Mary Helen Smith

Helen Parsons Smith was born Mary Helen Cowley in Chicago, the oldest of three daughters to Thomas Philip Cowley and his wife Olga Helena (nee Nelson). After Thomas died of pneumonia in 1920, Olga met Burton Ashley Northup, whom she married in 1922. The family soon moved to southern California, where two more daughters were born. When Burton Northrup was imprisoned in 1928 for fraud, Helen was forced to drop out of high school and work to help support her family. She later worked for her stepfather at Northrup Business Adjustments and graduated from Pasadena Junior College. She Jack Parsons at a church social and married him in 1935, making her home in Pasadena. In later years, she would be instrumental in maintaining OTO and Thelema in the decades after Crowley died, editing, publishing and selling his works.

Source: Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley. By Richard Kaczynsk. North Atlantic Books, 2010, page 660, footnote 54.

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Helen Parsons Smith celebrated her Greater Feast on 27th July 2003 e.v. at the age of 93. Well known by name as the oldest and longest serving initiate in the Order, she lived a quiet life during her long retirement, and few members in the modern resurgence of the O.T.O. had opportunities to meet her. Born in Chicago, the daughter of Burton and Olga Northrup, she moved with her family to southern California early in life, and worked during the 1930s for her father's firm Northrup Business Adjustments. She met Jack Parsons at a church social, they were married in the spring of 1935, and they bought a house in Pasadena which became a center for interesting visitors and wide- ranging discussions during their seven years together there. In 1939 a chance encounter with Crowley's volume Konx Om Pax led them to investigate Thelema, and soon Jack and Helen were attending Wilfred Smith's celebrations of the gnostic mass at Agape Lodge in Los Angeles. They were initiated together as Minervals and First Degree members of O.T.O. on 15th February 1941 e.v., and Helen the same day was accepted for membership in the A A as Soror Grimaud. Within a year they were among the most active members at Agape, both working very closely with the lodgemaster, and in June 1942 they sold their house to lease an old mansion on Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena and establish a better temple for the lodge. Within a few months of that move their relationship dissolved; Helen became pregnant by Wilfred Smith, and in the following year she was divorced by Jack (who for several years afterward lived at the lodge with Helen's younger sister Sara Elizabeth Northrup). Wilfred Smith was sent into retirement and excluded from O.T.O. membership, with Helen joining him in exile. They were married and moved to Malibu, where they began their own Thelemic group called "The Church of Thelema" and continued performing the gnostic mass together.

Left a widow upon Smith's death in 1957 e.v. she remained for years in Malibu, where during the 1960s Helen worked with Gabriel Montenegro to further the cause of Thelema during the period of the O.T.O.'s quiescence. By the 1970s she was established in northern California, where she set about realizing her life-time project of preserving and publishing the writings of Aleister Crowley. Starting her own small company as "Thelema Publications," she produced a fine edition of The Equinox of the Gods and a series of volumes which were small in size but greatly significant for the continuity of Crowley's legacy, including Shih Yi (1971), Khing Kang King, and The Soul of the Desert (both 1974). She became involved in O.T.O. again upon its revival by Grady McMurtry, and her publication of Crowley's translation of the Tao Teh King (Liber CLVII) in 1975 appeared under the O.T.O. imprint as volume III number 8 of The Equinox. Through the 1980s as the Order expanded she continued to play a role in its guidance, occasionally attending Areopagus meetings, and was able to enjoy some of the fruits of her long dedication. "With veneration for the Magus of the Aquarian Age" (as she wrote in 1990 e.v.), she offered her books to a new generation of Thelemites, "to aid your advancement in the Light." She at last retired from membership during the twilight years of her life, and her preference for complete privacy was respected. Helen Parsons Smith died at Tahoe Forest Hospital, close to where she had made her home at Kings Beach in North Lake Tahoe for twenty-five years, and according to her wishes no funeral services were held. Her son Kwen Smith survives her, with his wife and Helen's two grandchildren, and also two great-grandchildren. Helen remained a true Thelemic occultist throughout her life, and too little information is available concerning her work. It is hoped that the forthcoming publication of The Unknown God, a long awaited biography of Wilfred Smith written with Helen's full cooperation by Martin P. Starr, may contain additional details about a significant period in her long life, during which she may well have been the only regularly active priestess in the world who carried forth the celebration of the mass of Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica.

Source: http://billheidrick.com/tlc2003/tlc1003.htm