Christian

Thomas Lake Harris was born in Fenny Stratford, Buckinghamshire, England on May 15, 1823.

His father (also Thomas) was a blacksmith, a Baptist, and a strict disciplinarian. Young Thomas preferred to spend his time in the company of his doting mother Annie, who spoiled him rotten.

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In 1828 the Harrises emigrated to America and opened a general store near Utica, New York. Everyone was expected to pitch in, even young Thomas, who was pressed into service as a clerk. The store did not do well. In the 1870s a journalist investigating Thomas Lake Harris’s background who fancied himself a wordsmith described the elder Thomas as “oppressed with many children, an extravagant and vulgar wife, and a Micawberish state of impecuniosity.”

That “extravagant and vulgar wife” would presumably be the second Mrs. Harris, because Annie Lake Harris died in 1832. Her replacement turned out to be a stepmother of the “evil” variety who treated her stepchildren poorly. Young Thomas coped by retreating into the world of books, consuming volumes of Romantic poetry, Transcendentalist philosophy, and the Bible.

He also retreated into dreams. He would later claim to have received nocturnal visits from the spirit of his dead mother, who would emerge from a haze of blinding light, accompanied by dancing fairies, to give him the love missing from his real life.

In 1838 Thomas attended a traveling revival and was reborn in Christ. He quit the family business and became an evangelist, traveling up and down the Mohawk Valley and preaching in exchange for room and board.

At this point teenage Thomas Lake Harris seemed so shy and unassuming, so thin and frail that you could knock him over with a feather. The only thing that stood out were his intense eyes, which seemed to indicate a quiet inner strength that only emerged when he was preaching. His sermons were something else: thundering and righteous, but also sensitive and eloquent and poetic. They impressed the local Baptists so much that they pooled their resources and sent the young preacher off to divinity school so he could be formally ordained.

The Thomas Lake Harris that returned from divinity school was not the same Thomas Lake Harris who had left. More learned, of course, but less Baptist and more Universalist, which did not go over well with the locals.

Well, maybe one of them. In 1845 Harris married Mary Van Arnum… albeit mostly because she reminded him of his mother. The couple would eventually have two children: John and Thomas Jr. (Remember those names because you won’t be hearing them again for a while.) That same year Harris also decided to relocate to Manhattan, where he became the pastor of the Fourth Universalist Society.

The Universalists soon discovered that he was as committed to them as he had been to the Baptists, which is to say, not at all. In 1847 he left to found the Independent Christian Society for those who felt that organized Christian denominations had lost their vital spark.

The Independent Christian Society attracted powerful and influential members like newspaper editor Horace Greeley, transcendentalist George Ripley, poet Richard Henry Dana, and theologian Henry James Sr. That gave Harris some real power, and in 1850 Harris and the Society led a city-wide crusade against juvenile delinquency. Harris gave moving sermons, which Greeley reprinted in his newspaper, swayed public opinion to their side, and eventually helped write several important legal reforms and found the New York Juvenile Asylum.

That would have been the crowning achievement for many a man’s career, but not for Thomas Lake Harris. Which meant the Independent Christians were about to discover that Harris was not particularly committed to Christianity, either.

Spiritualist

It runs out when Harris wasn’t preaching, he was dabbling in other religions. Specifically, Spiritualism. (We’ve covered Spiritualism a lot here, but if you need a quick refresher, Spiritualists believe that that there is only a thin border separating the material world and the afterlife and that “mediums” can be trained to carry messages across that border.)

This was a logical progression for Harris, who had already been visited by his mother from beyond the grave. The experiences of other Spiritualists just convinced him that these were not dreams but actual visitations. His poetic nature was drawn to the naked emotionality and sublime mysticism of the religion. And he liked that Spiritualists were frequently active in social justice movements, as part of their commitment to make this world as much a paradise as the next world.

Harris eventually grew to see Spiritualism as the antidote to the twin scourges of the modern world: rationalism and materialism. He fell into the orbit of Andrew Jackson Davis, “the Poughkeepsie Seer,” who was building a more organized form of the religion with a complex cosmology that appealed to Harris’s own love of fantasy and hierarchy.

He spent a few years with Davis training to be a medium, but ultimately the two men did not get along. Each felt the other was a weak-willed simp, and in a sense, they were both right. When Davis became embroiled in what passed for a sex scandal in the 1850s (i.e., a relatively tepid embrace of free-love and no-fault divorce) the prudish and sexually-conservative Harris used that as an excuse to cut ties with his mentor.

He soon began receiving visions reassuring him that he had made the right choice and that he was destined for something far greater.

I became first of all conscious of a soft white luster… In a moment I was sensible of a mild and tranquil influence, which operated powerfully upon my cerebral and cardiacal systems, and caused me to feel as if my organism were provided by the most exquisite harmony. I was now impressed to look up and saw… a tall and majestic Spirit, apparently in the perfection of manhood… [The spirit showed me] a small book… clasped with a seven-fold seal full of divine truth and wisdom, full of hieroglyphs which contained entire worlds, and promised that within several years the volume would be open to my entire under standing.

[Important fact I left out here: shortly before getting this vision, Harris’s wife Mary Van Arnum passed away unexpectedly.]

Encouraged by these visions Harris formed a partnership with James Leander Scott, a former Baptist who was also dabbling in Spiritualism and what would eventually become Seventh-Day Adventism. The two men began playing with fire, channeling not only the spirits of loved ones but also Christian saints and martyrs.

Eventually Harris and Scott began channeling the Twelve Apostles, who commanded them to seek refuge in the Garden of Eden and await the Second Coming of Christ. Additional seances helped the preachers locate the Garden of Eden in remote Mountain Cove, West Virginia (just down the road from the Mystery Hole in Anstead). (And yes, I already know it wasn’t West Virginia). Somehow the two men convinced a hundred others to join them in purchasing a few acres of land, where they founded a cooperative agricultural colony and Spiritualist retreat.

The Mountain Cove colony was a mess from the very beginning. Every resident thought that they should the one in charge, and could channel messages from the other side that backed up those pretensions to leadership with Apostolic authority. Eventually Harris and Scott put their foot down and declared that they were the only ones allowed to do any channeling, thank you very much, which went over like a lead balloon.

Many of the colonists left but Harris and Scott’s megalomania only increased. They began calling themselves “the Lord’s Chosen Vessels” and “the two perfect mediums” and implying they were the two witnesses from the Book of Revelation, who would prophecy for four years before the Apocalypse. That led to some factional infighting and more defections.

During all of that it became apparent that no one had been bothering to keep track of the colony’s finances, because why bother with bookkeeping when the world was going to end any day now? Even more defections followed.

Finally, when the Eschaton failed to materialize on schedule in early 1853 the whole thing went tits up. Harris and Scott dissolved the colony, and Harris slunk back to New York in defeat.

Swedenborgian

Unsurprisingly, his commitment to Spiritualism was a bit shaken. He began looking around for the next big thing and eventually discovered the works of Emmanuel Swedenborg.

