Behind the Bastards - How L. Ron Hubbard Made An Antichrist Using Sex Magic

Episode Date: March 12, 2020

Robert is joined by DJ Danl Goodman to discuss Jack Parsons and Black Magic Scientology.FOOTNOTES: The Mysterious Mr. Parsons — Life at the Crossroads of Crowley and Hubbard Occultist father of rocketry 'written out' of Nasa's history Black Magic and Betty SCIENTOLOGY: Revealed for the first time. . . ALEISTER CROWLEY A Correction of the Falsehoods in Lawrence Wright's Book on Scientology Hymn to Pan Jack Parsons and the Occult Roots of JPL Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Reading, 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. Hello, Robert. How are you doing, buddy? I'm doing good, Dan. How are you doing? I'm honestly great. I could not be more thrilled to be here. I have my son and my work husband and my dog. 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. I'm sorry. It's okay. I appreciate that, though. Chris, redo that again. No editing. It's part of the meta now. Dan. Yes, Robert. You and I have been colleagues for a while. We've worked together. We enjoy each other's company.

We've become friends over the course of many months and many recording sessions. I'm honored you would say so. I don't know how things are done with friendship where you come from, Danil. There's a guy in a motorcycle. I'm excited for this going. I don't know how things are done where you come from, Danil. 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 an expression where you come from, Danil? Yeah, totally, man. Absolutely. Me and all my friends, we sit down and talk about that thing you totally just said. Welcome to our friendship group, Dan. Go on, please. I have done five episodes on L. Ron Hubbard because he was amazing. 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 Caitlyn 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, Danil. 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. Oh, fuck yeah. Does that sound good to you, Danil? 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 Senior, 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 Junior, 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's, you know, socks, but all right, I'm with. Marvel Junior's mom filed for divorce, and to avoid unpleasant memories of her ex began calling Marvel Junior, John.

In eighth grade, John met a boy named Edward Foreman. Like him, Eddie was a big fan of Jules Verne in 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. 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 you were just making bombs basically. 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. That totally rules.

Yeah. So the Parsons family neighbors reported bemusedly that the large backyard of their manor was filled with blackened craters and shrapnel from failed test launches. What a report. Yeah. Y'all is full of craters and debris. 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.

Freshly cratered ground. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we're still in the mostly exploding things territory here. 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. 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 Alistair Crowley. What do you know about Alistair 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 this Crowley. Oh, really? Oh, great. I know the chorus of that song. Yeah, he is the inventor of a religion called Philema. Okay. Yeah, he's starting in the late 1930s, 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 known today as the founder of the Philemic 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. Yeah. So he's like one of the founding fathers of 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 Kachinjunga in 1905, an avalanche had buried the rest of Crowley's team under snow. Oh, my God. 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. Yeah, I did tell you so. I told you this was a bad idea. Jesus Christ. That's, wow. All right, cool. Sick. Objectively, he's 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. Yeah. 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 could 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. Wait, I'm sorry. Hold on. Time out. Erotic poetry, Dale.

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 when does that come into play? How does the erotic poetry just come about? He writes a lot of erotic poetry. All right. So all of this occult stuff. That's just like a pastime outside of the occult shit is just like,

yeah, I mean, I also love to talk about that kind of thing. So Crowley's doing magic and telling other people to do magic. That's like his whole thing, but it's sex magic. A lot of it involves fucking. A lot of it involves tons of cum and blood and fucking. He's a big free love advocate. Cool. And a lot of this comes out of this rejection of Christian morality,

like this recognition from a lot of free thinkers that like, oh, wow, our Christian based society is completely fucked and immoral. All right. 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 got the Cummies.

All right. Where it sounds good. Yeah. Yeah. He's fucking cumming like you wouldn't believe in the fucking early 1900s, man. Hell yeah. This guy is seaming 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.

His wife, Heaven, joined 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.

Agape Lodge like, come on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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

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 and purposefully blasphemous rites. Wow. So 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, we contain multitudes. It's cool as hell is what it is. It is cool as hell. It fucking rules.

