons refused to reveal to him the details of his encounter with BABALON, and discouraged when L. Ron Hubbard effortlessly duped the young soothsayer out of a good slice of his life savings. Eventually Crowley just gave up on him.¹ Hubbard, indecently, would go on to fame and fortune with his own occult philosophy of Scientology, a belief system based in no small part on the magic he learned conjuring ghosts and goddesses in Pasadena with Jack.⁵

I’m not going to get into the messy business of historically reconstructing Parsons’ precise humoral complexion (such a process is time consuming to say the least, and doesn’t make for engaging blog copy). I will only note that if the history of other occult scientists like Paracelsus serves as any guide, it can be damn near impossible to separate out a scientist’s magical beliefs from their scientific ones. Indeed, in Parsons’ time, many established scientists held space travel and occult mysticism in similar esteem.⁵

Magic and science both rely heavily on intuition, experimentation, and personal experience. In Parsons’ case, it seems they both draw on the same Faustian impulse. Who’s to say what exactly turned his mind to thoughts of Greek Fire and asphalt explosions.

For obvious reasons, Jack Parsons is as good a launching point as any for a journey into the modern American cryptosphere. Video artist and occult synchromystic researcher Steve Willner says Parsons “was notorious in ripping wormholes in space-time and letting interdimentional negative entities in.”⁸ Fringe thinker Richard Hoagland nets our mad scientist in a vast occult NASA conspiracy that can be traced by carefully analyzing the astrological geometry at various launch dates.⁹ I’m not going to get into that stuff just yet (oh but for the love of all that is good and holy I’ll have some fun with it later!). For now I’ll just leave you the links and you can go down whatever rabbit holes you feel compelled to pursue.

Interest in Jack’s magical work has only increased since he accidentally exploded himself in his home laboratory at the age of 37.⁵

Though the scientific community has been slower to give Parsons his due, the International Astronomical Union bestowed upon him an honor befitting all great men of obscurity…an eponymous crater on the dark side of the moon.⁵

1. Staley, M. (1989). The Babalon Working. Starfire, 1(3). Retrieved January 21, 2011 from http://user.cyberlink.ch/~koenig/dplanet/staley/staley11.htm)
2. Parsons, J.W. (1946). Part One: The Book of Babalon. Unpublished Manuscript. Retrieved January 21, 2011 from http://web.archive.org/web/20040211081706/http://www.babalon.net/jwp/babalon.html)
3. A Severe Strain on Credulity [Editorial]. (1920, January 13). The New York Times, p. 12.
4. White, M. (2001). Rivals: Conflict as the Fuel of Science. Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd.
5. Pendle, G. (2005). Strange Angel: The Otherwordly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
6. Yang, V., Anderson, W.E. (Eds.) (1995). Liquid Rocket Engine Combustion Instability. AIAA.
7. Malina, F.J. (1967, June). Memoir on the Galcit Rocket Research Project, 1936-38. First International Symposium on the History of Astronautics. Symposium organized by the International Academy of Astronautics with the cooperation of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science, Belgrade. Retrieved January 21, 2011, from http://www.olats.org/OLATS/pionniers/memoir1.shtml
8. Willner, S. (2008, January 14). Hyperborea, The Pineal Gland, and The Spear of Destiny. Retrieved January 11, 2011 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3T9yIBz7qMA (jump to 1:30)
9. Hoagland, R. (2009, March 12). Richard Hoagland 1/6 Parsons Crowley NASA & the Occult. Retrieved January 11, 2011 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiBSHcZ5lkI&feature=&p=62DD161CD45974AA&index=0&playnext=1

It would take another 500 years for Europeans to finally ease their attitude toward lifelike automata. In 1739, Jacques de Vaucanson captured the public imagination with his “Defecating Duck,” a bizarre clockwork apparatus that ate food pellets and shat them out the other side. In 1770, Wolfang von Kempelen debuted his mystifying chess-bot (known simply as “The Turk”). The machine would go on to best the likes of Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin.²

Simulating human speech, however, proved a more elusive goal. While Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s robots could be programmed to write and draw pretty much anything, the most advanced mechanical speech synthesizers of the 18th century could utter nothing more than a few select words and phrases. It wasn’t until the early 1840s that an obscure German inventor by the name of Joseph Faber conjured up the very first bona-fide talking head.

