Articles

Jason Colavito
2011

In the first months of 2011, two stories in the news turned attention toward the Church of Scientology, the faith founded by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard in 1952 and long rumored to involve secret teachings about space aliens who came to earth 75 million years ago. The first was a major article in the New Yorker’s February 14 edition detailing alleged abuse and poor working conditions at the hands of the church and its leaders (Wright). The second was the rumor that film director Guillermo del Toro wanted the most famous Scientologist of all, Tom Cruise, to star in a big screen adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s 1931 story of the discovery of an ancient extraterrestrial civilization, At the Mountains of Madness. While the Mountains of Madness movie project fell apart, interest in Scientology did not.

As some noted at the time of the Tom Cruise rumors, Scientology and Lovecraft share eerie parallels. Lovecraft’s (fictional) extraterrestrials came to earth in the distant past and had a profound and largely dark influence on early humanity (see The Origins of the Space Gods), and this idea bears a resemblance to Operating Thetan Level III (OT-III), the (supposedly nonfictional) cosmological doctrine L. Ron Hubbard created circa 1967 for Scientology. Lovecraft’s version, to my mind, is the more subtle and convincing of the two.

It is a fact that Hubbard was a science fiction writer active in the same years that Lovecraft’s stories were first published (the late 1930s—some Lovecraft tales were published after his 1937 death) and writing for the same types of pulp magazines in which Lovecraft’s stories appeared. However, the two authors’ outlets overlapped only at Astounding Stories (known after 1938 as Astounding Science-Fiction), the magazine that published At the Mountains of Madness in 1936. This story, however, includes the same type of cosmic sweep as Hubbard’s cosmology, though both approach the concept in very different ways. Hubbard developed Dianetics (the precursor of Scientology) for Astounding Science Fiction in 1950, and science fiction luminaries such as L. Sprague de Camp and Astounding editor John W. Campbell were friends of Hubbard and also well-versed in Lovecraftian fiction.

I admit that in the past I have shied away from exploring the possible connections between Lovecraft and Scientology, both because of the church’s infamous litigiousness and also because I had not studied the Scientology materials needed to make judgments. I should note here that I have no special knowledge of the secret doctrines of Scientology, and I do not know what the group teaches its followers beyond the publicly available information that has been widely reported since its disclosure during legal proceedings in the 1980s and 1990s. The 2011 New Yorker article reported what the court document and news accounts of the 1980s and 1990s had made public: that Hubbard claimed an ancient astronaut named Xenu (or Xemu), onetime president of a galactic confederation of overpopulated planets, came to earth 75 million years ago and buried a billion or more aliens beneath volcanoes and killed them with hydrogen bombs. Their souls (or thetans) are said to now infest human hosts, causing many problems—problems that only Scientology’s “technology” can solve (Wright). According to testimony from Warren McShane, the president of the Scientology subsidiary, the Religious Technology Center, in the case of Religious Technology Center v. F.A.C.T.Net, Inc., et al. (1995), this information, “the discussion of the -- of the volcanoes, the explosions, the Galactic confederation 75 million years ago, and a gentleman by the name Xemu there. Those are not trade secrets.” Since this material is in the court records, it would seem to be fair game for analysis and criticism.

There are some superficial similarities between Lovecraft’s and Hubbard’s visions of our alien past. Both wrote that extraterrestrials came to earth tens of millions of years ago, and both wrote that earth had been a part of a galactic system of inhabited worlds before a cataclysm caused the aliens to retreat. Hubbard’s Galactic Confederation was something like a cosmic United Nations, while Lovecraft had a messier conception of a multiplicity of alien races treating earth as one planet among many to conquer and on which to spawn. Both authors also wrote about buried evidence of alien civilizations: in Hubbard’s case, alien implant or reporting stations at Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, a Martian station in the Pyrenees, and Xenu’s prison (“OT-III”; Miller 206); for Lovecraft, sunken or buried cities such as Cthulhu’s R’lyeh, the Old Ones’ Antarctic city, or the Great Race’s Australian metropolis. Hubbard’s Xenu is said to be “in an electronic mountain trap where he still is.” Of the other aliens, “‘They’ are gone,” Hubbard wrote (“OT-III”). Similarly, Cthulhu lives on, trapped in his undersea city of R’lyeh. Of the other aliens in Cthulhu’s retinue, “Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea” (Lovecraft Fiction 366). The differences are also telling. Cthulhu is trapped (in the original version) by purely natural forces (later August Derleth would make Cthulhu the victim of cosmic punishment), while Xenu is imprisoned by his rebellious lieutenants, like Kronos placed in the Greek Tartarus at the hands of Zeus.

