I Spent 9 Years Inside Scientology: The Shared Occult Origins of the Nazi Party and Scientology — and What It Means Today | Jon Atack

What if the roots of modern cults, extremist politics, and even today’s “wellness” movements trace back to Nazi occultism, hypnotic manipulation, and one of the most controversial religions in the world? In this explosive episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Jon Atack — the world’s leading expert on authoritarian cults and a former Scientologist who has spent over 40 years investigating its origins — reveals the shocking connections no one talks about. Drawing from his groundbreaking book If Scientology Ruled the World: Nazi Occultists, Sex Magick, Space Aliens, and the Second Coming, Jon uncovers how occult beliefs influenced the Nazi Party… and how those same ideas shaped Scientology. Jon Atack breaks down: - How L. Ron Hubbard repackaged occult practices (including hypnotic techniques, repetition, fixation, and mimicry) and sold them as revolutionary “science” - Outlandish promises that hooked followers: supernatural powers, immunity to illness, genius-level IQ, emotional mastery - How Hubbard’s early interest in psychology morphed into the darker techniques behind Dianetics - Hidden factors in Hubbard’s personal life (addiction, PTSD, and legal trouble for practicing medicine without a license) that shaped what Scientology would become - Allegations of how followers were treated, including psychological and physical abuse - Frightening recourse Jon himself faced for speaking out Jon also shares his deeply personal story of joining, and ultimately escaping, Scientology. He reveals the major red flags he ignored at first… and the first warning sign you should always look for before joining any movement or ideology. But this conversation goes far beyond Scientology. We also cover: - What actually defines a cult or authoritarian group - How recruitment tactics are now supercharged by the internet and social media - Where dangerous occult practices are still hiding in plain sight - Surprising benefits and dangers of hypnotherapy - How to distinguish modern spirituality from manipulative occult systems - Why today’s political climate often mirrors cult dynamics - Why healthy skepticism might be the most important survival skill of the digital age This isn’t about throwing away all ideology or spirituality. It’s about learning how to extract the good without falling for manipulation. If you care about psychology, cults, spirituality, politics, authoritarian movements, mind control, or the hidden forces shaping modern society…this is a conversation you cannot afford to miss. Head to https://impact.ourritual.com/c/4792730/2005678/24744 , take a quick quiz, and use code BREAKER20 for 20% off your first month. Stick with your wellness goals with Ka'chava and visit https://kachava.com and use the code BREAKDOWN for 15% off of your first order. Get 20% off all IQ Bar products - plus free shipping by texting BREAKDOWN to 64000. Jon Atack’s latest book, If Scientology Ruled the World: Nazi Occultists, Sex Magick, Space Aliens, and the Second Coming: https://jonatack.co.uk/if-scientology-ruled-the-world/ If Scientology Ruled the World - Chapter 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E4rI-5z_0s Jon Atack’s Art: https://jonatack.com/ Jon Atack’s book, Voodoo Child: A Jimi Hendrix Novel: https://a.co/d/0axlU7yA Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hubbard realized how he could merge hypnotic techniques, repetition, fixation, and mimicry, the ways of getting somebody into an altered state, with the promise of supernatural powers, resistance to any illness, brilliant IQ, wonderful emotional equanimity. And he continued to sell these things from 1950, and they're still being sold.

• 0:20Mayim Bialik?

  It's the stuff of science fiction.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  Only two aspects really in Scientology. One is to have the intention so you can command and control other people. And the other is to be able to leave your body and travel the universe. It's a huge scam, which has enslaved people psychologically and physically. There are about 4,000 members of his C organization, and they're slaves. They're not allowed to have children. They don't eat well. They're not paid properly.

• 0:43Mayim Bialik?

  You were a Scientologist for nine years.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  I was. I am officially an operating Satan Level 5.

• 0:50Mayim Bialik?

  What would you say is one of the most outlandish things that you believe?

• 0:55Speaker 00

  Seventy-five million years ago, the evil galactic overlord Xeno rounded up populations of 176 planets, blew them up in volcanoes, collected their spirits on electronic ribbons. And then we were exposed to 36 days of hypnotic implant in the place that Christians call heaven.

• 1:13Mayim Bialik?

  I don't know what's more disturbing, the occult origins of Nazism or the Nazi occult origins of Scientology. How did the occult make its way into the Nazi Party?

• 1:28Speaker 00

  It's fundamentally about...

• 1:37Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 1:38Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 1:39Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our Breakdown. Today, we're going to be taking a look into the world of the occult. But not just the occult, as you might think about it. Supernatural phenomenon, psychic phenomenon. Is it true? Is it real? What we're going to be talking about is how a set of beliefs that were absolutely in the category of the occult made their way into the hands and the minds of some of the most powerful men in the Third Reich. And how the occult played a significant role in not only Nazi policy, but Nazi perspective on how those ideas can be used to transform the world.

• 2:23Mayim Bialik?

  In addition, we're going to examine how the occult origins of the Nazi Party made their way into one of the most powerful organizations in the world today: Scientology. Our guest is a former Scientologist who has spent the past four decades examining the origins of Scientology and what he found has more impact on the history of the world than even he suspected. The book we'll be discussing is "If Scientology Ruled the World: Nazi Occultists, Sex Magick, Space Aliens, and the Second Coming." It's a pleasure to welcome to the Breakdown John Atack.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  Break it down. Thank you. It's great to be here.

• 3:09Mayim Bialik?

  Our podcast tends to revolve around the intersection of science and spirituality. But Jonathan and I have a very strong interest in the beliefs that shape people and, in many cases, the information, disinformation, and misinformation that is often communicated to people. The title and cover of your book alone are eye-catching indeed. "If Scientology Ruled the World: Nazi Occultists, Sex Magick, Space Aliens, and the Second Coming." And the cover of my book has the Scientology symbol alongside the SS symbol that guards war during World War II.

• 3:52Mayim Bialik?

  The book behind your left shoulder on your bookcase has the Scientology symbol and a swastika. So before we even get started, one of these things is not like the other. Why does my book not have a swastika? A question I've never asked anyone in my life.

• 4:09Speaker 00

  Because there are three countries in Europe where the image of the swastika is forbidden. And so the book couldn't be sold there. And after a little negotiation with Amazon, we put the SS symbol on instead. I wanted to show that fundamentally, the symbol we're seeing for Scientology here

• 4:30Speaker 00

  is in fact a Scientology symbol. It has the Sig runes coming off of the corners, and it is the Nazi flag with the Scientology symbol at the centre. It was first published in, I think, 1981. So it's the symbol of Scientology's International Management Organisation.

• 4:49Mayim Bialik?

  What are the other countries that don't allow the swastika on the cover of a book?

• 4:54Speaker 00

  Germany, Netherlands and Belgium, for obvious reasons.

• 4:57Mayim Bialik?

  Well, you know,

• 5:00Mayim Bialik?

  I could go on and on about that.

• 5:03Mayim Bialik?

  So this is definitely going to be, you know, a different kind of conversation than the kinds that we usually have with guests, because you bring a different expertise to this subject. I want you to start by, you know, explaining to us, what is a conversation about Scientology really about?

• 5:26Speaker 00

  Well, it's fundamentally about a man who found a way of scamming a lot of people by packing together ideas that he'd taken, particularly from the Ordo Templi Orientis, which was Aleister Crowley's group. And he kind of reframed those ideas, ideas which are being called Western occultism these days. And he repackaged those ideas absolutely cynically. I have no doubt about that. I wrote a history of Scientology called Let's Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky. And when I've gone into great depth, I've been researching this subject since I first met Scientology 50 years ago.

• 6:09Speaker 00

  And there is absolutely no doubt in my mind, he'd realised how he could merge hypnotic techniques.

• 6:17Speaker 00

  Repetition, fixation and mimicry, the ways of getting somebody into an altered state. With the promise of supernatural powers, resistance to any illness, brilliant IQ, wonderful emotional equanimity, and he continued to sell these things from 1950, and they're still being sold, and they've not been achieved. You know, you'll occasionally, of course, get spontaneous remission of a condition, but nobody's shown any supernatural powers yet. And he packaged this in a fairly simplistic cosmology that says, "We've been around for one and a quarter quadrillion years." That's beyond trillions and billions. "We've reincarnated repeatedly through this time,

• 7:01Speaker 00

  and we've lived in many, many different civilizations." However, for that one and a quarter quadrillion years, I'm only aware of four civilizations that he mentioned in that time. And in the last few thousand years on Earth, we've had quite a few. So it's basically, it's a huge scam which has enslaved people psychologically and physically. There are about 4,000 members of his C-organization, and they're slaves. They do whatever they're told. They're not allowed to have children, they don't eat well, they're not paid properly, they don't get proper sleep. I've talked with people who, I've talked with a woman who was getting two hours sleep a night, and that's going to break you, whatever happens.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  So, yeah, that's the Scientology element of it.

• 7:49Mayim Bialik?

  And reading your book is a fascinating history, you know, of not only the movement of Scientology, but its origins and, you know, sort of where it's led us now. You know, you have quotes throughout the book. I mean... Hubbard confessed that his intention from the very beginning was to assist Lucifer in bringing the Antichrist to earth, to thwart the second coming of Christ, which according to Hubbard will actually be a mass landing of aliens from the Marcabean planetary system. I mean, it's the stuff of science fiction, and I mean, it goes on and on, and the sort

• 8:33Mayim Bialik?

  of, you know, history that he talked about, you know, it does, it sounds like content that otherwise we would say is the ravings of a not-well person. And much of this was, and this is sort of known, much of this was not disclosed as part of the history of, you know, the structure of Scientology. But what I'd like you to talk about as a starting point is Hubbard began by using psychological language and techniques of a field of psychology that was rapidly evolving to try and assist people.

• 9:17Mayim Bialik?

  And what's interesting to me is the places that I do understand. Meaning Hubbard used techniques like what we would call exposure therapy, right? This notion of having you revisit trauma, revisit, you know, significant moments. That's not untrue, that psychology has methodology by which we expose people to something in order to sort of extinguish a response. And it's very well documented in Rodents in particular. It does not always work with humans, but Hubbard was not a psychologist. He was not able to practice. So talk a little bit about how Hubbard's sort of initial notions that we can form

• 10:02Mayim Bialik?

  a psychology that can help people, where did that shift? And where did it coincide with some of his more unreal and kind of bizarre ideas about the human experience?

• 10:17Speaker 00

  The first time that he mentioned the techniques he was going to use was in January 1949, in a letter that he wrote to his literary agent, Fari Ackerman, who provided me with the correspondence. In that letter, where he first reveals the technique that will be called Dianetics, he says that he's devised a method They will make a great deal of money. A method whereby you can rape women and they'll have no knowledge that you did this. And a method whereby he thinks he could take over the Catholic Church and he hasn't quite decided what to do. There is no mention of any therapeutic benefit.

• 10:53Mayim Bialik?

  And also, sorry, I just want to clarify, the goal was not to rape women. He was trying to demonstrate how powerful this technology was, that he believed that was the level to which you could have someone disengage from their conscious experience.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  The testimony of his first two wives, the second of whom was Bigamus, was that he did use these techniques to harm them. His second wife, Sarah, said that he'd fractured her eustachian tube, so she was deaf in one ear. So he was using hypnotic practices. Now, as you say, the abrreactive therapy, the reliving past experiences, has been with us for a long time. It goes back at least to Joseph Breuer in 1890. And it's the technique that Freud started with. And if you read, there's a lecture in 1909, given in Worcester, Massachusetts by Freud, where he describes this technique in some detail, very much what Hubbard would talk about.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  You count somebody into a state of reverie or light trance, and you then go back in time through incidents along a chain to release the emotional charge. These are all terms in the Freud lecture, which Hubbard will pick up on. Freud then says why the technique is no good. The technique doesn't work because, in Freudian terms, it does not resolve the transference. It makes the person more and more dependent, rather than less and less dependent. So as early as 1909, Hubbard claimed to have read Freud. He claimed the technique came from Freud, so you can only imagine that he was aware of this. He then mixed it in when he, to avoid combat duty, he claimed war wounds.

• 12:35Speaker 00

  He had no war wounds. He never saw combat. But the last year of the Second War, he was in hospital, claiming to have ulcers, which were, they x-rayed him and never found them. But he was given barbiturates, phenobarbital. And he admits to this, there's a lecture where he says he was addicted to phenobarbital. An obscure lecture, but a lecture nonetheless. And while he was in hospital, he says he put a white coat on so he could go into the hospital library and read the medical literature. And I'm pretty sure that what he read was a paper by two American psychiatrists called Grinke and Spiegel, who were using Benobarbital and Abreative therapy on crew from aircraft who had, you know, suffered awful trauma.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  It's very interesting. They wrote a book called Men Under Stress about the technique, which they thought was fantastically successful at first. In 1960, when they republished the book, they explained that in the long term, it didn't work, that the trauma came back. So fundamentally, what they were treating was what we now call PTSD, and they were not treating it successfully, it turns out.

• 13:43Mayim Bialik?

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• 14:27Mayim Bialik?

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• 15:12Mayim Bialik?

  It's the best way to support our show. So, talk a little bit more for us about, you know, what happened when Hubbard essentially posed as, you know, a mental health practitioner? And I have nothing against people who are struggling with their own mental health helping other people, meaning he definitely, I don't think in many ways should have been in that position, even had he been a psychologist. But talk a little bit about how some of these techniques kind of continued to evolve and how he was originally called out for practicing without a license.

• 15:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, the New Jersey Medical Association sued him for practicing medicine without a license in 1951. It's worth saying that in 1947, I have this little booklet that I wrote, and it has in it a letter, reprinted, where Hubbard in 1947 asks for psychiatric treatment because he has lost the balance of his mind. So that was his perception of himself, and he of course claimed a veteran's pension till his death. You know, so he claimed to have cured all of these things, but he kept claiming his $38 a month, or whatever it was, for minor disability. So, the techniques initially, that was Dianetics. He released a book in May 1950 called "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health",

• 16:36Speaker 00

  and those are interesting words, "modern science of mental health", to the amazement of all concerned, it sold 150,000 copies by the October of that year, when the medical publisher, Hermitage House, who'd published it, withdrew it from publication because they believed it to be fraudulent. They made no public statement about that, but they did sponsor a book by Dr. Joseph Winter, who'd been working with Hubbard. And Winter wrote a book called "A Doctor's Report on Dianetics", where he said, "I think the technique's good, but Hubbard is a con artist."

• 17:15Speaker 00

  And the New Jersey Medical Association sued, his second and bigamous wife, Sarah, sues for divorce. He kidnaps their one-year-old child, Alexis Valerie, and takes her to Cuba and threatens that he'll chop her up and throw her in a river if the divorce petition is not withdrawn, because there are allegations of torture on his part. A Texas oilman called Don Purcell, sorry, a Wichita oilman called Don Purcell, bails him out, brings him back, settles the suits, buys everything out to bankruptcy. And Hubbard, at that point, for $1, sells all of his interest in dinetics to Purcell, believing that everything's going to go south and badly.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  But Purcell manages to rescue it. By this time, Hubbard has fallen out with Purcell. He started attacking him publicly because he now wants to introduce the idea of reincarnation. Because the idea of going back to birth and prenatal trauma is not working. It's not producing the results that he claims, in Dianetics, Modern Science for Mental Health, have worked on 273 people. None of those, not one of those 273 people has ever come forward. So he's found it doesn't work. So the answer is to go earlier, and the only way to go earlier is to get into past lives, reincarnation. And he's picked this up from, it's called The Magical Memory by Aleister Crowley. He's picked it up directly from Crowley. And he talks about Crowley.

• 18:45Speaker 00

  In 1952, there are three lectures where he talks about his very good friend, Aleister Crowley, and how we all ought to read Aleister Crowley. So he falls out with Purcell because Purcell's saying, no, reincarnation, no, I'm not going to believe that. He steals the mailing lists of the Wichita Foundation, and there's a prosecution over that, a man called James Elliott, who works for Hubbard, is prosecuted. And he sends 31 letters to the whole mailing list about what a charlatan Don Purcell is, and how he's been mistreated. And he calls him a moneyed montibank in this thing. Flees to Phoenix, Arizona, and realizes he doesn't have dinetics anymore. He's got to do something new.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  So in February 1952, he invents Scientology, very much based upon Crowley's work, on a reframing of the idea that you can elevate the will, thelema, according to Crowley, so that you can command other people subliminally to do things. Hubbard just calls it intention. We will raise intention. And the goal of Scientology, there are two, only two aspects really in Scientology. One is to have the intention so you can command and control other people, and the other is to be able to leave your body. And Travel Universe at will. Again, coming from Crowley, and of course, as this new book shows, coming ultimately from Madame Blavatsky.

• 20:11Mayim Bialik?

  Right, which we will, which we will get to.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  Which we will get to.

• 20:15Mayim Bialik?

  I know that you are no stranger to accusations from the Church of Scientology about what you do and what you've dedicated, you know, a good portion of your life to. Hubbard wrote a book, Scientology: A History of Man. And it says, this is a, this is a quote, "This is a cold-blooded and factual account of your last 60 trillion years. Most of the 100 pages of History of Man are," this is from, from your book, "are devoted to a freakish version of human evolution. We're descended from clams."

• 20:48Speaker 00

  The boohoo, or the grim weeper, he calls the clam, yeah.

• 20:51Mayim Bialik?

  They're called grim weepers, or boohoes, and humans cry because these ancestors had to constantly expel seawater from their shells. You know, like, it catches in my heart when I read something like this because this is something that was published, you know, people have access to this and, and, you know, it's this combination of kind of psychology and it's mythology. I don't, you know, this is sort of what's fascinating to me. Before we get into a little bit more about aliens, planets, and Aleister Crowley, I'd like to give you an opportunity to, in a nutshell, tell us about your relationship

• 21:35Mayim Bialik?

  with Scientology.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  Surely, yeah. When I was 19, I came home from a, I'm a drummer and I was on a tour in the south of France, and I came home to find that, that the girl I'd been living with for 15 months had disappeared into thin air. And I'd had a pretty grim time in Toulouse. I'd had a week living on one franc a day, which bought me a loaf of bread, and I'm gluten intolerant.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  And so I got home and I was, you know, quite ecstatic about managing to get home. I'd had to leave my drums behind.

• 22:12Speaker 00

  And my girlfriend wasn't there. She'd just gone and nobody seemed to know where she'd gone. And it turned out that she was shacking up with one of our friends. And she went off to live in New Zealand with him, which was probably just as well for her and for me, frankly. But that's not how I felt at the time. And so I was broken hearted and I couldn't seem to get any help. You know, the people I was talking to couldn't help me. And one day, I was at a friend's house and there was a copy of a Hubbard book called Science of Survival. Now, I later found that this book was actually ghostwritten by Richard De Mill, the son of Cecil Beadmill, who I was in touch with along the way as

• 22:54Speaker 00

  well. He wrote three of Hubbard's books. But this book seemed to make sense. It said you have trapped attention units. Your attention's been stuck on things. You have to go back and dig these things out. He'd lost, he needed, he actually in that book cancelled the original dialectic technique because it was hypnotic. It's came back into use in 1977 and is still used despite Hubbard's admission that it's a hypnotic practice. But this book seemed to make sense. So I called up, I knew a psychiatrist. So I thought, well, she'll know about this. So I called her up and she said, don't know anything about it. Okay. So I called up an Anglican priest and said, do you know anything about this? And he said,

• 23:37Speaker 00

  don't have an idea. Now, which was kind of strange because three years before, there'd been massive front page news about government inquiry in Scientology and how damaging it was. And, you know, looking back, it was a bit irresponsible of those two adults. I was 19, not to say, hang on a minute, we'll go and check. But there were no dissenting voices. I went to the Scientology Centre. The people there were so friendly. They were a couple of years older than I were. They were all university graduates in art subjects.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  And they seemed to be very genuine. I, at that time, was involved with Zen Buddhism. I'd, I'd learned meditation in a Zen monastery and that wasn't helping me. And the abbot of the Zen monastery had said, don't join any group unless the least member of it has something that you want. Everybody I saw there was happy. I was not. And within a couple of weeks, I'd moved in with them. And I then had a nine-year career in which, because I'm a writer, artist, musician, there's a policy in Scientology that you

• 24:48Speaker 00

  have to be treated as a celebrity. So even though I had no money, I was always kid gloves, always nicely treated, wasn't humiliated or abused. And I did six of their significant counselor, they would call it, training courses. I don't think it is a form of counseling. And one of their course in logic, the data series evaluation course, which is very few people do and is very elaborate. And I also did 25 steps of the then 27 levels of Scientology's bridge. So I am officially an operating Thetan Level 5. So I think you should call me your eminence or something.

• 25:33Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, my goodness. So you were there, you were a Scientologist for nine years?

• 25:39Speaker 00

  I was, but never, always as a customer, never working for them. And the difference there is amazing. You know, the John Travolta's, Tom Cruise's, Trish Duggan's, these people, they are treated so carefully and kindly, whereas the staff are humiliated and abused on a daily basis. And they don't let you know that, of course. They smile at you and sell you the next course. So I was in love with the subject. And at the end of, towards the end of that nine years. I started to think, as many of us did, that Ron Hubbard was gone because things were becoming nasty. People were behaving in a militaristic way. David Miscavige,

• 26:23Speaker 00

  who became the leader in 1987, talked about being tough and ruthless. Now, I don't have a problem with tough. Sometimes you have to do that. Ruthless, no. Not having any mercy, never having any mercy, no. We have to have compassion for people.

• 26:39Mayim Bialik?

  Can you give us some examples so we can understand what was going on?

• 26:44Speaker 00

  First of all, the guy who Hubbard has named as his heir, David Mayo, was thrown out. And there was this bizarre piece called The Story of a Squirrel. A squirrel is somebody who practices Scientology without a licence. It's that simple. And Mayo, who had been bigged up for a couple of years by Hubbard as the guy who would take over, is suddenly on the outside. And this is a really vitriolic attack on him. It says in it, David Mayo was the bird dog in the control room. And it just seemed like a bizarre thing. Many of us started to ask questions. We heard that there'd been this thing called the Mission

• 27:25Speaker 00

  Holders Conference in October 1982 in San Francisco, and they published photographs of David Miscavige assaulting somebody at this thing. I later talked to that person about how he was slammed against a filing cabinet by Miscavige. There were Scientologists who ran so-called missions, the fundamental recruiting level of Scientology, who'd made millions of dollars. And several of them were taken aside. One of them had his Rolex watch ripped from his wrist. There were physical beatings. We heard about this and went, well, Hubbard must be gone. I later absolutely was able to prove that Hubbard had ordered

• 28:06Speaker 00

  this. He was fading into dementia the last years of his life, and he'd become paranoid about there being an attempt to take over Scientology. And so he was getting rid of the golden goose. He was getting rid of the people who were doing the recruiting. And about half the membership, there were probably about forty thousand people in Scientology then. It's never exceeded a hundred thousand people. And probably about twenty thousand of us left. But I left because I believed in Scientology. I left because I wanted to, you know, help people using these wonderful techniques. And so I was at the centre of the independent Scientology movement in the UK.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  And during the course of that, met Captain Bill Robertson, who's featured largely in this book, who's a complete lunatic.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  Though I always got on with him very well.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  And somebody delivered this sort of stack of, I didn't, eighteen inches of documents that they'd picked up in the US from a lawyer there. And this guy said, look, I don't have the time to read these, John, you read them. And it was material that had been gathered by a journalist called Michael Lynn Shannon. And he showed that all of the claims Hubbard made about himself, you know, he'd studied with gurus in the East. No, not one. He was a wounded war hero. No. He had a, he was a civil engineer with a degree. No. He had a PhD. No. He was a nuclear physicist. No. All made up. And reading this stack of documents, and I didn't sleep that night.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  I kind of went, I've been lied to. And there's a fundamental principle which Hubbard talks about. He says honesty is sanity. The road to truth must be trod with true steps. And at that moment, I went, he's a liar. Therefore, I have to question it all.

• 30:01Mayim Bialik?

  So when, when we hear about people leaving Scientology, there's usually something significant. And there's an excommunication, and there's threats and all these things. But you left to form kind of an independent.

• 30:16Mayim Bialik?

  Universe of Scientology, separate from the main organization, because you wanted to sort of preserve the things that you at that time believed were pure about it, correct?

• 30:27Speaker 00

  Yes, I was a true believer, and I believed that the so-called technology of Scientology, the auditing or counseling procedures would liberate people. Even though my own experience of the upper levels had been, you know, I was very confused by the idea that I was packed with thousands of little spirits who were determining how I behaved, you know, that confused me.

• 30:51Mayim Bialik?

  What would you say is one of the most outlandish things that you believed, that you now know was insane?

• 30:58Speaker 00

  Well, it's exactly that, that on the third operating thetian level, you were told that 75 million years ago, the evil galactic overlord Xenu rounded up the populations of 176 planets, brought them to Earth, blew them up in volcanoes, collected them, their spirits, on electronic ribbons. And then they were exposed, we were exposed, to 36 days of hypnotic implanting in the place that Christians call heaven, which Hubbard makes clear elsewhere. And I came away from that, and I went through it in a very short time, a few days. And I went back in and said, you know, I don't have any supernatural powers as a consequence of this.

• 31:42Speaker 00

  I, this is really weird. And to my amazement, rather than being told, well, you need to go back and redo it, retread, as they say, the guy looked at me and said, a lot of people find that. You need to do OT4. So I borrowed the money and I did OT4. And after OT4, which is about body thetians, these little spirits that have been drugged, that you're dealing with their drug problems from millions of years ago. And at the end of that, I went in and said, I'm sorry, but I don't seem to have any benefit from this. And again, the guy said, you need the next level, OT5. So I borrowed the money.

• 32:23Speaker 00

  And at the end of, you know, I stayed for about a year beyond doing OT5, though I didn't do anymore. And I sort of felt, well, maybe the lower level stuff was useful, but I don't understand this idea of me being, of any of us, being a collection of potentially millions of little beings.

• 32:45Jonathan Cohen?

  How much money were you borrowing each time that you were in order to take the next level?

• 32:52Speaker 00

  I think I borrowed about £4,000, maybe £4,500.

• 32:57Jonathan Cohen?

  This is many years ago, so if I-

• 32:58Speaker 00

  Many, many years ago.

• 33:00Jonathan Cohen?

  If I asked the internet, what year was it?

• 33:03Speaker 00

  It would have been 1982, so-

• 33:06Jonathan Cohen?

  So if I asked the internet-

• 33:07Speaker 00

  It'll tell us how much I could have put in the bank at that point.

• 33:12Jonathan Cohen?

  And so in today's money, we're talking about, about $13,500.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  Well, that would be in pounds, yeah, pound sterling. So probably about $17,000 or $18,000, somewhere around that. So yeah, it was not chump change and it was for a total of 37 and a half hours. That's all I got for that.

• 33:34Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm interested in this because in all narratives that end up circulating and impacting people significantly, there's often some foundational element that is either helpful or feels true. And so it sounds like at the earlier stages, you were getting benefit of some kind. And it was in the upper levels that things just felt either overly mythical, way too out there and didn't have any tactical tangible benefit. Can you talk a little bit about some of the benefits that you did receive in the early phases? Because if you go off and are-

• 34:17Jonathan Cohen?

  Hoping to take this work and are such a staunch believer in it. I think it's important in order to just, you know, reflect on and share some of the positive aspects that allowed you to suspend disbelief, to continue to borrow money and go through some of these upper levels that proved to really fall apart.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's very important. I mean, on my YouTube channel, there's a piece that I did with my friend Christian Schurko, where we are saying, if you've been in any kind of abusive authoritarian cult, you should also consider the benefits. You should also think, because it isn't all negative. Now, there is a problem, which is that

• 35:02Speaker 00

  feeling good and getting benefit are not the same thing. So, a simple example would be, I would say that any good counselling system will improve your relationships with other people. Scientology leads to a breakdown of relationships. No doubt about that, families are split apart. You have parents who won't speak to their children, which is to me the most appalling thing. The other thing is that a technique can make you feel high. So, many ex-scientologists will say that the original course, the communication course, where you do the so-called training routines, that that's tremendously good.

