In her response to his rejection, Elizabeth was not repentant in the slightest. She defended her conduct and feelings and told Sharman that they were not communicating because he lived by a code rather than by individual insight. She accused him of never letting the word "love" enter his religious thinking and explained that she based her religious ideals on it. She wrote that she was willing to be the scapegoat for all those at Minnesing who had extramarital relations, but she was amazed that Sharman would take upon himself the right to sit in judgment of others.^[15] She was subsequently dropped from the list of those who could lead sanctioned seminars and thereafter struck out on her own. Boyden Howes founded the Guild for Psychological Studies, a group that offers seminars that use the Sharman study technique in conjunction with Jungian psychology, and, since 1982, the only organized group that continues the Sharman tradition.^[16]

The Rathbuns were not directly involved in the split between Sharman and Elizabeth Boyden Howes, although Sharman kept them apprised of his role in the situation and their loyalty remained with him. The legacy of this controversy stayed with the Rathbuns in the form of a willingness to expect and to enforce very traditional codes of personal sexual conduct and a commitment to the indissolubility of marriage under almost any circumstances.

Emilia's attitudes and moral expectations were put to a personal test in the late 1940s-roughly at the time of Students Concerned-when she became emotionally entangled with a married neighbor who was also very active in Sequoia Seminar. Their mutual attraction was common knowledge among many of the people in the movement at the time. Although the man claimed otherwise, Emilia told confidantes that, despite their strong feelings for one another, the relationship was never consummated.^[17] Eventually the man asked her to leave Harry and said he would leave his family so that they could get married. She refused and rededicated herself to her marriage. The rumors and accusations of a possible affair eventually necessitated a meeting of the core leadership with Emilia and the man. At that meeting, she refused either to affirm or deny the charges, feeling that the others' knowledge of her and her character should speak for itself.^[18]

Whatever the specific facts of this event, it is clear that it served to reinforce Emilia's commitment to the inviolability of the traditional marriage relationship. Either because of her successful resistance to the power of passion over commitment, or because of guilt and denial, Emilia became even more critical of other peoples' failings in such matters. By the 1950s her personal attitude toward sex had become one of grudging tolerance. In 1952 she claimed that the "animal drive" for sexual union with another person could never be successful because true union could come only through God. She then praised psychology as a useful tool for helping people free themselves from the "repression of basic, animal drives" and observed that "sex life, even in happily married people, will last for only a time anyway."^[19]

This final comment seems to imply that Emilia had suppressed her own sexual feelings, an interpretation supported by a remark she made some years later while discussing the incident with a friend. She admitted that she had been strongly attracted to the man but said that she had refrained from acting on her feelings. She went on to say that a person either had to free herself from sexual feelings altogether or else repress them and live a lie, and that "God gave me the answer that there is freedom," which appeared to mean freedom from sexual desire itself.^[20] She further said that she would have to "relinquish what it meant to be a woman" because "you can't be a woman and be an instrument of God both."^[21] Being a woman meant being attracted to men, and being attracted to men meant "you have to look deep, deep down . . . and see whether you want to leave this completely and never have it anymore in order to be with God."^[22]

There was still one other crisis involving sexual behavior that affected Emilia deeply, perhaps because it echoed the earlier confrontation between Sharman and Elizabeth Boyden Howes. In 1959, Emilia became aware that a woman whom she considered one of her protégés, Norma Rosenquist, was having marital difficulties. Possibly as a consequence of her work with the Oxford Group, possibly because of her experience in her own marriage, Emilia saw other people's marriage crises as personal challenges. For more than a year, she and a small group of the inner circle of Sequoia Seminar met weekly with Rosenquist and her husband to try to help them resolve their problems. Their help was to no avail, and the Rosenquists were eventually divorced.^[23]

Discussions of the Rosenquist marriage were complicated by Emilia's suspicion, never voiced in the group, that Norma Rosenquist was having an affair with John Levy, a member of the planning group and the first full-time volunteer worker in the movement. Both Levy and Rosenquist have denied that there was an affair, although they admit to having been strongly attracted to each other. Indeed, Rosenquist observed that Emilia "taught her better than she knew," because she would not have dreamed of having a relationship with another man while she was married.^[24]

Nevertheless, Emilia believed there was an affair and, when she realized that Norma and John were scheduled to lead a seminar together, she "went into a spasm." From her perspective, it was clear that someone even suspected of having an extramarital affair and clearly unable to preserve her own marriage could not lead a seminar. She therefore refused to allow either Rosenquist or Levy to direct the seminar. This situation brought to head problems that had been developing for some time. Seven members of the Sequoia Seminar leadership group, including Rosenquist and Levy, met for a week of intensive discussion and at the end decided that they needed to strike out on their own. They were extremely grateful for the Rathbuns' love, friendship, and instruction, but they also were beginning to feel confined by the two founders' strongly paternalistic approach and concluded that the time had come to break free of the Rathbuns' close rein. In addition to sexual values, there were differences in attitudes toward alcohol, prayer, and other religious practices.^[25]

