Michael Flynn recently recited one of their prayers. But the I AM Cult goes all the way back to the 70s and beyond — thanks to theosophist Helena Blavatsky. It also has early links to fascism and was the central belief system behind the "ascended masters" trend. We cover the movement, from the myth of Saint Germain to Guy & Edna Ballard. Our guest is QAA attorney Allie Mezei, who recently attended a service by one of the branches of the I AM cult.
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 167 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the I Am Ascended Master Religious Activity episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Field, Allie Mezzi, and Travis View.
All aboard the train to Mount Shasta, California, where the so-called I Am cult was born in a cauldron of theosophy, ascended masters, and extremely pale blonde aliens with blue eyes.
This week we'll be exploring their roots and how they became so influential in conspiracy theory circles, their ideas about humanity's ascension embraced by a surprising assortment of people you would not expect to see burning sage or meditating.
Welcome back on the show, Allie!
Great to be back!
General and ex-DIA director Michael Flynn, who recently got into hot water with some
QAnon influencers over his public reading of a prayer that originated from the I Am
cult.
With us is friendly neighborhood QA lawyer Allie Mezzi, who you might remember from our
episode on the Sovereign Citizen Movement.
In the course of her research, she recently attended an I Am gathering, which was open
to the public.
Welcome back on the show, Allie.
Great to be back.
QAnon News.
So, like, the big story, I think, this week is that the QAnon shaman, aka General and
Jake Angeli, a.k.a.
Jacob Chansley, was sentenced for taking part in the January 6th insurrection.
So he got 41 months in prison.
So given the 11 months he had already served, He's going to serve about two and a half more years in
federal prison.
This will apparently be a minimum security unit.
The QAnon shaman is getting a lot more time than other people who have been sent so far,
like Jenna Ryan, the realtor, who got 60 days.
This is probably in part because Jacob Shansley, he left kind of like a threatening note to
Mike Pence when he was in the Senate.
He also was deeper inside of the Capitol than other people.
He also had like a megaphone in which he was sort of like egging other people on.
I think he also became the face of the insurrection in a lot of ways.
There's a lot of eyes on him.
And I think that to a lot of people, he is the visual representation of QAnon.
Yeah.
Even within the trial, one of the lawyers said, you know, the Kunon Shaman has become like the Nike swoosh for Nike.
And so it's like, yes, he has become the brand.
He was the first charged as well.
One of the arguments they had was when he left the note and when he was, you know, kind of speaking to people as they went in and as they occupied the building, one of the arguments is that he knew there was a noose outside.
And so his statements, like they kind of, um, Put them adjacent to the noose and showed the noose and all of that stuff.
So there was arguing back and forth about that.
But yeah, a lot of people online reacting in all the expected ways.
Either, you know, like, yeah, screw him to the wall.
Let's get this guy the death penalty.
You know, he deserves way more.
Or this guy was an angel.
He's a hero.
He should be out of, like, he shouldn't get into any trouble.
Yeah, it's just good.
It's good to be online again on a day like this because you get to see just everyone, I don't know, slip on banana peels and fall into shit, so it's good.
Yeah.
I mean, here's what I think was, I guess, troubling, is that the prosecutors argue that Anjali played a key role by goading on the crowd.
Through shouts blasted from a megaphone.
And if that's the standard, if he deserves a harsher punishment for goading on the crowd, then there are a lot of people who are much more culpable for January 6th, who deserve a lot more than whoever Jake Angeli gets.
Like, you know, Ali Alexander, you know, of course.
There was, of course, there's Ron Watkins, who was retweeted by Trump a few times encouraging people to go to D.C.
on January 6th.
Even offering to pay people to go.
I think something that's kind of gone into this sentencing is the fact that people like Jenna Ryan, who acted like they were so sorry during their sentencing hearings and got short sentences, have then immediately turned around and run to the media being like, I regret nothing.
So then, you know, going forward, the judge is going to look at that and be like, well, if all of your friends aren't sorry, I don't actually believe you're sorry, which is, like, horrible because, like, no one's watching out for, like, you know, their supposed where-we-go-one-we-go-all buddies.
Well, I think one thing that's consistent is that nobody cares about Jacob.
The people in the QAnon movement, the people who were there literally on tape beating cops, who should all get way longer sentences than this guy, who did not commit violence on anybody that day, It doesn't matter, you know, because the idea is you need somebody to make an example of, which I really shudder when people who are supposedly liberal or on the left are online making that argument that I've heard from demented, conservative, bloodthirsty people for a long, long time.
I am Ascended Master Activity.
Now, modern conspiracists are a multifaceted bunch.
Today, you might encounter a hippie star child who promotes strongly nationalist or even fascistic beliefs, while simultaneously they might have beliefs about aliens and secret knowledge from high-level sources that will make humanity spiritually ascend.
Well, I'm here to say that this kind of thinking actually has a long pedigree in the United States, and that's why today we're going to talk about a weird cult made by a husband and wife duo named Guy and Edna Ballard.
This is the I Am Ascended Master religious activity, which is also often called the I Am Presence, the Great I Am, or more frequently just the I Am Cult.
I Am, which flourished in the 30s, is part of the Ascended Master Teachings.
And like all Ascended Master Teachings, it's descended from the ideas of the 19th century occultist Helena Blavatsky, who founded Theosophy.
The Ascended Masters are supposedly highly enlightened beings who are described as our elder brothers and sisters on the spiritual path.
These are people throughout history who have balanced their karma and fulfilled their unique mission on Earth so they ascended back to God in the ritual known as the Ascension.
These masters are part of a vast brotherhood of spiritual beings and angelic hosts who work with mankind for the betterment of life on Earth.
This group of enlightened beings is sometimes called the Great White Brotherhood or Great White Lodge.
Now, some of these masters, according to theosophists, are unrecorded in history while they guide humanity, but others are world-famous spiritual leaders such as Moses, Buddha, or Jesus.
Helena Blavatsky originally referred to the Ascended Masters as Mahatmas, or Adepts.
She conceived of them as occultists who acquired immense psychic or spiritual powers.
But interestingly, according to her, they nonetheless had physical bodies and were subject to the limitations of anyone else with a body.
And therefore, she rejected notions that they were purely spiritual beings or people who could live for thousands of years.
Here's what Blavatsky wrote about the Masters in her book, The Key to Theosophy.
I have never heard of mortal man, layman, or adept, who could live even half the 969 years allotted to Methuselah.
Some adepts do exceed, by a good deal, what you would call the ordinary age.
Yet there is nothing miraculous in it, and very few of them care to live very long.
So, later 20th century theosophists disagreed, and they seemed to treat the ascended masters as demigods who could just do anything, these spiritual beings who just lived forever.
Now, in the period between World War I and World War II, there are lots of interesting religious movements in the U.S.
Perhaps this is because of World War I or the pandemic of 1918 and the Great Depression.
All these disasters made people seek out new answers to their spiritual questions.
But perhaps this is just part of the way new religions always form.
To cite a few examples, it was during this interwar period that the Pentecostal preacher Sister Amy Semple McPherson founded the Four Square Gospel Church in California.
In Idaho, a pharmacist named Frank Bruce Robinson started a successful positive thinking group called Psycheana.
The theosophist Alice Bailey started an occultist organization called the Lucius Trust.
In North Carolina, an occultist and former screenwriter named William Dudley Pelley founded a fascist organization called the Silver Shirt Legion.
And we're going to return to the Silver Shirts shortly because, unfortunately, they are relevant to our story.
It's always got to be some screenwriter.
I want to see their full silver outfits.
I demand more than just a shirt.
I want a whole uniform made of silver.
The most resplendent.
The full Martian head-to-toe reflective ensemble.
Let's go.
The old silverfish.
It was in this environment that Guy Ballard, born 1878, and his wife Edna Ballard, born 1886, founded the I.M.
Ascended Master Religious Activity.
Guy and Edna married in 1916 and they had a son a few years later.
Guy worked as a wallpaper hanger and then served in the Army during World War I.
After he came home, he superintended his uncle's lead mine in Tucson, Arizona.
Edna Ballard worked as an accomplished concert harpist, and the pair shared a deep interest in metaphysics and the occult.
Edna Ballard even got a job in an occultist bookshop in Chicago called The Philosopher's Nook.
Mrs. Ballard also edited two occultist periodicals, American Occultist and The Diamond.
In the early 20s, Guy Ballard attended a strange theatrical church service in San Francisco, which may have inspired the showmanship of the I Am Church services a decade later.
