Strange Angel Quotes

“I remember When I was a star In the night A moving, burning ember Amid the bright Clouds of star fire Going deathward To the womb.   —JOHN WHITESIDE PARSONS, untitled”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“Those interested in rockets were as much obsessive visionaries as technical geniuses. Jack Parsons was just such a figure, living on the cusp between an old world in which the very idea of space travel was a scientific absurdity and a new world in which it would become scientific fact.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“As for Crowley, his reputation grew and grew. His gospel of “Do what thou wilt”—modified and transformed—appealed strongly to the socially liberated sixties generation. He resurfaced as a countercultural icon; his photograph appeared on the cover of the Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and his ideas influenced everyone from Dr. Timothy Leary to the rock group Led Zeppelin. He was hailed as a prophet before his time for bringing together eastern and western esoteric traditions, and although he could never quite escape the “Satanist” tag that he had gained in the Edwardian newspapers, this ensured his present-day popularity.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons – A Portrait of the JPL Founder: Genius, Rocketry, and the Occult

“While Crowley struggled throughout his life to popularize the OTO, the Church of Scientology became hugely successful, and now claims over eight million members in some 3,000 churches spread across fifty-four countries. It is said to make more than $300 million a year, and Hubbard’s numerous writings are central to its success.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“Parsons’ interest in the OTO had not been lessened by his new workload. Indeed, it had grown stronger as he immersed himself in the writings and philosophy of Aleister Crowley.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“In 1912 he had joined a small quasi-Masonic organization named the Ordo Templi Orientis, or OTO, which boasted 500 members spread across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Crowley seized control of the OTO, started a chapter in Britain, and began rewriting its rituals, grafting The Book of the Law into the society’s texts”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“Both rocketry and magic were rebellions against the very limits of human existence; in striving for one challenge he could not help but strive for the other.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“Newton was not the first of the age of reason,” wrote Keynes. “He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“Parsons’ story reassures us that at the heart of all scientific advances is the imagination—that what we perceive as perverse eccentricities can be the key to important breakthroughs.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“How could a college dropout find himself, at the age of twenty-six, a government-funded rocket scientist?”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“Jack Parsons was just such a figure, living on the cusp between an old world in which the very idea of space travel was a scientific absurdity and a new world in which it would become scientific fact.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“The pair adopted the phrase Ad Astra per Aspera—through rough ways to the stars—as their motto.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“Since the scientific community had largely overlooked Parsons, the OTO became sole guardians of his story. He became the Che Guevara of occultism, his few surviving writings pored over, his magickal workings the subject of intense debate.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“Some said that he died with tears on his cheeks, his last words being the uncharacteristically hesitant, “I am perplexed.” Others thought that his final utterance was the melancholic admission, “Sometimes I hate myself.” His”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“His manner of dealing with explosives also caused her consternation. On one occasion Helen joined Parsons and Forman on one of their recreational skyrocket launching trips in the desert. Sitting in the back seat of the car, she lifted up a rug covering the floor to find it had been hiding sticks and sticks of dynamite, no doubt taken from Halifax by Parsons. Nervously leaning forward to the front seat where Parsons and Forman were sitting, she asked whether the explosives were safe. As the truck bumped heavily along the desert road, Parsons turned to her with an amused grin and told her not to worry: “The detonator’s in the front seat.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“Ad Astra per Aspera—through rough ways to the stars”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“Ever since Parsons had been a boy, however, the dark side of magic had captivated him. "I know that witchcraft is mostly nonsense, except where it is a blind," he wrote to Crowley in 1943, "but I am so nauseated by Christian and Theosophical guff about the 'good and the true' that I prefer the appearance of evil to that of good.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons – A Portrait of the JPL Founder: Genius, Rocketry, and the Occult

“On December 1, 1947, the Great Beast died, aged seventy-two.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons – A Portrait of the JPL Founder: Genius, Rocketry, and the Occult

“but I am so nauseated by Christian and Theosophical guff about the ‘good and the true’ that I prefer the appearance of evil to that of good.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“quantum physics, in which the simple act of observation seemed to affect the physical world, and in which changes performed on one physical system could have an immediate effect on another quite unlinked system (the theory of nonlocality),”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“One of these was Harry Hay, a young actor and communist who had been performing in Clifford Odets’ play on unionization, Waiting for Lefty, at the Hollywood Guild Theatre. Hay would later become father of the gay rights movement in America, but he was hired to play the organ for the OTO’s Gnostic Mass, having been drawn to the temple through his friendship with Regina Kahl.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“The Golden Bough was popular with both scholars and laymen, and it dramatically influenced the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung—Frazer’s depiction of tales of myth and romance as echoes of ancient rituals chimed with Jung’s description of archetypes that exist within the collective unconscious—as”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“Theosophy was both a philosophy and a religion, preaching the doctrine of reincarnation as well as spiritual evolution.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), whose Egyptian museum in San Jose took up an entire city block. It stressed the virtues of reason and science while also suggesting that ancient Egyptian wisdom would allow its followers to re-lease the hidden powers inherent in man.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“in Chicago in 1893. While they introduced the American people to such new words as reincarnation, nirvana, and Karma, the new religions also echoed the creed of self-reliance that had been an article of faith in American religion and culture for almost a century.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“harmonialism”—a belief that spiritual, physical, and even economic well-being flow from a person’s connection with metaphysical forces of the cosmos—manifested itself in such new forms of thought as Spiritualism, Christian Science, New Thought, and Theosophy.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“If ever there had been a place to begin a religion, it was Los Angeles in the first half of the twentieth century.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“It has seemed to me that if I had the genius to found the jet propulsion field in the US, and found a multimillion dollar corporation and a world renowned research laboratory, then I should also be able to apply this genius in the magical field.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“Like his illustrious predecessor, Parsons did not see the two disciplines of science and magic as contradictory.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“They were a couple of powder monkeys,” remembered Marjorie Zisch, a fellow pupil at John Muir. “They would go out into the desert and make rockets and do all sorts of explosive stuff.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons