Let's Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky: Hubbard, Dianetics and Scientology (19 page)

L. Ron Hubbard was still an officer of the US Navy
because [sic] he was well known as a writer and a philosopher and had friends
amongst the physicists, he was sent in to handle the situation. He went to live
at the house and investigated the black magic rites and the general situation
and found them very bad.

Parsons wrote to Crowley in England about Hubbard.
Crowley “the Beast 666” evidently detected an enemy and warned Parsons. This is
all proven by the correspondence unearthed by the
Sunday Times
.
Hubbard's mission was successful far beyond anyone's expectations. The house
was torn down. Hubbard rescued a girl they were using. The black magic group
was dispersed and destroyed and has never recovered. The physicists included
many of the 64 top US scientists who were later declared insecure and dismissed
from government service with so much publicity.

During the Scientologists' case against Gerry Armstrong in
1984, the original of this peculiar statement was produced.
⁴
It is
in Hubbard's handwriting. The statement is confusing and is mistaken on several
points. Karl Germer, not Parsons, was in charge of Crowley's organization in
America. Parsons, known as “Frater Belarion” or “Frater 210,”
⁵
was
head of the single “Church of Thelema” or “Agape Lodge,” in Pasadena. Hubbard's
opening statement, the claim to have broken up black magic in America, is of
course ridiculous. Hubbard did, however, contribute significantly to Jack
Parsons' later financial difficulties. There is no evidence to support the claim
that Hubbard was working for “Intelligence.” Parsons' FBI file shows that he
was routinely investigated from 1943 onwards, because of his peculiar
lifestyle. There is no mention of Hubbard in the file, and despite
investigations, Parsons retained his high security classification until shortly
before his death in 1952.

However, the Scientology statement does admit Hubbard's
involvement with Parsons. In a “Bulletin” written for Scientologists in 1957,
Hubbard said this of the man whose black magic group he had “dispersed”:

One chap by the way, gave us solid fuel rockets and assist
take-offs for airplanes too heavily loaded, and all the rest of this rocketry
panorama, and who formed Aerojet in California and so on. The late Jack Parsons
... was not a chemist, the way we think of chemists ... He eventually became
quite a man.

Parsons was indeed “quite a man.” He was one of the
developers of Jet Assisted Take-Off (“JATO”) units, and an original member of
Cal-Tech's rocket project, which became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Hubbard also had something to say about Aleister Crowley,
Parsons' mentor, and the most notorious practitioner of black magic of the 20th
century. Crowley was a determined opponent of Christianity, who had proclaimed:
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” He was well known for his
defiance of conventional morality. Crowley recorded his considerable abuse of
drugs in
The Diary of a Drug Fiend
, and his bizarre sexual practices in
numerous other works. He called himself the “Beast,” after the “Beast” spoken
of in the biblical Revelation of St John the Divine.

In the Scientology “Philadelphia Doctorate Course” lectures,
given by Hubbard in 1952, there are several references to Crowley.
⁷
Hubbard made it clear that he had read Crowley's pivotal
Book of the Law
.
He also said: “The magic cults of the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th centuries in
the Middle East were fascinating. The only work that has anything to do with
them is a trifle wild in spots, but it's fascinating work ... written by Aleister
Crowley, the late Aleister Crowley, my very good friend ... It's very
interesting reading to get hold of a copy of a book, quite rare, but it can be
obtained,
The Master Therion
... by Aleister Crowley. He signs himself
'The Beast', the mark of the Beast, six sixty-six.”

In another Hubbard lecture we are told: “One fellow,
Aleister Crowley, picked up a level of religious worship which is very
interesting - oh boy! The Press played hockey with his head for his whole
life-time.
The Great Beast
- 666. He just had another level of religious
worship. Yes, sir, you're free to worship everything under the Constitution so
long as it's Christian.”
⁸

Jack Parsons wrote to Crowley early in 1946
⁹
:

About 3 months ago I met Capt. [sic] L. Ron Hubbard a
writer and explorer of whom I had known for some time... [no omission] He is a
gentleman, red hair, green eyes, honest and intelligent and we have become
great friends. He moved in with me about 2 months ago, and although Betty and I
are still friendly, she has transferred her sexual affections to him.

Although he has no formal training in Magick he has
an extraordinary amount of experience and understanding in the field. From some
of his experiences I deduce he is in direct touch with some higher
intelligence, possibly his Guardian Angel. He is the most Thelemic person I
have ever met and is in complete accord with our own principles. He is also interested
in establishing the New Aeon, but for cogent reasons I have not introduced him
to the Lodge.

We are pooling our resources in a partnership which
will act as a parent company to control our business ventures. I think I have
made a great gain and as Betty and I are the best of friends, there is little
loss...

I need a magical partner. I have many experiments in
mind. I hope my elemental gets off the dime [gets moving] - the next time I tie
up with a woman it will be on [my] own terms.

“Betty” was both Parsons' sister-in-law (his wife's sister)
and his mistress. Her full name was Sara Elizabeth Northrup, and there is no
doubt that she was the girl Hubbard “rescued” from Parsons. She was later to
play an important part in the creation of Dianetics.

Parsons' house was a meeting place for a group of
California's eccentrics; so many people met Hubbard during his stay there. Science-fiction
fan Alva Rogers gave a detailed account of the comings and goings of the
“Parsonage.” He said the place was run as a “co-operative rooming house,” so
Parsons could afford to keep it up: “In the ads placed in the local paper Jack
specified that only bohemians, artists, musicians, atheists, anarchists, or
other exotic types need apply for rooms.”
¹⁰

Rogers struck up a relationship with a girl who lived in the
house, and came to know Parsons and Betty quite well. He gave this description
of Parsons: “Jack was the antithesis of the common image of the Black Magician
... he bore little resemblance to his revered Master, Aleister Crowley, either
in looks or in his personal conduct. He was a good looking man ... urbane and
sophisticated, and possessed a fine sense of humor. He never, as far as I saw,
indulged in any of the public scatological crudities which characterized
Crowley ... I always found Jack's insistence that he believed in and practiced
magic hard to reconcile with his educational and cultural background.”

Of Sara “Betty” Northrup, Rogers wrote: “She was young,
blonde, very attractive, full of
joie de vivre
, thoughtful, humorous,
generous, and all that. She assisted Jack in the O.T.O. and seemed to possess
the same devotion to it and to Crowley as did Jack.”

Roger's impression of Hubbard was favorable:

I liked Ron from the first. He was of medium build, red
headed, wore horn-rimmed glasses, and had a tremendously engaging personality.
For several weeks he dominated the scene with his wit and inexhaustible fund of
anecdotes. About the only thing he seemed to take seriously and be prideful of
was his membership in the Explorers Club (of which he was the youngest member)
which he claimed he had received after leading an expedition into the wilds of
South America, or some such godforsaken place. Ron showed us scars on his body
which he claimed were made by aboriginal arrows on this expedition ...
Unfortunately, Ron's reputation for spinning tall tales (both off and on the
printed page) made for a certain degree of skepticism in the minds of his
audience. At any rate, he told one hell of a good story.

Alva Rogers had no involvement with Parsons' attempt to
conjure a “Moonchild.” To Aleister Crowley the personification of female-kind
was “Babalon,” his capricious respelling of Babylon.
¹¹
Chapter seventeen
of St. John's Revelation tells of “Babylon the Great,” the “Scarlet Woman”:

With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication,
and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her
fornication ... I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet colored beast, full of names
of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in
purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls,
having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her
fornication: And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon the
Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth. And I saw the woman
drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of
Jesus.

