HIGHER THAN TRUTH
[S1E13] MURPHY RANCH — SHADOW WAR: PART 3
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.
“Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
On the morning of September 11, 1893, a replica of the Liberty Bell rang out ten times as international members of ten distinct religious traditions gathered for the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Considered the birth of the interfaith movement, this conference, “where Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Unitarians, and adherents of the Shinto and Zoroastrian traditions met together for the first time in modern history,” intended to unite the world’s religions on shared ground for the betterment of all humanity. The spirit of the event—the word on everyone’s lips—was “Universalism.”
Event chairman and Presbyterian minister John Henry Barrows, suggested that religion had broken into a “many-colored fragment,” and the purpose of the Parliament was to “to change this…back into the white light of heavenly truth.” Rabbi Emil Hirsch spoke on “Elements of a Universal Religion.” Paul Carus, publisher and philosopher, delivered a speech titled “Science: A Religious Revelation,” in which he argued:
“The nature of religious truth is the same as that of scientific truth…Religion is as indestructible as science; for science is the method of searching for the truth, and religion is the enthusiasm and goodwill to live a life of truth.”
No one exemplified this spirit better than Swami Vivekananda, a Bengali Hindu monk (and guest of Paul Carus) whose first words on stage, “Sisters and Brothers of America…” elicited a two-minute standing ovation from the audience of 7,000. As they calmed down, he continued:
“I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true…Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair…But their time is come.”
Annie Besant (discussed at some length in [S1E5] — Maitreya) was by this time co-vice president of the Theosophical Society alongside William Quan Judge after the death of Helena Blavatsky in 1891. They, along with an entourage of theosophists from India, Ceylon, and America, had arrived in Chicago as delegates of the convention only the day before. And like the rest of the crowd, they were captivated by Vivekananda. Besant recounted her experience meeting him after the speech:
…A lion head, piercing eyes, mobile lips, movements swift and abrupt…Off the platform, his figure was instinct with pride of country, pride of race — the representative of the oldest of living religions, surrounded by curious gazers of nearly the youngest religion…
Besant’s recollection of Vivekananda—breathless as it was—seems to have been shared by the majority of the Parliament’s attendees, but her romanticized excitement may also have been a result of where she was headed next: India, for the first time. Despite her prominent role among the leadership of the Theosophical Society, she had yet to travel to the birthplace of its teachings. And so, just two months later, when she set sail on the Kaiser-i-Hind, she spoke passionately about the continent where she would spend the rest of her life:
She portrayed India as the “holy land whose great philosophy has been the source of all the philosophies of the Western world, the land whose great religion has been the origin of all religions, the mother of spirituality, the cradle of civilization.”
While Besant departed for India, Vivekananda signed a three-year contract with the Slayton Lyceum Bureau of Chicago to manage his lecture tour across the United States. It was Vivekananda—also known as “Swamiji”—who introduced yoga and chakras to a Western audience through the teachings of the Vedas:
Arguably, Indian yoga conquered the world by way of America, and it was Vivekananda who got the Americans hooked during his New York sojourn in 1895. His free yoga classes in Manhattan opened the door for the mostly U.S.-based work of Swami Paramahansa Yogananda twenty or so years later, as well as, still later, that of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The new yogis moved yoga away from its putative Indian/Hindu roots and towards more abstract ideas and practices of “unity” — the unity of man and the supreme being, the unity of science and religion, the unity of mind and body, the unity of all religions, and so on…
And it was Vivekananda who popularized the concept of involution—which he borrowed from Blavatsky—a necessary step, they said, in the process of spiritual evolution (see [S1E8] The Planetary Hierarchy). Wherever he traveled, the Hindu emissary in orange robes was welcomed into the homes of average Americans eager to hear his message of universal love and understanding:
“He who has given up all attachment, all fear, and all anger, he whose whole soul has gone unto the Lord, he who has taken refuge in the Lord, whose heart has become purified, with whatsoever desire he comes to the Lord, He will grant that to him. Therefore worship Him through knowledge, love, or renunciation.”
In Chicago, Vivekananda regaled a dinner party with the story of The Frog in The Well at the home of Mrs. Potter Palmer, a socialite and heiress known for wearing “a tiara of diamonds as large as lima beans.”
In New York, he stayed first at the Fifth Avenue home of Metropolitan Hospital President Dr. Egbert Guernsey, who popularized the use of homeopathic medicine. Through Guernsey, Vivekananda befriended a neighbor interested in metaphysics, Miss Helen Gould, and thus was invited to visit the estate of her father, Jay Gould, the millionaire railroad magnate and robber baron.
In Maine, he attended a religious conference at the Green Acre Inn, a spiritual retreat founded by a Miss Sarah Farmer, whose primary benefactor was Phoebe Hearst, mother of the budding media mogul William Randolph Hearst (see [S1E11]—Shadow War: Part 1). It was here that Vivekananda introduced his concept of Vedanta—“one eternal religion”—to a rapt audience of transcendentalists, metaphysicians, authors, artists, and educators. He explained that Vedanta:
“…is applied to different planes of existences, is applied to the opinions of various minds, and various races. There never was my religion or yours, my national religion or your national religion, there is only the one. One infinite religion existed all through eternity and will ever exist, and this religion is expressing itself in various countries in various ways.”
Among those in attendance at Green Acre was Ralph Waldo Trine, a New Thought author and correspondent for the Boston Evening Transcript, whose glowing review of the event opined: “It is a rich opportunity to us who are privileged to enjoy it, and our only regret is that so many hungry souls are missing it.” Inspired by Vivekananda’s philosophies, Trine published his best selling spiritual self-help book In Tune With the Infinite the following year: “The great fundamental principles of all religions are the same.”
So popular was Vivekananda’s message of peace and love that he began training disciples—including his eventual successor, Abhedandanda—to spread his teachings around the world. By November of 1894, the headquarters of the Vedanta Society opened at 228 W 39th Street in New York City, where “hungry souls” could take the first raja yoga classes offered in America and listen to Vivekananda espouse his inclusive, universalist philosophy. Five years later, a Pasadena branch opened in a charming Victorian home which still exists today — “The bedroom where Vivekananda slept is now a sanctuary for meditation.”
One devotee, a Miss Josephine Macleod—who financed Vivekananda’s publications and travel—described in her memoirs a typical evening with the Swami at Ridgely Manor, an 82-acre estate in the New York countryside where Vivekananda lived and lectured:
He pointed out the hidden meanings of ancient Hindu myths and epics, of their bearing on modern life, of the ideals they depicted, the lessons they taught…Or he spoke prophetically of social problems, of “the mixture of races,” and of “the great tumults, the terrible tumults” through which the next state of things must be reached.
In the early Spring of 1900, Vivekananda stood before a gathering of The Shakespeare Club, where the first Vedanta Society meetings were held in Pasadena. It would be his final lecture tour. His health was failing, and already Abhedananda was poised to take his place. But today, Vivekananda wanted to give a speech on Buddhistic India:
There is something in caste, so far as it means blood; such a thing as heredity there is, certainly. Now try to [understand] — why do you not mix your blood with the Negroes, the American Indians? Nature will not allow you. Nature does not allow you to mix your blood with them. There is the unconscious working that saves the race. That was the Aryan’s caste. Mind you, I do not say that they are not equal to us. They must have the same privileges and advantages, and everything; but we know that if certain races mix up, they become degraded.
With all the strict caste of the Aryan and non-Aryan, that wall was thrown down to a certain extent, and hordes of these outlandish races came in with all their queer superstitions and manners and customs…And that was degrading to the whole race.
And then the blood mixed; [intermarriages] took place with all sorts of unmixable races. The race fell down. But, in the long run it proved good. If you mix up with Negroes and American Indians, surely this civilization will fall down. But hundreds and hundreds years after, out of this mixture will come a gigantic race once more, stronger than ever; but, for the time being, you have to suffer.
The Hindus believe…there was only one civilized race: the Aryan. Until he gives his blood, no other race can be civilized. No teaching will do. The Aryan gives his blood to a race, and then it becomes civilized.
The Swamiji elaborated on what he believed endangered Aryan civilization:
And you are trying today what you call socialism! …Freedom is the watchword. Be free! A free body, a free mind, and a free soul! That is what I have felt all my life; I would rather be doing evil freely than be doing good under bondage.
Says professor Dorothy M. Figueroa in her book Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority through Myths of Identity:
…Swami Vivekananda’s vision of Hinduism…depicted a glorious past and a degenerate present. His prescription for the future consisted of reactivating past Aryan glory by empowering Hindus through the rediscovery of their superior spirituality…It was this vision of the Aryan’s intrinsic ascendancy over others (both foreign and domestic) that came to fuel nationalist rhetoric. This racialist script was exported to the West by Swami Vivekananda.
…In Vivekananda’s schema, caste becomes necessary insofar as it prevents the destruction of blood heredity…Vivekananda viewed caste as one of the greatest social institutions the Lord gave men, and [believed it] “is destined to lead Indian humanity to its goal.” Exactly what Vivekananda envisioned to be India’s goal was clear.
Prevention of race chaos appears as the central message Vivekananda believed India could impart to the world. Just as Sanskrit provided the linguistic solution for humanity, the Aryans provide the racial solution with the caste system.