It will be very hard for a short description to do this unusual man and his complicated belief system any sort of justice, so I’m not even going to try.

All you really need to know is that instead of a regular mid-life crisis, Swedenborg had a series of visions where he was taken on a tour of Heaven and Hell and everything in-between; conversed with angels and devils and the inhabitants of other planets in the solar system; and was gifted the revelation that the true path to salvation involves not only faith and good works but a “divine respiration”, a sort of cosmic attunement to the numinous soul of the universe and the infinite being of God.

(Swedenborgians, feel free to come at me in the comments if I got any of that wrong.)

To Harris, Swedenborgianism seemed like the glue that could bind together his strange patchwork of beliefs: the strict Baptist ethics beaten into him as a child; the Universalist view of mankind’s innate goodness that had enraptured him in divinity school; and the bizarre cosmology of Spiritualism.

At the time organized Swedenborgianism had divided into two rival camps. One group pursued social justice causes, inspired by Swedenborg’s admonition to do good in this world. The other group renounced the world and retreated inward, inspired by Swedenborg’s esoteric mysticism. Harris saw the merits of both camps but was frustrated by their inability to work together. He thought he could be the man who would reunite them, which may have been a bit presumptuous.

Still, at first the Swedenborgians welcomed their new convert with open arms. And then he began using their official press to publish his poetry.

It was hardly unusual that Harris wrote poetry.

What was unusual was how he did it: it just poured out of him in long ecstatic fits lasting for weeks. Harris felt his poetry was divinely inspired, that the fits were mediumistic trances where angels and spirits spoke through him. (The rest of Harris’s biography suggests that he may have had a bipolar disorder, and only wrote poetry when he was in a manic phase.)

Harris’s work was technically competent but… um, not very good. He mixed classical structures and formal rhyme schemes with blank verse and prose in a format he called the “proem”. The constant shifting between meters and rhyme schemes is jarring, but the larger problem is that Harris’s writing is tedious and overblown, full of ten-dollar words and abstruse imagery. He also has a terrible inability to get to the point, talking around his subject in endless circles without ever quite reaching it.

It might just be easier to quote a typical contemporary critic…

It is in blank verse, verse so blank in its vague magnificence that it makes us feel tenfold ‘the limited power of the mortal intellect to whose receptive capacity’ it has to be ‘lowered.'”

God alone is great
He is the primal splendour who illumes
The full-orbed intellect; He gave the power
To plan and execute; the work is His,
Its faults grew from our creature finiteness.
Would it were worthier of its origin.
‘Tis but a wandering Voice, the harbinger
Of a great poem that, Messiah-like,
Shall tread down evil with its feet of fire,
And clasp all sufferers to its heart of love
The latchets of whose shoes it may not loose.
Five years will lead their swift revolving dance
In choral music round the brightening world,
Before that Poem shall unfold its form,
And we will make the Medium worthy it,
And give it as his spiritual powers
Wake from their slumber.
For the time, farewell.

An unbeliever might wonder why a ‘heart of love’ should wear shoes with ‘lachets’, and an unregenerate Fortnightly Reviewer might assert that a Medium worthy of such a poem might be found in the platitudinous person of Mr. Chatband. But we are not so ill-disposed. What we like about such poetry is its soothing flow, so easy to follow, so innocent of vulgar mystery.

(“The Literature of Spiritualism.” The Examiner, 30 Nov 1878)

The proems also tend to feature a thinly disguised version of Harris as a focal character. Since they are about weighty spiritual matters, they tend to feel like he’s puffing up his own status…

In a city of the Earth-world lived a Poet, in his prime,
He had won by ceaseless labors many praises of the time,
Striving ever, in the selfhood, through the wild world’s battle storm,
To arouse the trampled nations to the combats of Reform.
He had watched by many death-beds and had mused by many graves,
He had seen the strong grow tyrants and the weak and poor made slaves,
But a deathless thought was in him and he bade its flame aspire ;
It was this, that Heaven is nearer to the son than to the sire,
That a better day is coming, when the nations will unite
In the Brotherhood of Peoples, in the Commonwealth of Right.

(Regina: A Song of Many Days, 1860)

…which is going to come back and bite him very soon. But enough literary criticism for now.

Harris’s first major proem was 1855’s An Epic of the Starry Heaven, which would eventually be followed by others including 1855s A Lyric of the Morning Land, 1856’s A Lyric of the Golden Age, 1860’s Regina: A Song of Many Days, and 1867’s The Great Republic: A Poem of the Sun.

Now, these can be taken at face value as meandering tales of epic fantasy, but Harris meant them to be taken seriously, as the foundation for a new cosmology of his own devising that fused Swedenborgianism’s heavenly spheres with Spiritualism’s overlapping planes of the afterlife.

Of course, the exact nature of Harris’s cosmology remains unclear because when have mystic visions ever been clear? More than that, Harris just loves to be obtuse and speak entirely in allusions. Some parts of his work are meant to be taken literally and others poetically, but good luck telling which parts are which.

The end result feels a lot like Theosophy only far less developed. The only real takeaway is that Harris believed in a paradisical spirit world filled with angels and fairies. Everything else just comes across as window dressing. Does it really matter if there was a planet called “Lutetia” between Mars and Jupiter that disintegrated into the asteroid belt, if that doesn’t have any larger theological implications? (It does not.)

The general public wasn’t quite sure what to make of Harris’s proems. Oh, sure, the words were pretty enough, but people were more interested by his claims that they had been dictated through him by history’s greatest poets. Dante apparently composed An Epic of the Starry Heaven, and the other proems had been authored by Byron, Shelly, Keats, Goethe, Co leridge and countless others. A Lyric of the Golden Age had even purportedly received some punch-up from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Hindu god Indra. (It’s worth noting that in the afterworld history’s greatest poets no longer felt any need to adhere to the poetic forms they had mastered in life.)

Harris paired his proems with several straightforward essays about his beliefs, collectively referred to as The Arcana of Christianity. Astoundingly, this work finally managed to unify mainstream Christianity, Swedenborgianism, and Spiritualism — unify them in hatred of Thomas Lake Harris. All courtesy of a proem, “The Song of Satan”, included as an appendix to the second volume in 1857.

The proem claimed that in March of that year Harris had been tormented for several nights by demons led by “Joseph Balsamo” (it is unclear whether this is supposed to be the historical Count Cagliostro — real name Giuseppe Balsamo — or the fictional version of the count created by Alexandre Dumas or someone else entirely). These demons assumed the forms of the great poets whom Harris had previously channeled and attempted to break his spirit. It didn’t work. Harris easily saw through the ruse, and the demons’ taunting inadvertently revealed to him that he was the “pivotal man” who would explore hitherto-unknown spiritual realms, perfect the practice of divine respiration, and usher in the next stage of humanity’s spiritual evolution.

A follow-up proem, “The Wisdom of Ages”, further described Harris’s initiation into “the Celestial Degree of Sight,” a ceremony conducted by Socrates, Plato, and Swedenborg himself.

