The United States of Paranoia

by Jesse Walker

  H. Spencer Lewis—the founder of another fauxsicrucian operation, the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis—found a way to lay claim to a popular occultist while denigrating the group she had founded when he wrote that avatars “under the observation of the Great White Brotherhood” were allowed “to organize movements of their own befitting the time and development of the people with whom they were dealing.” Blavatsky, he suggested, was one of those avatars, and her “writings and teachings will remain as a monument to her contact with the Brotherhood.” But her organization had “accomplished its definite mission, and there seemed to be no need for its continuance under the name and form used by her.”16 Message: Please join Lewis’s order instead.

  The Theosophists themselves soldiered on, not at all convinced that their mission was complete. A Los Angeles Theosophist, Manly Palmer Hall, gave the legend of the Benevolent Conspiracy its most thoroughly American form. In two books, The Secret Destiny of America (1944) and America’s Assignment with Destiny (1951), he laid out the story I outlined at the beginning of this chapter: that the United States had been designed to be an enlightened empire and was being guided to this destiny by an ancient Order of the Quest. Columbus’s counselor, Bacon’s grand design, the speech that swayed the signers of the Declaration of Independence—Hall covered them all.17

  Hall’s books oscillate between paeans to liberty and suggestions that the ideal form of government is an enlightened oligarchy; he repeatedly calls for a “world democracy,” but the reader is left wondering just how democratic, let alone free, his world state would really be. He doesn’t help matters with his interpretation of Plato’s Republic, in which Hall describes rule by a wise elite as a “philosophic democracy,” since “all men had the right to become wise through self-discipline and self-improvement.”18

  Many figures claimed by students of the supposed Rosicrucian tradition, from Plato to Francis Bacon, espoused authoritarian ideas.19 And though the sects inspired by the tradition bubble over with individualist exhortations to find your inner light, they are also frequently filled with the idea that the enlightened should govern the unenlightened. The groups often ran themselves in a rather authoritarian manner as well. Call it the Curse of Weishaupt: when organizations allegedly dedicated to liberating minds find themselves embracing hierarchies even more elaborate than those of the old order they aim to replace.

  We’ve seen how easy it is for one myth to melt into another: the Enemy Below unmasked as a tool of the Enemy Outside, the Enemy Outside revealed as a front for the Enemy Above. The Benevolent Conspiracy can change forms too. It was an easy leap from imagining a friendly secret government to imagining an evil one. There was a Theosophical presence in the Populist Party of the 1890s, allowing a belief in a benign lodge of Ascended Masters to exist alongside complaints about cabals of eastern bankers.20 Blavatsky herself said that the Great White Brotherhood was locked in a long war with the evil Lords of the Dark Face. Many of her followers adopted anti-Jesuit or anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, and the Russian Theosophist Yuliana Glinka may have been responsible for bringing The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a notorious anti-Semitic forgery, from France, where it was composed, to Russia, where it was published.21

  The Silver Shirts, a paramilitary group organized in 1933, offered a particularly tangled mishmash of ideas taken from Christianity, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, spiritualism, and Nazism. The group’s founder, a Massachusetts-born novelist and screenwriter named William Dudley Pelley, claimed to have had an out-of-body experience in 1928, slipping somehow from the physical world to a “sort of marble-tiled portico” in the spiritual realm, where he conversed with ethereal beings and learned transcendent truths.22 Pelley soon declared that he was in regular contact with those Ascended Masters. The Masters were also, he added, in contact with Adolf Hitler, who would visit the Bavarian mountains to “get his orders from the Hierarchy of Presiding Dignitaries who meet and counsel with him.”23 (From Pelley’s point of view, that was a good thing.) But the Silver Shirts didn’t just believe in a Benevolent Conspiracy that beamed ideas to Pelley and the führer. They imagined a malevolent conspiracy they needed to combat, one that included Communists, bankers, the Illuminati, and, of course, the Jews.

