was casting out the devil before her Pasadena congregation. At the height of the Scopes Trial controversy, and amid the efforts of the Bryan Bible League of California to make the King James Bible a required textbook in schools, Millikan – ‘to a great many people in Southern California (Babbitts and quacks included) the greatest man in the world’ – intervened to reconcile God and Science. Millikan went on the stump as a ‘Christian scientist’ proclaiming, via radio, a national lecture tour and a book, that there was ‘no contradiction between real science and real religion’. The ‘debunker’ Morrow Mayo, disgusted by the capitulation of America’s leading scientist to the fundamentalist backlash of the 1920s, described his performance as follows:
When he got through with science and religion, they were so wrapped up in each other that a Philadelphia lawyer could never untangle them. The closest this great scientist ever came to a definite stand was a full gallop on a supernatural race-track running from Fundamentalism to theism, but his powers of occult observation would have done credit to any crystal-gazer in Los Angeles. . . . The whole thing was a conglomeration of metaphysical aphorisms and theological sophistry, suffused in a weird and ghostly atmosphere of obscurantism, with occasional and literal references to Santa Claus.104
At the same time that Millikan was trying to soothe evangelical ire with reassurances about Jesus, the electron and Santa Claus, Los Angeles’s powerful ‘New Thought’ movement was avidly assimilating Einstein and Millikan to Nostradamus and Annie Besant as ‘Masters of the Ages’. Contemporary ‘science’, in the guise of astounding powers and arcane revelations, became the progenitor of an entire Southern California cult stratum. As Farnsworth Crowder explains the origin of ‘good vibrations’ in his ‘Little Blue Book’ classic, ‘Los Angeles – The Heaven of Bunk-Shooters’:
Science is the first-assistant Messiah inspiring many a sect. . . . What psychology will not suppply can be lifted from the physical sciences. Einstein, Michaelson, Millikan and company are unwitting contributors. . . . Whatever waves, oscillates, vibrates, pulses or surges contributes, by analogy, to the explanations of harmony, absent treatment, telepathy, magnetic healing, vibratory equilibirum, spiritualism or any other cloudy wonder. Surpassing are the powers of these scientific sects. One awed citizen referring to a busy group of vibrators cloistered in the hills, whispered, ‘My lord, man! – they wouldn’t dare release their secrets. The race isn’t ready – not advanced enough. The world would go to pieces. It would be like giving everybody a handful of radium. Ignorant people would have too much power.’105
In Southern California physics and metaphysics continued to rub shoulders in a variety of weird circumstances. Crowder specifically had in mind those ‘superscientists’, the Rosicrucians and Theosophists, as well as more ephemeral sects (the Church of Psychic Science, the Metaphysical Science Association, and so on), who exploited the public’s simultaneous awe and mystification in the face of strange new disciplines like quantum mechanics and psychoanalysis. Before the emergence of a full-fledged, alternative ‘science fiction’ milieu in the 1940s, and in the absence of any truly popular culture of science, they filled in the cracks between ignorance and invention, and mediated between science and theology. A more bizarre liaison, however, directly connected the oldest metaphysic, the Luciferian Magick or Black Art, to Cal Tech and the founders of the American Rocket State, and then, through an extraordinary ménage à trois, to the first world religion created by a science-fiction writer.
Cal Tech’s connection with the emergence of Scientology can be briefly retold here (relying heavily on Russell Miller’s account). Sometime during the 1930s one Wilfred Smith founded a Pasadena branch (‘the Agape Lodge’) of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) – a German-origin brotherhood of magicians (and spies) that had come under the spell of Aleister Crowley, the notorious Edwardian sorcerer and ‘most hated man in England’.106 For several years the Agape Lodge quietly succored Satan and his ‘Great Beast’ (Crowley) with contributions, while secretly diverting Pasadenans with the amusements of sexual necromancy. Then, sometime in 1939, the Lodge fell under the patronage and leadership of John Parsons, a young L.A. aristocrat and pioneer of Cal Tech rocketry (later a founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory). During the day, Parsons worked at the Cal Tech labs or the Devil’s Gate test range with the great Theodore von Karman, perfecting propellant systems for liquid-fuel rockets; at night, he returned to his mansion on Pasadena’s ‘millionaires row’ (South Orange Grove Avenue) to perform blasphemous rituals (with, for example, naked pregnant women leaping through fire circles) in his secret OTO ‘temple’ under the long-distance direction of Crowley.107
Aside from being a world-famous rocket pioneer and a secret wizard, Parsons was also a devoted science fiction fan who attended meetings of the Los Angeles Fantasy and Science Fiction Society to hear writers talk about their books. One day in August 1945, to Parsons’s delight, a LAFSFS acquaintance showed up at the Orange Grove mansion with a young naval officer, Lt. Commander L. Ron Hubbard, who had already established a reputation as a master of sci-fi pulp. Captivated by Hubbard’s ‘charm’ and expressed desire to become a practitioner of Magick, Parsons welcomed him as house guest and sorcerer’s apprentice. Hubbard reciprocated by sleeping with Parsons’s mistress. Perturbed by this development, but not wishing to show open jealousy, Parsons instead embarked on a vast diabolical experiment, under Crowley’s reluctant supervision, to call up a true ‘whore of Babylon’ so that she and Parsons might procreate a literal Antichrist in Pasadena.
‘With Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto playing in the background’, Hubbard joined Parsons in the ‘unspeakable’ rites necessary to summon the ‘scarlet woman’, who, after many mysterious happenings (inexplicable power failures, occult lights, and so on), was found walking down South Orange Grove Avenue in broad daylight. After Parsons seduced the young woman in question, Hubbard and Parsons’s previous mistress ran off with the rocket scientist’s money to Florida. There is no need to relate the ensuing complex chain of events, except to say that Parsons – the renowned explosives expert – managed to blow himself and his Orange Grove mansion skyhigh in June 1952. Debate still rages as to whether it was an accident, suicide or murder.108
Hubbard, meanwhile, was ready to employ the occult dramaturgy and incantatory skills that he had imbibed in Parsons’s OTO temple to more lucrative uses. Frustrated with the small-change earnings of a pulp sci-fi writer, he founded a pseudo-science, Dianetics, which he eventually transformed into a full-fledged religion, Scientology, with a cosmology derived from the pages of Astounding Science Fiction. Russell Miller, in his fascinating biographical debunking of the Hubbard myth, described the notorious Shrine Auditorium rally, at the height of the original Dianetics craze in 1950, when Hubbard introduced the world to his own equivalent of Parsons’s ‘scarlet woman’:
As the highlight of the evening approached, there was a palpable sense of excitement and anticipation in the packed hall. A hush descended on the audience when at last Hubbard stepped up to the microphone to introduce the ‘world’s first clear’. She was, he said, a young woman by the name of Sonya Bianca, a physics major and pianist from Boston. Among her many newly acquired attributes, he claimed she had ‘full and perfect recall of every moment of her life’, which she would be happy to demonstrate.
SCI-FI RELIGION
Hollywood
’What did you have for breakfast on 3 October 1942?’ somebody yelled. . . . ‘What’s on page 122 of Dianetics?’ . . . someone else asked. Miss Bianca opened her mouth but no words came out. . . . As people began getting up and walking out of the auditorium, one man noticed that Hubbard had momentarily turned his back on the girl and shouted, ‘OK, what colour necktie is Mr Hubbard wearing?’ The world’s first ‘clear’ screwed up her face in a frantic effort to remember, stared into the hostile blackness of the auditorium, then hung her head in misery. It was an awful moment.109