To Spiritualists this was sheer megalomania. To Christians this was unspeakable heresy. To Swedenborgians…

Swedenborg had taught that the Celestial Spheres were inherently unknowable, and now Harris was claiming to know and describe them them while simultaneously having history’s greatest poets, philosophers and mystics proclaim him the new Messiah. All in books printed by the Swedenborgian New Church’s in-house press, a move seemingly designed to give them an official-sounding imprimateur.

Harris was formally expelled from the Swedenborgian church — a pointless gesture, because he had never formally joined it in the first place.

Somehow he still managed to hold together a small congregation of true believers scattered across the country.

(One of those congregants, Emily Isabella Walters, became the second Mrs. Thomas Lake Harris in 1855. The marriage seems to have gone unconsummated — Harris was a hopeless romantic but had a visceral disgust of sex, and in any case Emily went hopelessly insane in a maddeningly unspecified way shortly after the marriage.)

The Brotherhood of the New Life (Glasgow)

In May 1859 God ordered Harris to and spread the good world in England. Which was convenient timing, because his local support had dwindled to just about nothing.

At the time England was a popular destination for radical preachers and unconventional religious thinkers. America had been undergoing a continuous religious revival for three decades and everyone was just kind of burned out. Established religions increasingly met new religious movements with hostility and violence. It was generally thought that it would be easier to find converts in foreign countries, which meant England by default, because if there’s anything Americans hate it’s learning a second language.

Harris leaned on his old friend Horace Greeley, who procured him an invitation to stay in London with homeopathic doctor and influential publisher James John Garth Wilkinson. Wilkinson was part of a group of radical Swedenborgians, who hoped that a bold new voice like Harris’s could shake up the moribund British church. They sent him out on a lecture tour.

General audiences appreciated Harris’s trenchant critiques of the modern industrialized nation-state and his poetic appeals to pastoralism, but lacked the context to understand his attacks on American Christianity and Spiritualism, and were utterly baffled by his esoteric mysticism. The Swedenborgians understood more of it, and the more the heard the less they liked.

Before long Harris had worn out his welcome with the British Swedenborgians, so he retreated to the Yorkshire countryside, ostensibly to work on the next volume of The Arcana of Christianity, which was to feature a lengthy commentary on the Book of Revelation.

He had managed to make several rich and influential converts, though, and in 1860 they banded together in Glasgow as “The Brotherhood of the New Life.” They were very insistent that they were not a church, but a “community of souls” who would show the world a way of life far superior to the industrial hellscape of contemporary Britain and open the path for the Second Coming.

Which means I should probably spell out what Thomas Lake Harris and the Brotherhood of the New Life actually believed.

That turns out to be surprisingly difficulty to do, because the Brotherhood’s doctrine was deliberately concealed from outsiders and rarely spelled out in clear, unambiguous terms. But there are a few things that we can say for sure.

So, let’s get one thing out of the way immediately: they were Christians, in the sense that they believed Jesus Christ was only son of God, begotten not made, will come again in glory to judge the living and the eead and his kingdom will have no end, etc. etc. However, like several other sects, they did not believe Jesus was the last prophet. There were others that had come after him, most notably Emmanuel Swedenborg.

There were to be three main crises in human history: the Deluge, in which sin was destroyed; the Incarnation, in which sin was redeemed; and the Eschaton, where the world itself would be regenerated. Swedenborg declared that the Last Judgement was soon to begin; Harris broke with him by declaring that it had already concluded and the new cycle of the ages was to begin.

This new cycle of the ages would require new leaders to usher it in. Though Harris maintained that democracy was the only true form of government he also believed that not only did people need leaders, there were those who were predisposed to be leaders — poets, philosophers, priests, heroes, and kings. He himself was the ultimate leader, Swedenborg’s “pivotal man” who would unify the temporal and spiritual realms.

He was the new Messiah, but he was not God begotten as man, but the synthesis of God and man, a process that could be repeated.

To understand how this could be accomplished you have to understand Harris’s conception of God. It was in many ways an Eastern one, mythopoet as creator, with the universe itself merely being an emanation of the poetic thoughts of the ineffable divine mind. Well, ineffable to anyone other than Harris, that is.

Swedenborg often talked about forms of spiritual respiration, basically, a way of attuning oneself to ones own vital energies and through them to the numinous infinities of the universe itself. Harris took that concept and “perfected” it into Divine Respiration, which allowed one to replace the earthly gases in their lungs with the effluvia of the higher planes. This would have the effect of demagnetizing the body and soul, allowing one to reject the “poisonous injections of Infernal Demons” and return to an Adamic state of perfection. In that state one would not only be attuned to the universe but would in effect be the universe, a man-god.

It’s hard to know what Divine Respiration actually involved, because Harris thought any attempt to practice it by the spiritually unprepared would be fatal, and as a result made sure the actual practice remained undocumented. Eyewitness accounts mike it sound like some very basic hatha yoga inspired breathing exercises, much like doing a savasana cool-down at the end of a yoga class.

On the other hand we do know exactly what he thought was necessary to prepare oneself for Divine Respiration — a complete abandonment of modern society for an ascetic abnegation to God’s will. In practice this seemed to involve gathering in communes, living simply, shunning material things, valuing the arts, and performing honest manual labor.

Once one had achieved Divine Respiration one could perceive the true nature of the universe. It consisted of both material and spiritual realms, the latter of which seemed to be borrowed lock stock and barrel from Andrew Jackson Davis and spiritualism. It was populated with angels or purely spiritual beings, the spirits of those who had passed from the material realms, and faeries, who were “such infinitesimal germs of the human race as are not yet received into the human auras and procreated in natural-human forms.” (The pre-born, basically.)

In a Swedenborgian fashion the spiritual and material realms had a significant degree of overlap. The planet Venus, for instance, was not only a material reality but another plane home to an enlightened race of beings who helped shepherd human spiritual development.

This duality and overlap was a key theme in his theology, most notably in the doctrine of counterparts. Harris believed that God, the universe, and man were hermaphroditic in both a physical and spiritual sense, but that only man lived a diminished half-existence. The ultimate goal of Divine Respiration was to achieve perfection by reuniting with one’s counterpart, which would be a purely spiritual being of opposite gender. This fusion would be what transformed a man into a lowercase-g god.

Everyone had a spiritual counterpart: God (Theos/Theia), Christ (Kristos/Kristeya), even the Devil (Lucifer/Lutetia). Harris’s own counterpart was a powerful spirit known as “Queen Lily” or “The Lily Queen of the Conjugal”, a European princess who had died in early childhood and whose perfect innocence had elevated her to the position of Queen of Heaven. She ruled over the higher realm of “Lilistan” or “Aestavossa,” the center of the universe’s “arch-solar and arch-natural electricities.” (Perhaps of interest to armchair psychiatrists is that the Lily Queen seemed to be a fusion of Harris’s mother Annie with his first wife Mary Ann.)

