HIGHER THAN TRUTH
[S1E8] MURPHY RANCH — THE PLANETARY HIERARCHY
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.
“We are telepathic communicators…who prefer to work behind the scenes and acknowledge our position only when it serves the purposes of the Planetary Hierarchy during this time of transition.”
—Norman Stevens, 1975
While wrapping up the previous episode, I hesitated whether to include the above quote by Norman Stevens — written in the distant year of 1975 — since these early episodes still focus on the first half of the 1930’s. But the urban legend itself implies that whoever the owners of Murphy Ranch were, “they got away,” so it should come as no surprise that the real owners did, in fact, continue to live their lives after their time in Rustic Canyon was complete.
In the previous episode, [S1E7] A Lifetime of Study, I visited Murphy Ranch myself and explored the enormity of the project—the roads and buildings and power plants, etc. My intention there was to try to understand if the property was, like Norman and Winona’s daughter said, just “a beautiful ranch”, a weekend retreat for a rich couple and their children to get away from the hustle and bustle of 1930’s Los Angeles. My conclusion, though hardly definitive, was that the property was too big, too planned, too hidden, and “felt” like it had a purpose beyond what Toni claimed.
So again and again, the question comes down to motivation. What prompted this massively expensive project in the midst of the Great Depression and what, if anything, might it have to do with supposed Nazis, the end of the world, and an alleged metaphysical cult leader named Herr Schmidt? Even as we continue to examine the time period leading up to and during the Murphy Ranch years—roughly 1931 to 1949—Norman’s statement four decades later can, I think, give us some insight into the property’s true purpose:
“It is our intention to present the results of a lifetime of study and experiments to accomplish certain needed changes…which are preliminary to the Return of the Christ.
…The cyclic crisis coming at the end of the 2,500 and 25,000 year cycle, based on all current data, may be offset by the efforts of Hierarchy itself which was the case in the 30’s, or by an unexpected response by humanity as in 1942.”
It appears, then, that Norman devoted the entirety of his life to “study and experiments” which he hoped would bring about the right conditions to enable the return of Christ on Earth. And, he fully expected this “crisis called Armageddon” to occur in the 1930’s, but it was somehow stopped by either a group he refers to as the “Hierarchy” or, the “unexpected response by humanity in 1942.” What could humanity have possibly done that year to collectively offset the apocalypse?
I offer one hypothesis:
Churchill and US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been working together for some time when the United States entered the war in 1941. Roosevelt believed a British victory over the Axis was in America’s best interests, while Churchill believed such a victory was not possible without American assistance. In 1940, the two leaders worked to find ways for America to help Britain hold on without violating its neutrality. The following year they met off the coast of Newfoundland to begin planning, in sweeping terms, the postwar world. Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin was a late addition to the Big Three. On New Year’s Day 1942, representatives of all three nations signed the United Nations Declaration, pledging to join hands to defeat the Axis powers.
But to understand how this seemingly incomprehensible grab-bag-word-salad—Telepathic Communicators! Planetary Hierarchy! The Return of Christ! Cyclical Crisis! Armageddon! Axis! and Allies!—possibly fits together into anything resembling a coherent ideology, we’re going to have to better understand not just the belief system that drove Norman and Winona to spend their fortune on a multi-million dollar doomsday bunker in the 1930’s, but how that belief system evolved and mutated over the decades of their lives—and continues to evolve and mutate today.
It would be easy and unfair, I think, to dismiss their actions as an isolated incident spurred by inconsequential or “kooky” occult beliefs unrelated to bigger events in the 20th Century. Norman and Winona weren’t hiding from civilization in a dirt-floored shack; they were well-educated, wealthy, and connected members of the community, working and socializing with the most powerful people in Los Angeles. And as we shall see, if the story of Murphy Ranch is true, far from representing the forgotten remnants of an irrelevant movement that one researcher calls—
…so strange, indeed bizarre, that most Americans who know anything about it dismiss it outright and relegate those who believe it to the quaint and quirky fringes of the nation’s religious subcultures…
—the story of Murphy Ranch represents the movement’s birth.
