L. Ron Hubbard infiltrated Jack Parsons' sex magic rituals in Pasadena, where they summoned the "whore of Babylon" to impregnate Parsons' girlfriend with a soulless "moon child" intended to end Western Christianity. Hubbard defrauded Parsons of $10,000 to $20,000 before fleeing, while Parsons' subsequent FBI scrutiny over communist suspicions ruined his rocketry career and led to his 1952 suicide. Ultimately, this betrayal by a con artist not only destroyed a scientific pioneer but also laid the occult groundwork for Hubbard's later founding of Scientology. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Forgotten Tragedy at City Hall00:01:33
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Regalespi and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, city hall building.
Did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Woods.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Summoning the Antichrist00:03:08
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
I'm Robert Evans, broadcasting to you live, although it won't be live when you listen to it, from the parking lot behind a random Arco in Redding, California.
Because like all professional podcasters, I am working out of a car right now because I decided to fuck off to the mountains for a week and the reception in the mountains is not ideal.
My guest today is the person who normally has to deal with my bizarre decisions that wildly impact the sound quality of this show, but is instead the co-host of today's episode while Chris deals with my irresponsibility.
Daniel!
Hello, Robert.
How you doing, buddy?
I'm doing.
I'm doing good, Daniel.
How are you doing?
I'm honestly great.
I could not be more thrilled to be here side-saddle to you right now with Sophie on the mic for this lovely podcast.
I'm honored to be here, truly.
I have my son and my work husband and my dog.
So you can't say that on the mic.
We can't have that be the meta now.
I'm supposed to be in a relationship.
Oh, that's right.
You're, I'm sorry.
It's okay.
I appreciate that, though.
Chris, redo that again.
No, editing.
It's part of the meta now.
It's part of the meta.
Daniel.
Yes, Robert.
You and I have, you and I have been colleagues for a while.
A while, indeed.
We've worked together.
We enjoy each other's company.
Very much so.
We've become friends over the course of many months and many recording sessions.
I'm honored.
You would say so.
And I don't know how things are done with friendship where you come from, Daniel.
There's a guy on a motorcycle.
I'm excited to throw this going.
I don't know how things are done where you come from, Daniel.
But back in my hometown, we have a saying.
And that saying is, you aren't really friends with someone until you've spent an hour or so talking about that one time L. Ron Hubbard and a rocket scientist tried to summon the Antichrist using sex magic.
Do they have that expression where you come from, Daniel?
It's, yeah, totally, man.
Yeah, absolutely.
Me and all my friends, we sit down and talk about that thing you totally just said.
Welcome to our friendship group, Dan.
So go on, please.
I did, I have done five episodes on L. Ron Hubbard because he was amazing.
Sci-Fi Nerds and Exploding Things00:04:31
Oh, God.
In so many different ways.
Yeah, there's just so much about that guy's life that we have to talk about.
And when I did my initial three-parter with the wonderful Caitlin Durante, one thing we glossed over was the time L. Ron Hubbard tried to summon the Antichrist via fucking his friend's girlfriend.
What?
That's only a small part of it, Daniel.
Oh, my God.
I'm already in shock.
Today, I felt like in the midst of this year of political nonsense and coronavirus, we should talk about L. Ron Hubbard and sex magic and just have a relaxing time.
Fuck yeah.
Does that sound good to you, Daniel?
It sounds great, Robert.
I'm in.
All right.
All right.
So our story begins with one of the most fascinating and enigmatic men in the history of science, Jack Parsons.
Now, depending on your perspective, Parsons was either the smartest idiot or the dumbest genius in human history.
He was born in Pasadena, California in 1914 to a wealthy family with a history of incredible names.
His father was named Marvel Sr., and he abandoned the family when Jack was a small child so he can continue to have an affair with a young woman.
Jack, then named Marvel Jr., was thrust into the position of being the head of the family at a very young age.
Wow.
Okay.
All right.
I'm with it so far.
That sucks, but all right.
I'm with.
Marvel Jr.'s mom filed for divorce and to avoid unpleasant memories of her ex, began calling Marvel Jr. John.
In eighth grade, John met a boy named Edward Foreman.
Like him, Eddie was a big fan of Jules Verne and the amazing stories science fiction magazine that was then quite new.
John Parsons grew up.
Yeah, he grew up on, he was a sci-fi nerd.
You know, he was one of the first generation, the first generation of sci-fi nerds, really.
I love it.
I love it.
Yeah.
So he grows up on this steady diet of tales of magic and witchcraft and fantasy, along with, you know, rockets and robots and aliens.
And like most boys, he was fascinated by fireworks.
Unlike most boys, he immediately started making his own.
In 1928, at age 14, John and Eddie graduated from cutting up and modifying fireworks to trying to build their own solid-fuel rockets, which did not exist at the time.
That's extremely adventurous.
Yeah.
And dangerous.
Like, there weren't kits and stuff.
Like, they were just making bombs, basically.
Oh, yeah.
No, they were the forefathers.
They were the ones getting their fingers blown off for all of us.
Yeah, exactly.
Great.
And because it was the 20s and there were no rules at all, everyone just let them make rockets, which rules, honestly.
Totally rules.
Yeah.
So the Parson family neighbors reported bemusedly that the large backyard of their manor was filled with blackened craters and shrapnel from failed test launches.
Yeah.
What a report.
Oh, y'all.
Kratos and Deborah's.
A lot of shrapnel coming from the neighbors.
It's the 20s, though, so I guess we won't do anything about it.
Yeah, exactly.
Oh my god.
In an effort to build more efficient and reliable rockets, John began experimenting with using glue as a binding agent to keep the loose powder in his engines together.
At age 18, while still in high school, John was hired by the Hercules Powder Company.
When he graduated in 1933, he enrolled in Pasadena Junior College with his friend Eddie Foreman.
The two continued their experiments and began to correspond with luminaries in the nascent field of rocketry.
Robert Goddard, Herman Oberth, Konstantin Solkovsky.
This proved to be mostly useless, since rocketry at this point was primitive enough that even the luminaries in the field weren't like all that good at it.
People hadn't really figured much out about rockets yet.
Yeah, I mean, this seems like still completely fresh ground.
Yeah, freshly cratered ground.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, we're still in the mostly exploding things territory.
Fuck yeah.
Neither Parsons nor Goodman were able to divert their focus from mastering the art of shooting random shit into the sky long enough to focus on other studies.
They both dropped out of college in the early 1930s and got jobs at Halifax Explosives, a company in the Mojave Desert that did exactly what you'd guess.
For a while, John Parsons looked to be on a relatively normal path.
He married his high school sweetheart, Helen Northrop, and became increasingly influential in the developing science of rocketry.
The Inventor of Thelema00:10:05
His new colleagues took to calling him Jack.
In 1939, Jack's interest in fantasy, kindled by those amazing stories comics he devoured as a child, led him to pick up a book by Aleister Crowley.