• 35:42Speaker 00

  I think Aaron Smith Levin, he's said as much, and he's a major opponent of Scientology, but he told me that he thinks that some of the ideas are good. So, people will come away and they'll say, well, yeah, I did that and I felt great. And you're going, yes, you entered a hypnotic trance. And in a hypnotic trance, you feel euphoric. And that manipulation of euphoria is a very important thing to understand, so that we don't get caught. Now, when Steve Hassan, a mutual friend... First saw the training routines demonstrated. Now Steve's an experienced hypnotherapist, a highly qualified hypnotherapist. And the first time he saw this, he said, this is the most overt use of hypnosis in any cult

• 36:26Speaker 00

  that I've seen of the hundreds of cults he looked at. So you have that thing of it makes you feel good, but it doesn't necessarily do you good. It may make you a worse person, you know, more narcissistic. I think that's the main element within Scientology and many of its hundreds of derivative cults.

• 36:45Mayim Bialik?

  From what we know about techniques like EMDR, which people use for trauma processing, which, you know, with all due respect, like is not dissimilar from some of these concepts. You know, the notion of EMDR, that if you go back and you find that original first or worst trauma, right, that you can then in somehow, and we don't really know how, right? There's some processing that goes on by which you then resolve something. But there is always this component of then trying to emphasize to the system, to the nervous system, that this is healthy, this feels good, this is the place where you can find peace, right?

• 37:28Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, even in, you know, sort of trauma processing that that is done with like the use of psychedelics and therapeutic situations, even in a bad trip, right? Even in a complicated journey, there's always this potential for resolution, right? What's the elevated place of you? What's the source? Where's your higher self? What can we draw on, right? In holotropic breathwork as well. So that notion can be used for good and it can be used for evil. And what you're talking about is a situation when that is used as a manipulation of the psychological nervous system.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  EMDR is a form of hypnotherapy and was devised by an Ericssonian hypnotist. And Shapiro.

• 38:19Speaker 00

  Hypnotherapy can be positive. Hypnotherapy can be negative. It depends partly on the intention of the therapist, or anti-therapist, if you think about it the other way, and partly upon the recipient. Last year, Steve Hassan and I wrote a chapter for a book called Psychiatry and Eastern Religions and Spirituality. And I gave a list of the techniques that are used to induce altered states, to use euphoria. And when I got to the end of the list, having written this thing, I went, "I don't know of any religion that doesn't use at least one of these techniques." And people believe they're having a supernatural effect, when what they're actually experiencing is physiological.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  So for example, meditation, mindfulness, staring at something. We know that that is, gives you the Gansfeldt effect, where, and it's your field of expertise, not mine. But when there is no information coming into the brain, the brain starts to turn up the sensitivity and creates a feedback loop where you will hallucinate. You will see things. You'll also feel euphoric. And, you know, as I say, as a Zen meditator, I carried on meditating long after Scientology and still have it as part of my practice. Though I think it's more about the deep breathing than the staring. And I tend to listen to music and have a painting to look at.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  But, so, you know, the Rajneeshis use hyperventilation. They go, "Hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo." And that oxygenates the blood and makes you feel dizzy and high. We very often say fasting will do it, sleep deprivation will do it. There are all sorts of chanting, dancing, drumming. There are ways of getting into the nervous system and creating a response, where you feel great. And it can be that you'll come away from that. You know, I have friends who tell me that ayahuasca has done them tremendous benefit. It's not for me. You know, it's not something I want to experience. The first person who told me about it, who'd been in the Amazon and, you know, it was 25 years ago, and he said, "Angels came and spoke to me."

• 40:29Speaker 00

  And I went, "I don't want that conversation. Thank you so much."

• 40:33Mayim Bialik?

  And also, I mean, the reports of DMT and, you know, Terrence McKenna saying that, you know, what's revealed is the actual matrix of the universe, which is also operated by tiny elves. I think this is a fascinating point that really, you know, kind of hits exactly where Jonathan and I have interest. You know, if you're having an experience, if you are hearing voices, if you are experiencing access to other realms, if you're in an altered state of consciousness, is that supernatural or is it physiological? What do we know about what happens to the brain in psychedelic experiences? What do we know about the brain in near-death experiences, right?

• 41:16Mayim Bialik?

  What can we know about oxygenation, about also what happens when you shut down the input that the brain is constantly receiving, right? When people say, like, "I took mushrooms and everything was so clear." It's like, yeah, because your sensory systems are all being blunted and you're in this, like, beautiful cavern of, you know, the molecules of your brain. But I think this is a really, really interesting point. I want us to go back, now that we've gotten a little bit of sort of your, you know, your personal connection, you know, to write a book about Scientology that includes a discussion of the occult and of the origins of the Nazi Party and the destruction, you know, of World War II and really a change in the world.

• 42:01Mayim Bialik?

  You know, this intersection is disturbing. Meaning, I don't know what's more disturbing, the occult origins of Nazism or the Nazi occult origins of Scientology? And the fact that I have to choose between which is more disturbing is literally why you wrote this book. So. The connection point, just so people are clear, and you know, I really, I really did enjoy, you know, going through this book and following, you know, the history, right? Just so people can understand the framework that we're working in. When you think of Nazis, right?

• 42:41Mayim Bialik?

  Many of us think of, you know, a global attempt to eliminate the Jewish people, the Jewish population, you know, successful, I don't even know what word to use, but, you know, 6 million Jews approximately, right? And 5 million other people were, were killed. So something like 11 million people, I think, is the, the going statistic. But the beginnings of the, the, the death campaign of the Nazis did not begin with Jews. It began with mentally ill individuals, with disabled individuals. You know, and this was the umbrella perspective that we're going to perfect the human race. And we're going to create an elevated people,

• 43:26Mayim Bialik?

  which also involved elaborate notions of, of eugenics and, and, you know, disgusting race theory and things that we know are A, not true, and B, were manipulated, right? But that notion shares similarities with what Hubbard was doing in saying, "We have a way to perfect the human experience. And if extrapolated, that perfection of the human experience can reveal a pure race, a race that is free of any adulteration." And while that may not have been the perspective of Jews and the disabled and the mentally ill, which then extended to homosexuals, to communists, you know,

• 44:10Mayim Bialik?

  to Roma, like, name it. The origins are the same, and that's where I want you to take us next. So, explain who Helen Petrovna Blavatsky was.

