The Scientology Succession

There’s plenty of books out there offering exposés on Scientology. Probably the best and most expansive overviews of the subject are found in Jon Atack’s A Piece of Blue Sky and Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear. Russell Miller’s Bare-Faced Messiah is a bit more restricted in scope in that it is a biography of L. Ron Hubbard and so doesn’t continue its story particularly far past his death in 1986; at the same time, Scientology is so dependent on the words of Hubbard and on the veracity of the boasts he made about his life, and has both its procedures and organisational structure so irreversibly frozen in the form he himself set, and has so many abuses which arise directly from his instructions, that any even-handed biography of him which isn’t bamboozled by Scientology propaganda is also a pretty effective takedown of Scientology as a subject.

There’s also a trickle of tell-all books by ex-Scientologists who have become disillusioned; A Piece of Blue Sky has elements of this, since Jon Atack was an enthusiastic Scientologist before he dropped out and became one of its most knowledgeable critics, and Jenna Hill’s Beyond Belief, though more focused on her personal experience than an examination of the subject as a whole, is interesting because of Jenna’s insights as the niece of David Miscavige, who has exerted dictatorial control over orthodox Scientology ever since Hubbard’s death – and, indeed, before.

Miscavige, as a key member of the Commodore’s Messenger Organisation, was one of the very few people who were in regular contact with L. Ron Hubbard when he went into hiding to avoid legal trouble (with both civil and criminal cases pending) in 1980 until the end of his life. As the designated mouthpiece of Hubbard, Miscavige was well-placed to set himself up as Hubbard’s successor, and he duly did so, with the formation of the Religious Technology Center headed up by him a key part of this process. Thus, when Hubbard finally died in 1986, there was little opposition to Miscavige continuing as the de facto ultimate leader of Scientology, since he and his RTC and CMO allies had already purged the ranks of perceived enemies in the preceding years, supposedly with Hubbard’s approval.

This makes Stewart Lamont’s Religion Inc. a rather interesting overview of Scientology. It is not as wide-ranging as Going Clear or A Piece of Blue Sky, but it came out in 1986, with Lamont conducting his research process for a few years previously; this meant he was able to capture a snapshot of the Church right around the time when Hubbard’s death was announced, when the success of Miscavige’s power grab was becoming apparent, and when the victims of the early 1980s purges were still taking stock and figuring out what to do next.

Unlike some books critical of Scientology, Religion Inc. does not rely solely on publicly-available information and on the testimony of defectors. Lamont comes to the subject from the perspective of a religious affairs journalist, and a man of religious convictions with an openness to belief in the supernatural. Over his career he’s also served as a Church of Scotland minister, and spends his retirement indulging his long-standing interest in ghost investigations.

As well as talking to several prominent critics of Scientology – both outsiders who had never been involved and former members who had defected – Lamont was given extensive access to Scientology officials and premises, and (according to him) he made it clear to them that he had also been talking to critical individuals, mentioning some of them by name. The Church did not seem to mind, and seems to have fully expected that they could answer any queries Lamont had to his satisfaction.

Oh Donna, We’re ALL Devo!

For her follow-up to Kooks, Donna Kossy continued to explore the world of offbeat ideas but changed the nature of the focus. Whereas Kooks tried to focus on a particular kind of off-beat thinker, Strange Creations concerns itself with a particular flavour of “aberrant ideas”: namely, non-mainstream concepts of human origins.

This obviously includes creationism, with Kossy’s treatment largely picking up the story in the 18th Century, when new advancements in geology demolished old beliefs about the age of the Earth and kicked off a backlash which then gathered steam after the scientific establishment came around to evolution as the most plausible theory. (Kossy does, however, note that Christian arguments against a literal interpretation of Genesis date as far back as St. Augustine.)

However, as Kossy points out, creationists are really promoting an extremely narrow alternative to Darwin; in general, they aren’t advocating for the whole swathe of creation myths out there to be taken seriously, or even an appreciable subset of them, they are only really interested in trying to show that the Biblical account of creation in Genesis (or, specifically, one of the two mutually contradictory accounts in Genesis) is more accurate than evolutionary theory. Some go very literalist (especially in the “young Earth” wing of the movement), some allow for more metaphor and allegory, but if you are a creationist in the sense the term exists in American culture (Kossy’s focus), it’s because you want a dose of Bible in your creation narrative and the idea that God just set the entire universe in motion and then all the accidents of evolution ended up happening in accordance with his omniscient foresight (a perfectly acceptable reconciliation between evolution and religious faith which many Christians are happy to follow) isn’t quite Bible-y enough for you.