…Vivekananda presented the Aryan ideal as an alternative to the decadent West. India will lead the world in the regeneration of man-the-brute into man-the-god. For the colonized, this message was, indeed, uplifting. However, behind the holy man, lies a disingenuous will to power: the determination to maintain traditional structures of power and domination.
…Effective reform or actual amelioration of the disenfranchised was never an issue…Without caste reform, any romanticization of the downtrodden is foreclosed. What remains is a glorification of an India in which the Brahmin descendants of Aryans are the only real beneficiaries.
(See [S1E10] Ârya for more on the connections between Sanskrit, Aryan race theory, caste, and class.)
Meanwhile, author Mark Singleton argues in Yoga Body, that: “Yoga as it is popularly practiced today owes a greater debt to modern Indian nationalism…than it does to any ancient Indian yoga tradition.” He continues:
In the late nineteenth century (and throughout the twentieth), individuals, like states, became “transfixed with the idea of improving their own bodies and were often equally obsessed with the vision of improving the collective national or racial body.” This eugenic compulsion often grew from a perceived imbalance of “body-mind-soul” that had occurred from an over-development of the intellect at the expense of the spiritual and physical aspects of man.
…Vivekananda was outspoken in his belief in the necessity of physical culture for Indian youth and at times insisted on its sequential priority over mental and spiritual development, such as in the following dialogue recorded in 1897:
Swamiji: How will you struggle with the mind unless the physique be strong? Do you deserve to be called men any longer — the highest evolution in the world? . . . First build up your physique. Then only you can get control over the mind. . . . “This Self is not to be attained by the weak” (Katha Upanishad , 1. ii. 23). (Vivekananda 1992 [1897]: 155)
It is difficult to see how Vivekananda extracts his translation from this Upanisad, but his message is clear: the development of bodily strength is of the utmost importance for the spiritual evolution of the modern Hindu…Vivekananda, along with associates like Sarala Debi and Sister Nivedita, was instrumental in pushing forward the physical culture agenda among the nationalist youth of the country, and it is clear to see that a close relationship obtained from the beginning between the ideological milieu in which modern yoga had its genesis and the militant nationalist physical culture movement.
In Dharma for the State, author Jyotirmaya Sharma takes a closer look at what Vivekananda’s universalism really meant:
According to Sharma, the swamiji’s regard for pluralism and universalism was skin-deep, as evidenced in the way he dismissed Islam, among other religions, as a “sect” in no way equal to Hinduism. These views, Sharma observes, may have been airbrushed from the received record, but they have nonetheless shaped Hindu nationalism for over a century. More importantly, these views are being built into a growing Hindu majoritarianism within the Indian Republic, whose secular leaders always talk softly but nevertheless carry a big stick pointed at excessive “communalist politics” of a certain kind. The swami’s preference for the Vedanta, Sharma suggests, was at least partly driven by a collective need for a version of “soft” Hinduism that could legitimately claim to subsume other religions, including India’s Islamic traditions. So viewed, Vivekanandian philosophy becomes a blueprint for state-sanctioned Hindu imperialism with a friendly human face.
Dorothy M. Figueroa concludes that Vivekananda’s nationalist and spiritual rhetoric could “portray the common people as possessing unparalleled love, power of incessant work, and manifestation of strength,” but points out that he most often made these claims “at a safe distance, among Californian and Chicagoan society matrons.” It proved to be a successful formula.
A 1912 edition of The Courier-Journal describes a phenomenon taking place across the United States in which waves of Americans, primarily women—and, more specifically, rich Protestant women—were deserting their families and giving all their money to “wise men of the East.”
Miss Sarah Farmer, a New England spinster, gave her entire fortune to found at Green Acre a summer school of Hindu philosophy, and ended her little journey into mysticism by being incarcerated by her friends in a lunatic asylum.
In Chicago, Miss Aloise Reuss was taken from the Hindu Mazdaznan Temple of the Sun so violently insane that she had to be taken to the Illinois Insane Asylum.
Miss Ellis Shaw, of Lowell, Mass., became so obsessed with the teachings of the Hindu mystics that she had to be restrained by law from giving away all her property to the Sun Worshippers.
…In New York, the center of these activities is the Vedanta Society, with headquarters at 135 W Eightieth Street…Swami Abhedananda, not unknown to fame, is the founder.
…The beauty of Vedanta, according to its advocates, is that it asks no man to give up his religion, whether he be Christian, Jew, or Pagan.
