The Cults of California
1
THE first eccentric of Southern California was a Scotsman by the name of William Money, who arrived in Los Angeles around 1841. Married to a Mexican woman, Money was a quack doctor, an economic theorist, and the founder of the first cult in the region. Known to local residents as Professor Money,” “ Doctor Money,”and “ Bishop Money, he had been born, so he contended, with four teeth and “the likeness of a rainbow in the eye.”
The cult that he founded was called “The Reformed New Testament Church of the Faith of Jesus Christ” and was pretty largely made up of “native Californians.” He once prepared a map of the world entitled “William Money’s Discovery of the Ocean.” On this map San Francisco — a community that he detested — was shown poised on a portion of the earth that he predicted would soon collapse, precipitating the city into the fiery regions.
Living in a weird oval structure in San Gabriel, the approaches to which were guarded by two octagonal edifices built of wood and adobe. Money was the leading Los Angeles eccentric from 1841 until his death in 1880. He died with “an image of the Holy Virgin above his head, an articulated skeleton at his feet, and a well-worn copy of some Greek classic within reach of his hand.”
Bishop Money was a typical Southern California eccentric: he was born elsewhere; he came to the region in middle life: his aberrations were multiform; and he founded a cult. As an eccentric, however, he was in advance of his time, an exceptional figure. Southern California evidenced few manifestations of cultism between 1850 and 1900. The hordes of newcomers who arrived after 1880 were a God-fearing, highly respectable, conservative lot. In 1894 a visitor reported that two thousand Easterners were spending their winters in Pasadena; that they were all regular church communicants; and that there was “not a grog shop in town.”
As long as the tide of migration was made up of such people, there was no opportunity for the visionary or the faith-healer or the mystic. But as the region grew in wealth and fame, it began to attract some strange characters.
The first major prophetess of the region was unquestionably Katherine Tingley. Born in New England in 1847, three times married, Mrs. Tingley lived in almost total obscurity for the first forty years of her life. When she was forty, she moved to New York, where, through her interest in spiritualism. she came to know the theosophist William Quan Judge, over whom she soon acquired an extraordinary influence. Much talk began to be heard in theosophical circles about the emergence of a mysterious disciple, referred to by Judge as the “Promise,” the “Veiled Mahatma,” the “Light of the Lodge,” and the “Purple Mother.”
Shortly after Judge’s death, Katherine Tingley was revealed as the Purple Mother. Although she had never been West, Mrs. Tingley had, since childhood, dreamed of “building a White City in a Land of Gold beside a Sunset Sea.” Raising a considerable sum of money in the East, she established the Point Loma Theosophical Community near San Diego in 1900.
The community was an extraordinary phenomenon to appear in the complacent middle-class village of San Diego. It consisted of forty buildings, with “a harmonious blending of architectural lines, partly Moorish, partly Egyptian, with something belonging to neither.” One of the main structures, called the Homestead, had ninety rooms and a great dome of opalescent green. Still another building, the Aryan Temple, had an amethyst Egyptian gateway.
When visitors approached the colony, a bugler hidden behind the Egyptian gales sounded the note of their arrival. It was not long before some three hundred bizarre devotees, representing twenty-five different nationalities, had taken up residence in the colony. When a person entered the colony it was customary to present Mrs. Tingley with a sizable “love offering.” The Purple Mother ruled the colony with the utmost despotism. “From changing the milk-bottles of the newest baby to laying the last shingle on a bungalow,” wrote one observer, “her desire equals a Czar’s edict.”
On the lovely 500-acre Point Loma tract soon appeared a School of Antiquity, a Theosophical University, a Greek theater, Râja Yoga College, and the Iris Temple of Art, Music, and Drama. Still later an opera house was acquired in San Diego, where the Point Loma yogis, appearing in Grecian costumes, lectured the natives on the subtle dialectics of theosophy. In its early years, Point Loma possessed an atmosphere described as “like ozone — like poppyscented champagne.” Wearing strange costumes, the residents of the colony raised chickens, vegetables, and fruits, and cultivated silkworms.
