HIGHER THAN TRUTH
[S1E5] MURPHY RANCH — MAITREYA
DID NAZI OCCULTISTS BUILD A MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR DOOMSDAY MANSION IN LOS ANGELES DURING WWII?
Note: Higher Than Truth is an ongoing series taking deep dives into strange mysteries, conspiracies, and forgotten history. Please refer to the table of contents for all articles in their chronological order.
“…When the time comes for the effort of the XXth century…The general condition of men’s minds and hearts will have been improved and purified by the spread of [theosophy], and, as I have said, their prejudices and dogmatic illusions will have been, to some extent at least, removed…[T]he next impulse will find a numerous and united body of people ready to welcome the new torchbearer of Truth. He will find the minds of men prepared for his message, a language ready for him in which to clothe the new truths he brings, an organization awaiting his arrival, which will remove the merely mechanical, material obstacles and difficulties from his path. Think how much one, to whom such an opportunity is given, could accomplish.” —Helena Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy, 1889
Norman Stevens joined the Olcott Lodge of the Theosophical Society in March 1927, with blessing of the lodge’s founder, who was discussed at length in [S1E4] Sanford Bell. This gives at least the foundation of credibility to the allegations that Murphy Ranch, which was owned by Norman and his wife Winona, was an occult compound of some kind—but it doesn’t prove it, nor does it prove the more serious rumors connecting the property to Nazi paramilitary groups in the 1930’s. As we learned in [S1E3] Cults of California, Los Angeles was teeming with brand new alternative religions at this time, many of which attempted to create their own utopian communities. Did Norman’s membership in the Theosophical Society have anything to do with his decision to construct a multi-million-dollar self-sustaining mansion on a 41-acre estate hidden at the bottom of Santa Monica’s Rustic Canyon just five years later? What was going on in the Theosophical Society at that time?
In 1889 Annie Besant, writer and political activist, read Helena Blavatsky’s theosophical magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, and approached the esoteric author to conduct an interview for the Pall Mall Gazette. This encounter would result in her ultimate conversion to theosophy, a decision she later described as the “glory” of her life.
Annie Wood was born on October 1, 1847 into an upper-middle-class London family, but when she was just five years old her father died, leaving her Irish Catholic mother with no means to support her. She was, then, raised by a family friend, Ellen Marryat, who according to biographer Anne Taylor, instilled in her “a strong sense of duty to society and an equally strong sense of what independent women could achieve.” Another biographical sketch of her life states:
Annie’s upbringing had a strongly Evangelical bent. She was allowed to read not only the Bible, but also John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Having a great facility of learning by heart, she often recited for her own amusement lines from the great Christian epic. In 1861, Miss Marryat took Annie on an educational tour to Holland, France and Germany. After her return to England she perfected her French and German. As a result of such upbringing, Annie became a self-made intellectual.
At the age of twenty, Annie married Frank Besant, an evangelical Anglican vicar with whom she had two children. But, she wrote in her own autobiography—
We were an ill-matched pair, my husband and I, from the very outset; he, with very high ideas of a husband’s authority and a wife’s submission holding strongly to the “master-in-my-own-house theory,” thinking much of the details of home arrangements, precise, methodical, easily angered and with difficulty appeased; I, accustomed to freedom, indifferent to home details, impulsive, hot-tempered, and proud as Lucifer.
—and by 1873 the marriage came to an end. Divorce, however, was an impossibility and she remained Annie Besant for the rest of her life.
Another source of disagreement within their union was political: while Frank was a Tory who backed landowners and farmers, Annie supported the farmworkers hoping to unionize for more rights and better working conditions. Once free from her husband, she began vocally backing causes she believed in, which included “freedom of thought, women’s rights, secularism, birth control, Fabian socialism and workers’ rights.” She publicly questioned the Church of England as a state-sponsored religion and joined the National Secular Society to work alongside its founder, Charles Bradlaugh.
In 1877, Besant and Bradlaugh published The Fruits of Philosophy by American birth control activist Charles Knowlton, who argued:
Is it not notorious that the families of the married often increase beyond which a regard for the young beings coming into the world, and the happiness of those who give them birth, would dictate. In how many instances does the hard-working father, and more especially the mother, of a poor family remain slave throughout their lives, tugging at the oar of incessant labor, toiling to live, and living to toil; when, if their offspring had been limited to two or three only, they might have enjoyed comfort and comparative affluence? How often is the health of the mother, giving birth every year to an infant…how often is the mother’s comfort, health, nay, even her life, thus sacrificed?