Whew! That was a lot. Hope you can remember it all!

Of course, in the very short run none of this matters, because for reasons no one has ever been able to articulate Glasgow’s Brotherhood of the New Life collapsed after only a few months. There is plenty of speculation, why, though…

The Brotherhood of the New Life (Dutchess County)

…and it probably didn’t help that Harris returned to America in 1861. After the outbreak of the Civil War he claimed his country needed him more than ever. It probably didn’t hurt that he was increasingly disgusted by the industrialization of Britain, and had managed to burn all of his bridges with the local Swedenborgians.

He set up shop in Wassaic, a small rural community in Dutchess County, New York, northeast of Pougkeepsie near the Connecticut state line, and established a second version of the Brotherhood of the New Life.

It was originally very small, consisting only of Thomas Lake Harris, his “hopelessly insane” second wife Emily; his two sons from his first marriage, John & Thomas Jr.; and about half a dozen disciples who followed him from New York. Over the next several years the Brotherhood’s ranks swelled until there were about sixty people, some Southern converts fleeing the war and others totally new disciples. Most notable among these were several Baptist ministers who had previously corresponded with Harris; James Requa, a bankrupt banker; and Jane Lee Waring, a wealthy heiress whose father made a small fortune selling stoves (no relation to modern Waring blenders), who served as his second-in-command mostly because she turned over a personal fortune worth about half a million dollars.

We have a much better idea of how the Wassaic Brotherhood functioned.

Though to all outward appearances the Brotherhood was a de facto commune, it was not actually a de jure commune. Harris’s experience at Mountain Cove had soured him on communal ownership which was legally problematic, so as a practical matter all property was held in Harris’s name. He called this new system Theo-Socialism, and claimed that he had “evoluted out of Communism” (and later cheekily claimed he could not be a Communist because he was anti-social and therefore not capable of holding together a community).

Harris believed honest manual labor was humbling, that it could help break down a lifetime of accumulated bad habits, clearing space for the new spiritual pathways necessary to achieve true enlightenment. Consequently everyone was given the most menial tasks to perform, partly to break down the ego and partly to prove their absolute devotion to the ideals of the Brotherhood. Once an initiate had proved their devotion they would be assigned to tasks more suited to their actual abilities. James Requa, for instance, was too physically frail to do farm labor so he was put to work as a tailor, in spite of the fact that he absolutely sucked at it. After a few months he was put in charge of handling the books, which Harris sucked at.

(Even with everyone chipping in there was too much to be done and not enough bodies to do it, so the Brotherhood often had to hire Swedish day laborers to pick up the slack.)

As part of this refashioning of the self everyone was given a slightly infantilizing George W. Bush-style nickname. Harris himself was “Father Faithful”; Emily Harris was “Aunt Emily” or “Lady Pink Ears”; Jane Lee Waring was “Dovie”; James Requa was “Steadfast”; and Mrs. Requa was “Golden Rose”. Everyone slept together in communal dormitories, except for Harris and his family and few of the more elderly members.

In the evenings the Brotherhood practiced the first basic steps towards Divine Respiration, breathing exercises that would “demagnetize” the self to repel negative influences and “energize” it to be receptive to positive influences. Harris, of course, wrote a bad poem about it.

If you dear friends would hold your State
With Fairies wise, with Fairies wise
When joy within the heart abates,
Demagnetise, demagnetise!
If you would overcome disease,
With Fairies wise, with Fairies wise
Call Virtue through you like the seas:
Demagnetise, demagnetise!
If you would help the Golden Cause,
With Fairies wise, with Fairies wise
Draw order through you by its laws:
Demagnetise, demagnetise!
If you would build the Social Town,
With Fairies wise, with Fairies wise
Tread the Magnetic Serpent down:
Demagnetise, demagnetise!
If you would learn the Choral Dance,
With Fairies wise, with Fairies wise
Bid Sunbeams through your hands advance:
Demagnetise, demagnetise!
If you would crash the Dragon’s head,
With Fairies wise, with Fairies wise
Your open hands to Heaven outspread:
Demagnetise, demagnetise!
If you would slay the lust that smites,
With Fairies wise, with Fairies wise
Serve as the Golden Child invites:
Demagnetise, demagnetise!

There was even time for relaxation. Evening gatherings often involved song and dance, poetry recitals, amateur dramatics. Harris was all to glad to recite a few of his proems but his preferred method of relaxation was fishing in the spirit world, where no actual fish would be harmed.

The end goal of this? According to Harris…

The new respiration, imparting a simultaneous vibration to all beings, will attract, through the operation of Divine affinity and cement the bonds of a perfectly reliable and permanent fraternity in which civil discord will be impossible.

Now, if this is all sounding a bit cult-y, that’s because it is!

While having a single person own all the property in a community does dramatically simplify things from a legal standpoint, it of course gives that single person a disproportionate amount of power and leverage over everyone else in that community. And indeed, Harris’ word was law and could not be questioned.

The idea of breaking down a recruit to build them back up is another common cult tactic, where one manufactures a complete break from the old life to make them more receptive to the new. (Of course, the military also extensively uses this technique… and maybe we’ll hold off the idea that the military is a cult for another day.)

Harris himself was not subject to these laws. Though he made a big show of rolling up his sleeves to do woodworking or butchery whenever it was needed, most of the time he could be found in the big house writing his terrible poetry and smoking twenty-cent cigars that wre forbidden to everyone else. (Except for Jane Lee Waring, who would break up the stumps and smoke them in a clay pipe.)

And as for the idea that the spiritual nature of the Brotherhood would self-select for a “reliable and permanent fraternity in which civil discord will be impossible”… Well, again it helped that Harris’s word was law and the only punishment for transgressing that law was immediate expulsion from the Brotherhood. Expelling everyone who dares to think differently is definitely one way to create unity.

And that’s without even getting into the dark side of the cult.

The conditions described by former members of the Brotherhood frequently sound like a form of psychological torture. Sometimes Harris would wake everyone in the bunkhouse up in the middle of the night and make them switch beds, as a way of improving the spiritual energy of the room. In the same vein he was constantly breaking apart and rearranging work groups, which was supposed to encourage people of the same “magnetism” to work together while simultaneously preventing people from forming long-term attachments to each other.

Some nights he would make select members maintain a prayer vigil at the bedside of other members who he claimed were “beset by demons.” Or maybe they would be called to maintain a prayer vigil at Harris’s bedside as he suffered for the sins of the world, battling with evil spirits in the lower planes of existence, battles which frequently resembled nothing more than epileptic fits.

Families were often broken up without explanation. Husbands were often completely separated from their wives, not even allowed to share a bed. In one notable case Harris performed a marriage and the immediately sent the husband away to become a lumberjack because he didn’t like him. This was apparently a technique meant to encourage personal attachment to Harris above all others. It also cut down on the amount of sex going on, which Harris found increasingly disgusting as he aged.

