Jon Atack is the author of A Piece of Blue Sky, one of the very best books on L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology. He has a new edition of the book for sale, and on Saturdays he’s helping us sift through the legends, myths, and contested facts about Scientology that tend to get hashed and rehashed in books, articles, and especially on the Internet.
Jon, for a few weeks now we’ve been bugging you about L. Ron Hubbard’s interest in Sex Magick and Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), which predated his work on Dianetics and Scientology. We know you covered it in depth in A Piece of Blue Sky, as have other writers, such as Lawrence Wright in Going Clear. But we have a reason for bringing it up, and we thought you might ease us into the subject again.
JON: When I first went to Saint Hill in the mid-70s, I was befriended by a Crowleyite named Carlos. He told me that Hubbard had set up Scientology as a beacon for the “mages” — of whom, he assured me, I was one. The vast majority of recruits would simply be drones, who would do our bidding at some future date. I believe Carlos went back to heroin addiction, in preference to the state of OT. We only met twice, but it made me watchful. I had no interest in magic (or heroin, for that matter, contrary to OSA rumors).
When I left, I met Steve Bisbey, who ran the Advanced Ability Centre, East Grinstead, and Ralph Hilton, who set up his own independent auditing practice. Both had come to Scientology from Crowley, as many did, after the Sunday Times exposed Hubbard’s involvement with Sex Magick. I liked Steve, but he had never abandoned his fondness for Crowley, and, indeed, the last time we met, he told me that he still “loved” Crowley’s work. Steve was a standard techie. Ralph Hilton mixed Crowleyite ideas into his practice. He did not necessarily inform his preclears of this.
I very soon found myself poring over Crowley texts to try and understand Hubbard. I was surprised to find that Hubbard had taken more ideas from Crowley and the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) than from any other place — including the trauma of birth, the use of “past lives” rather than “reincarnation,” and the “creative processing” which is the revelation of the Philadelphia Doctorate Course and allowed Hubbard to do something after he’d given Dianetics away.
Along the way, I spoke with John Symonds, who was Crowley’s literary executor and wrote The Great Beast about Crowley. He loathed Crowley and helped me to steer through the OTO material, until I realised that the Babalon Working rituals Hubbard performed after the war with Pasadena rocket scientist Jack Parsons had continued to become Scientology — Scientology is a magical “working,” where Hubbard elevated himself by enslaving others. I think I was the first person to show that Parsons and Hubbard had actually done the eighth ritual of the OTO (OTO VIII). Authors both before and since fail to mention that Babalon Working is simply a version of the eighth ritual, which was made public in Francis King’s Secret Rituals of the OTO. That the ritual is evidently gay (in both the accepted and the South Park sense, really) also seems to be avoided, but, given Hubbard’s horror of homosexuality, this is an important point. Hubbard has since turned up as Robert Heinlein’s lover in that famous author’s letters, so I’m told. Too late for poor Quentin Hubbard, who lost his life to his father’s public homophobia when he committed suicide in 1976.
Crowley was upset at the “idiocy” of Hubbard and Parsons (he called them “louts” which was mistranscribed as “goats” and is usually quoted so), not because they were trying to create a demonic force in human form, as he himself had tried to do, but because they had jumped steps on his “bridge.”
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