A few years ago I read 'Strange Angel', George Pendle's very readable biography of Jack Parsons, the (in)famous rocket pioneer and occultist. Parsons led a strange double life of rocket science and Crowleyan magician. For Parsons, the old Hermetic maxim 'As Above, So Below' was taken very seriously.

During the 1990s I lived in Pasadena, not realising that Parsons' old OTO lodge would have been a short walk from my house - so the constant references to 'Orange Grove' as haven of Crowleyan magic were fun, as today it's a very vanilla middle class street.

An awful lot of virulent rubbish has been written about Parsons - it's common to see the usual reactionary tosh about him and Crowley being 'Satanists' (AM radio level analysis). You'll also hear him described as though he was some sort of blue-blood 33 degree baby-eating Illuminati insider. He's often incorrectly credited as a founder of Caltech (now that would be magic, as Caltech was founded 19 years before he was born); He did found JPL, but he was one member of a team of about half a dozen). Pendle's book gives a very different depiction from the usual inflated portrayals - but no less interesting because of it.

The occult blogs Daily Grail and Secret Sun take on the show.

Viewers expecting a giant owl from Bohemian Grove to devour babies in Canaanite rituals whilst being cheered by GOP Chamber of Commerce members are advised to prepare for bitter disappointment.

I'm really looking forward to seeing L. Ron Hubbard show up at some point - his interactions with Parsons will be, eh, most entertaining! Conjuring elementals with whom Parsons would try to conceive a Moonchild!

Hopefully the scene with the first ever use of SRBs on a prop plane will be worthy of the description in the book - it should be a 'Right Stuff' moment.

The book is a fun read, and feels like a TV show in waiting, so it's no surprise that it's finally going into production. Hopefully the show will do the subject justice. I wonder how Parsons would have turned out had he not died in a chemical explosion in 1952 (aged only 37). I imagine as the fifties and sixties rolled on, he'd have been caught up in all sorts of counter-cultural mischief.

Parson's poem 'I height Don Quixote':

I height Don Quixote, I live on Peyote,
    marihuana, morphine and cocaine.
I never knew sadness but only a madness
    that burns at the heart and the brain,
I see each charwoman ecstatic, inhuman,
    angelic, demonic, divine,
Each wagon a dragon, each beer mug a flagon
    that brims with ambrosial wine.
I went to the city and found it a pity
    the devil was playing at hell,
And ten million mortals had entered hell's portals
    and thought they were all doing well.
I said: "See, dear people, on every church steeple
    an imp of the devil at play,
See ghouls cut their capers in daily newspapers
    and fiends in police courts hold sway;
The mountains are palaces, women are chalices
    meant to be supped and not sold,
The desert a banquet hall set for a festival,
    ripe for the free and the bold;
The wind and the sky are ours, heaven and all its stars,
    waken, and do what you will;
Break with this demon spawn'd hel-inspired nightmare
    bond - Magick lies over the hill."

* * *

They said I was crazy, ambiguous, lazy,
    disgusting, fantastic, obscene;
So I hied for my sagebrush and cactus and corn mush,
    To see if the air was still clean.
Oh, I height Don Quixote, I live on peyote,
    marihuana, morphine and cocaine,
And may I be twice damned for a bank-clerk or store hand
    if I visit the city again.