Before Scientology’s Xenu was a genocidal galactic overlord, he was a … mountain?

This doesn’t happen every day: A tipster recently pointed us to something buried in a 1958 L. Ron Hubbard lecture that really knocked us for a loop. And so we showed it to half a dozen of the best experts we know on the subject, and not only had none of them noticed the item before, most of them admitted they were stumped about it.

What was it that had us puzzled? It turns out that Hubbard mentioned the name “Xenu” ten years before that word became such a famous part of Scientology’s secret lore.

Even if you’re the most casual Scientology watcher, you’ve no doubt heard of Xenu. Hubbard famously described him in a February 1968 handwritten document for the “OT 3” auditing level, and then in more detail several months later in a taped lecture in which he said the name “could be spelled X-e-m-u.” Nine years later, Xenu became one of the main characters in “Revolt in the Stars,” a screenplay Hubbard wrote while he was hiding in Sparks, Nevada from process servers and the FBI.

Robert Kaufman, in his 1972 book Inside Scientology, was the first former Scientologist to make public the name Xenu and that it was part of Scientology’s upper-level secret teachings. The Clearwater Sun wrote about Xenu in 1980, and the Los Angeles Times really boosted Xenu’s fame with a 1986 story and then a 1990 series. But it was the Comedy Central show South Park that made Xenu a household name with its 2005 episode, “Trapped in the Closet.”

 
You probably know at least the bare outline of the story that Hubbard revealed about Xenu in the 1968 OT 3 materials, that some 75 million years ago he ran a federation of 76 planets with an overpopulation problem. So he had beings by the billions brought to planet Teegeeack, which was Earth’s name then. He vaporized the beings with hydrogen bombs, then captured their souls and subjected them to mental image pictures before setting them loose on the planet. To this day, you learn in OT 3, you are actually made up of clusters of these unseen beings left over from that 75-million-year-old genocide, and you spend the next higher Scientology auditing levels — from OT 4 to OT 7 — locating and chasing these invisible beings away (and at insanely high prices).

But why “Xenu”? Was Hubbard trying to convince his followers that this was an actual person who had really lived 75 million years ago? Scientology historian Jon Atack has told us again and again that church members are expected to consider everything Hubbard wrote as infallible scripture. But it’s hard for an outsider not to assume that with a name that has the sound “zee-noo,” Hubbard wasn’t just pulling things out of his ample posterior.

And that’s why we think the 1958 lecture we’re looking at today — recorded ten years before “OT 3” — is an interesting reflection on that. In a typically turgid passage, Hubbard manages to come up with two words while riffing rapidly that seem to be transpositions of the same sounds — “ex-noo” and “zee-noo.”

Here, listen for yourself to this fair use excerpt, and then look carefully at the transcript…

Now the person you are processing, the person you have under the guns of the E-Meter right at this moment, has wrong with him just this fact only: That the ‘significances’ surrounding matter, energy, space, and time are so overwhelming that he cannot easily approach the is-ness of things, and this is particularly true of the Rock.

The Rock has such terrific significances connected with it: “Violations, survival, not to survive, thisa, thata, the other thing, identifications, cross-references, see file B, see file A, 1,002,642, cross-reference Navy Department” — you get the idea.

“Bulletin of War, Space Command, Planet Exnoo, figure-figure-figure-figure, think-think-think-think-think-think, figure-figure-figure-figure, thought-thought-thought-thought-thought, significance-significance-significance-significance…” And when he looks at this particular piece of matter, energy, space, and time which is all it’s conceived of, he doesn’t conceive of matter, energy, space, and time. He thinks “Cross-reference: Space Command, 8,000,000,682, general order to all torpedo-men. Following: pursuant to the orders of the admiral …” See? Now, this unfortunately cross-references with “Order of the Day, Monastery Platitude, Mount Xenu.’There shall be peace.'” Which conflicts with, “Dear, I know you are dedicated to holy orders, but I need a new pair of shoes.” Which in itself is very vastly in conflict with “Order of the Mount: Honor thy father and thy mother.” Wait a minute, how’d that get in there? And that’s why the preclear’s so baffled.