In Paris 1783, Abbé Mical produced two rudimentary talking heads that exchanged a set of stock phrases in praise of the king.¹

No joke people. His machine could pronounce any combination of vowels and consonants, in any European language.³ In the hands of a skilled operator, it could laugh, whisper, talk, and even sing!³

Faber accomplished this feat by carefully aping the structure of the human vocal tract. A bellows, pumped by a foot pedal, served as the gadget’s lung. The glottis and mouth were modeled though a complex system of levers, tubes, and shutters, hooked up to a keyboard, and cloaked under the stoney-eyed mask of a human face.

“Euphonia,” as it would later be dubbed, was leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessors. Faber could have promoted his work within the scientific community, or used it as a springboard for practical applications. Instead, he chose to spend the rest of his life as a cheap showman, touring the head across Europe and The United States.⁴

It’s hard to fathom why, since by most accounts he wasn’t much of an entertainer. As theater manager John Hollingshead recalls:

“The Professor was not too clean, and his hair and beard sadly wanted the attention of a barber. I have no doubt that he slept in the same room as his figure – his scientific Frankenstein monster – and I felt the secret influence of an idea that the two were destined to live and die together.”⁵

Hollingshead notes, with particular horror, the machine’s “sepulchral version of ‘God Save the Queen,’” which he quips, “suggested inevitably, God save the inventor.”⁵

The London press turned Faber into a punchline:

“By the way, why should not Lord George Bentick have one of these machines constructed, with a Benjamin Disraeli figure-head, and play upon it himself at once, and spare the honourable Member for Shrewsbury the bother of being his Lordship’s Euphonia?”⁶

Needless to say, Faber’s act failed miserably. In a frenzy of madness and frustration, the sad German hacked and set fire to his life’s work.⁴

"Never probably, before or since, has the National Anthem been so sung. Sadder and wiser, I, and the few visitors, crept slowly from the place, leaving the professor with his one and only treasure - his child of infinite labour and unmeasurable sorrow." -John Hollingshead⁵

Faber belongs to that particular breed of mad scientists who miserably marry themselves to their inventions—the Pygmalions and Promethei of the world, for whom creation is a mere end in itself. Only, marriage is an inappropriate term for the union, as the contract certainly does not terminate at death. In hell the two wretched souls remain forever entwined, plunged into an infinity of torture and despair.

While Faber would rebuild Euphonia once again and resume the touring life, success continued to elude him.

Sometime in the 1860s, guy dropped of the face of the Earth. A few decades later, his head followed suit.⁴

VODER, the world’s first electronic speech synthesizer, premiered at the New York World’s Fair in 1939.⁷ From that point on, speech synthesis has been cast as branch of computational signal processing. Faber’s hand-pumped, human-controlled talking head was doomed to obscurity, perhaps forever.

Elocution specialist Melville Bell was quite taken by Faber's Euphonia, and challenged his young son Alexander Graham to try his own hand at artificial speech synthesis.⁸ A decade later, Aleck invented the telephone. Coinkidink?

It’s a bummer because it would be soooo cool to hear what this thing sounded like. Our ability to build weird shit has increased so dramatically since the 19th century that many steampunk wet dreams are becoming reality. Aviation engineers recently developed a human-powered ornithopter that flies by flapping its wings. Programmer John Graham-Cumming has set out to build a steam-powered, gear-driven, PC (post to come on this most probably). Surely with today’s technology we could even improve upon Faber’s design. Imagine, instead of a clunky keyboard, a sexy sax with a human face stretched over its opening. I can just hear it now: It—must—have been moo—oooonglo—HONK! Eh people?

Recently, there have been a few horrifying attempts (see below) to wire physical models of the human vocal tract to computer controllers.⁹ But thus far, judging by publicity videos, even these fanciful creations seem incapable of producing anything beyond chilling infantilisms.

Ah Joseph, you were ahead of one time and behind another, but perhaps in obscurity you will find salvation. The internet loves its losers, all the more so if they’re frighteningly insane.

1. Hankins, T.L., Silverman, R.J. (1995). Instruments and the Imagination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
2. Riskin, J. (2003). The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life. Critical Inquiry, 29, 599-633.
3. Lindsay, D. (1997). Madness in the Making: The Triumphant Rise & Untimely Fall of America’s Show Inventors. New York: Kondasha America.
4. Lindsay, D. (1997). Talking Head. Invention and Technology Magazine, 13(1). (url: http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/1997/1/1997_1_56.shtml).
5. Hollingshead, J. (1895). My Lifetime: Vol 2. London: Sampson, Low, Marston & Co.
6. Lemon, M., Mayhew, H., Taylor, T., Brooks, S., Burnand, F.C., Seaman, O. (1846). The Speaking Machine. Punch, 11, 83.
7. Dudley, H. (1950). The Speaking Machine of Wolfgang von Kempelen. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 22(1), 151-166.
8. Bruce, R.V. (1973). Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd.
9. Ngo, D. (2010). Video: moaning rubber robot mouth simulates human voices, fuels our nightmares. Retrieved from: http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2010-04/freaky-robot-mouth-simulates-human-voices. (2010, April 19).