To understand what any of this means we must, of course, discuss the history of the universe and the spiritual evolution of mankind.
Helena Blavatsky’s influential 1888 magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, opens with the following explanation:
The aim of this work may be thus stated: to show that Nature is not “a
fortuitous concurrence of atoms,” and to assign to man his rightful place in the scheme of the Universe; to rescue from degradation the archaic truths which are the basis of all religions; and to uncover, to some extent, the fundamental unity from which they all spring; finally, to show that the occult side of Nature has never been approached by the Science of modern civilization. If this is in any degree accomplished, the writer is content.
Very simply put, Blavatsky posited that history, the universe, the planets, and humanity are connected in cycles of evolution guided with intention and purpose. That said, it’s difficult to overstate just how complex this system—which she expounds upon over 1,400 pages using a combination of Buddhist, esoteric, and scientific terms—really is. She claimed to have learned of this “hidden knowledge” from Masters of the Ancient Wisdom who she met while living in Tibet and who later telepathically guided her creation of The Secret Doctrine.
The first volume, Cosmogenesis, explains Blavatsky’s unique interpretation of Hindu concepts about the origin and evolution of the universe as it goes through four descending and ascending passages of time called Yugas, each lasting thousands and millions of years. According to Blavatsky, the universe was set in motion by an Absolute Divine Principle (“God”, essentially) physically represented by the Sun, which emanates energy to create all life:
Now this Parabrahmam [i.e. the Absolute Divine Principle] which exists before all things in the cosmos is the one essence from which starts into existence a centre of energy . . . the Logos. This Logos may be called in the language of old writers either Eswara or Pratyagatma or Sabda Brahmam. It is called the Verbum or “the Word” by the Christians…
Life and the universe are manifestations of the Solar Logos, and as a result, every single atom carries with it the consciousness of “God.” All life and all things are connected and evolving in cycles, in a guided process. Blavatsky believed humanity was living in one of those cycles, the Kali Yuga, a “black age” that was coming to an end:
It began 3,102 years B.C. at the moment of Krishna’s death, and the first cycle of 5,000 years will end between the years 1897 and 1898.
As noted in [S1E5] Maitreya, Blavatsky also referred to this time period as:
“One of the several remarkable cycles” coming to a close in the end of the nineteenth century…“the Messianic cycle of the Samaritan (also Kabalistic) Jews of the man connected with Pisces.”
These cyclical shifts were, according to Blavatsky, directly tied to the physical and spiritual evolution of the planets themselves, with each planet simultaneously existing on seven different planes of existence—called Globes—which can vary from the lowest level of dense materiality to the highest level of astral ethereality. (You can imagine this, I think, like a person who has a physical body that contains an intelligence and soul; the outer body has the potential to change in the same way that the inner self might change through education or enlightenment.) Each planet is in a different stage of its evolutionary path, and as they transition from one plane of existence to the next, the lifeforms on that plane disintegrate and life begins again in the next. Once all seven stages have been completed—called a Chain—the full process repeats seven times. Forty-nine globes and seven chains. Got that?
This same system applies to humanity. The Secret Doctrine is, in many ways, a direct response to Darwin’s theories, and offers an “intelligent design” approach that connects physical attributes with spiritual enlightenment in a system where human evolution can be divided into seven root races (like chains), each of which is then divided into seven sub-races (like globes). According to Blavatsky, present day humanity is the fifth sub-race of the fifth root race.
In the second volume of The Secret Doctrine, Anthropogenesis, the First Root Race was “as ethereal as ours is material” and reproduced like amoeba. Little is known of the First Root Race or its sub-races, but theosophist A.E. Powell, in a 1930 work attempting to simplify The Secret Doctrine, explains:
When the time was ripe for the second Race to appear, the nature-spirits built round [them] denser particles of matter, forming a kind of stiffer shell on the outside, and “the outer of the first became the inner of the second.”
