The Setting

The relationship between Jack (John) Whitesides Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard which culminated in the ritual documented in The BABALON Working has been written about by those interested in the occult side of the equation (i.e. Parsons) and those investigating Hubbard and or Scientology. This gives an interesting range of perspective, since the affair is important to the two points of view for wholly different reasons; in the case of Parsons, he is seen as an immediate successor (and therefore a link) to Aleister Crowley; for Hubbard, the story really begins after, and his entanglement with the OTO and Parsons is an important indication of where he was coming from as he founded Dianetics and then Scientology.

Several controversial studies of the founder and chief prophet of Scientology have been written and are, in part due to the tendency of The Church of Scientology to vigorously attack critics through libel and copyright litigation, available for free on the Internet. Of these, The Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller focuses on the life of Hubbard while A Piece of Blue Sky by John Atak is an expose` on “Scientology, Dianetics and L. Ron Hubbard”. Both books devote a chapter to Hubbard’s time in Southern California, Miller’s book titles the section, appropriately, “Black Magick and Betty”.

As for Parsons, Sorcerer of the Apocalypse by Michael Staley , a lengthy essay reprinted in the Feral House Pub. infamous Apocalypse Culture (Adam Parfrey, ed.) was one of the first biographical sketches of Jack Parsons to reach a wider readership than the work of Kenneth Grant, who undoubtedly is responsible for the interest the story has gained in Thelemic circles over the last couple of decades, particularly his Magical Revival devoted to Parsons in . Recently, a book length biography of Parsons, focusing on his occult activities, was published by Adam Parfrey’s Feral House, bearing the fitting title Sex and Rockets, the author a pseudonymous Jack Carter (of Mars?) containing a great deal of background and many salacious bits of speculation but not much really new (or at least interesting) concerning Jack Parsons’ life and untimely death.

Finally, there is also a brief note penned by LRH when,

(i)n 1969, the London Sunday Times exposed Hubbard's magickal connections. The Scientologists threatened legal action, and the Sunday Times, unsure of its legal position, paid a small out-of-court settlement. Without retracting their earlier article, they printed a statement submitted by the Scientologists. (Atak, 70)

It is probable the statement was written by Hubbard himself. We will return to it later .

Leaving aside Hubbard’s apologia, it is useful to compare differing accounts of what went on, particularly in regard to the author’s main subject and his attitude towards it. Interestingly, while the occult historians tend to be sympathetic to Parsons and the Scientologist authors less so, neither have much good to say about Hubbard.

The authors writing about Scientology (Scientologist authors) tend to view Hubbard as genuine practitioner of magick, invariably described as ‘black magic’ which implies the magicians goals were nefarious, materialistic and self-centered in nature. . Which is to say, while this does not proves that Hubbard held a belief in the (supernatural) efficacy of magic, he was no bystander. A strong case, in fact, can be made that Scientology is simply magic stripped of its trappings and dressed up as science; there is a good deal of occult theory in the writing of Hubbard, though presented with a veneer of modernity. The scientology focused works tend to have an outsider view of occult practices, which is to say, the perspective of all but the tiniest fraction of the population. This seems to inspire a lot of erroneous detail. For example,

In 1939, Parsons … joined the OTO, Ordo Templi Orientis, an international organization founded by Crowley to practice sexual magic. [ in fact the OTO originated in Germany and Crowley was the head of the order only in Great Britain. The OTO, like most secret societies, was suppressed by the Nazis, leaving the only surviving lodges in England under Crowley ]
A lodge had been set up in Los Angeles and met in a suitably sequestered attic. Meetings were conducted by a priestess swathed in diaphanous gauze, who climbed out of a coffin to perform mystic, and painstakingly blasphemous, rites.[Here, the author is probably talking about the Gnostic Mass devised by Crowley, which is led by a Priest and Priestess, has no coffin (nor does any other Thelemic ritual I am aware of) in it and is in no way blasphemous, at least in the sense that it was parody of Christian (or other) rites].
(Atak, 70)

This is typical of such work and is not of import to the main point of their individual books, but is a warning as to the accuracy of certain details, at least insofar as accepting conclusions without corroboration.

On the other hand, the Scientologists make a point that is glossed in the occult chroniclers, namely the fact that while Parsons was the performer of the rites (the operator) it was Hubbard that acted as the Medium (called, confusingly, the scribe in Liber 49) and so the communication came through him. It is this fact that opens the Pandora’s box that is Hubbard’s (and thus Scientology’s) relationship with magick. This is because nature of the ritual, an invocation, requires that the spirit being summoned is drawn into the body of the seer or clairvoyant. Therefore, leaving aside for the moment the question of whether or not magick actually allows one to call down gods or daemons or is, rather a generator of psychological phenomenon, the ritual put Hubbard into direct communion with BABALON, a phenomenon found in most religions in some sense and known to most people as possession.

