But where did it go? Casting a wider net in the shadowy realms of fin de siècle mysticism offers up some surprising answers. Jack Parsons, one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech and an early pioneer of rocketry, counted himself as an adept of Alesteir Crowley — and so too, at one time, did Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Robert Openheimer famously quoted Vedic scripture (“Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds”) when he witnessed the first atomic bomb blast. But in the context of figures like Besant and Leadbeater, Oppenheimer’s fascination with Eastern mysticism seems less like a personal quirk and more like a thread in a larger tapestry: an interweaving of mysticism, technology, and art that began at the turn of the last century and is still with us in the twenty-first.