In a curious aside, [Aleister] Crowley was a significant influence on L/ Ron Hubbard, creator of the psychoanalytic system of Dianetics and founder of the controversial Church of Scientology. In 1945 Hubbard stayed for some time in the home of Jack Parsons, a rocket scientist and a senior member of Los Angeles OTO [Ordo Templi Orientis]. In a letter to Crowley, Parsons said that Hubbard was ‘the most Thelemic person I have ever met and is in complete accord with our own principles’. Parsons and Hubbard are said to have worked major sex-magick rituals with a ‘scarlet woman’ in an attempt to conceive a ‘moonchild’ – the antithesis of Christ – as first proposed by Crowley in his Book of the Law (1904) and fictionalized in his novel Moonchild (1929).
– A Brief History of Secret Societies: An Unbiased History of Our Desire for Secret Knowledge (1997), p. 221