The appearance of this exotic colony in Southern California greatly disturbed the boosters of the period, who regarded it as “bad advertising.” General Harrison Gray Otis was convinced that weird orgies were being enacted at Point Loma. He was particularly incensed by stories of a sacred dog, called “Spot,” who was supposed to be the reincarnation of one of Mrs. Tingley’s deceased husbands. Under such headlines as “Outrages at Point Loma Exposed by an ‘Escape’” and “Startling Tales from Tingley,” sensational stories began to appear in the Los Angeles Times.
General Otis contended that Point Loma was a “spookery”; that Mrs. Tingley exercised a hypnotic influence on the colonists and fed the children so skimpily that they became “ethereal”; that “the most incredible things happen in that lair”; that purple robes were worn by the women and khaki uniforms by the men; and that, at midnight, the pilgrims “in their nightrobes, each holding a torch,” went to a sacred spot on the Point Loma peninsula where “gross immoralities were practiced by the disciples of spookism.” For once, however, General Otis had met his weight in wildcats. Mrs. Tingley promptly sued the limes for libel and, after years of litigation, eventually collected a handsome judgment.
It was through Point Loma that the yogi influence reached Southern California. Attracting thousands of visitors to the region, some of whom purchased real estate, the colony soon ceased to be regarded as heretical. Unfortunately, Mrs. Tingley became involved in a serious scandal in 1923, as a result of which she abandoned Point Loma and went, to Europe. One of the first couples to settle at Point Loma, Dr. and Mrs. George F. Mohn, lived for some years in the Homestead before Mrs. Mohn first suspected that the Purple Mother was exerting a powerful influence on her husband. Whatever the nature of the influence, it was unquestionably persuasive: Dr. Mohn contributed $300,000 to the colony. Mrs. Mohn thereupon sued Mrs. Tingley for alienation of affections, and a jury returned a verdict in her favor for $75,000.
2
AFTER Mrs. Tingley’s appearance in Southern California, the region acquired a reputation as an occult land and theosophists began to converge upon it from the four corners of the earth. One of t hese early colonists was Albert Powell Warrington, a retired lawyer from Norfolk, Virginia, who arrived in Los Angeles in 1911. Purchasing a fifteen-acre tract in what is now the center of Hollywood, he established Krotona, “the place of promise.”
At its heyday, Krotona boasted an Occult Temple, a psychic lotus pond, a vegetarian cafeteria, several smalt tabernacles, a large metaphysical library, and a Greek theater. Like Point Loma, the architecture was Moorish-Egypt ian. At one time, Warrington rented a hall on Hollywood Boulevard where courses were given in Esperanto, the Esoteric Interpretation of Music and Drama, and the Human Aura. Krotona. in fact, “became a considerable factor in the commercial life of Hollywood.”
The story of Krotona has been well told, in novel form, by Jane Levington Comfort (From These Beginnings, 1937). While most residents of Hollywood have never heard of the place, Krotona left a definite cultural imprint on Southern California. It was at Krotona in 1918 that Christine Wetherill Stevenson, a wealthy Philadelphian, sponsored an outdoor production of Sir Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia — a production which led to the creation of the Theater Arts Alliance in 1919, out of which eventually came the Hollywood Bowl concerts of today. Mrs. Stevenson was also responsible for the production of the Pilgrimage Play in 1920—long since institutionalized by the boosters as one of the major tourist attractions of Los Angeles.
By 1920 Hollywood had begun to encroach upon Krotona, and Dr. Warrington decided to lead the faithful to the Ojai Valley, a section of Southern California thoroughly impregnated with occult and psychic influences. It is the home of Edgar Holloway, the Man from Lcmuria, who claims to have flown to Ojai some years ago in a great flying fish.
