Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [98]
Spalding also had frequent run-ins with the law. According to California newspaper reports, he was arrested no fewer than three times between 1928 and 1935. The incidents ranged from mine fraud in Los Angeles, to forgery in New York, to charges stemming from a paternity claim in San Francisco. He was cleared on the paternity claim, but by 1937, his wife, Stella, had had enough and obtained a divorce.
The Camera of Past Events
Despite the chaos that ran through Spalding’s personal life, even his critics marveled at the million-selling author’s gifts. His biographer, David Bruton, a West Coast metaphysical writer and lecturer who argued with Spalding as much as he agreed with him, decided to test the mystic chronicler’s reputed talent for relating vivid details about nearly any person or idea put to him. Bruton mentioned to Spalding his father-in-law, a man of no note whom he was sure the miner had never known, only to hear Spalding expound on his old pal “Charlie” in accurate and eerie detail. “I was soon convinced,” Bruton wrote, “that there was no end to Spalding’s ready knowledge. I heard him repeatedly come up with the right answers on almost any topic, any place or any time.… The manner in which Spalding talked of people, places and events made the whole world seem about the size of a golf ball.”
Indeed, Spalding’s tales would have gotten a less gifted speaker hooted off podiums—especially when he told audiences of inventions like his “Time Camera,” which he said could capture images of the past by tuning to the proper “band of vibratory frequency.” He told of inventing the marvel with no less a luminary than electrical-engineering pioneer Charles Steinmetz (who conveniently died the year before Spalding’s first book appeared). Spalding explained to audiences that he could film historic events, soundtrack included, such as the signing of the Declaration of Independence, George Washington’s inaugural address, and (never one to stop before reaching the top) the Sermon on the Mount, each of which he recounted in pleasingly quirky detail. But for Spalding’s apparent seriousness, it could have been Mark Twain putting on a satire.
But when Spalding would push his lecture audiences too far, just as people might cast glances around them, wondering, Is anyone buying this?, he would change course and offer a moving homily on universal spiritual values. And at such times, Spalding was no cipher. When a questioner at a 1935 lecture asked him whether the Jews had killed Christ, the author turned the question back on him:
We do not put that at the door of any nationality at all. Had He not wished to present a condition through which all men could go, they could not have crucified Him. It was a definite method to show His people that they could go through these conditions without the least effect upon themselves. Had it not been for that purpose, He could have taken His body and gone on with it as He showed many times. It was not a thing imposed upon Him except that He allowed the imposition for a purpose.
Spalding exemplified the one facet found fairly consistently in the work of popularizers and fabulists who refashioned Theosophy’s theme of hidden Masters: a complete absence of religious chauvinism or bigotry. And this is no mere happenstance. As seen in the testament of Gandhi, the vision opened by the Theosophical Society placed all historic faiths and nationalities on equal footing. Theosophy, possibly more than any other nineteenth-century organization,