Now, this story was related by a friend of Ballard's who helped finance Ballard's trip to California.
While in San Francisco, this great idea of Guy's was born.
We went to a fake church, and there was a lot of chicanery.
The priest and priestess sitting in two gold chairs with the twelve Vestal Virgins as the choir.
Behind them was a great illuminated cross with flashing lights.
During the service, the very lightly clad virgins threw flowers among the audience.
It was a scream.
Afterwards came the Love Feast.
A virgin held a basket of strips of bread and the audience were asked to join in this holy order, which was non-sectarian.
Another virgin held a loving cup of wine.
Talk of hypnosis, would you believe it?
Over 150 people went forward and partook of that sacrilegious feast, a parody upon the Lord's Supper.
During this scene, Guy's face was a study.
He was enchanted with the show, but did not join the church.
As soon as he reached the sidewalk, he could not stop talking about it.
I love how they call it, like, a fake church.
church upon the same lines.
I love how they call it like a fake church, like it's a cardboard cutout with nothing
behind it.
Guy Ballard, perhaps unsurprisingly, was also a con artist before founding I Am.
One of his scams involved selling these, his rubes and marks, stock in oil wells that he
claimed were going to "gush full of valuable petroleum."
They, of course, did not.
These were worthless or fake.
But Ballard's most audacious scheme was the so-called Lake of Gold scam.
Ballard and a few business associates convinced gullible investors to invest thousands of dollars in order to purchase a lake in California.
He claimed that the lake only needed to be drained and the precious metals could be scooped up with shovels.
That was just so... just... I mean, what a deal.
Hey, you just got gold laying on the bottom.
It's just at the bottom of the lake.
There's a layer of gold nuggets just on the bottom of the lake.
But you know what?
But we're not going to swim down and retrieve them ourselves.
We're going to drain the entire lake.
You could dredge it.
You could fucking dredge it.
Like, what is he fucking on about?
No, they're gonna bottle the water.
Gold springs.
Yeah, they're gonna sell it like the town of Miracle in The Leftovers.
What if you set up, like, I don't know, some kind of showers nearby that were alimented by the lake, so you could have, like, golden showers kind of thing, and then the lake gets slowly lower as you take those golden showers?
I don't know.
It sounds like a lot of plumbing.
Doesn't sound like this guy had this sort of means to, you know, invent such a system.
So investors lost somewhere between $200,000 and $500,000 in this scheme.
Oh my god, which at the time, that's a lot of money.
I mean, it's still a lot of money, but... He was quite a grifter.
It's the American dream.
In 1929, a grand jury indicted Guy Ballard on the charge of obtaining money and goods by means of the confidence game, which is not a charge I don't think we see much anymore.
No, no.
I think we need to bring it back.
Yes.
No, it's called clout nowadays, and it's not a crime, and in fact you want as much of it as possible.
Arrest warrants were issued, but by this time, Guy was living in Los Angeles under the assumed name of Dick Gilbert.
Come on.
And he wasn't caught.
Yeah, yeah.
What a time.
We just scammed people out of like a half a million dollars, saying, my name's Dick Gilbert now, bye.
Yeah, change his name to Dick and bounce.
You can call me Gil.
Old Gil, I got a lake to sell ya.
It was Guy Ballard's fascination with the occult that eventually led him to visiting Mount Shasta, which is a potentially active volcano located in Northern California.
Now, Mount Shasta has long been the source of myths and legends for native and non-native peoples.
For example, in the creation myth of the Winnemem Wintu people, the spring in Mount Shasta's panther meadows is where they first bubbled into the world at the time of creation.
Now, it's my understanding that the Winnemem Wintu people are not very happy with the New Age sort of groups that often show up at Mount Shasta and do ceremonies and stuff.
Yeah, we need to get them a bulldozer for those people, basically.
And they can just clear the land every so often.
New Age adherents got many of their ideas about Mount Shasta from a 1905 book called A Dweller on Two Planets.
The author of the book, Frederick Spencer Oliver, claims that he wrote the work by channeling a spirit named Phylos the Tibetan.
The book claimed that inside Mount Shasta there is a temple of ascended masters from the lost continent of Lemuria.
Ballard wrote about his supposed experiences on Mount Shasta in his 1934 book, Unveiled Mysteries, which he wrote under the pseudonym Godfrey Ray King.
According to Guy Ballard's account, he went to Mount Shasta because he heard a rumor that a group of divine men called the Brotherhood of Mount Shasta could be found there.
Oh, this is, yeah, I just went here in Skyrim the other night.
Of course.
They taught me how to shout.
He followed the little quest pointer up there.
Yeah, I followed the little diamond and I got there and I became ascended.
So this Brotherhood of Mount Shasta was supposedly a branch of the Great White Lodge, which makes it sound like there's just little chapters inside mountains everywhere or something.
Ballard says that he went for regular hikes on the mountain, and during one of these hikes, he encountered a mysterious man who appears to be able to make things appear with his will alone.
This mysterious man instructed him to drink some creamy liquid, which Ballard does.
Here's what Ballard wrote in Unveiled Mysteries.
It came time for lunch, and I sought a mountain spring for clear, cold water.
Cup in hand, I bent down to fill it as an electrical current passed through my body from head to foot.
I looked around, and directly behind me stood a young man who, at first glance, seemed to be someone on a hike like myself.
I looked more closely, and realized immediately that he was no ordinary person.
As this thought passed through my mind, he smiled and addressed me saying,
"My brother, if you will hand me your cup, I will give you a much more refreshing drink than spring water."
Oh yeah.
*laughter* I obeyed, and instantly the cup was filled with a creamy
liquid.
Oh my god, man.
This is so bad!
Why is he doing this?
Why?
I had to, like, keep picturing it as that, like, opaque white Gatorade, so I didn't picture it as any other liquid.
Yeah, this is just... I mean, the writing is... It's leaving a little bit too much to the imagination, I would say.
Fill my bloody chalice to the brim with cum, sir!
Handing it back to me, he said, drink it.
I did so, and must have looked my astonishment for, while the taste was delicious, the electrical, vivifying effect in my mind and body made me gasp with surprise.
I did not see him put anything into the cup, and I wondered what was happening.
That which you drank, he explained, comes directly from the universal supply, pure and vivifying as life itself.
In fact, it is life, omnipresent life, for it exists everywhere about us.
It is subject to our conscious control and direction, willingly obedient, when we love enough, Because all the universe obeys the behest of love.
Whatsoever I desire manifests itself when I command in love.
I held out the cup, and that which I desired for you appeared.
See, I have but to hold out my hand, and if I wish to use gold, gold is here.
Instantly, there lay in his palm a disc about the size of a ten dollar gold piece.
Again, he continued, I see within you a certain inner understanding of the Great Law, but you are not outwardly aware of it enough to produce that which you desire direct from the omnipresent Universal Supply.
You have desired to see something of this kind so intensely, so honestly, and so determinately, it could no longer be withheld from you.
This mysterious stranger on the mountain revealed himself to be no ordinary hiker, but rather the Ascended Master Saint Germain.
And this requires us to go on a bit of a tangent to talk about this guy, because Saint Germain is both a strange historical figure and a legend for theosophists.
The real-life Count of Saint-Germain was an 18th century scholar, linguist, diplomat, musician, and alchemist who managed to impress European high society in a few countries.
A triple threat.
He was apparently multi-talented, according to everyone he encountered.
He sounds like a confidence man.
Well, yes.
Some people actually, some of his contemporaries thought the same.
Oh, God.
St.
Germain's real origins are genuinely mysterious.
There's just no good documentation.
A 1912 biography of St.
Germain by Isabel Cooper Oakley offers like six theories about his ancestry.
They think he might have come from Charles II, who was the king of Spain, perhaps a Portuguese Jew, a Jew from Alsace in eastern France, a tax gatherer in Rotondo, Italy, perhaps the king of Portugal, and finally the prince of Transylvania.
That last one is the one he personally claimed.
Still Jewish, though, probably.
Possibly Jewish.
This is why his origins are mysterious.
Yeah.
I mean, they say tax gatherer.
I don't know how I feel about that.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I Am shows him as like a blonde, blue-eyed, pale-skinned man.
Yeah.
That's incredible.
He deliberately obscured his origins and used a few pseudonyms, including the Count of Saint-Germain, so no one actually knows what his real name was.
