In the Church of Scientology mythos, the Marcab Confederacy is said to be one of the most powerful galactic civilizations still active. Church founder L. Ron Hubbard describes it as:
Various planets united into a very vast civilization which has come forward up through the last 200,000 years, formed out of the fragments of earlier civilizations. In the last 10,000 years they have gone on with a sort of decadent kicked-in-the-head civilization that contains automobiles, business suits, fedora hats, telephones, spaceships — a civilization which looks almost an exact duplicate but is worse off than the current US civilization.[1][2]
The capital of the Confederacy is said to be "one of the tail stars of the Big Dipper", probably Alkaid, a star 108 light years distant from Earth. The Marcabians used to rule Earth at some point in the past but lost control of it due to "losses in war and other things".
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The Marcabians had an oppressive political system: "if [a person] was considered to be in contempt of court or anything like that, [he was] simply fried since there was a curtain of radioactive material which went clear across the front of the bench anywhere that a witness or anybody would stand, and so on."[3]
Hubbard said that the Marcab Confederacy invented income tax as a means of punishment, with the death penalty imposed for making even the slightest mistake in returns — "one comma wrong and it's 'dead forever'." The Marcabians also appear to have been distinctly socialistic, having "had plan balanced economies" (presumably some form of planned economy).[4]
They were also keen on motor racing and every once in a while Scientologists undergoing auditing "will run into [memories of] race tracks and race-track drivers". Hubbard described this in some detail in a 1960 lecture:
They had turbine-generated cars that went about 275 miles an hour (443 km/h). They ran with a high whine. I notice they've just now invented the motor again. And they had tracks that were booby-trapped with atom bombs, and they had side bypasses. The tracks were mined, and the grandstands were leaded-paned.[5]
The tracks were deliberately designed to be as dangerous as possible, with "a mountain that you went up to the top of and fell off", and death was commonplace. This, however, was not a problem, as Marcabian medicine was so good that nobody ever died permanently. According to author Russell Miller,[6] Hubbard liked to reminisce to his followers about "how he was a race-car driver in the Marcab civilization". One of the people who accompanied him aboard his private fleet in the late 1960s described Hubbard's stories of life with the Marcabians:
LRH said he was a race driver called the Green Dragon who set a speed record before he was killed in an accident. He came back in another lifetime as the Red Devil and beat his own record, then came back and did it again as the Blue Streak. Finally he realized all he was doing was breaking his own records and it was no game any more.[6]
Hubbard describes exactly this in his lecture Create and Confront, telling how he went through multiple lives as a Marcabian racing driver with names like The Green Rocket, The Red Comet, The Silver Streak, The Gold Bomb, etc.
Hubbard stated that the Marcab Confederacy was now using Earth as a "prison planet". When a person dies or "drops the body", as Scientologists put it, his thetan is pulled into a Marcab-established "implant station" or "report station".
The report area for most has been Mars. Some women report to stations elsewhere in the Solar System. There are occasional incidents about Earth report stations. The report stations are protected by screens. The last report station on Earth was established in the Pyrenees.[7]
The thetans are brainwashed and sent back to Earth, where they find a new body to inhabit. Only Scientologists who have reached the level of "Operating Thetan" are said to be able to avoid this fate.
Note: HCOB refers to "Hubbard Communications Office Bulletins", HCOPL refers to "Hubbard Communications Office Policy Letters", and SHSBC refers to "Saint Hill Special Briefing Courses". All have been made publicly available by the Church of Scientology in the past, both as individual documents or in bound volumes.