Although the article doesn’t get all its facts straight (the Mazdaznan Temple, which will be explored in a future episode, was “inspired” by Zoroastrianism and formally unrelated to the Vedanta Society) it seems clear that the exotic mysticisms of Eastern religions, as presented to a Western audience, were enchanting to a certain class of educated, wealthy, bored women otherwise confined to stifling home lives. Because of the universalist approach, following a guru meant there was no need to abandon or convert religions. In fact, one preacher stated: “Vedanta…makes clear the real spirit of Christ’s religion.”
The gurus’ messages were a seductive mix of love and devotion to god (any god!) that filled a void left empty by marriage, the church, and domesticity. On the surface, there was nothing to indicate the deeper and more complex messages of race, class, and nationalism that were key to understanding the “wisdom of the ancients.” (A Dr. Archer L. Hood, president of the American School of Vibration, suggested that the “religious ecstasy” experienced by these women may have been the result of “actinic rays” produced by Halley’s Comet.) And that intensity of feeling, of purpose and belonging, could be strong enough to drive some people mad, or give away their life savings—or even, perhaps, build a doomsday compound in the remote canyons of Santa Monica (see [S1E7] A Lifetime of Study).
A Mrs. Harriet Beauley of New York described how her relationship with Abhedananda developed:
“I first met the Swami in January of 1907. It was when I was a nervous wreck following the death of my mother. I went to the Vedanta Society house and met the Swami. He talked beautifully and I grew more interested. I became a convert to the faith of the cult. They helped me mentally and physically. The Swami was most kind and my husband and I invited him dinner at our apartments in the Marie Antoinette. After many refusals he came. He charmed my husband as he did myself.
At dinner the Swami told us that he was going to London and Paris for some months. My husband suggested I take the ocean trip on the Adriatic with him, so I could get the benefit of 10 days of uninterrupted talk.
When we reached London, I was a firm believer and in love with the Swami as a priest and as a man…Perhaps it was indiscreet when I rented an apartment in Clarence Gate Garden, London, of eight rooms and took the Swami into my home. All the followers of Vedanta in London gathered with us and spread the truth. I observed the conventions of society by having with me at all times a companion, sometimes paying as much as $10 a week to her.
…A certain woman—a ‘Chinese Blonde,’ too fat for her height, ignorant and not even prepossessing in appearance, captivated the Swami when we returned to this city.
…I accused the Swami of having fallen from his high estate and he threatened me with violence, even pulling me about by the arm. I was broken hearted, but there was nothing more I could do. I tried to prevent it, but the god had fallen.”
Mrs. Beauley’s revelation of Abhedananda’s “human frailty” caused cracks within the Vedanta Society, but members held on. A follow-up article in The Chicago Tribune states:
Even though he has been deserted by so ardent a disciple as Mrs. Beauley, they think [the Vedanta Society] will still continue through the wonders and powers of the Jnana yoga, the ultima Thule of Vedantic teaching.
…“He was working Raja yoga,” said one who had heard the swami lecture. “This yoga develops the psychic powers, teaches the cure of disease by mental power, and enables the performance of all the miracles for which the yogis of India have been noted for centuries.”
This won’t be the last time we meet unlucky-in-love Mrs. Beauley, but even as she and others like her were devoting their attention and financial resources to embracing the mystics and holy men arriving on North American shores, a larger group of Indians was also immigrating to the New World. They weren’t brahmins or priests. They weren’t gurus or swamis. They promised no secret wisdom or psychic powers.
They were Sikh day laborers. And they received a very different reception.
After the death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and the collapse of the Sikh Empire (see [S1E12] Shadow War: Part 2), Britain began recruiting Sikhs into the British army. Thousands of Sikh troops fought for Britain across dozens of armed conflicts around Asia—most famously in the Battle of Saragarhi, where 21 Sikhs fought to their death against an army of 12,0000 Afghan tribesmen—so, when Queen Victoria held her Diamond Jubilee in the Summer of 1897, crowds cheered as the Indian Cavalry marched past.
It was as part of the Diamond Jubilee delegation that Sikh army regiments first toured Vancouver, British Columbia. A second group were welcomed in 1902 to celebrate the coronation of King Edward VII. Local newspapers proclaimed: “Turbaned Men Excite Interest: Awe inspiring men from India held the crowds.”
The climate and agriculture of North America’s West Coast appealed to the Indian visitors and, between 1903 and 1908, approximately 6,000 Sikhs from the province of Punjab migrated to Canada, Oregon, Washington, and California. The majority worked for the Western Pacific Railways, while others found employment in agriculture, forestry, and fishing. Adjusted for inflation, they earned anywhere from $30 to $60 a day. Because wages were so low (and immigration laws forbade both women and children under the age of eighteen), they often lived in bunkhouses with twenty or thirty men under one roof. But, “because employers preferred to hire Punjabis due to their work ethic at lower pay, many Caucasians resented their presence...”
