Going Clear

by Lawrence Wright

  In October, he got another assignment, this time as the navigation officer on the cargo ship the USS Algol. The US Navy and Marines had begun their final island-hopping campaign before the expected invasion of Japan itself—Operation Downfall. Millions of Allied casualties were forecast. For a man who wanted to be a hero, there would be a genuine opportunity. Instead, Hubbard requested a transfer to the School of Military Government at Princeton. “Once conversant with the following languages, but require review: Japanese, Spanish, Chamorro, Tagalog, Peking Pidgin and Shanghai Pidgin,” Hubbard wrote in his application, adding, “Experienced in handling natives, all classes, in various parts of world.” Through all the carnage, the end of the war was lurching into view, and the likely occupation of Japan was on the horizon. A polyglot such as Hubbard claimed to be would certainly find a place in the future administration.

  When he arrived in Princeton, in September 1944, Hubbard fell in with a group of science-fiction writers who had been organized into an informal military think tank by his friend Robert Heinlein. The Navy was looking for ways to counter the kamikaze suicide attacks on Allied ships, which had begun that fall as desperation took hold of the Japanese military planners. Hubbard would spend weekends in Philadelphia at the Heinleins’ apartment, along with some other of his former colleagues, including his former editor, John Campbell, gaming different scenarios for the Navy. (Some of their suggestions were actually tested in combat, but none proved useful.) Heinlein was extremely solicitous of his old friend, remarking, “Ron had had a busy war—sunk four times and wounded again and again.” The fact that Hubbard had an affair with Heinlein’s wife didn’t seem to affect his deep regard. “He almost forced me to sleep with his wife,” Hubbard later marveled.

  There was another lissome young woman hanging around with the science-fiction crowd: Vida Jameson, whose father, Malcolm, was a part of the Campbell group of Astounding writers. “Quiet, shy little greymouse,” one of the crowd described Vida, “with great soulful black eyes and a habit of listening.” She was twenty-eight, and already selling stories to the Saturday Evening Post, a more respectable literary endeavor than the pulps. Hubbard proposed to her. She knew he was married and refused his offer; still, she was captivated by him and continued her relationship with him until after the war.

  Hubbard graduated from the School of Military Government in January 1945, and was ordered to proceed to Monterey, California, to join a civil affairs team, which would soon follow the invading forces. The Battle of Okinawa, in southern Japan, got under way that spring, creating the highest number of casualties in the Pacific Theater. Kamikaze attacks were at their peak. American troops suffered more than 60,000 casualties in less than three months. Japanese forces were fighting to the death. The savagery and scale of the combat has rarely been equaled.

  Once again, Hubbard stood on the treacherous precipice, where the prospect of heroic action awaited him—or else indignity, or a death that would be obscured by the deaths of tens of thousands of others. One month after the invasion of Okinawa, Hubbard was admitted to the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California, complaining of stomach pains.

  This is a key moment in the narrative of Dianetics and Scientology. “Blinded with injured optic nerves and lame with physical injuries to hip and back at the end of World War II, I faced an almost nonexistent future,” Hubbard writes of himself during this period. “I was abandoned by my family and friends as a supposedly hopeless cripple.” Hubbard says he healed himself of his traumatic injuries, using techniques that would become the foundation of Dianetics and Scientology. “I had no one to help me; what I had to know I had to find out,” he recalled. “And it’s quite a trick studying when you cannot see.”

  Doctors at Oak Knoll were never sure exactly what was wrong with him, except for a recurrence of his ulcer. In records of Hubbard’s many physical examinations and X-rays, the doctors make no note of scars or evidence of wounds, nor do his military records show that he was ever injured during the war.

  In the hospital, Hubbard says, he was also given a psychiatric examination. To his alarm, the doctor wrote two pages of notes. “And I was watching this, you know, saying, ‘Well, have I gone nuts, after all?’ ” He conspired to take a look at the records to see what the doctor had written. “I got to the end and it said, ‘In short, this officer has no neurotic or psychotic tendencies of any kind whatsoever.’ ” (There is no psychiatric evaluation contained in Hubbard’s medical records.)