In addition to the conflict with the churches and the issue of sexual morality, Emilia experienced a third set of crises that involved a broad range of personal issues. The year 1959 was Harry's last as a member of the Stanford faculty, and retirement meant a considerable drop in his already relatively low income. Casting about for a way to supplement the family earnings, Emilia decided to return to college and get a credential that would allow her to teach in the public school system. She enrolled in her alma mater, San Jose State College, took the necessary courses, and got a job teaching in a predominantly Mexican American elementary school in San Jose. Although she thought she did well as a teacher (and got the principal involved in Sequoia Seminar), she kept the job for only three years. She seemed to feel that her changed circumstances involved a serious loss of status. In the first place she found it "humiliating and embarrassing" to have to work, since she did not believe that married women should be employed outside the home if their husbands could support them. This feeling was exacerbated by her assignment to a school that served predominantly lower-income families. Revealing the status-conscious attitudes that occasionally showed through the group's liberal position, she recalled, "I didn't want to work in that school. I wanted to work in a high class school that has good kids to work with, and these were all blacks and kind of deprived kids."^[26]

Added to these changes in financial and career circumstances, there was growing unhappiness with the religious process in Sequoia Seminar. Emilia came to feel that "somehow Jesus wasn't working anymore, that people would write these great papers about their commitments and what they've got and somehow it wasn't working, it wasn't taking hold."^[27] A close associate at the time recalled that she began to question the Sharman method's ability to bring about individual change and at the same time raised questions about Harry's ability to lead the group, complaining that he "didn't have it anymore."^[28] Ever impatient to see dramatic change as a result of the seminar process and to see in tangible terms the formation of a community dedicated to common purpose, Emilia was rapidly losing faith in the efficacy of the Sharman method to bring about those ends. As Emilia herself recognized, she was seriously depressed and "in trouble."^[29] She began to talk about the necessity of gathering a group of ten women who would fully and totally commit themselves to "live the life" and made fitful starts in this direction, but nothing organized emerged from those early efforts.^[30]

Emilia's sense of personal crisis was further aggravated by problems she had with Betty Eisner, who had first joined the group while a student at Stanford. After she became a psychotherapist, Eisner led therapy sessions at Sequoia Seminar where she commonly used low doses of LSD to relax people. Her relationship to Emilia was characterized by tension and apparent competitiveness.^[31] At one point in 1959, Eisner had conducted a meeting with the leadership at the Ben Lomond camp on the condition that Emilia not be present or even on the camp grounds. People who were there say she used the meeting to try to turn the group against Emilia.^[32] Later, Emilia participated in a therapy session under Eisner's guidance in which Eisner urged Emilia to confess that there was violence in her, which Emilia refused to do.^[33] Depending on the source of the story, Eisner either succumbed to her competitiveness with Emilia and took advantage of a situation in which Emilia was drugged and vulnerable, or merely used the therapy situation, without LSD, to get Emilia to confront deeply buried problems. In either case, it is agreed that this experience, coming on the heels of the adultery accusations and the departure of valued and long-time members of the group, was powerful enough that Emilia had to leave the religious work and take some months of rest and recovery.^[34]

The cumulative problems placed Emilia in an untenable psychological position that demanded some kind of resolution. Given her personality and religious preoccupations, it was perhaps inevitable that the resolution would take a religious form. Emilia herself was well aware at the time that "something had to give." In a long handwritten memo from Emilia to the membership in 1960 she expressed the expectation that something had to change and that she would be the force behind a purification and revitalization of the movement.^[35] Like much of Emilia's writing, the memo was vague. It appears, however, to have been a reaction against the heavy psychological emphasis of the late 1950s and a reassertion of the fundamental purpose of the work to act as "a dynamic intermediary between the individual and the living God."^[36] Ostensibly this represented a return to the religious purity of the Sharman legacy. Yet, there was a simultaneous sense that Sharman had been only a beginning and now was the time to move in the direction of a new and unambiguous religious commitment. Although that direction had not yet emerged clearly, the organization was demanding unprecedented dedication from its members and was taking another step in the process of becoming a sect.

How was this fundamental clarity of purpose to be restored- Emilia began to see the movement as awaiting a true charismatic leader who, armed with an infusion of insight from God, would be able to marshal the forces of the group and lead it in a new direction. As her crisis deepened, Emilia increasingly speculated whether she might not be that leader, and whether the tensions and crises she felt might not be attributable to her failure to discern her mission. A participant from this period remembers that in one "revelation," she "went into one of her trances and she said she saw a movement coming where the men that were needed were the men that were there" in the group, and that she expected them to commit themselves to her and she would be their leader.^[37] In an undated fragment from about this period Emilia wrote that God intended the work to go into a second phase in which Harry would play the role of "stabilizer & anchor," while she would be the visionary "with all the vicissitudes & characteristics that make the role precarious."^[38]

As early as 1958 the various tensions and stresses bearing on Emilia began to manifest themselves in headaches and other ailments for which she sought professional help.^[39] The turmoil of 1959 and 1960 that ended with the defection of much of the leadership group, Harry's retirement, Emilia's brief experiment with teaching, the confrontation with Betty Eisner, and the end of the connection with the churches, brought on additional illnesses that provided temporary escapes from the unsettled state of her life.