What do you know about Aleister Crowley?
Oh, you know, nothing.
That name sounds familiar.
Honestly, whenever I hear the name Crowley, it makes me think of that song, Mr. Crowley.
Yeah, I think that's about Miss Crowley.
Oh, great.
Well, I know the chorus of that song.
Yeah, he is the inventor of a religion called Thelema.
Okay.
Yeah, he's in starting the late 19th, like by the time Jack sort of becomes aware of this guy, Crowley's name for himself is the Great Beast 666.
Oh, shit.
Yeah, he was regularly called the wickedest man in the world by the media of his native England.
And considering the fact that Adolf Hitler was the dictator of Germany at the time, one might question the media's definition of the word wicked.
Yeah, wow, okay.
Get your priorities straight, media.
So, yeah, Crowley is, yeah, known today as the founder of the Thelemic religion and the originator of the phrase, do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
So, you've heard that, I'm sure, that one gets around.
So, he's like one of the founding fathers of like kind of the modern occult subculture, community, whatever you want to call it.
So, Crowley had first reached prominence as a mountaineer, leading the first expedition to reach the foot of K2 and almost scaling Kachinjunga, the second and third highest mountains on Earth, respectively.
During the expedition up Kanchenjunga in 1905, an avalanche had buried the rest of Crowley's team under snow.
They'd begged him for help, but as the story goes, he'd made himself a cup of tea and watched them die horribly instead.
He claimed to have no sympathy for them as they had attempted to make the descent after he'd advised them not to.
That's just some shit you just cannot get away with anymore.
You just can't be like, well, I told you so.
I didn't tell you so.
I told you this was a bad idea.
Jesus Christ.
That's wow.
All right, cool.
Sick.
Crowley objectively is one of the most interesting dudes who ever lived.
And I honestly don't know enough about the man to declare him a bastard or not.
He deliberately spread lies about horrible things he'd done that he hadn't really done.
So he also did some really messed up stuff.
So it's really hard to know.
The cliff's notes of this guy's life is that in 1910, he joined a secret society called the Ordo Templi Orientis, or OTO.
Now, during the turn of the 20th century, there were a lot of different similar occultic societies throughout Europe.
And the OTO can be seen in the same family of organizations as Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and the Tula Society.
Thanks to his charisma and his erotic poetry, Crowley rose to eventually command the English-speaking sections of the OTO.
What?
I'm sorry, don't want to talk out.
You can't just drop poetry.
You can't just drop that.
You can't just drop erotic poetry in the middle of the things that make him charismatic.
Okay, so it is, when does that come into play?
How does the erotic poetry just come about?
He writes a lot of erotic poetry.
I mean, so all of this.
That's just like a pastime outside of the occult shit.
It's just like, yeah, I mean, I also love to talk about that kind of thing.
So Crowley's doing magic and telling people other people to do magic.
Like, that's like his whole thing.
But like, it's sex magic.
A lot of it involves fucking.
A lot of it involves like tons of cum and like blood and fucking.
He's a big free love advocate.
Cool.
And he's a big, like, a lot of this comes out of like this rejection of Christian morality, like this, this recognition from a lot of like free thinkers that like, oh, wow, our Christian-based society is completely fucked and immoral.
We should just discard all of this and just bang each other all the time and maybe try to summon the devil.
Hell yeah.
Yeah.
Crowley, Crowley got the cummies.
All right, where it sounds good.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He loves, he's fucking coming like you wouldn't believe in like the fucking early 1900s, man.
This guy is semen all over the place.
All right, great.
Sorry to interrupt.
Please continue.
So in 1939, our man Jack Parsons comes across Crowley's writing and falls in love with it.
The whole do-what-thou-wilt thing is particularly exciting to him.
As a brilliant man in the late 1930s, he realizes that most of the moral restrictions in his very repressed society are rooted in bullshit.
Jack likes the idea of a faith that encourages him to indulge in forbidden pleasures and gives him the power to affect his material reality.
He and his wife Heaven join the OTO's Pasadena chapter, known as the Agape Lodge.
And I'll let you guess what thing is Agape.
All right.
All right, all right, all right.
Yeah.
That's leaving literally nothing to the imagination.
A gape lodge, like, come on.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, it's, it's all fucking.
All right.
So most of the ceremonies at the Agape Lodge focus around sex magic.
And the meetings take place in an attic properly equipped for secret and probably illegal sex because a lot of sex was illegal back then.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
Meetings were run by a priestess wearing sheer gauze who rose out of a coffin to lead the worshipers in purposefully blasphemous rites.
Wow.
So that's cool.
That's cool.
So Jack Parsons.
Wow.
Yeah.
The theatrics.
Wow.
Okay.
And Jack Parsons is one of the founding fathers of the jet propulsion laboratory.
So while he is starting the JPL, he's also super into fuck magic.
Into the crazy sex magic and also advancing the sciences.
Wow.
Yeah.
And also helping to invent rocketry.
That's, you know what?
We contain multitudes.
It's cool as hell.
It's cool.
It is cool as hell.
I got rules.
I fuck with this guy so far.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
No, I got no problems with Jack Parsons.
So, well, maybe a couple.
Yeah.
We'll get to those, I'm sure.
Yeah.
So Jack started corresponding with Crowley, and unlike the correspondence he'd had with early rocket scientists as a younger man, these letters actually went somewhere.
Before long, Parsons was addressing Aleister Crowley as my most beloved father and signing his letters to him as thy son, John.
Jack quickly rose to become Crowley's American representative for the OTO.
In a few short years, Jack's chapter was responsible for the vast majority of the donations the OTO brought in.
Crowley's later years were largely funded by the fundraising skill of Jack Parsons.
One of Jack's housemates later recalled, he had a voluminous correspondence with Crowley in the library, some of which he showed me.
I remember in particular one letter from Crowley, which praised and encouraged him for the fine work he was doing in America, and also casually thanked him for his latest donation and intimated that more would shortly be needed.
Jack admitted that he was one of Crowley's main sources of money in America.
So Crowley really relies on this guy for money.
He's an old man at this point in the late 30s and early 40s.
And that's kind of like Jack's main purpose in the OTO is raising money to keep Crowley alive.
And sorry, this is just like a little time check for me.
I apologize.
Can you give me, how old is Crowley at this point and how old is Jack Parsons at this point?
Jesus, Crowley is like 60s or 70s or something.
He dies in 46 and Parsons is like in his 20s.
Okay, cool.
Got it.
Definitely like some mentor-mentee relationship kind of shit.
Exactly.
Maybe 30s.
Yeah.
Cool, cool.
So raising money for the OTO was only a small part of Jack's focus as the 1930s turned into the 40s.
By this point, he was working as a rocket engineer for the California Institute of Technology, taking part in groundbreaking research and launching experimental rockets as well as experimenting with pagan sex magic at night.
His two lives soon began to blend.
