By Gerald B. Bryan
In this first ten-day class held at Chicago in the summer
of 1934 was a man who innocently, it seems, became the victim of the Ballard
strategy. This man was one of William Dudley Pelley’s faithful workers, whom we
mentioned in the last chapter, a prominent Silver Shirter and treasurer of the
organization. He had read the Ballard book, Unveiled Mysteries, then just out,
and, after some correspondence with its author, went to Chicago to attend this
first ten-day class.
Here was an opportunity for the financially embarrassed
Ballards to really start their movement and get out of their economic doldrums.
This man’s wide experience with the Pelley organization could be used, and his
contact with key Legionnaires throughout the country would be just what they
needed to promote their own religion-patriotic movement. So they did what they
could to swing him their way.
No doubt the former Pelleyite was influenced into
sincerely believing the Ballards had something to give the world. He had
battled hard for Pelley in the court action against him in Asheville, N.C., and
now he was discouraged and somewhat disillusioned as well. The Ballard
metaphysics seemed a heaven compared to what he had gone through in fighting
Pelley’s political battles. The two metaphysical systems were very similar, but
the ideality and beautiful summer land of ease and plenty pictured by the
Ballards in their book intrigued him as nothing else ever had.
Were not the never-failing Ascended Masters in charge of
the new order and not a storm-centered Pelley? They in their divine power and
wisdom would bring in the new Republic. They would bring a heaven on earth.
They would emancipate humanity from the three thieves-disease, poverty, and
death. It would all happen in perfect divine order, without revolution, court
actions, militant Legionnaires, racial hatreds, brown shirts, white shirts,
silver shirts, or any of the storm-troop trappings of a world besieged by human
leaders dominated by fascistic desires and principles.
All this and much more, in effect, had been stated in
that marvelous new book for the New Age — Unveiled Mysteries. Lawyers, doctors,
clergymen, and even hard-headed business men had read it, and, after looking
over the topsy-turvy world, were persuaded in spite of themselves to believe
it. So was Pelley’s treasurer. Was it not a way out of all the mess?
The “Accredited Messengers of the Ascended Masters” lost
no time in their efforts to crystallize these thoughts. In a letter to Pelley’s
treasurer dated September 6, 1934, written and signed in pen and ink by Guy
Ballard himself, the senior messenger says:
“Blessed Brother, I have no right to say this, but I know
it is right to cut yourself completely loose from Pelley in every way.” The
outcome of the matter was the Pelley’s trusted employee became the “Associate
Director of the Saint Germain Activities.” For three months he promoted the
Ballards on the lecture platform in the east until an automobile accident,
which happened when he stepped out of the Ballard car, cut short his usefulness
to “Saint Germain” and his Messengers.
Pelley in a special bulletin to his people describing his
difficulties with the courts of North Carolina, which he graphically entitled
“The Battle of Asheville,” commented on the defection of his former supporter
in this wise:
“One real shadow cast over the proceedings was the word
received on the fourth day of the trial that our former Treasurer, who had quit
the Silver Shirt work called Liberation people together to sell them instead on
the work of the Ballard King Group in Chicago, had suddenly met with a terrible
auto accident in Baltimore and been rushed to the Johns Hopkins Hospital with a
fractured skull and compound fracture of the left leg.”
“Strange, strange indeed,” very meaningly commented the
Silver Shirt chief, “are the denouement of events in the lives of those who
take up the Silver-shirt work and then turn back.” And then he goes on to
recount the misfortunes of other workers who had deserted the cause.
Again the parallelism between the two movements, and
their methods of holding their people, is inescapable. But the Ballards and their
“Masters,” as we shall find, have gone much further than the Pelley in putting
the fear of disaster into the minds of those who “turn back.”
As might be expected, considering this former treasurer’s
influence among the Pelleyites, the first “I AM” audiences were recruited
largely from members of the Silver Shirts organization. And so the Saint
Germain “Mighty I AM” movement got well under way right from the start. “Saint
Germain: had started to build his movement on the foundation of another one, just
as he had planned.
Through the efforts of the former Silver Shirter the
first out-of-town class was held in Philadelphia during the early part of
October, 1934. The Ballards chose not to use their real names, for reasons
which will later be clear, and so they were introduced as Mr. and Mrs. Godfre
Ray King, “Accredited Messengers of the Ascended master Saint Germain.”