(Note: At this time many Sikhs were incorrectly identified by Western newspapers as “Hindu” or “Hindoo”. Learn more about the similarities and differences here.)
A July 1907 edition of The American Journal of Eugenics—which had only recently changed its name from Lucifer the Lightbearer after its editor relocated to an astronomical observatory in California where he claimed to watch Lemurians living on Mt. Shasta—argued under the headline “The Hideous Hindu Menace”:
These dreadful Hindu obsessed fiends are now entering the ports of Seattle and Portland…The putrid Hindu cancer is securing roots and fibers here in the United States. New York is so appalling that all human words are incapable of describing its sex obsession. Here is a distortion of Nature’s laws. These Hindus of whom I am speaking — not the descendants of those mighty men who elaborated the great systems of philosophy, the Vedanta Samkhya and Yoga — have festered in sex debasement so many centuries that, by the law of influence, girls reach puberty at the age of four to six years in many instances. Then incredible horrors begin. They are subjected to the lust of full-grown men fiends.
(see [S1E8] The Planetary Hierarchy and [S1E9] Light Bringer for more on Lemurians and Lucifer)
Amidst advertisements for vegetarian magazines, phrenological symposiums, and a monthly publication by the Mazdaznan Temple, The American Journal of Eugenics implored its readers: “Who is wise enough to save the Caucasian race? Now is the time for a leader to appear.”
That August, The Vancouver Trade and Labour Council formed The Asiatic Exclusion League (AEL)—based on a similar organization in San Francisco—whose aim was “keeping Oriental immigrants out of British Columbia.” Says the BC Labour Heritage Centre:
At its formation…the Vancouver Asiatic Exclusion League determined it would organize a parade and rally in the City, and set to work. It set its sights on expelling all ‘Orientals’ including Japanese, Chinese and South Asians.
The first attack occurred less than a month later.
In the early morning hours of September 5, 1907 in Bellingham, Washington, “a mob of half a thousand white men” descended on the bunkhouse colony of Sikh day laborers where “the blacks” worked and slept. The mob battered down the doors of buildings, chasing the Sikhs into the streets or nearby creek.
By the end of the day, the entire colony was cleared. Six Sikhs were hospitalized, 400 hid in the local jail, and the remaining 150—“beaten, hungry, naked and half-clothed”—were already fleeing toward Canada to seek the protections Queen Victoria had promised them in 1858 (see [S1E12] Shadow War: Part 2).
But there was little refuge to be found on either side of the border:
As the South Asian refugees arrived at Vancouver, AEL organizers forged ahead with a plan to parade through the streets, carrying signs and flags calling for “A White Canada”. On September 7, 1907 while a huge crowd listened to speeches outside City Hall, Lieutenant Governor James Dunsmuir was hung in effigy — not as a ruthless anti-union coal mine owner — but because he refused to give assent to legislation that would further restrict Asiatic immigration to BC. A capitalist to the core, Dunsmuir exploited immigrant labour to keep his profits high.
The parade and rally turned violent. Thousands of Asiatic Exclusion League supporters and members of the general public rioted, marching into Chinatown destroying homes and businesses. Windows are smashed, stores looted, and many Chinese people are beaten. After venting their fury on Chinatown, the crowd headed to Powell Street to attack Japanese citizens. However, the Japanese community was forewarned and the crowd is beaten back.
(Back in Bellingham, Chinese immigrants had already been assaulted and expelled in 1885: “The thoroughly frightened Chinamen left the town as ordered, and their going was celebrated with a grand torchlight parade.”)
The following month, the homes of Sikh laborers in Everett, Washington were ransacked in the middle of the night. Police “doubted” any money had actually been stolen, as the Sikhs claimed.
The next day, seven men who “resented the presence of the Hindus” in the lumber camps of Boring, Oregon, murdered a Sikh man named Binghwan Singh. His brother requested Binghwan’s body be cremated along the banks of the Willamette River “to consign the soul of the dead man to the gods.” The coroner denied his request.
Weeks later, The Tacoma Daily Ledger reported that:
There was no danger of white laborers being thrown out of employment by Hindu laborers. There is plenty of work there for everybody, but it was the principle of being looked upon as a rendezvous for Asiatics against which the people of Bellingham objected…[The Hindus] had a quarter all by themselves and did not bother white people so very much, but Bellingham had an eye to the future and took steps before it was too late.
