Sometimes truth is much stranger than fiction.
Read up on Aleister Crowley, Jack Parsons, and Marjorie Cameron. L Ron Hubbard was Jack Parson's roommate, the Babalon Workings (believe it or not I did spell that right) were an event or undertaking where Jack Parsons and Marjorie Cameron were trying to create....err...trying to incarnate some type of mystical superintelligence by sex magick rituals. They said that L Ron Hubbard was part of the Babalon workings but I didn't get the details on whether he and Jack were both tag-teaming Marjorie or whether L Ron was giving the sex magick moral support from the corner (regardless that's one room I wouldn't want to sit in!).
For those not familiar with Aleister Crowley, aka. in his own words 'The Beast', He reformed the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) and Argenteum Astrum (I'd abbreviate but don't know how to do the 'therefor' sign), was the guy who fully formed the concept of Thelema and in 1904 believed himself to have received a spiritual transmission/channeling from what he thought to be his guardian angel and then transmittions from Nut (Egyptian godess) and Horus - son of Osiris and Isis; from these writings he wrote "The Law", which is the 'Do what thou wilt' law of Thelema. Additionally he was the guy who went out to Algeria in....1917 or 1918?....and did 48 of the 49 invocations of the Enochian keys (which came of the workings of Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelly in the 1580's). Supposedly he was one of the foremost scholars of the Enochian transmissions, studied them perhaps in greater depth than anyone thus far had within the Golden Dawn. What were the Enochian keys about? They were given supposedly to Edward Kelly by the archangels. Why? They apparently wanted occultists to trigger the end times of Revelations, or at least this is how they described it, and each Enochian key in the invocation would open the four gates a little bit more - except that only the antichrist himself would have the 49th to complete the process.
Oh and on a side note - for those who think Wicca is cool and even might think it's got an uncanny similarity to OTO and Freemasonry in its structure - you're right. Gerald Gardener asked Aleister Crowley for his system and mentioned that he wanted to start his own version based on witches (his admission - he was in it for the naked women dancing around the campfire, shame for him they didn't have Viagra back in his day). Wicca was a rip off of Argenteum Astrum, Argenteum Astrum and OTO were a rip off of Freemasonry, hence in relationship to Freemasonry, Wicca is a knock-off of a knock-off.
Aleister Crowley mentored Jack Parsons, a young...err....Thelemite himself who was high up in the California branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis as well as the Temple of Set. Jack was also a rocket propulsion engineer, founder of NASA-JPL. Majorie's story was a little bit different - it sounds like she just got pulled in and had an affinity for magick of that sort and it seemed like she just came pre-built with natural talents in witchcraft/sorcery. So together in that circle you had 'The Beast' (Aleister Crowley), Jack Parsons who claimed to be the Antichrist (no small ego for sure), and Marjorie who was encouraged to believe that she was the Scarlet Woman/Mystery Babylon in the flesh - something she eventually sort of agreed with and saw in herself. For better or worse Jack blew himself up in the lab before Marjorie ever conceived the moon child.
As far as L Ron Hubbard's founding of Scientology - I have no idea what he was doing. I don't think Aleister Crowley ever met L Ron Hubbard, at least as far as I remember I know Jack Parsons wanted to introduce Marjorie to him but never got the chance. What I can say is that - like Gerald Gardner and Wicca, I'm sure L Ron Hubbard took plenty of organizational ideas from OTO, Temple of Set, as well as applying his own innovations. Ideologically it seems like Scientology is quite a ways removed from anything directly Crowley or Parsons influenced but the structure seems much more built around having an iron grip on the minds of those inside of the core organization - ie. it's been a bit of a mind control experiment.
Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 08 Apr 2013, 6:58 pm, edited 2 times in total.