• 44:24Speaker 00

  She was a woman born in what is now Ukraine, within the Russian Empire of, of German aristocratic descent.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  I think I quote in the book a biographer who says that she was perhaps the most learned woman of the 19th century, if not the wisest. And she had an incredible retentive memory. Her grandfather was said to have studied with Count Caliostro, one of the most significant figures in the Rosicrucian movement. He had a massive occult library. By the time she was 17 and married, she'd already read much of this library. She had what we might think of as an autistic savant memory. She was able to quote reams of books. And she basically

• 45:17Speaker 00

  had the inner teachings of the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, she studied with Sufis, she travelled the world. She claimed to have studied with Tibetan masters. That claim has to be questioned. Because getting into Tibet at that time was not really possible, especially for a woman. We later have Alexandra David Neal in the 20th century, who does manage to get in there, but shows how difficult it was. And of course, the Nazis were fascinated by Tibet and sent to expeditions there. She pulls all of this material together, everything she can get her hands on. She then travels to the US and becomes part of the spiritualist

• 45:59Speaker 00

  movement. And she admits that she's gone there really to spread her ideas. She doesn't believe that the Fox Sisters are genuine. She doesn't believe that spiritualism is genuine. But it gives her a way in. And she believes that she is projecting material into other people's minds. She believes that she is, you know, including hallucinations and visions of material. She can make things materialize out of thin air. And she becomes a massive sensation. It's worth saying that she was the first person to be investigated by the British Society.

• 46:38Speaker 00

  Parasychic phenomena, which was started by the brilliant psychologist William James, who said, you know, we have to understand psychic phenomena, let's investigate them scientifically. And the first investigation was of her in India, and the guy doing the investigation said she's a complete fraud. So one of the things that was said was that she was, she had these, this cabinet where she would pull a drawer out and it would be empty. Then she'd put it back in and when she drew it out again, there'd be something in it. And her servants said, well, we're on the other, in the room next door, putting the thing in the drawer.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  There's a lot of argument, people in the Blavatsky theosophy circles are, you know, they're outraged at the thought that she was, was performing these tricks. I think she was a very impressive woman. She, she wrote, she first of all focused on bringing back Egyptian ideas, which of course would massively influence Aleister Crowley. This is the Emerald Tablet, the Book of Thoth, these supposed things.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  And she then switched and wrote the secret doctrine, which puts forward this idea that there have been five different races of beings, that the first intelligent life on earth was between 200 and 300 million years ago. So we can see where Hubbard's getting his dating from, but they were gaseous beings, they did not have tangible form. They're still with us apparently. Then there were these other races and there's miscegenation. She grabs hold of the idea of the Aryan race and says in Atlantis, there was this Aryan race.

• 48:19Mayim Bialik?

  I'm sorry, Atlantis underwater?

• 48:21Speaker 00

  Well, Atlantis, yes, the, the fabled continent, which historically we first find in two of Plato's dialogues. So you're in about 300 B.C. Who's saying 7,000, he'd been told by an Egyptian priest that 7,000 years ago, there was a war between Atlantis and Athens. There wasn't anything of Athens 7,000 years before that. And that they need to be cognizant of this, they need to be aware of this. And Plato seems to be. You know, telling a story to make a moral point, it doesn't seem to be serious. This idea is abandoned until the 19th century, when I think three American writers pick up the idea and start to flesh it out.

• 49:06Speaker 00

  And one of them is Ignatius Loyola Donnelly. He's a fascinating character. He's a state congressman and serves four terms. And he writes a book, Atlantis, the Lost Continent, which is published six years before Blavatsky's secret doctrine. And here we have the idea of the Aryans. Now, he thought the Aryans were Scots and Irish.

• 49:31Speaker 00

  You know, so they were red-haired people. But Madame Blavatsky seems to have had a thing about red hair, and she complains about people miscegenating and, you know, interbreeding and getting red hair and being covered in red hair. So she shifts the place of Atlantis, and she has this idea that there is an evolution of races. There will be two further races. And the Nazis didn't seem to keep reading the book, because she says that the final root race will be an interbred race in America. So, you know, maybe we're headed towards that. And they will be the super beings. But the Aryans lost their superpowers by interbreeding with inferior beings, that they had godlike powers.

• 50:15Mayim Bialik?

  And this should be ringing every bell. This should be ringing every bell of Mein Kampf. This should be ringing every bell of this is the foundation of a notion that changed the world and caused a world war.

• 50:32Speaker 00

  Yes, and the deaths of 50 million people.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  So, and, I mean, I thought I knew something about this, because for 40 years I've been fascinated. I knew I had some inclination that there was a connection between Nazi occultism and Scientology. But the books that are out there, Paul's and Bergier, they wrote three books, and The Morning of the Magicians and things, and they're fantasies.

• 50:59Mayim Bialik?

  How did the occult make its way into the Nazi Party? How did that literally happen?

• 51:06Speaker 00

  There's a devotee of Blavatsky's called Dr. Franz Hartmann. And whether he was actually a medical doctor or not, we don't know. There's no record of qualification, but he performed eye surgeries for some years in Colorado for a dozen years. And he had gone to spiritualist seances and felt they were fraudulent. He felt there was something underneath it, but he felt they were making things up, which of course, one of the two Fox sisters later admitted they were and explained how they were doing it. And then he read something that Blavatsky had written. And he travelled to India. And if you can imagine how arduous the journey would be back in the 1880s to go from the

• 51:50Speaker 00

  US to India, to sit at the feet of Madame Blavatsky. He would become head of one of the two German theosophical societies. The other one was led by Rudolf Steiner, founder of Anthroposophy. And while he was head of a theosophical society, he also joined the List Society, which followed a man called Guido von List. They are Aryan racists. They are anti-Semitic racists. And shortly before joining that society, he was one of the three founders of the Ordo Templi Orientis, which Aleister Crowley will take over and from where Scientology's ideas will come. So one line goes through Crowley to Scientology.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  The other line goes through the List Society to the Tula Gesellschaft, the Tull Group. And there we find the founders of the Nazi Party. Hans Frank, Rudolf Hess, Dietrich Eckhart. And they are literally...