Knowlton’s book was immediately opposed by the Church, and both Besant and Bradlaugh were arrested. The resulting trial caused a firestorm of controversy—the book was condemned as “obscene libel”, which had the effect of increasing its circulation from 700 copies per year to over 125,000—and for a time it seemed likely they would both be sentenced to prison. The case was dropped, however, on a technical error and they were let go. But Besant’s (ex)husband argued that her actions made her an unfit mother, and as a result she lost custody of her children forever.
Besant was soon alienated from Bradlaugh when he ascended to Parliament, a political sphere which had no room for women. She worked for a time on behalf of Irish Homerulers and befriended Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw as well as Eleanor Marx, daughter of German philosopher Karl Marx. But throughout this political and economic activism she found it lacking a spiritual dimension she could only describe as “Love.” She finally found her calling in theosophy.
Says one biographer:
[Besant’s] sudden and an unexpected defection from socialism to theosophy stunned many of her supporters and admirers in Britain…Blavatsky claimed to be receiving messages from mythical Mahatmas who lived in the Tibetan Himalayas and communicated to her ‘ancient wisdom’ that could improve the lot of mankind. In 1889, Besant joined the Theosophical Society and began to edit together with Blavatsky the monthly theosophical journal Lucifer, which was later renamed to the Theosophical Review. Soon Besant also admitted that she was receiving similar messages like Madame Blavatsky, who died in Besant’s home in London, in 1891.
…As a theosophist, Besant revoked her notorious teachings on birth control. She bought and destroyed the unsold copies of her pamphlet, The Law of Population, and wrote a new pamphlet, Theosophy and the Law of Population, which advocated complete abstinence, since “the sexual instinct that man has in common with the brute is the most fruitful source of human misery” (Chandrasekhar 211). The Theosophical Society propagated ‘universal brotherhood’, self-restraint in marital relationship and the concept of sexless companionship.
As discussed in [S1E3] Cults of California, upon Blavatsky’s death there was a period of uncertainty and infighting in the Theosophical Society. The American branch broke away and renamed itself The United Brotherhood of Theosophists, and then later experienced more schisms resulting in colonies like Katherine Tingley’s Lomaland outside San Diego. Besant, who had been included within Blavatsky’s inner circle of twelve disciples, moved in 1893 to Adyar, India where the existing society’s headquarters were located and she worked alongside the new president, Colonel Henry Olcott Steel.
In 1894, Besant met Charles Webster Leadbeater—mentioned briefly in [S1E4] Sanford Bell—who had by then already been an active theosophist for over a decade, and who claimed to have been the one responsible for helping Besant advance her psychic powers. They developed a lifelong friendship, with Leadbeater at Besant’s side when she became president of the Theosophical Society in 1907.
As early as 1896, Besant began to echo Blavatsky’s message about a coming “torchbearer of truth” who would arrive on earth to aid in the spiritual development of mankind and bring about a transition to a New Age—from the Piscean to the Aquarian. Says one theosophical scholar:
Writing in 1887, the founder of the modern esoteric movement gave the dates and duration of recent astrological ages, indicating that the year 1900 was to be the starting point for the new Aquarian age. HPB wrote that “one of the several remarkable cycles” coming to a close in the end of the nineteenth century was “the Messianic cycle of the Samaritan (also Kabalistic) Jews of the man connected with Pisces.” (SD Questions and Answers, p. 100)
And she explained: “It is a cycle, historic and not very long, but very occult, lasting about 2,155 solar years, but having a true significance only when computed by lunar months. It occurred [in] 2410 and 255 B.C., or when the equinox entered into the sign of the Ram, and again into that of Pisces.”
Geoffry Barborka, author of The Divine Plan comments: “Since 2155 year is the time period for the duration of each of the cycles of the age of Aries and Pisces, and as the Piscean age began in 255 B.C., the date of the beginning of the Aquarian age is 1900 A.D.”
Blavatsky could foresee that the expansion of higher mind brought about by the new age would be dramatically painful at first. Referring to the equinox, she said: “When it enters, in a few years, the sign of Aquarius, psychologists will have extra work to do, and the psychic idiosyncrasies of humanity will enter into a great change.”
