Two against the gods

On December 9, 1952, L. Ron Hubbard delivered a lecture in Philadelphia titled “What’s Wrong With This Universe: A Working Package for the Auditor.” It’s even harder than usual to figure what he’s trying to say here, but it appears to be a description of the experiences that an individual might have “between lives,” a transitional phase in which he’s vulnerable to implanted ideas and hypnotism that can influence his goals in his next incarnation. Hubbard described a typical incident:

There was a big building. He was curious, he was very curious, and he…he wanted to know what was in the big building. It was very fancy…He’d heard some mystery had taken place in there so he goes in to take a look. It’s wide open, it’s very easy to walk into, and what does he find? He finds this enormous stone hanging suspended in the middle of the room. This is an incident called the Emanator. By the way, and this thing is, by the way, the source of the Mohammedan lodestone that they have hanging down there that—when Mohammed decided to be a good small-town booster in Kansas, Middle East, or something of that sort. By the way, the only reason he mocked that thing up is the trade wasn’t good in his home town. That’s right. You read the life of Mohammed. And he’s got a black one and it’s sort of hung between the ceiling and the floor and, I don’t know, it—maybe it’s called a casbah or something. Anyway, that thing is a mockup of the Emanator. The Emanator is bright, not black.

Hubbard would frequently suggest that other religions were misreadings of “implants” that the disembodied thetans received before attaching themselves to human hosts, which he casually extended here to the Ka’bah in Mecca. But this wasn’t the point of the lecture, and he quickly moved on.

This aside has received a fair amount of attention because it’s one of the few places where Hubbard explicitly mentions Islam. (His treatment of it isn’t much different from his views on Christianity, which he also saw as a distortion of an image implanted by Xenu: “The man on the cross—there was no Christ!”) Perhaps the most striking moment is the curious description of Muhammad as “a good small-town booster,” which certainly sounds like Hubbard—but he didn’t come up with it on his own. In fact, he took it almost verbatim from the book Twelve Against the Gods: The Story of Adventure by the South African journalist William Bolitho, which was published in 1929. Here’s the relevant section, from the chapter “Mahomet,” in full:

The start of Mahomet’s adventure, or in its more usual synonym, the basis of the Mahomedan religion, is this preoccupation of his with the fortunes of his native town. Squeamish pedantry may object to the triviality of the phrase which fits nevertheless with a precision no other can give: Mahomet was a “home-town booster,” and this conception will unlock the many obscurities of his life and his doctrine, with which the most subtle theological speculations and the most careful minutiae of history are incapable of coping with. The door by which he enters is this: “How can we attract the whole world, at least the whole of Arabia, yearly to the Ka’ba?” And the vision of One God, greatest common denominator of religion, is the solution, not the prime inspiration. In fact Mahomedanism is a religion, because Mecca’s problem, as a religious town, was religious. The rhapsodies, the epilepsies of the man while he is still struggling toward his invention, are the symptoms of a process which they sometimes assist and sometimes retard; if they were taken as analogous to the painful mental straining of a Rotarian enthusiast racking his brain for a world-beating slogan for the town of his heart it might be irreverent (we regretfully foreswore reverence at the beginning of these studies) but it would not be a joke; nor a mistake.

And we know that Hubbard read Twelve Against the Gods because he told us so himself, in a lecture that he had delivered just a few days earlier, on December 5, 1952:

There is never a great adventurer who did not end his career upon having discovered the sacred treasure of Peru. Bolitho, good old Bolitho, with his Twelve Against the Gods. It’s a wonderful thing to read—gorgeous! And the introduction of Twelve Against the Gods is one of the best pieces of work I know of, even related to a lot of things, and particularly to this subject.

It’s unclear when Hubbard first encountered it, although the occultist Jack Parsons read it aloud at meetings of the Agape Lodge during the period when the two of them were living together. Three decades later, Hubbard allegedly called it his favorite nonfiction book in response to a questionnaire from the Rocky Mountain News, although his answers were actually written up by his spokesman, who dug up the reference in his lectures. (One of the book’s other fans, interestingly, is Elon Musk, who mentioned it approvingly to a reporter last year, leading to a spike in the price of used copies online. I was lucky enough to find it for two dollars this summer at the Newberry Library Book Fair.) It might be a worthwhile exercise—and maybe I’ll do it one day—to read Bolitho’s book systematically to see where else it comes up in Hubbard’s teachings, particularly in the Philadelphia lectures. But we know for a fact that he read the chapter on Muhammad, a figure with whom he shares some superficial similarities. Hubbard’s early knowledge of Islam came primarily from The Book of a Thousand Nights and One Nights, translated by his hero Sir Richard Francis Burton, who wrote in a footnote:

Mohammed…claimed (and claimed justly) to be the “Seal” or head and end of all Prophets and Prophecy. For note that whether the Arab be held inspired or a mere impostor, no man making the same pretension has moved the world since him. Mr. J. Smith the Mormon (to mention one in a myriad) made a bold attempt and failed.

I don’t want to overemphasize these parallels, but it’s impossible for me to read Bolitho’s take on Muhammad without thinking of Hubbard. When he writes “Mahomedanism is a religion, because Mecca’s problem, as a religious town, was religious,” I’m reminded of the founding of Scientology, which was less the outcome of a coherent plan than a pragmatic solution to a specific set of problems that occurred right around the time that the Philadelphia lectures were delivered. Bolitho writes of a turning point in Muhammad’s career: “The lever of his position is now his own converts, his own past, the picked fanatics.” Hubbard was in exactly the same situation in Phoenix and Philadelphia. And many of the most resonant echoes were yet to come. What Bolitho writes of Muhammad just before the Hegira evokes Hubbard’s doomed dream of sailing the seas with his fleet: “The town-booster…has decided to liquidate, and distribute himself the bonus years of the effort of thinking and unpopularity had won for him; he signals the gods of adventure to stop and let him get down.” And these lines near the end of the chapter are chillingly prophetic:

But Mahomet the adventurer has been swallowed by his adventure, which is now openly independent of his personality…Out of the mass of incoherent writings, cursings, distichs, that he is still pouring out in his old age, half buried under the minutiae of new laws obviously inspired by the domestic bickerings of his harem, there is vaguely visible the plan to which the old man is arrived; the species of vast plunder gang, the Bandit State, in which he will brigade all the faithful, the gigantic enterprise or organized looting of the whole world to which he calls his race.

Hubbard was no Muhammad, but he probably believed that he was, and when he looked around him in the late fifties and early sixties, he would have found little evidence to the contrary. And it would be dangerous to underestimate how much he achieved. As Bolitho writes of such religious adventurers: “They have lived on this little earth like an island, and made up their night fires to scare away the noises of the interstellar dark.”