The Revelation of the Third Age

Leaving school one day, Emilia felt that "something happened" to her back. She remained bedridden, waiting for an appointment with an osteopath, who diagnosed her as having a very serious problem with cartilage in her spine. As quickly as it began, however, her pain disappeared, and Emilia concluded that "somebody had done something" to her and that she "was in the hands of something."^[40]

This was followed by a second experience in which she felt very ill and told the principal that he had better get a substitute for her because she was not coming back. He commiserated, telling her that he understood that the work had gotten to her. She responded that it was not the work, that she felt happy and fulfilled in her teaching. She went home, nevertheless, and "slept for three days solid," eventually waking up and complaining to Harry that the doctor must have prescribed "some medication with dope."^[41]

But it was not Emilia's style to retreat into invalidism or to allow the religious flame to be extinguished. She was to find a more creative solution.^[42] As she lay in her depressed state she remembers that she woke up thinking, "I am emptied. I have no feeling for God, and Jesus somehow has removed himself, and I can't work."^[43] Having reached her nadir, physically, psychologically, and religiously, Emilia recognized that her old resources and old patterns would not be adequate to extricate her from her problems. She had reached the end of a three-year process during which she had prayed to God asking him to find a leader, to raise up somebody "because I can't do it, I can't do the work anymore."^[44]

The crisis was finally resolved in a dramatic religious experience that cut the Gordian knot of her conflicts:

In the middle of the night from a sound sleep I woke up . . . and I felt the presence of Christ in the room-not Jesus-Christ. . . . Always when you come to the end of the life of Jesus as we study him, he says, "I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until I drink it new in the kingdom of God." And every time I come to that passage I've wondered what that meant. Because I know Jesus didn't believe that he's coming back . . . and I knew he didn't believe he's going to go to heaven and sit up there drinking new with God in heaven. I didn't believe that and still don't, so then I would say what does it mean, this passage- What is God going to do with the Passover- That's one question that I've always asked. So when this presence of Christ came into the room, he said to me, "Lazara, arise! I'm going to have communion with you in the new covenant and drink it anew from the kingdom of God."^[45]

Emilia concluded that the presence could be trusted because "it snapped me out of the condition I was in."^[46] She believed that she had been "raised" by a higher power, for, as she explained, "I don't think it's possible to understand the depth of the thing I was into and how I was slipped out of it like that. I had to interpret it as something I hadn't done for myself-that had been done for me."^[47]

Emilia explained the significance of the fact that it was Christ, not Jesus, who had appeared to her by saying the vision was "something more universally attainable by everybody, but not particularized in that one individual in history."^[48] A merely historical figure like Jesus could not, of course, appear in contemporary religious visions, and a figure who could do so must surely transcend in some sense the limitations of history. Because this vision was a direct communication from "the other side" and a radical departure from the prior theology of the group, it had a dramatic effect on Emilia's views and, through her, on the shape and focus of the movement. Emilia now felt divinely authorized to move beyond the historical focus on Sharman's Jesus. No longer was she confined to deducing the meaning of the historical Jesus as constructed with the tools of biblical scholarship. The way was clear for her to pursue an explicitly mystical path of present communion with Christ. The rationalism and intellectualism of the Sharman tradition was now supplemented with a more explicitly religious spiritualism. Harry would continue to honor the academic approach by leading Records seminars, but Emilia could begin to move off in new and creative directions.

Although conscious of the danger that her own personal story might interfere with the "message," in fact Emilia's experience validated her role as the new prophet who could guide the movement through direct revelation. The new "condition for the movement succeeding was to surrender Jesus," she explained, but it was not her idea to do that: "Never in this world would I ever think that-come out of my head- surrender Jesus-"^[49] If it were not her idea, then it must have come from a higher power and therefore be legitimate. Continuity with Sharman's interpretation of Jesus was preserved through the position that true religion consisted of absolute submission of the individual to a higher authority and that that understanding could be achieved through the study of the gospels. As the movement transmuted itself, however, into a sect in the months and years following the vision, the Sharman legacy was recast with a radically new context of mythology, rituals, and a vision of the group as a religion in its own right.