Crowley's black magic centered upon Babalon, and he
identified himself with the “Beast” upon which Babalon is to ride in her
conquest of the Earth. In his novel,
The Moonchild
, Crowley described
the creation of an “homunculus,” elsewhere described by him as “a living being
in form resembling man, and possessing those qualities of man which distinguish
him from beasts, namely intellect and power of speech, but neither begotten and
born in the manner of human generation, nor inhabited by a human soul.” Crowley
said this was “the great idea of magicians of all times: to obtain a Messiah by
some adaptation of the sexual process.” Crowley's “Messiah” was the Antichrist
who would overthrow Christianity: Babalon the Great.
¹²

The secret rituals of Crowley's “Ordo Templi Orientis” were
made public by Francis King in 1973. They lay out the strict sequence of mystic
rites and initiations that the adept is to follow as a series of “degrees.”
Jack Parsons was intent upon conjuring Babalon as a “Moonchild.” He wanted to
incarnate the “Eternal Whore” in human form using Crowley's Rituals. The
ceremonies, which Parsons recorded, are known as “The Babalon Working.”
Parsons' transcription was later typed and given very limited distribution as
“The Book of Babalon.”

In January 1946, Parsons performed the “VIIIth degree” of
the OTO, with Hubbard's assistance. The ritual is called “Concerning the Secret
Marriages of Gods with Men,” or the “Magic Masturbation.”
¹³
After a
lengthy preamble to the ritual we find the following, under the title “Of Great
Marriages”:

On every occasion before sleep let the Adept figure
his goddess before him, wooing her ardently in imagination and exalting himself
with all intensity toward her.

Therefore, with or without an assistant, let him purge
himself freely and fully, at the end of restraint trained and ordered unto
exhaustion, concentrating ever ardently upon the Body of the Great Goddess, and
let the Offering be preserved in Her consecrated temple or in a talisman
especially prepared for this practice. And let no desire for any other enter
the heart. Then shall it be in the end that the Great Goddess will descend and
clothe Her beauty in veils of flesh, surrendering her chaste fortress of
Olympus to that assault of thee, O Titan, Son of Earth!

It does not take much imagination to understand what Hubbard
was watching Parsons do. The ritual took place over 12 consecutive nights in
January 1946.
¹⁴
To the strains of a Prokofiev violin concerto, Parsons
made a series of 11 invocations, including the “Conjuration of Air,” the
“Consecration of Air Dagger” and the “Invocation of Wand With Material Basis on
Talisman.” John Symonds, in his book
The Great Beast
, explains that “wand”
is a Crowleyism for “penis.”
¹⁵
A disappointed Parsons wrote to
Crowley “nothing seems to have happened.”

One night, there was a power failure, but nothing more
eventful, until January 14, when a candle was knocked from Hubbard's hand.
Parsons said, “He [Hubbard] called me, and we observed a brownish yellow light
about seven feet high in the kitchen. I banished with a magical sword, and it
disappeared. His [Hubbard's] right arm was paralyzed [sic] for the rest of the
night.”

The next night, Hubbard saw a vision of one of Parsons'
enemies. Parsons described this in a letter to Crowley, adding: “He attacked
this figure and pinned it to the door with four throwing knives, with which he
is expert.” In the same letter, Parsons spoke of Hubbard's guardian angel
again: “Ron appears to have some sort of highly developed astral vision. He
described his angel as a beautiful winged woman with red hair, whom he calls
the Empress, and who has guided him through his life and saved him many times
... Recently, he says, because of some danger, she has called the Archangel
Michael to guard us ... Last night after invoking, I called him in, and he
described Isis nude on the left, and a faint figure of past, partly mistaken
operations on the right, and a rose wood box with a string of green beads, a
string of pearls with a black cross suspended, and a rose.”

Parsons performed rituals which led up to “an operation of
symbolic birth.” Then he settled down to wait. For four days he experienced
“tension and unease ... Then, on January 18, at sunset, while the Scribe [Ron
Hubbard] and I were on the Mojave Desert, the feeling of tension suddenly
snapped ... I returned home, and found a young woman answering the requirements
waiting for me.”

The woman was Marjorie Cameron. Parsons wrote to Crowley: “I
seem to have my elemental. She turned up one night after the conclusion of the
operation and has been with me since ... She has red hair and slant green eyes
as specified.”