I fuck with this guy. So far. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. 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 Alistair 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, got it, got it. Definitely like some mentor-mentee relationship kind of shit. Exactly, maybe 30s. 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. 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 prepared to launch a rocket. I am pan, yo pan, yo 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 hooves 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 manid man in the might of pan, yo pan, yo pan, pan, pan, yo pan. Wow. Wow.

Fuckin' what? I'm just thinking about 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. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.

That is fantastic. Yeah, it rules. Good for him, good for him, good for you, good for you. So 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... Seriously.

They did. He got fired from the JPL for being a fucking weirdo. But moreover, just that it took a while, that they're like, you know... But he's such a good scientist. He's an incredible scientist. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's how it goes. His chief invention. He's considered to be the main inventor of the solid fuel rocket.

Yeah, I mean, that's... Yeah, we don't have space travel without it. Precisely. Yeah. No less a mind than Vernevon Brown 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, 1941 is when they officially start to found the JPL.

Got it. Yeah, they had done so much damage to the campus at Caltech that they'd been forced to relocate to a series of iron sheds in the Arroyo Seco Canyon. And this became the jet propulsion laboratory. 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 Orngrove Avenue, which he had inherited upon his errant father's death. South Orngrove 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, 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 is gone too far. Yeah, 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 manner 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 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. Yes, especially in the early fucking 40s when everybody sucked even more than they do now.

Yeah. So the police showed up semi-regularly as a result of these loud parties. What? 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. So... Gotta cleanse that baby.

Yeah, gotta cleanse that baby. I mean, that's just basic obstetrics. Yeah. This is fucking awesome. Well done, well done. 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.

With that lead in, do you know what time it is? Oh! It's time for something that's not El Ron Hubbard, the products and services that support this show. Yay! Although we would take El Ron Hubbard as a sponsor, absolutely. Not Scientology the Church,

but El Ron Hubbard himself. Yeah. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. We'll take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys,

we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good badass way.

He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass,

and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit

when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space.

313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science

you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted

pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial

to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! So, Elron Hubbard is entering the story now, Daniel. Hell yeah.

Elron Hubbard has LRH has entered play. Oh boy. New player has joined. LRH. In September 1945, after World War II would draw into 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 of his ailments. 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 trolling around Pasadena. And in August of 1945, he stumbled into the house on South Orange Grove Avenue at a particular meeting of science fiction aficionados. Because Jack Parsons is a big ol' nerd. So LRH instantly recognized

the Jack Parsons circle as the ideal environment for an instinctive conman like himself to operate in. And I'm going to quote now from the book Bare-Faced Messiah. Ron, ebullient as always, was not in any way intimidated by the egregious company in 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 while others 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.

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 invited to him his belief, confirmed by extensive research he had undertaken at the Royal Museum in London,

extended from the same line of Neanderthal 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 Parson's manor. And in true Elron 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, 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. Nah.

I was not one of his favorite people because I like to try and trip him up. One time he told a story about how he was walking down a corridor to a 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, G. 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 as an old, old folklore story that goes way back. He was always broke in trying to borrow money. That was another reason he didn't like me.

I would never lend him a cent. He used to say that he thought the easiest way to make money would be to start a religion. Yeah, 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 usually Heinlein who reports it.

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. That you could just tell stories like that. And if there wasn't someone around who knew George or was 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? Yeah, exactly. You can convince them of anything. I once convinced a friend of mine that the band Hanson had died in a bush crash

and you know, it's shockingly easy is what we're saying. Poor Hanson. They're okay by the way. They're not dead. They're fine. On December 5th, 1945,

Elron 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, Danil, 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.