Unlike Sharman, who thought he could influence established groups by osmotically permeating them with individually transformed people, Emilia understood her vision as divine permission for the group to fully express the sectarian impulses that had been building for many years. Individual transformation now took place in a collectivity, and it was the group as much as the person that would bring about social change. Emilia wrote at the time that it was her

commitment to God to help Him . . . attain a head for the human body of a group of educated, intelligent persons willing to step out of the boundaries of organized religion. . . . A group of one mind so identified with the purpose of God in this age that they will work to gain the numbers to shift the balance of history by a great event.^[50]

The implication of this change was clear: God was calling for a new convenant community, based on a new revelation that would be a "successor religion" to the earlier covenants of Judaism and Christianity. The movement would be an expression of the third age in which "people will resurrect that spirit that was once in Jesus and affirm the truth that he once spoke."^[51] Although she was unwilling to make the claim in public, in private Emilia was willing to affirm that she was to the covenant of the third age what Jesus was to the second and Moses was to the first. The idea was not a passing one. As late as 1976 Emilia wrote a long meditation that expressed these same ideas. All religions, she wrote, had found their fulfillment in Creative Initiative, a fact that she illustrated by describing a meeting that included Zoroaster, Buddha, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Peter, Paul, and "someone in actual life now"-clearly herself-^[52]

Emilia's special role in the new covenant was always problematic. On the one hand, she consciously resisted the temptation to allow a cult of personality to grow up about her. On the other hand, both she and many movement participants viewed her as a woman of special insight, if not special powers. She, for example, held a strong belief in reincarnation, as did many others in the group, and spoke of herself as drawing on the experience of "many lifetimes" to make herself "pliable to the law and will hidden in the stars and yet close, as close to me as soul."^[53] Reincarnation never achieved official sanction as part of group philosophy, but the idea of an alternative plane of being did. As Emilia's sense of her mission developed, so did the concept of the "gnostic world," or "gnostic plane," from which instructions were delivered through a process of mystical insight into the earth plane of ordinary existence. In a private meditation that reflected the broader group belief in the powers of the gnostic plane, Emilia wrote, "There is a Gnostic plane of existence where a higher intelligence has planned how to lift us from lower to higher states of awareness."^[54]

The belief that individuals could, in some special way, be chosen to receive wisdom from the gnostic plane generated a distinctive tension in the group. Emilia expressed this problem in her concern for "the intrusion of the self." Nevertheless she reasoned that "God must use human vehicles for expression." She tried to resolve the tension by consciously renouncing her ego. "My person is now named 'Sin nombre,' " she wrote, "which means without a name." There is a play on words here too because when spelled "sinombre" it means "without a man." Having taken on a symbolic cloak of anonymity, she then went on to pledge, "I, Sin nombre . . . set out with a banner-a steel bracelet, a burning world, a twelve-pointed star, twelve candles, twelve golden cloaks of light, one burning wooden cross, on God's mission. I will cry, 'Women of the World unite.' End the fight. Accept the light. Exert the might of the right."^[55]

The Gathering of the Thousand

The call for a new covenant community was immediately followed by details for a ritual to initiate the third age, revealed to Emilia by means of automatic writing on the day after her vision of Christ.^[56] She was told to gather a group of ten women to perform the rites that would bring the third age into being. In language that the group developed later, this ritual was supposed to "fix the third age into the time stream," or "bring it down from the gnostic plane to the earth plane." Emilia prepared the details of the ceremony in secret, telling the women who were to participate only when and where to gather. They were psychologically prepared for something like this event by the sense of crisis that had pervaded the group for the previous several years. Those years had been an "environment of holding . . . a stillness, a biding of time" complemented with a "tremendous faith" that "there would be a movement."^[57] These mystical experiences of Emilia's, although recognized by the other women as especially valuable and meaningful for the whole group, were more easily accepted because others had been equally conscious of the need for a new breakthrough and were also having mystical experiences and intensive prayer times of their own.^[58]

The first "Dawn" ceremony, as it came to be called, was held on February 2, 1962, at a lodge on the Ben Lomond property. Although the date was chosen simply because it was convenient, the women were delighted to discover that it was an astronomically auspicious time because on that day seven planets aligned themselves behind the sun. The fact that their random date turned out to be one on which people all over the world expected great events was taken as one more sign that their enterprise was blessed.^[59] On the evening before the ceremony the ten women and Emilia gathered at the lodge to help decorate it. The next day at dawn they entered a room "aglow with hundreds of lighted gold votives. The fragrance of fresh roses permeated the air." Ten chairs, each draped with a gold robe, were arranged in a circle around a large felt twelve-pointed star with a candle at each point. The women put on the robes to symbolize their inclusion in the new age and subordination of their personal identities into the uniform of the collaborative work. As they lit the candles, each pledged to gather ten more women who in turn would gather ten more and so on until a thousand women had been brought into the movement. The pledge spoke of them passing "the threshold into the secret fellowship of Hermanas en la Luz [sisters in the fight]" and taking on the new name of "Sin nombre [without a name]."^[60]

The use of a twelve-pointed star as the centerpiece for the ritual was the first time that symbol had appeared in the work. In a modified form, as a cross composed of six intersecting lines, it would survive for many years as the central symbol of the movement, their equivalent of the cross for Christians or the Star of David for the Jews. Designated the "cross of fulfillment," it was embellished with a plethora of additional features. Each point was marked with a word standing for a basic teaching of the group, the first letters of which, when read in a clockwise direction, formed a mantra used by the group for collective meditation.^[61]

Having lit their candles and pledged to help build the movement, the one black woman of the original ten placed a bracelet on each of the other women to symbolize that she was becoming a "free slave of God." The women then drank a "communion of the new age." One woman drank for Judas the betrayer; one for Cain, the first homicide; and one for the "living presence" that was guiding the movement. The drink for the new communion was orange juice-the golden fruit-to symbolize the golden third age.^[62]