The complexities of Blavatsky’s teachings will be reserved for a future episode, but the key takeaway here is that Blavatsky viewed the Theosophical Society as just one of many attempts throughout history by a group of Hidden Masters who were guiding the spiritual evolution of mankind as part of a larger cosmic evolution. “The work” of the Theosophical Society was to prepare humanity for such a change, and once the Torchbearer of Truth—also known as Bodhisatva, Maitreya, and World Teacher—arrived:
He will find the minds of men prepared for his message, a language ready for him in which to clothe the new truths he brings, an organization awaiting his arrival, which will remove the merely mechanical, material obstacles and difficulties from his path.
It may come as a surprise to some but H. P. Blavatsky actually said very little about Maitreya. The emphasis in the Theosophical Movement on Maitreya did not begin until 1909, 18 years after Blavatsky’s death. This emphasis and focus was begun by a highly controversial English Theosophist named C. W. Leadbeater.
The controversy surrounding Leadbeater is argued even today within theosophical circles, but it stems from an incident in 1906 in which:
Leadbeater admitted under oath…to intimately touching and performing indecent acts on young boys in his care on numerous occasions and often in ongoing circumstances. This confession, which he made after complaints and allegations from several boys, quite rightly resulted in his being forced out of the Theosophical Society in shame and disgrace, only to later be invited back and readmitted by Annie Besant, much to the disgust of many other Theosophists.
Leadbeater maintained his innocence and said that his attempts to provide a sexual education to the boys was grossly misunderstood. His denials are countered at length in The Case against C. W. Leadbeater—
“A few months ago charges reached me of immoral sexual practices by Mr L. with boys, having been made in India, and the same having been suspected in England. When [the boy] was again questioned he testified that Mr. L. had taught him how to practice self-abuse [i.e. masturbation]. When asked what reason he gave for teaching him such practices he said, ‘Mr Leadbeater told me that it would make me grow strong and manly.’ Asked his reason for concealing these facts so long from his parents, he said, ‘He made me promise not to tell.’”
—but for our purposes the relevance of this episode is that 1) Annie Besant sided with Leadbeater, so he stayed with the Theosophical Society despite the protests from some theosophists, and 2) in 1909, while walking along the river next to Adyar, Leadbeater found himself inexplicably drawn to a fourteen-year-old Indian boy living on the grounds of Theosophical Society headquarters. He had, according to Leadbeater, the “most wonderful aura he had ever seen, without a particle of selfishness in it.” Not long after, Leadbeater and Besant would declare that the boy, named Jiddu Krishnamurti, was the probable physical vehicle for the coming Lord Maitreya.
In 1910, Annie Besant became legal guardian to Krishnamurti and his younger brother, Nityananda—despite the fact that the boys’ father was very much alive. Leadbeater began conducting experiments into Krishnamurti’s past lives, and at this time called him by the short-lived nickname, Alcyone, while Leadbeater referred to himself as Sirius. Among the thirty previous lives that Leadbeater discovered in Krishnamurti’s past—ranging from 22,662 BC to 624 AD—eleven had been girls. Leadbeater described these past lives in the April 1910 issue of Theosophist under the heading Rents in the Veil of Time:
One of the characters whom we shall frequently meet in these incarnation-stories is Sirius, and we shall always find a strong attachment between him and our hero Alcyone. On this occasion Sirius was the son of the priest Brhaspati, and his first sight of Alcyone was at that consecration ceremony. Although he was only about three years of age, he had been brought by his parents to witness this dedication ceremony, which was an exceptionally brilliant one, as the parents, being wealthy people, spent a great deal of money on decorations and processions. The grandeur of it greatly impressed him, and he at once fell in love with the baby, declaring his intention of marrying her when he became a man. When he was a few years older and again expressed the same sentiments, his parents advised him to put the thought out of his mind, since they were poor and Alcyone’s parents were rich. The two families lived on opposite sides of the river, which at this point was about a mile wide. Sirius did not share the view of his parents that poverty should be a barrier to his love, and when he was about twelve and Alcyone about nine years old, we find him having himself ferried across the river in order to pay his little sweet heart a visit.
According to Leadbeater, the story of Alcyone and Sirius during this incarnation of Krishnamurti’s many lifetimes happily resulted in their marriage:
The Lords of Karma appear to have utilised this life for a considerable gathering of the Theosophical clan, for in addition to the nine children of Helios there were sixteen born to Sirius and Alcyone, and all of them were Egos who reappear in later lives.