Trepanation, the act of drilling a hole into one’s skull, has its roots in the mystical/therapeutic practices of prehistoric civilization. Archaeologists have unearthed trepanned bone fragments in every continent except Antarctica, with some samples dating as far back as 10,000 BC.¹

Greek physicians like Hippocrates performed trepanations in cases where traumatic head trauma had damaged a patient’s skull.²

In the days before suction and lighting, trepanations were performed outdoors, in the sun, with the patient sitting upright.

The Roman surgical pioneer Galen used the procedure to relieve intracranial pressure caused by brain hemorrhaging.² A similar surgery is still controversially employed today under the term “craniectomy.”³

Huges, however, did not drill a hole in his head to relieve any acute physical trauma. He was, from a purely physiological standpoint, healthy. So was his disciple Joe Mellen, who chronicled his own self-trepanning experience in the autobiography “Bore Hole.” So was Joe’s wife, Amanda Fielding, whose trepanation was the subject of the terrifying short film, “Heartbeat and the Brain.”

Their desire to crack into their own skull was born out of a longing to restore their mind’s youthful vitality.

After all, we’re all born with holes in our head. Evolution has sectioned the infant skull into a series of jointed plates, so we can flex and squeeze our heads through mom’s narrow birth canal.

Soft spots on the head (called fontanels) visibly throb to the baby’s heartbeat, revealing cavities where bone has yet to form. As we mature, these fontanels close up. Our mind loses its pulsating vitality, Huges claims, as precious blood is literally squeezed out.⁴ Our brain suffocates inside our own skull!

Fuck guys we're cool.

Huges and his "revolutionary" scroll.

Photos by Cor Jaring.

Since intracranial pressure in a healthy adult is between 7-15mmHg⁵, and atmospheric pressure is around 760mmHg, Huges theorized that cutting a hole in his skull would raise the pressure inside his head. This in turn, would squeeze out a portion of the brain’s cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), thus increasing what he termed “brainbloodvolume,” or the ratio of blood to CSF in the head.⁶

Greater brainbloodvolume means more oxygen to the brain. More oxygen means more brainpower, more mental energy, and a faster cerebral metabolism.⁷

Similar benefits could be achieved by standing on one’s head, which Huges’ claims his father did every morning—“to keep fit.”⁶

Trepanning equipment from back in the day.

Psychoactive drugs can also dramatically speed up the brain’s metabolism, though the effects wear off quickly.⁷ Huges promoted the use of “psychovitamins” like pot and LSD (guy named his daughter Maria Juana).⁶ But he cautioned that massive increases in brainbloodvolume necessitated the ingestion of massive quantities of glucose. For an ordinary acid trip, the recommended dosage is no less than a pound of sugar!⁶

All this making sense so far? Huges was surprised by the profoundly negative reaction many scientists and journalists had to his work, which was first published on a scroll entitled “Homo Sapiens Correctus” (brief note for aspiring mad scientists: if you want to convince skeptical academics of a revolutionary theory, it’s probably best not to reveal your findings in scroll form).

He believed the mark he bore on his forehead was the herald of a revolution. “Gravity is the enemy. The adult is its victim – society is its disease…I think that no construction of adults can work optimally unless each adult in the construction is trepanned.”⁶

Amanda Feilding campaign poster

Unsurprisingly, Huges convinced few to follow him on this oddly brutal path towards hippie enlightenment. But the supporters he did gather were extremely devoted to the cause. Amanda Fielding twice ran for British Parliament on the platform that trepanation should be freely available for all citizens. She got 139 votes in her local district in 1983.⁸ Peter Halvorson founded the International Trepanation Advocacy Group (ITAG), which promotes scientific research into the benefits of the procedure.⁹

Most neuroscientists will tell you, out of no animosity towards Huges, that his theory is total bunk. That’s right you heard me—BUNK! It’s blood flow not blood volume that is implicated in brain function.⁹ And, according to associate professor of neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston J. Bob Blacklock, “there is no reason to believe drilling a hole in the head will increase blood flow to the brain.”⁹

However, in the spirit of anti-skepticism that this blog is, I guess, founded on, I should note that there is some apparently scientific support for Huges’ theory. In a study funded by the ITAG (translated pdf here), and published in Fiziologiya Cheloveka (which as far as I can tell is a real sciencey-type journal), researchers found that trepanned skulls did experience an increase in intracranial blood volume “during systolic elevation of arterial pressure increases” (i.e. they throbbed viscerally during heartbeats).¹⁰

Take it with a grain of salt…or a pound of sugar. Whether the theory’s true or false doesn’t make it any less insane. Huges, as an unlicensed, amateur science blogger, it’s my solemn duty the bestow upon you a most grave diagnosis: incurable science-madness!