It's possible that Saint-Germain was educated in Italy by the last of the Medicis, Gian Gastone.
He was also believed to be a student at the University of Siena.
But the earliest concrete mention of Saint-Germain comes from a letter written by the British politician Horace Walpole in 1745.
He wrote that St.
Germain was arrested on charges of being a Jacobinite spy in London, but then quickly let go.
This letter includes a vocab word that I had to look up, which is succidanium, which apparently means substitute.
And the other day they seized an odd man who goes by the name of Comte Saint-Germain.
He has been here these two years, will not tell who he is or whence, but professes two very wonderful things.
The first, that he does not go by his right name.
And the second, that he never had any dealings or desire to have any dealings with any woman.
Nay, nor with any succidanium.
He sings, plays on the violin wonderfully, composes, is mad, and not very sensible.
He is called an Italian, a Spaniard, a Pole, a somebody that married a great fortune in Mexico and ran away with her jewels to Constantinople, a priest, a fiddler, a vast nobleman.
Jesus.
Is there anything this guy can't do?
Holy shit.
The Prince of Wales has had unsatiated curiosity about him, but in vain.
However, nothing has been made out against him.
He is released, and what convinces me that he is not a gentleman stays here and talks of his being taken up for a spy.
Cool, so yeah, it like 100% sounds like a con man basically faking inside information about a variety of things.
But it actually, like, he did, like, hang out with royalty and stuff eventually.
Yes.
He faked it until he made it.
Yeah, he's the first American.
Yeah.
Apparently, after St.
Germain's release, he departed England and spent one year as a guest of Prince Ferdinand von Lobkowitz, who was the first minister to the Austrian emperor.
So at this time, the war of Austrian secession was still raging.
In which Austria and England were allied against France and Prussia.
And during his visit to Austria, Saint-Germain was introduced to the French Minister of War, who in turn introduced Saint-Germain to the French court.
So he knows how to work people, very sociable apparently.
While in France, he was employed by Louis XV for diplomatic missions.
Saint-Germain also apparently made an impression on the Italian adventurer Giacomo.
Giacomo Casanova, who wrote the fucking... That's the Maltese guy!
Mole people!
He's the mole people guy!
That's the guy who talks about sucking on, like, mole nipples and stuff.
Teat!
Yeah, mole, that's the sucking on mole teat guy!
Oh my god!
This is terrible!
Why are we, why did you, why are we doing this?
I don't need to know that these guys were friends.
That's amazing.
They were friends!
There was like 100% like a great thing to be done when aristocracy was like ruling over us instead of like weird non-personality having tech guys.
And it was that if you could be a good friend, just like a cool buddy, you were fucking done, dude.
You'd probably be given like a part of a country at some point.
Some castle to preside over, land, whatever.
Given the hole where you can go down to the mole people.
These people had like the brain waves of Trump and Biden at the age of like 21.
Well, because, I mean, look, you died at 25, you know, so... Yeah, you're done, you're almost done.
The syphilis has already reached your brain.
Casanova wrote that he thought Saint-Germain was a liar, but he was nonetheless charmed by him.
Wow, so this guy believed in fucking mole people that he described in sexual ways, but he was like, nah, Saint-Germain's a liar.
Yeah, and here's what Casanova says.
"This extraordinary man, intended by nature to be the king of imposters and quacks,
would say in an easy, assured manner that he was 300 years old, that he knew the secret of
the universal medicine, that he possessed a mastery over nature, that he could melt diamonds,
professing himself capable of forming, out of 10 or 12 small diamonds, one large one of the
finest water without any loss of weight.
All this, he said, was a mere trifle to him.
Notwithstanding his boastings, his bare-faced lies, and his manifold eccentricities, I cannot say I thought him offensive.
In spite of my knowledge of what he was, and in spite of my own feelings, I thought him an astonishing man, as he was always astonishing me.
Wow.
So the real St.
Germain died in February 1784, but because of St.
Germain's mysterious origins, impressive talents, fables he told about himself, and his extraordinary life, myths and legends about him began to propagate in the 19th century.
According to the Theosophical Society, St.
Germain was previously incarnated as many important figures in the past.
For example, St.
Germain was supposedly a high priest in Atlantis 13,000 years ago.
Of course!
He was also the biblical leader Samuel.
He was the Greek philosopher Plato.
He was Joseph in the Gospels.
He was, of course, Merlin in King Arthur's Court.
He was Sebastian in The Little Mermaid.
Of course.
He was Christopher Columbus.
He was also, allegedly, the 17th century philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon.
Theosophists also commonly believe that Francis Bacon, and therefore Saint Germain, actually wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare.
So they think that basically Saint Germain is also Shakespeare, but under a different name.
The 1928 book Secret Teachings of All Ages also suggests that Saint Germain influenced the founding of the United States, That book tells of a mysterious stranger who on July 4th helped inspire the Founding Fathers to summon enough bravery to sign the Declaration of Independence by giving a rousing speech and then he disappeared.
Now, this of course didn't happen even if we assume that Saint Germain like teleported to America somehow.
Because the Continental Congress voted in favor of independence on July 2nd, and the majority of them signed the declaration on August 2nd.
July 4th is just when the Declaration of Independence was approved.
Nice.
So yeah, you didn't even do your research for your lie.
Well this is just like a common myth that like all the founding fathers gather in the same room on July 4th and sign the Declaration of Independence.
And a ghost appeared.
A ghost appeared and gave such a rousing speech that any hesitations they had about the Declaration were assuaged.
We all know it was a guy on like a scooter with a FedEx package, and he was shuttling the document from person to person in their mansions, and they all signed.
Guy Ballard is actually not the first theosophist who claimed to have personally met Saint Germain.
The British theosophist Annie Besant claims that she met Saint Germain in 1896, and a member of the Theosophical Society, Charles Webster Leadbeater, claims that he met the Count in Rome in 1926.
But Guy Ballard was a bit of an innovator in that he claimed that he met Saint Germain in the United States and on Mount Shasta, no less.
Now, Allie, I understand that you also read this book, so I was wondering if you could help us understand a little bit more about what is revealed in Guy Ballard's Unveiled Mysteries.
The Teachings of Saint Germain Atop Mount Shasta, Saint Germain explains his great power to Guy.
We in the Ascended State can control the atomic structure of our world as a potter controls his clay.
Every electron and atom in the universe is obedient to our desire and command because of the god power by which we control it and of which we have earned the right to be the directors.
Saint Germain promises that Guy II can attain these powers if he follows the teachings of the Ascended Masters.
Immediately, and over the next couple weeks, Saint Germain reveals secrets to Guy about the nature of the world and about the human condition.
It all starts with an incredible cosmology.
70,000 years ago, a great civilization thrived in a tropical paradise.
The civilization, ruled from a shining metropolis called the City of the Sun, revered a great power called the Source.
A wellspring of all good on Earth, synonymous with life, love, order, and God, that brought the civilization great peace and prosperity.
Saint Germain explained, For hundreds of years this perfection was maintained without army or navy of any kind.
The control of the people was vested in the care of fourteen ascended masters of light, two working on each of the seven rays.
They thus formed points of focus for the mighty god activity to be made visible.
Under these fourteen luminous beings were fourteen lesser masters who formed the heads
of seven departments controlling the activities of science, industry, and art.
Each of these department heads guided the work under his care by conscious and direct
contact with the God in himself.
Hence, direct from their source did all direction and instruction come for those under them.
Thus, divine perfection was constantly flowing through without any interference from the
human.
At the head of this great realm sat its emperor, Saint Germain, and his three radiant, beautiful
teenage children who Guy immediately recognizes as being himself, his wife, and his young
son in their past lives.
And the kid is, like, older than all of them in this, which is kind of weird.
Wait, what?
Like, but he is- Like, the son is the older brother of him and his wife in, like, all of their incarnations except the one that's real.
Wild.
Weird.
The perfect civilization did not last.
The people at the edge of the empire began valuing the appetites of their bodies and of their senses more than they valued the Great Source.
This corruption swept through the lands and soon the moral rot was encroaching on the walls of the City of the Sun itself.
When only the city remained pure, the Emperor Saint-Germain received a vision.
It was no longer in the divine plan to maintain his once perfect kingdom.
So Saint Germain, his children, and the rest of the ascended masters withdrew into the etheric golden city of light to watch and see if mankind would choose of his own free will to return to its love of the source and restore paradise on earth.
With Saint Germain gone, the Empire collapsed under the weight of its own decadence.
