Mugshots of the Some of the More Infamous Founders of Modern Religions
These mini-portraits provide evidence of the constructed nature of some of the ‘religions’ receiving tax-exempt status in the United States today, but the implications for the bizarre nature of these organizations’ founding myths is best evidenced by the religions’ creation stories themselves, some snippets of which are recounted here, with their composers’ portraits: Aleister Crowely, L. Ron Hubbard, and Joseph Smith.
Aleister Crowley was the inadvertent founder of the O.T.O. (Ordo Templis Orientis — “Order of the Oriental Temple,” an hierarchical secret society adhering to the writings of Aleister Crowley). He had no weird or irrational Origin Story or Creation Myth, and was in fact quite liberating with his philosophies, except of course in the matter of women, who were viewed as a sort of natural resource, or nuclear fuel source, like uranium, available to occult-oriented men for mining for the efficacy of magickal workings. Overall though, this subject was the least offensive and mendacious of all our candidates for infamy presented in these profiles.
He was raised in a Plymouth Brethren family, which, though eschewing alcohol, nevertheless sold it for their livelihood. He was routinely abused with beatings and berated by his punitive mother as ‘The Beast,’ which is another name for the Antichrist in apocalyptic Christianity: “And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy” (Rev. 13:1).
In defiance, Crowley adopted this slur as his handle later in life for sensationalist self-billing. Crowley also adopted ‘The Number of the Beast’: “Here is a call for wisdom: Let the one who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and that number is six hundred sixty-six” (Rev. 13:18).
He liked to be photographed so there is a preponderance of Crowley portraits to be found, in civilian gear or full priestly regalia. He wanted to be viewed as potent and intense, which resulted in images that made him appear bug-eyed and somewhat apoplectic.
He never particularly, personally profited from his religious construct and in fact died alone and in extreme poverty as the result of lifelong alcoholism and ‘debauchery,’ as it was called then, attended only by Gerald Gardner, who gave him small amounts of money and supplied him with alcohol in return for his help in composing the faux-Elizabethan ‘Lady Sheba’s Ordains.’ This was a forged document that purported to have originated with an aristocratic Witch ancestor of Gerald Gardner, and which he claimed to have first seen extracted from his grandmother’s cupboard as an occult family heirloom, thus justifying his claim to be the scion of a ‘British Witchcraft Tradition’ hundreds of years old. (More on him later….)
I think that Uncle Fester in the Addams Family cartoons for The New Yorker, and the subsequent TV series and movie, was modelled on Aleister Crowley.
Pretend sea captain, L. Ron Hubbard (he was actually ejected from the Navy as he kept blowing up the wrong targets at sea), the fully intentional founder of Scientology, based his creed on his book ‘Dianetics’ and a whole lot of crap from his earlier B-grade Science Fiction writing days. His motive was clearly based on his earlier, much publicised premise on record that the best way to make any “real money” was to start a religion and thereby gain tax-exempt status.
Essentially, the core ‘Mystery’ of Scientology is a yarn about a space alien warlord, ‘Xenu,’ who seriously fucked up a lot of people by freezing their brains with glycol, and then sending them to Earth in spaceships in order to put them into volcanoes to then blow up, much as Hubbard was in the habit of blowing up soft targets in the Pacific and elsewhere without authorization during his abruptly terminated Navy days. Xenu (/ˈziːnuː/),[ also called Xemu, was, according to Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, “the dictator of the “Galactic Confederacy” who 75 million years ago brought billions of his people to Earth (then known as “Teegeeack”) in DC-8-like spacecraft, stacked them around volcanoes, and killed them with hydrogen bombs. Official Scientology scriptures hold that the thetans (immortal spirits) of these aliens adhere to humans, causing spiritual harm.” (Wikepedia) It is to remove these legion dispossessed souls from adhering to our persons and become “clear” that cult members are exhorted to pay in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to the ‘Church.’
On January 24 1986, under circumstances that can at best be characterized as ‘suspicious’, L. Ron Hubbard died. Although his condition had been steadily deteriorating for years, even the coroner noted that there were irregularities surrounding his death, including the presence in his body of vast quantities of Vistaril, a powerful anti-psychotic medication. Just days before Hubbard’s death, his personal physician, Scientologist Gene Denk, left for a gambling vacation in Las Vegas with some of Hubbard’s top aides, including Gamboa, Miscavige and wife, and the Aznarans. By the time he returned, it was far too late and there was nothing he could do. Hubbard died, and the battle for control of his legacy, which had been simmering for years, took centre stage.