Women were thought to have a decisive role to play in the new age. They were to reappropriate the direct connection to the divine that had been broken by Eve. The new woman would return to an age of communion with God armed with new power, both uniquely feminine and yet equal to that of men. Unlike the previous covenants in history that had been introduced by men, the new covenant was to be mediated by women. For the first time in history, Emilia told them, "we are promoted by God to be equal."^[63] To achieve this new equality women had to make a conscious effort to change themselves. When they did so, they would benefit themselves, their husbands, and all humanity.^[64] To affirm this new role of women in the Dawn ceremony, the participants lifted the crown of thorns from Jesus and replaced it with a crown of yellow roses to mark the fulfillment of Jesus' mission and the beginning of an era of direct connection between God and individual persons.

As the ceremony concluded and the women walked out of the lodge into the early mountain dawn, one participant remembers that they looked at the rising sun and all of them saw it take the form of the twelve-pointed star they had just used in the ceremony. Like the lining up of the seven planets, the astronomical event was taken as a sign that their efforts had been favorably received.^[65]

There was a very real sense among the participants in the first Dawn ceremony that they were the nucleus of a movement that would expand to fill the world. Each of the original ten was charged with the responsibility of recruiting ten more women for a second round of initiations. Although the process would later become much more elaborate, the first initiates did their recruiting on a one-to-one basis, inviting friends to their homes to discuss the two core documents of the New Religion. The first document, "The Blue, Blue Lake," was a guided meditation that described "the predicament and solution." In it the participant imagined herself standing on the edge of a beautiful lake, witnessing a growing fire coming over a hill. Feeling a powerful urge to do something to contain the fire, she suddenly finds herself amid a host of women, marching and singing a dirge. Together, they "abandon all" and "claim lessons of the past and bring into reality . . . the New Jerusalem."^[66] The second document, entitled "The First Paper," constituted a creed for the new movement:

We, the women of the world unite, under God, to change the course of history. As instruments of a higher cause, God, we conceive, nurture and give birth to the human race. We arise from our unconscious sleep and will act now, in this present world emergency, to will a great, powerful, absolute spiritual force to work through us.^[67]

After the first two groups had been initiated, a "Ceremony of Twenty" was held to cement the unity of the women gathered thus far. Ceremonies continued apace and, on April 26, 1964, two years after the first Dawn ceremony, a "Ceremony of 100" commemorated their reaching that milestone in the drive for one thousand. It was not precisely specified what would happen when a thousand women were assembled, and speculation on the point was discouraged in favor of "just working for that thousand." Yet there seems to have been a millenarian hope that when the thousand were gathered God would at last have "a mighty instrument through which to work" and their task would then be made plain.^[68]

While the process of gathering women into the movement progressed, the first men were introduced to the New Religion. More than in the earlier days of Sequoia Seminar, the group began to shift toward bringing couples into the group together in order not to cause marital dissension over the level of commitment required. Indeed, Emilia came to the conclusion that "it had to be a couple, and if a woman got too interested and the husband wasn't interested, we eased her out-suggested to her that she work someplace else."^[69]

Initially, Emilia and the other women had hoped that the men would find their own independent role in the New Religion and that a ceremony would be "given" to one of the men just as the Dawn ceremony had been given to her. Harry, however, failed to share her enthusiasm for ritual, continuing to prefer the more academic Sharman Records study. "I never got excited about the ceremonies and that sort of thing," he admitted.^[70] Still, Emilia insisted that the men had to "have a ceremony, but the Lord will have to instruct somebody or give somebody the instructions."^[71] The decisive signal for change came during a July seminar for leaders. Twelve men and a few women were meeting together in the Casa de Luz lodge on the Ben Lomond property discuss ing the question of male participation in the New Religion. They had just agreed to begin such work when one of the men looked at the stone fireplace in the room and saw the "shadow of the Star of David which had been made by the lines from the wooden skylight frame overhead." Everyone present interpreted this as a divine sign, calculating that such an apparition "was an unusual occurrence which could only happen once each year at exactly twelve noon, when the sun was at its highest point in the heavens." Further reflection on the fact that there were twelve men in the gathering, that the time was twelve noon, and that the sun, which symbolized enlightenment, was at its highest point in the sky, reinforced the sense that the time was indeed right to begin.^[72]

Predictably, it was Emilia who ultimately received instructions for the men's ceremony shortly after this event. This first "Able" (Abel) ceremony was enacted on November 3, 1963, and was far more complicated than the women's Dawn ceremony, graphically illustrating the elaboration of symbols and rituals already taking place. The men gathered before dawn, dressed simply in white cotton shirts and dark-colored slacks. The women of the group had prepared the altar and placed votive candles around the room. A special chair draped with a purple velvet cape, "to honor Jesus of Nazareth," was placed near the altar. On the altar itself were a large "God candle," the Bible, a statue of a lion, a statue of the Buddha, "Jewish symbols," a globe, and a dozen white stones.