Nature itself turned against the remnants of the once great society, and what had once been a paradise withered away and was consumed by the arid expanses of the Sahara.
Over the next several weeks, Saint Germain took guide to a number of hidden chambers under Mount Shasta and into lost civilizations of the past, using the Akashic Records.
The majesty, splendor, and riches of each and every exotic setting are described in sumptuous detail.
We passed through the last door on our right and entered a room whose dimensions were about 80 feet long, 40 wide, and 20 high, with an arched ceiling similar to that in the large hall from which we had just come.
The entire interior surface of this room is made of frosted gold, and the purple and green veining you see on the walls, as if embossed, is precipitated.
These rooms contain only gold and jewels that are to be used for a special purpose which will bless the entire world when mankind has transcended its unbridled selfishness.
Gold is stored from the lost continents of Mu and Atlantis, the ancient civilizations of the Gobi and Sahara Deserts, Egypt, Chaldea, Babylonia, Greece, Rome, and others.
If all this gold were to be released into the outer activity of the world, it would compel sudden readjustment in every phase of human experience.
So with these journeys, Guy learned that every civilization on Earth rose because it honored the source and fell because it forgot what made it great and turned away from the source, inviting cataclysm and societal decline.
Saint Germain revealed that the Ascended Masters watched the cosmic cycle churn on, offering their wisdom to those who would listen, but only ever interfering with man's free will when it was absolutely necessary to save the planet from the selfishness and foolishness of the human race.
And that's where it comes to the next descent.
America is intended to be the coming great civilization, and through Guy Ballard, Saint Germain intends to lead the whole world into a golden age.
In your beloved America, in the not so far distant future, will come forth a recognition of the real inner self, and this her people will express in high attainment.
She is a land of light, and her light shall blaze forth brilliant as the sun at noonday among the nations of the earth.
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.
Through their protection and love, she shall fulfill that destiny.
America!
We, the Ascended Host of Light, love and guard you.
America, we love you.
So, um, this is one of the core messages of The Unveiled Mysteries, the first great text of the I Am Movement.
These great civilizational cycles are dependent wholly on the worship of the Great Inner God, or Vsauce, and America has a special place in God's plan.
Now one thing I definitely want to add to your great description of the book, Ali, is that in one of the last chapters, our hero is introduced to visitors from Venus.
Here's how they are described.
Presently, twelve guests from Venus stood in our midst, robed in white, scintillating garments, surpassing all power of description.
There were seven gentlemen and five ladies, all extremely handsome.
Six of the men were at least six feet four inches in height, the seventh Fully two inches taller than the rest.
The ladies were about five feet ten.
All had light brown hair, with the exception of the tall master, and his was a glorious pure gold.
Their brilliant, piercing, violet-blue eyes were beautiful and fascinating.
This is like someone describing their original characters in fan fiction.
Yeah, absolutely.
This is Ebony Darkness Dementia Raven Way.
It is very Jacopo Casanova.
Yeah, like the whole Aya mythology had just had this incredible emphasis on like beauty and wealth, like everything was like, you know, gold and riches and just astonishing beauty to look upon and just sparkling colors.
They say in the book that no one ever got rich without it being the will of the ascended masters.
Right.
Now, it's worth noting that Ballard's first book plagiarized heavily from previous theosophical works.
Most notably, it lifts from A Dweller on Two Planets, which also tells of a neophyte in the mysteries encountering a master who was taken inside the hollowed-out solid rock of a mountain.
Ballard describes St.
Germain as having long, golden hair and sparkling eyes.
This description is likely lifted from the 1894 book The Brother of the Third Degree, which describes St.
Germain in the same way.
Ballard may have also borrowed from the series of books Life and Teachings of the Masters of the Far East, which also discusses things like The Great I Am, The Ascension, Dazzling Light Rays, and even gold coins being snapped out of thin air.
Spalding himself reportedly spent some weeks as a guest in Ballard's home.
There's also some speculation that the true author of the books attributed to Guy Ballard is Edna Ballard.
And this is partly due to the fact that Edna was much better read than Guy Ballard.
You know, she was an editor of Occultist Literature.
She also apparently was seen writing, actually, their second book by one of the former members of the group.
This is what he claims.
I guess the 1930s just weren't the era of the Girlboss yet.
The Ballards were also associated with William Dudley Pelly's Silver Shirt Group.
Now, like I mentioned, Pelly was a former Hollywood screenwriter who wrote a magazine article called Seven Minutes in Eternity, which describes an out-of-body experience that he supposedly had in the Sierra Madre Mountains.
He got a great response from this article, and so people wrote to him and they wanted more information.
So to satisfy their desire, he published ongoing communications from masters living on inner planes in his magazine, which is called The New Liberator.
Hey, you know, he made a new post.
That's right.
He got a lot of likes on that post.
And so, you know, naturally, he wanted to give the people more of the same content.
Pelly started with a kind of mystical focus, but that took a political turn when he started advocating fascist ways of changing the American government.
When Pelly learned that Hitler was elected as Chancellor of Germany on January 31st, 1933, Pelly immediately founded the Silver Shirts.
He was inspired.
One of the guys that popularized the sovereign citizen movement, he got his start in politics as a Silver Shirt.
Fun connection there.
Nice.
Great.
Yeah, apparently he was explicitly named after the black shirts in Italy and the brown shirts in Germany.
But of course, this is America.
We need some shine.
We need some showmanship.
We need silver and gold.
Pelley promoted his ideas in the overtly racist book No More Hunger, an exposition of Christian democracy.
The Ballards borrowed heavily from Pelley's work.
They read his articles to members of their early meetings and persuaded many of Pelley's followers to join them.
According to the biography William Dudley Pelley, A Life in Right-Wing Extremism and the Occult, Around 1935, Pelly's more spiritual followers started abandoning him because of some legal troubles he was having and an increasing focus on political matters over spiritual matters.
And the Ballards were happy to absorb the fascists into their group.
Here's from that book.
doctrine.
They argued that the masters lived in the United States, primarily in the far west, that humanity began in America, and that this country would be a vessel of spiritual light.
The Ballards essentially filled the void, with admittedly much greater success left by Pelley when he formed the Silver Shirts.
Their doctrines were almost interchangeable, and the Ballards promoted a pro-American, conservative agenda very similar to Pelly's pre-anti-Semitic position.
It was not surprising, then, that Pelly's spiritualist followers deserted him for the I Am organization.
As a tribute to Pelly, Guy Ballard, in his second book of I Am Doctrine, even named a lesser master Pellieur.
The Ballards' acknowledgment of influence, however, did not prevent them from rating Pelly's membership for I Am Converts.
The Ballards attracted both rank-and-file league for the Liberation Veterans and close Pelly associates.
For example, Harry Sieber left his post as Silver Shirt Treasurer in the wake of Pelly's trial to become the Associate Director of the St.
Germain Activities.
To make the organization official, the Ballards founded the St.
Germain Foundation and its publishing arm, the St.
Germain Press.
In 1934, they held a 10-day class at which Ballard, for the first time, operated as a messenger of St.
Germain in a public setting.
The Ballards, of course, kept receiving new messages from the Ascended Masters, not just St.
Germain, but a whole host of them.
And so to keep everyone updated, they founded a periodical called The Voice of the I Am.
Jesus and Saint Germain are portrayed as the most important Ascended Masters in I Am, but there are others who go by names like Leto, Cyclopea, and Lord Manachokkan.
These are all bosses in Dark Souls, by the way.
Now, but most most intriguingly to me, while I was going through like the, I guess, the roster of Ascended Masters that apparently communicated through the accredited messenger Guy Ballard, I found one who was called K-17.
Already a great number.
Yeah, right?
The master K-17 supposedly ran an inner-secret service that worked with the regular Secret Service and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.
K-17 and his crew claimed to have destroyed, with the help of the decrees of IM followers, 364 foreign spies along with three enemy submarines whose mission was to destroy the Panama Canal.
So we have the Ascended Master K-17 running secret military ops and protecting America.
Not good.
This is like all the people who think Q-Team is doing fights in deep underground military bases where every single day there's this new battle that they have and it's always winning.
Yeah, it is the same exact thing where they often claim that Like, oh, the Q-team is, like, taking out, like, the CIA spy satellites.
Or Q-team is, like... They're raiding the German servers, or that kind of shit.
Yes, yes, secret op in Germany, yes.
Or, like, they're doing a secret op in China.
There are a few Q-drops that reference that.
