In the City of the Holy Faith

1951 - The Flaming Sword of Saint Germain

On January 5, 1951, the Santa Fe New Mexican front page carried a banner headline: “ ‘I Am’ Leader Sued Here.” The story involved Hepzibah Powell, a 75 year-old woman bedridden at St. Vincent Hospital, who filed a suit against Edna Ballard, leader of the controversial religious sect known as the Mighty I Am. Mrs. Powell, through her lawyer, Donnan Stephenson, claimed that Ballard had promised to take care of all of Powell’s earthly needs and to protect Powell’s interests in the next world. In return, Powell gave Ballard $9,000 in cash and $3,000 in jewels. But Ballard had refused to pay her hospital bills. Powell, in her lawsuit, asked for her $12,000 back plus $50,000 in punitive damages.

For her part, Ballard issued a statement to the United Press that the lawsuit was nothing more than a smear campaign. The $12,000 was simply a donation to her ministry and she had no obligation to return it. Ballard, who identified herself as president of the St. Germain Foundation, sniffed, “If she (Powell) had brought as much love and blessing into the world as I have, she wouldn’t be in this shape.”

The New Mexican story went on to remind readers that the federal government had indicted Ballard which led to a series of sensational trials during the war years. But the story actually began much earlier.

Sometime in 1930, Edna Ballard learned that her husband, Guy Ballard, was the reincarnation of Jesus. And Moses, Frances Bacon, Buddha, George Washington and nearly every illustrious personage of the last four thousand years of human history. In this life, Guy Ballard was a rather less colorful mining engineer from Newton, Kansas who had married, in 1916, a charming concert harpist named Edna Wheeler. Both shared a deep interest in theosophy, a rather elaborate belief that a group of immortals that had transcended the cycle of reincarnation were guiding human destiny from above. This philosophy was a large and generous one, easily accommodating theories concerning the occult, magic potions, astrology and the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria.

As Guy Ballard tells it, he was climbing California’s Mount Shasta when he became thirsty. He felt a presence behind him and there, on the mountain top, Ballard encountered Le Comte de Saint Germain. The count was a mysterious occultist and magician who took his name from the French village, Saint Germain, in which he resided. The Count was fabulously wealthy, loved jewels and was reputed to converse with the spirits. And he had died in 1784. To Ballard in 1930, however, Saint Germain appeared to be none the worse for it.

Saint Germain offered Ballard a creamy drink which Ballard found wonderfully exhilarating, then he told Ballard an amazing tale. Saint Germain was a member of an elite group of humans known as the Great White Brotherhood, each of whom had undergone multiple reincarnations so successfully that they had “ascended” to become Masters to guide human history. Saint Germain himself had been tasked with leading the human race through the Aryan age of Aquarius, a Seventh Plane of existence, into the light of the Violet Flame. There might also have been something about Atlantis as well. At any rate, Saint Germain required someone to speak for him on earth and so appointed Guy Ballard, his wife Edna (herself the reincarnation of Joan of Arc and Benjamin Franklin) and his son Donald as “Accredited Messengers” of the Ascended Masters.

Ballard began to spread the teachings of Saint Germain first in Chicago, then in Los Angeles through an organization he called the Mighty I AM. (The name is taken from a verse in Exodus which describes Moses encountering a burning bush calling his name. When Moses inquires who it is, the voice of God responds by saying, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’”)

By 1938, Ballard had gathered, some say, more than a million followers who devoured the “decrees” of Saint Germain as revealed to him. These decrees resembled high speed chanting. This constituted the I Am Activity, an amalgamation of Theosophist ideas and various occult notions which proved very popular in California. Eager followers bought books, pamphlets, posters, rings – even a New Age Cold Cream – and otherwise showered the Ballards with “love offerings” in the neighborhood of $3 million (in Depression-era America!), enabling the Accredited Messengers to live a decidedly luxurious lifestyle.