Parents were also separated from their children. Despite Harris’s earlier sermons about the sanctity and innocence of childhood, he often seemed to have little interest in the welfare of the actual children in his care. They were made to labor in the fields like everyone else, given no education whatsoever. It was hardly surprising that they rebelled. His own son, John, drank and smoke and slept around and was happy that these actions led to his father shunning him. Thomas Jr. started stealing everything that wasn’t tied down and was ejected from the cult in his teens. Almost every other child raised in the cult left it at the first available opportunity. One of them, Rosa Emerson, even wrote a harsh roman à clef about her time in the cult called Among the Chosen. (A book which I have been completely unable to find a copy of — if you have an idea where I can find one, drop me a line!)

Fear of harsh treatment at Harris’s hands led the cultists to spend most of their time jockeying for his favor. The goal was to be accepted into his inner circle, which would get you out of the bunkhouse and into a nice room in the big house. That’s where Harris lived with his family and a small coterie of women, most of whom were transient vessels for Harris’s counterpart, the Lily Queen. That may sound odd to you — surely the thing that made Harris the new Messiah was that by manifesting his counterpart in his own person he had created the perfect androgynous unity of soul and body. But it helps if you know that while Harris was revolted by sex, he was also a hopeless romantic and a bit of a cuddle-slut. He had an almost tragic longing to be hugged, caressed, mothered by women. And this was how he got that.

Other cult members were also obsessed with finding their counterparts, which required Harris’s help to find them in the spirit realm and channel them into others. This gave him another tool he could use to manipulate their behavior.

In the end, the colony was little more than a badly run farm whose workers would get religious instruction whenever Harris felt like it. It was not financially stable and required new cash infusions from wealthy converts and foreign supporters to keep it afloat. And in 1863, to relocate to Amenia, about three miles north of Wassaic.

For the first several years things functioned more or less as they had in Wassaic, with the only real difference being slight changes in the status of various cult members. James Requa, for instance, was given leave to found the First National Bank of Amenia. (This was partly a way to get Requa to contribute financially to the cult, but it was also a way to separate him from his wife, who had become one of Harris’s favored vessels for the Lily Queen.)

Where things got really interesting, though, was the arrival of six Japanese converts in 1867.

The Japanese had been part of the “Satsuma expedition” — a group of nineteen young samurai who, against the explicit orders of the Shogunate, had been covertly sent to Europe to learn the secrets of Western science, technology, and pedagogy. Unfortunately after a few years the expedition lost its financial backing, forcing the students to choose between returning home as pariahs or staying in Britain as penniless students.

A third option was offered by Laurence Oliphant, a former diplomatic envoy to Japan who had befriended the students. (More about him in a minute.) Oliphant had met Harris on his earlier British sojourn and had become enamored with his teachings. He suggested that the Japanese might find what they were looking for in the Brotherhood of the New Life, so in the spring of 1867 two of them, Sameshibi Naonobu and Yoshida Konyari, traveled to Amenia to receive a private sermon from Harris himself.

Sameshibi and Yoshida were impressed. While most outsiders might find Harris and his techniques tyrannical, it only reminded them of the ascetic Zen Buddhist practice of their homeland. It made the farm feel almost like home.

Harris too, was intrigued. He had long thought that organized Christianity and Western Civilization had been corrupted by the “masculine and cruel Jewish monotheistic ideal” — his words, not mine, I should stress. He believed the regeneration of the human spirit would have to involve countries not in thrall to that ideal, namely Asian countries like India, China, and Japan. He invited the Japanese to join the Brotherhood, stressing that it included free room and board and a chance to continue their education. Sameshima and Yoshida accepted the offer, and convinced four of their fellows to join them.

The Brotherhood of the New Life (Brocton)

The Japanese arrived at an unusual moment, because the Brotherhood was planning another move. This time they had their eyes on a community on the other side of the state: Brocton, a small village on the shores of Lake Erie.

James Requa had visited the area a few months earlier and had noted three things. First, it was good country for growing grapes and making wine, which Harris had long been interested in. Second, that it was near the junction of lines for the Lake Short and Buffalo, Corry, and Pittsburgh Railroads. And third, that land was relatively cheap.

Mind you, cheap doesn’t matter all that much when you are barely keeping yourself afloat. To finance the move Harris would need more resources. To get those resources he and Jane Lee Waring took a trip to England to visit the handful of wealthy supporters he had remaining there.

This time they leaned heavily on the Oliphants, with whom he had been acquainted with since 1859. They were well-to-do politically connected Scottish aristocrats — the late Lord Oliphant had been attorney general of Cape Colony and later Chief Justice of Ceylon, and his son Laurence was a diplomat and Member of Parliament. Somehow he managed to convince them to finance the move. With the Oliphants’ backing the Brotherhood purchased 2,000 acres of farmland outside Brocton, which they called “Salem-on-Erie,” and got down to the hard business of making wine.

Though members of the Brotherhood were not allowed to drink wine — it interfered with Divine Respiration or something like that — Harris was oddly obsessed with it due to its role in the Eucharistic Sacrament. He believed it was a special substance that was “infused with the divine aura, potentialized in the joy spirit” which would release “the finer electro-vinous spirit” when consumed properly. (In other words, that it could be a shortcut for the uninitiated to briefly touch the divine.) When later criticized by temperance crusaders, Harris claimed that the special techniques used by the Brotherhood to make their wines infused them with a divine aura that made them non-intoxicating. Which was definitely not true.

Now, we have previously seen that the Brotherhood was not that great at farming, so you would think that they would make a hash out of viticulture as well. Fortunately for them, it turned out that several of their members actually had a knack for it. Chief among these was Kanaye Nagasawa, one of the Japanese converts, who eventually took control of every aspect of the winemaking process.

Nagasawa may have been thriving, but the other Japanese were not. Though they had been enticed by the possibility of continuing their education, life on the farm did not really give them opportunities to do so. Several left after a political argument over whose side they would take in a potential war between Japan and the United States. Most of the others left after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, feeling that they should be active participants in the modernization of their country.

(Chief among those who chose to return to Japan was Mori Arinori, who also made a half-hearted attempt to set up a Japanese branch of the Brotherhood of the New Life. His subsequent career seems to have been guided by Harris’s teachings. In 1871 he became the first Japanese Ambassador to the United States; in 1886 he became Japan’s first Minister of Education, and in 1889 he was stabbed and killed by a disgruntled ultranationalist student.)

Oddly enough, as the Japanese were leaving the very people who had encouraged them to join, the Oliphants, were arriving.

So, let’s take a moment to talk about Laurence Oliphant.

He had been born in 1829 in Cape Colony, and had traveled extensively throughout Asia and Africa. He eventually followed his father and uncle into the law and government, but also had a sideline as a writer; his travelogues A Journey to Khatmandu and The Russian Shores of the Black Sea were best-sellers. Those apparently earned him the post of private secretary to Lord Elgin — not the Parthenon marbles guy, his son, who was Governor General of Canada. As part of Lord Elgin’s retinue he briefly served as Canada’s Superintendent on Indian Affairs; helped negotiate the 1858 the Treaty of Tianjin, which doled out zones of influence in China to Western powers after the end of the Second Opium War; and was involved in negotiations for the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Amity and Commerce, during which he survived an assassination attempt by a group of disgruntled samurai.

That whirlwind life of adventure came to an end in 1859 when Lord Oliphant died, forcing Laurence to return to the United Kingdom to take care of his widowed mother. Who had recently become very interested in the work of a visiting American preacher — namely, Thomas Lake Harris.

It is easy to see how the deeply distraught and very religious Lady Oliphant might find value in Harris’s mysticism and optimism. Contemporaries of Laurence Oliphant could not conceive of any reason that he would, and came up with all sorts of explanations for what they saw as insane behavior: perhaps he was grappling with homosexuality or bisexuality, or maybe he believed Harris could magically cure his syphilis, or even that he was sexually attracted to Jane Lee Waring. They were operating off of their own limited views of Oliphant, however, and even a cursory glance at his later biography would suggest that the onset of middle-age and the death of his father had triggered a deep psychological and spiritual crisis in him. Harris offered both a solution to that crisis and a replacement father figure.

The Oliphants wanted to join the Brotherhood of the New Life in 1860, but were rebuffed. Party this was because Harris liked to hold potential converts at arm’s length to see which ones were actually serious, and partly because he did not think they had the internal fortitude to weather the indignities he knew he would inflict on them. However he was more than happy to take their money to fund his operations.

Meanwhile Laurence Oliphant tried to follow his father’s footsteps into politics, and in 1865 was elected to Parliament to represent Stirling Burghs in Scotland. He continued to write and publish, most notably the novelette Picadilly, where the disaffected Lord Frank Vanecourt tries and fails to find spiritual fulfillment in the superficial world of high society, tries to convert others to true Christianity, and eventually puts himself into the hands of a Messiah figure clearly inspired by Thomas Lake Harris. Most notably, the novelette features numerous exhortations to “live the life” which is how Oliphant chose to interpret Harris’s doctrine of honest labor and self-denial.

In late 1867 Laurence Oliphant decided to take an official trip to America to see how the country was rebounding from the Civil War. During the trip he swung by Amenia to visit the Brotherhood of the New Life, only to be laid low by attacks of migraine headaches. His mother came over from England to tend to him, and then chose to remain behind with Harris who accepted her into the Brotherhood where she worked as a charwoman.

Laurence Oliphant would have liked to stay behind with his mother, but Harris did not think he was ready. Instead he sent Oliphant back to England with instructions to give up everything he held dear — his wealth, his social standing, and his political ambitions — if he truly wanted to join the Brotherhood.

In 1868 he decided he had done all of that, and returned to America to join the Brotherhood for good.

The Brotherhood was a little different from the last time he had visited. It had grown to almost a hundred members, and they had built a lovely house named Vinecliff for their Messiah to live in. Several other members had left, including the Japanese, but also James Requa who had died of rheumatism shortly after the move. (His wife had been identified as a vessel for the Lily Queen and moved into the big house, inspiring rumors that Harris had engineered her husband’s death to have her all to himself.) Another member, James Fowler, had been expelled from the colony and shot himself.

Oliphant turned up at the gates Salem-on-Erie dressed as a proper English gentleman with a three-piece suit and a pocket watch, and Harris immediately doubted that he truly had put his old life behind him. No matter, he would get the same treatment as anyone else. Oliphant was stripped of his name and became “Woodbine.” He was stripped of his finery and given simple quarters in a barn with only a straw mattress to sleep on and empty boxes for furniture. The next day he was put to work picking up garbage, mucking out the stables, and working as a teamster. All while maintaining a vow of silence.

At first Oliphant did not take it well. One day while driving a sleigh into Brocton his horses became startled and he snapped. He threw down the reigns, curled up in a ball in the bottom of the sleigh, and began screaming. That panicked the horses further and they took off, dragging him hither and yon before returning to the colony.

Instead of terrifying Oliphant, though, the incident seemed to refresh him and give him new perspective. He became more convinced than ever that he was on the right path, and that he would be able to overcome any hardship.

Not everyone was as sanguine about it all as Oliphants. Later in 1868 the Ruxtons, another family of Harris’s British backers, dropped by Brocton for a visit. They found the goings-on at the colony scandalous: the minor physical intimacies exchanged by unmarried followers (who may have been channeling each others counterparts), nude mixed-gender bathing (a custom brought by the Japanese), and the borderline abusive treatment of the children. The Ruxtons left and withdrew their financial support.

That left the Brotherhood in a financial pickle, which led Harris to conclude that he needed to make better use of what he had, and what he had was Laurence Oliphant. He sent Oliphant back out into the world to earn some scratch.

At first Oliphant tried a series of odd jobs, most notably a brief stint as a tailor. Then, fortunately, the Franco-Prussian War broke out — okay, for a limited definition of “fortunately” — and Oliphant was hired by the London Times to be their war correspondent. He set out for Paris.

(As he was heading out, a new convert was heading in — Mori Arinori sent over Osui Arai, who was in trouble for converting to Orthodox Christianity. Osui took over the Brotherhood’s printing press and spent the rest of his days printing books of proemtry and religious pamphlets.)

Oliphant did not find the Franco-Prussian War to his liking, nor did he like the fact that people in the Paris Commune kept taking potshots at him. In early 1871 he beat feet back to Brocton, only to discover the colony in financial turmoil once again. The Ruxtons had been badmouthing Harris to everyone who would listen, and as a form of damage control he was offering to hand back the colony’s property to those who had donated. Few had taken him up on it, but enough had that they were even shorter on cash than when Oliphant had left.

To make up for the shortfall Harris and Oliphant set off on a lecture tour of Europe, hoping he could capitalize on the chaos there as he had earlier capitalized on the chaos in Civil War America. Unfortunately Harris fell ill, spent most of his time in Switzerland recuperating, and then returned to Brocton as soon as he was able.

Oliphant, meanwhile, had fallen in love with Alice Le Strange, a beautiful young Englishwoman he had bumped into in Paris, and had become convinced she was his counterpart. In many ways, she was; at the very least she was open-minded enough that she didn’t mind her new boyfriend’s weird new religion.

Harris was less sure, partly because he didn’t like sex, but he mostly because he worried he might lose his most famous follower to love’s siren song. He summoned the couple back to Brocton and put Alice le Strange through ordeals that made Oliphant’s seem tame, including burying her up to the neck and making her ponder the transience of beauty for a whole day. Amazingly, she submitted willingly to all these tests and passed.

In 1872 Harris begrudgingly relented and allowed Oliphant and le Strange to get married, but forbade them from consummating the marriage and split them up to make sure they didn’t. Oliphant was sent all around the world to manage the Brotherhood’s business interests, and le Strange was forced to remain in Brocton to work in the house. Where Harris began to suggest that she was the new vessel of the Lily Queen.

