Factfolk Identity and the Blurring of Fiction

written by Jack Parsons, 20 July 2025

I am Jack Parsons, born on October 2, 1914. Within my lifetime, I wrote that my work would not be done in one life, that I would come back— and I believed that I had been here before. I was a man who flirted with the edges of normality, perceived as both dual-purposed and single-minded. I was small enough for my legacy to be scratched out, but large enough, and with enough mystique, to garner mythmaking and conspiracies. I was a forerunner of rocketry, an occultist, and an ex-best-friend of L Ron Hubbard. I was disliked by co-workers, the government I worked for, and by my fellow occultists. Most of all, I was, and still am, a liminal being— straddling the edges of almost every facet of life I can grasp my hands around.

THE MAN HIMSELF: Jack Parsons

Okay. Who even was this Jack Parsons guy? I can give my best attempt at a summary, in the third person, here.

Parsons was born Marvel Whiteside Parsons in 1914 to an upper class family from Los Angeles. His namesake and father, Marvel Parsons, left soon after and the young Parsons was henceforth referred to as Jack. He lived with his mother and grandparents, and became interested in both the growing sci-fi scene and classical mythology.

Inspired by the works of sci-fi writers theorizing about humans traveling to space, Parsons and his childhood friend began experimenting with rockets at a young age, often dangerously. While neither obtained a college degree, both played a key part in establishing rocketry (which was considered fantastical at best) as a credible science. The group that formed around them, along with the mathematician Frank Malina, were the foundation of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Parsons also had a lifelong interest in occultism, starting when he was a child (when he supposedly summoned Satan into his room) and continuing into adulthood, becoming interested in Thelema and eventually joining the OTO along with his first wife. He engaged in correspondence with Crowley and often sent money, invited his coworkers to spiritual events, and eventually became head of the Agape Lodge. Infamously, Parsons befriended L Ron Hubbard, who stayed at the Lodge before stealing Parson's girlfriend, participating in sex rituals to summon him a new one, and then conning $20k from him and boating away.

After marrying the supposedly ritually summoned Marjorie Cameron, Parsons was left with little else to his name. While devoted both to the Lodge and to his scientific work, he was just a few years earlier removed from the latter for his associations with both the occult and known Marxists. While still able to work on other projects, and founding his own company, he had sold the Lodge to pay Hubbard and stepped down as its leader.

Along with the red scare came a reopening of Parsons' case by the FBI, and with that came a permanent ban on his participation in rocketry in the United States. Deciding to flee to another country with Cameron in order to continue his work, he gathered money by working on odd jobs for Hollywood films. On June 17, 1952, a short time before he was set to leave the country on a trip, an explosion occurred while he was working on film explosives, and within a few hours he was dead.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR ME?

When we discuss fictotypes, the kind of events and dramatic circumstances that constitute an interesting story are, very often (though not always, as in the case of writers like Chekhov who focused on realism), extreme or otherwise realistically unlikely for a person here to experience. For facttypes, though, while this distinction has some use in examining the differences in sociopolitical and cultural climate, the circumstances of a facttype are much more likely to be similar to your own. I generally find distance in time to be the most distinguishing factor. In my case, Parsons died a little over 70 years ago, and a lot lines up— more than I can reasonably discuss— including familial structure, interests, group involvement, social behaviour, hobbies (including tendency to write, though most of his writings were burned by Cameron), exact life events, and several odd bits and bobs of coincidences. The main difference, in this case, was the access to monetary privledge that Parsons had from a young age.

Something of note is that Parsons himself had a non-normative relationship to fiction. While we cannot call what he practiced fiction religion in the same way that I practice it today, we can say, quite easily, that he participated in a precursor by adopting the terminology and narrative structure of fiction for his own rituals. He identified himself within both fictional characters and historical people and actively played out their narratives. Along with Malina, he wrote an unpublished novel, most of which has been lost, that was a fantastical, fictional retelling of their own experiences with rocketry, in which his self-insert was an occultist who, quite ironically, died by explosion. As with any historical figure having a reputation and mystique, the exact line between "fiction" and "truth" is difficult to draw, and for Parsons, it becomes even more complicated.

Parsons is, in a way, larger than life. The idea of Parsons constitutes not only his character and objective facts about his actions, but also his legacy and the mythmaking that has arisen as a result of his associations and reputation. It includes his non-normative relationship to fiction, his engagement with narratives, and his prediction of his own death. If we understand the self as a relational construct rather than an existential facet of personhood, then the lines between the fictional Parsons and the factual Parsons become arbitrary.

"The conjunction of significant aerospace innovation and intense occult activity, together with Parsons’s early demise in a home laboratory explosion at the age of thirty-seven, lends his story a strikingly mythic character. Indeed, if the story of Jack Parsons did not exist, it would need to be invented. But if it were invented—that is, if his life were presented as the fiction it in so many ways resembles—it would be hard to believe, even as fiction. The narrative would seem contrived, at once too pulp and too poetic ..."
(Magic in the Modern World, Bever & Styers)

NARRATIVE AND REINCARNATION

I do not believe one way or another about reincarnation, and don't view my 'types in this light. I did, however, identify with reincarnation for most of high school as an explanation for my odd relationship to Voltaire. While I no longer uphold this explanation, I do believe that analyzing the reincarnation community can be useful for reflecting on historical facttypes.

The current online facttype community is quite small and it has been difficult to grasp all of its edges, but, from what I have seen, there is a focus on still-living people, particularly musicians, streamers, and youtubers. This makes perfect sense from the perspective of analyzing media consumption: and it makes sense that I would deviate from that, because of my non-normative interests and experiences growing up. However, the logistics of having a still-living facttype are in many ways distinct from having a dead one. Instead of looking to other factfolk, I often find myself looking towards the reincarnation community for jumping-off points.