1. Kim, D.J. (2004). The appeal of holes in the head. W.A. Whitelaw (Ed.), Proceedings of the 13th Annual History of Medicine Days, 17-24.
2. Missios, S. (2007). Hippocrates, Galen, and the uses of trepanation in the ancient classical world. Neurosurgical Focus, 23(1):E:11, 1-9.
3. Kudo, H., Kawaguchi, T., Minami, H., Kuwamura, K., Miyata, M., Kohmura, E. (2007). Controversy of Surgical Treatement for Severe Cerebellar Infarction. Journal of Stroke and Cerebrovascular Diseases, 16(6), 259-262.
4. Mitchell, J. (1999). Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions. Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press.
5. Steiner, L.A., Andrews, P.J.D. (2006). Monitoring the injured brain: ICP and CBF. British Journal of Anaesthesia, 97(1), 26-38.
6. Mellen, J. (1966-1967, Winter). The hole to luck – interview with famous self-trepanner Dr. Bart Huges as questioned by Joe Mellen. The Transatlantic Review, 23. (It’s worth a read: http://lundissimo.info/docs/trep/luck_hole.html)
7. Mellen, J. (n.d.) Mind at large – the mechanism of brainbloodvolume. Retreived Jan 7, 2011, from http://joemellen.net/brainbloodvolume.html
8. Turner, C. (2007-2008, Winter). Like a hole in the head. Cabinet, 28. (url: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/28/turner.php)
9. Colton, M. (1998, May 31). You need it like…a hole in the head. The Washington Post. (url: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/features/trepan.htm)
10. Moskalenko, Y.E., Weinstein, G.B., Kravchenko, T.I., Mozhaev, S.V., Semernya, V.N., Feilding, A., Halvorson, P., Medvedev, S.V. (2009). The effect of craniotomy on the intracranial hemodynamics and cerebrospinal fluid dynamics in humans. Fiziologiya Cheloveka, 34(3), 41-48.

If you have access to some vials, semen, and significant quantities of human blood and putrefied horse manure, you may want to try Paracelsus’ recipe on your own time:

“Let the semen of a man putrefy by itself in a sealed cucurbite with the highest putrefaction of the venter equinus [horse manure] for forty days, or until it begins at last to live, move, and be agitated, which can easily be seen…If now, after this, it be everyday nourished and fed cautiously and prudently with [an] arcanum of human blood…it becomes, thenceforth, a true and living infant, having all the members of a child that is born from a woman, but much smaller.”¹

Did it work? Congrats! You just created a homunculus!

The idea that human life can be created artificially through strict adherence to magic and ritual is nothing new. The Greek myth of Pygmalion and the Golem narratives of Jewish legend are just two notable examples of a tale that’s been told over millennia. Paracelsus’ contribution, as an intermediary between medieval occultism and enlightened empiricism, was to translate this myth into the language of proto-science. By framing artificial genesis (hereafter termed “ectogenesis”) as a natural process, he transformed a supernatural story into a plausible hypothesis. In fact, when you consider the prevailing reproductive science of the day, this weird recipe doesn’t even seem that far-fetched.

Hartsoeker's sketch of his findings.

“Spermists” up until the end to the 18th century argued that children drew their essential features from the father.² The mother, it was thought, provided only a womb and the raw material.² Dutch physicist Nicolaas Hartsoeker’s 1694 “discovery” of pre-formed humanoid “animalcules” inside sperm cells lent credence to the theory.²

In this phallocentric view of inheritance, the male testes contain legions of swarming homunculi. If doctors could just simulate the conditions of the womb—say, by mixing shit and blood in a sealed glass cask—they should reasonably be able to extract life from nothing more than a glob of sperm.

To be sure, the idea of life arising purely through male ingenuity and substance smacks more than a little of chauvinism. But before everyone starts shouting that Paracelsus was just a big ol’ misogynist, I must note, for the purpose of making him look exceptionally weird, that his own relationship with semen was incredibly odd and complex.