The ceremony began with each man being called by name. As he entered the room, he crossed over a black and white yin/yang symbol on the floor which signified "his choosing to pass over from the darkness of ignorance into the light." In the center of the room on the floor was a large felt Star of David with a red rose at its center. Small gold swords with twelve-pointed crosses were placed at the points of the Star of David symbol and, beyond them, twelve chairs were arrayed in a circle. Each chair was draped with a long blue cape lined with gold satin cloth. The blue "symbolized the world of which each was a part," the gold, "the inner life, dedicated to attaining enlightenment." A four-sectioned gold satin cap rested at the foot of each chair. The four points of the cap represented the four corners of the earth and alluded to the prophecy of Jesus that all people would come from the east and the west into the Kingdom of God (Luke 13:29). The number twelve stood for "the masculine principle" in the group's numerology, and the fact that twelve men participated in the ceremony meant "the establishment of the cor rect masculine principle" through which men "would be motivated from a God-centered base and would work in the world to bring others into this same knowledge."

Each man took a red votive candle and extinguished it, symbolically eliminating "the red fire of hatred, selfishness, and the war within him." He then lit a white votive from the central God candle and placed it on the altar next to the globe "to symbolize his willingness to use the light of God in his life." All then received a white stone symbolic of the purified will that made each man Able (Abel). This "Able" stone referred with deliberate orthographic ambiguity both to the slain brother of Cain, renouncing of violence in the new age, and to the ability of each man to fulfill his vow. Taking red roses, traditionally given in love to women, the men offered them instead to God as an expression of their first loyalty and devotion to Him. A crown of red roses was put on the altar to replace the crown of thorns that Jesus had worn, and a "brotherhood with Jesus" was declared as each man committed himself to carry out the unfinished task of Jesus-to realize the Kingdom of God.

They put on the gold caps and the gold-lined robes signifying their willingness to take up the task and commitment. Finally, the participants raised the flaming swords of truth as they rose to affirm their willingness to battle for God and to work vigorously to spread His truth. The elaborate ceremony concluded with a male version of Emilia's "drinking together," as they drank grape juice from red goblets to represent living fellowship with Jesus, their brother in the light.^[73]

At the end of the ceremony the men received gold rings embossed with the twelve-rayed cross of fulfillment. These rings were the men's sign of initiation, the equivalent of the women's bracelets, and many of the men inducted during this period have continued to wear their rings to the present day. Harry, however, dryly ascribed theological significance to the fact that, as the movement continued to evolve into Beyond War (and he lost weight), his "Just dropped off."^[74] Groups of twelve men at a time were initiated and, like the women, new members were expected to gather groups of their own.

Like the women, the men recited a pledge that was in fact a creed of the new sect. In it they declared themselves to be "the nucleus of the new collective, the new community, the new church, the new race, the new species, the new world."^[75] They continued, "I affirm my faith that by the continued expansion of community through this process mankind can and will become united in a continuously growing organism wholly dedicated to fulfilling God's purpose for man on planet Earth."^[76] The ostensible goal of the community gathered through these initiation rituals was, therefore, nothing short of messianic. It was the community itself, however, that was the means of redemption-not anything specific that they would do, but simply their existence as a collectivity dedicated to following the principles of Jesus. Thus, the proximate goal and practical focus of activity was spreading the educational message that would lead to the augmentation of the community itself. This created a particular tension that would plague the movement throughout its subsequent history: although the growth of the community was believed to be an end to a grander (indeed, cosmically important) goal, in practice the function of the movement was simply to enhance its own numerical growth. The link between the growth of the community and the rectification of all the social, political, and ecological evils that fueled the fervor of the recruiters was vague at best, and often wholly an affirmation of faith. Indeed, questioning the mechanism by which the numerical growth was supposed to bring about sweeping social change was dismissed as "cynical" and a distraction from the urgency of expanding the group itself.

The Dawn and Able ceremonies were the core rituals of the 1960s. Although they would be joined later by a wide variety of additional rites, all attention was focused on these two ceremonies during the first few years of the New Religion. These two original ceremonies addressed one of the major issues that made the new covenant new-the role of women. Although the movement's ideas on the place of women in the new religious age probably originated in Emilia's personal perspectives on sexuality and gender roles, the group's aversion to having a single individual as the sole source of insight led them to look elsewhere for confirmation. Much was borrowed from the ideas of C. G. Jung, especially his notions of the animus and anima .^[77] But a most potent reinforcement came unexpectedly from a visiting professor.