The Second Root Race lived on the mythical northern continent of Hyperborea, and they were called Kimpurushas, the children of the Sun and the Moon:
Their colour was a golden-yellow, sometimes glowing almost into orange, sometimes of palest lemon shades, and these gorgeously-hued forms, filamentous, often tree-like in shape, some approaching animal types, others semi-human in outline…
The Third Root Race lived on a sunken land bridge in the Indian Ocean called Lemuria, which was first hypothesized in 1864 by the zoologist Philip Sclater, who hoped to explain the presence of lemur bones in both Madagascar and India. By 1870, biologist Ernst Haeckel proposed Lemuria to have been the cradle of civilization, and although the later discovery of plate tectonics disproved Lemuria’s existence, in Blavatsky’s telling it is in the Third Root Race Lemurians where we begin to see identifiable human characteristics among the sub-races—though the earliest were “sweat born” or “egg born” and lived 164 million years ago. Blavatsky says:
The race is the Negroid, and some of its descendants still exist, though by this time much mixed with offshoots of later races.
By the time the Lemurians reached their third sub-race—which were pink, yellow, and orange—distinctly human bodily forms were created for their “egos” to inhabit, yet something strange happened:
The orange group of egos; on seeing the bodies offered to them, refused to enter, not out of any wickedness, but from sheer pride, disdaining the unattractive forms, and also perhaps from their ancient hatred of sexual unions.
The karma of the refusal of the orange group of egos to take their due place in the work of peopling the world was that, later on, they were forced into incarnation and had to take even lower and coarser bodies…They thus became a backward race, cunning but not good; and passed through many unpleasant experiences. They diminished in number by constantly coming into collision with the common order, and being hammered, largely by suffering, into ordinary folk.
…By nature they are “turbulent and aggressive, independent and separative, prone to discontent and eager for change.” They are the unscrupulous among the kings of finance, statesmen like Bismarck, conquerors like Napoleon. But they are gradually disappearing, for they have learned many bitter lessons.
Those who are wanting in heart, who are always fighting, always opposing everything everywhere, on general principles, must ultimately be beaten into shape; a very few may end in black magic, but the steady pressure is too great for the majority.
The pink and yellow groups, however, took the physical bodies offered them and evolved into the seventh and final sub-race of Lemurians:
Degraded remnants of the third Race may be recognised also in the aborigines of Australia, the Andaman Islanders, some hill tribes of India, the Tierra-del-Fuegians, the Bushmen of Africa, and some other savage tribes. The entities now inhabiting these bodies must have belonged to the animal kingdom of this chain.
There existed in Lemuria a Lodge of Initiation, but it was not primarily for the benefit of the Lemurians…[but] for those entities who had come from Venus and who, while helping to direct evolution on the earth, were at the same time pursuing their own evolutionary development.
The transition to the Fourth Root Race is considered to be one of the most important moments in our evolutionary cycle, because it is when The Lords of the Flame arrived from Venus, an event which Norman Stevens described in 1975:
Evolution is progressive adaptation to environment and it is also a movement of consciousness upward in the scale of being. It is response to the will of the Logos, of God. It is the purpose behind the Plan. It is the movement from multiplicity toward unity. It is God’s drawing of all his creation back to Himself.
In His vast cosmos there are many methods, processes and forms of evolution. We are concerned with one of them. Twenty-one million years ago, inconceivably long ago to our short lives, a successful experiment was completed in an earlier cycle on the planet Venus. A portion of the humanity of that cycle, having submitted and cooperated in a forcing process, attained a degree far beyond what was considered normal for that planetary cycle. They had gained all that was to be gained and were masters of all that planet could offer. Their perception was becoming cosmic and they began to participate in the larger purpose and activity of the Solar System. They considered the planet Earth which was, in a solar sense, a backward planet: its evolution had not gone beyond the animal stage, and Logoic purpose required stimulation of animal man.
A group of forty-nine Venusians volunteered to assist in the application of the forcing process to Earth, and a vanguard crossed space to this planet in physical form; the Hierarchy was founded here on Earth by these forty-nine pioneers.