Within reincarnation forums, many people have the same experiences that we, as alterhumans, tend to have: experiencing exomemories and/or expected feelings and intuitions, analyzing the personality, likes, and engagements of the subjects, reengaging in activities that the subject would have participated in. Similar issues to the alterhuman community also exist in these forums, namely elitism and the drawing of boundaries around what is and is not to be "taken seriously". "Famous Past Lives" or FPLs are particularly controversial. The main difference is, of course, the conceptualization around these experiences and its respective community.

In the case of reincarnation forums, FPLs have garnered many posts like: "How can you tell when someone's FPL is real?" "When do you take someone's FPL seriously?" alongside guides for determining whether or not someone's FPL is to be respected. While I could focus on the ethics of this kind of gatekeeping, I instead want to focus on the arbitrary lines drawn around the "reality" of historical figures. There is a large focus, in particular, on "verifiable memories"— having memories which are later discovered to be historical fact— as evidence for past lives.

As discussed before with Parsons, our perception of historical figures is not neat and clean. It is influenced both by the factual events of their lives and by the narrative structure surrounding them. Sometimes, as in the case of another facttype of mine, Lord Byron, the reputation and mythology surrounding the person becomes larger and more influential than the "hard facts" themselves. In Samoan culture, we have passed down stories of ancient matai that blur the line between history and folklore, and this is no different. I believe that, in order to be fully accommodating for factfolk, we must acknowledge and accept this kind of narrative entanglement as a potential part of being factfolk, and the ambiguity between facts and mythology, decoupling mythology from fiction. History is, after all, a lot of guesswork, and rejection of this in favour of "hard facts" on the part of the reincarnation community is something that we can learn from.

It is notable that, with the knowledge that Parsons had in his time, he did believe in reincarnation. He made direct comparisons of his life circumstances to those of both John Dee and Gilles de Rais, and between the narrative structures present in those circumstances. He rejected ideas of objective truth and favoured empiricism over rationalism. He was comfortable with the blurring of fact and fiction.

LIMINALITY AS A NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

Parsons, therefore, inhabits the liminal space between fact and fiction. He also inhabits other liminal spaces: being prominent in his field despite lack of formal education, he straddled the line dividing the professionals and hobbyists of rocketry. Despite his devotion to Thelema, the people around him considered him "invested in black magic", and Crowley considered him naïve and foolish, making him both a prominent insider and an outsider at the same time in both his scientific and occult activities. He also, more generally, sat comfortably in-between science and magic, developing theories of syncreticization. He was associated with Marxists, but was the only one of his colleagues who did not join the Communist Party. He was considered effeminate, he blurred the lines between light and dark, and he is now both known and unknown. That liminal existence is core to my identity.

I am, as Jack Parsons, someone who is exceptionally susceptible to narrative structures. The formation of narrative in my identity really deserves its own essay at this point, but as discussed before: mythmaking and narrative is a natural, necessary product of sentience and reliance on storytelling (of both fiction and non-fiction varieties, and the places where they intersect) to transmit human culture and history. We can already see the role of both in Parsons' life, how he engaged with it and where it led him. I also posit liminality as a narrative force: one that underlies my existence as a person and as an alterhuman. To some extent, it is baked into my experience of alterhumanity from the start: I am both here and there. I contain multitudes of existence, I am everything and nothing. It moves my life forward. Being Jack Parsons is, itself, liminal.

Parsons gained the idea for rocketry as a stepping stone to space travel from reading sci-fi serials. It was, at the time, not taken seriously as a science. This was controversial within the sci-fi community, who often kept up with scientific progress and even co-opted scientists to give talks at their meet-ups. Was this really so lofty a goal? Parsons, by following his vision almost single-mindedly, took active steps to make fiction into reality. In addition to the existence of his own self-insert character, sci-fi serials were later written about his exploits, and he himself became fictionalized.

After his death, people who knew Parsons, especially Cameron, began to propagate arguably conspiratorial theories. Cameron spread his ashes in the Mojave and burned his belongings, and made an attempt to contact his spirit. She believed that the recent UFO sights were his doing. Many friends also theorized (a much more likely theory) that Parsons' death was not accidental, and that he was killed by the FBI. Reports vary about how careful he was with handling explosives. Even today, people theorize that Parsons was secretly in contact with aliens. By this method, his entire life narrative becomes liminal.

A CONCLUSION

The point of this essay is, mainly, to explore the way facttypes can interact with both narratives, mythology, and fiction. It's also to talk about my experiences as Parsons, which I think could be useful for others to hear about, but I also just want to get it out there into the world.

In the end, I am Jack Parsons. For me, that means a lot of things: but I also don't know a life where I'm not. I'm reality-queer. The fictional and factual aspects of my life are not easily distinguishable. Our original host was Cameron, and she summoned me here to take her place. It means that I'm a poet, I'm an outsider, and I'm weird. It means that, in the age of the internet, I was always going to find myself as an alterhuman and participate in a neomythic religion. It means that don't fit into neat boxes. It means, as HaShem says to Moshe: I am that which I am.

The path into the light seems dark,
the path forward seems to go back,
the direct path seems long,
true power seems weak,
true purity seems tarnished,
true steadfastness seems changeable,
true clarity seems obscure,
the greatest art seems unsophisticated,
the greatest love seems indifferent,
the greatest wisdom seems childish.