Quotes from George Pendle

If airports can be seen as temples to travel, gateways to other worlds, then airport carpets are the vast prayer mats upon which we all genuflect.

Feathers! spluttered Sargatanas. Feathers are for the birds, my boy. Flaking, peeling, scale-ridden wings, now that's what real beings wear. I'll tell you a secret. He said, and drew me closer. The eternal pain at having known Paradise and lost it is priceless. I wouldn't swap it for anything.

Why, hello, Death. Long time no see. As you can see, I just couldn't stay away. The creeping things called out to Me. Anyway, what brings you here?- God

It can safely be said that no one has touched more lives, more deeply, than Death. Through this devastating memoir, it is hoped he will touch many, many more.

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

If ever there had been a place to begin a religion, it was Los Angeles in the first half of the twentieth century.

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.

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.

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.

Ad Astra per Aspera—through rough ways to the stars

Similarly the animal psychologist, Aristophanes, accidentally discovered the world's first joke while inquiring into the hitherto mysterious motivations of pathway-traversing fowl.

The pair adopted the phrase Ad Astra per Aspera—through rough ways to the stars—as their motto.

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.

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.

Like his illustrious predecessor, Parsons did not see the two disciplines of science and magic as contradictory.

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.

Theosophy was both a philosophy and a religion, preaching the doctrine of reincarnation as well as spiritual evolution.

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

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

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.

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.

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)

How could a college dropout find himself, at the age of twenty-six, a government-funded rocket scientist?

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.