But the real genesis of Ojai as an occult center may be traced to the publication, in the early twenties, of a magazine article by Dr. Ales Hrdlička predicting the rise of “a new sixth sub-race.” It seems that psychological tests given in California schools had revealed the existence of a surprising number of child prodigies; ergo, California was the home of the new sub-race. Once this revelation was made, writes the biographer of Annie Besant, “theosophists all over the world turned their eyes toward California” as the Atlantis of the western sea. Among those who came to California was Mrs. Besant, who, “acting on orders of her Master,” purchased 465 acres in t he Oja i Valley as a home for the new sixth sub-race. And to Ojai she brought Krishnamurti, “the new messiah.”
Throughout the twenties, the annual encampments in Ojai were widely reported in the Southern Californian press, as thousands of people, mostly elderly neurotic women, trouped to Ojai to worship the messiah. Ojai is, today, the center of all esoteric influences in the region. The Ojai Valley theosophists. however, do not get along well with those of Point Loma. Bitter enmity existed between Annie Besant and Katherine Tingley: Mrs. Besant referred to Mrs. Tingley as “a professional psychic and medium and “a clever opportunist.”
3
ALONG with theosophy, other strange faiths have migrated to Southern California. Originally the New Thought movement was centered in New England; in fact, it was called the “ Boston craze. But like all metaphysical and religious movements, New Thought traveled westward. From Boston it moved to Hartford, then to New York, and finally spread to Chieago, Kansas City, and St. Louis. First appearing on the West Coast in San Francisco, it did not reach Los Angeles until after the World’s Fair in 1915. A day at the San Francisco fair was given over to New Thought, and George Wharton James, the omnipresent, delivered a lecture on “California - the Natural Home of New Thought.”
Following the fair, the New Thought leaders began to arrive in Los Angeles: Annie Rix Militz, who established the University of Christ; Fenwicke Holmes, who founded the Southern California Metaphysical Institute; and Eleanor M. Reesberg, who organized the Metaphysical Library. During these years, New Thought studio-lecture rooms sprang up throughout the city and the Metaphysicians’ May Day Festival became an annual civic event.
Among the pioneers of the movement was the Reverend Benjamin Fay Mills. Under his leadership, the Los Angeles Fellowship was a flourishing institution from 1904 to 1911, with over a thousand members, a large organizational apparatus, and its own orchestra, schools, and magazine. In 1915, alas! the Reverend Mr. Mills abandoned New Thought, left California, and died the next year in Grand Rapids, a sound Presbyterian.
These two imported movements — theosophy and New Thought — constitute the stuff from which most of the later creeds and cults have been evolved. Since Southern California was the world center of both movements — theosophy from 1900; New Thought from 1915 — it not only attracted adherents of these creeds from all over the world, but it became a publishing center from which issued a steady flow of magazines, newspapers, and books devoted to mysticism, practical and esoteric. The mystical ingredients came from Point Loma; the practical money-mindedness from the New Thought leaders.
Of nearly a hundred books catalogued in the Los Angeles Public Library under the heading “New Thought,” over half have been published in Southern California. I once attempted to examine these items, but abandoned the effort after a try at the first volume, indexed: Scientific Air Possibilities with the Human, by Zabelle Abdalian, “Doctor of Airbodiedness.”
On meeting in Southern California, strangers are supposed to inquire, tirst, “Where are you fromt" and second, “How do you feel?” Invalidism and transiency have certainly been important factors stimulating cultism in the region. The number of food and body cults in Southern California has never been reckoned. In the early thirties, there were over a thousand practicing nudists in Los Angeles, and three large nudist camps: Fraternity Elysia; the Land of Moo, over the entrance to which appeared the saucy slogan, “In All the World, No St rip LikeThis”; and, in the hills of Calabasas, a mysterious retreat called Shangri-la. The existence of a large number of transients and visitors has always stimulated the cult-making tendency. It should be remembered that, for the last twenty-five years, Los Angeles has had, on an average, about 200,000 temporary residents.
4
IN SUCH an environment it was, of course, foreordained that a messiah would some day emerge. The first local messiah was a poor, uneducated, desperately ambitious widow by the name of Aimee Semple McPherson.