This excerpt is from a series of lectures known as the 20th American ACC, for “Advanced Clinical Course,” which Scientology today sells for $375, and describes like this…

With clearing now an accomplished fact, Mr. Hubbard devoted the 20th American Advanced Clinical Course in Washington, DC, to a comprehensive restatement of the very fundamentals of auditing from the perspective of all that had been learned in those intense years of research and discovery. In other words, not merely what process to run and why, but something even more basic—the skill and technical application required of an auditor to evoke from the preclear the willingness to be audited and their full participation in the session—namely, in-sessionness…

Hey, sounds like a bargain. Anyway, to understand what Hubbard is talking about in this excerpt, and to explore this surprising use of the word “Xenu,” we asked for help from several of our favorite experts on Scientology technical matters, former church members with decades of experience.

Not one of them said they had ever noticed this use of “Xenu” a decade before OT 3.

“The 20th ACC lectures were not part of auditor training, so I had not run across this passage before,” Bruce Hines told us. “Fascinating and completely new to me,” Jon Atack said. “I’ve never heard the lecture you’re quoting from,” Dan Koon told us.

The particular lecture is titled, “The Rock: Putting the PC at Cause,” and we were told by our experts that “The Rock” referred to a concept that Hubbard only developed for a short while before moving on to other avenues. “The Rock is something that appeared only briefly and there were a couple of bulletins that mentioned it, almost in passing, and then it was never heard from again,” Koon says.

“Ask 10 different Scientologists about The Rock and you will get 10 different answers, probably all wrong,” says ‘Techie,’ who often chimes in with expert commentary about technical matters here at the Bunker.

“The simplest explanation of The Rock is that it’s the entire case of a person, down the entire whole track,” says Sunny Pereira, referring to a thetan’s whole track of existence, which is trillions of years. “The Rock is where the thetan stores his illogic and keeps it to use all up and down his lifetimes. They hold him down, like a reactive mind, but on a timeless timeline, if that makes sense.”

Anyway, we think what’s happening in that passage is that Hubbard is explaining that to get to the root of what’s going on in a particular person’s case, you have to deal with chains of “significances” that anyone is going to have bouncing around in their head but that are extraneous and not helpful. In order to demonstrate that, he riffs on several different chains of words, and it seems obvious that he’s making stuff up on the spot to act as examples (“thisa, thata, the other thing”). During that riffing he comes up with “Planet Exnoo” and “Mount Xenu,” nonsense words that we know now were already in his head when, a decade later, he sat down to write up this planet’s history in OT 3.

We asked our experts, did the 1958 Mount Xenu really have any connection to the Xenu who shows up ten years later as the genocidal galactic overlord or did it, as it appeared to us, just show that Hubbard was pulling similar sounds out of thin air because they sounded exotic to him, and so the sound “zee-noo” happened to turn up in both 1958 and 1968?

Our experts said they saw no actual connection between 1958’s Mount Xenu and 1968’s Xenu of OT 3. “Hubbard had an active imagination and was used to coming up with ‘science-fiction-sounding’ names for things like planets and space-opera beings,” Bruce Hines said. “I tend to agree with you, I think he is just making up words as he goes along,” Jefferson Hawkins told us.

“This is a peculiar little gem,” Atack said. “I agree that it isn’t the ‘Xenu origin story’ but it points to Hubbard’s limited stock of ideas and his drug-addled repetition of them…Hubbard didn’t believe there was anything new – only the reconstituting of existing material – and he lived by that principle, so he recycles material. This includes acronyms and abbreviations – RTC is an example. It originally meant Ron’s Technical Compilations before it was the Religious Technology Center. He used ‘CC’ for both Clearing Course and Celebrity Centre.”

And speaking of recycling, “Mount Xenu” will also show up again — in the 1977 “Revolt in the Stars” screenplay, but this time referring to the mountain prison on the Planet Tawn where Xenu is imprisoned to this day.

What do you think? Does this repetition show a steel-trap mind unlocking the secrets of the universe, or a carnival barker making shit up as he goes along? Or something else? We look forward to your own assessment of 1958’s “Mount Xenu.”

 
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Aaron Smith-Levin answers your questions

Aaron answers a variety of questions in this video, including how Scientologists try to assure that their next life will be with a Scientology family, and why some public figures leave the church but don’t talk publicly about it.

 
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Bonus items from our tipsters

Scenes from Coachman Park and the Fort Harrison Hotel from Scientology’s Easter celebrations, when the return of Elvis to the planet Marcab results in much rejoicing.

 
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Countdown to Denver!

 
HowdyCon 2017: Denver, June 23-25. Go here to start making your plans.

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on April 17, 2017 at 07:00

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