In 1967, Robert G. Albertson, chairman of the humanities department at the University of Puget Sound, was invited by a Stanford fraternity to take part in their week-long scholar-in-residence program. At a lunch with several Creative Initiative members, including Harry and Emilia, Albertson became intrigued by the New Religion. He introduced the group to a number of sources that they felt gave their beliefs an "intellectual and concrete basis."^[78] These included Jeremiah 31:31 that affirmed the message of the new age; Joseph Campbell's book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which described the life-cycle of heroes and which the group then applied to their own lives; and finally the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, which confirmed their own peculiar understanding of gender roles.^[79]

Emilia recalled Albertson saying, "What you just said to me explains to me the ending of the book of Thomas."^[80] Albertson was referring to the final passage of the Gospel of Thomas, one of the recently discovered Nag Hammadi gnostic Christian documents. In it, Simon Peter suggests to Jesus that Mary should leave the disciples, since "females are not worthy of life." Jesus replies cryptically, "See, I shall lead, so that I will make her male, that she too might become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven."^[81] Emilia understood this to be "an affirmation" of "exactly what [she] had been telling the women"-that they needed "to rise up out of the collective unconscious of femaleness" and "become like men-strong."^[82]

Thus, the study of the Gospel of Thomas bolstered some gnosticlike tendencies already present in the group. These included the belief that the major human shortcoming was ignorance, that "salvation" was to be had by knowledge of a special truth initially available only to a leadership group, and the conviction that knowledge could be communicated by special mystical means to those gifted with the ability to receive it. The group was already accustomed to speaking of bringing insights and rituals down from the "gnostic plane" to the "earth plane." Ideas from the Gospel of Thomas helped to complete the transition from exclusive reliance on the relatively objective authority of the teachings of Jesus as learned through the Sharman method, to a state in which the unfettered authority of personal mystical experience, Emilia's in particular, could supplement the Records study.

The 1962 Transition: A Descriptive Model

This remarkable reshaping of the Sequoia Seminar, from quasi-academic study group, through proto-sect, into full-blown New Religion, was driven by the engine of Emilia's religious vision. She was a "religious virtuoso" whose private struggles played themselves out in the arena of public faith. Yet she did not travel on her religious journey alone, but in the company of others who were usually men and women of wealth, education, and social position ultimately willing to follow her as she deviated from the main road and sought to blaze a new trail to enlightenment. The history of Creative Initiative is much more than the story of one woman's religious life writ large. The response of the group to her charismatic leadership was an essential element in the dynamic process that institutionalized her insights and produced the New Religion of the Third Age.

One standard account of such events is Max Weber's now classic notion of the charismatic individual who brings forth new insights and perspectives and then has his or her work "routinized" by later followers.^[83] Descriptively, however, this model has limited application to the Creative Initiative transition of 1962. In Weber's model the charismatic figure operates outside the framework of organization and, indeed, resists it. Emilia began her religious life inside the churches and functioned for all of her charismatic career within a highly organized group. Most importantly, however, Emilia's role differs from that of the Weberian model because both she and her followers struggled mightily to restrain her charismatic appeal and prevent her from becoming the single fountainhead of truth for the movement.

A useful descriptive model of the way a charismatic figure, even a reluctant one like Emilia, can affect the structure and values of a group is provided by the recently published work of Raymond Trevor Bradley.^[84] As Bradley defines it, charisma involves two elements: the idea that an individual is endowed with extraordinary powers and abilities, and "the belief that there is a divine or supernatural basis to the exceptional powers."^[85] On the basis of the presence or absence of such beliefs, Bradley divides communal groups into four categories. Those in which these beliefs are not present at all he labels "low charismatic potential" groups. The other three types share a belief in the existence of persons with such powers. In one type, which he calls "high charismatic potential" groups, despite the acceptance of such persons and powers in principle, the group does not believe that anyone within it possesses these powers in fact . Indeed, these groups are often conscious of waiting for such a leader to emerge to show them the direction in which they should go. The remaining two types believe that there are such powers at work within their group at the present and differ with respect to whether the powers reside in a given individual solely on the basis of his or her individual qualities (charismatic leadership type), or because he or she bears an office that is viewed as the routinized locus of such powers (charismatic authority type).^[86]

Using Bradley's typology, Sequoia Seminar prior to 1962 can be described as a "high charismatic potential" group-one that accepted in principle the existence and communication of higher powers but was at least ambivalent about claims that any member actually possessed them. After 1962, however, the movement became a "resident charismatic leader" group. Although Emilia and others had explored the mystical aspects of religious experience prior to this transition, those explorations had remained subordinate to the rationalistic Sharman method. Like Bradley's high charismatic potential groups, Emilia was convinced that the movement was languishing, "not working anymore," and eagerly entreated God to help her "find you a leader, raise you up somebody." With the revelatory vision of Christ, the ceremonies that were "given" by automatic writing, the confirmations from astronomical signs, and the support from the Gospel of Thomas, the path was cleared for full-blown charismatic leadership to emerge.

