State of Protest

The first Church of Scientology was formed in 1953 in New Jersey by Science Fiction author Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, better known as L. Ron Hubbard. Scientology promotes the use of Dianetics, a self-help system developed by Hubbard, which attempts to “clear” the portion of the mind which stores trauma. Part Two of this article will go into further detail on Dianetics and other practices of Scientology, but I would like to begin with some background on the fascinating life of L. Ron Hubbard.

Hubbard’s father was in the Navy, which allowed the family to travel often. Hubbard loved to share the stories of his travels, particularly of his time spent in the Far East between 1927 and 1929. His followers would later repeat, “Among other wonders, Ron told of watching monks meditate for weeks on end, contemplating higher truths … he befriended … a thoroughly insightful Beijing magician … Old Mayo was well versed in China’s ancient wisdom that had been handed down from generation to generation. Ron passed many evenings in the company of such wise men, eagerly absorbing their words … he closely examined the surrounding culture. … he spent time with nomadic bandits originally from Mongolia … [t]hese sojourns in Asia and the Pacific islands had a profound effect, giving Ron a subjective understanding of Eastern philosophy … the world itself was his classroom, and he studied in it voraciously, recording what he saw and learned in his ever-present diaries…”¹

These stories paint a picture of an open-minded young man, eagerly absorbing culture and philosophy, but his “ever-present diaries” tell a very different story. They make no mention of Old Mayo the Beijing magician or nomad bandits, and they contain no reflection on Eastern philosophy. Instead, there are entries such as: “As a Chinaman can not live up to a thing, he always drags it down.” and “They smell of all the baths they didnt [sic] take. The trouble with China is, there are too many chinks here.” He described the Tibetan Buddhist temples as “very odd and heathenish … miserably cold and very shabby … The people worshiping have voices like bull-frogs and beat a drum and play a brass horn to accompany their singing…”²

In 1933, Hubbard married Margaret “Polly” Grub, with whom he fathered two children. It was around this time that he began his career in writing, quickly becoming well-known in the science fiction, fantasy, and pulp fiction genres. In 1938, he wrote a letter to Polly reading, “I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form, even if all the books are destroyed. That goal is the real goal as far as I am concerned.” After serving in the U.S. Navy in World War II, during which he was the subject of several negative reports,³ Hubbard abandoned his wife and children and married Sara Northrup. This was an act of bigamy, as he did not divorce his first wife for more than a year after he had remarried.⁴ Both women claim Hubbard physically abused them. When Sara filed for divorce in 1950, she accused Hubbard of kidnapping their baby daughter Alexis, and of “systematic torture, beatings, strangulations and scientific torture experiments.”⁵ Hubbard later disowned Alexis, claiming she was the child of his friend, Jack Parsons.

Jack Parsons was an aeronautics professor and an associate of British occultist Aleister Crowley. Hubbard and Parsons allegedly attempted to summon a goddess or “moonchild” in 1946 by practicing sex magic rituals called the Babalon Working. Hubbard later claimed he was on a mission to end Parsons’ practices in ritual magick and to “rescue” a girl being used in the rituals, who happened to be Sara Northrup, Hubbard’s second wife. Crowley’s notes at this time indicate that he considered Hubbard a “lout” who made off with Parsons’ money and girlfriend in an “ordinary confidence trick.”⁶

After his second divorce, Hubbard threw himself into his writings and in 1952, the same year he expanded Dianetics into Scientology, he married Mary Sue Whipp. They had four children together and remained married until Hubbard’s death in 1986, although they separated in the early 1970s. As Scientology grew in both numbers and controversy, Hubbard began to distance himself from the unwanted attention. In 1967, he resigned as executive director of the church and declared himself “Commodore” of a small fleet of ships, appointing a crew of Scientologists known as the “Sea Org.” He spent the next eight years sailing the Mediterranean Sea and being attended by teenage girls dressed in white hot pants, known as the “Commodore’s Messengers.” He was said to have had frequent screaming tantrums, and errant crew members were punished brutally through incarceration in the ship’s chain-locker for weeks at a time or through “overboarding,” in which they would be bound, blindfolded, and thrown into the sea. In a letter home to Mary Sue, he wrote, “I’m drinking lots of rum and popping pinks and greys…”⁷

After returning home and being weaned off a diet consisting almost entirely of drugs, he began to run into many legal difficulties, including accusations of espionage, conspiracy against the U.S. Federal government, and fraud through skimming millions of dollars from church accounts. In the mid-1970s Hubbard decided to end his life at sea, but covertly returned to the United States. He later retired to a ranch in California, where he began writing science fiction again in the 1980s. He died on his ranch at age 74, reportedly from a stroke. The official announcement of the Church of Scientology was that Hubbard had deliberately discarded his body to do “higher level spiritual research,” and was now living “on a planet a galaxy away.”⁸

1. 1923-1929: On the road to discovery, L. Ron Hubbard: Shaping the 21st Century with Solutions for a Better World 1-2. [↩]
2. Miller, Russell. Bare-faced messiah: The true story of L. Ron Hubbard, 1987 [↩]
3. Sappell, Joel; Welkos, Robert W.. “The Mind Behind The Religion“, Los Angeles Times [↩]
4. Atack, Jon (1990). A Piece of Blue Sky. New York, NY: Carol Publishing Group [↩]
5. Lattin, Don. “Scientology Founder’s Family Life Far From What He Preached”, San Francisco Chronicle, 2001 [↩]
6. Scientology: A new light on Crowley, Sunday Times, December 28, 1969 [↩]
7. L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman? Corydon [↩]
8. ”The Making of L. Ron Hubbard,” Los Angeles Times, June 24, 1990 [↩]