  POLLY AND THE TWO CHILDREN had spent the war waiting for Ron on their plot in Port Orchard, but there was no joyous homecoming. “My wife left me while I was in a hospital with ulcers,” Hubbard noted. “It was a terrible blow when she left me for I was ill and without prospects.”

  Soon after leaving the hospital, Hubbard towed a house trailer behind an old Packard to Southern California, where so many ambitious and rootless members of his generation were seeking their destiny. There was a proliferation of exotic new religions in America and many other countries, caused by the tumult of war and disruptions of progress that older denominations weren’t prepared to solve. Southern California was filled with migrants who weren’t tied to old creeds and were ready to experiment with new ways of thinking. The region was swarming with Theosophists, Rosicrucians, Zoroastrians, and Vedantists. Swamis, mystics, and gurus of many different faiths pulled acolytes into their orbits.

  The most brilliant member of this galaxy of occultists was John Whiteside Parsons, known as Jack, a rocket scientist working at what would later become the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Technical Institute. (Parsons, who has a crater on the Moon named after him, developed solid rocket fuel.) Darkly handsome and brawny, later called by some scholars the “James Dean of the occult,” Parsons was a science-fiction fan and an outspoken advocate of free love. He acquired a three-story Craftsman-style mansion, with a twelve-car garage, at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena—a sedate, palm-lined street known as Millionaires Row. The house had once belonged to Arthur H. Fleming, a logging tycoon and philanthropist, who had hosted former president Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and Albert Einstein in its oval dining room. The street had also been home to William Wrigley, of the chewing-gum fortune, and the beer baron Adolph Busch, whose widow still lived next door.

  She must have been appalled to watch as Parsons divided the historic home and the coach house behind it into nineteen apartments, then advertised for renters. He sought artists, anarchists, and musicians—the more Bohemian the better. “Must not believe in God,” the ad stated. Among those passing through the “Parsonage” were an aging actress from the silent movie era, an opera singer, several astrologers, an ex-convict, and the chief engineer for the development of the atomic bomb. A number of children from various alliances constantly raced through the house. Parsons threw parties that featured “women in diaphanous gowns,” as one visitor observed, who “would dance around a pot of fire, surrounded by coffins topped with candles.” Parsons turned the mansion into the headquarters of the Agapé Lodge, a branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a secret fraternal organization dedicated to witchcraft and sexual “magick,” based on the writings of the notorious British writer and provocateur Aleister Crowley, whose glowering countenance was captured in a portrait hanging in the stairwell.

  Despite the bizarre atmosphere that he cultivated, Parsons took his involvement in the OTO seriously, making brazen ethical claims for his movement—claims that would sound familiar when Scientology arose only a few years later. “The breakup of the home and family, the confusion in problems of morals and behavior, the frustration of the individual need for love, self-expression and freedom, and the immanence of the total destruction of western civilization all indicate the need for a basic reexamination and alteration of individual and social values,” Parsons writes in a brief manifesto. “Mature investigation on the part of philosophers and social scientists have [sic] indicated the existence of only one force of sufficient power to solve these problems and
effect the necessary changes, and that is the force of a new religion.”

  TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD SARA ELIZABETH “BETTY” NORTHRUP, Parsons’s feisty mistress, was the younger sister of his wife, who had run off with another man. Sara was tall, blond, buxom, and wild, often claiming to have lost her virginity at the age of ten. “Her chief interest in life is amusement,” one of the boarders observed. But she was also quick and intelligent and full of joy, delighting everyone around her. She had become involved with Parsons, who was ten years older, when she was fifteen. Her parents tolerated the relationship; in fact, her indulgent father helped bankroll the Parsonage, which Sara purchased jointly with Parsons while she was still a teenager. One evening Robert Heinlein appeared at the house, bringing along his friend L. Ron Hubbard, who was wearing dark glasses and carrying a silver-handled cane. “He was not only a writer but he was a captain of a ship that had been downed in the Pacific and he was weeks on a raft and had been blinded by the sun and his back had been broken,” Sara later recalled. “I believed everything he said.”