So yes, their idea that there is this secret messenger who is like working with the good guys in government and doing these special missions that are known to no one except for a special accredited messenger is not a new idea.
Every once in a while, I'll find like some Nasara website where they believe that all of the money from Nasara is coming from like St.
Germain's Trust Fund.
Yeah, of course.
Rather than prayers, adherents of the I Am activity, they spoke decrees.
These decrees always involve the words I Am, which they believe have some kind of special power.
Here's from the voice of the I Am.
Only the self-conscious individual has all the attributes and creative power of the mighty I AM Presence.
Only he can know who and what he is, and express the fullness of the creative power of God whenever he decrees by the use of the words I AM.
The words I am, whether thought, felt, or spoken, release the power of creation instantly.
These two words are the acknowledgement and release of the power to create and bring forth into outer existence, whatever quality follows that acknowledgement.
I Am Activity also placed a special emphasis on color.
Every color has a different effect on people, so they claimed, but the absolute worst colors are red and black.
Uh-oh.
Yeah, terrible.
Oh no.
So we are, none of us, all of us are not very I Am Friendly right now.
No, we're all demonic entities, witch tracks.
I don't know, I'm wearing purple.
That's a good color to them.
Oh, okay, fair enough.
Yeah, yeah, okay, that's a good color.
That's a... It's a violet flame color.
Divine and noble color, yes.
You, Ally, are worth billions in untold riches.
Here is a message from a 1937 edition of The Voice of the I Am.
Each color is a special rate of vibration, which is its quality.
In electrical parlance, each color is a special frequency, which is the manifestation of a definite form and quality.
Each rate has a special effect upon the mental, emotional, and physical bodies of the individual.
his pocketbook, and world as well. It is the understanding of this that mankind needs to
have in order to correct destructive conditions and reach perfection. No one on this earth
need ever expect health, prosperity, protection, or happiness if that one insists on wearing
black or red clothing or surrounds himself with those colors. There are absolutely no
life, health, nor prosperity vibrations in black, for it is the absence of all life.
Well, I mean, R.I.P.
to any serious Bulls fans, you know?
IM activity also involved high-energy services.
Now, one of our best sources of information about the IM cult is an ex-member of the group named Gerald Bryan.
He wrote pamphlets and books critical of IM, and this actually apparently prompted Guy Ballard to instruct his disciples to burn his works unread.
According to Bryan, some members even purchased copies of his work for the sole purpose of burning them, which he appreciated, as you can imagine.
Yeah, this was like when they bought the Nike shoes to burn them.
Yeah, this is a toddler level own.
Here's how Brian described attending an IM service back in the 30s.
We must save America, says the announcer.
You learn there are visible forces within her borders and without.
These are all to be destroyed.
They are to be blasted from the face of the earth by decrees of the students.
Saint Germain, the mighty cosmic master, has commanded it.
Like other movements which have as their credo the saving of America, the flag of the American Republic is displayed prominently on the stage.
But you notice There are two large flags on the stage instead of the customary one.
You think St.
Germain's Americanism leans a little backward here.
Also, little American flags are displayed prominently on the lapels and white dresses of men and women in the audience.
The man on stage has his little flag too.
Everywhere there seems to be flags, little stripes of red and white and rectangles of blue, adding more color and sentiment to a gala event.
But you soon learn to your surprise that the color red is simply intolerable to Saint Germain and his, quote, accredited masters.
It is the color of the communists and all that is vicious, says the announcer.
You students should not wear it!
No ascended master ever uses it!
The only exception seems to be the flag of our country.
Someday, however, the announcer quotes St.
Germain as saying, when the Ascended Masters take charge of the affairs of this country, there will be gold stripes instead of red ones in the flag of the new American Republic.
This is not a religion, the announcer adds, but a patriotic movement.
Ayamaga.
Ayamaga.
Yeah, so the whole I Am belief system is actually extremely bizarre and elaborate and involves, like I said, hyper patriotism, nationalism, weird spiritual stuff.
Now, Ali, I mean, you've been you've been reading a lot about about what exactly the Ascended Masters believe.
So what do you make of them?
So, in the metaphysical belief system of the I Am Activity and related groups, there is this ultimate source of all things good, which can be called God, or life, or perfection, or order, or the Great God Presence.
And every single one of us are aspects of that Great God Presence.
However, due to corruptions of our physical forms, we forget this, and forget that it's our purpose and duty to create abundance and perfection, as the God Presence wants.
The I Am Practitioner, then, must become aware of the God Presence and willfully form a bridge within themselves so that the God Presence can use their thoughts and actions to enact the divine plan.
As both the cause and the result of the outpouring of God Presence caused by thinking good things and doing good things, the individual gains happiness and success and becomes more and more in tune with the God Presence.
They then become capable of incredible feats, like reversing aging or, as Guy Ballard claimed he could do in The Unveiled Mysteries, shooting energy beams out of their hands at evildoers.
Eventually, an individual working to emanate the energy of the Divine Plan will have transformed their consciousness to be so in tune with the God power within them that they will leave behind their physical body and join the Ascended Masters.
Ascension is the ultimate goal of the religion, and every individual reincarnates again and again until they attain their ascension.
And from the service I attended, I will say that they really do believe this.
So, God Presence is flowing through us and creating and manifesting our world, no matter what.
But this doesn't mean that everything everyone does is part of the divine plan.
When people think or do bad things, they're denying the God Presence and using that same energy to make miscreations that disrupt the order of the universe.
And this is the cause of aging, illness, death, natural disasters.
Just like all goodness is because we manifested it, all badness is because we manifested it.
So it's really important not to make miscreations by doing and thinking bad things.
And in order to keep yourself clean of miscreations, IAM practitioners must discipline themselves
mentally so that their physical desires or other corrupting influences don't interfere
with their ability to channel the God energy in a way that is constructive and in accordance
with the divine plan.
And a way that they can do this is through the use of the violet flame, an entity that
could be summoned by any person at any time to purify their thoughts by burning away everything
in them that is not from the God Presence.
It can also be cast outwards to cleanse the universe of disorder.
Sounds just great.
Trust the divine plan.
And I think manifesting belief systems like this, they're really, really primed for abuse.
Anything with manifesting or transform your consciousness, it always turns into blaming the person and saying, you know, you're bad and wrong if something doesn't go their way.
Or, you know, you haven't transformed your conscious to the right levels.
to understand. So that's why you're unhappy. And cult leaders can use this to manipulate people
really easily. So it's just, you know, such like a fraught area that they're standing on.
The organization grew and by 1938, the Ballards are traveling with an entourage of 14 people
and staying in the best hotels. They even developed auxiliary organizations.
For men, there were the Minutemen of St.
Germain, and for women, there was the Daughters of Light.
So we got like, you know, I Am Proud Boys going on now.
The Ballards received contributions in the form of what they called I Am Love Gifts.
And these were heart-shaped tin containers which were placed near doors and elevators in IM centers.
In addition to that income, the Los Angeles Times estimated that the Ballards averaged about a thousand dollars a day
from their class tuition fees and book sales, which was equivalent to almost like 20 grand a day today.
Yeah, people loved this shit.
Yeah, all over the country.
They toured.
They filled auditoriums.
They ate at fancy steak restaurants.
Yes, exactly.
I mean, accurate estimates of how big they were aren't very good, but they claimed at various points to have somewhere between 400,000 and a million followers.
Guy Ballard claimed that he had ambitions to grow that to 3 million, which we would then use to take over the country, but that obviously did not happen.
Now, one of these live appearances happened in 1938 in a San Francisco Scottish Rite auditorium, and it was described by the journalist R.S.
Clampett for the San Francisco Examiner.
Now, reading this article, I felt a bit of kinship with the reporter because they wrote sort of describing all the insane things that the ballers were saying, and then they inserted some sarcastic asides, which suggests that not much has changed in covering extremism.
So here's what Clampett wrote.
Mr. Ballard was explaining that America is going to be invincible from now on.
We were thinking about Japan and her warships, and the argument that seems to be going on.
But Mr. Ballard said that wouldn't matter because St.
Germain would put a wall of blue flame around the country.
It was pretty reassuring because we had been somewhat worried about that.
Mr. Ballard brought up another subject we hadn't heard about before.
He said that a foreign nation had planned to send a fleet of airplanes across the Atlantic, laden with germs to start an epidemic here, but that St.
Germain had taken care of that by putting up another wall of blue flame.
What happened to the fleet of planes he did not say.