And before long, he was dancing and shouting Crowley's hymn to Pan before rocket launches to bless the endeavors.
Hell.
Here's how that hymn ended, by the way.
So imagine this guy hanging out with like 1940s rocket scientists chanting this shit as they prepare to launch a rocket.
I am Pan.
EO Pan.
EO Pan, Pan, Pan.
I am thy mate.
I am thy man.
Goat of thy flock.
I am gold.
I am God.
Flesh to thy bone, flower to thy rod.
With hoofs of steel, I race on the rocks through solstice, stubborn to equinox.
And I rave and I rape and I rip and I rend everlasting world without end.
Mannequin, maiden, maned, man, in the might of Pan.
Eo, pan, eo, pan, pan, pan, eo, pan.
Wow.
Wow.
Fucking what?
I'm just thinking about this, the other scientists sitting around taking their super long drags of their cigarettes, being like, God, come on, man.
We're just trying to launch this rocket.
Come on, Jack.
Come on, Jack.
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
That is fantastic.
Yeah.
Yeah, it rules.
Good for him.
Good for him.
Good for you.
Good for you.
It's a testament to what a brilliant engineer Jack was that it took his colleagues a while to make a fuss about his eccentricities.
He would eventually go on to.
They did.
He got fired from the JPL for being a fucking weirdo.
But moreover, not just that it took a while, that they're like, you know, but he's an incredible scientist.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's, you know, that's how it goes.
Progress.
His chief invention, he's like considered to be the main inventor of the solid fuel rocket.
I mean, that's true.
Yeah, we don't have space travel without it.
Precisely.
Yeah.
No less a mind than Werner von Braun considered him to be one of the founding fathers of rocketry.
So he is hugely influential.
And you do not ever hear about him.
You don't hear about him much.
This has started to change in recent years, but for a very long time, you didn't hear about him when people would talk about the founding fathers of rocketry because of the story we're about to talk about today.
Oh my God, hell yes.
So in 1941, Jack Parsons and a group of his colleagues at Caltech.
Yeah, this is what, yeah, 1941 is when they officially like start to found the JPL.
Got it.
Yeah, they had done so much damage to the campus at Caltech, they'd been forced to relocate to a series of iron sheds in the Arroyo Seco Canyon, and this became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Unsung Father of Rocketry00:04:07
A bunch of iron sheds.
Yeah.
We'll put you in the bomb-proof shelter so you guys can blow yourselves up and not hurt anything else.
So to Jack Parsons, there was no disconnect between his love of the occult and his love of science.
One of his biographers later noted, Parsons had his rocketry as well as his normal life.
He discovered other worlds by imagining going in a rocket to the moon.
He wanted to explore the new frontier.
He saw both space and magic as ways of exploring these new frontiers, one breaking free from Earth literally and metaphysically.
And Jack's rocket ship for these metaphysical explorations was an enormous mansion on southern Orangerove Avenue, which he had inherited upon his errant father's death.
South Orange Grove was maybe the nicest neighborhood in Pasadena at that point, and the upright citizens who were Jack's neighbors were not happy when a black wizard moved in next door and turned his family home into a mystical fuck cavern for a bunch of the strangest people in Southern California.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, I guess I probably wouldn't be too happy either.
I mean, that sounds like it would rule, but I mean, yeah, that feels like the kind of thing where the first couple weeks you'd be like, hey, they're really having a rocket party over there.
And then just a couple extra, you know, extremities are left in your yard.
And you're like, okay, this has gone too far.
Yeah, this is, I've had enough of these wacky people now.
Yeah.
So Jack's dad hadn't left him with much money, and the only way Jack could afford to maintain the great manor that he now had was by renting it out.
But he wasn't willing to compromise his lifestyle by lending out his space to normies.
He put a notice in the local paper asking for tenants who were atheists and of a bohemian disposition, with no exceptions.
This led to a colorful cast of characters who occupied his home and also an endless series of loud parties and orgies.
One long-term tenant later recalled, mundane souls were unceremoniously rejected as tenants.
There was a professional fortune teller and a seer who always wore appropriate dresses and decorated her apartment with symbols and artifacts of arcane lore.
There was a lady, well past middle age, but still strikingly beautiful, who claimed at various times to have been the mistress of half the famous men in France.
There was a man who had been a renowned organist in the great movie palaces of the silent era.
They were characters all.
So pretty cool house.
Wow.
I mean, sounds, you know, sounds like a great crew.
A motley crew, if you will.
Especially in the early fucking 40s when everybody sucked even more than they do now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the police showed up semi-regularly as a result of these loud parties.
But they were always talked down to.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They were always talked down by Jack Parsons, who was a handsome, charming, and a respectable rocket scientist.
He was good at dealing with cops.
Got it.
On at least one occasion, the police were called in, having been told by neighbors that they had witnessed a pregnant woman being ordered to jump nine times through a sacred fire.
Gotta cleanse that baby.
Yeah, gotta cleanse that baby.
I mean, that's just basic obstetrics.
Yeah.
It's fucking awesome.
Well done.
Well done.
Yeah.
So two rooms in the manor had been turned into a temple for the OTO Lodge.
Jack's bedroom held the ceremonial altar, which was flanked by pyramids and covered with bizarre symbols.
A massive signed portrait of Crowley hung over the fireplace.
It was, in short, a pretty badass living situation.
And then, into this wonderful place in time, stepped an actual demon, Lafayette Ron Hubbard.
Robert.
Wonderful.
Yeah.
With that lead in, do you know what time it is?
Oh.
It's time for something that's not L. Ron Hubbard, the products and services that support this show.
Yay!
Although we would take L. Ron Hubbard as a sponsor.
Absolutely.
Not Scientology the Church, but L. Ron Hubbard himself.
Totally.
Yeah.
10-10 shots fired.
City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
Murder in the Council Chambers00:03:55
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
Business Rivalries and Jealousy00:15:13
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back!
So, L. Ron Hubbard is entering the story now, Daniel.
Hell yeah.
L. Ron Hubbard has LRH has entered play.
Oh, boy.
New player has joined.
LRH.
In September 1945, after World War II had drawn to a close, the future founder of Scientology had enrolled himself as a patient in Oak Knoll Naval Hospital.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with him, other than the fact that he was broke and would soon be mustered out of the Navy.
For three months, LRH dutifully whined and moaned and tried to convince doctors to diagnose him with something, anything, that might be vaguely defined as a service-related injury.
He complained about headaches, rheumatism, conjunctivitis, pain in his side, belly aches, shoulder pain, arthritis, and hemorrhoids.
After weeks of looking, the only evidence of any sickness they found was an ulcer.
LRH's injuries were described as minimal.
In between days spent trying to convince doctors of his ailments, LRH spent some time trawling around Pasadena.
And in August of 1945, he stumbled into the house on South Orange Grove Avenue for a regular meeting of science fiction aficionados because, you know, Jack Parsons is a big old nerd.