Additionally, both wrote about the ability of minds to travel millions or billions of years across time and millions or billions of miles across space for encounters with the aliens. For Lovecraft, this took several forms. In “The Whisperer in Darkness,” human brains were removed from their bodies and placed in metal canisters for interstellar travel. In “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” Randolph Carter’s mind travelled from body to body across the planets and the eons, while in “The Shadow Out of Time,” Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had his own mind traded with that of a member of the Great Race of Yith from 250 million years ago. The Great Race, of course, had learned to migrate from age to age by projecting their minds into other species’ bodies, rendering the Grace Race close to immortal. For Hubbard, the initiate into Scientology’s highest secrets is able to project his mind into the stars. According to David G. Bromley and Mitchell L. Bracey, Jr., the official Scientology doctrine is that the dead Hubbard lives on in bodiless form, researching spirituality on another planet (144), just as Randolph Carter’s mind visits the cosmic oneness that is Yog-Sothoth and studies magic in the body of a wizard on the planet Yaddith. Similarly, the Scientology “thetans” are also disembodied spirits who persist from age to age, like the roving minds of the Great Race. In both Lovecraft’s and Hubbard’s conceptions, this idea derives from nineteenth century occult ideas of astral projection, which Lovecraft encountered in such sources as Walter De Le Mare’s The Return (1910). Hubbard was also familiar with astral projection, having written about the practice early in his career in the science fiction story “The Dangerous Dimension” (1938), which he described as an updated, science-fiction form of astral projection (“Golden Age”).

Both writers even had similar ideas about madness-inducing literary secrets. In “The Call of Cthulhu,” Lovecraft’s narrator describes the way madness results should anyone put together the pieces of the true history of aliens on earth, including hints from the Necronomicon and other written texts:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (Lovecraft Fiction 354)

In parallel, Hubbard claimed to Forrest J. Ackerman that his book Excalibur was so dangerous that those who read it committed suicide or went insane (“L. Ron Hubbard”). Hubbard himself said that he wrote the book after receiving a message from the stars when he “died” for eight minutes during a dental examination (Gardner 272), and the Church of Scientology claimed that four people who read the book went insane (Malko 39). Scientology would also declare that anyone who learned of Xenu without proper preparation would catch pneumonia and die (Rothstein 369). Such claims are unique neither to Lovecraft or Hubbard, though. In 1895, for example, Robert W. Chambers wrote of the fictitious play The King in Yellow, which he said would cause madness should anyone read its final act.

However, Hubbard’s cosmic vision is very different in detail and in tone from that of Lovecraft. Lovecraft imagined a grand cosmos of a multiplicity of diverse aliens and incorporeal entities that were utterly inhuman and incomprehensible, that treat humans as elephants might treat earthworms. By contrast, Hubbard’s aliens are essentially human in all but name, possessed of human vices and motivations. Lovecraft’s cosmos is also much less dependent than Hubbard’s on the tropes of space opera and Golden Age science fiction (presuming, of course, you take Hubbard’s cosmology as a literary text rather than revelation).

While both writers actively worked to create a new mythology, they did so in very different ways. Lovecraft’s artificial mythology was self-consciously fake, created for fun, and intended to create a deep background that presumably stood behind early fertility cults and shamanic faiths. Nor was the materialist, atheist Lovecraft shy about declaiming the falsity of his fake gods:

Regarding the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred—I must confess that both the evil volume & the accursed author are fictitious creatures of my own—as are the malign entities of Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, &c. Tsathoggua & the Book of Eibon are inventions of Clark Ashton Smith, while Friedrich von Junzt & his monstrous Unaussprechlichen Kulten originated in the fertile brain of Robert E. Howard. For the fun of building up a convincing cycle of synthetic folklore, all of our gang frequently allude to the pet daemons of the others—thus Smith uses my Yog-Sothoth, while I use his Tsathoggua. Also, I sometimes insert a devil or two of my own in the tales I revise or ghost-write for professional clients. Thus our black pantheon acquires an extensive publicity & pseudo-authoritativeness it would not otherwise get. We never, however, try to put it across as an actual hoax; but always carefully explain to enquirers that it is 100% fiction. (Lovecraft “Letter”)

Hubbard, by contrast, meant his artificial mythology to be taken as truth. Like Lovecraft’s black pantheon lurking behind classical mythology, Hubbard would claim that Christianity emerged when a “madman” discovered Xenu’s 75 million-year-old “R6” implant within his soul around 600 BCE (Hubbard). This implant apparently included images of God and the Devil, high technology, and crucifixions, inspiring the Christian faith six centuries later and leaving humans predisposed to accepting a (false) Christian message. In both cases, therefore, the aliens are the originators or manipulators of religious thought, with humans mistakenly worshipping entities that did not have their best interests in mind.

