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who grew temporarily consumed and then politically disgraced by his attachments to an arcane teacher, Gandhi was shrewder, carefully stepping around his occult allies and knowing when to keep them at a distance. In a letter he published in the newspaper Young India in 1926, Gandhi drew a line that forever divided his fealty to Theosophy’s ideals from Theosophy as an organization. It could have served as a guide to Wallace, or to any leader who dwelled in the worlds of politics and the arcane. “Whatever critics may say against Madame Blavatsky or Col. Olcott or Dr. Besant,” Gandhi wrote, “their contribution to humanity will always rank high. What has been a bar to my joining the society … is its secret side—its occultism. It has never appealed to me. I long to belong to the masses. Any secrecy hinders the real spirit of democracy.”

* Sirhan’s reading habits also included the Rosicrucian literature of California’s Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, or AMORC. But he was dropped from its membership rolls after neglecting to pay a $2 lesson fee.

* The term near-death experience entered the popular lexicon in 1975, when physician Raymond A. Moody, Jr., used it in his book Life After Life.

* Competing notions of “Aryanism” began to appear in the late eighteenth century, but Blavatsky’s was among those that German occultists would most likely have heard of in the early twentieth century.

CHAPTER NINE

THE MASTERS AMONG US

Whatever is published and made known to everyone concerning our Fraternity … let no man take it lightly, nor consider it an idle or invented thing, much less dismiss it as a mere personal conceit of ours.

—THE CONFESSION OF THE LAUDABLE FRATERNITY OF THE MOST HONORABLE ORDER OF THE ROSY CROSS, 1615

For months it was the talk of the Unity Metaphysical Center of Helena, Montana—this strange book that told of wonderful miracles performed by centuries-old teachers living in farthest India. Many hungered to learn more about the holy beings venerated in its title: Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East. Their curiosity extended to the book’s mysterious author, the bald, professorial-looking Baird T. Spalding, who had carried out a “metaphysical research” expedition for an Ivy League university at the distant corners of the earth.

“So many Helena men and women have been reading a book, the subject of so much speculation and hot controversy,” reported the Helena Daily Independent in March 1931, that Ruth E. Chew, a Smith College–educated teacher of positive thinking and the town’s doyen of the metaphysical, had selected it for a series of “five Lenten lectures.” A New Yorker by birth who gained brief national note for her “diet of joy” teachings, Chew had received Spalding’s personal blessing to lecture about his journeys. Her audience was no cluster of starry-eyed Californians or avant-garde New Yorkers. They were spiritually curious heartland folk enthralled with Spalding’s claim that wise immortals dwelled in the Himalayas, preaching a gospel of love, self-realization, and human potential. The lecture series was so popular that within a few years Spalding himself came to town to speak. For two evenings the crowd so overflowed the Unity Center that the auditorium of a nearby Baptist church had to host the messenger of the Masters.

Since a private printing of one thousand copies, financed by the wife of a California railroad magnate in 1924, Spalding’s book had run into many tens of thousands of copies. It would sell more than a million in years ahead—popularizing early themes of New Age spirituality. The Masters taught that all religions are one, there is no hell outside “man’s mortal thought,” and the seeds of “Christ Consciousness” exist within all people. Spalding produced a popular second volume three years after the first, recounting dialogues with Jesus Christ himself, who, Spalding wrote, had studied as an adept in India, where he now lived among his fellow Masters in the form of an ordinary man but for “a peculiar translucent quality about the flesh.”

For those believers