  A similar movement called Mankind United, founded in San Francisco in 1934 by one Arthur L. Bell, posited an invisible war between a beneficent cabal called the Sponsors and an evil oligarchy known as the World’s Hidden Rulers. Bell claimed to have been working secretly for the Sponsors since 1919, when he had supposedly been recruited into one of its covert arms, the International Legion of Vigilantes.

  Meanwhile, Christian conspiracists could construe all this literature as essentially true but inverted: The ancient secret brotherhood does exist, the Christians argued, but it’s in league with the Devil. Theosophy is denounced in anticonspiracy literature to this day. So is Manly P. Hall, whose work is quoted by writers who think the Order of the Quest is real but despicable. One relatively recent New Age book, Marilyn Ferguson’s best-selling The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), isn’t actually about a conspiracy at all; it uses the word as a metaphor for a grab bag of trends in science and society that the author admires. The book was nonetheless interpreted in some quarters as a guide to Satanic subversion.24 The Christian conspiracy theorist Constance Cumbey quoted copiously from Ferguson, though she pushed back when Ferguson reminded her readers that the Aquarians aren’t a genuine conspiracy. “While Marilyn Ferguson and others have protested that the Movement is both leaderless and unstructured,” Cumbey warned, “their statements are belied by the abundance of network council organizational charts, matrixes, statements of purpose, and directories—all showing both leadership and structure to an advanced degree.”25 Where Ferguson described a decentralized network of networks, Cumbey imagined a hidden hierarchy. (Cumbey also referred to the Guardian Angels, a collection of grassroots anticrime patrols, as a “para-military organization with ties to the New Age movement.”26 So worrying comes naturally to her.)

  It isn’t just the New Agers’ religious rivals who suspect them of being part of a diabolical conspiracy. The political center is often frightened by “cult” activities, and sects that claim a connection with the Ascended Masters have inspired the same alarm that greeted Mormons and Shakers in the nineteenth century. Both Bell and Pelley were imprisoned for sedition during the first Brown Scare. Around the same time, the government moved against one of the oddest offshoots of the 1930s New Age: the mystical movement called the I AM Activity.

  The man behind I AM was Guy Ballard, an Iowa-born mining engineer and self-proclaimed reincarnation of George Washington who borrowed freely from Blavatsky, Lewis, Pelley, and other occultists as he developed a doctrine of his own. Ballard believed, or at least claimed to believe, that Mount Shasta was “one of the most Ancient Foci of the Great White Brotherhood which has been working for man’s freedom since his advent upon this planet.”27 In Unveiled Mysteries, published in 1934, Ballard recounted a visit he had made to Shasta four years earlier. He had been hiking there one day, he claimed, when he encountered Saint Germain at a mountain spring. The immortal count had taken him on a series of astral journeys through space and time: to ancient civilizations, to his own past lives, to a meeting with visitors from Venus, to the Ascended Masters’ lair in the heart of the mountain. In those headquarters, Ballard wrote breathlessly, “at the far end of the hall about thirty-five feet from the floor in the wall itself—was a large eye—at least—two feet across. This represented the—‘All-Seeing-Eye of the Creator’—forever watching over—His Creation—and from Whom—nothing can be hidden.”28

  A decade before Hall published The Secret Destiny of America, Ballard had Saint Germain delivering a similar message about the purpose and future of the New World: “America has a destiny of great import to the other nations of the earth and Those—who have watched over her for centuries—still watch.” According to the count, the United States would attain a “form of perfect govern
ment,” but only “at a later period, when you have cast off certain activities within—that hang like fungi—and sap your strength as a vampire. Beloved ones in America—be not discouraged—when the seeming dark clouds hang low. Everyone of them—shall—show you its golden lining.”29

  It was an attractive pitch, particularly during the Depression. Also attractive were Ballard’s promises that followers could acquire limitless wealth, health, beauty, and power. The group attracted tens of thousands of members, and it also attracted a large collection of critics. The loudest of the latter was Gerald Bryan, a former I AMer whose 1940 book Psychic Dictatorship in America charged Ballard and his wife with running an authoritarian cult.