Krishnamurti’s star name was used only briefly, but it should be noted that in Greek mythology, Alcyone “derives from an old pagan observance of the turning season, with the moon-goddess conveying a dead symbolic king of the old year to his resting place,” and within the context of astronomy, thirty years prior to the “discovery” of Krishnamurti, in 1880:
The astronomer Madler posited the theory that the star Alcyone of the Pleiades was the central star of the stellar universe, about which all members of the visible universe of stars were rotating.
Although Madler’s Central Sun Hypothesis was later proven incorrect, it can be inferred that by naming Krishnamurti “Alcyone”, Leadbeater meant to convey the imagery of a star about whom the known universe revolves, who will bring about the end of one age and the beginning of another.
Krishnamurti was subsequently groomed for his role as the World Teacher, and in 1911 Besant formed a new group, Order of the Star in the East, to support him in this work. On December 28, while Krishnamurti officiated the annual Theosophical Convention in Benares, India members of the audience reported feeling a “strange power” emanating from the fifteen year old boy. Said Leadbeater:
It reminded one irresistibly of the rushing, mighty wind, and the outpouring of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost. The tension was enormous, and every one in the room was most powerfully affected. It was exactly the kind of thing we read about in the old scriptures, and think exaggerated; but here it was before us in the twentieth century.
At a meeting [of the Esoteric Section] on the 29th, the President said for the first time that after what they had seen and felt, it was no longer possible making even a pretence [sic] of concealing the fact that Krishnamurti’s body had been chosen by the Bodhisattva and was even now being attuned to him.
The following year, Krishnamurti’s biological father, disturbed by Besant’s “announcement that [his son] was to be the Lord Christ, with the result that a number of respectable persons had prostrated before him,” sued for custody of his children, but lost on appeal. Krishnamurti would be raised by the Theosophical Society to fulfill his messianic destiny.
In 1912, the Theosophical Society opened its Krotona Colony in Hollywood, California. A home was built for Krishnamurti there, followed in 1919 by the purchase of 465 acres of land in Ojai for the earthly vessel of the coming messiah. According to author Carey McWilliams:
…The real genesis of Ojai as an occult center may be traced to the publication, in the early twenties, of a magazine article by Dr. Ales Hrdlička predicting the rise of “a new sixth sub-race.” It seems that psychological tests given in California schools had revealed the existence of a surprising number of child prodigies; ergo, California was the home of the new sub-race. Once this revelation was made, writes the biographer of Annie Besant, “theosophists all over the world turned their eyes toward California” as the Atlantis of the western sea.
Krishnamurti toured the world with Annie Besant at his side: Adyar, Ojai, Paris, London, New York, Chicago, and on and on. Upon arriving in cities, he was “besieged on arrival…by throngs of theosophists who deluged him with garlands of flowers.”
On December 28, 1925—fourteen years to the day since he was overcome with “strange power”—Krishnamurti took the stage at the annual Star Congress to give a speech when a “dramatic change” occurred:
…His voice suddenly altered and he switched to first person, saying “I come for those who want sympathy, who want happiness, who are longing to be released, who are longing to find happiness in all things. I come to reform and not to tear down, I come not to destroy but to build.” For many of the assembled who noticed, it was a “spine-tingling” revelation, “felt…instantly and independently” — confirmation, in their view, that the manifestation of the Lord Maitreya through his chosen vehicle had begun.
By January of 1927, the expectation within the Theosophical Society that Krishnamurti’s transformation into the second coming of the Christ had reached a fever pitch, with Besant declaring unequivocally “the World Teacher is here.” Upon his arrival, they expected the imminent evolution of humanity to begin, and they expected it to take place in California.
In March—the same month Norman joined Sanford Bell’s Olcott Lodge— Annie Besant wrote in the Theosophical Messenger:
American anthropologists tell us that a new human type — “perhaps a sub-race” says the greatest of them, Dr. Hrdlika — is appearing in the United States, most numerously in California, and common observation here confirms the fact. History tells us that with each such new departure, a new civilization begins, founded on the teachings of a great Prophet or superhuman Man. At such a point we stand today. Shall we copy the people of the past, and blindly ignore the law of evolution, or shall we cooperate with it, with open eyes, by creating the conditions in which can be sown the seeds of the new civilization, sowing them gradually and with thoughtful care, and planting the new order. To serve as model for the mighty world, And be the fair beginning of a time?
Christ was returning to build a brand new civilization, and Norman would have a front row seat.
Will Krishnamurti become a living vehicle for Maitreya? Find out next, on:
