L. Ron Hubbard
Hubbard wrote pulp fiction for John W. Campbell at Astounding Science Fiction through the late 1930s. By 1942 he had roughly two hundred published stories under several pen names. The war put him in the US Navy reserve and the Pacific. He came back to California in late 1945 and moved into Jack Parsons's house at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena. He was the working scribe for the Babalon Working that Parsons conducted across January and February 1946 under the American Agape Lodge of the OTO. By the end of that year he had left Pasadena with Parsons's money and Parsons's lover. Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health appeared first in Astounding in May 1950 and then as a Hermitage House book the same month. The Church of Scientology was founded at Camden, New Jersey on 18 December 1953. He set up the Sea Organization on the converted cattle ferry Apollo in 1967 and ran the church from international waters for the next eight years. He died at his Creston, California ranch on 24 January 1986, age seventy-four.
A Life
Hubbard was born on 13 March 1911 at Tilden, Nebraska, the only child of Harry Ross Hubbard, a US Navy chief warrant officer and pharmacy graduate, and Ledora May Waterbury Hubbard, a Montana schoolteacher. The Hubbards moved frequently with Harry Hubbard's Navy postings; Ron spent his youth between Tilden, Helena Montana, Bremerton Washington, San Diego, the Pacific Northwest, and (with his father's 1927 to 1929 Guam posting) the western Pacific. He took the Helena High School diploma in June 1930 and entered George Washington University in Washington DC in autumn 1930 as a civil engineering major, but did not graduate.
The pulp-writing career opened in 1933 with the first published short story in The University Hatchet and the first professional sale to Thrilling Adventures in 1934. He wrote across western, adventure, mystery, science fiction, and fantasy markets for the next nine years under his own name and at least seven pen names (Winchester Remington Colt, Bernard Hubbel, Tom Esterbrook, Frederick Engelhardt, Kurt von Rachen, Rene Lafayette, Captain Charles Gordon). The science-fiction and fantasy output appeared from 1938 onwards in John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction and the companion Unknown: Slaves of Sleep (1939), Death's Deputy (1940), Final Blackout (1940), Typewriter in the Sky (1940), Fear (1940), and approximately fifty further Astounding and Unknown appearances through to 1942. Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A. E. van Vogt, L. Sprague de Camp and the rest of the Campbell circle were his immediate working contemporaries.
He married Margaret Louise "Polly" Grubb on 13 April 1933 at Elkton Maryland; the marriage produced Lafayette Ron Hubbard Jr. ("Nibs") in 1934 and Catherine May Hubbard in 1936. Hubbard joined the US Naval Reserve as a lieutenant junior grade in July 1941 in the months before Pearl Harbor and was called to active duty after 7 December 1941. His Pacific service from 1941 to 1945 ran across three commands but is contested in detail (Hubbard's later autobiographical accounts conflict in places with the surviving Naval Service Record); he commanded the USS YP-422 patrol craft briefly in 1942, the USS PC-815 submarine chaser briefly in 1943 (with the 18 to 19 May 1943 Cape Lookout incident in which Hubbard reported an attack on a Japanese submarine off the Oregon coast that the Navy reviewed and concluded was a magnetic anomaly, not an enemy contact), and shore postings at Princeton's School of Military Government and at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital. He was discharged from active duty in December 1945.
The Pasadena residence with Jack Parsons at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue ran from August 1945 to May 1946. Hubbard had been introduced to Parsons by a Navy friend in the Pasadena science-fiction-and-Thelemic community of the period; Parsons was OTO Agape Lodge Master, a JPL co-founder, and the major figure of the Pasadena Aleister Crowley OTO American branch. Parsons identified Hubbard as a sensitive of unusual quality and made him the working scribe of the January and February 1946 Babalon Working ritual sequence at the Parsons house. The Babalon Working is documented in detail in the Parsons biography; in summary, the Working aimed to incarnate Babalon, the Thelemic Scarlet Woman figure, into a human partner. Parsons identified Marjorie Cameron, who arrived at the Parsons house on 19 February 1946, as the elemental partner the Working had produced.
Hubbard left Pasadena in May 1946 with Sara Northrup (then Parsons's working partner, ten years his junior, half-sister of Parsons's former first wife Helen) and a part of Parsons's working capital from the Allied Enterprises partnership the three had formed in January 1946. Parsons recovered approximately half of the capital through Florida court action in July 1946. Hubbard married Sara Northrup at Chestertown Maryland on 10 August 1946 in a bigamous ceremony (his marriage to Polly Grubb was not dissolved until December 1947); the marriage produced Alexis Valerie Hubbard in 1950 and ended in 1951 with the Sara Northrup divorce filings and a custody dispute.