  Bryan’s book made it clear that Ballard was a con artist, and it made a good case that chunks of Unveiled Mysteries had been plagiarized from other people’s writings. But it also got lost in an effort to argue that Ballard’s movement was a fascist Enemy Within. The House Committee on Un-American Activities had investigated several far-right groups the year before, concluding that they were subversives, racketeers, and “peewee Hitlers.”30 Bryan believed that the Ballards were up to the same game. Pelley of the Silver Shirts, after all, had “started out originally as a psychic or metaphysical leader” before becoming “a political fuehrer with ‘storm troopers’ or legionnaires in every state.” Ballard and his wife “likewise are psychic leaders, but have political ambitions too.”31

  Bryan acknowledged that the Ballards avoided “the Silver Shirts’ well-known hatred of the Jew.” But they “denounced other ‘enemies,’ ” made a fruitless attempt to attract Pelley’s support, and made a more successful bid to bring in disaffected Silver Shirters.32 One interpretation of this is that Ballard was an opportunist attempting to draw members from a rival organization. Bryan saw it as a sign that Ballard shared Pelley’s fascist orientation, and he wondered why the House Committee on Un-American Activities hadn’t investigated I AM yet. “No doubt its ‘religious’ set-up protects it,” Bryan concluded. “Racketeers who hide under the cloak of religion are likely to become one of the most dangerous and difficult problems in the future, if not, indeed, at the present time. It is a weak spot in our protective armor against ‘Fifth Columns.’ ”33

  By the end of the year, the government was investigating I AM, not for subversion but for mail fraud. A grand jury held that the sect’s leaders “well knew” that their claims to heal the sick and communicate with the divine were bogus and that they therefore were defrauding the followers who sent them money. That verged on having a jury determine whether a religious doctrine was valid—not a comfortably constitutional activity—and the conviction was eventually reversed, though by that time Guy Ballard was dead and his movement had shrunk to a tiny fraction of its former self.34

  Before we depart the tale of I AM, a word about Ballard’s visitors from Venus. This wasn’t the first time a guru had reported an encounter with spacemen: Emanuel Swedenborg claimed to have journeyed to several planets way back in 1758,35 and Blavatsky’s Ascended Masters included some Venusian “Lords of the Flame.” It wouldn’t be the last time either. The years following World War II would see a wave of alleged encounters with extraterrestrials; and though some of the contactees viewed the aliens as a force to be feared, there were others who essentially announced that they had met Ascended Masters from outer space.36

  Nick Herbert, a physicist with psychedelic inclinations, split the difference the night he got high and started hearing voices in his head. (This was in the sixties, as you may have guessed.) “They claimed to be an ancient group of galactic telepaths traveling through space mind-to-mind rather than in clunky metal ships,” he later recalled:

  They were inviting me to join the conspiracy of galactic telepaths. They told me that some of my friends were already members. . . . My initial response was that if this community really existed its goals would differ from human goals as much as human goals differ from the goals of fishes. This group must by necessity be non-human. So by joining it I would in some sense be betraying the human race.

  The aliens seemed to understand my misgivings, but assured me that although I qualified for membership, there was no pressure to join. Then they withdrew from my mind and left me alone.

  For the next few days I was obsessed with this contact and tried to discover other members of the group. Some of my psychedelic pals in the Stanford psychology department were prime candidates but they all shrewdly denied being galactic telepaths.37

  As the last line suggests, Herbert had a sense of humor about the experience; he refrained from setting up his own Church of the Mind-Melding Space Brothers. Not every acid-dropping hippie with a cosmic vision would be so reticent.