  A few months later, Hubbard moved in. He made an immediate, vivid impression on the other boarders. “He dominated the scene with his wit and inexhaustible fund of anecdotes,” one of the boarders, Alva Rogers, later recalled. “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.” Like Hubbard, Rogers had red hair, and he was intrigued by Hubbard’s theory that redheads are the living remnant of the Neanderthals.

  Hubbard invited one of his paramours from New York, Vida Jameson, to join him at the Parsonage, with the ostensible task of keeping the books. It’s a testimony to his allure that she came all the way across America to be with him, although soon after she arrived, she discovered that she had been displaced.

  The other boarders watched in astonishment as Hubbard worked his charms on the available women in the household, before setting his sights on “the most gorgeous, intelligent, sweet, wonderful girl,” as another envious suitor described Sara Northrup. “There he was, living off Parsons’ largesse and making out with his girlfriend right in front of him. Sometimes when the two of them were sitting at the table together, the hostility was almost tangible.” Enlivened, no doubt, by their rivalry over Sara, Parsons and Hubbard quickly developed a highly competitive relationship. They liked to begin their mornings with a bout of fencing in the living room.

  Parsons struggled with his feelings of jealousy, which were at war with his philosophy of free love. He could understand Northrup’s attraction to the new boarder, describing Hubbard in a letter to Crowley in 1946 as “a gentleman, red hair, green eyes, honest and intelligent.… He moved in with me about two months ago.” Then Parsons admits, “Although Betty and I are still friendly, she has transferred her sexual affections to Ron.” He went on to admire Hubbard’s supernatural abilities. “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 deduced that he is in direct touch with some higher intelligence, possibly his Guardian Angel. He describes 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.”

  The extent to which Scientology was influenced by Hubbard’s involvement with the OTO has long been a matter of angry debate. There is little trace in Hubbard’s life of organized religion or spiritual philosophy. In the Parsonage, he was drawn into an obscure and stigmatized creed, based on the writings and practice of Crowley—the “Great Beast,” as he called himself—who gloried in being one of the most reviled men of his era. The Church of Scientology explicitly rejects any connection between Crowley’s thinking and Hubbard’s emerging philosophy; yet the two men were similar in striking ways. Like Hubbard, Crowley reveled in a life of constant physical, spiritual, and sexual exploration. He was a daring, even reckless mountaineer, and his exploits included several failed attempts to climb the world’s most formidable peaks. He, too, was a prolific writer who authored novels and plays as well as books on magic and mysticism. Boisterous and highly self-regarding, he had been kicked out of an occult society called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn after feuding with some of its most prominent members, including William Butler Yeats, whom Crowley accused of being envious of his talent as a poet. He may have served as a British spy while living in America during World War I, despite the fact that he was constantly publishing anti-British propaganda. Crowley relied on opiates and hallucinogens to enhance his spiritual pursuits. During an excursion to Cairo in 1904, he discovered his Holy Guardian Angel, a disembodied spirit named Aiwass, who claimed to be a messenger from the Egyptian god Horus. Crowley said that over a period of three days, Aiwass dictated to him an entire cosmology titled The Book of the Law, the main principle of which was, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

  Nibs—Hubbard’s estranged eldest son and namesake, L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. (he later changed his name to Ronald DeWolf)—claimed that his father had read the book when he was sixteen years old and developed a lifelong allegiance to black magic. “What a lot of people don’t realize is that Scientology is black magic just spread out over a long time period,” he contended. “Black magic is the inner core of Scientology—and it is probably the only part of Scientology that really works.”

  One striking parallel between Hubbard and Crowley is the latter’s assertion that “spiritual progress did not depend on religious or moral codes, but was like any other science.” Crowley argued that by advancing through a graded series of rituals and spiritual teachings, the adept could hope to make it across “The Abyss,” which he defined as “the gulf existing between individual and cosmic consciousness.” It is an image that Hubbard would evoke in his Bridge to Total Freedom.