We felt sort of sorry for whoever it was.
Sent all those planes out like that and they didn't even report back what they had accomplished.
Didn't even come back.
Those planes cost money and no epidemic, so far.
Mr. Ballard said that he had suffered from insomnia.
Quote, When you can't get to sleep at night, you should contemplate this chart of the mighty I Am Presence, said Mr. Ballard.
If you can't sleep, stand in the middle of your bedroom floor and tell the Ascended Masters Stop this nonsense.
I'm gonna try that.
This sounds like the Ascended Masters are keeping you from sleeping.
They're being dicks to you and you just have to be like, come on!
I did that, said Mr. Ballard, and the first thing I knew, I was asleep in the center of the floor.
I mean... What?
I don't know.
You pass out?
Do you get to go back to your bed before they put you down?
I woke up on the floor.
My back was hurting.
I think he's confusing the Masters with like a bottle of whiskey.
Mrs. Ballard also spoke about preventing war in Europe and Asia.
The plea to the Ascendant Masters being that they should "withdraw and withhold all energy, money, and supply of every kind
from all destructive channels."
With that question settled, the Ballards took over the radio situation.
This was an idea to clear the air currents everywhere so that the Ballards' broadcasts, both personal and by
electrical transcription in America and throughout the world, would go everywhere without interference of any kind.
We applauded that heartily with the rest of the students in the hall, because not only do we dislike static, That must be like a joke for the era.
He's a Charlie McCarthy of ventriloquist dominance.
Yes, he's a ventriloquist.
and Jack Benny, especially the former.
That must be like a joke for the era.
He's a Charlie McCarthy of ventriloquist dummies.
Yes, he's a ventriloquist.
That's perfect.
As the movement continued to spread, it became more secretive and institutionalized around
1939.
Heretics were harshly reprimanded.
Open sessions, which were previously the norm, were banned.
White uniformed Minutemen acted as bouncers to eject the uninitiated from meetings.
So then all of a sudden they're, you know, getting a little paranoid and cloistered.
An elite, devoted class of followers developed within the I Am Movement.
These were sometimes called the Hundred Percenters.
To demonstrate their complete allegiance to the movement, they agreed to attend extra study sessions and to abstain from all meat, onions, garlic, tobacco, liquor, card playing, and sexual activity.
Married followers had to separate.
What?
Yeah, yeah.
And give up onions?
And onions.
No sex, no onions.
No sex, no onions.
So basically you're giving up fucking Italian food.
It's No Nut November forever.
This is hell.
No Nut November.
Can't even do Go Fish or Uno.
And no cards.
Guy and Edna Ballard often promote this idea of like a physical ascension into heaven, like they would physically go into heaven like they think Jesus did.
In fact, the membership was told that Guy, Edna, and their son Donald were all going to ascend at the same time, which would be just a triple ascension altogether.
For years, Guy Ballard had preached that his physical body was indestructible.
He told his followers that he'd been offered a chance to ascend, but he had chosen to stay on Earth in embodiment for a while longer.
Very noble of him.
Ballard boasted that his body was so charged with light that nothing could harm him physically.
Edna Ballard, therefore, was forced to improvise when Guy Ballard died a very human death from heart disease and cirrhosis of the liver.
Okay, so I think that whiskey bottle was... Yeah, right, yeah.
Sounds like, yeah, this no liquor thing might be wishcasting.
Maybe it was an Edna rule that guy didn't follow.
Just, just, just fucking shooting your eyeballs with laudanum and walking into the middle of the room screaming at the Ascended Masters and collapsing.
Into a coma.
Edna's, like, complaining to her friend.
She's like, all he does is he plays cards, he smokes tobacco, he drinks, he wants to have sex.
The onions!
That's the worst part.
It's all he does.
He eats onions like they're an apple.
Guy Ballard died on December 29th, 1939, and Edna managed to keep this fact secret for two days.
But of course, three days later, on January 1st, 1940, local and national newspapers announced his death.
Edna told members that Guy was now an Ascended Master himself, and he would take a special interest in the members' personal situations.
He's now our beloved Ascended Master of Light who can give limitless help to all who will accept and apply the Ascended Master's instructions of the I Am which he gave under the direction of our beloved Ascended Master Saint Germain.
He is glorious, beyond words to describe.
His love and light are limitless, and he pours them to all through the freedom of America and all mankind.
In his unlimited state, our blessed daddy can wield more power of light rays than he could through the physical body, or that I can wield in this body.
I want you to understand this clearly, so when the outer world has anything to say about it, Make your statement with positive force, for I assure you I am telling the truth, and I will never tell you anything but the truth.
We have nothing to cover up.
Our blessed daddy.
We have nothing, nothing at all to hide, I assure you.
Not one single thing.
Protesting a little too much.
I am, where nothing can possibly go wrong.
So, in his ascended state, Guy Ballard became the Ascended Master Godfrey.
Members, they bought pictures of Godfrey and they placed them on their altars.
Loyal followers rallied around Edna and she continued to dictate what the Masters supposedly said, but the I.M.
group shrank after Guy's death and never regained the strength and momentum of its former days.
Sort of, let's, I think, a little bit of credence to the idea that Edna was really the brains behind the operation and Guy was like, you know, maybe the... He was the face.
He was the face because he was a man.
He was a blessed daddy, and you should respect that because you're the only blessed daddy on this podcast.
After Guy died, the organization suffered even more troubles.
In 1941, the St.
Germain Foundation was sued for infringing the copyright of A Dweller on Two Planets.
However, the judge dismissed the case because, quote, I'm quoting from the motion, Frederick Spencer Oliver, to whom the original was issued, did not pretend to be the author of the book A Dweller on Two Planets, but stated plainly that it was dictated to him by the spirit of a previously deceased person.
Boom.
Wow.
Loophole.
You can't claim copyright of this work because you yourself claim you didn't author it.
It was channeled through you from a person long since dead.
You are not the author.
He's like, I'm going to fuck you basically.
You're not going to get anything because I think your entire premise is ridiculous.
In 1942, Edna Ballard and her son Donald were charged with 18 counts of mail fraud for collecting about $3 million from followers.
Interestingly, the judge in that case, U.S.
District Judge Leon R. Yankovich, great name, declined to wear a black robe out of deference for the beliefs of IM followers.
He told the court this, I am leaving my judicial robes today.
Many people here honestly believe that light and bright colors have a favorable effect on their soul's welfare, and I am not one to flout another's religious beliefs.
In the trial, disappointed former disciples came forward with accounts of how the organization swindled them.
In one case, the organization promised to restore the eyesight of a blind senator, but failed.
Another member, a destitute 75-year-old woman, was assured that she would be taken care of for the rest of her life and guaranteed protection in the next world after she handed over thousands of dollars worth of jewels and cash.
But this whole ordeal actually wound up being quite a significant landmark Supreme Court case.
And of course, to learn more about this, I'm going to turn to the QAA attorney, Ali.
So what exactly happened here?
So, when the Ballers were accused of promising their followers great blessings and rewards in their aim to achieve salvation, in exchange for mail order purchasing certain merchandise, they were brought to trial in a federal court in California.
As IM followers protested outside the courtroom, the jury was instructed by Judge Gankwich.
The issue is, did these defendants honestly and in good faith believe those things?
If they did, they should be acquitted.
If these defendants did not believe those things, if they did not believe that Jesus came down and dictated, or that Saint Germain came down and dictated, did not believe the things they wrote, the things they preached, but used the mail for the purpose of only getting money, the jury should find them guilty.
The Ballards were found guilty, and they appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit, arguing, among other things, that the trial court had botched the jury instructions.
The 9th Circuit ruled that the jury instructions were indeed wrong.
In their view, the trial court should have asked the jury to decide whether the government proved that what the Ballards told their followers was false.
The government appealed and the Supreme Court reversed.
Justice Douglas of the Stone Court wrote the 5-4 decision.
The religious views espoused by respondents might seem incredible, if not preposterous to most people.
But if those doctrines are subject to trial before a jury, charged with finding their truth or falsity, then the same can be done with the religious beliefs of any sect.
When the triers of fact undertake that task, they enter a forbidden domain.
This decision still stands in America's laws.
Prohibiting courts from declaring any religious belief true or false.
And this is an important protection.
Governments can, and in the past they have, persecuted minority religions by declaring religions invalid and believers criminal.
The Ballard decision is meant to help prevent that from happening here.
But there's another side to the decision.
