I just finished John Carter's biography of Jack Parsons, which, until I was filling out my Media List, I didn't know ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lagizma was the Amazon star reviewer for. It's extra amusing because she seems to have read it from a rocket history perspective whereas I read it for the occult history perspective and thus were annoyed by opposite aspects of the book.
By day, Jack Parsons was one of the founders of Jet Propulsion Laboratories and basically single-handedly invented the rocket. By night, he was Frater 210, the self-proclaimed Antichrist, a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, and a follower of Aleister Crowley (rhymes with 'holy'.) Oddly enough, he was a very meticulous, if reckless scientist, but a very sloppy and reckless magician. (Though his death might suggest otherwise. He was killed in an explosion in his home when he was 37.)
The information in the book was great and I drank it up, but Carter's writing is simply bad and uninteresting. His speculations are often spotty and he blindly repeats some untrue myths about Crowley as fact. Otherwise, it was a nice view into the early years of the OTO and Thelema in America. My favorite parts, I think, were the excerpts from Crowley's correspondence. He was intelligent and witty till the very end. (Jack Parsons sent large amount of money to Crowley on a regular basis, supporting Crowley in his last years.) Much of this time period was not covered in Crowley's autobiography, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, also appears in quite a large chunk of this book as a magical scribe and con man.
I have a few more books about Parsons to read for research. He and Hubbard performed some powerful rituals that were well beyond their skill levels and there is a whole branch of conspiracies that say they opened a sort of magical portal and that's where UFOs came from. Considering that Aleister Crowley once contacted an entity named LAM who looked much like a modern grey alien, it's an interesting story to delve into. I want to use portions of this for a book I've been planning for quite a while. After reading this, I may want to add a bit more, like the connections Parsons and Hubbard had with John Dee & Edward Kelley. (Hubbard stole a very large sum of money and ran off with Parsons' wife. Kelley did the same to Dee way back in the ye olde 1500s.)
Hopefully further books will be better written. I can see why this is the only book John carter has written.
lagizma was the Amazon star reviewer for. It's extra amusing because she seems to have read it from a rocket history perspective whereas I read it for the occult history perspective and thus were annoyed by opposite aspects of the book.By day, Jack Parsons was one of the founders of Jet Propulsion Laboratories and basically single-handedly invented the rocket. By night, he was Frater 210, the self-proclaimed Antichrist, a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, and a follower of Aleister Crowley (rhymes with 'holy'.) Oddly enough, he was a very meticulous, if reckless scientist, but a very sloppy and reckless magician. (Though his death might suggest otherwise. He was killed in an explosion in his home when he was 37.)
The information in the book was great and I drank it up, but Carter's writing is simply bad and uninteresting. His speculations are often spotty and he blindly repeats some untrue myths about Crowley as fact. Otherwise, it was a nice view into the early years of the OTO and Thelema in America. My favorite parts, I think, were the excerpts from Crowley's correspondence. He was intelligent and witty till the very end. (Jack Parsons sent large amount of money to Crowley on a regular basis, supporting Crowley in his last years.) Much of this time period was not covered in Crowley's autobiography, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, also appears in quite a large chunk of this book as a magical scribe and con man.
I have a few more books about Parsons to read for research. He and Hubbard performed some powerful rituals that were well beyond their skill levels and there is a whole branch of conspiracies that say they opened a sort of magical portal and that's where UFOs came from. Considering that Aleister Crowley once contacted an entity named LAM who looked much like a modern grey alien, it's an interesting story to delve into. I want to use portions of this for a book I've been planning for quite a while. After reading this, I may want to add a bit more, like the connections Parsons and Hubbard had with John Dee & Edward Kelley. (Hubbard stole a very large sum of money and ran off with Parsons' wife. Kelley did the same to Dee way back in the ye olde 1500s.)
Hopefully further books will be better written. I can see why this is the only book John carter has written.
