Jon Atack is a former high-ranking Scientologist (Operating Thetan Level 5) who spent nine years inside the organization before leaving in the early 1980s, after discovering that L. Ron Hubbard had fabricated virtually every claim about his biography. He has since dedicated four decades to researching and exposing the origins of Scientology, arguing that its core ideas were cynically assembled from occult sources, particularly the work of Aleister Crowley and the Theosophical movement founded by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and that these same occult currents fed directly into Nazi ideology. His book If Scientology Ruled the World traces this shared lineage, showing how both movements drew on ideas of racial perfection, mind control, and supernatural power that originated in 19th-century occultism.
Hubbard’s Techniques and the Birth of Dianetics
Hubbard first proposed his mental health method in a January 1949 letter to his literary agent, where he described it as a way to make money, rape women without their knowledge, and potentially take over the Catholic Church, with no mention of therapeutic benefit.
He borrowed the core technique, abreaction (reliving past trauma to release emotional charge), from a 1909 lecture by Freud, who had already abandoned the method because it increased patient dependency rather than resolving it.
Hubbard likely encountered the work of American psychiatrists Grinker and Spiegel, who used barbiturates and abreaction on traumatized aircrews during WWII; their book Men Under Stress initially claimed success but was republished in 1960 acknowledging long-term failure.
While hospitalized during the war (claiming fabricated war wounds and ulcers), Hubbard admitted to barbiturate addiction and said he wore a white coat to access the hospital library, where he read the psychiatric literature.
His first wife and second wife (Sara Northrup) both testified that he used hypnotic techniques to harm them; Sara alleged he fractured her eustachian tube, causing deafness in one ear.
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (May 1950) sold 150,000 copies by October, but the medical publisher withdrew it believing it fraudulent; the New Jersey Medical Association sued Hubbard for practicing medicine without a license in 1951.
Joseph Winter, an early collaborator, published A Doctor’s Report on Dianetics saying the techniques had merit but Hubbard was a con artist.
None of the 273 people Hubbard claimed to have cured in Dianetics ever came forward.
From Dianetics to Scientology
When Dianetics failed to produce results, Hubbard introduced reincarnation as a way to go “earlier” than birth trauma, borrowing the concept of “magical memory” directly from Aleister Crowley.
He fell out with Wichita oilman Don Purcell, who had rescued Dianetics from bankruptcy, because Purcell refused to accept reincarnation; Hubbard stole the foundation’s mailing lists and fled to Phoenix, Arizona.
In February 1952, he invented Scientology, reframing Crowley’s concept of elevating “the will” (Thelema) as “intention” and setting two goals: the ability to command and control others, and the ability to leave the body and travel the universe.
Hubbard openly praised Crowley in three 1952 lectures, calling him a “very good friend” and urging followers to read him.
Atack’s Personal Experience Inside Scientology
Atack joined at age 19 after a breakup, drawn in by Hubbard’s book Science of Survival, which seemed to explain his emotional distress; he was a Zen meditator at the time but found Scientology’s community more immediately appealing.
He spent nine years as a paying customer (never staff), completing six major counseling courses and 25 of the 27 levels of Scientology’s “Bridge to Total Freedom.”
He was treated well because he was a writer, artist, and musician, and Scientology policy requires celebrities to be handled with care; staff members, by contrast, were humiliated and abused daily.
He borrowed roughly £4,000–£4,500 (approximately $17,000–$18,000 in today’s money) for each of the upper Operating Thetan levels (OT3 through OT5), totaling about 37.5 hours of auditing.
The Upper Levels: Zenu, Body Thetans, and Disillusionment
At OT3, Hubbard taught that 75 million years ago, an evil galactic overlord named Xenu rounded up populations from 176 planets, brought them to Earth, blew them up in volcanoes, collected their spirits on electronic ribbons, and subjected them to 36 days of hypnotic implanting in the place Christians call heaven.
At OT4, practitioners addressed “body thetans,” tiny spirits allegedly drugged millions of years ago, dealing with their drug problems.
At OT5, the idea expanded to potentially millions of little beings making up each person.
After each level, Atack reported no supernatural benefits and was told he needed the next level; he eventually left after reading documents gathered by journalist Michael Lynn Shannon proving Hubbard had fabricated his entire biography, including claims of studying with Eastern gurus, being a war hero, holding a degree, and being a nuclear physicist.
The Euphoria Trap: Why Scientology Feels Good
Atack acknowledges that early Scientology courses produce genuine feelings of well-being, particularly the communication course with its “training routines.”
Steve Hassan, an expert hypnotherapist and cult researcher, has said these routines represent “the most overt use of hypnosis in any cult” he has studied among hundreds.
The euphoria comes from entering a hypnotic trance, not from actual therapeutic benefit; Atack argues this is a manipulation that can make people more narcissistic and damage their relationships.
He draws a parallel to EMDR, which was devised by an Ericksonian hypnotist and works through similar mechanisms; hypnotherapy can be positive or negative depending on the practitioner’s intention.
He lists multiple techniques that induce euphoric altered states: meditation, hyperventilation (Rajneesh’s “hoo” breathing), fasting, sleep deprivation, chanting, dancing, drumming, staring at a fixed point (Ganzfeld effect), and psychedelics.
He does not deny that people benefit from practices like ayahuasca or meditation, but warns that feeling good is not the same as getting better, and that these states can be exploited by authoritarian leaders.
Retaliation from the Church of Scientology
After leaving, Atack was followed worldwide by private detective Eugene Ingram, who sought damaging information about him in multiple countries including Australia.
The Church distributed leaflets accusing him of rape, attempted murder, and drug dealing throughout his town; people marched with placards outside his house.