The occult oriented writers usually point out that Hubbard was a con artist (correctly, as we shall see) and dismiss him out-of-hand. They give little attention to the fact that Hubbard may have been the key player in the performance ‘Working’ . The entire episode has many striking parallels with the relationship between Jon Dee, the English Renaissance man and creator of the Enochian (Angelic) system of magic and his own clairvoyant or scryer Edward Talbot, aka Kelley. While this is not directly important to the current study, there are several good studies of Dee and Kelley which should provide a great deal of insight as to the nature of both the relationship between Parsons and Hubbard and the Babalon Working in general.

Dramatis Personae:

In any case, the background and main players in this story are:

1. Jack Parsons – “John Whiteside Parsons was born on 2 October 1914 in Los Angeles, California. His mother and father separated whilst he was quite young and Parsons said later that this left him with "...a hatred of authority and a spirit of revolution", as well as an Oedipal attachment to his mother. He felt withdrawn and isolated as a child, and was bullied by other children. This gave him, he thought, "...the requisite contempt for the crowd and for the group mores” … Parsons … went on to develop a career as a brilliant scientist in the fields of explosives and rocket-fuel technology. His achievements as a scientist were such that the Americans named a lunar crater after him when they came to claim that territory for their own. Appropriately enough, Crater Parsons is on the dark side of the moon.
Parsons made contact with the O.T.O and the A.'.A.'. in December 1938, whilst visiting Agape Lodge of the O.T.O. in California.” (Staley).

Parsons belief and commitment to Crowley and his teachings is not in doubt.

2. L. (Lafayette) Ron Hubbard - During the 1920s, L. Ron Hubbard traveled twice to the Far East to visit his parents during his father's posting to the United States Navy base on Guam.
Although he claimed to have graduated in civil engineering from George Washington University as a nuclear physicist, university records show that he attended for only two years, was on academic probation, failed in physics, and dropped out in 1931. It is also claimed that he obtained his Ph.D from Sequoia University in California, which was later exposed as a mail-order diploma mill. [2] [3]
Hubbard next pursued writing, publishing many stories and novellas in pulp magazines during the 1930s.[4] He became a well-known author in the science fiction and fantasy genres, and also published westerns and adventure stories. Critics often cite "Final Blackout", set in a war-ravaged future Europe, and "Fear", a psychological horror story, as the best examples of Hubbard's pulp fiction. His 1938 manuscript "Excalibur" contained many concepts and ideas that later turned up in Scientology. [5]
Hubbard married Margaret "Polly" Grubb in 1933, with whom he fathered two children, L. Ron, Jr. (1934–1991) and Katherine May (born 1936). They lived in Bremerton, Washington during the late 1930s.

Hubbard married Margaret "Polly" Grubb in 1933, with whom he fathered two children, L. Ron, Jr. (1934–1991) and Katherine May (born 1936). They lived in Bremerton, Washington during the late 1930s.
… One afternoon in August 1945, Lou Goldstone, a well-known science-fiction illustrator and a frequent visitor to South Orange Grove Avenue, turned up with L. Ron Hubbard, who was then on leave from the Navy. Jack Parsons liked Ron immediately, perhaps recognized in him a kindred spirit, and invited him to move in for the duration of his leave. (Miller, 103)

Sara “Betty” Northrup - In the summer of 1944, Helen Parsons left her husband (Jack) and ran off with another member of the lodge, by whom she was pregnant. Parsons consoled himself by transferring his affections to Helen's younger sister, Sara Northrup, who was then eighteen, a beautiful and vivacious student at the University of Southern California. Within a few months, Sara dropped out of her course and moved in with Parsons, to the great distress of her parents. At South Orange Grove Avenue she became known as Betty (her middle name was Elizabeth). Completely under the spell of her lover, she was soon inculcated onto the OTO and assisting in its ceremonies. (Miller, 102)

Marjore Cameron - When (Parsons and Hubbard) returned to South Orange Grove Avenue, they found the 'scarlet woman' waiting for them. Her name was Marjorie Cameron and in truth she was not very much different from many of the unconventional and free-spirited young women who had gravitated to the Bohemian lodging house in Pasadena. But Parsons was convinced that she was his libidinous elemental spirit, not least because it transpired she was not only willing, but impatient, to participate in the magical and sexual escapades he had in mind. 'She is describable', he wrote in the 'Book of Babalon', 'as an air of fire type, with bronze red hair, fiery and subtle, determined and obstinate, sincere and perverse, with extraordinary personality, talent and intelligence.' (Miller, 106)