The Dianetics publication opened in May 1950. The John W. Campbell Astounding editorial of December 1949 had announced the forthcoming Hubbard article on a new "modern science of mental health"; "Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science" appeared as a forty-three page article in the May 1950 Astounding, and the 452-page book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health appeared from Hermitage House on 9 May 1950. The book sold approximately 150,000 copies in its first year. The Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation opened at Elizabeth New Jersey in May 1950 with John W. Campbell as a director and Joseph Winter, MD, as the medical consultant. The Foundation collapsed financially within fifteen months under the Sara Northrup divorce, the FDA medical-claims investigation, and the Winter and Campbell departures.
The Church of Scientology was founded at Camden New Jersey on 18 December 1953 as the reorganisation of the Dianetics movement around an explicitly religious framework. Hubbard developed the Scientology doctrinal corpus across the 1950s and 1960s in lecture series (the 1952 Wichita lectures, the 1960 Saint Hill Special Briefing Course, the 1968 Class VIII Course on the Sea Organization Apollo), the Operating Thetan levels OT I through OT VIII (the doctrinal core of the higher-grade material), and the published corpus (approximately 25 million words of recorded lectures and 5,000 published works across the 1948 to 1986 period). The Sea Organization was established in 1967 with the flagship Apollo (a renamed Royal Scottish Mail steamship) as its operating base; the Sea Org ran from a fleet of ships across the Mediterranean and Caribbean across 1967 to 1975 and from Clearwater Florida thereafter.
Hubbard went into seclusion from January 1980, residing at the Whispering Wind Ranch near Creston California from 1983 onwards under the care of Pat and Annie Broeker. He died at the Creston ranch on 24 January 1986 of a cerebral haemorrhage following a stroke. He was cremated within twenty-four hours per his recorded instructions and his ashes were scattered at sea. He was seventy-four. He was succeeded as Scientology's working organisational head by David Miscavige, then a twenty-five-year-old Sea Org Commodore's Messenger Organization staff member, who has held the role through to the present day.
Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.L. Ron Hubbard, attributed at the 1948 Eastern Science Fiction Association meeting at Newark, recorded by Sam Moskowitz
The 1946 Babalon Working
The Pasadena Babalon Working of January and February 1946 is the working intersection between Hubbard's pre-Dianetics period and the Pasadena Thelemic community that Jack Parsons headed as OTO Agape Lodge Master. Hubbard had moved into the Parsons house at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue in August 1945 as part of the wartime-and-postwar bohemian community Parsons maintained there. Parsons identified Hubbard as a working sensitive of unusual quality and engaged him as the scribe for the January 1946 Initial Working and the February 1946 Babalon Working proper.
The scribe role in the Thelemic working tradition is the participant whose function is to record the visions, dictations, and announcements of the operating magician under altered state of consciousness. Hubbard's working notes from the January and February 1946 sessions survive in the Parsons archive and form the documentary record of the Working. Parsons wrote to Aleister Crowley (then in declining health at Netherwood, Hastings) across January, February and March 1946 reporting on the Working; Crowley's responses, including the 22 May 1946 letter to Karl Germer noting "Apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is producing a Moon-child. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts," constitute the working Crowley position on the sequence.
Hubbard's subsequent published statements on his Thelemic period were contradictory. He denied involvement to the Apollo crew in the 1970s, claimed to have been working as an undercover Naval Intelligence officer infiltrating the Pasadena occult community (no naval-service-record corroboration of this claim survives), and across the Scientology doctrinal literature did not address the Working directly. The documentary record (Parsons's correspondence with Crowley, the OTO Agape Lodge files, the Crowley papers held at the Warburg Institute London) places Hubbard as a working participant in the January-February 1946 sequence.
The Babalon Working is documented in detail in the Jack Parsons biography and the Aleister Crowley biography. The Hubbard-Parsons-Crowley correspondence and the OTO Agape Lodge records constitute the documentary record. The Working is the intersection between the Thelemic system and the figures whose subsequent careers (Parsons in rocketry to 1952, Hubbard in Dianetics and Scientology to 1986) intersect with the archive's documentary holdings.
Photographs
Significance to the Archive
Hubbard matters to this archive for one specific documented reason: the 1946 Pasadena Babalon Working at Jack Parsons's house, in which Hubbard served as the working scribe, is the documented intersection between his pre-Dianetics period and the Pasadena Thelemic-and-rocketry community Parsons headed. The Working connects directly into the existing Parsons biography and the Aleister Crowley biography as the principal twentieth-century American occult-and-contactee historical episode.
The subsequent Dianetics and Scientology developments (1950 publication, 1953 Church founding, 1967 Sea Organization, 1986 death) sit outside the archive's UAP-and-NHI documentary scope and are documented in the Hubbard biography for context only.
