The n-Category Café

This person also has their name on the administration building at Caltech. It has many weird architectural details, e.g. skulls.

There was an article in the Caltech alumni magazine some years back making the case that this group of people (person, Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard if I remember right, others) were the ones that originally gave California its nutso reputation.

Even the second question is easily answered using Google.

Hm, there’s an awful lot of Crowley lore out there. Given the extensive involvement between said person and Crowley, is it clear that the second question has a unique answer?

I first learned of Crowley after viewing a very peculiar film, Lucifer Rising by Kenneth Anger. Have you seen that, John?

I don’t want to go off on this tangent, but he was also close to L. Ron Hubbard.

JPL still has many occult cliques within, unknown to the administration as such, as these folks are utterly good at what they do by day. JPL’s administered by Caltech, unlike the normal government facility. Caltech is a great believer of academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the like. Prof. Geoffrey Landis wrote a good book review (was that in American Scientist?) on 2 books about JPL History.

There was a flap in the last 1-2 years of the Bush administration about Homeland Security requiring all JPL employees to go through new background checks to be re-badged, which led to a lawsuit that got some national attention. Many eccentric scientists and engineers rightly objected to open-ended scrutiny of their sex lives and political affiliations.

This whole subject is no joking matter. Remember: every religion begins as a cult, though not every cult evolves into a religion. Rocketry itself was cult-like, in USA, Germany, Russia, other early experimenting nations. Impossible to separate from science fiction, and other imaginative influences, which it then re-influenced in weird feedback loops.

Jonathan, I guess John’s fishing for the word ‘scientology’. Perhaps his reasoning is ‘if even a complete nutter such as Crowley saw that Hubbard was a fraud, then why… etc, etc.’

I agree with Todd that the puzzle may have multiple answers. There’s a good story to be told about ‘Moonchild’ (added bonus: conspiracy theories regarding ???’s death).

No doubt John will tell us what we should have known if we would have been ‘erudite readers’ rather than merely persistent googlers.

A Satanist scientist?

Did C. S. Lewis know about this? Jack Parsons might have been the inspiration for N.I.C.E.

I almost hesitate to mention again that I’ve been working on for some years, and added 50,000 words since Xmas (250 double-spaced pages) of a novel “Axiomatic Magic” at an alternate history CIT (California Institute of Thaumaturgy), where Magic and Science coexist; Feynman is amateur sleuth in Sherlock Holmes style, Norbert Wiener in Nero Wolfe style. I’ve sent several chapters written as stand-alone short stories, novellas, novelettes to Analog, the New Yorker, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. There’s too much material in the actual Caltech archives; I’ve had to focus on the characters to make the story stronger. If I met Spielberg in an elevators, I’d pitch this as “Harry Potter meets A Beautiful Mind.” John Horton Conway is the prime suspect for a while. Composition of Spells defines a Groupoid. Not every spell has an inverse. There is a null spell as zero. It takes a while for the characters to figure out WHY someone would magically murder a Group theorist.

Hmmm … I had a friend in grade school who was into model rocketry, and I distinctly remember finding a book about the occult in his attic workshop.

From a Jack Parsons website, in the part of the David Wilson (Penn) interview which begins “The magical approach is technological in that you want to bring about changes in your own or others behavior, in the state of society, or in physical matter. But the starting point for effecting change is the consciousness of the magician himself. Or herself.”

Fascinating stuff guys! Just another of many reasons why I lurk around here (cuz I’m a mathematical illiterate ,but I figure it might trickle into me after maybe 10^43 years). Thanks for posting something I could actually read! ;-)
For some reason it makes me think of “weird California” and P.K. Dick’s “Confessions of a Crap Artist” and other vestiges of California weirdness like Korla Pandit and Candy Bar. Keep up the fun stuff and get back to your n-categories!