Body Thetans

Also Known As: also body thetan, BT, BTs; groups of them are called clusters
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: Body thetans are bodiless spirits that sit in, on or near a living human body, alone or packed together in clusters, and are held to cause unwanted conditions of mind and body.
Role in Mythos: They are the lasting damage of the Xenu story, the secret teaching that L. Ron Hubbard wrote for Scientology’s OT III level in 1966 and 1967.
Relation to Humans: Every human body is said to carry them. Scientologists on the upper levels find them one at a time and take each back through its old injury until it lets go and leaves.

A dull weight sits behind the left shoulder. It has been there for years, like a thumb pressed into the muscle. It does not belong to the person who feels it. It is somebody else. Somebody very old, who stopped paying attention seventy-five million years ago and never left.

That is a body thetan. In Scientology a thetan is the self, the spirit that owns a body and is not the body. A body thetan is a spare one, a spirit with no body of its own, stuck in or on or near a body that belongs to another. They come singly and they come in clusters, many of them pressed together like a handful of wet snow. The teaching holds that every human body carries them.

The idea has an author and a date. L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, wrote it down in late 1966 and early 1967 while travelling in North Africa on his way to Las Palmas. He announced it as a breakthrough on a tape recorded on 20 September 1967. It became the third of the upper grades of his church, Operating Thetan Level Three, known as OT III and nicknamed the Wall of Fire. Nothing older stands behind it. Before 1967 nobody had body thetans.

The story Hubbard told to explain them is set seventy-five million years ago. A ruler named Xenu governed a Galactic Confederacy of twenty-six stars and seventy-six planets, each with an average of 178 billion people. That was too many. He called his citizens in by the billion for what they were told were income tax inspections. Then he had them paralysed, frozen in a mix of alcohol and glycol, and loaded onto spacecraft that Hubbard said looked like DC-8 airliners without the fans.

The ships came to Earth, then called Teegeeack. The frozen bodies were stacked around the bases of volcanoes. Hydrogen bombs were lowered into the craters and set off together. In a later lecture, given on 3 October 1968, Hubbard listed some of the mountains: Loa, Vesuvius, Shasta, Fujiyama, Etna and many more.

The blasts killed the bodies. They could not kill the thetans, and Xenu had planned for that. The spirits rose on the hot wind and were caught by what Hubbard called an electronic ribbon, then pulled down into vacuum zones around the world. From there they were taken to something like a cinema. For thirty-six days they were made to watch what he called a three-D, super colossal motion picture. It filled them with false pictures, God and the Devil among them.

When the film stopped and the dark came back, the thetans no longer knew who they were. They could not tell one from another. They drifted into clumps, and each clump settled into one of the few living bodies left on the planet. They have been passed along ever since. Xenu was overthrown by a faction called the Loyal Officers and shut inside an electronic mountain trap, where the story leaves him.

No account gives a body thetan a face, a colour or a voice. It is a spirit without a body, which is the whole trouble with it. What a person can notice is a sense of pressure, or of mass, at some point in or around the body. The teaching says body thetans and clusters cause unwanted conditions of the mind and the body. The ache, the dread or the stray thought is not the person’s own. It is leaking from a passenger.

The cure is patient and solitary. A Scientologist who has reached OT III works alone with an E-meter, the church’s device for reading small changes through two hand-held metal cans. The person looks for a spot of pressure and speaks to whatever is there, without sound, mind to mind. The body thetan is taken back through the bombing and the film. It may be taken further still, to a far older event Hubbard dated to four quadrillion years ago: a loud snap, a flood of light, a chariot, a cherub blowing a horn, more snaps, and then darkness. Once it has faced these, the body thetan wakes up and goes. The work does not end at OT III. It carries on through the levels above, up to OT VII, where members audit alone at home every day.

Their power is that of a stowaway. They cannot be seen, they outnumber their host, and their trouble passes for the host’s own. They are also guarded by a threat. Hubbard wrote that the implant was calculated to kill, by pneumonia or otherwise, anyone who tried to solve it, and members were warned not to read the story before they were ready.

Their weakness is that they are victims too. A body thetan is not wicked. It is dazed, and it holds on only because it has forgotten it can let go. Attention is enough to move it. Each one that leaves is said to be free to find a body of its own.

The church meant all of this to be secret. Members signed promises not to speak of it, and Hubbard ordered the papers kept under lock and key. It did not hold. A former member, Robert Kaufman, put the OT III material in a book in 1972. A Florida newspaper, the Clearwater Sun, described it in 1981. In 1985 the papers were entered in a Los Angeles court case, the church failed to have them sealed, and the Los Angeles Times printed a summary. In April 1993 older versions of the levels were filed in another case as part of a sworn statement by Steven Fishman, and from there they spread across the internet. Asked about the story in public, church spokesmen have sometimes answered that it is not what they believe.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are body thetans?

Body thetans are bodiless spirits in Scientology teaching that are stuck in, on or near a living human body. They appear alone or in groups called clusters. Every human body is said to carry them, and they are held to cause unwanted conditions of the mind and body.

Where did body thetans come from?

Body thetans come from the Xenu story, which L. Ron Hubbard wrote for Scientology’s OT III level in 1966 and 1967. In that story the ruler Xenu brought billions of frozen people to Earth 75 million years ago and killed them with hydrogen bombs in volcanoes. Their spirits were captured, shown a film for thirty-six days, and then gathered in clusters inside the few living bodies left.

How do Scientologists get rid of body thetans?

A Scientologist on the upper levels works alone with an E-meter to find a body thetan as a feeling of pressure or mass in the body. The person addresses the body thetan silently and takes it back through the bombing and the film, and sometimes through a far older event called Incident I. Once it has faced these, the body thetan is said to wake up and leave. The work continues from OT III up to OT VII.

What do body thetans look like?

Body thetans have no appearance. They are spirits without bodies, and no account gives them a shape, a colour or a voice. The person carrying a body thetan is said to feel it as pressure or mass at a point in or around the body.

Who invented body thetans?

L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, created body thetans. He wrote the OT III material in late 1966 and early 1967 and announced it on a tape recorded on 20 September 1967. The teaching was meant to be secret, but it became public through a 1972 book, a 1985 Los Angeles court case and court papers filed in 1993.