• 52:58Speaker 00

  You know, communicants of the dual group, which is an occult German society and the founders of the Nazi Party, all of the founders of the Nazi Party belong, you know, were at the periphery of this group. Hitler is recruited in very shortly afterwards.

• 53:13Mayim Bialik?

  I literally, I have a minor in Hebrew and Jewish Studies, which is basically a minor in the Holocaust and the Third Reich. And, you know, I know many, many things about World War II, about the Nazi Party, about the structure, you know, of Western Europe. Like, this is a thing that I never knew or knew to think about. And, you know, of all the things we talk about when we talk about the insanity and the nonsensical brutality of the Nazi Party, it never occurs to us to look into some of these foundations of the belief systems that formed, again, a party that transformed the

• 53:58Mayim Bialik?

  world and started a world war. That's astounding to me.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  It's surprising. I mean, historians, and I've talked with historians along the way, they'll kind of go, well, magic is nonsense, so therefore it doesn't matter. And I kind of go, no, what people believe does matter, whether it's nonsense or not. So that Heinrich Himmler had a round table to the Wevelsberg Schloss, his castle, where he trained SS officers, and he's the head of the SS. He trained SS officers in yoga and meditation and took them through occult ceremonies. But he has a round table because he's waiting for King Arthur and the Knights of the Holy Grail to come back. And you're going, they're made up stories. They're stories made up by Christian de Troye from Geoffrey of Monmouth.

• 54:42Mayim Bialik?

  I don't know why I feel like, you know, in defense of Himmler, which is not what I'm saying, but people are, people are obviously allowed to have side beliefs. I don't really, like, I don't really care in that sense. The point when we do have to care is when have those outside beliefs actually become part of the mainstream policies of the Nazi Party?

• 55:07Mayim Bialik?

  Right? Because you can say like, oh, he could believe in fairies and angel dust. Like, how does that affect me? But what we're talking about and what you have studied and spent decades working on is that it does matter. And a lot of these things that we like to push to the side as fringe and it's a conspiracy. And, oh, the Church of Scientology is mad at you for saying this. The fact is, there is an origin that made its way into not only the Nazi ideology and the implementation of the murder of tens of millions of people. But in addition, this separate branch of the similar root of the occult

• 55:48Mayim Bialik?

  found its way into an enormous part of 20th century American history and has shaped not only the Church of Scientology, but the way we view belief, the way we view, you know, who's worthy of helping someone and what determines sanity. That seems incredibly significant. And that's where the occult is not just something for the fringes of the internet. It's still valid. It's still working in our society. It's not so hidden.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  The great majority of people believe in the supernatural. There was a survey of atheists done in 1990s. And it was found that although they didn't believe in God, 80% of them believed in magic and the supernatural. So it is our inclination to believe in such things. And, you know, my fundamental proposition for this book, it's attributed to de Voltaire, but he didn't actually say it. But absurd beliefs can lead to atrocious behaviors. If Himmler, the head of 1 and 1/4 million troops, the SS, if Himmler had not believed what he believed, then he wouldn't have ordered the SS to kill 30 million Slavs during Barbarossa.

• 57:06Speaker 00

  And there was no differentiation made. Himmler said they are Jew Bolsheviks. That's the same thing. So, you know, 27 million Slavs were actually killed.

• 57:18Mayim Bialik?

  And when you mention that yoga and meditation were part of some sort of...

• 57:24Mayim Bialik?

  Training and indoctrination of SS soldiers as we know them. You know, what comes to mind is, you know, a lot of people don't want to talk about, but do talk about the things that soldiers had to do in order to do the things they did. And the administration of drugs is one of the things that people talk about. Amphetamines. Yes, the use of amphetamines. And, you know, it's kind of like one of these things. And whenever I would hear about it, I was always like, that's gross. I don't want to think about it. It's not part of the historical academic conversation. However, it is part of the academic conversation.

• 58:04Mayim Bialik?

  And it's part of understanding what does it mean to brainwash people? What does it mean to create an environment where someone is being given hypnotic techniques in addition to amphetamines to see what you can make them do? And I'm not absolving any Nazi soldier, SS soldier of responsibility. That's not what I'm talking about. But this is the way that you structure a killing machine, right? And when you think about the similarities of the use of amphetamines by Hubbard early on in the techniques of mental control, even on his own child, right?

• 58:50Mayim Bialik?

  When you think about what happens in those situations, you see it's, people are very easy to control when you are using techniques of hypnosis, when you are using drugs to alter the physiology. That's how you control a people, which is ironic because one of Scientology's main platforms is we don't believe in psychiatry. We don't believe in medication.

• 59:17Mayim Bialik?

  We're going to hit pause here on our conversation with John Atack, but guess what? There's a lot more in part two of our conversation. We're going to discuss how the occult went wrong. How do we keep the good parts of the occult and get rid of the parts that can be destructive? We're also going to talk about places in our current government and our current world where the occult may still be present.

• 59:41Jonathan Cohen?

  John's going to talk about the recourse he's received from the church and ways that he has been stalked and even threatened.

• 59:48Mayim Bialik?

  He's also going to answer the question, is all politics occult? Please make sure to stay tuned for part two of our conversation with John Atack. And from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time.