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Comment by tunnuz | Hacker News Reader

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...

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And if you want to dig even deeper, the book "John Dee and the Empire of Angels: Enochian Magick and the Occult Roots of the Modern World" takes this topic even further.

https://www.amazon.com/John-Dee-Empire-Angels-Enochian/dp/16...

Additionally the "biography" of Parsons, "Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons", is a great read.

https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Rockets-Occult-World-Parsons/dp/0...

And because Parsons' life intersected in the late '40s with that of L. Ron Hubbard, he features prominently in Lawrence Wright's excellent history of Scientology Going Clear (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_Clear_(book)) as well.

Wikipedia summarizes Parsons' and Hubbard's sex-magic collaboration here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons_(rocket_engineer)...

The Dollop podcast has an amusing take on Jack Parsons too. NSFW and probably less historically accurate than Unexplained, but amusing at least.

http://thedollop.libsyn.com/jack-parson

I couldn't make it past 5 minutes. Fratboy-level jokes and constant detours into the irrelevant. Clearly my sense of humor is different from theirs.

Yet another podcast episode about Jack Parsons from Something True. Highly recommended.

https://www.idlethumbs.net/somethingtrue/episodes/babylon

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)

I haven't read the book but I like the series.

The way the series depicts occultism vs traditional religion, traditional vs modernism and their interaction is surprisingly deep. It's not just shady characters using vulnerable and unstable people (it's that too). It's also people trying to escape traditional society and using things like occultism as way to get out. It leads to tragedies, but sometimes it nudges people to the right direction.

also many shades of this in the Pynchon classic Gravity's Rainbow

WHOA. Alright, time to re-read that guy again.

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