As Chief Justice Stone worried it might be in his dissent, the doctrine has been a godsend to certain fraudsters who convincingly hide their schemes behind a veneer of faith.
Since the Supreme Court passed the decision down, United States v. Ballard had been cited and interpreted in thousands of cases.
And as for the Ballards themselves, Edna and Donald managed to wriggle their way out of a conviction.
Eventually, they managed to have the whole case against them thrown out on the grounds that women had been purposefully excluded from the grand jury that indicted them.
After over half a decade of litigation, the government gave up and the Ballards got the best of the law.
Edna Ballard assumed the role of the messenger of St.
Germain and hosted a radio show in the 50s and 60s.
She died in 1971 at the age of 84.
The St.
Germain Foundation still exists.
In fact, every summer they put on what is known as the I Am Come pageant, which is a two-hour play about the life of Jesus Christ, which ends in a dramatic ascension.
Sorry, again with the name of the pageant?
Yes, yes, yes.
It's called the I Am Come pageant.
I don't know what to tell you, man.
Travis doesn't write this shit, he just reads it.
It's called, they have the I Am Cum pageant to celebrate when Guy Ballard drank the thick syrupy white liquid.
Wait, is something weird about that?
There's nothing funny.
So this pageant is performed at the G.W.
Ballard Amphitheater in Mount Shasta, and it was originally created, produced, and directed by Edna Ballard all the way back in 1950.
It has been performed every year since then, except for 2020 because of the pandemic.
The amphitheater only seats a thousand people, but reportedly attracts believers from all over the world every year.
And the headquarters of the Saint Germain Foundation is still in Illinois, which is why Ali was able to pay at least some of the believers a visit and explore what they were up to.
Okay, so they do have a couple of buildings here.
I think the offices of the headquarters are in the suburb, but they have a temple in the loop on Washington and Wells.
And I've been past it a thousand times, and I've been told by other people around here that its lobby is open, so I tried to pay them a visit, and I had some issues with that.
I added a picture or two that I took of the temple and of its window display, if you guys want to check that out.
Yeah, yeah, lots and lots of gold.
Very austere.
Gold and violet.
And American flags.
Then on the inside there's a framed picture that says American's Creed and behind it is the whitest white Jesus you've ever seen.
Yeah, he's porcelain white Jesus with curly hair.
Yeah, and a big gold gaudy frame.
So I tried to go, but no one was there during my lunch hour, because I thought it would just, like, pop in, chat, grab some literature.
No.
Locked door.
So eventually, I went to the How Do I Join section on the website.
Using an email I created just for this purpose, I contacted the foundation to request a meeting with a sponsor.
It took them over a week to answer my email, and then they told me to call some people, but never returned my calls.
So, really, really great cult recruitment, guys.
But, you know, it's probably for the best.
Guy Ballard would be so disappointed at the unenthusiastic recruitment efforts.
Here we have a willing, you know, potential member.
She's a lawyer, you know, good salary, lots of money to, you know, welch off of.
And here they're not even calling you back.
I also, in trying to figure out a little more about this place, realized that there was a church of an I Am offshoot sect in the suburbs.
And it happened to be the offshoot sect that the prayer General Flynn said was from.
And so they had open meetings.
So I decided I would just show up.
Just a little bit of background on this group.
It's called The Church Universal and Triumphant.
And it describes itself as the teachings of the Ascended Masters through Mark L. and Elizabeth Clare Prophets.
As mentioned, it got in the news because of General Flynn.
The Church Universal and Triumphant was started in the 1950s as a syncretic, theosophical belief system heavily, heavily influenced by the Ballard's teaching.
And like the Ballards, Mark and his wife Elizabeth became a couple dynamic duo that claimed to channel the Ascended Masters and traveled the country making dictations.
...as the mouthpieces of these ethereal beings.
After Mark died in the 70s, Elizabeth successfully proselytized the teachings of the Ascended Masters to thousands of ex-hippies burnt out on sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
Through the next decade, the sect garnered wide attention for its fanatical anti-communism and for dramatic predictions of a nuclear Armageddon that would befall the world in March of 1990.
This prophecy led more than 2,000 followers to gather in a compound in Montana and stockpile an arsenal of assault rifles and armored vehicles, food, and other provisions in an underground bomb shelter.
Accounts of former members described living in an atmosphere of constant fear and under the total control of Elizabeth Clare Proffitt.
Stories I came across in my research include all sorts of bad things like followers being exploited for money and labor, March 1990 came and went without nuclear end times and the cult began a period of decline.
sessions, being encouraged to develop bulimia, and being required to submit to Elizabeth's
decisions about who to date, who to marry, and what to name their kids.
March 1990 came and went without nuclear end times, and the cult began a period of decline.
And it wasn't just the failure of the prophecy, because it never is.
The church got sued, and it took some serious losses.
And then when it was already shedding members, Elizabeth Proffitt's health declined due to Alzheimer's.
She stepped down from her leadership role in 1999 and died in 2009.
Although several followers announced their own visitations of the ascended masters and posed themselves to fill her shoes, the official church rejected all of these claims for a decade and has been without a charismatic leader speaking for the divine beings.
And so that's where the group was when I showed up at their open service.
Let me say, I really, really had a nice time when I was there.
I understand, theoretically, the concepts of love bombing and about recruitment tactics, but now I really understand why people join cults.
They were very, very nice.
Up front, I'd like to say that I only went to one meeting, but they opened to the public, and they were aware that me and another non-member were attending.
So what I have is a really limited snapshot.
I can't speak to what's talked about in members-only meetings, nor do I know what time, lifestyle, and financial commitments members have to currently make to the church.
So it could be way darker than what I saw while I was there.
I do hope it's not and that the abusives I learned about in my research stopped with Elizabeth out of the picture.
But without further knowledge and without knowing the history of the group and how easily these groups and their beliefs facilitate exploitations, I wouldn't bet on it being significantly better.
So, you know, I do hope things are okay because I only want good things for everyone nice I met there.
Also, if anyone from the church is listening, I'd like to thank you all for being such warm and welcoming hosts.
And I'm also sorry for not telling you I was there for research purposes.
I have some pictures here of the altar and a picture on their wall.
Yeah, we got, I mean, I love this picture of Jesus and St.
Germain just hanging out.
We have Jesus with his arm around St.
Germain holding hands.
We have multiple beautiful rays of light emanating from between them.
Of course, rays of light emanating from both inside of Jesus and St.
Germain.
Good.
Look like they're having a good time.
And then if you look at the picture of the altar, in the back they have the golden-striped American flag that Guy Ballard was talking about.
Oh my gosh, it's real, yeah.
Yeah, the minister brought it up and was like, can you believe that someone made us this handmade gift?
And was, like, really excited about it.
Oh, the gold-striped American flag to replace the evil red.
Amazing.
They still have one of those, though.
You know, Saint Germain, in this depiction at least, looks surprisingly like Travis.
Mmm.
I see it.
I need to grow up and do a handlebar style.
But yeah, I'm getting there.
And if you comb your hair back, I don't know, it's pretty there.
He's become Saint Germain.
And Jesus, oddly enough, looks a lot like Julian.
Now that's a stretch.
About the congregation, there were about 25 people there.
The crowd skewed older, but there were one or two families with young kids.
And actually, there was a 12-year-old who sat in the hallway under this black and white picture of Guy Ballard, and he just played Fortnite the whole time.
Wow, the devil's game.
King!
It's like the most normie church thing I saw there.
There were a little bit more women than men, but not by much.
And despite being an offshoot of I Am, which, you know, started filled out with silver shirt American Nazis, the congregation was really diverse.
With a lot of black and Latino members, I'd say the room was about half Latino.
And the bookshop had a ton of Spanish language literature.
There were also a handful of Eastern European immigrants there.
It doesn't seem like this is a very active or booming group, because at some point during the announcements, the minister mentioned that Cult Headquarters and Bozeman were really excited to learn that the Chicago congregation had gotten 14 people to attend a weekday event.
Oh my gosh.
So, like, in their service, because they stayed for the service, they really heavily rely on recordings of Mark and Elizabeth Prophet channeling the Ascended Masters, and they played those at regular intervals between, like, the live minister talking, and they definitely still really idolized the Prophets.
The minister was talking about how she was super excited for this upcoming potluck, and she went on this tangent About how once in the 90s she ate a salad that Elizabeth Prophet had put together and how it was like holy communion with Elizabeth's life essence.
