The Doom That Came to Dunwich by Richard A Lupoff

Author:Richard A Lupoff [Lupoff, Richard A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Venture Press
Published: 2017-08-07T04:00:00+00:00

DOCUMENTS IN THE CASE OF ELIZABETH AKELEY

Surveillance of the Spiritual Light Brotherhood Church of San Diego was initiated as a result of certain events of the mid-and late 1970s. Great controversy had arisen over the conduct of the followers of the Guru Maharaj-ji, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (the “Hare Krishnas”), the Church of Scientology, and the Unification Church headed by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

These activities were cloaked in the Constitutional shield of “freedom of religion,” and the cults for the most part resisted suggestions of investigation by grand juries or other official bodies.

Even so, the tragic events concerning the People’s Temple of San Francisco aroused government concern which could not be stymied. While debate raged publicly over the question of opening cult records, Federal and local law enforcement agencies covertly entered the field.

It was within this context that interest was aroused concerning the operation of the Spiritual Light Brotherhood, and particularly its leader, the Radiant Mother Elizabeth Akeley.

Outwardly there was nothing secret in the operation of Mother Akeley’s church. The group operated from a building located at the corner of Second Street and Ash in a neighborhood described as “genteel shabby,” midway between the commercial center of San Diego and the city’s tourist — oriented waterfront area.

The building occupied by the Church had been erected originally by a more conventional denomination, but the vicissitudes of shifting population caused the building to be deconsecrated and sold to the Spiritual Light Brotherhood. The new owners, led by their order’s founder and then-leader, the Radiant Father George Goodenough Akeley, clearly marked the building with its new identity.

The headline was changed on the church’s bulletin board, and the symbol of the Spiritual Light Brotherhood, a shining tetrahedron of neon tubing, was erected atop the steeple. A worship service was held each Sunday morning, and a spiritual message service was conducted each Wednesday evening.

In later years, following the death of the Radiant Father in 1970 and the accession to leadership of the Church by Elizabeth Akeley, Church archives were maintained in the form of tape recordings. The Sunday services were apparently a bland amalgam of non-denominational Judeo-Christian teachings, half-baked and quarter-understood Oriental mysticism, and citations from the works of Einstein, Heisenberg, Shklovskii, and Fermi.

Surviving cassettes of the Wednesday message services are similarly innocuous. Congregants were invited to submit questions or requests for messages from deceased relatives. The Radiant Mother accepted a limited number of such requests at each service. The congregants would arrange themselves in a circle and link their fingers in the classic manner of participants in séances. Mother Akeley would enter a trance and proceed to answer the questions or deliver messages from the deceased, “as the spirits moved her.”

Audioanalysis of the tapes of these séances indicates that, while the intonation and accent of the voices varied greatly, from the whines and lisps of small children to the quaverings of the superannuated, and from the softened and westernized pronunciations of native San Diegans to the harsh and barbaric tones of their New Yorker parents, the vocal apparatus was at all times that of Elizabeth Akeley.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.