Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [87]
Pelley’s career went beyond the printed page. He spent the 1920s as a successful Hollywood screenwriter, penning a string of studio vehicles at the height of the silent-film era. In Pelley’s high mark as a screenwriter, two of his films featured horror pioneer Lon Chaney. In 1922’s The Light in the Dark, the changeling actor played a heart-of-gold hoodlum who steals the Holy Grail in order to heal an injured girl. Better remembered is The Shock from 1923, for Chaney’s performance as a crippled hit man compelled to reevaluate his life. The screenwriter and actor became good friends for the rest of the decade.
Pelley’s public profile took an immense leap in March 1929 with the publication of a hugely popular article on the cover of The American Magazine: “Seven Minutes in Eternity—the Amazing Experience that Made Me Over.” Pelley depicted a quiet spring night in 1928 in which a near-death experience transported him to the regions of the spirit world. As he described it, the evening began ordinarily enough—that is, if your idea of ordinary includes falling asleep over a book on “ethnology” in an isolated California bungalow with only the company of a massive police dog. Between three and four A.M., the dozing Pelley let loose a “ghastly inner shriek”: I’m dying! I’m dying!, as he plunged through “cool, blue space.” The fall was followed by a frantic whirling, similar, he recalled, to when he had been in an airplane over San Francisco that went into a tailspin and almost crashed into the Golden Gate. Just as suddenly, “someone reached out, caught me, stopped me.” It was two people—“two strong-bodied, kindly-faced young men in white uniforms not unlike those worn by internees in hospitals.” They laid him naked on a “beautiful marble-slab pallet” and began to massage and talk reassuringly to him.
This was Pelley’s first encounter with the “Spiritual Mentors” who tutored him, as they would many times in the years ahead, on karma, reincarnation, and the realities of the afterlife. Only later would their ideas turn political. Revived by the “cool, steadying pressure of my friends’ hands,” the nude Pelley was gently directed to bathe in a soothing marble pool. The magical waters seemed to remove his sense of nakedness, and he then strolled through the illuminated Roman porticos of the Higher Realm, where he encountered “saintly, attractive, magnetic folk … no misfits, no tense countenances, no sour leers, no preoccupied brusqueness or physical handicap.” How happy everybody seems! he inwardly exclaimed. Suddenly he was surrounded by a “swirl of bluish vapor” and he floated up, once more launched through space. He then heard a mechanical click in his body—“the best analogy is the sound my repeating deer-rifle makes when I work the ejector mechanism”—which signaled his return to his physical form. The writer shot up in bed and yelled: “That wasn’t a dream!”
Pelley told readers that the experience had remade him into a more peaceful, loving person whose sharper edges had been smoothed by his contact with his spirit brothers. In the months ahead, he said, his nerves calmed, he stopped smoking (until the higher Mentors told him that tobacco helped free his subconscious), he was kinder to editors, business associates, and neighbors. Weirdly enough, all of them—and even total strangers—seemed mysteriously to want to help him.
If not quite the first, “Seven Minutes in Eternity” was certainly the nation’s most influential tale of near-death experience. Given that The American Magazine reached over 2.2 million subscribers, Pelley’s article, surmised