This was the real start of the movement, although the
foundation for it had been made in 1932, and even a year a two before when Edna
Ballard was holding secret classes while her husband was “traveling in the Far
East,” or for other reasons (to be discovered) only occasionally showing up at
the classes.
From 1934 on, beginning at Philadelphia, the Mighty I AM
movement began to take hold of the imagination and fancy of metaphysical and
patriotic people. Starting with thirty persons the first night, the attendance
grew until toward the end of the ten days a hundred and fifty were in
attendance.
People wanted the things that Mr. and Mrs. Godfre Ray
King so authoritatively promised, and they were willing to pay for them. At the
close of the class the Ballards and their Associate Director divided 300.00
between them as clear profit.
It was sadly needed, for despite the enormous stores of
gold assertedly held by Saint Germain in his private retreat in the mountain,
the Ballards were in most straightened financial circumstances. They made no
secret of the fact that they even used their rent money due on their modest
Chicago bungalow to pay their railroad fare to Philadelphia to start their
movement.
Saint Germain with his discourses was most liberal, but
with his gold he was most penurious. Despite the fact that her assertedly had
gold nuggets, coins, and “Spanish gold lost at sea,” all neatly stored away in
a secret retreat in the mountain, his own Accredited Messengers had to beg,
borrow, and bargain to get out this “Ascended Master” gentle-mans’s own books.
Not one cent of it came from the stored wealth of this modern Croesus. It came
from the pocketbooks of the “Beloved Students” in dimes and dollars and gold,
for the audiences were requested in the early days not to put copper pennies
into the collection plate. Gold and not copper was to be the symbol and god of
this cult.
From Philadelphia the Godfre Ray Kings went to New York,
then to Boston. In both places they stirred the psychic waters to some degree
with their claims and promises. By the time these lectures were over, the
expectant students in Philadelphia were clamoring for more “Ascended Master
Miracles.” These miracles, of course, were only on paper, as it were, but they
were accepted by the Beloved Ones on a sort of Psychic promissory note.
So a return engagement was staged in the City of
Brotherly Love, with similar successes for the Ray Kings, but without the
promised miracles for the Beloved Students.
And before a month was scarcely up, the hurrying New
Yorkers were calling for another ten-day class, This Saint Germain graciously
agreed to, but again it was without benefit of miracles.
The great Mighty I AM movement was now well under way,
both financially and metaphysically speaking. But in those early days it was
only a dim shadow of its coming grandeur, only a side show compared to the
later five ring performance which swept on from city to city luring the unsuspecting
with psychic pink lemonade and other sure-fire circus ballyhoo.
Like most road shows the Ballard extravaganza followed in
the wake of the seasons. In the winter it was found in sunny California or
Florida, with, however, the Golden State winning out most of the time. In the
spring and fall it traveled to favored eastern cities. In the hot summer months
it lingered near the cool breezes of the pacific. “Saint Germain,” the director
of the show and the one responsible for its itinerary, has always been most
sensitive to the physical comforts of his Messengers.
Fresh from these early successes on the Eastern Coast,
the two Kings and their son Donald moved southward, stopping over for a ten-day
class at out Nations’s capital during the early part of January, 1935.
It must have been with strange feelings of personal
possession that the Ballards parked their newly acquired Ford car in political
Washington. Here, allegedly, was the scene of the political labors of their
mysterious Comte de St. Germain in his endeavors to bring about his “New
Government” in America. He had promised his “Friends of Long Ago” —the growing
“I AM” family— they would have a part in it. And surely his own “Accredited
Messengers,” would not exactly be forgotten in the new dispensation.
Indeed, Guy Ballard, so we are informed, had held a very
high office during a former incarnation in this very city of Washington, and
had a name to which all Americans, including little school children, pay special
reverence on stated occasions. We shall a little later tell all about this.
So here was Ballard, his wife and son again back in the
city of his past achievements. And right at his elbow was the mighty Saint
Germain and a whole legion of “Ascended Masters.”
After this little sojourn at the American capital,
Ballard and his family moved on for further fields to conquer, but left a
promise to return to this center of the Nation’s life with more power of the
“Light Rays” than before.
Their design was to take in the solid South and bring it
under “Ascended Master” domination. But Circumstance is ever the maker and
breaker of empire, and their day was not exactly to break with full glory in
the South.
The tragic accident to their Associate Director, which
occurred on the night of their last lecture in Washington, intervened to check
their fast-building Ascended Master empire.