Yep.
So L. Ron Hubbard instantly recognized the Jack Parsons circle as the ideal environment for an instinctive con man like himself to operate in.
And I'm going to quote now from the book Barefaced Messiah.
Ron, ebullient as always, was not in any way intimidated by the egregious company and surroundings.
On the contrary, he felt instantly at home.
Most evenings, he could be found dominating the conversation at the big table in the kitchen, where the rumors tended to gather, telling outrageous stories about his adventures.
One night, he unbuttoned his shirt to display the scars left by arrows hurled at him after he encountered a band of hostile Aborigines in the South American jungles.
Oh my.
Like almost anyone in the house, Alva Rogers, a long-term resident at the parsonage, thought Hubbard was an enormously engaging and entertaining personality.
Rogers also had red hair, and Ron confided to him his belief, confirmed by extensive research he had undertaken at the Royal Museum in London, that all redheads were related, being descended from the same line of Neandertal men.
A classic.
Yeah, we're all.
I love that.
That's a classic right there.
Good times.
Good times.
So, Hubbard started crashing at the Parsons Manor.
And in true L. Ron Hubbard form, he paid as little as possible by sharing a bedroom with a broke reporter named Neeson Himmel.
As a journalist, Neeson was instantly skeptical of his roommate, telling an interviewer later, I can't stand phonies.
And to me, he was so obviously a phony, a real con man.
But he was certainly not a dummy.
He was very sharp and quick, a fascinating storyteller, and he could charm the shit out of anybody.
He talked interminably about his war experiences and seemed to have been everywhere.
Once he said he was on Admiral Halsey's staff.
I called a friend who had worked with Halsey, and my friend said, Shit, I've never heard of him.
I was not one of his favoritist people because I liked to try and trip him up.
One time he told a story about how he was walking down a corridor in the British Museum when he was suddenly grabbed by three scientists who dragged him into an office and began measuring his skull because it was such a perfect shape.
I said, gee, Ron, that's a great story.
Didn't I read it in George Bernard Shaw?
Another time he said he was in the Aleutians in command of a destroyer and a polar bear jumped from an ice flow onto his ship and chased everyone around.
I realized it is an old, old folklore story that goes way back.
He was always broke and trying to borrow money.
That was another reason he didn't like me.
I would never lend him a cent.
Whenever he was talking about being hard up, he often used to say that he thought the easiest way to make money would be to start a religion.
Yep, my favorite.
That's my favorite L. Ron Hubbard line right there.
Yeah, and a lot of people think he just said that to the one guy.
I think it's like usually Heinlein who reports it.
But like, no, he said that.
He said that a lot.
He said that over and over.
He was extremely clear about that.
Not offhanded, even a little bit.
It wasn't a gotcha moment.
It was, I'm a genius, and I shall make my money this way.
Also, I love that.
I love to think about that time when it would take someone extremely wise to be able to call you on your own bullshit.
Like that you could just tell stories like that.
Yeah.
And if there wasn't someone around who knew George or was like at least aware of authors and stories and everything in history, you could just get away with that shit.
Yeah, it's just a matter of like, have you read more shit than other people?
Exactly.
And if so, you could probably convince them of anything.
Yep.
Yeah.
I once convinced a friend of mine that the band Hansen had died in a bush crash.
And, you know, it's shockingly easy, is what we're saying.
Poor Hansen.
They're okay, by the way.
They're not dead.
They're fine.
Just a lot of people.
On December 5th, 1945, L. Ron Hubbard was mustered out of the Navy.
The very next day, he applied for a pension due to his sprained left knee, conjunctivitis, chronic duodenal ulcer, arthritis, recurrent malaria, and a weird pain on his left side that wouldn't go away and had no cause, but that he was pretty sure was service-related.
Now separated from the Navy, he devoted all his time to applying for more disability, ignoring his wife and child, and trying to get in closer with Jack Parsons.
Now, by 1946, Daniel, Jack and his first wife, Helen, had separated.
Being a cool and totally emotionally mature dude, Jack did the healthy thing and instantly started dating Helen's younger sister, Sarah Northrop, when she was 17 years old.
Aw, bro.
I mean, that's what most psychologists will recommend.
Okay, for sure.
So, oh, man.
Shortly after they get together, Sarah drops out of USC and moves in with her brother-in-law, Jack, and his collection of weirdos and wizards.
She starts going by the name Betty after her middle name, and she gets drawn into the OTO and into sex magic.
Now, in keeping with Crowley's teachings, Jack urged his new girlfriend to have lots and lots of transgressive sex with other members of the lodge.
Jealousy was an emotion of unenlightened beings, something powerful wizards like Jack, attuned to the greater mysteries of the cosmos, did not suffer from.
Jack took great joy in explaining to strangers how jealousy was for losers, and he and Betty were better than normal people because they did not feel it.
Wow.
And when you type it out that way, the whole situation sounds like a fucking time bomb.
And it absolutely was.
Oh, 100%.
I mean, we stand a sex positive king, but like it has its limits most certainly.
Yeah, and especially like if you're the guy bragging about that and having her have sex with strangers to test.
Yeah, that's not, that's not...
There are healthy ways to do non-monogamy.
Yeah.
This is not one of the things that we're doing.
No, it doesn't really sound like it.
No, not quite.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
Everyone who, now, I should note that everyone who knew Betty and Jack at the time emphasized later how deeply in love the couple appeared to be.
And for several months, this seemed like it was something that was actually going to last.
L. Ron Hubbard would finally, you know, break up this relationship.
See, being gullible and sort of dumb for a trailblazing rocket scientist, Jack Parsons had immediately been taken in by LRH's charm.
He'd ridden Aleister Crowley, his master, at the start of 1946.
He, Hubbard, is a gentleman, red hair, green eyes, honest and intelligent, and we have become great friends.
Although he has no formal training in magic, he has an extraordinary amount of experience and understanding in the field.
Ron appears to have some sort of highly developed astral vision.
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.
He's in complete accord with our own principles.
I have found a staunch companion and comrade in Ron.
Oh.
Yeah.
It's his butt.
He loves this guy.
He's his buddy.
Yeah.
And he's got his butt.
Ron Scott.
Yeah, I got a...
Of course, I've got a guardian angel.
She's called the Empress.
Oh my God.
Sick.
So there's a lot of debate to this day as to how much of the magic stuff L. Ron Hubbard actually believed.
Some people will argue, and there's a decent amount of evidence for this, that a lot of Scientology wound up just being a rip-off of Thelema, and that basically Hubbard was just sort of laundering a lot of Crowley's ideas, but making them less tied to like the devil and stuff, and so that you could kind of sell it to a bunch of people in the 50s.
That's an argument people will make.
Others will say that that's going too far.
And, you know, it seems in either case true that L. Ron Hubbard was primarily interested in the Parsons circle because he wanted to have a lot of weird sex, sheep room and board, and a chance at conning a bunch of money out of a dummy with too much of it in hand.