Then, in 1939, Guy Ballard died of heart failure. This was inconvenient as he had often declared his body physically indestructible and preached that he would someday ascend, body and soul, to become a Master himself. His quick-thinking widow, Edna, had the body cremated and told the followers that Ballard had indeed “ascended,” leaving her in charge. As principal Accredited Messenger, Edna Ballard took the name Lotus Ray King

Barely weeks after Guy Ballard’s death, the United States government indicted Edna Ballard and her son, Donald, with mail fraud. Simply put, the Ballards were charged with manufacturing a bogus religion and using it to separate money from the gullible.

The Ballards were convicted in spite of, or perhaps because of Edna’s invocations of the Ascended Masters and the Violet Flame. Donald’s defense fared no better: he claimed that he could make himself invisible at will and that, using his psychic powers, he had sunk several German U-Boats during the war. The conviction was appealed, resulting in a historic Supreme Court decision holding that the truth of a religious belief may not be examined under our Constitution although the sincerity of that belief may be put before a jury. United States v. Ballard, 322 US 78 (1944). Because the trial court allowed inquiry outside the constitutional bounds, the Ballards’ conviction was fatally flawed.

It was a close decision, 5-4, with Justice Robert Jackson’s dissent the most often quoted. Excerpts follow:

I should say the defendants have done just that for which they are indicted. If I might agree to their conviction without creating a precedent, I cheerfully would do so. I can see in their teachings nothing but humbug, untainted by any trace of truth. But that does not dispose of the constitutional question whether misrepresentation of religious experience or belief is prosecutable; it rather emphasizes the danger of such prosecutions....

In the first place, as a matter of either practice or philosophy I do not see how we can separate an issue as to what is believed from considerations as to what is believable. The most convincing proof that one believes his statements is to show that they have been true in his experience. Likewise, that one knowingly falsified is best proved by showing that what he said happened never did happen.

How can the Government prove these persons knew something to be false which it cannot prove to be false? If we try religious sincerity severed from religious verity, we isolate the dispute from the very considerations which in common experience provide its most reliable answer . . .

Some who profess belief in the Bible read literally what others read as allegory or metaphor, as they read Aesop’s fables. Religious symbolism is even used by some with the same mental reservations one has in teaching of Santa Claus or Uncle Sam or Easter bunnies or dispassionate judges. It is hard in matters so mystical to say how literally one is bound to believe the doctrine he teaches and even more difficult to say how far it is reliance upon a teacher’s literal belief which induces followers to give him money....

If the members of the [“I Am”] sect get comfort from the celestial guidance of their “Saint Germain,” however doubtful it seems to me, it is hard to say that they do not get what they pay for. Scores of sects flourish in this country by teaching what to me are queer notions. It is plain that there is wide variety in American religious taste. The Ballards are not alone in catering to it with a pretty dubious product.

The chief wrong which false prophets do to their following is not financial. The collections aggregate a tempting total, but individual payments are not ruinous. I doubt if the vigilance of the law is equal to making money stick by over-credulous people.

But the real harm is on the mental and spiritual plane. There are those who hunger and thirst after higher values which they feel wanting in their humdrum lives. They live in mental confusion or moral anarchy and seek vaguely for truth and beauty and moral support. When they are deluded and then disillusioned, cynicism and confusion follow.

The wrong of these things, as I see it, is not in the money the victims part with half so much as in the mental and spiritual poison they get. But that is precisely the thing the Constitution put beyond the reach of the prosecutor, for the price of freedom of religion or of speech or of the press is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish.

Prosecutions of this character easily could degenerate into religious persecution. I do not doubt that religious leaders may be convicted of fraud for making false representations on matters other than faith or experience, as for example if one represents that funds are being used to construct a church when in fact they are being used for personal purposes. But that is not this case, which reaches into wholly dangerous ground.

When does less than full belief in a professed credo become actionable fraud if one is soliciting gifts or legacies? Such inquiries may discomfort orthodox as well as unconventional religious teachers, for even the most regular of them are sometimes accused of taking their orthodoxy with a grain of salt. I would dismiss the indictment and have done with this business of judicially examining other people’s faiths.

On re-trial, the Ballards were again convicted and the matter went up on appeal in 1946. The Supreme Court overturned the conviction again, this time on the sole basis that women had been unconstitutionally excluded from the jury, never reaching the merits. The government took no further court action but, through its administrative agencies, successfully denied the I Am Activity access to the mails and tax exemption on religious grounds for nearly a decade.

It was in the midst of these troubled times, in March of 1942, that Edna Ballard purchased a large house in Santa Fe at 510 Old Taos Highway, moved the Saint Germain Press there and opened an I Am school. By 1951, the members of the I Am sect, usually wearing colorful clothes, were a familiar part of the Santa Fe scene. (The sect members wore different colors for each day of the week; Saturday, for example, was a day for violet or purple colors. The colors red and black, however, were evil and never worn.)

In January of 1951, the I Am School was hosting some 600 students from around the nation who had come to hear Edna Ballard’s “dictations” from Saint Germain and otherwise receive the blessings of the Messenger, Lotus Ray King. Then came the headline in the New Mexican on January 5, 1951, opening old wounds and inflicting fresh ones.

The following day, about 40 I Am students -- almost all women -- crashed through the front door of the New Mexican offices on Marcy Street, demanding to speak to the editors. A few were led to meet with editors Will Harrison and John Mickey McGuire where they delivered an ultimatum to the stunned newspapermen. Mrs. Ballard, they told the editors, demanded the right to review and approve any article regarding the Powell lawsuit before publication or else the newspaper faced a citywide boycott of its advertisers. Other students spread out through the plant, condemning secretaries and printers with strange incantations. The police were called to escort wandering I AM students to the more public areas of the building. Things appeared peaceful if somewhat noisy.

Then, in the midst of debate, a “portly woman in a fur trimmed coat” slapped the paper’s managing editor, John Mickey McGuire, in the face. Another unidentified student slapped editor Will Harrison. Even Calla Hay, the society editor, injured a finger attempting to avoid a roundhouse from an I Am student. Someone broke an antique table in the editor’s conference room. The newspaper was threatened variously with death by a Divine Hand, a $10 million libel suit, bankruptcy, a boycott of advertisers and, worst of all, the “flaming sword of Saint Germain.” Police removed four male I Am students who were threatening employees with fists but the majority of the students simply planted themselves in the building and refused to move.

In less than an hour, the police – armed with a restraining order issued by a District Judge David Chavez – escorted the I Am students out of the building. Though closed for five hours, the newspaper brought out the Saturday edition on time with this headline: “Angry ‘I Am’ Mob Lays Siege to New Mexican on Suit Tale.” The somewhat defiant editor of the New Mexican issued this editorial:

No Thank You, Mrs. Ballard

Mrs. Edna Ballard, president of the I Am activity, has threatened the New Mexico with boycott and rioting, unless she is permitted to read and approve before publication articles relating to a suit filed in district court Friday by an I AM student accusing the I AM president of fraud.

The proposal to call off the boycott, which Mrs. Ballard said had been arranged among merchants of the city, and to keep mobs out of The New Mexican building came after five hours of siege Saturday morning in which throngs who said they were Mrs. Ballard’s followers crowded through the newspaper building, slapping three employees, breaking a piece of furniture and engaging in verbal abuse.

It is a disturbing situation in a little town where we have all been living together in mutual respect and happiness, and we trust it will soon pass.

But more disturbing is the demand to print or not print news under threat of financial ruin. It is the first time, we think, that anything like this has been presented to the New Mexican in its 101 year history of publication.

Of course we cannot comply. If Mrs. Ballard or her representatives want space in the New Mexican to present their views, they may have it. But they may not determine the nature of the news that we are to publish.