As this man stepped out of the Ballard car, he was hit by
a fast-moving automobile which came tearing along in the early morning hours of
January 13, 1935, and this faithful servant of the Ballards, one whom Saint
Germain frequently called his “pal,” lay maimed and apparently dying in the
roadway.
For months he was totally incapacitated for any further
use either to Saint Germain, who had promised faithfully to protect him from
any harm, or to the Ballards who had guaranteed him the protection of the
entire Cosmic Host. However, apparently not having any faith in their own
powers of healing or those of their Master, they wired a physical-plane mental
healer in a nearby state for help, and left their friend and Associate Director
in a critical condition in the hands of the surgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital
in Baltimore.
With recovery came gradual disillusionment for this man.
He wrote us in 1936, shortly after we had published the first brochure exposing
some of the hoax of this cult. We are indebted to him for supplying documents
and information concerning the early beginnings of this movement. Below are a
few excerpts from his correspondence at that time:
“You may be interested in knowing that I am the poor Sap
who found the Ballards stranded out in Chicago, and thinking they really had
something that would benefit humanity, I took them out and started them on
their mad conquest.
“I took them to Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and
Washington; and after finishing at Washington and leaving there, I was hit by
an auto, thrown a hundred feet and then run over. I was terribly mangled, my
head being terribly fractured and my left leg broken. . . .
“I was driving their car. . . . They gave out that my accident
happened because I wasn’t in the circle of Light with which they had surrounded
the car; yet, later on, in St. Petersburg while Ballard, with Don driving, was
in the car, they had an accident. The car was so demolished they had to get a
new car and Ballard couldn’t finish the classes. I was told he had a rib or two
broken. . . .
“I surely should like to see them stopped from their
lying and deceiving. They told it here in Philadelphia that the real _____ [naming
himself] died in the hospital and the present _____ [himself ] now walking
around is another entity occupying this body!
“I had no business to tie up with such people. It is a
terrible thing to me and has preyed terribly on my mind and my soul for
releasing and starting the terrible thing which they represent.”
After the accident to this man, the three
divinely-appointed Messengers turned their Ford car southward and continued
doubtlessly in a none-too-happy frame of mind toward the sunny climes of
Florida. They passed through Richmond during a blinding snowstorm with Mrs.
Ballard fighting a throat cold which she had acquired during the two closing
days of the Washington class. At last they reached West Palm Beach for their scheduled
ten-day class, but the South was not so easily taken in as the North,
financially or metaphysically, causing Mr. Ballard to write: “The Love Gifts
were less in West Palm Beach than usual.”
It was in Miami, however, that the Messengers met with the
most provoking circumstances. The Ballard contact-man there, a former Silver
Shirter, was delegated to make the arrangements for the usual ten-day class,
hire a good hall, and do the other things which good lecturers like to have
well done.
But the hall selected was not very satisfactory. In fact,
Mr. Ballard wrote to a friend on February 7th in his own handwriting saying:
“The hall he got here isn’t fit for a dog fight, let alone an Ascended Master
Activity.”
It seems that Saint Germain, who attends so well to more
important matters, not only let his own Messengers down in the matter of a
lecture hall, but other matters as well, for on March 13th Messenger Ballard,
who promises his students absolute mastery over circumstances, wrote: “You will
never know the forces we have been pitted against since we left Washington.”
What some of these “forces” were will now be told.
It appears the Ballard contact-man in Miami had come to
the conclusion that despite the Accredited Messengers’ claims and vaunted power
over circumstances, they were just like other ordinary people — subject to
little provoking happenings as well as to tragic events. He found that Mrs.
Ballard was suffering from a cold, that daddy Ballard had a temper when things
didn’t go right, that son Donald could use on occasions un-Ascended Master
invectives, that their Associate Director had just had a tragic automobile
accident in the service of the Ascended Masters, and that Saint Germain himself
was conspicuous by his continued and unexplained absence at the hall and
elsewhere.
He forthwith decided that the whole thing was a hoax and
concluded he might as well play this little game of “Saint Germain” himself. So
one night he got down to the hall early before the crowds had arrived,
padlocked the door and put a sign on it reading:
“CLOSED BY ORDER OF
SAINT GERMAIN!”
Mr. Ballard in describing this tragic little incident in
a letter dated February 12, said:
“He is a fiend, the most vicious I have met, and don’t
anybody try to tell me he is not. On the door in typewriting, read, ‘Closed by
Saint Germain’s Order,’ showing he was trying to assume my Authority with Saint
Germain. That is Insanity.”