And the thing is, there’s way more alternatives out there than the Christian narrative – and Kossy’s got them to offer too. You have the rather charming (but factually challenged) aquatic ape theory, which speculates that at some point in human evolutionary history there was an intermediate stage where, after abandoning the forests, our ape-like ancestors started being primarily coastal sorts and sort of went a little way down the evolutionary pathway to becoming oceanic mammals (such as seals). You have the ancient astronaut theory and its variants, which Kossy plausibly traces back to Theosophy. (Yes, David Icke is mentioned in passing, but most of the reptoid-based information here derives from the various sources he ripped off – Icke simply isn’t an original enough thinker for Kossy to spend much time on.) You have various theories centred on the idea that, rather than evolving from simpler life forms, humanity has de-evolved from the status of its nobler ancestors. (Kossy admits her interest in this whole subject kind of comes from her being a big Devo fan.)

And you have a whole bunch of racism.

Beastly Sincerity

In writing A Magick Life Martin Booth sets himself a challenge. Biographies of figures like Aleister Crowley can be difficult because he was one of those people who devote their lives to subjects which believers take extremely seriously, but which sceptics tend to simply find amusing and/or disturbing (depending on just how prudish their instincts are).

In the case of Crowley, the subject in question is occultism and ritual magic, including sex magic rituals. This is the sort of subject matter people tend not to have mild, moderate, wishy-washy opinions about. For occultists, Crowley is either a hugely important figure in terms of recent innovations in the subject (Thelemites follow his system to this day, yet more draw on it, and chaos magicians tend to see his work as a necessary precursor to the sort of postmodern take they utilise) or one of the worst disasters to ever befall the field. Those who do not lend credence to occultism still tend to pass judgement on it; “it’s creepy and culty and manipulative” say some, “it’s an amusing eccentricity” say others, “it’s the work of the Devil” say yet others, “it’s asinine self-aggrandising nonsense” say still others.

A New Strategy For Battlefield: Earth

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

In the grim darkness of the far future there’s only slavery – humanity having been enslaved by the evil economically-driven Psychlos, tall aliens who wear big stompy boots and dreadlocks. One day, Terl (John Travolta) – the Psychlo in charge of the security of their operations on Earth – decides to see if humans can be trained to mine gold, and he picks recently-captured chump Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper) as his first test subject and begins subjecting him to vastly accelerated speed learning. This, of course, allows Tyler to realise humanity’s old accomplishments and hatch a plan to lead a daring revolution to overthrow the alien oppressors. It involves using that speed-learning tech to allow him and his pals to use some remarkably well-preserved fighter aircraft…

Battlefield Earth is a legendarily bad movie spawned from a legendarily bad book by L. Ron Hubbard, penned after he’d grown tired of cranking out Scientology material and decided to turn his hand to a bit of old school science fiction. I don’t really need to break down the deficiencies of the movie – that road’s been well-trod. For this article, I’d like to instead try out a little thought experiment: could there have been a route which would have led to the movie, if not actually being good, at least being entertainingly watchable?

Let’s put some restrictions on our thought experiment to make it interesting. Let’s say that we can’t just pirate the material – thus, like the actual filmmakers, we must still report back to David Miscavige, current God-Emperor of Scientology, and justify any changes to him. On the other hand, Miscavige is a weird tyrant, so let’s give ourselves a little advantage: let’s pretend we have an expert Miscavige-wrangler on hand who’s great at pitching ideas to him so that he will accept them, provided that some sound fiscal or doctrinal basis can be found.

Likewise, let’s assume that we have to stick to the actual story as penned by Hubbard; we are allowed to abridge and cut parts – the issued movie did, after all – but we can’t just abandon it completely.

With these restrictions in place, here’s what I reckon you could do.

Xenu Not Included

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

It’s no secret that L. Ron Hubbard was an SF author before he invented Dianetics and Scientology – even the Church of Scientology is willing to admit that – but through a combination of his monstrous charlatan creation overtaking the rest of his life’s work in the public imagination, and his last major SF works being the utter disaster of Battlefield Earth and the downright illucid Mission Earth, the place of his early writing in the development of the genre has been glossed over a lot.

This presents a difficulty to anyone trying to piece together the history of the genre. Hubbard’s tendency to wildly overstate his qualifications and accomplishments in more or less every area he turned his hand to – a habit which the Church of Scientology continues on his behalf to this day – complicates any appraisal of his work, but even critical biographies like the hilarious Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller acknowledge that Hubbard was popular amongst his fellow authors, and after all it was through the connections he made in the field that he first promoted Dianetics. On top of that, although like many of his peers he penned a tremendous amount of material and wasn’t really one for finely polishing his works – the realities of the pulp market tended to preclude that – a few of his works do still earn praise from figures in the field, despite his later reputation.