Aimee, who was “not so much a woman as a scintillant assault,” first appeared in California at San Diego in 1918. There she began to attract attention by scattering religious tracts from an airplane and holding revival meetings in a boxing arena. That Mrs. McPherson’s first appearance should have been in San Diego is, in itself, highly significant. In San Diego she unquestionably heard of Katherine Tingley, from whom she probably got the idea of founding a new religious movement on the coast and from whom she certainly got many of her ideas about uniforms, pageantry, and showmanship.
From San Diego Mrs. McPherson came to Los Angeles in 1922 with her Four Square Gospel: conversion, physical healing, the second coming, and redemption. She arrived in Los Angeles with two minor children, an old battered automobile., and $100 in cash. By the end of 1925 she had collected more than $1,000,000 and owned property worth $250,000. In the early twenties, as Nancy Barr Mavity has pointed out (in an excellent biography of Mrs. McPherson), “Los Angeles was the happy hunting ground for the physically disabled and the mentally unexacting . . . no other large city contains so many transplanted villagers who retain the stamp of their indigenous soil.. . Most cities absorb the disparate elements that gravitate to them, but Los Angeles remains a city of migrants,”a mixture, not a compound.
Here she built Angelus Temple at a reputed cost of $1,500,000. The Temple has an auditorium with 5000 seats; a $75,000 broadcasting station; the classrooms of a university which once graduated 500 young evangelists a year; and, as Morrow Mayo pointed out, “a brass band bigger and louder than Sousa’s, an organ worthy of any movie cathedral, a female choir bigger and more beautiful than the Metropolitan chorus, and a costume wardrobe comparable to Ziegfeld’s.”
Mrs. McPherson founded a magazine, The Bridal Call, and established 240 “lighthouses,” or local churches, affiliated with Angelus Temple. By 1929 she had a following of 12,000 devoted members in Los Angeles and 30,000 in the outlying communities. From the platform of Angelus Temple, Sister Aimee gave the Angelenos the fanciest theological entertainment they have ever enjoyed. I have seen her drive an ugly Devil around the platform with a pitchfork, enact the drama of Valley Forge in George Washington’s uniform, and take the lead in a dramatized sermon called “Sodom and Gomorrah.”
Adjutants have been praying, night and day, for thirteen years in the Temple. One group has been praying for 118,260 hours. While Mrs. McPherson never contended that she could heal the sick, she was always willing to pray for them and she was widely known as a faith-healer. A magnificent sense of showmanship enabled her to give the Angelus Temple throngs a sense of drama and a feeling of release that probably did have some therapeutic value. On state occasions, she always appeared in the costume of an admiral of the fleet while the lay members of her entourage wore natty nautical uniforms.
On May 18, 1926, Sister Aimee disappeared. Last seen in a bathing suit on the beach near Ocean Park, she had apparently drowned in the Pacific. While Los Angeles went wild with excitement, thousands of her followers gathered on the beach to pray for her deliverance and return. A specially chartered airplane flew over the beach and dropped flowers on the waters. On May 23, an overenthusiastic disciple drowned in the Pacific while attempting to find her body. A few days later, a great memorial meeting was held for Sister at Angelus Temple, at which $35,000 was collected. Three days later, the mysterious Aimee reappeared at Agua Prieta in Mexico, across the border from Douglas, Arizona.
Her entrance into Los Angeles was a major triumph. Flooded with requests from all over the world, the local newspapers and wire services filed 95,000 words of copy in a single day. Airplanes showered thousands of blossoms upon the coach that brought Sister back to Los Angeles. Stepping from the train, she walked out of the station on a carpet of roses. A hundred thousand people cheered while she paraded through the streets of the city, accompanied by a white-robed silver band, an escort of twenty cowboys, and squads of policemen.
The jubilation, however, did not last long. Working hard on the case, the newspapers soon proved that the kidnaping story, which she had told on her return, was highly fictitious, In sensational stories, they proceeded to trace her movements from the time she disappeared, through a “love cottage” interlude at Carmel with a former radio operator of the Temple, to her reappearance in Mexico. Following these disclosures, she was arrested, charged with having given false information designed to interfere with the orderly processes of the law, and placed on trial. Later the charges against her were dropped.
No one bothered to inquire what crime, if any, she had committed. It was the fabulous ability with which she carried off the kidnaping hoax that infuriated the respectable middle-class residents of Los Angeles. Although I heard her speak many times, I never heard her attack any individual or any group, and I am thoroughly convinced that her followers always felt that they had received full value in exchange for their liberal donations. She made migrants feel at home in Los Angeles; she gave them a chance to meet other people; and she exorcised the nameless fears which so many of them had acquired from the fire-and-brimstone theology of the Middle West.
Although she managed to maintain a fairly constant following until her death from an overdose of sleeping powder in 1944, she never recovered from the vicious campaign that had been directed against her in 1926. The old enthusiasm was gone; the old fervor had vanished. She was no longer “Sister McPherson” in Los Angeles, but merely “Aimee.” In many respects, her career parallels that of Katherine Tingley: both were highly gifted women with a great talent for showmanship; both had lived in poverty and obscurity until middle age; both founded cults; and both were ruined by scandal.
5
THE outstanding cult movement in Southern California in the twenties, the Four Square Gospel was succeeded by still fancier cults in the thirties, By any standard the I AM cult is the weirdest mystical concoction that has ever issued from the region It is a witch’s caldron of the inconceivable, the incredible, and the fantastic. Stated in objective terms, the tenets of the cult constitute a hideous phantasm. Originating in Los Angeles, the cult spread across the nation, with centers in Chicago, New York, West Palm Beach, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Denver, Salt Lake City, Fort Worth, and Dallas; it enrolled 350,000 converts and deposited in the hands of its creators the tidy sum of $3,000,000.
The creators of the cult, Guy W. Ballard and his wife Edna Ballard, came to Los Angeles from Chicago around 1932. Paper hanger, stock salesman, and promoter, Ballard had been obsessed, since his childhood in Newton, Kansas, with visions of gold and jewels. Indicted in Illinois in 1929 for a gold-mine promotion, he had fled westward. A professional medium, his wife had edited a spiritualist magazine. The Diamond, in Chicago. After coming to Los Angeles, Ballard, under the nom de plume of Godfrey Kay King, published a treatise in 1934 entitled Unveiled Mysteries, which sets forth the doctrine of the Mighty l AM Presence.
The deity of the cult, it seems, is the Ascended Master Saint Germain. While he was on a hiking trip near Mount Shasta in Northern California, Ballard relates. Saint Germain, appearing out of the void, tapped him on the shoulder and offered him a cup filled with “pure electronic essence.”After drinking the essence and eating a tiny wafer ot concentrated energy,” Ballard felt himself surrounded by “a White Flame which formed a circle about fifty feet in diameter.”
Enveloped in the flame, he and Saint Germain set forth on a trip around the world in the stratosphere, visiting “the buried cities of the Amazon,” France, Egypt, Karnak, Luxor, the fabled Inca cities of antiquity, the Royal Tetons, and Yellowstone National Park. Wherever they journeyed, they found rich treasures: jewels of all kinds, Spanish pirate gold, rubies, pearls, diamonds, emeralds, amethysts, gold bullion, casks of silver, the plunder of antiquity. Fantastic as this revelation may sound, Unveiled Mysteries began to sell like hot cakes at $2.50 a copy. Soon the Ballards were able to secure radio time. The “love gifts” poured in so rapidly that they took over a large, rambling tabernacle, from the top of which a blazing neon light flashed word to all Los Angeles of the Mighty I AM Presence.
And then the Ballards began to sell things: a monthly magazine called The Voice of the 1 AM; various books, such as The Magic Presence, the I AM Discourses, the I AM Adorations, Affirmations, and Decrees; and the Ascended Master Discourses. Photographs of Ballard, “our beloved messenger,”sold for $2.50; phonograph records, which recorded “the music of the spheres” and lectures of Ballard, sold for $3; a “Chart of the Magic Presence” brought $12; a steel engraving of the “Cosmic Being, Orion, better known as the Old Man of the Hills,” retailed for $2; the “Special I AM Decree binder” was listed at $1.25; I AM rings at $12; a special electrical device, equipped with colored lights, called “Flame in Action,” sold, in varying sizes, for $50 and $200; and, finally, a “New Age Cold Cream” preparation was available for the faithful. When Mrs. Ballard was later convicted of mail fraud in the Federal court in Los Angeles, an audit of the books revealed that over $3,000,000 had been collected in sales, contributions, and “love offerings.”
The meetings of this cult were unlike anything of the sort I have witnessed in Los Angeles. Buxom middle-aged usherettes, clad in flowing evening gowns, with handsome corsages of orchids and gardenias, bustled around at the morning services in a tabernacle that literally steamed with perfume. Although sex is taboo in the I AM creed — it tends to divert “divine energy” — it would be difficult to imagine a ritual in which sexual symbolism figured as prominently as it does in Master Saint Germain’s revelation.
Basically the cult has two symbols: wealth and energy. Great emphasis is placed on words such as “energy,” “wealth,”“jewels,” “riches,” and “ power.” The faithful are promised power by which they can acquire wealth, gold, radios, hotels, automobiles, jewels, and innumerable luxuries. A keyword in the affirmations, chants, and adorations is “ blasted ” by the dynamic energy of Saint Germain’s “purple light” and the, “atomic accelerator.” A talented appropriator, Ballard had lifted ideas at random from a dozen sources in putting this strange creed together. (The sources are documented in an interesting volume: Psychic Dictatorship in America by Gerald B. Bryan, published in Los Angeles in 1940.)
One of the sources that Ballard used was a series of articles which William Dudley Pelley had published in 1929, entitled “Seven Minutes in Eternity,” written while Pelley was a resident of Sierra Madre, near Pasadena. It is not by’ chance, therefore, that the I AM cult has Hitlerian overtones, with such auxiliary organizations as the “Minute Men of Saint Germain” and the “Daughters of Light.”By the time an I AM audience repeats a chant the fourth time, the members are shouting with all the frenzy of a mob of Nazis yelling, “Sieg Heil!”
6
IN 1875 a group of men, whose names must be forever unknown, succeeded in establishing contact with a superhuman race of little men with metallic heads who dwell in the center of the earth. With the aid of these supermen, The Sponsors propose to eradicate war and poverty from the earth. Such is the basic revelation of Mankind United, a cult movement launched by Arthur Bell in 1934. Once 200,000,000 people have joined the organization, Mankind United will be in a position to ensure that no mortal will have to work more than four hours a day, four days a week, eight months a year, in order to earn a salary of not less than $3000 a year. Pensions of $250 a month will be paid all who have worked 11,000 hours or have reached the age of sixty.
Bell promised each of his followers a $25,000 home, equipped with radio, television, unlimited motion pictures, and an “automatic vocal-type correspondence machine.” The homes were also to be equipped with automatic news and telephone recording apparatus; automatic air-conditioning; with fruit trees, vegetable gardens, hothouses, athletic courts, swimming pools, fountains, shrubbery, and miniature waterfalls. While traveling some years before the war in China and Japan, “and certain countries in Europe,” Bell had discovered 100,000,000 gardeners who wished to spend the rest of their lives gardening In America for Mankind United.
In exchange for these promised luxuries, members were asked to surrender their worldly possessions on joining the secret order. Throughout a network of affiliated organizations — the Universal Service Corporation, the International Institute of Universal Research, and the International Legion of Vigilantes — the leaders of Mankind United received $97,500 in 1930 from the sale of Arthur Bell’s revelation. Between 1934 and 1941, more than 14,000 Californians joined the cult, most of whom were “either elderly persons or individuals who had suffered severe economic losses.”
Arthur Bell claimed to have possession of a ray machine so powerful that its beams, once released, would knock out the eye sockets of people thousands of miles distant (a notion based upon an article which Dr. R. M. Langer, of the California Institute of Technology had contributed to Colliers in 1940). Using the principle of the ray machine, power plants would be created capable of exterminating a million people at a single blast. Claiming to be omnipotent, Hell told a California legislative committee that, if he wished, he could go into a trance and be whisked off to the far corners of the earth. Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the leaders of the cult, most of whom were anti-war, were convicted of violating the sedition statutes.
Certain basic themes appear in the I AM and Alankind United cults. In both movements there is a marked emphasis upon energy and power, symbolized by the ray machine in Mankind United and by the “mystic purple light” of the I AM cult. Both cults reflect a psychoneurotic preoccupation with the symbols of material wealth, luxury, and ease of living. Splendor and release, power and wealth, are to come, in both cases, through the intervention of a messiah who possesses the magic formula. There are villains in both cults: hidden rulers, destructive forces, static elements that must be blasted into eternity. Sired by Buck Rogers and Superman, they are nevertheless profoundly symptomatic of the unrest, the suppressed fury, and the preoccupation with violence and power of certain classes in our society.
In Los Angeles, I have attended the services of the Agabeg Occult Church, where the woman pastor who presided had violet hair (to match her name) and green-painted eyelids (to emphasize their mystical insight); of the Great White Brotherhood, whose yellow-robed followers celebrate the full moon of May with a special ritual; of the Ancient Mystical Order of Melchizedek; of the Temple of the Jewelled Cross; of Sanford Church, “food scientist, psychologist, and health lecturer”; of the Bahai World Faith Center; of the Crusade of the New Civilization; of the Self-Realization Fellowship of America, which proposes to construct a Golden Lotus Yoga Dream Hermitage near Encinitas at a cost of $400,000.
I have also heard the lectures of Dr. Horton Held, who believes that California is an unusually healthy place in which to live, since “so many flowers find it possible to grow in this vicinity. The flowers, cultivated or wild, give out certain chemicals which beneficially affect the human body.” In Los Angeles one finds the Maz-daz-lan cult of Otomnn Bar-Azusht Ra’nish (real name Otto Runisch).
Los Angeles is the home of the Philosophical Research Society, Incorporated, of Manly Palmer Hall, “America’s Greatest Philosopher”; the center of Zoroastrianism in America; the headquarters of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism. In a single office building in the heart of Los Angeles, Thomas Sugrue found the following listed as tenants: “Spiritual Mystic Astrologer: Spiritual Psychic Science Church, number 450, Service Daily, Message Circles, Trumpets Thursday; Circle of Truth Church; Spiritual Psychic Science Church; First Church of Divine Love and Wisdom; Reverend Eva Coram, Giving Her Wonderful Cosmic Readings, Divine Healing Daily; Spiritual Science Church of the Master, Special Rose Light Circle, Nothing Impossible.”
Southern California, wrote Michael Williams, is a “vertiginous confusion of modern idolatry and sorcery and superstition,” which is finding philosophical justification as a “new paganism, made up of Theosophists, Rosicrucians, Christian Mysticism, Hermeticism, and New Thought.” Most of the movements described here represent cultic phenomena — that is, they are not sects which have split off from some established faith; they are new cults.
Migration is the basic explanation for the growth of cults in Southern California. “History is replete,” writes Dr. William W. Sweet, “with instances of corruption of religion among migrating people.” In tlie process of moving westward, the customs, practices, and religious habits of the people have undergone important changes. Old ties have been loosened, old allegiances weakened. Leaders of the orthodox faiths have repeatedly complained, with the exception of the Catholic Church, that established church practices and procedures have undergone various mutations in Southern California.
A church survey made in Los Angeles points up the real problem: “For the most part,” it states, “the newly developing religious teachers are sincerely trying to serve their followers, and prove to be strong influences because traditional habits do not reach the people in this community. [Italics mine.] Even the older-type churches have been adopting measures unsanctioned in other parts of the country for a more effective hold upon their people.”
In a lesser measure, the cultic aberrations of Southern California are an accidental by-product of its geographical location. Dr. Lee R. Steiner, in her study of quacks and fakirs, has pointed out that, when difficulty besets the quack, ”he usually flees to Los Angeles,” not so much because it is a haven, but because it is the largest metropolitan center west of Chicago. Cult movements have moved westward in America, and Los Angeles is the last stop.