He wrote fervently against masturbation. Cum that did not find its way into a woman’s womb, Paracelsus feared, could form monsters.¹ But he also opposed abstinence, claiming that sperm left inside the body would decay and spawn lumps.¹ The only recourse for the bachelor—castration.¹

“[His] complex of ideas concerning sexual pollution, unnatural generation, disease, and religious purification by castration,” notes science historian William Newman, “is, even by sixteenth-century standards, bizarre.”¹ The man was religious, but he was no ascetic.³ In fact, he seems to have been a pretty heavy drinker.³ Still, as far as anyone knows, he had no interest sex, and never let anyone see him naked.³ This has lead to speculation that Paracelsus was castrated at some point during his reportedly gruff, rural upbringing, or perhaps born a hermaphrodite.⁴ An analysis of Paracelsus’ skull, dug up in the 1930s, gave indications of congenital syphilis, but I digress.⁴

A rendering of Penfield's somatosensory homunculus

Modern science has rendered spermist preformationism obsolete, but the homunculus is still very much alive and—um—doing whatever gross thing it is that homunculi do.

In psychological circles, the concept has stretched into metaphor. Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield used the term to denote a specific area in our brain that acts as a map of our own body. His “somatosensory homunculus” is now taught in most introductory psych classes. Cognitive psychologists talk of the “homunculus fallacy”—the erroneous assumption that your sensations are projected onto your mind like a movie, which logically necessitates the presence of a viewer, or homunculus, inside your brain.

In the lore of rare birth defects, the word homunculus may refer to a tumor that has mysteriously begun to display fetal characteristics.⁵

It is among hard-nosed reproductive biologists, however, that the enterprise of the homunculus has been most directly pursued. In the 1980s, when in-vitro fertilizations were beginning to demonstrate the viability of test tube embryos, Japanese scientist Yoshinori Kuwabara set about developing a fully functional test tube uterus.⁶ He excised more than 50 goat fetuses and brought them to term using a bio-regulated tank setup that pumped amniotic fluid through network of tubes and filters.⁶

Example of a homunculus found inside a woman's uterus. Note the fetiform structure, hair, and limb buds. Histological examination also uncovered a rudimentary skeletal structure, organ differentiation, and minute amounts of nervous tissue.

Dr. Helen Hung-Ching Liu of Cornell University has tested her artificial womb on human embryos. The results have been successful thus far, but are limited to a maximum length of 14 days under U.S. embryo law.⁷

Penn State feminist theorist Irina Aristarkhova cites what she terms an “ectogenetic desire” in scientific and academic circles.⁶ It is a desire that, she argues, “corresponds to and promises to realize the old philosophical desire for autogenesis/self-creation.”⁶

Yes, researchers may occasionally couch their studies in the language of health benefits and reproductive opportunities, but science, like sorcery, has its own ends. Much like the titular homunculus, wriggling in Paracelsus’ flask, the theory of ectogenesis has crept and nudged its way through centuries of obscurity and scientific dead ends, only to find itself at the vanguard of reproductive research.

Dammit Paracelsus! Quit being so interesting! I’m going to spend one more week talking about the strange relationship between Paracelsianism and psychoanalysis and then that’s it. (edit: ah never mind, let’s just move onto the next one.)

(note: most of the profiles I do won’t be this long and rambling)

Diagram of an artificial placenta system employed by Dr. Kuwabara.⁸

1. Ball, P. (2006). The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance and Magic. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
2. Epigenesis and Preformationism. (2005). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved December 31, 2010, from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/epigenesis/
3. Pagel, W. (1982). Paracelsus: an Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (2nd ed.). New York: Karger.
4. Bayon, H.P. (1941). Paracelsus: Personality, Doctrines and His Alleged Influence in the Reform of Medicine. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 35(1), 69-76.
5. Weiss, J.R., Burgess, J.R., Kaplan, K.J. (2006). Fetiform Teratoma (Homunculus). Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, 130(10), 1552-1556.
6. Aristarkhova, I. (2005). Ectogenesis and Mother as Machine. Body & Society, 11(3), 43-59.
7. Eaton, S. (2005). The Medical Model of Reproduction: A Path to Artificial Wombs. New Antigone, 1, 28-37.
8. Kuwabara, Y. et al. (1989). Artificial Placenta: Long-Term Extrauterine Incubation of Isolated Goat Fetuses. Artificial Organs, 13(6), 527-531.