Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [88]
Somewhere between Pelley’s out-of-body experience and the triumph of the fascist ideologies of the 1930s, something in the writer’s outlook became terribly, tragically twisted. His gifts for crafting a memorable phrase were abruptly refocused on producing some of the darkest anti-Semitic tracts in American history. The vehicle for his hatred was a mystico-political magazine he founded, Liberation. And he did more than just write: By 1933, acting under “clairaudient” instructions from his cosmic Mentors, Pelley started the Silver Shirts, a paramilitary neo-Nazi order that served as a template for some of the worst hate groups of the twentieth century.
What had happened to the man who spent “Seven Minutes in Eternity”?
“Something Clicked in My Brain!”
To behold the large photograph of Pelley’s face as it appeared with his American Magazine piece, one would never imagine the career in front of him. The writer of “Seven Minutes” looked trusting, mild, relaxed, with gentle features and softly graying hair—so much the image of a small-town druggist from one of his Paris, Vermont, stories. Within a few years, however, Pelley appeared transformed: Photographs showed his goateed face squinting and scowling and his diminutive five-foot-seven-inch frame decked out in a paramilitary uniform of pantaloons, a silver shirt, and a leather band strapped across his chest. By 1939, his icy visage on a sheriff’s WANTED poster in North Carolina—where he was convicted of securities fraud—reveals a contrast that is so dramatic, so Jekyll-and-Hyde in nature, that it would have intrigued the master of disguise himself, Lon Chaney.
A few hints to the Pelley mystery appear in material that had been cut from the article-length version of his astral adventure and that Pelley later restored in his “unabridged” (though actually carefully and selectively edited) book-length version. In the longer version, Pelley professed fascination with “racial urges” and how they shaped history. He groused, even in the published article, over “unfriendly bankers” and “the swarming millions of Asia.” Pelley later disclosed—though it is difficult to tell when he is revealing his past attitudes versus projecting his later ones backward—that during his trip to the higher realms the Spiritual Mentors explained the true nature of human races: “They’re great classifications of humanity epitomizing gradations of spiritual development, starting with the black man and proceeding upwards in cycles to the white.”
As the 1930s began, Pelley led something of a double life. Best known as the author of “Seven Minutes in Eternity,” he became a kind of Spiritual Mentor himself, publishing mystical magazines and newsletters and running Galahad College, a small metaphysical school in Asheville, North Carolina. But, as directed by the Mentors, he explained, he was also studying the career of Adolf Hitler—with fascination and awe. In 1932, Pelley reported a clairaudient message from his Higher Mentors: “We are presenting through you and your fellows of Our Order the complete delineation of a New World Society, politically, sociologically, and religiously …” When Hitler secured the German chancellery on January 30, 1933, Pelley recorded in his memoirs, “Something clicked in my brain!” On January 31, he sprang into action. Pelley transformed