Yeah. Okay, for sure. Oh, man. Shortly after they get together, Sarah drops out of USC and moves in with her brother-in-law, Jack, in a 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 and he and Betty were better than normal people because they did not feel it. And when you type it out that way,

the whole situation sounds like a fucking time bomb. I mean, yes. Oh, 100%. I mean, we stan a sex-positive king, but 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... There are healthy ways to do non-monogamy. Yeah. This is not one of them. No, it doesn't really sound like it. No, not quite. Yeah. So, yeah, 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. Elron Hubbard would finally 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 written Alistair 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 many times. He is in complete accord

with our own principles. I have found a staunch companion and comrade in Ron. Oh. It's his butt. He loves his guy. It's his buddy. Yeah. And he's got his butt. Ron's got, yeah, I gotta, 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 Elron 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 Thilema, 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 Elron 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.

Sounds like Elron 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. Those of you Yeah,

those of you who listened to our first three-parter on Elron 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 in that point if you're going to be. I know, yeah. Jealousy is an emotion of the week. Oh, man. Hubbard absolutely knows what

he's doing here. Yeah. 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, yeah, I can certainly imagine. Mm-hmm. 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 signed 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's 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. 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 horror of Babylon so that he could impregnate her with a moon child. It just gets so much deeper. It just keeps going. Like, just the idea. 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 Thelamite friends will forgive me if I get some details wrong about

what precisely Jack Parsons and Elrond 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. Well, Jack Parsons masturbated in a variety of elaborate ways. A short stroke today. Yeah. Wow. Wow.

Yeah, it's awesome. I found a medium article written by someone who's a lot more occultically trained than I am, and he explained the rituals this way. That means, you know, just hanging out with my friend, while he masturbates. Perfect.

Sounds like a great Saturday. That does sound like a good Saturday. Me and a buddy, him coming, me looking at the astral plane, taking notes to times. Just good times. Life was really a lot better before the internet. Taking notes and noting strokes.

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. No, they're constant. But Jack took this as a sign that his magical ritual was working. And L. Ron Hubbard played along, claiming on January 14th

that the 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 it. That's awesome. So time out, real question. Is the magical sword just his penis? It has to be, right? It has to be his penis.

I love that. Brandish a magical sword. I'll be sure to bust that one out next time. Yeah. Everything that's happening here, it rules and I'm fine with it. Amazing. Now, the very next night,

they began their rituals again, with Jack baiting 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 throwing knives. Oh, this is some sci-fi for sure.

So I used my throwing knives. Wow, okay. I love it. I love it. This is like an anime plot right here. Yeah, it's amazing. 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.

However much fucking speed, they're on enough speed that if they'd been partying with Hunter Thompson, he would have been like, guys, you are doing way too much speed. Dr. Gottzom himself would have been like, this is too much. Calm the fuck down with the speed.

That's really funny. That's funny. I will say, when I had my occult phase, I was also doing a lot of fucking speeds. 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. 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 were turned 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 waiting at the Parsonage, which is what he called his house for them. Now, the reality of the situation, Danil, is that Jack Parsons was a really handsome genius with a fuck mansion and young women were always

showing up to fuck. 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. 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, Alistair 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 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. 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 products?

The products and services. Yeah, let's support this podcast. 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 whore of Babylon. That whore of Babylon? Capitalism. Yeah. We have that clause

in our agreements with the advertisers, right Sophie? That they'll help you summon the whore of Babylon. Yep, here you go. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man

who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good-bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys

on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become

the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space

with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic

science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match of science in CSI. How many people

have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back. Amazing. And we're talking about Elron Hubbard and Jack Parsons and Sex Magic. Jerking off on rocks. Jerking off on rocks. 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 the instructions for how he could impregnate his elemental girlfriend with a moon child. Quote from the goddess that he met after coming on a rock in the desert. I'm ready to give birth to a moon child for sure after that.

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 writing naked

on a great cat-like beast. I imagine that whenever LRH closed his eyes, he just saw scenes from the movie Heavy Metal. Yes, yes! Oh my gosh, love it. The monologue was illustrated by Ralph Bakshi. I love it, I love it.