Right.
Yeah.
Sounds about right.
Yeah.
Sounds like L. Ron Hubbard.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So when Hubbard heard that Parsons was actively encouraging other members of the circle to fuck his girlfriend, he jumped right on that train and rode it to Poundtown.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
Those of you who listened to our first three-parter on L. Ron Hubbard will recall that the man did, in fact, learn to fuck.
And in this instance, his fucking proved good enough that Betty was soon completely in love with him.
Wow.
This was tremendously painful for Jack Parsons, but he'd spent so much time bragging to everyone about how he was immune to jealousy that there was nothing for him to do but smile and pretend everything was awesome.
I was going to say you have to stand by your word on that point if you're going to be jealous is an emotion of the weak.
It's like, oh, man.
Prepare to get Hubbard absolutely knows what he's doing.
Yeah.
And Parsons later wrote to Crowley, she has transferred her sexual affection to Ron.
I cared for her rather deeply, but I have no desire to control her emotions.
Now, Ron's roommate Himmel later recalled, Betty was beautiful, the most gorgeous, intelligent, sweet, wonderful girl.
I was so much in love with her, and I knew she was a woman I could never have.
Then Hubbard comes along and starts having affairs with one girl after another in the house and finally fastens on to Betty.
I couldn't believe it was happening.
There he was, living off of 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.
Wow.
I mean, I can certainly imagine.
Seems like a less fun house at this point in the story.
Yeah, definitely a less fun house at this point.
Yeah.
Then again, to be a fly on the wall for those scenarios had to have been hilarious.
Absolutely.
Oh, my gosh.
Sounds incredible.
Yeah, seriously.
So Jack seemed to need to feel the need to really prove that he was super okay with everything by starting a business with Ron and Betty.
Allied Enterprises was never much more than a vague plan to buy yachts on the East Coast and sell them in California at a profit.
The whole idea has the distinctive reek of an LRH scheme to it.
And my suspicion is that Hubbard recognized that Parsons had a deep need to prove how cool he was with Hubbard and Betty fucking, and that doing something as mundanely normal as going into business with them allowed him to really present this image that he was like fine with everything.
I kind of think that's what Hubbard, how Hubbard gets him to sign on to this.
So on January 15th, 1946, the three partners sign on to an agreement to start this business.
Jack puts in the majority of his savings, $20,000.
Ron puts in all of his savings too, but this only comes to $1,200.
And Betty puts in nothing.
For a while, the business went nowhere, and the money sat in an account while Jack and Hubbard set to work engaging in more magical endeavors.
So at the same time as they're starting this business, Jack Parsons, who still hurt from the loss of Betty, had started engaging in a nightly incantation ritual, what he called the conjuration of air, invocation of wand, and consecration of air dagger.
The goal of these increasingly elaborate rituals was to summon a new girlfriend for Jack Parsons.
Oh my what?
Jack, it's okay.
We'll summon you a new girlfriend.
Yeah, we'll summon you a girlfriend, Jack.
Sounds just about right.
Yeah, an elemental mate, as Jack called her.
Now, I want to be clear here, Daniel.
Jack didn't just want a girlfriend.
He wanted to summon the incarnate form of the whore of Babylon so that he could impregnate her with a moon child.
It just gets so much deeper.
It just like it keeps going.
Just the idea of the moment.
I will remind you all, this is one of the founding fathers of rocketry.
Oh, my gosh.
It's incredible.
That is truly beyond.
But now, at this point, is no surprise.
So I'm ready.
Let's keep it going, baby.
So I'm not an expert in the occult, Daniel.
I've only participated in one demon summoning, and it was a goetic ritual.
So I'm not an expert on this, and I tend to think it's all kind of nonsense anyways.
So I hope my OTO and Satanist and Thelemite friends will forgive me if I get some details wrong about what precisely Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard were trying to do, because it's very complicated.
But feel free to sound off in the comments because I would like to read how it's supposed to go down because this sounds fascinating.
Go off.
The short of it is that Hubbard started working as a scribe and basically taking notes and watching bemusedly while Jack Parsons masturbated in a variety of elaborate ways.
A short stroke today.
Yeah.
Wow.
Wow.
I found him.
Yeah, it's awesome.
I found a medium article written by someone who was a lot more occultically trained than I am, and he explained the rituals this way.
Quote, the method employed was that of the solo eighth-degree working of the OTO.
Parsons used his magic wand, his penis, to whip up a vortex of energy so the elemental would be summoned.
Translated into plain English, Parsons jerked off in the name of his spiritual advancement while Hubbard, referred to as the scribe in the diary of the event, scanned the astral plane for signs and visions.
I mean, you know, just hanging out with my friend, looking for ghosts while he masturbates.
Perfect.
Sounds like a great Saturday.
That does sound like a good Saturday.
Just me and a buddy, him coming, me looking at the astral plane, taking notes.
Good times.
Just good times.
Life was really a lot better before the internet, Daniel.
Taking notes and noting strokes.
That's what we're doing.
That's what we're doing out here.
Sophie just shook her head disappointedly, which is frankly exactly what I was going for.
Yeah, it's the only way this could go.
So after the first few nights of these masturbation adventures, Pasadena was hit by a series of powerful windstorms, one of which knocked out the power.
Now, if you've spent any amount of time in Pasadena, you'll know that heavy winds are not a rarity there.
No, they're not.
Jack took this.
No, they're constant.
But Jack took this as a sign that his magical ritual was working.
Magical Rituals Gone Wrong00:08:48
And L. Ron Hubbard played along, claiming on January 14th that some form of celestial force had hit him on the right shoulder and knocked a candle out of his hand.
Parsons later wrote, he called me and we observed a brownish yellow light about seven feet high.
I brandished a magical sword and it disappeared.
Ron's right arm was paralyzed for the rest of the night.
These two gentlemen are both so up each other's asses.
I love that.
That's awesome.
I brandished a magic.
So timeout, real question.
Is the magical sword just his penis?
It has to be, right?
It has to be his penis.
Okay, okay, cool.
I love that.
Brandish a magical sword.
I'll be sure to.
It's the best.
I'll be sure to bust that one out next time.
Yeah, everything that's happening here rules and I'm fine with it.
Amazing.
Now, the very next night, they began their rituals again, with Jack masturbating furiously while L. Ron Hubbard took notes on his furious masturbation.
Midway through this celestial wank session, L. Ron Hubbard claimed to have some sort of astral vision and see one of Parsons' enemies standing behind him, wearing a black robe and bearing an evil, pasty face.
According to Parsons, Hubbard, quote, attacked the figure and pinned it to the door with four big throwing knives with which he is expert.
So L. Ron Hubbard is a master of the throwing knives.
Oh, this is some sci-fi for sure.
So I use my throwing knives.
Wow.
Okay.
I love it.
I love it.
It seems like this is like an anime plot right here.
Yeah.