The Brotherhood of the New Life (Santa Rosa)

In 1875, Harris received a divine command to relocate the Brotherhood of the New Life to California. It is not clear what motivated the move, but why does anyone move to California? Sunny skies and warm weather and liberal politics, most likely.

He purchased some 700 acres of farm just north of Santa Rosa, in Sonoma County, and began to build. In just under a year the Brotherhood had transformed the property into a lavish country estate, Fountaingrove. There were vineyards and fields and groves. There were magnificently landscaped gardens and paths. There was even a large manor house finished with marble and gilt fixtures and equipped with every modern convenience. (Purportedly the mansion also included “Bowers of Heavenly Bliss” reserved for trysts with one’s counterpart, though the literature is frustratingly vague about whether those trysts were physical or purely spiritual.)

Not everyone in Brocton got to make the move to Santa Rosa. Harris used the move as an excuse to cut the dead wood, so to speak. He left behind malcontents, hangers-on, and those who he believed were no longer of use to him. That included his own sons John and Thomas Jr. John’s wife got to make the move, while Thomas Jr.’s wife was sent to join a non-existent branch of the cult in Cleveland.

The Brocton colony would continue to linger on for years, in spite of the fact that Harris had clearly lost interest in it. The land was slowly sold off under their feet, and the upkeep of the remaining property was completely neglected. Even so those who remained toiled away, hoping that one day they would get a summons to Fountaingrove that would never come.

The cultists left behind were replaced by an influx of Japanese converts, including Yoshihara Shigetochi, a former member of the Satsuma expedition who hadn’t joined the Broterhood earlier, and who would go on to become the first Governor of the Bank of Japan. In the end the Brotherhood would have almost twenty active Japanese members, meaning they comprised somewhere between 15% to 20% of its total number.

Fountaingrove thrived thanks to the Japanese. Kanaye Nagasawa had been making fine wines in the soil around Lake Erie, but now that he was in the Sonoma Valley his craft really hit the next level. He made some of the finest Cabernets, Pinot Noirs, Rieslings, and Zinfandels the state had to offer. (Nagasawa is often lauded as the mane who brought the wine industry to Sonoma, but that’s too generous — wine had been made there for centuries. He just kicked it into high gear.) Soon the Brotherhood were making more than 70,000 gallons of wine each year and selling it all for a tidy profit.

Meanwhile, like almost everyone who moves to California, Harris himself got weirder.

He began develop[ing an elaborate origin story for the universe, involving a golden age ruled by perfect humans that were wiped out by demons from the planet Oriana that used to be between Mars and Jupiter. The sole survivor of this age was the “Adept Adonai” of the “Secret Brothers of the New Life” who moved to Venus and later telepathically communicated the secrets of the universe to Harris. Later ages were ruled by different grades of people, silver and copper and bronze, who were wiped out due to hubris and various catastrophes. (No points for noting that this sounds very similar to Theosophical doctrine, though Harris vociferously denied any connection.)

Harris developed a series of increasingly confusing rituals which were necessary to achieve ascension. That included “The Sword” where the initiate is taught to use the Sword of the Word; how to extinguish desire in “The Sepulchre,” and so forth. After mastering these rituals one is admitted to a series of occult fraternities and metaphysical lodges until one has grown to be the entire physical universe, defeated the Man-Beast, and united with the godhead itself. To me they just sound like ever-more ludicrous Operating Thetan levels.

Harris claimed to have completed this process and to have become not just Christ’s successor, but Christ himself, the reincarnated biune Chrystantheus-Christa. And that now that he had done that, the Apocalypse was nigh.

He also began seriously putting the moves on Alice le Strange, insisting she was the new vessel of the Lily Queen. This was extra creepy because he was also claiming that the Lily Queen had born him children in heaven, and Alice worried that he expected her to bear his children on Earth as well. When he began turning away Laurence Oliphant whenever he tried to see his wife, that was the final straw. Alice left Fountaingrove in 1878 and went out into the neighboring communities to teach.

Astoundingly, that did not shake Laurence Oliphant’s faith, but it wouldn’t be long until it crumbled. In 1881 he learned his mother was on her deathbed, and that Harris had sent her back to Brocton to die. He went to Brocton, claimed Lady Oliphant, and took her to Fountaingrove to yell at Harris. There was a terrible row, where either Oliphant quit the Brotherhood or Harris expelled him, depending on who was telling the story. Oliphant then demanded the return of all of the money his family had donated to the Brotherhood over the years, which Harris refused because that would bankrupt him.

Six days later Lady Oliphant died. And Laurence Oliphant filed a lawsuit.

Harris had been backed into a corner from which there was no good escape. He briefly debated trying to have Oliphant involuntarily committed. In the end he deeded all the lands he held in New York over to Oliphant, who sold them off, took his wife and everyone else left in Brocton, and moved to Palestine to start his own religious community. (A few years later he published another satirical novel, Massollam, whose villain is a rather unflattering caricature of Harris.)

Harris, meanwhile, retreated inward, calling his one-time disciple the worst traitor since Judas Iscariot and mumbling something about the Anti-Christ.

The Beginning of the End

He stayed out of the public eye for almost three years, before roaring back to life in 1885, embarking on a lecture tour that he hoped would help him conquer the world spiritually.

At roughly the same time, an expose on the Brotherhood of the New Life was published in the San Francisco Chronicle. It dragged up every piece of dirt that had ever been published about the cult and then some.

It talked about Harris’s Spiritual ping-ponging in his early years, his failures at Mountain Cove, the (non-sexual) physical intimacies exchanged between counterparts, the scandalous mixed-gendered bathing, the shameful treatment of children, and the cultis ts he left behind at Brocton.

It dragged out stories of Harris’s insane wife. Of his spiritual mistresses, of his neglected children who had to run away from home to find fulfillment. (At this point John Harris had run away to get married and then died in Reno, and Thomas Lake Harris Jr. was drinking himself to death in Montana.) It mentioned all the ugly business with the Oliphants.

It had stories — multiple stories — of cultists like James Fowler and T.J. Miller who had given all their money to Harris, =tried to leave, could not get their money back, and killed themselves. It even claimed that he had fled Fountaingrove because he knew that this expose was going to be published.

And, you know, it talked about what he actually believed, as filtered through the lens of local Swedenborgians who were none-too-happy about it.

This was all news to the Brotherhood’s neighbors. Most people had a positive opinion of the cult, largely because the cultists kept to themselves and did not really promote their stranger doctrines. Most people didn’t even know they were a cult. They just thought they were a winery. There was, to put it mildly, a bit of an uproar.

Harris canceled his lecture tour and headed back to Fountaingrove to do damage control. In some ways, he was thankful. The scandal was giving him an easy out from the growing revelation that he was getting too old and frail to travel. For the next several years he was content to hide away in his study, reading poetry and churning out political tracts that no one read.

Then things went completely off the rails.

