Evadare Volney's Blog - Posts Tagged "jack-parsons"

John Dee and the Empire of Angels: Enochian Magick and the Occult Roots of the Modern World by Jason Louv

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This was a fascinating read, and the most striking thing about it for me is the way it builds on earlier writers on Dee and his life and work like Dame Frances Yates and Benjamin Woolley to carry that legacy of, not just Hermetic magick but also his apocalyptic worldview, into the present day: through the Rosicrucian movement, the Order of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, and Jack Parsons (whom he compares to Dee as someone who was both a committed occultist and a pioneer in the cutting-edge science of his time and saw no conflict between the two whatsoever - a POV you'd expect in the 16th century but rather more striking, if not completely un-heard of, in the 20th). This is a brand-new book and it works events like the Trump election into a legacy of spiritual conflict and desire to take material control of occult energies that's rooted in the very history of Western religious iconography. Jason Louv also runs the Ultraculture blog (https://ultraculture.org/) and is deeply immersed in this background - I enjoyed this book immensely not only for its intense modern-day relevance but for the way the various characters in this centuries-long drama come through as people: flawed, sometimes unhinged, dedicated, torn between their mortal lives and the spiritual forces that pushed them beyond human limits.



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