By November 13, 1907, the entire population of over 600 Sikhs had evacuated Bellingham for the supposed safety of the Canadian border. The News Tribune argued that this was for the best:
Wherever Hindus or other Orientals gather in the Northwest, race riots are inevitable…Set this down to unreasoning prejudice, to hatred of competition with cheap labor, to whatever you like, the fact still remains that the Oriental is not wanted and will not be tolerated…The Hindu has no rights here. He is protected by no treaty; he is a British subject. If he belongs anywhere in America, he belongs in Canada. This being generally understood, he is most apt to be the subject of a mob’s ill treatment. That may be evidence of our lack of civilization, as some foreigners persist in declaring, but it is a concrete fact. Attempts to change it by appeals to reason or by any other method are not going to succeed.
Two months later, in January 1908, a white mob lead by “prominent businessmen” working for the Southern Pacific railroad broke down the doors of Sikh homes in Marysville, California and “compelled them to get out.” The police, who were “powerless to prevent the mob from carrying out its plans,” stated they had “grave doubts” about the Sikhs’ reports that, in addition to being forcibly driven out of town, they were also robbed of $1927 (or $63,000 today) in cash. No one disputed the violent attack on the Sikhs, but it was argued that the wealthy mob leaders would never stoop to robbery— “…they simply considered the Hindus an undesirable set of people as neighbors…” Two members of the mob were promptly arrested, found not guilty, and let go.
While the Sikhs filed an official complaint with the British embassy in San Francisco, both the American and Canadian governments came up with solutions to the problem—not the problem of white mobs attacking Asian immigrants, but the problem of the immigrants themselves: both countries passed increasingly draconian laws meant to stop the arrival of non-white immigrants in North America.
But even while lower-class blue collar workers were told to resent non-white immigrants for taking their jobs, the upper-class business owners continued to want low cost labor that the immigrants could provide. And even as lower-class non-white immigrants were being beaten and chased from their own homes, the upper-class white wives of the business owners continued to invite high-caste mystics and gurus into theirs.
That same year, 1908, three events took place to reinforce the idea that “this was in fact a race and class issue” that would continue to have ramifications around the world for the next century to come:
Akhay Kumar Mozumdar—the theosophically inspired preacher who ran The Society for Christian Yoga in Spokane, Washington—began his campaign for United States citizenship in which he would successfully argue five years later that, “The high-caste Hindus (Brahmins) always consider themselves to be members of the Aryan race.” He was Brahmin, therefore Aryan, therefore White, and therefore became the first Indian allowed to be a U.S. citizen. The decision caused an uproar, and a ten year legal battle.
Abhedananda, “head of the Brahmanic order,” opened a branch of the Vedanta Society in Paris with funding and support from Mrs. Robert Van Wyck, wife of the first mayor of New York City. Membership skewed heavily towards American-born daughters of wealthy industrialists who married European royalty—Countess Plater (Poland), Princess Eristoff (Russia), and Countess Castelmenardo (Italy), to name just a few. During the Swami’s absences, it was reported, Van Wyck would be acting head of the Parisian cult. It was here where Harriet Beauley fell in love with Abhedananda.
The Sikhs—having been robbed, beaten, and killed by their American and Canadian neighbors, then ignored and abandoned by the British government they’d fought for—regathered in new communities and began construction of the first North American gurdwara (“place of worship”) at 1866 West 2nd Avenue in what is now present day Vancouver, BC. Similar gurdwaras slowly appeared along the West Coast, becoming meeting places for The Khalsa Diwan Society, which “served as a meeting ground for those seeking to build support for the Indian freedom struggle, especially those involved with the Ghadar Party.” In acts of increasingly open defiance, the Sikhs burned their British army uniforms and medals in public bonfires.
The name “Ghadar” may have been a mystery to the majority of Americans who heard it, but for those familiar with Punjabi or Urdu, the double meaning was clear: Mutiny. Revolution.
In the late summer of 1915, Aleister Crowley—poet, occultist, and black magician—took a break from his work with George Sylvester Viereck’s New York-based German propaganda magazines, The Fatherland and The International, to travel West across the United States. (see [S1E11] Shadow War: Part 1)
Upon arriving in Chicago, Crowley immediately visited the home of Paul Carus, the “science of religion” speaker who first hosted Vivekananda at the World Parliament of Religions. In the years since, Carus had done very well for himself. Having emigrated to the United States from Germany in 1884, he promptly married Mary Hegeler, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist who owned the largest zinc smelting operation in the United States. Shortly after their marriage, Paul and Mary moved into the 16,000 square foot Hegeler family mansion situated adjacent to the zinc mine, and for the next three decades operated The Open Court Publishing Company out of its basement.