We learn here that instead of Saint Germain having
authority over his own messenger, Messenger Ballard has authority over his own
Master — a queer reversal of the time-honored relationship, giving the
suspicion that the high and mighty Saint Germain is nothing more than Ballard’s
man Friday.
Such incidents as related were but some of the forces
against which Ballard said they had been pitted since leaving Washington, as we
shall see, proving that “Whom the Ascended Master loveth he chasteneth.”
Under the instruction of Saint Germain himself, they were
told to arrange classes at St. Petersburg, but as this all-knowing Ascended
Master from the Seventh Octave of Light did not know that this saintly old city
exacts a $500 lecture fee for itinerant lecturers, which was not forthcoming
from his gold reserves at his secret mountain retreat, the idea of lecturing there
wasn’t exactly feasible even for Saint Germain’s Accredited Messengers.
His Messengers, therefore, had to arrange for their class
at Pass-a Grille, a fishing town about twelve miles from St. Petersburg, which
did not exact a cover charge to this feast of the Mighty I AM.
But here new tragedy struck out of the blue. Messenger
Ballard had told the good Florida people about his marvelous protection, that
nothing could hurt him, and the Magic Presence manuscript had told of his body
of “Immortal Endurance.” Mrs. Ballard was holding the fort at the lecture hall
in Pass-a-Grille waiting for her husband and son to show up so that the meeting
could begin. Minutes passed, then hours, and not even Saint Germain, who knows
all the secret agreements of European diplomats and the sublime mysteries of
the universe, divulged the news to the waiting audience that son Donald had
driven their new Ford car into a ditch, and with it Saint Germain’s own senior
Messenger!
Donald, not having a body of immortal endurance, was
uninjured, but Mr. Ballard’s immortal body sustained a couple of broken ribs.
To the faithful, such a thing will doubtless seem
impossible, but we quote from Guy Ballard’s letter written to a friend under
date of April 2, 1935:
“Your beautiful letter received at Pass-a-Grille and I
would have answered it from there but out car turned over and my ribs were
fractured and I am just now catching up my correspondence.” These happenings,
however, did not permanently dampen the Ascended Master ardor of the Accredited
Messengers. The goal was westward toward the peaceful Pacific, to the land of
promise, Southern California, and especially to that favored Los Angeles region
which has ever been the mecca for things metaphysical and unusual.
Saint Germain’s advance agents, mostly disillusioned
Silver Shirters, had been contacted and everything was ripe for the entry of
the Accredited Messengers of Saint Germain into the city of the Angels.
Glowing accounts of these marvelous people had been
spread among the metaphysical elect of Los Angeles, and they in turn had passed
the good news on to their students and friends. No bill boards splashed the
countryside, but the telephonic wires were hot with the news of the
near-arrival of Comte de St. Germain’s Accredited Messengers.
A few of the more prominent metaphysical leaders and
teachers were invited to meet the Messengers privately at their hotel when they
arrived. These private interviews and first classes were largely successful
because of the enthusiastic acclaim for the Messengers by a man of prominence
in the occult field, both here and abroad, whom the Ballards had been fortunate
to secure as their new manager after the unfortunate accident of their former
Associate Director.
At these private interviews and during the first classes
Mrs. Ballard dressed simply and unostentatiously. It was not until the flood
gates of wealth opened up in Los Angeles through the book sales and love gifts
of students that this simplicity changed to the gorgeousness which later has characterized
her every appearance. During these first interviews and classes she spoke with
seeming authority of her close contact with her beloved Master. And while Mr.
Ballard, meek and spiritual looking, let his more expressive wife do most of
the direct selling, the far-away mystic look in his eyes spoke volumes.
This effective and characteristic teamwork put them over
with many of the metaphysical leaders, and, as a result, these Los Angeles
teachers announced to their classes the arrival of the Accredited Messengers of
Comte de St. Germain, “Der Wunderman” of 18th-century Europe. They urged their
students to hear these marvelous people, and some even closed their classes to
have their students attend en masse.
This gesture of friendliness and cooperation, however,
was late regretted by many of these teachers. With chagrin and astonishment
they heard Count St. Germain’s Messengers proclaim to their own hard-earned
students 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!
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.
All is fair, it seems, in love and war and with the
Mighty I AM of the Ballards, tending to prove at least superficially that the
end justifies the means among occult dictators as well as among the political
variety.
(Psychic Dictatorship in America, chapter 4)
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