Did The 'I AM' Cult Influence Star Wars?
A reposted essay on popular culture history
Reposted from one year ago. Regular posting will resume next week.
“They project at their meetings what they call the destructive ‘BLUE LIGHTNING,’ analogous it seems to the ‘DEATH RAY’ of the pulp magazines,” Gerald Bryan wrote of the ‘I AM Activity’ in 1940. His book Psychic Dictatorship in America remains the only standalone volume of historical research on the strange, new religion that swept the United States during the Great Depression. Walk past “an I AM Temple or ‘Sanctuary,’” Bryan wrote, and the reader “would be very likely to hear reverberating out upon the street the loud shouting of the following decree: ‘STOP! STOP! STOP! YOU HAVE NO POWER! YOUR DAY IS DONE! BE THOU DISSOLVED AND CONSUMED BY THE POWER OF LIGHT!’”
My essay on the cult and its founders is linked below. In this essay, my focus is how Guy and Edna Ballard refashioned the Ascended Masters of H.P Blavatsky’s Theosophy into an all-American cult of the prosperity gospel at the cusp of the Second World War — and unintentionally set the stage for the emergence of flying saucer cults in the postwar USA.
But as I composed this essay, I glimpsed an unexpected pattern to the belief-system of the Ballards, who might have been perfect villains in any cinematic adventure franchise set during the 1930s: think Indiana Jones and the I AM Activity. Consider the following passage in Bryan’s book describing the ritual behavior of the Ballards as they toured the country in their flashy Chryslers, recruiting believers and dodging Guy’s creditors in Chicago. Imagine what Steven Spielberg and George Lucas could make with this material:
At night, following their class meetings, the Ballards and their staff many times would congregate in secret conclave in Mrs. Ballard's hotel apartment. They formed a circle around the room, with, so far as possible, a man and a woman alternating. In the center of the circle would be a stand or table upon which had been placed a chalice or a gilded goblet containing a few odd gold trinkets and coins — put there no doubt for some magical reason. Upon this chalice would be placed a list of names. It was a "black list” — names of people they wanted destroyed! Then still standing in the circle around the magic urn with its list of persons to be destroyed, they would raise their hands and thrust them rhythmically back and forth as though pushing something away from themselves. This was supposed to represent the destroying or cutting power of Archangel Michael's "Sword of the Blue Flame." Calling on their various "gods” and “goddesses,” they would then issue the decree: "STIFFEN ON THE CROSS OF BLUE FLAME ALL THOSE WHO OPPOSE THIS LIGHT!” Then again pushing their hands back and forth with appropriate gestures toward the “death list,” they would call aloud the names of FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT and ELEANOR ROOSEVELT, and issue the decree to “BLAST! BLAST! BLAST! THEIR CARCASSES FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH FOREVER!”
Guy Ballard’s “Sword of the Blue Flame” was a recurring motif of his “classes.” Ballard told his “students” that the Archangel Michael was steadily removing black magicians from the United States with his sword of blue flames. “Since more than six hundred thousand people are calling for Me,” Michael announced through the mediumship of Ballard in 1939, “they shall wield the Sword of Blue Flame in their PHYSICAL HANDS.”
Of course, the sword and blue flames were invisible. “Mentally, picture it in your hands,” Ballard commanded a class in Philadelphia. His ‘Minute Men,’ a social organization of male I AM cultists that drew directly on William Pelley’s pro-Nazi Silver Shirts for inspiration, had a marching song “with drums and bugle” in which they supposedly wielded “Archangel Michael’s ‘Sword of the Blue Flame’ in their physical hands” while “hurling forth their decrees.” For example, “Fill every office in our Land with Almighty Asended Master FRIENDS of the Light!” This ‘decree’ supposedly had the power to alter reality, making the I AM Activity a forerunner of today’s ‘manifesting’ movement.
What the Ballards wanted to manfest in the United States was a “New Government” — one that they would lead, naturally, by speaking for the Ascended Masters. This was Bryan’s chief concern. Publishing his work just a few months after Guy Ballard died, Bryan worried that the cult had attracted “those who are mentally unbalanced, psychopathic, or perhaps criminally insane. Fired with the ardor of being able to wield Archangel Michael’s ‘Sword of Blue Flame’ in their ‘physical hands,’ there is no telling what such individuals might do physically against any so-called vicious person; for when their decrees of death do not work on the mental plane of being, the tendency is to go over to the physical.” Any Hollywood writer could easily raise the stakes of their script to world-altering, if they were inspired by this history. “When such a mob spirit as this gets loose in America under the guise of religion and patriotism, does it not constitute a danger and a menace?”
The body of Guy Ballard notably failed to “ascend” to Venus as he was supposed to. Edna had his corpse removed from the family home and cremated on the third day, announcing that he had been transfigured by Saint Germain at a secret location using an “Atomic Accelerator” instead. The promise of ascension was very important to the I AM believers. “I have touched Saint Germain, just as I touch you now,” Edna told one newspaper reporter. “His flesh is something like ours, but it is alabaster white, and a light flows from it ... The blood of Ascended Beings turns to gold when they leave the mortal sphere.” Or as Yoda would later put it, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.” Living beings could interact with these astral projections, which are capable of flying through space instantaneously. The essence, or individual indentity of the believer, remained intact as a spirit after death. This was how Saint Germain had supposedly ascended to Venus in the 18th century.
As the saying goes, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and three times is enemy action. Something is clearly going on here.
The most likely explanation for this resonance between the Ballards’ spiritual programming and the force powers of the Star Wars universe is that the I AM Activity belongs to the pastiche of the historical 1930s America that inspired George Lucas. He was born after that decade, but it has fundamentally shaped his imaginarium all the same. Force lightning, light sabers, and force ghosts, and even the concept of ‘the force’ itself may simply be inevitable elements of a creative consciousness that looks to the decade of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials for inspiration. To borrow the term coined by Claude Lévy-Strauss for the phenomenon of humans constructing spirituality out of cultural materials around them, the Ballards form a cinematic-historical bricolage with these other sources of inspiration for Lucas. Through cultural transmission, he may have been entirely unaware of the Ballards prior to writing the first scripts that became Star Wars even while transmitting these elements himself.
I have no evidence yet that George Lucas consciously and intentionally drew on the Ballards. Not being a pop culture historian, I am working outside my accustomed sphere of knowledge. However, it is my understanding that Lucas did take some inspiration from eastern religious, occult, and mythic sources — in other words, the same cultural bricolage found in Christian Theosophy which has become the basis of present-day ‘New Age’ religion. I am aware that Lucas had a close friendship with director and fellow UCLA graduate Carroll Ballard, but he does not seem to be related to Guy and Edna. So I am leaving the comments to this post open, which I hardly ever do, in hopes that some kind stranger who knows much more about George Lucas than I do will point to something I have missed.
interesting!!