His house was broken into, his airline tickets and hotel reservations were canceled, and people knocked on his door at night to yell at him.
Social services came to his home to take his four-year-old daughter based on a Scientologist’s false report of child abuse, a tactic Atack says is commonly used against critics.
He was reported to the police and subjected to ongoing harassment for years.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and the Theosophical Roots
Blavatsky (born in Ukraine, German aristocratic descent) was perhaps the most learned woman of the 19th century, with an extraordinary memory and access to her grandfather’s massive occult library; her grandfather studied with Count Cagliostro, a major Rosicrucian figure.
She studied with Sufis, traveled the world, and claimed (dubiously) to have studied with Tibetan masters; she was the first person investigated by the British Society for Psychical Research, which concluded she was a fraud.
She wrote The Secret Doctrine, proposing five root races of beings, the first intelligent life on Earth appearing 200–300 million years ago as gaseous beings, and placing the Aryan race in Atlantis.
She claimed Aryans lost their godlike powers by interbreeding with inferior beings; the Nazis adopted this framework but apparently stopped reading before her conclusion that the final root race would be an interbred race in America.
She was a spiritualist who didn’t believe in spiritualism but used it as a platform, claiming she could project material into other people’s minds and make things materialize.
The Occult Pipeline to Nazism
Dr. Franz Hartmann, a devoted Blavatsky follower who traveled from the US to India to study with her, became head of one of two German Theosophical societies and joined the List Society, an Aryan racist and anti-Semitic group.
He was one of three founders of the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), which Aleister Crowley later took over; this is the direct line from Blavatsky through Crowley to Scientology.
The other line runs from the List Society to the Thule Gesellschaft (Thule Society), whose members included Rudolf Hess, Dietrich Eckart, and other founders of the Nazi party; Hitler was recruited shortly after.
Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, trained officers in yoga, meditation, and occult ceremonies at his castle Wewelsburg, which featured a round table because he was waiting for King Arthur and the Knights of the Holy Grail to return.
Himmler ordered the extermination of 30 million Slavs during Operation Barbarossa, viewing them as identical to “Jew-Bolsheviks”; approximately 27 million were actually killed.
Mindfulness, Meditation, and the Dark Side of Spiritual Practice
Atack has been a vocal critic of mindfulness programs that ignore the potential for meditation to cause traumatic experiences and psychotic episodes.
After the Meiji Restoration in Japan, Zen schools (Obaku, Soto, Rinzai) taught meditation to the imperial army; all have since apologized for this following the Nanjing massacre, in which 400,000 civilians were killed.
The Zen master of the commanding general wrote praising the massacre as bringing “true Buddhism” to China.
Atack’s fundamental concern is about agency: individuals should not surrender their own judgment to a group or guru, and teachers have a responsibility not to exploit the trust that altered states create.
He references research by Miguel Farias (editor of the Oxford Handbook of Meditation) whose graduate students reviewed 3,000 meditation studies and found only 32 scientifically valid.
Herbert Benson’s famous transcendental meditation experiments showed that the specific mantra (often a deity’s name) made no difference; simply repeating the word “one” produced identical results.
The Internet Age: Information, Disinformation, and the Persistence of the Occult
Atack and Hassan have written about how authoritarian cult groups now recruit primarily on the internet rather than on campuses.
Figures like Stefan Molyneux (who advocated cutting off one’s family), Jordan Peterson, and Andrew Tate spread ideas that Atack considers dangerous and irrational, yet they attract large followings.
The core problem is teaching people how to think critically; before reasoning can be taught, people need to understand how their emotions can be manipulated to override rational thought.
Atack wrote Opening Minds on this subject and has tried unsuccessfully to fund a course on critical thinking and propaganda resistance.
He argues that the majority of people, including 80% of atheists surveyed in the 1990s, believe in magic and the supernatural, making them vulnerable to manipulation.
Distinguishing Psi Phenomena from the Occult
Atack is agnostic about psychic phenomena; he praises Harry Houdini’s investigations of spiritualists (notably exposing a fraudulent medium message from his own mother that was written in English despite her never speaking the language), James Randi’s work, and Derren Brown’s demonstrations.
He notes that the James Webb telescope has revealed approximately 700,000 observable galaxies, each containing on average 100 billion stars, suggesting the universe is far stranger than we understand.
He distinguishes between mysticism (personal experience) and organized religion (behavioral control), noting that “religion” literally means “to bind together” (as in ligament).
He considers both Freud and Jung to be charlatans who created cult-like followings; Jung concealed his Red Book until the 1990s, which documents his own descent into madness while he continued treating clients and having sex with them.
He argues that what we call supernatural today may become natural as understanding develops, quoting Sir James Frazer: “When magic is understood, it becomes science.”
Absurd Beliefs and Atrocious Behaviors
Atack’s central thesis, attributed (perhaps apocryphally) to Voltaire, is that “absurd beliefs can lead to atrocious behaviors.”
He points to current political divisiveness in the United States, arguing that both major parties have become cultic and that the real division is between the powerful and moneyed plutocracy and everyone else.
He criticizes multiple U.S. presidents, including Obama for failing to close Guantanamo Bay (800 people illegally detained and tortured) and for war crimes related to the capture of Saddam Hussein.
He highlights the Epstein files as evidence that powerful figures across the political spectrum have evaded accountability.
He tells the story of Kelvin Pierce, son of American Nazi leader William Pierce, who overcame a brutal childhood, adopted two children from Georgia (the country), and now runs orphanages there, only to see USAID funding cut.
His fundamental ethical principle is compassion for all of humanity, opposition to any system that incites hatred, and the recognition that we are all one race descended from Black Africans.