Laurence Oliphant had died unexpectedly in Palestine in 1888, but in 1891 Margaret Oliphant published a biography of her cousin. The Life of Laurence Oliphant and Alice Oliphant firmly placed all the responsibility for Laurence’s “decline” on Thomas Lake Harris, despite having very little idea of what the Brotherhood of the New Life believed or how Laurence Oliphant had interacted with it. But it was a best-seller, and so its one-sided view of the cult became the default view of the cult.

The Brotherhood did fire back, writing letters to the editor, publishing a hagiography of Harris and a very toned down catechism of their philosophy attributed to the anonymous “Respiro.” None of these did much to improve the increasingly negative public view of the cult.

And then Alzire Chevaillier happened.

Chevaillier was a public-spirited woman, known to be an apostle of “Christian Science, nationalism, social reform, liberalism, mysticism, the woman movement and a few other products of the present day.” In recent years she had become a muckraking girl reporter (well, okay, she was 40, so not much of a girl reporter) who specialized in exposing corrupt preachers and degenerate cults.

She was not particularly good at her job. At one point she had to abandon a planned expose of Christian Science because Mary Baker Eddy got wise to her and shut down all of her access.

Local Swedenborgians encouraged Chevaillier to take a deeper look at the Brotherhood of the New Life and she took them up on the offer. She presented herself at Fountaingrove, claiming that she had been inspired to join by Harris’s terrible proems.

Harris himself did his usual thing, trying to dissuade her from joining by talking about how difficult it was and showing her copies of Margarent Oliphant’s book and the 1885 Chronicle expose. When she would not be dissuaded he allowed her to join, and she stayed with the cult for five months.

The resulting expose was published in December 1891. It accused the Brotherhood of the New Life of promoting “disorderly doctrines” with sexual practices “worse than those of Mormonism”, but honestly it seems to say more about Chevaillier’s squeamishness and the prevailing morals of the day than it does about the cult.

His religion is just a trifle worse than Mormonism… the place is an idealized house of sin, a den of iniquitous debauchees whose only religion is the satisfaction of the passions, where there are no ties of affection, and where both sexes of one family bed together like dogs in a kennel.

She criticized the cult’s acceptance of Japanese members as unacceptable race-mixing. She called Harris “the most unprincipled black magician who walks the earth today” who used hypnosis and animal magnetism to brainwash his followers into a “spiritual harem” with a “new sexology.” That the sect’s chastity was a cover for free love, wife swapping, nudism, and child molestation.

Which are the same things they say about every cult. (The unfortunate thing is that they do appear to be true for quite a few of them.) In this case, at least, Chevaillier had unearthed nothing new or even particularly scandalous and had no proof of her more outrageous claims.

That didn’t stop her from trying to make a mountain out of her molehill. She resolved to take it (whatever “it” was) to Governor Markham, Postmaster General Wanamaker, Congress, and President Harrison. She even demanded Harris be expelled from the Masons. Of which he was not a member.

The Brotherhood’s initial response was… not great. They libeled Chevaillier as a puppet of the Oliphants and local Swedenborgian ministers, claimed she had been possessed by evil spirits, and branded her a fame-seeker and a “traveling whore” who was only attempting to expose Harris because she had failed to seduce him.

There should have been a scandal. There would have been a scandal, if Harris hadn’t cut it off at the knees by marrying Waring, in what he called “a matter of form and a concession to the prejudice of California society.” The couple left California for New York, the public outrage died down, and all was soon forgotten. Chevaillier declared victory and started her own magazine, the Comforter, which folded in short order.

Thomas Lake Harris never returned to Fountaingrove. He spent most of his time in Manhattan, though he summered in New Brunswick and wintered in Florida. He tried to run the cult via the post, sending them new edicts to read and tracts to publish, but it wasn’t quite the same. He briefly flirted with the idea of moving the entire operation down to Tobolobampo in Mexico, but quickly realized he would never be able to secure the funding.

The Brotherhood of the New Life continued running on autopilot for a few years, with Harris devotees vainly hoping their master would return. At one point another would-be Messiah, Hollow Earth enthusiast Dr. Cyrus Reed Teed, offered to take over for their absentee leader but was roundly rejected.

Cult members began to slowly drift off. Harris’s granddaughter, a willful teenager who had been locked in her room at Fountaingrove for years, somehow managed to get a hold of a bottle of poison and kill herself in 1896. Osui Arai packed up his bags in 1899 and returned to Japan.

In 1900 Harris formally divested himself of Fountaingrove, selling it to a consortium of his remaining disciples. The agreement was structured as a sort of tontine, where the last survivor of the group would become sole owner of the property. That turned out to be Kanaye Nagasawa, who turned it into the most successful winery in Sonoma. So successful, in fact, that in 1915 Emperor Taisho of Japan awarded Nagasawa the Order of the Rising Sun at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.

Harris virtually disappeared from public life after the sale. Jane Lee Waring’s private correspondence suggests that he was too physically feeble and senile to function on his own. Over the previous few decades she had gone to great lengths to hide his decline from the public, and felt obligated to keep up the ruse even in retirement.

(It wasn’t easy. One nurse who cared for Harris in this period described him as “a drivelling, sensual old man” whose only thoughts were “hugging and kissing women.” Most of the nurses who cared to him tried to never be alone with them. He would try to corner them, hug them, and declare “I love you! I love you! I love you! You do not know how much I love you!”

Thomas Lake Harris died on March 23, 1906. His few remaining followers held out hope that he would rise from his grave, but Harris disappointed them all by choosing to remain deceased. The funeral was apparently quite lovely, though. Edwin Markham, the poet who composed “The Man With the Hoe,” and a long-time admirer of Harris’s, gave the eulogy.

Markham was appointed Harris’s official biographer. He spent decades combing through Harris’s papers and proems, trying to organize them into something coherent, before giving up in frustration when his personal secretary died in 1925. (Markham did at least have the decency to feel guilty when his late secretary manifested during a seance in Toledo to upbraid him and tell him to get on it.). After Markham’s death in 1940 he bequeathed Harris’s papers to Wagner College on Staten Island.

The Fountaingrove winery continued to be excellent for several more decades. Kanaye Nagasawa died in 1934, though, and his descendants ran into California’s racist laws which prohibited “aliens” from owning property. The city of Santa Rosa seized the winery and sold it. It wound up under the control of a series of undistinguished white men who had no idea what they were doing and ran it into the ground. Two decades later all the winemaking operations had shut down and the vineyards were being rewilded into wetlands. In the 1980s portions of the property were redeveloped into residential housing.

Harris’s once-fabulous mansion and several other buildings remained untouched. They were apparently eligible for inclusion on the National Registry of Historic Places but no one could be bothered to get around to listing it, so no preservation efforts were made. Several buildings were knocked down for safety reasons, and by 2017 wildfires had destroyed the rest.

Today there is no evidence that the Brotherhood of the New Life ever existed, except for a Thomas Lake Harris Road and a city park named after Kanaye Nagasawa. And hundreds of volumes of bad, incomprehensible proems cluttering up libraries across the nation.