He built a lucrative seminar empire in the 80s, owned an Italian Villa, founded a “spiritual university,” and travelled the world with a harem of handsome young initiates. Roger Hinkins claimed to be inhabited by another consciousness that he called “John the Beloved” and the “Mystical Traveller,” which taught the secrets of out-of-body experiences. As he copied those teachings from elsewhere, his lies eventually caught up with him. But he told his loyal followers that critics and defectors were infected with an infectious demonic energy called “The Red Monk.”
For this self-contained installment of his popular Roots of Conspirituality series, Julian tells the fascinating story the Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness, and how its leader fooled devotees into thinking he was clairvoyant.
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The workers were installing sound equipment at 1902 Lincoln Boulevard in sunny Santa Monica, California.
The year was around 1983, and this was and remains today the location of a personal growth business called Insight Seminars.
The job required getting into the building's crawl spaces.
What the workers found there was shocking.
Meanwhile, the man around whom those seminars were organized was likely at his 3500 West Adams Boulevard headquarters in the swanky Jefferson Park neighborhood of South LA.
That property is still there too, now referred to as the Peace Awareness Labyrinth and Gardens.
The house is a mansion fit for European aristocrats, if not royalty, imposing, white-walled with a stately staircase flanked by large sculptures of lions, ornate symmetrical windows and balconies.
It's actually an historic Italian villa built by a homesick wine magnate named Secondo Guasti in the 1910s before it was bought in 1937 by Hollywood director Busby Berkeley, but neither of them are implicated in what was found in the early 1980s via those crawl spaces in the other building on Lincoln Boulevard.
The tiled walkway approaching the house on West Adams features manicured hedges and trees, again symmetrically arranged and a prominent fountain-like planter with California desert succulents in it.
The back steps open out onto a huge rectangular swimming pool.
It's really worth having a look at Google Images if you're interested.
I'll tell you more about it after the break.
I can't find a reliable estimate on the current value of that villa, but it was built at a cost of a half million dollars around 110 years ago.
Believe it or not, the adjustment for inflation on that half million in today's dollars calculates at over $15 million.
So who owned this Italian villa?
And how did the Insight seminars at 1902 Lincoln Boulevard bring in enough money to be able to purchase it?
To answer those questions, I will tell you that in 1963, at the age of 29, a man named Roger Delano Hinkins suffered complications from a kidney stone, apparently caused by a serious car accident earlier that year.
His surgery would lead to a nine-day coma and what he described as a near-death experience.
Upon awakening, he claimed to have found himself now inhabited by a spiritual consciousness he would come to call the mystical traveler.
When asked by his mother from the hospital bedside who he was, the new personality referred to itself as John, but said that Roger was still in there.
So Roger Hinkins became John Roger and taught a set of beliefs and practices supposedly issuing from his new consciousness.
But plot twist, it was mostly plagiarized from other sources.
While it is almost certain that Roger Hinkins was lying in his claim about this paranormal transformation, that lie actually puts him in revered company, as we'll explore a little later.
This kind of syncretic charlatanry, stitching together borrowed esoteric teachings as if they have occurred by magic revelation, is at the heart of New Age spirituality and therefore ends up being tangled up in what I call the roots of conspirituality.
Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Julian Walker.
This is now episode 10 of my Roots of Conspirituality series here on Patreon.
But not to worry, previous listening is not required to follow today's story.
If you'd like to catch up, all other episodes can be found under the Collections tab at the very top of our Patreon page.
And be aware that they are listed in reverse order, so you'll have to scroll down to the bottom if you want to start with episode one.
Today we'll learn about a charlatan guru at the top of a multi-million dollar empire, his inner circle of square-jawed, hand-picked, handsome young men, the New York Times bestsellers he falsely claimed to have written, and what those workers found in the crawl spaces.
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