Love you, good Bakshi. So, he tells her, yeah, he's seen this vision of a woman writing 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 Bare-Faced 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, Rachmaninov's Isle of the Dead was played as background music. At eight o'clock, Hubbard began to entone, yeah? At eight o'clock, Hubbard began to entone 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 ten 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 ten 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 her 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-litted daughter of sunset. I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous

night sky. So wow. Throughout this whole process, Jack and Marjorie, and probably Alron Hubbard too, were all getting hornier and hornier. Together they read out, together they read out a chorus. Glory unto the scarlet woman, Babylon, the mother of abominations that righteth 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 hordom. Wow. Her hordom. Hubbard. Her hordom. 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 Alron Hubbard narrated. And this sort of thing continued for three more days. Three days. Three days? Jesus. Three days they're doing this shit.

So 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 menstrual 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. The climax. Nice. Over Rockmononov. 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 words worth 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 D&D 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 moonshile 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 be gotten 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 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. So...

And then what? Is that just like his beast of control? What is this homunculus then achieve? I will tell you, Daniel. I will tell you. 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 following the angelic language of the Anachian calls of Elizabethan magus John D in the attraction of the sex force of the duo's copulation 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 rights of the Babylon working it was Parsons goal to bring on the apocalypse. So this is from that medium of course, analyzing all this occultically. Of course.

He's trying to bring on the apocalypse. It's important to understand what Jack Parsons conceived of as the apocalypse. 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 Elran 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 lousy.

I was just shading your boy right there. Wow. So, Alistair Crowley knew a con artist when he saw one. Yes. And he suspected that Hubbard was playing along with his 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. So, after this happened you got conned. You did. Absolutely get conned. Damn. And he didn't even

get the homunculus. No, no, didn't even get the moon child. Come on, man. 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 LRH Hubbard stole 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 US office on May 22 this message. Suspect Ron playing a confidence trick. Jack Parsons weak fool, obvious victim prowling swindlers.

In the 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 5 he had traveled to the east coast and in the words of a letter to his master he sued 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. For sure. After recovering the last of his money Jack Parsons left LRH 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 Bolarian Armulus Aldigel Antichrist. What? Say that again. Bolarian Armulus Aldigel Antichrist. Dijel is like the Islamic name for say. Okay cool.

The Antichrist just thrown in there at the end. Just in case it wasn't clear enough. Yeah. Great. Cool. 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

yeah because of his growing weirdness and experimentation. You keep jerking off on the rockets. You gotta 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 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 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 fatal accident or a targeted assassination ordered by the US government. Oh. And it's entirely possible he was assassinated because like 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 gonna 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. Oh.

Maybe before is like I don't know. Wow. Elron Hubbard had no more dealings with the OTO after this but in 1969 his new found 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 US 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. That's that fucking mainstream media for you. Yeah.

Pain in the narrative. Rescue a girl by sleeping with her and then stealing her baby several years later. Well, 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. Well, we have been brainwashed to believe as 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

suffering 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, Robert. How are you feeling? How are 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 LRH Hubbard sitting on the ground with his notepad and then Jack Parsons is just hunched over, just jerking off as fast as he possibly can and just like and LRH just, yes, yes. We must summon.

Yes, the ghosts are happy. Sound effect I never needed. Oh my god. I just can't get it out of my head. 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 totally got 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. Mm-hmm. 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 and I'd be happy doing it. I will not attend that event. That's great to know. 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 narrative. There we go.

Stay tuned. Dan, plug your plugables this episode. Disasters. 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 of Sophie's shows. Support the shows on the network. If you want to follow me for my bad takes and follow me's jokes, you can follow me at dj underscore Danl, 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 Danl. 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. I'm more thrilled to be part of that experience. You would have thought Cody Johnson was in the room. You would have thought Cody Johnson was in the room. I'm very unhappy.

He was here in spirit, masturbating in the Mojave. So... I'm so sorry, Cody. You can find this podcast on the internet behindthebastards.com, including the book Bareface Messiah, which is all available in its entirety for free online.

It's a great read and an amazing story of the life of Elron Hubbard. Um... You can find me on Twitter at I write okay. You can find this podcast on Twitter and Instagram at At Bastards Pod. 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. MUSIC Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations.

In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of goods. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them?

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow,

hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I oughta know. Because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut

who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast,

or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.