In short, Norman believed that spiritually advanced Angels from Venus—lead by Sanat Kumâra, the Head of the Hierarchy—imbued The Fourth Root Race with a divine spark that “stimulated the growth of our brain” and helped humanity make a great leap in the evolutionary process.
Like the Lemurians, the Fourth Root Race lived on a mythical sunken continent, Atlantis, and within theosophical lore much more is known about the evolution of their sub-races. That evolution, however, isn’t a straight line, and there is much overlap and intermingling.
The first Atlantean sub-race were called the Rmoahal:
The race was at first mahogany black in colour. They were about 1O or 12 feet in height, their stature dwindling gradually through the centuries. They ultimately migrated to the southern shores of Atlantis, where they fought with the Lemurian sixth and seventh sub-races. Some of them settled down and inter-married with the black Lemurians.
The second Atlantean sub-race were the Tlavati:
They were of a red-brown colour, powerful and hardy, but not quite so tall as the Rmoahals, whom they drove further north. They settled chiefly in mountainous districts approximately in an area which later became the island of Poseidonis.
…At a later period they occupied the south of South America, so that the Patagonians probably had remote Tlavalti ancestry. Remains of this sub-race, as of the Rmoahals, have been found in the quaternary strata of Central Europe, and the “Cro-Magnon” man may be taken as an average specimen of the race in its decadence…The only fairly pure-blooded specimens of the race now existing are some of the brown Indians of South America.
The third Atlantean sub-race were the Toltec:
The people were a rich red-brown, redder or more copper coloured than the Tlavatli. This sub-race was a magnificent development, the most splendid and imperial of the Atlantean peoples, ruling the whole of Atlantis for thousands of years in great material power and glory.
…After about 1OO,OOO years of this golden age, degeneracy set in. Many of the tributary kings, as well as many of the priests and people, began to use their faculties and powers for personal aggrandisement, the attainment of wealth and authority, the humiliation and ruin of their enemies, and, in general, for all kinds of selfish and malevolent purposes. This led to “sorcery,” and to the breaking of their connection with the Occult Hierarchy.
During this time the Atlanteans developed warfare and eventually evolved into the fourth sub-race, the Turanians:
In the period 800,000 to 200,000 years ago, they lived further south, occupying the country where Morocco and Algeria now are. They occupied also both the east and west coasts of the Central Asian sea. Some moved still further east, the inland Chinese being to-day the nearest approximation to them. A small branch of them became the brutal Aztecs, who conquered and replaced the last great empire that the Toltecs raised.
…They were thus turbulent, lawless, brutal and cruel. At some periods regiments of women took part in their wars.
Being continually defeated in war by the Toltecs, who greatly outnumbered them, and desiring increase of population, every man was by law relieved from the direct burden of maintaining his family, the State regarding all children as its property, and therefore providing for them. This led to increase of the birth-rate, and disregard of the marriage ceremony. The ties of family life and parental love were destroyed, and the scheme was then given up, having proved a failure. They tried also, and abandoned, other socialistic solutions of economic problems.
This lead to the development of the fifth sub-race, The Semites:
They were turbulent and discontented, always at war with their neighbours, especially with the growing power of the sub-race that followed them—the Akkadians.
During the period 800,000 to 200,000 years ago, they spread both west and east: west to what is now the United States of America; thus accounting for the Semitic type found in some of the Indian races; and east to the northern shores of the continent which combined all there was then of Europe, Africa and Asia. The ancient Egyptians, and other neighbouring nations, were to some extent modified by Semitic blood. With the exception of the Jews, the only representatives of comparatively unmixed blood at the present day are the lightly coloured Kabyles of the Algerian mountains.
The enemies of the Semites made up what was to be the sixth sub-race, The Akkadians:
They fought with the Semites both on land and sea, very considerable fleets being used on both sides. About 1OO,OOO years ago they finally vanquished the Semites, setting up a dynasty in the old Semite capital, and ruling the country wisely for several hundred years. They were a great trading, sea-going and colonising people.
