In the last month or so, I’ve been digging through my library, revisiting some of the obscure and interesting bits of occult and metaphysical history I have accumulated. John Oliphant’s biography deals with a fascinating character, a prophet whose utopian community drew a worldwide community to British Columbia in the 1920s.
The ’mysterious West’ of Canada has housed more than a few New Age communities and experiments because of the romantic appeal of the sublime landscape, the mystical aura of the conquered peoples’ territories and art, and the weaker ordinary social controls out on the periphery of the Empire. The utopian community of the Brother XII’s “Aquarian Foundation” on the Gulf Islands between Vancouver Island and the mainland, which grew from the Theosophical and Rosicrucian milieu in the late 1920s and 1930s, was among the first.
The area was part of a general occult tourist circuit. The whole esoteric community of the West Coast of the United States and Canada was small and interconnected in the 1920s. In Theosophy there was a belief in progressive evolution with the coming ‘sub-race’ emerging on the west coast of North America to lead forward human evolution. This notion of the exceptionalism of the West Coast persists to the present.
The Brother XII was born Edward Arthur Wilson in Birmingham, England in 1878. After a period of world travel in his youth, he settled briefly in New Zealand, where he married his first wife, Margery Clark. He then settled in Victoria, British Columbia and worked there as a clerk with the Dominion Express Company from 1907 until 1912. He experienced a religious revelation and joined the Theosophical Society, shortly thereafter abandoning his wife and children to study astrology and travel the world as a sailor.
In the mid-1920s he ended up in Genoa, Italy, where he was part of Crowley’s circle. There he received The Three Truths as a dictated document from the Master Twelve, which propelled him to international fame with its publication in England in 1926. The debt that his work owes to Crowley is uncertain, but there was an influence.
Wilson / the Brother XII travelled to England later in 1926 and quickly became prominent in the theosophical community there after the publication of a series of apocalyptic articles in The Occult Review (London), the leading occult journal of the time, which spoke of the need to form a ‘sixth sub-race of humanity’ to rule after a coming period of tribulation. He also spoke of the need to establish a series of safe havens to wait out this period of chaos (to last to 1975). The enthusiastic response to these articles led Brother XII to establish the Aquarian Foundation with the intention of getting going on this world-saving mission and set up a utopian Theosophical community on Vancouver Island in 1927. The Foundation’s utopian community first at Cedars-by-the-Sea on Vancouver Island near Nanaimo and then on Decourcey Island recruited from Theosophists across Canada and more broadly.
In contrast to the socialist and anti-racist ideals of the Theosophical Society’s “universal brotherhood of humanity without regard to race, gender, or religion,” the Aquarian Foundation was established “to divide the wheat from the Chaff” and for “gathering together and of ‘binding into bundles’.” The ‘binding into bundles’ image is particularly interesting since he had received the religious revelation from which he was inspired to gather his wheat while living in Italy under the Fascist government whose symbol was the fasces, a bundle of sticks bound together.
Brother XII later set up a Protestant Protective League to organize an anti-Catholic third party in the USA for the 1928 Presidential elections in collaboration with the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan had grown to five million members (one in ten adult Americans) in 1924 from its rebirth in 1915. In 1928, when Brother XII met privately with Senator Thomas Heflin of Alabama, the KKK’s unofficial spokesperson in Congress, about running for this proposed third party, it was still a potent political force.
Although the Aquarian Foundation had 2000 members in 1928, two years after its founding, in more than 125 affiliated groups around Canada and the United States, there were only a dozen or so residents at the Foundation’s colony at Cedar-by-the-Sea or later DeCourcy Island. From the start the community was wracked by internal tension, particularly around the erratic behavior, political machinations, and sexual peccadillos of the Brother XII, and it collapsed after a couple of years, dissolving in a flurry of lawsuits in 1931-33.
Although the legend around the Aquarian Foundation is entertaining reading, what is most noteworthy about this project is that there was a sufficiently well-developed web of connections among the occult communities of the British Empire and further afield to Victoria that a prominent member of that movement would think it reasonable to settle there.
The messianic mission of the Brother XII was suited to the tone of the esoteric scene internationally in the late 1920s. The leadership of the Adyar faction, the largest portion of the organized Theosophical movement, Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, had been promoting the young Jiddu Krishnamurti as the “World-Teacher”, the Maitreya, (the fifth and final Buddha, the embodiment of all-embracing love - another example of Orientalized Buddhism in Theosophy – in Mahayana Buddhism he is expected in about 30,000 years) through their Order of the Star in the East for twelve years by 1929. The decision by Krishnamurti to dissolve the Order on August 2nd, 1929, upon being formally installed as the head of it because, in his magnificent phrase, “Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever,” did not immediately kill the search for the new messiah. The Brother XII was able to tap into this messianic hope, a hope that was also prominent in Italy, Germany and the Soviet Union, among other places, with their respective cults of messianic leaders.
~ review by Samuel Wagar
Author: John Oliphant
Twelfth House Press, 2016
446 pg. Paperback £13 / $25 Can / $17 US