LRH left behind a vast corporate empire, including millions of dollars worth of copyrights and trademarks, as well as a personal fortune rumoured to be in the hundreds of millions. Rumour, though, is all that is available — the vast portion of Hubbard’s riches were buried far inside the CoS ledgers, safe from the prying eyes of the IRS, which had been threatening an audit of Hubbard for years, right up until his death. But even leaving aside his personal fortune, Hubbard’s legacy was rich — and there was no shortage of people eager to take a cut.
The day before Hubbard died, his will was redrafted. Gone was the reference to Pat Broeker, who had been the executor in the previous will. The new executor, who would oversee the transfer of all Hubbard’s intellectual property to a trust known as Author’s Family Trust-B, and from there, into the newly created vessel, the Church of Spiritual Technology, was Norman Starkey, a longtime CoS heavyweight who had earned the animosity of many now-disenfranchised Scientologists during the days of the Missionholders Conference in 1982, when David Miscavige and the young rulers first made waves as the new power behind LRH’s throne. Gone, too, was Norton S. Karno, Hubbard’s former tax lawyer whose presence weaves through the story of the Church of Scientology like an invisible, but unbreakable thread.
Now, David Miscavige is the one to watch, whose history is literally filled with fraud, violence, abuse, harassment, coercion, intimidation, and malign intent.
The founder of the Mormon church, Joseph Smith, wed as many as 40 wives, including some who were already married and one as young as 14 years old. Smith’s marital history had been the subject of frequent historical debate, but until recently Mormon leaders had taken pains to present its founding prophet as happily married to one woman. Now, the church says, “careful estimates put the number between 30 and 40.” The church, officially called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, disavowed plural marriage in 1890 under pressure from the U.S. government, which had imprisoned polygamists and seized their assets.
Smith was convicted of forgery and fraud (posing as a psychic treasure hunter) four years before he came up with Mormonism and a bunch of mysterious documents buried in a box in the ground. In rendering the information passed to him by the Angel Moroni, in the form of a salamander who spoke to him from a hole in the ground and told him of the buried treasure of the ‘Golden Plates’ (like unto Moses’), Smith came up with the basis for his “Book of Mormon.’
Joseph Smith said that the moon was inhabited by people six feet tall who dressed like Quakers and lived to be 1,000 years old (Source: Journal of Oliver B. Huntington, a devout Mormon contemporary of Joseph Smith; copy at Utah State Historical Society, Vol. 2, p. 166). Smith said the “gulf stream” was the result of the city of Enoch’s being taken out from the place where the gulf of Mexico is. “My Lord always spoke where of He knew — before Abraham was, He was — He was in the beginning with God.” (John 1:1)
Smith had begun practicing polygamy long before he preached it as an injunction from God. The identity of his second wife is disputed because the ceremony took place in secret, without even the knowledge of his first wife, who vigorously opposed the whole idea, which is sometimes called the Law of Sarah after Abraham’s first wife. Joseph Smith’s 1843 revelation on polygamy was actually, personally directed at his resistant first wife. He was tired of hiding his other wives from her and everyone else and wanted it all out in the open. He wrote that God told him, “I command mine handmaid, Emma Smith,” to “receive all those that have been given unto my servant Joseph” and “cleave unto my servant Joseph and to none else . . . if she will not abide this commandment she shall be destroyed.”
He was ultimately murdered — not by a group of “anti-Mormons,” but by men whose wives and daughters he had tried to ruin! When the jail was stormed, Joseph Smith used a handgun to kill two men and wound another. (David Padfield, ‘Conclusions About Mormonism,’ Church Bulletin Articles) What is most striking about the early photographic portrait of Joseph Smith shown above is how much he resembled the young Aleister Crowley, shown below.
Crowley greatly admired Joseph Smith, one suspects more for his means and methods than for his message, which he wouldn’t countenance. His novel Moonchild referenced several modern occultists and friends, “…one of them being Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. It shows that this reference to Smith was not accidental, and that this reference reveals Crowley’s intense fascination with Smith” ( Introvigne, Massimo, ‘The Beast and the Prophet: Aleister Crowley’s Fascination with Joseph Smith', in Henrik Bogdan, and Martin P. Starr (eds), Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism (New York, 2012; online edn, Oxford Academic, 24 Jan. 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199863075.003.0011, accessed 16 Apr. 2024). It seems Crowley was fascinated by Joseph Smith as a romantic character, a persecuted hero, but was not prepared to accept — or even to discuss — the heart of Smith’s message.