Although mostly forgotten today, just as Vivekananda brought neo-Hinduism and Yoga to the West, Carus is perhaps singlehandedly responsible for popularizing Zen Buddhism—albeit, his own universalist interpretation. Over the course of his lifetime, Carus published more than 75 books and 1500 articles with titles like The Gospel of the Buddha, which by the time of Crowley’s visit “was in its thirteenth English edition, with versions having appeared in Japanese, Chinese, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Urdu.” Through this interest, Carus was befriended by D.T. Suzuki—nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1963—who lived in Carus’ Illinois mansion for eleven years and worked for three dollars a week on The Open Court’s payroll. Pop culturally, the West’s entire understanding of Zen comes filtered through the translations of Carus and Suzuki:
Readers today may find nothing unusual in Suzuki’s belief in the essential unity of all religions, his presentation of Zen as a tradition fully consonant with modern science, and his insistence that Zen eschews ritualism, sacerdotalism, and belief in supernatural forces. Yet all of this has little in common with classical Zen — a monastic tradition that emphasized ritual mastery and the protective powers of a host of supernatural beings. If the claim that Zen traditionally involved the ritual worship of divine beings seems odd to Western practitioners today, it is due in large part to the enduring influence of Suzuki and his intellectual heirs. And Suzuki’s Zen in turn owes a great deal to the thought of Paul Carus.
In 1936, Suzuki visited with relatives in the German town of Rüdesheim am Rhein, and wrote a series of articles about his experience:
My relative has been living in this city for a long time and has many acquaintances. When he meets his acquaintances they exchange greetings by giving the Nazi salute and saying, “Heil Hitler!” When I asked my relative the reason for his celebration of Hitler, what he told me is briefly as follows:
Before Hitler arrived on the scene there were many political parties in Germany. As a consequence, political affairs were unable to find a direction and citizens became more and more depressed as time went on. They were at their wit’s end, wondering what was to become of them. Hitler, however, was able to unite the people and lead us with a definite goal in mind. Thus we have never experienced a greater sense of relief than we have today. While we don’t know much about politics, we have never enjoyed greater peace of mind than we have now. Isn’t that reason enough to praise Hitler?
This is what my relative told me, and I agree this is quite reasonable.
Changing the topic to Hitler’s expulsion of the Jews, it appears there are considerable grounds for this, too. While it is a very cruel policy, when looked at from the point of view of the current and future happiness of the entire German people, it may be that, for a time, some sort of extreme action is necessary in order to preserve the nation. From the point of view of the German people, the situation facing their country is that critical.
Acting as editor-in-chief with Suzuki at his side, Carus used The Open Court to promote his ideas about religion, science, philosophy, and other matters he deemed to be of importance:
According to research by author and professor Richard Spence, Crowley reported that Carus “received me royally and showed me around the city.” Spence argues that by this time Carus, like Crowley, was involved with the Germans’ Propaganda Kabinett, specifically working with the pro-German Harvard philosophy professor, Hugo Munsterberg, who had mentored Viereck and encouraged him to start publishing The Fatherland. Additionally, Spence ties Carus to the German nobleman, Alvo von Alvensleben, who allegedly used Chicago as a money laundering base for Franz von Papen to funnel cash to saboteurs on the West Coast.
During that summer of 1915, as mysterious explosions at munitions plants continued unabated across the country (see [S1E10] Shadow War: Part 1), and while von Papen secretly arranged shipments of weapons to members of Ghadar in California, Carus published Crowley’s opinion piece, “The New Parsifal,” comparing German Kaiser Wilhelm to the Messiah—in the same issue of The Open Court in which Carus argued that Britain’s decision to oppose “Teutonic civilization” was a “grievous mistake” and criticized the Americans’ manufacture of the very weapons that the Germans were smuggling:
“Made in America” now comes to mean the production of machines for human destruction, indeed those of the most barbaric and death-dealing efficiency—and all the while we are posing as the sponsors of a higher humanity and peace among men!”
But his visit with Paul Carus was just one stop on Crowley’s American tour. By November 5, 1915, Crowley ended up at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco for what he called in his notes, “a semi-private gathering.” Coincidentally, the very next day, nearly all of the leaders of the German spy ring who employed Crowley and Viereck back in New York were gathered at The Palace Hotel to celebrate the wedding of Baron Wilhelm von Brincken, military attaché of the German Embassy in San Francisco, to Miss Milo Abercrombie, “the most beautiful girl in California” and stepdaughter of George McGowan, the powerful lawyer and politician.
A little more than a month after the wedding, McGowan would find himself acting as defense attorney for his new son-in-law when informants confessed to receiving payments from von Brincken for explosive devices “small enough to go into a thermos bottle.” Somehow, it seemed law enforcement had been tracking the Germans’ every move.