They were law-abiding, lived in settled communities, and produced an oligarchical form of government. Like Sparta, in modern times, they had a dual system of two kings reigning in one city. They made great advances both in astronomy and in astrology.
The seventh sub-race were the Mongolians, and about them A.E. Powell wrote in 1930:
…[it] seems to have been the only one which had no touch with the mother-continent…The Mongolian is the last Atlantean sub-race in full force to-day, and has, in fact, not yet reached its zenith, the Japanese nation having history still to give to the world.
And then humanity took its next great leap forward to the Fifth Root Race: The Aryans.
In Blavatsky’s system, there’s an orderly way by which one root race advances from the last:
The general principle seems to be that a Root-Race is developed from the numerically-corresponding sub-race of the preceding Root-Race. Thus, the fourth Root-Race should, by the rule, have been developed from the fourth sub-race of the third Root-Race; the fifth Root-Race was developed from the fifth sub-race of the fourth Root-Race; whilst the sixth Root-Race will be developed from the sixth sub-race of the fifth Root-Race.
And so, the Aryan Root Race was developed from “the fifth sub-race of the fourth Root-Race”—the Semites. About 100,000 years ago the Hierarchy specially selected 1,200 people to serve as the nucleus of the next race:
The tribes resulting from the segregation travelled to the southern shores of the central Asian sea, where the first great Âryan kingdom was established. The Semites, although the second of the four later “yellow” sub-races, were comparatively white in complexion.
The first Aryan sub-race was the Hindu:
The general characteristics of the Race, and its civilisation, well repay study. Beginning, as it did, with hundreds of thousands of years of Atlantean civilisation behind it, and having spent thousands of years under its own Manu in Arabia and northern Asia, it was in no sense primitive.
The whole population could read and write; all work was considered honourable, no matter what it was, being done for the Manu. Especially cultivated was the feeling of the brotherhood of the Race, a wonderful fundamental equality; and a mutual courtesy.
The second Aryan sub-race was the Arabian.
From the nucleus group, the Hierarchy proceeded to “Aryanize” a colony of people on the northern tip of Arabian peninsula, and under Hierarchy leadership the Arab group prospered, developing irrigation, cultivated land, and healthy crops. In this way, with Hierarchy oversight, the Arabs “absorbed tribe after tribe, usually without bloodshed and with their own consent.”
The third sub-race was the Iranian:
They were great traders; merchants, manufacturers, being much more settled than the second sub-race, and with more definite religious ideas. The best specimens of the Parsis of the present day give a fair idea of their appearance. The present inhabitants of Persia have still much of their blood in them, though largely commingled with that of their Arab conquerors. The Kurds; the Afghâns and the Baluchis are also mainly descended from them, though with various admixtures.
The fourth sub-race was the Keltic:
[The Hierarchy] was now striving to develop certain new characteristics, to awaken imagination and artistic sensibility, to encourage poetry, oratory, painting and music, and the people who responded to this could not do agricultural or other hard manual labour.
…As time went on the sub-race grew somewhat conceited; looking upon the rest of the kingdom as what we should now call “Philistine.” Their vanity was justified, for they were extraordinarily handsome, cultured and refined in their tastes, and with much artistic talent.
Which brings us, finally, to the fifth sub-race, the Teutonic, about which A.E. Powell writes in 1930:
The fifth sub-race was strong and vigorous, much larger than the fourth, and was tall, fair, long-headed, with light hair and blue eyes. The character also was very different from that of the Kelts; it was dogged and persevering, with little of the dash of the fourth. Its virtues were not of the artistic type, but rather of the business and commonsense sort, blunt and truthful, plainspoken and straightforward, caring for the concrete rather than for the poetic.
[The fifth sub-race] gave us…the Germanic, those called especially the Teutons spreading over Southern Germany, others going north and becoming the Goths and Scandinavians.
