Sex and Rockets Review

I have actually finished my Lent book in Lent (for a change) largely because my employer's hopeless IT department means that I can't actually do any work 😋
I am afraid that I don't really recommend the book, for two reasons:
1. Parsons lived in two very specialised worlds, Thelemic magic and rocket science  and a huge amount of the book is spent explaining these two things. I can't speak for the rocket scientists, but for the specialist magical reader this means that what is explained is usually already familiar.
2. We learn next to nothing of Parsons' own inner journey to magic, and the book repeatedly says, if he made notes of this, they have not survived.
What does strike me is that even as a man in his thirties, people keep commenting that Parsons was relatively young and easily-influenced. I have a feeling there is this in a lot of magical people, because there is no natural niche for us we tend to try to find one and fail. On the other hand the magical person would surely benefit from a youthful ability to see anyone as possible?

Not Showing Up Well

The virus hasn't noticeably shown us humans up in a very good light, has it. What with hoarding bog roll, crowding together in beauty spots, and what have you.

Our politicians have also been caught on the hop. Sigh. 

You will all know how obedient I am, so am obediently keeping away from fools and am working from home for the first time of my life. In true Hound fashion my notice is in and I have been offered another role in the same organisation. I should be able to transfer but I told HR if they mess it up I will have an enforced break at home because I am not in the habit of being spoken to like that. 

I do like the way water is running clear: see I could have told them humans were the problem! 

Spirit of Place: the Automated Car Park in the Bull Ring

Source

Today a post about a car park, specifically the automated one in the 1960s Bull Ring. You can see it in the top picture: it is behind the long pierced wall. I heard an anecdotal account that this car park was 'never' used because nobody would trust their car to the automated machinery, however I suspected that it was probably used when it was novel and then stopped being used, maybe for the reason of distrust. In short succession I have found a published account of what happened and urbex-style photos of the abandoned car park:

MORE than 40 years ago the Bull Ring shopping centre announced a revolution in car parking.

Owners said they had developed a sophisticated automated system which would see the end of scratched wheel rims and craning your neck as you reversed your vehicle into tight spaces.

Heralded as ‘the future in car parking’ the 1964 scheme, considered the height of high tech at the time, featured a concrete rolling block, which could move Ford Anglias and Austin 1100s into a space – after a fleet of attendants manually pushed the vehicles into a bay.

But – despite the developers’ high hopes – the scheme only lasted for three days.

And the concrete rollers which could have blazed a trail for car parking, if they had worked, were finally demolished when the shopping centre was rebuilt in the early 2000s. Source

So it seems the mechanism didn't work properly and I have also read elsewhere that it was too slow and people wouldn't wait. The article this quote comes from is about the Cube, but there is another automated system, in whatever Beetham Tower is called this week. True to form, it has stopped working and people's cars were trapped inside. You can see a bit of the Bull Ring system working in the video below.

I was delighted to find these pictures of the interior, which I think were taken in the nineties. I am ashamed to say I didn't make a note of where they came from, so if they are yours, please leave a comment or contact me and I will happily attribute or remove them.

My Lent Book

As is my custom, ruthlessly stolen from the Christians, once again I have taken up a book to feed me during the Lent I am not keeping. As we know, we witches aim to recreate a mythical golden age of feasting and joy in which misery and abnegation didn't happen - Z Budapest writes about this at length. The book I have taken this year is Sex and Rockets - the Occult World of Jack Parsons. I have only just started it and am afraid its main effect on me so far is to make me jealous that he could be in on the early years of a new technology, communicate with big names in the field, and pick and choose what research jobs he took - all completely self taught and with no degree at all. Parsons' field of work also seems to have been incredibly tolerant of eccentricity, and he would recite Crowley's Hymn to Pan from memory when a new rocket was being set off:

Thrill with lissome lust of the light,
O man! My man!
Come careering out of the night
Of Pan! Io Pan!
Io Pan! Io Pan! Come over the sea
From Sicily and from Arcady!
Roaming as Bacchus, with fauns and pards
And nymphs and satyrs for thy guards,
On a milk-white ass, come over the sea
To me, to me!
Come with Apollo in bridal dress
(Shepherdess and pythoness)
Come with Artemis, silken shod,
And wash thy white thigh, beautiful god,
In the moon of the woods, on the marble mount,
The dimpled dawn of the amber fount!
Dip the purple of passionate prayer
In the crimson shrine, the scarlet snare,
The soul that startles in eyes of blue
To watch thy wantonness weeping through
The tangled grove, the gnarled bole
Of the living tree that is spirit and soul
And body and brain — come over the sea,
(Io Pan! Io Pan!)
Devil or god, to me, to me,
My man! my man!
Come with trumpets sounding shrill
Over the hill!
Come with drums low muttering
From the spring!
Come with flute and come with pipe!
Am I not ripe?
I, who wait and writhe and wrestle
With air that hath no boughs to nestle
My body, weary of empty clasp,
Strong as a lion and sharp as an asp —
Come, O come!
I am numb
With the lonely lust of devildom.
Thrust the sword through the galling fetter,
All-devourer, all-begetter;
Give me the sign of the Open Eye,
And the token erect of thorny thigh,
And the word of madness and mystery,
O Pan! Io Pan!
Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan Pan! Pan,
I am a man:
Do as thou wilt, as a great god can,
O Pan! Io Pan!
Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! I am awake
In the grip of the snake.
The eagle slashes with beak and claw;
The gods withdraw:
The great beasts come. Io Pan! I am borne
To death on the horn
Of the Unicorn.
I am Pan! Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan!
I am thy mate, I am thy man,
Goat of thy flock, I am gold, I am god,
Flesh to thy bone, flower to thy rod.
With hoofs of steel I race on the rocks
Through solstice stubborn to equinox.
And I rave; and I rape and I rip and I rend
Everlasting, world without end,
Mannikin, maiden, Maenad, man,
In the might of Pan.
Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan! Io Pan!