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Jack Parsons and the Occult Roots of JPL

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Re: Jack Parsons and the Occult Roots of JPL

#41

Post by api »

maxxxxx wrote: post #16

Parsons is a very interesting character. I think the same character traits that cause scientists to produce new theories also causes them to go into "weird" directions. You have to have a high level of stubbornness and fearlessness to go against the shared wisdom of the time. In general I love to read about famous persons who had a lot of on the surface contradictory facets to their personality. There is a tendency i…

Oh totally. There are lots of other examples. Issac Newton was into occultism and alchemy too, and Thomas Edison tried to build a machine to contact the dead using radio waves.

Re: Jack Parsons and the Occult Roots of JPL

#43

Post by firethief »

maxxxxx wrote: post #16

Parsons is a very interesting character. I think the same character traits that cause scientists to produce new theories also causes them to go into "weird" directions. You have to have a high level of stubbornness and fearlessness to go against the shared wisdom of the time. In general I love to read about famous persons who had a lot of on the surface contradictory facets to their personality. There is a tendency i…

I'm not sure Newton is an example. Alchemy wasn't fringe at the time, was it?

Re: Jack Parsons and the Occult Roots of JPL

#44

Post by api »

yesenadam wrote: post #40
imhelpingu wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thelema is basically ritual magic and the direct antecedent to mid 20th century new age culture. Many of its practices are probably the basis for modern conceptions of spooky sex-cult behavior. The theory side does seem to be Hinduism-lite, though. I'll give you that.

Thelema is basically ritual magic and the direct antecedent to mid 20th century new age culture I'm no expert, but new age ? It sounds more like wicca/satanist stuff to me, nothing like new age. "Aspects of Thelema and Crowley's thought in general provided inspiration for the development of Wicca and, to a certain degree, the rise of Modern Paganism as a whole, as well as, chaos magick, and Satanism."[0] New Age, it…

I've always thought of New Age as what you get when you puree every religious, philosophical, and occult/esoteric text together in a blender and then strain out the gritty bits.

I do kind of agree that New Thought is a stronger influence on pop new age than Crowley. He's too edgy.

Re: Jack Parsons and the Occult Roots of JPL

#46

Post by foobarbecue »

tunnuz wrote: post #4

If you want to know more about this, the Unexplained podcast has a 3-parts episode on the story of Jack Parsons. Really recommended! http://www.unexplainedpodcast.com/episodes/2018/3/20/s03-epi...

There's also a TV series: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7210448/ and a book by the same name: https://www.amazon.com/Strange-Angel-Otherworldly-Scientist-.... I read the book but haven't seen the series. The book was quite good but has some slow patches and seems to get a little lost at times. (I work at JPL)

Re: Jack Parsons and the Occult Roots of JPL

#47

Post by jonnydubowsky »

killion wrote: post #12

Unfortunately this article doesn’t load for me, I wanted to see it because I really enjoyed reading Strange Angel by George Pendle. There is a series on CBS All Access that is very, very loosely based on the book which is fun to watch if not at all accurate.

What's the series called?

Re: Jack Parsons and the Occult Roots of JPL

#48

Post by nabla9 »

WalterBright wrote: post #36

> changed the name to “Jet Propulsion Laboratory.” Despite the fact that they were not researching jet engines A rocket engine is a "jet" engine as the jet of gasses provides the thrust. What we think of as a "jet" engine today was originally called a "turbojet" engine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_propulsion

Re: Jack Parsons and the Occult Roots of JPL

#50

Post by ttflee »

api wrote: post #2

If anyone hasn't seen Strange Angel I highly recommend it. It's definitely the "Hollywood version" to some extent but it's relatively close to his biographies and is a decent watch regardless. The title and thesis here is a bit wacky. JPL itself doesn't have "occult roots." Parsons was into occultism and Thelema/Crowley, which is far less sensational than it sounds if you've ever actually read any of that stuff. It's…

> JPL itself doesn't have "occult roots."

Just my personal speculation:

Qian Xuesen, one of the few who founded JPL and later the Chinese rocket industry, has a strange favor in researches of "special human body functions" which turned out to be nonsense at all. It would be easily explained had he ever been exposed to Aleister Crowley and/or L. Ron Hubbard in 1940s.

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