…The fifth sub-race has still to build, like its predecessors, its World-Empire, though this has already begun. The blunder of the eighteenth century, which tore away the North American Colonies from Great Britain, may be remedied by a reunion; in some form or other, of the severed halves. It seems possible; also, that a similar alliance with Germany, the remaining great section of the Teutonic sub-race; would weld the whole sufficiently into one to make a federated Empire. For part of the “Plan” very shortly to be realised is the drawing together of the various branches of the Teutonic sub-race.
…At the present time a magnificent opportunity is being offered to the Anglo-Saxon race; to the whole Teutonic sub-race, if only it will sink its rivalries and jealousies and take it.
Each of the sub-races of the Aryan Root Race were created by the Hierarchy from the Original Semites, yet a curious event occurred as the Arabs were being “Aryanized” during the formation of the second sub-race.
While the Hierarchy peacefully controlled the northern half of the Arabian peninsula, according to Blavatsky, the population on the southern half were ruled by a ruthless religious fanatic who opposed the Hierarchy, which:
…had intended to Âryanise [them], but the idea that they were a chosen people was held by them so strongly that they rejected his overtures. It will be recollected that it was from these people that the Jews were descended…
The karma of the rejection has left the Jews ever since a race apart, the same egos incarnating again and again in that line instead of passing from race to race in the usual way. It is possible that some unconscious perception of this difference may account for the treatment the Jews have received from other races; it may also be partially due to the fact that because of the tradition of that original selection by the [Hierarchy] they have always had a feeling somewhat similar to that of the Brâhmanas that they are superior to the rest of the world.
Originally a nomad tribe like the Bedouin Arabs, they lived largely by robbery, their deity being confessedly but a tribal god who fought against the gods of other nations and was perpetually vaunting himself as superior to them. His demand for blood-sacrifices is a criterion as to his status.
The carrying away into captivity to Babylon of a number of these turbulent people was the best thing that could have happened to them, for then for the first time they came into contact with a highly civilised race, and heard of a supreme God.
They tried to identify their own tribal deity with this Supreme Being; and so caused much confusion. When they returned from captivity, they re-wrote their scriptures and put into them a certain admixture of the higher ideas about a supreme deity.
The Founder of Christianity having taken possession of a Jewish body, and all the earlier teachers of the religion also being Jews, there was brought into Christianity a very mixed conception of a god full of irreconcilable characteristics. If the Christians could have left alone the primitive Jewish conceptions, and taken the teachings of the Christ, who spoke of the Deity as the Father in Heaven, many of the troubles of the Christian Church would have been avoided.
So, in this understanding of history, although the Aryan Root Race was created from the Original Semites, the Jews themselves were never “Aryanized” because they rejected the benevolent Hierarchy in favor of their own ruthless, blood thirsty god—and they forever remain separate.
By now we know that at the time Norman Stevens joined the Theosophical Society, there already existed the expectation that the future sixth sub-race was coming into existence—specifically in California. In his 1975 work, Norman explains that his lifetime of experimentation is intended, just like the Venusians, to “force” an evolutionary jump on earth that will coincide with the reappearance of The Christ. But how? Norman writes:
Armageddon began in 1932…
[We] function as an intermediate group between Humanity and Hierarchy…[Our techniques] enable disciples to link with Hierarchy, and with the Christ, and with the Logos, and the planet itself in a constructive way in this period of Changeover. Not only is this necessary for the planet, but each disciple represents another channel of energy, lightening the planet, thus, coming closer and closer to the point where the Christ can reappear openly.
This is the project that we have successfully followed all our lives…Any gain at all in the direction of this linkage and the weaving of the thread, or the bridge or the Antakharana for the planet as a whole, will save days of real suffering for humanity…This is our main objective in calling attention to the very real existence of a group of people scattered all over the planet, not an organization but an organism, which has lightened the planet and has the capacity to take over in all departments and rid the planet of the many evils which have come to the surface at this time for their final destruction.
Who might the blonde haired, blue eyed Germanic Aryan Fifth Sub-Race have been? And who were the “many evils” standing in their path? Find out next, on:
