Quotes from George Pendle

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.

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.

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.

On December 1, 1947, the Great Beast died, aged seventy-two.