Free Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright Page B

ofCrowley—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 theHermetic Order of the Golden Dawn after feuding with some of its most prominent members, includingWilliam Butler Yeats, whom Crowley accused of being envious of his talentas a poet. He may have servedas 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 namedAiwass, 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 wiltshall be the whole of the law.”
    Nibs—Hubbard’s estrangedeldest son and namesake, L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. (he later changed his name to Ronald DeWolf)—claimedthat his father had read the book when he was sixteen years old and developed a lifelong allegiance toblack magic. “What a lot of peopledon’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 betweenHubbard and Crowley is the latter’s assertion that “spiritual progress did not dependon 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 hisBridge to Total Freedom.
    Although Hubbard mentions Crowley only glancingly in alecture—calling him “my very good friend”—they never actually met. Crowley died in 1947 at the age of seventy-two. “That’s when Dad decidedthat 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 womanriding 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 wandwith material basis on