  Although Hubbard mentions Crowley only glancingly in a lecture—calling him “my very good friend”—they never actually met. Crowley died in 1947 at the age of seventy-two. “That’s when Dad decided that he would take over the mantle of the Beast and that is the seed and the beginning of Dianetics and Scientology,” Nibs later said. “It was his goal to be the most powerful being in the universe.”

  JACK PARSONS EXPERIMENTED with Crowley’s rituals, taking them in his own eccentric direction. His personal brand of witchcraft centered on the adoration of female carnality, an interest Hubbard evidently shared. Parsons recorded in his journal that Hubbard had a vision of “a savage and beautiful woman riding naked on a great cat-like beast.” That became the inspiration for Parsons’s most audacious mystical experiment. He appointed Hubbard to be his “scribe” in a ceremony called the “Babalon Working.” It was based on Crowley’s notion that the supreme goal of the magician’s art was to create a “moonchild”—a creature foretold in one of Crowley’s books who becomes the Antichrist. Night after night, Parsons and Hubbard invoked the spirit world in a quest to summon up a “Scarlet Woman,” the female companion who would play the role of Parsons’s consort. The ceremony, likely aided by narcotics and hallucinogens, required Hubbard to channel the female deity of Babalon as Parsons performed the “invocation of wand with material basis on talisman”—in other words, masturbating on a piece of parchment. He typically invoked twice a night.

  Parsons records that during one of these evenings a candle was forcibly knocked out of Hubbard’s hand: “We observed a brownish yellow light about seven feet high in the kitchen. I brandished a magical sword and it disappeared. His right arm was paralyzed for the rest of the night.” On another occasion, he writes, Hubbard saw the astral projection of one of Parsons’s enemies manifest himself in a black robe. “Ron promptly launched an attack and pinned the phantom figure to the door with four throwing knives.”

  Evidently, the spirits relented. One day, an attractive young woman named Marjorie Cameron showed up at the Parsonage. Parsons later claimed that a bolt of lightning had struck outside, f
ollowed by a knock at the door. A beautiful woman was standing there. She had been in a traffic accident. “I don’t know where I am or where I’ve come from,” she told him. (Cameron’s version is that she had been interested in the stories of the naked women jumping over fires in the garden, and she persuaded a friend who was boarding at the Parsonage to take her for a visit.) “I have my elemental!” Parsons exclaimed in a note to Crowley a few days later. “She has red hair and slant green eyes as specified.… She is an artist, strong minded and determined, with strong masculine characteristics and a fanatical independence.”

  The temple was lit with candles, the room suffused with incense, and Rachmaninoff’s “Isle of the Dead” was playing in the background. Dressed in a hooded white robe, and carrying a lamp, Hubbard intoned, “Display thyself to Our Lady; dedicate thy organs to Her, dedicate thy heart to Her, dedicate thy mind to Her, dedicate thy soul to Her, for She shall absorb thee, and thou shalt become living flame before She incarnates.” Whereupon Parsons and Cameron responded, “Glory unto the Scarlet Woman, Babalon, the Mother of Abominations, that rideth upon the Beast.” Then, as Hubbard continued the incantation, Parsons and Cameron consummated the ceremony upon the altar. This same ritual went on for three nights in a row. Afterward, Parsons wrote to Crowley, “Instructions were received direct through Ron, the seer.… I am to act as instructor guardian guide for nine months; then it will be loosed on the world.”

  Crowley was unimpressed. “Apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is producing a Moonchild,” he complained to another follower. “I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these goats.” Cameron did become pregnant, but got an abortion, with Parsons’s consent, so it’s unclear exactly what this ceremony was designed to produce. (Parsons and Cameron later married and aborted another pregnancy.) Nonetheless, Parsons asserted that the ritual had been a success. “Babalon is incarnate upon the earth today, awaiting the proper hour for her manifestation,” he wrote after the ceremony. “And in that day my work will be accomplished, and I shall be blown away upon the Breath of the father.”