It would go far beyond the evidence to suggest Hubbard borrowed his cosmology from Lovecraft, but the core concepts of ancient aliens, buried civilizations, and mental transfer across time are all ideas that Lovecraft wrote about in stories that Hubbard almost certainly would have read years or decades before developing OT-III. Nevertheless, the reported revelations of OT-III are much more similar to Golden Age SF space opera projected into the past than anything Lovecraft would have written. (Hubbard even called the Xenu story “very space opera” in his handwritten OT-III notes.) It is, quite frankly, impossible to imagine Cthulhu engaging in palace politics the way Xenu’s lieutenants are said to have conspired against him. The closest parallel in Lovecraft is the war between the Old Ones of Antarctica and the spawn of Cthulhu in At the Mountains of Madness, but this takes much more of the form of a Darwinian survival of the fittest than a palace coup or even a Greek Titanomachy. It would seem that Hubbard’s ancient aliens are the direct result of needing the aliens to exist in the past to provide a creation story for Scientology rather than any actual interest in saying something profound about ancient history, while Lovecraft’s aliens have a immense prehistory because the enormity of time and the transience of humanity were two of Lovecraft’s major themes.

Scientology headquarters, Los Angeles. Photo © PictorialEvidence via Wikimedia Commons

I previously established in The Cult of Alien Gods (Prometheus, 2005) and my eBook The Origins of the Space Gods (2011) that Lovecraft was the primary force marrying Theosophy’s idea of planets inhabited by ascended masters and human souls waiting to be born (itself derived from medieval notions of planets as the seats of various ranks of angels) to science fiction’s non-spiritual extraterrestrials in order to create the modern myth of ancient astronauts. In this limited sense, later works like Scientology’s OT-III (taken again as a literary text) can be thought of as influenced by the ancient astronaut myth Lovecraft developed in the 1920s and 1930s. However, the more accurate thing to say is that both Lovecraft and Hubbard drew on the heritage of nineteenth century scientific romances and occult speculation, creating similar end products from the same source material. (Both, for example, were influenced by occultism—Lovecraft through the works of Arthur Machen and thus the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, while Hubbard was involved with the Rosicrucians and Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis, either to infiltrate the orders as Scientology claims or to practice magic as Russell Miller argued [112-130].) That Lovecraft created his alien gods decades before Hubbard gives him priority in imagination.

It would be interesting to think that in some parallel world, a less scrupulous Lovecraft, had he lived past 1937, might have turned his artificial mythology into a profitable religion, leaving Hubbard’s Xenu and friends to eke out an existence solely the pages of pulp fiction. Of course, in that world we would have dramatic exposés of the real origins of Cthulhu, and that would take all of the fun out of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Works Cited

Bromley, David G. and Mitchell L. Bracey, Jr. “The Church of Scientology: A Quasi-Religion.” Sects, Cults, and Spiritual Communities: A Sociological Analysis. Eds. William W. Zellner and Marc Petrowsky. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998. 141-157. Print.

Gardner, Martin. Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1957. Print.

“Golden Age, The.” The L. Ron Hubbard Site. Church of Scientology. 2004. Web.

Hubbard, L. Ron. “Class VIII Course, Lecture #10, Assists.” 3 Oct. 1968. Audio recording.

“L. Ron Hubbard.” Secret Lives. Channel 4. 19 Nov. 1997. Television.

Lovecraft, H. P. Letter to William Frederick Anger. 14 Aug. 1934. “Quotes about the Necronomicon from Lovecraft’s Letters.” HPLovecraft.com. 13 Apr. 2004. Web.

---. The Fiction. Ed. S. T. Joshi. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2008.

Malko, George. Scientology: The Now Religion. New York: Delacorte Press, 1970.

Miller, Russell. Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard. Michael Joseph, 1987. Print.

“OT-III Scholarship Page.” Operation Clambake. Web.

Religious Technology Center v. F.A.C.T.Net, Inc., et al. 95-B-2143. US District Court. 1995.

Rothstein, Mikael. “‘His Name Was Xenu…He Used Renegades.’: Aspects of Scientology’s Founding Myth.” Scientology. Ed. James R. Lewis. New York: Oxford, 2009. 365-388. Print.

Wright, Lawrence. “The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology.” The New Yorker. 14 Feb. 2011. Web.