We trust this threat was a hasty one and made in excitement. We hope it was because it would not be good to have among us a group that would censor the public information given to a community of 30,000.

Meanwhile (with cheek still tingling) the New Mexican wishes for its neighbors an early settlement of the difficulties that have risen among them and a return to the happy days.

A few days later, attorneys for Ballard and the I AM group arrived in Santa Fe, ostensibly to investigate the Powell matter but they also appeared for Mrs. Ballard in the scheduled January 12, 1951 hearing on the restraining order before Judge Chavez. But there was no hearing. Instead, the lawyers for the New Mexican and for Mrs. Ballard arrived at a settlement in which the injunction action against Ballard was dismissed and Mrs. Ballard issued this statement:

It is a matter of regret if any students of the “I Am” Religious Activity created a public disturbance at the office of the New Mexican the 6^th of January last. It was not and never has been my intention that for any of our people to create any public disturbance, and I sincerely regret that any violence occurred. In making any protest they had in mind, it should have been done peacefully and with dignity.

President and publisher of the New Mexican, Robert McKinney, reiterated the newspaper’s policy of printing the news as they saw fit and graciously accepted Ballard’s statement which the newspaper generously called an “apology.” There was no further action arising of this curious incident. No personal injury suits were filed by Harrison, McGuire or Hay; no property damages were sought and, despite front page photographs as graphic evidence, no criminal charges for assault or battery were lodged. It was as if it had never happened. More interestingly, the Hepzibah Powell case was never again mentioned in the pages of the Santa Fe New Mexican.

Eventually, Ballard and most of the school left Santa Fe to settle in Schaumberg, Illinois where Ballard died in 1971. Today, the numbers of the faithful have dwindled considerably. After Edna’s 1961 death (or “transition” as it is called within the organization), a board of directors now passes along Saint Germain’s messages while Donald Ballard long ago left the movement to run a manufacturing plant. The Mighty I Am is still based in Chicago but maintains about 300 activity “centers” throughout the United States, including a “Sanctuary” in the house off Old Taos Highway in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

I find myself thoroughly puzzled by the whole affair. The New Mexican, victim of an astonishing outrage, responded by yapping like a chihuahua about censorship yet seeking harmonious relations with a patently deranged bag of nuts. Back to “the happy days,” indeed. Its only legal action – a simple injunction – was dumped when la presidente Ballard uttered a mealy-mouthed statement of general regret without even the scent of personal responsibility, a statemen which only the deluded could call an apology. Most tellingly, the newspaper made sure never to offend the Ascended Masters by not mentioning Ballard or the I Am group again.

Perhaps the lesson, if there is one, is this: While the pen may be mightier than the sword, it isn’t mightier than the flaming sword of Saint Germain.

A small footnote: In the course of its reportage, the New Mexican cited St. Germain as the patron saint of the I Am movement. The Count of Saint Germain (allegedly encountered by Guy Ballard on Mount Shasta in 1930) was a real person whose life story is attended by mystery, romantic rumor and outright fable – but he was no saint, at least not one recognized by the Catholic Church.

But there actually is a Saint Germaine. Germaine Cousin was born in France with a deformed right hand and scrofula. Scorned by her stepmother, Germaine was kept apart from the family, slept in a barn and made to care for the sheep. She prayed constantly and signs of her holiness began to appear. One witness saw the waters of an overflowing stream part to allow Germaine to attend Mass. Eventually even her stepmother recognized Germaine’s holiness and asked her back into the family but Germain refused and continued to herd sheep and sleep on a rough vine-mat in the barn. She died in 1601 at the age of 22.

Years later, her body was accidentally exhumed and discovered to be in perfect condition. Many miracles were attributed to Germaine and she was eventually canonized in 1867. She is known as the patron saint of shepherdesses, the disabled and – as the Church delicately puts it – less attractive girls.