And what I saw at the sermon seemed really similar to the original I Am ideology I learned about in Guy Ballard's book.
It started with their version of the Rosary and we sang a song about Saint Germain.
There's a ton of singing and chanting at these services.
We had an ashram ritual to El Morya, and we also sang hymns to Helios and Vesta.
And, okay, we did a decree at the service where we decreed to end the pandemic.
We were asked to visualize the Violet's Flame purifying force dissolving the actual viruses all over the world, and to chant along with a recording of Elizabeth Prophet.
I am the violet flame in action in me now.
I am the violet flame whose light alone I vow.
I am the violet flame in mighty cosmic power.
I am the light of God, shining every hour.
I am the violet flame blazing like a sun.
I am God's sacred power, freeing everyone.
I am the violet flame enacting in me now.
I am the violet flame, to light alone I bow.
I am the violet flame in mighty cosmic power.
I am the light of God, shining every hour.
I am the violet flame, blazing like the sun.
I am the sacred power, freeing everyone.
Okay, someone has clearly hacked the Small World ride at Disneyland and turned it into a hell.
What is this fucking Alvin and the Chipmunks shit?
It's just a video of, like, a virus on fire, but the fire is purple.
But it's so fucking annoying sounding.
How can you- that's not a nice chant.
You want to base your chant lower like, I was going to say, for any musical theater people out there, this follows almost the exact melody from The King and I of, if my lord and Buddha lead the way, da da da da da, it's the same shit.
Oh god, it's show tunes!
I think it's, if my lord and heaven Buddha show the way, da da da da da, it's from The King and I.
So it was expected that by doing this decree, we would send the violet flame all over the world to every single virus, and the proteins would like melt and dissolve from the heat, and all the viruses would die.
And you know what?
I think it might have worked if I hadn't been there corrupting it and fucking it up.
So sorry, I'm the reason the pandemic's still going.
Pandemic's still going on because of you, Allie.
Messing up their service, their decrees.
We're just corrupting everything.
They're bad scientists.
They're letting their samples get spoiled by outside contamination.
Right.
So knowing what I knew about the church history, and there was like some book on cancel culture in their library, and just from living in this rotten world in general, I expected the sermon to be super political.
But it really wasn't.
There wasn't also any subtle grievance or culture war hooks, and most of the actual sermon was about how to learn from Ascended Master Mighty Victory so you could use your connection to God to power through the difficult times in your life.
So the woman who gave the address was in training to be a minister, and I thought she was a really, really talented speaker.
Um, but it was also like within the span of a sentence or two, or within even the same sentence, it would oscillate between something really mundane and these really casual references to ascending and stuff.
Like, feel like you're worthy of asking to help from your friends and family, and soon you'll leave your physical form behind to join the sky.
I can kind of see how a lot of this stuff is, like, super appealing for the people who are into it.
Because, like, you know, if you're a newcomer and you show up at one of these things that isn't there to spy for a podcast, someone might really like it when they hear the sermon say a message that, you know, you're valuable and inherently have a relationship to a higher power because you're part of it and it's part of you and the most powerful thing in the universe is going to help you overcome your struggles because it wants you to be happy.
And I think that can be really, really empowering to some people.
But, you know, the flip side of this is all these, like, systems of guilt and control.
And, you know, the idea that you've got to do what we want, or else, you know, you're not walking within, like, the light.
And then, of course, the other appeal is this promise of community.
So they invited me to stay for lunch with them after the service, and I said yes.
They'd gotten catering from a nearby Italian restaurant, which apparently they do every week.
We had eggplant parmigiana.
We chatted a bit, and I did not give them my full name or why I was there, but I was pretty candid otherwise.
And I'd asked some how long they'd been involved in the community.
Some said the 70s, meaning they'd been with the congregation during the 1990 bunker nuke scare.
I kind of wanted to ask about that, but I was pretending I didn't know about it.
And the minister was, like, trying to tell me all about reincarnation and about how when her son was born, she saw that he had a face of an old man because she could, like, see him in his past life.
It was interesting.
They were all really, really nice.
So there was one other new person there who was a woman who spoke with a heavy Eastern European accent.
And she told me she'd grown up in Soviet Lithuania, seeing religion as a form of rebellion against the atheist government.
And as a teen, she and her friends had smuggled these Bibles and psalm books around and met in secret to do Catholic sacraments.
Nice.
But when she was finally able to come to America, she could find none of the old joy and strength she'd found in faith.
She told me she felt the people here were, in her words, more brainwashed than any party loyalist back home, and the people here treated religion like a cudgel to demand obedience.
Damn!
But she still wanted and hadn't found a spiritual home, and she was hoping to find it with the church universal and triumphant.
I mean, I just really hope she stays safe.
I really hope all of those people I met there stay safe.
They asked me to join them for this prayer at an altar, and I'm not really a praying person, but I prayed for them all to be happy and safe because, you know, just these belief systems are, you know, so wild, right?
Yeah, I think, honestly, hearing all of this, and great job Travis and Allie on this, so much background, hearing St.
Germain's stories, hearing all of these Ascended Master traditions, and I Am, and how it existed and exists today, I can safely say that this movement belongs on a torn-up piece of napkin in Michael Flynn's wallet.
Yeah, I mean, the fact that the Church Universal and Triumphant is so small and weak, I think it really makes it even more mysterious how the hell this prayer got in his wallet, so he claims, in the first place.
But yeah, I mean, a lot of interesting parallels.
I mean, the most obvious one is the idea of an accredited messenger.
You know, the idea, the Ballards and the Prophets apparently claimed that they were the only ones who could deliver this higher special message.
And this is a lot like QAnon's, you know, no outside comms, you know, don't trust other people, don't trust the mainstream media, don't trust anyone except for the message I'm delivering you.
Yeah, when this message is about like a secret operation to protect the Panama Canal or something.
And then how like the Ballard started closing off all of their meetings because the media kept making fun of them.
It's like, you know, what you're seeing with the QAnon conferences now, like sure, they live stream it, but like they vet or like don't let in any mainstream journalists.
I think it's kind of interesting because I think I am kind of dissolved in the water of broader, more maybe like pious Christianity, probably through like evangelism and all of the kind of forms of Protestantism that have like revival elements.
And I think also more unorganized New Age belief.
Like, you know, a lot of their belief systems are a lot of like, you know, what those TikTok people who talk about manifesting talk about, right?
It's very, very similar.
Right.
There's also a lot of, yeah, there's a lot of elements of like the secret, positive thinking, the belief that your thoughts can, you know, thoughts are things and they have the power through your attention and your focus, change your physical reality and bring you riches.
Thanks so much for joining us, Ali.
I think people can follow you on Twitter at PinealDecalcify.
That's right.
Well, thank you so much for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
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Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Q.
If your desire is union with God, then come with me and let me show you through this chart of the I Am Presence what are the stages of that reunion.
If you look at the chart behind me, you see a likeness of yourself standing in the violet flame.
The violet flame is God's gift of the Holy Spirit to you.
Through the violet flame, you transmute the records of negativity, or sin, or karma.
And in that process, you attain union with your Holy Christ Self, who is the middle figure in the chart.
This is the manifestation of the Son of God.
As you look beyond that presence of the Christ, you see the I Am That I Am, centered in spheres of concentric light.
The I Am Presence is the same, the very one who appeared to Moses and gave to us that name, I Am That I Am.
The goal of the conclusion of your life is to attain union with God, the I Am Presence.
Your soul ascends to that presence, already wearing the garments of your Christhood.
And in that I Am Presence, then, you know yourself as an immortal being whom we call an Ascended Master.
The path of the teachings of the Ascended Masters is this, union with God.
All of the world's major religions, in their mystical paths, have demonstrated this union.
And therefore, come and study the teachings of the Ascended Masters, and find your liberation in this life.
Saint Germain, that magic name, Brings to all sweet freedom's wing, I love you, St.
Germain.
I love your violet flame.
And I love your sacred name, Beloved St.
Germain.
St.
And I love your sacred name, Beloved Saint Germain.
Saint Germain, thy patience rare, Holds the earth in heaven's care,
Releases all life everywhere, In freedom all may share.
I love you Saint Germain, I love you.
I love your wild plane And I love your sacred name Beloved Saint Germain Saint Germain, my love sublime Let thy spirit through all shine Make all that's human now divine Beloved friend of mine I love you, Saint Germain.
I love your violet flame.
And I love your sacred name, Beloved Saint Germain.
