'Psychic Dictatorship': The New Age Cult That Worships The American Flag

And spawned the early UFO cults

The Accredited Messengers of the Comte de Saint Germain, Guy Warren ‘Godfré Ray King’ and Edna Anne Wheeler ‘Lotus Ray King’ Ballard

Guy Ballard, “a man dressed in dazzling white,” and his wife Edna, always similarly immaculate, abhorred the colors black, which represented evil, and also red, which was the color of communism.¹ Ardent patriots, they saw no contradiction whatosever in making Old Glory an object of religious worship. When the Comte de Saint Germain came into his destined glory as spiritual and temporal master of the United States through the mediumship of the Ballards, they assured their followers, he would change the red stripes on the American flag into gold. The Ballards liked gold, and also diamonds, wearing a great deal of both in a show of prosperity every time they appeared in public. Gold was quite important to Guy, who had sold many shares in a “Gold Lake” that he claimed to have found in Colorado. Indeed, during the time he was dodging those Chicago creditors, Guy Ballard claimed the Comte de Saint Germain had appeared to him on Mount Shasta in California. The mystic Asended Master then produced a gold coin out of thin air before whisking Guy Ballard away, via teleportation, to view subterranean chambers filled with gold.

America was mired in the Great Depression. The Ballards’ “mix of nationalism, Christian imagery, and utopian millennialism under the guidance of divine Ascended Masters constituted a powerful discourse during the 1930s as many people encountered significant financial problems, which may account for the popularity the I AM movement gained,” says the Handbook of the Theosophical Current.² It was at core a prosperity cult, repurposing the so-called ‘New Thought’ Christianity of Emma Curtis Hopkins and her student Annie Rix Militz. The Ballards made a great deal of “affirmations” and “decrees,” a spiritual schema of New Thought in which “everyone is divine and perfect in essence, and therefore always in a condition of perfect health, and furthermore that the mind is causative, which means that humans themselves through misapprehension and false thoughts construct bad health and ill conditions.” The Law of Success, a 1925 bestseller by Napoleon Hill purporting to teach the secrets of powerful businessmen, has also been identified as an influence on the Ballards. Their cult clearly fits within a long American tradition of hucksterism that continued with Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking, then more recently The Secret and the ‘manifesting’ movement. “We can alter our false self-perception by affirming or decreeing how things are in the divine reality, and thus change the negative condition in which we think we are at present,” changing reality through the power of words. To say “I am unhappy” is to create unhappiness. To say “I am happy!”, even though we are lying, is to create happiness. One can therefore affirm and decree their way to wealth, a message that surely resonated with many Americans in that depressed decade.

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Joseph Smith And The Galactic Order (Audio)

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“It shows, in these days when panaceas parade the land and people reach out for straws to save themselves, how American ideals of freedom and independence are being supplanted by a slavish dependence upon odd sorts of deliverances,” wrote their greatest critic, Gerald Bryan. His 1940 book Psychic Dictatorship in America remains the only volume of historical biography of the Ballards. Styling themselves ‘Godfré Ray and Lotus Ray King’, and claiming to be the reincarnations of George Washington and Joan of Arc, respectively, Guy and Edna Ballard set out to corner the spiritual market for alternative religion in America. In 1935, they announced that “the ‘old occult order had been set aside,’ had become obsolete and even dangerous, and thenceforth, the ‘Saint Germain’ teachings, as put out only by Mr. and Mrs. G. W. Ballard and son Donald, would have charge over the occult destinies of mankind,” Bryan writes. “The result was a sudden and disastrous swing of metaphysical students to the new leadership and the old was left out very much in the metaphysical cold.”

Temporal power was supposed to accompany spiritual authority. As totalitarian movements spiralled the world abroad into war, Bryan thought that “the Ballard cult, too, is really a political movement and that its metaphysics, among other things, is largely engaged in an effort to bring about a weird sort of government in the United States.” Bryan’s book was intended to “reveal subversive psychological influences which are producing widespread mental confusion in the United States, from which some form of political despotism may sprout and jeopardize constitutional principles of Freedom and Liberty on which this nation is founded.” In this respect, the Ballards not only took inspiration from American fascist William Pelley, founder of the anti-Semitic Silver Legion, they actively recruited from, and organized through, the so-called Silver Shirts network in 1934, poaching the organization’s treasurer. Failing to win over Pelley himself, they jettisoned his anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. The plan for a “New Goverment” laid out over that ten-day “class” in 1934 closely resembled the one Pelley had described. In 1929, Pelley wrote “Seven Minutes in Eternity,” seen today as an early literary account of a near-death experience, in American Magazine. In that article, Pelley claimed to have visited heaven through astral projection. In 1930, Ballard claimed that he left his body and also recieved discourses from the Ascended Masters. Clearly, the Ballards considered Pelley something of a model.

The war changed everything. Guy Ballard died before the war began in earnest. When it was over, the public associated occultism with fascism and the personal excesses of Aleister Crowley. Colin Bennet writes that as a result of this image problem, “in the 1950s, interest in occult philosophy, fringe religion, and metaphysics in general was perhaps at its lowest ebb in European history.”³ The United States was also in an oppressive mood. Edna and Donald were subject to criminal fraud trials and revocation of their tax-exempt status until 1953. Donald, who had declared his father belonged in the White House during 1938, distanced himself from the ‘I AM Activity’ in 1957. By that time, American alternative religion had found a new groove. The fusion of Christianity and Theosophy had produced Ascended Masters who now visited earth from Venus in saucer-shaped spacecraft. After two centuries of development as a spiritual idea, the extraterrestrial being was finally manifesting on earth as a physical teacher and savior carried from the literal heavens using technology that was indistinguishable from magic.