Thanks Rebecca for a good summary of an amusing little mythology. Given the intrinsic absurdity of all magical beliefs, it seems a little unfair to pick on Hubbard's particular brand of money-making. All mythologies start off as the ravings of a madman or the fairytales of a good yarn-spinner, all are incoherent, internally contradictory, full of childish notions, and of course utterly disconnected in every way from reality. The Christian mythology alone has spawned hundreds of sub-cults, many of which have made far more money than Hubbard's sci-fi based nonsense.