  The idea of the Benevolent Conspiracy always owed a lot to beliefs about angels. The Elizabethan magician John Dee—a man whose name almost invariably comes up when people start listing alleged Rosicrucians—believed that he was in contact with angels and that they had imparted important knowledge to him. There wasn’t a huge difference between the spirits he described and the beings that later mystics dubbed Secret Chiefs.38

  In the middle of the twentieth century, UFOs remade angels in their image: Books on “ancient astronauts” argued that the angels and gods of Earth’s mythologies were actually aliens influencing humanity.39 But the belief in angels qua angels didn’t go away, and in the 1990s a full-fledged angel fad erupted. These angels were a Benevolent Conspiracy just as much as the Ascended Masters were. In one self-proclaimed psychic’s words, they were a “spiritual network in this world.”40

  The angel boom began in 1990 with Sophy Burnham’s A Book of Angels, a wide-ranging tour through several centuries of angelic lore. It wasn’t the first volume about angels to be aimed at a popular audience: The previous decades had seen Gustav Davidson’s A Dictionary of Angels in 1967, Peter Lamborn Wilson’s Angels in 1980, and Hope MacDonald’s When Angels Appear in 1982.41 But none of those had the cultural impact of Burnham’s book, which hopped easily from histories of angels in different spiritual traditions to anecdotes about encounters with the divine, with side excursions into other paranormal topics: ghosts, premonitions, past lives. The book leans heavily on tales of the unexplained, of the kind you might find in a supermarket paperback, but it also includes several stories whose magical content is nothing more than a helpful stranger coming along at just the right moment. “A shiver runs down your spine when you realize it is not our imagination,” Burnham wrote. “Something is watching us out there.”42 Those two sentences could have appeared in a terrified paranoid manifesto, but here the watchers are a blessing.

  The book began as a private project. Burnham had had several odd and mystical experiences, so she “decided to set them down, just for myself. Not for publication necessarily, but just to understand what’s making the world tick.”43 A book began to take shape, and Burnham gave it the working title Angels and Ghosts I Have Known. It wasn’t until much later—after the first draft of the book was done and after two publishers had expressed an interest in it—that Burnham realized that angels should be at the center of the book. And it was only then that she wrote the literal center of the book, a middle section that pulls back from the personal anecdotes and explores the history of angelology.

  Burnham is an engaging stylist and a talented storyteller, and it is no surprise that her book was a commercial success, eventually selling more than a million copies. What might be more surprising is the interfaith approach she adopted, the ease with which a volume studded with Bible quotes could also declare casually that Zoroastrianism “transformed the old Babylonian and Assyrian gods into archangels, whence they crept irrevocably into Judaism and Christianity.”44 Burnham was following in the footsteps of an earlier book: Peter Lamborn Wilson, who is in no sense a Christian, had argued in Angels that the angelic archetype appears in almost every religion.45 She was also drawing on her own hopscotch spiritual path, which included a spell as a Buddhist and a long-standing interest in the faiths of the w
orld. “I have spent a lifetime looking into various religions,” she says today, “and realizing that they’re all saying the same thing in slightly different words.”

  Burnham’s book also declared forthrightly that its author doesn’t believe in Hell: a tolerant, positive outlook for the age of Oprah and the self-help shelf. Indeed, the author eventually appeared on Oprah, and some stores filed her book in the self-help section. But her books were sometimes filed as Christian literature too, and Burnham doesn’t seem displeased about that. When she heard that a priest had told his congregation that everyone should keep two tomes by the bed, the Bible and A Book of Angels, she reported the news proudly in a later edition of the text.

  As Burnham climbed the best-seller list, vendors took note. A flood of angel tchotchkes cascaded onto the market: angel dolls, angel figurines, angel watches, even angel perfume. And, of course, more angel books. Because they prominently feature the word angels, those books attracted a lot of Christian buyers. Some of them were written by conventional Christians, while others strayed even further from orthodoxy than Burnham did. One volume might thank “the helpful research departments at the Christian Broadcasting Network, the Assemblies of God General Council Headquarters, and Guideposts magazine.”46 Another might announce that the ranks of angels include “incarnated elementals,” which turns out to mean “leprechauns, fairies, brownies, and elves.”47 And both books might sit on the same shelf at Barnes & Noble.