I love it.
I love it.
For the next four days, Parsons and Hubbard grew increasingly nervous and jumpy.
This may have something to do with the unspoken reality that both men were on literal buckets of uppers throughout this entire process.
This does not get emphasized enough in any discussions of even L. Ron Hubbard specifically, but like these guys and Hubbard for decades, these guys are on so much fucking speed.
That's like however much fucking speed, like they're on enough speed that if like if they'd been partying with Hunter Thompson, he would have been like, guys, you are doing way too much speed.
Dr. Gonzo himself would have been like, this is too much.
This is too much.
Calm the fuck down with that.
That's really funny.
That's funny.
That is an important.
And I will say, when I had my occult phase, I was also doing a lot of fucking speed.
So, you know, it comes with the territory, you know?
It comes with the territory.
So the ritual masturbation continued until January 18th when Jack Parsons and LRH headed out to the Mojave Desert to conduct some new ritual that probably involved Parsons coming on a rock.
Hell yeah.
This desert magic inspired another vision in Parsons as he felt and he felt his anxiety fade away.
He turned to Hubbard and said, it is done.
They returned home, drained of magical energies and bodily fluids.
It is done.
It is done.
Wow.
They returned home, drained of magical energies and bodily fluids to find a young red-haired woman matching Jack's requirements working at the parsonage, which is what he called his house for them.
Now, the reality of the situation, Daniel, is that Jack Parsons was a really handsome genius with a fuck mansion, and young women were always showing up to fuck.
Okay, it was a place where you go to fucking do drugs.
And this happened a lot.
But in this particular case, this woman, Marjorie Cameron, came to the house the night after they went out to go masturbate in the Mojave together.
So they thought that she had been summoned by the ritual.
I mean, as far as they know, she was.
As far as they know, she was.
Wow.
Okay.
So Parsons convinced himself that Marjorie was an elemental spirit, the scarlet woman, capable of bearing the incarnate essence of the whole of the beast of Babylon and bringing it back into the world.
Jack and Marjorie quickly started fucking, and Jack wrote excitedly back to his master, Aleister Crowley.
I have my elemental.
She turned up one night after the conclusion of the operation, and she has been with me since.
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.
We love an independent woman.
Yeah.
Crowley replied with a vague statement that he'd been trying to intervene personally to help Jack in his magical quest to find a girlfriend.
I can't be certain, but it sounds to me like Crowley was just saying what he thought would butter Parsons up the most because he needed more money from Parsons.
No.
That's me reading into it a bit.
I mean, you're probably right.
And you know who needs more money from you, dear listeners?
Is it the product?
Products and services.
Yeah, that support this podcast.
Yes.
My favorite.
Yes, I feel confident saying all of our sponsors will follow you into the desert to masturbate on a rock so you too can summon the horror of Babylon.
That horror of Babylon, capitalism.
Yeah.
We have that clause in our agreements with the advertisers, right, Sophie?
That they'll help you summon the horror of Babylon.
Okay, cool.
Yep, here you go.
10-10 shots fired in the city hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, you just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
Occultists and Celestial Forces00:15:24
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We're back.
Amazing.
And we're talking about L. Ron Hubbard and Jack Parsons and sex magic.
And jerking off on rocks.
Jerking off on rocks.
Wow.
So in late February, 1946, LRH flew down to the East Coast to look at yachts he might buy with Jack's money, while Parsons drove alone again into the Mojave to perform an invocation of the goddess Babylon, probably by masturbating in the desert again.
He claims he was visited by the goddess who started reading out a series of 77 clauses that he wrote down in a notebook, the Book of Babylon.
He believed these were instructions for how he could impregnate his elemental girlfriend with a moon child.
Just the.
All right.
You gotta.
I don't even keep going.
I don't even know.
Quote from the goddess that he met after coming on a rock in the desert.
Now is the hour of birth at hand.
Now shall my adept be crucified in the basilisk abode.
Oh, this podcast, a lot of comers on this episode.
I'm ready to give birth to a moon child for sure.
After that, wow.
So, Parsons and Hubbard both wound up back in Pasadena by early March, and Jack told his best buddy what he'd seen out in the desert.
Essentially, playing yes and, Hubbard then informed Jack that he too had experienced a magical vision of a savage and beautiful woman riding naked on a great cat-like beast.
I imagine that whenever L. Ron Hubbard closed his eyes, he just saw scenes from the movie Heavy Metal.
Yes, yes.
Oh my gosh.
His inner monologue was illustrated by Ralph Bakshi.
I love it.
I love it.
Love it, Bakshi.
So, yeah, so he tells her, yeah, he's seen this vision of a woman riding a cat, and this beautiful naked cat lady had a message to deliver.
And so, the two magical masturbators prepared a new ritual so that they could receive this message.
And I'm going to quote again from Barefaced Messiah: Candles were lit, incense burned, and a magical altar was laid with flowers and wine.
Hubbard, the scribe, wore a white hooded robe and carried a lamp.
Parsons, the high priest, wore a black robe and carried a cup and dagger.
An automatic tape recorder was set up, and at Hubbard's suggestion, Rachmananov's Isle of the Dead was played as background music.
At eight o'clock, Hubbard began to intone.
Yeah.
At eight o'clock, Hubbard began to intone his message from the astral world.
These are the preparations.
Green gold cloth, food for the beast upon a hidden platter.
Back of the altar, disclose only when the doles are bolted.
Transgression is death.
Back of the main altar.
Prepare instantly.
Light the first flame at 10 p.m., March 2nd, 1946.
The year of Babylon is 4063.
After a few minutes, Parsons noticed that his scribe was pale and sweating profusely.
Hubbard rested for a few minutes and then continued.
Make a box of blackness at 10 o'clock.
Smear the vessel which contains flame with thine own blood.
Destroy at the altar a thing of value.
Remain in perfect silence and heed the voice of our lady.
Speak not of this ritual or of her coming to any person.
And Hubbard said a bunch more stuff like this, while the scarlet woman, Marjorie Cameron, lay naked under a red robe.
When Hubbard prompted her, she read out lines that had been written for her by Parsons when he was on his masturbation quest in the desert.
Hell yeah.
To love me is better than all things, she chanted.
Put on the wings and arouse the coiled splendor within you.
Come unto me, to me, sing the rapturous love songs unto me.
Burn to me the perfume.
Drink to me, for I love you.
I am the blue-lidded daughter of sunset.
I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night sky.
So throughout this whole process, Jack and Marjorie, and probably L. Ron Hubbard, too, were all getting hornier and hornier.
Together they read out a chorus.
Glory unto the scarlet woman, Babylon, the mother of abominations, that rideth upon the beast, for she hath split their blood in every corner of the earth.
And yo, she hath mingled in the cup of her whoredom.
Wow.
Her whoredom.
Hubbard.
Her whoredom.
Yeah.
Hubbard, the scribe, stood at the altar, ranting about what was supposedly happening on the astral plane, while Jack Parsons whipped out his magic wand and entered the whore of Babylon.
The two fucked like methed out hyenas while L. Ron Hubbard narrated.
And this sort of thing continued for three more days.
Three days?
Three days?
Jesus.
Three days they're doing this shit.
That's a lot.
I found a report on this whole ritual written by the Sunday Times in 1969, and I'm fucking shocked this was published in a mainstream newspaper in the 60s.
It notes, quote, On the third day, the ritual began four hours before dawn.
Ron tells his companion, lay out a white sheet, place upon it blood of birth, envision her approaching thee.
Think upon the lewd, lascivious things thou couldst do.
All is good to Babylon.
All preserve the material basis.
Thus lust is hers, the passion yours.
Consider thou the beast raping.
These invocations, along with other passages in the ritual, indicates that Parsons had collected specimens of his own sperm and the girl's minstrel blood.
Oh, they got samples, all right.
Yeah.
The climax of the ceremony occurred the following day with Ron at the altar working his two subjects into a sexual frenzy.
Ulurachmanonov, he intoned such gyms as, Her mouth is bread and her breasts are fair and her loins are full of fire, and her lust is strong as a man is strong in the heat of her desire.
Wow.
A real wordsworth right there.
Yeah.
An exalted Parsons wrote the next day, Babylon is incarnate upon the earth today, awaiting the proper hour of her manifestation.
And in that day, my work will be accomplished, and I shall be blown away upon the breath of the Father, even as it is prophesied.
And it's probably at this point that we should discuss what precisely Jack Parsons thought he was doing, other than having a bunch of kinky sex while his best friend, the founder of Scientology, watched him and quoted from what was basically a DD source book.
Yeah.
Yeah, what was going on, the old noodle up there?
Yeah, what was he thinking?
What did he think he was doing?
So this moon child that he wanted to impregnate Marjorie with was a homunculus, which he described as a living being in form resembling a man and possessing those qualities of man which distinguish him from beasts, namely intellect and power of speech, but neither begotten nor born in the manner of human generation, nor inhabited by a human soul.
So he wants to birth this soulless monster so that he can...
Yeah, so that he can...
Yeah.
So Crowley had written a lot about this idea and felt that the goal of all great magicians was to create a messiah via sex magic.
And Jack's goal was basically to fuck into Marjorie a living soulless being that he could then summon the spirit of the whore of Babylon into.
Oh, okay.
But and then what?
And then what?
Is that just like his beast of control?
What does this homunculus then achieve?
I will tell you, Daniel.
Oh, boy.
I will tell you.
Oh, boy.
So, this is what Jack Parsons wrote.
The operation was formulated to open an interdimensional doorway, rolling out the red carpet for the appearance of the goddess Babylon in human form, employing the angelic language of the Anachian calls of Elizabethan Magus John Dee in the attraction of the sex force of the duo's population to this end.
The Babylon working itself was a preparation for what was to come: a thelemic messiah, to wit, Babylon incarnate as a living female.
The scarlet woman is consort to the Antichrist, bride to the beast 666.
In effect, Parsons also claimed the mantle of Antichrist for himself.
Without the Scarlet Woman, the Antichrist cannot make his manifestation.
The eschatological formula must first be complete.
In wider words, the magical rites of the Babylon working, it was Parsons' goal to bring on the apocalypse.
Sorry, this is from that medium of post analyzing all this occultically.
So, of course.
Yeah, he's trying to bring on the apocalypse.
Now, it's important to understand what Jack Parsons conceived of as the apocalypse.
Yeah.
He was not trying to bring about the end of the human race.
Rather, he was trying to bring about the end of the Western Christian world order.
He felt that the ruling class in the United States and most of the rest of the world was corrupt and hypocritical.
And this was doubly true of Christian religious leaders.
Uh-oh.
The invocation of Babylon was meant to end that world and bring about a new age of free love.
Upon completion of his multi-day fuck ritual with his new girlfriend and his buddy L. Ron Hubbard, Parsons was ecstatic that he had started the process that would end with the breaking of the world order.
He wrote yet another letter to Crowley on March 6th.
I can hardly tell you or decide how much to write.
I am under command of extreme secrecy.
I have had the most important, devastating experience of my life.
And he meant that in a good way.
He outlined the ritual he'd performed to his master, who, rather than being excited, responded with utter shock.
You have me completely puzzled by your remarks.
I thought I had the most morbid imagination, but it seems I have not.
I cannot form the slightest idea of what you can possibly mean.
The same day, Crowley sent a letter to the head of the American branch of the OTO.
Apparently, Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is producing a moon child.
I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts.
I was just shading your boy right there.
Wow.
So, Aleister Crowley knew a con artist when he saw one.
Yes.
And he suspected that Hubbard was playing along with this whole caper, both for the sex, which he got in plentiful quantity and because doing these rituals would help him build up trust with Jack Parsons, so he could then rob the high priest blind.
And this is exactly what happened.
In May of 1946, LRH and Betty Northrop fled California with something like $10,000 to $20,000 of Jack Parsons' money, ostensibly to buy a yacht to resell on the West Coast.
But instead, they stayed on the eastern seaboard, living off Jack's savings and yeah, just stole all of his savings.
Wow.
Wow.
So, after this happened, you got conned.
You did.
Absolutely good.
Damn.
And he didn't even get the homunculus.
No, no, didn't even get the moon, child.
Maybe he did.
We'll talk about that at the end.
Oh, hell yeah.
Okay.
One OTO cult member wrote to the head of the American branch of the church after L. Ron Hubbard stole all of Jack's money.
Ron and Betty have their boat at Miami, Florida, and are living the life of Riley, while brother John Parsons is living at rock bottom, and I mean rock bottom.
So, Crowley cabled his U.S. office on May 22nd this message: Suspect Ron playing a confidence trick.
Jack Parsons, weak fool, obvious victim, prowling swindlers.
In a letter a few days later, he said, It seems to me on the information of our brethren in California that Parsons has got an illumination in which he lost all his personal independence.
From our brother's account, he has given away both his girl and his money.
Apparently, it is the ordinary confidence trick.
And to his intellectual credit, Jack Parsons did eventually realize what was going on.
By July 5th, he had traveled to the East Coast and, in the words of a letter to his master, pursued the children of my folly.
He succeeded in salvaging about $3,000 of the money Hubbard had escaped with.
In true form, Jack credited this with his magical abilities, summoning a squall to stop their boat from leaving port.
He also went to the police for help, which maybe had more of an impact.
My squall.
Yes, indeed.
Yeah.
For sure.
After recovering the last of his money, Jack Parsons left L. Ron Hubbard and Betty Northrop, both of whom wound up bigamously married later before splitting up violently in the early 1950s.
Parsons never saw either of them again.
But he remained with Marjorie, still dedicated to summoning a moon child and becoming the Antichrist.
In fact, he took the oath of the Antichrist in 1948 and changed his name to Belarian Armilus Aldajal Antichrist.
What?
Say that again.
Belerian Armilus Aldajal Antichrist.
Daijal is like the Islamic name for saying that.
Okay, cool.
Just antichrist.
Just thrown in there at the end, just in case it wasn't clear enough.
Yeah.
Great, cool.
Yeah.
Hell yeah, for sure, dog.
Sadly, all this monkeying around with the occult had a negative impact on Jack's career as a rocket scientist.
He'd been forced out of the JPL by 1944 because of his growing weirdness and experimentation.
You keep jerking off on the rockets.
You got to stop coming on the rockets, Jack.
As the Cold War settled in during the late 1940s and early 1950s, Jack was caught up in the dragnet of suspicion over communist sympathizers in the defense research establishment.
His security clearance was pulled.
And the irony here is that Jack was very fucking far from being a communist.
He was more of a libertarian than anything else and described himself as both anti-fascist and anti-communist.
But the FBI saw a weirdo free love magic person and assumed that made him a dirty commie.
Jack went through a series of jobs after this, including some work for an Israeli company that brought him under suspicion of being a spy.
He wound up destitute, making pyrotechnics for the film industry in order to make ends meet.
In 1952, at the age of 37, he was working on a large order when he dropped a vial of nitroglycerin and blew himself into the astral plane.
Oh.
Yeah.
Oh, shit.
Yeah, sad story.
Oh, I wasn't aware of that part of the story.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, he blew himself up.
Oh, poor guy.
Depending on who you ask, this was either a horrible accident or a targeted assassination ordered by the U.S. government.
Oh.
And it's entirely possible he was assassinated because he was working with these Israeli companies and there were a lot of people who thought like this guy's just got is too smart, has too much dangerous knowledge to be allowed to like fuck around and be desperate for money.
And like if we can't use him because he's such a whack job, then we're going to have to kill him.
Maybe it did happen.
Who knows?
There are even those who suspect Marjorie, the infamous Scarlet Woman, of being his assassin.
Ooh.
Because she'd been in the Navy before.
So I don't know.
Wow.
L. Ron Hubbard had no more dealings with the OTO after this, but in 1969, his newfound Church of Scientology began to spin the story of LRH's days as an occult sex scribe to claim that he'd really been a secret government agent tasked with destroying the U.S. black magic scene.
They issued this statement.
Hubbard broke up black magic in America.
Because he was well known as a writer and philosopher and had friends among the physicists, he was sent in to handle the situation of black magic being practiced in a house in Pasadena occupied by nuclear physicists.
He went to live at the house and investigated the black magic rights in the general situation and found them very bad.
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 never recovered.
He rescued a girl.
Rescuing a Girl from Darkness00:07:17
That's that fucking mainstream media for you, painting the narrative.
Rescued a girl by sleeping with her and then stealing her baby several years later.
Wow, what a hero.
My hero.
Modern occultists are heavily split over the legacy of Jack Parsons and the Babylon Working, as it is called.
A number of occultists will argue that the ritual that Jack Parsons carried out may have actually worked, just not in the way Parsons had anticipated.
As one of them, a fellow named Metzger noted, Perhaps Parsons was an Antichrist and his particular mission was to pry open the apocalyptic gateway and activate the occult forces necessary for the upheaval of consciousness.
But this will not happen without a struggle between the forces of control, black magic, and oppressive boredom on one hand, and the Luciferian agents of wisdom, unleashed creativity, and anarchic rebellion on the other.
What we have been brainwashed to believe is good, patriotism, so-called free enterprise, private property, Christianity, not the teachings of Christ, but the hateful travesty that the religion bearing his name has become thanks to the likes of Pat Robertson and his filthy ilk, is now beginning to be seen by the emerging generation of the crowned and conquering child to be the death trip bullshit it truly is.
A whole culture is collapsing and a new one is about to be born.
Jack Parsons would be pleased.
Wow.
So there's an optimistic way to end it.
I mean, I suppose so.
So Daniel.
Yes.
How you feeling?
How you feeling about LRH, Jack Parsons, and the moon child?
If I'm being completely real with you, I just see this like a movie where it's like you have a shot that's like 30 meters away.
It's a steady shot, and you just see L. Ron Hubbard sitting on the ground with his notepad, and then Jack Parsons just hunched over, just jerking off as fast as he possibly can, and just like, and L. Ron just, yes, yes, we must summon.
And that's the ghosts.
Sound effect I never needed.
Oh my God.
I just can't get it out of my head.
And that is just too funny to me.
No, it's amazing.
I feel for Mr. Parsons, to be honest with you.
No, it sucks.
He got really fucked over.
He totally got fucked over.
That poor moon child wanting man.
That poor moon child wanting antichrist, man.
Well, Daniel.
Yes, Robert.
This was a fun tale.
It really was.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm honored to be receiving this incredible story.
Well, Daniel, keep this in mind because one day I may call upon you to follow me out to the desert and take notes on what ghosts do while I masturbate.
Robert, I would follow you to the ends of the earth.
I'd be happy doing it.
I will not attend that event.
It's okay.
You can be just you and me, Robert.
We'll just tell Sophie about it afterwards.
Hell yeah, we will.
I would like to be excluded from that.
Just Daniel and Robert jacking off in the Mojave.
There we go.
Stay tuned.
Oh, boy.
Dan plug your pluggables.
This episode is disaster.
Okay.
Listen to all the shows on the network.
Listen to Worst Year Ever.
If you didn't get a chance to listen to It Could Happen Here, please do.
It's an incredible piece of work done by this incredible man, Robert Evans, here.
Get ready for more shows.
Support all the Sophie shows.
Support the shows on the network.
If you want to follow me for my bad takes and cummies jokes, you can follow me at DJ underscore Daniel, D-A-N-L on Twitter.
And also shout out to the Behind the Bastards subreddit and Behind the Bastards Out of Context.
You make me laugh every day.
So thank you all for being so funny on the internet.
And Robert, thank you for having me.
This has been such a pleasure.
Thank you for being on, Daniel.
And thank all of you for listening to this story, which I think has involved the use of the word and variations of the word come more than any other episode of this show.
Could not be more thrilled to be part of that.
You would have thought Cody Johnson was in the room.
You would have thought Cody Johnston was in the room.
I'm very unhappy.
He was here.
He was here in spirit.
Yes, he was.
Masturbating in the Mojave.
So You can find this podcast on the internet at behindthebastards.com, including the book Barefaced Messiah, which is all available in its entirety for free online.
It's a great read and an amazing story of the life of L. Ron Hubbard.
You can find me on Twitter at iWriteOK.
You can find this podcast on Twitter and Instagram at BastardsPod.
And you can find a moonchild of your own if you just find a couple of good friends to come with rocks on and talk about ghosts too.
New merch item, Moonchild.
Great.
That's the episode.
Love it.
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