Following his stay in San Francisco, Crowley traveled south to San Diego, where he attempted yet another mysterious rendezvous—this time without success. “Bearing a message of Pure Love,” Crowley drove out to Katherine Tingley’s Raja Yoga Academy and Temple of Peace in Point Loma (see [S1E3] Cults of California), but Tingley wanted nothing to do with him and had him thrown off the property. Crowley actually had little interest in Tingley herself and found Point Loma to have a “nauseating atmosphere”—so why was he there? His real motive may have had less to do with Tingley, and more to do with her bitter rival: Annie Besant.
Shortly after the World Parliament of Religions, Besant and her co-vice president, William Quan Judge had a falling out when Judge accused Besant of being under the influence of “Black Magicians” who, he said were:
“…manipulating the [Theosophical] Society’s Brahmin members, either consciously or unconsciously, to nullify the great work which [Blavatsky] began…for the Western Nations [that would be accomplished by] influencing certain Brahmans in India through race-pride and ambition…”
Believing Besant was being controlled by orthodox Brahmins, Judge broke off from her group and created the American Section of the Theosophical Society. When he died not long after the split occurred, Katherine Tingley took over and started Point Loma. The two groups remained at odds ever since. Given Crowley’s very public writings defending the Germans (not to mention his general reputation as a practitioner of “sex magick”), it’s hardly surprising that Tingley turned him away.
She may have changed her mind had she known about Crowley’s own dislike of Besant; he had, by this point, battled with Besant for several years over control of secret societies in Europe, and called her declaration that Krishnamurti was the Coming Messiah (see [S1E5] Maitreya), “the most impudent blasphemy and filthy fraud that has ever been attempted in the history of the world.” In 1917 he wrote a novel, Moonchild, in which a character based on Besant headed an evil group known as The Black Lodge. But it turns out there was a lot Tingley didn’t know about Crowley.
Unknown to her, unknown to Carus, unknown to von Papen, and unknown to von Brincken:
Aleister Crowley, Wickedest Man in the World, was a British spy.
Commenting later on the article he’d published through Carus in which he’d praised the Kaiser as a Messiah, Crowley wrote:
I must have been beautifully drunk to write that. I don’t remember anything about it — but I must have been much more than drunk when I sent it to Paul Carus. I suppose I had become acclimatized to the idea that all serious and eminent people are perfectly brainless. He swallowed it, hook, line and sinker… I had always known Paul Carus for an ass since he published The Gospel of Buddah, but I had no idea that he was such an ass!
Explored at length in Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult, Richard Spence discovered the truth about Crowley’s role in the files of the U.S. Army’s old Military Intelligence Division:
“Aleister Crowley was an employee of the British government…in this country on official business of which the British Consul, New York City has full cognizance.”
…Besant was an outspoken proponent of Indian freedom and was suspected in London of using her movement to provide aid and comfort to “seditionists.” Crowley’s visit was an opportunity to see if any threads of the Hindu-German conspiracy led to Point Loma or whether Tingley’s hostility toward Besant could be exploited to serve the Empire.
Like Blavatsky, when Besant arrived in India both she and the Theosophical Society became involved with Indian nationalists fighting to free themselves of British control. And like Blavatsky, who worked with Russian militarists to damage the British Empire in the 1880's, Besant found herself wittingly or unwittingly aligned with the German government during WWI hoping to do the same—for the Russians and Germans, freeing the people of India was of secondary concern, if at all.
Millions of people, with vastly different motivations and aspirations, were caught in the middle of this Great Game between warring nations. The Sikh day laborers who joined Ghadar would find out that revolution and freedom didn’t go hand in hand:
Ghadar sought to overcome the British, not imperialism or nationalism. Ghadar’s opposition to British rule, while completely understandable as a counter to great-nation chauvinism (such as that of the United States, Canada, and Britain), nonetheless remained within nationalist confines, and therefore included all of nationalism’s inherent inequalities.
Even the Theosophical Society, headed almost entirely by British citizens living in India, felt the conflicting impulses of the struggle. A 1913 edition of the American Theosophist notes: “We are confronted with the alternatives of self-sacrifice or revolution.” But, it continues, there was hope:
The situation is wholly unique. We must either drift into intellectual and social anarchy or all these forces must be whipped into line; they must be united into one harmonious movement for the realization of Theosophical—and that means Christian—ideals. And now a new idea comes to the front—that of a Great Teacher or Leader who shall extract the kernel from all these different schools; who shall point out in language which cannot be misunderstood, the simple underlying principles of all and their practical application; who shall possess the force, the genius, the personal magnetism which will make him heard, respected and, if possible, obeyed.
Next on: [S1E14] Murphy Ranch — Shadow War: Part 4
As WWI comes to a close and players in the Shadow War move to 1930’s Los Angeles, a magnetic figure gains power to unite Aryans around the world behind a common cause.
