Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [100]
Spalding’s gospel was strongly suggestive of the New Age Christianity that gained popularity more than a generation later through such writers as Matthew Fox and Andrew Harvey. It prefigured the cross-pollination of Jewish, Christian, Sufi, Buddhist, and Hindu ideas, today derided by critics as “cafeteria religion” but indelibly stamped on the spiritual experience of countless Americans. For a generation of readers and religious experimenters, the tales of this Western mining prospector became a source of encouragement that spiritual understanding is possible through many doors, open to any who seek.
Black Magicians
Although Spalding was nearly broke when he died, the commercial success of his books was not lost on the canniest observers. One of the oddest strains of mystical religion in America appeared in a 1930s movement heavily influenced by Spalding: the “Mighty I AM”* teachings of Guy and Edna Ballard. The Ballards were a charismatic Chicago couple who briefly built a huge prosperity cult based on hyperpatriotism and the teachings of their own “Ascended Masters.”
Guy and Edna Ballard were catholic, in the occult sense of the word. In the 1920s and ’30s, the couple maintained an occult bookshop and absorbed a wide range of metaphysical ideas: Frank B. Robinson’s Psychiana, New Thought, Christian Science, the Rosicrucian-styled teachings of the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), and a variety of books and novels on “hidden masters,” including the works of Silver Shirt leader William Dudley Pelley, whose members they actively recruited. They seem to have been fairly forthright about wanting to start their own for-profit, membership-based mystical movement. According to Frank B. Robinson, Guy sought out the prophet of Moscow, Idaho, and told Robinson of his ambitions. Robinson said it was okay with him—as long as Guy knew where they stood. “I told him I didn’t mind,” he recalled to columnist Westbrook Pegler in 1939, “… I just warned him to keep off my stuff.”
The itinerant Spalding had stayed as a houseguest at the Ballards’ Chicago home. Like Spalding, Guy Ballard was a professional prospector with a passion for speculative digging. And on a mountain, Ballard found his gold. As Ballard described it, his first encounter with an “Ascended Master” came in 1932 during a day hike on Northern California’s snow-peaked Mount Shasta. Shasta was a kind of Mount of Olives for the West Coast occult, steeped in local legend as a place of hidden tunnels, mythical races, UFO landings, and remnants of lost civilizations from Atlantis or Lemuria. During his leisure hike, Guy met the ethereal being that would ever after serve as his heavenly teacher, Saint Germain: “a Magnificent Godlike figure in a white jeweled robe, a Light and Love sparkling in his eyes that revealed and proved the Dominion and Majesty that are his.”
The personage called Saint Germain had considerable pedigree in occult tradition. His legend began with an altogether real Count of Saint Germain, an eighteenth-century European courtier, diplomat, musician, and purveyor of mystical ideas. His life and career later took on wondrous dimensions among early Theosophists who conceived of him as an ageless, beneficent messenger of the Great White Brotherhood. In the twentieth century, his reputation traveled in many directions: from the pages of Manly P. Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages to the theology of Elizabeth Clare Prophet, who cited Master