Bradley analyzes the differences between these types of groups by studying two major dimensions of social organization. The first, which he calls "communion," is a measure of the "intense emotional bond that fuses the group into an undifferentiated whole."^[87] The second, "power," is in dialectical tension with the first but is needed to maintain group stability and control over the emotional power released by communion. He argues that two relational patterns differentiate charismatic systems from noncharismatic forms of social organization. First, they have an interlocking pattern of highly charged bonds of fraternal love in which virtually every member is connected to everyone else, and, second, there is an interlocking, transitively ordered, power hierarchy, aligned under the charismatic leader or, if absent, the leader's lieutenant.^[88] He further notes that these patterns vary and are more apparent in collectivities where the charismatic leader is resident than where the leader is absent.^[89]

There was an intermittently strong sense of community in Sequoia Seminar prior to 1962, but, except for a relatively few top leaders, the sense of group tended to be episodic, largely limited to the summer seminar periods. For most participants in the seminars the exposure was intense but lacking in staying power. After 1962, however, an almost "communal" atmosphere developed as a result of the emotionally intense rituals and bonding experiences that followed from their new sense of themselves as a collective messiah. Such a profound communion could not take place unless there were a powerful sense of the unity among group members. Since intimate relationships between individuals, even married ones, could weaken that unity, the philosophy of the New Religion taught that the love of God took precedence over all other relationships, including spousal affection.^[90] The movement as it emerged after 1962 deemphasized special love between particular members and emphasized instead the mutual ties of each person to every other-an approach reflected in its tendency to make all important decisions through long, loosely structured "group think" sessions rather than through a formal apparatus of committees and subgroups.

Bradley shows that groups with a charismatic resident leader have a unique structure of relations among their members. Three features distinguish such groups. First, the experience of communion generates a sense of "collective unity" and "oneness." With the appearance of a clear line of supernatural authority, the group no longer sees itself as a loose assembly of disparate individuals striving to find a common purpose, but rather as a whole that is more important than its parts. Second, such groups share a "strong feeling of optimism about the future" that "follows from the belief in the efficacy of charismatic leadership as the means to achieve the desired utopia."^[91] They are confident that, having found the leadership they were awaiting, they are in fundamental harmony with the direction, will, and purpose of the deity or universe, and that their plans will inevitably succeed. Finally, they experience an exuberant bond of euphoria and excitement from the fact that they are privileged to be part of such a movement.^[92] All of these features clearly characterize the movement in the aftermath of Emilia's revelations and the ceremonies the group enacted in the years after 1962.

Bradley has found that the love felt among members of charismatic groups is more "a universal bond embracing all members" and "not personalized or particularized" to properties unique to specific individuals.^[93] Members tend to think of one another in familial terms (brother, sister, etc.) and seem to experience something of an incest taboo in interpersonal relations, thus strongly reducing intimacy within the group. Thus, Creative Initiative's deemphasis of sexuality in general, even in the context of marriage, can be seen as much more than the imposition of Emilia's and Harry's own attitudes on the movement. It was, according to Bradley, typical of groups with a charismatic leader, groups in which the participants expected to sacrifice their individuality to the collective-or, as Emilia put it, to be "sin nombre" (without a name).

Despite their sense of closeness, Bradley says that there is frequently little personal intimacy in such groups (for example, they might know very little about members' families outside the group). Although members of Creative Initiative always maintained very close personal relations with one another, there was a symbolic shift after 1962 as the new Dawn and Able ceremonies emphasized the overcoming of individuality and the donning of the "cloak of anonymity." Clearly, what was important in the new age was not assisting individuals with their perceived psychological problems but rather reorienting them to identify the goals and values of the group as their own. As Emilia said regarding the Christ who appeared in her vision, it was no longer Jesus as a historically particular individual but "the impersonal consciousness . . . that Jesus personalized in his lifetime. Something more universally attainable by everybody."^[94] Hence, Creative Initiative followed the pattern of groups led by charismatic leaders, promoting the group itself as a whole rather than attempting to accommodate individuals and their differences.

Finally, Bradley's model provides insight into the survival and behavior of the group during this period. On the one hand, his model predicts a very high rate of instability and dissolution for resident charismatic movements during the first years of their lives-and as we saw, there were major defections during the transition period. On the other hand, many of the features that he predicts would tend to stabilize such movements quickly appeared in Creative Initiative. Most importantly, Bradley says that the channeling of the energy of communion into exclusive "dyads" (couples) while retaining a very strong sense of communal control over the dyads "would seem to reduce the destabilizing consequences of higher levels of communion."^[95] Thus the pattern the group developed after 1962 with its strong emphasis on bonded pairs of married couples (and indeed, the virtual exclusion of "isolates"-unbonded individuals), while maintaining effective collective control over many aspects of the internal lives of those couples, served a valuable social purpose. It effectively stabilized the intensity of communion while not routinizing the charisma.

Ultimately Emilia emerged from the difficulties that culminated in 1962 with a recipe for a relatively stable religious group. It was a group that simultaneously provided each individual with a strong sense of his or her place in the secure relational system of the community while keeping open the possibility of new interventions from the charistmatic leader that could reshape, rename, and redirect the energies of the collective. In many ways, indeed, it would appear that the Creative Initiative's frequent changes of direction into new all-consuming campaigns and activities served to recreate and regenerate the experience of communion that might have otherwise flagged under a visible and stable power structure.

Rituals for the Third Age

With the transition in 1962, Sequoia Seminar was decisively changed in ways that would endure for twenty years. When ceremonies given in Emilia's automatic writing were enacted by the group, the door was opened to further innovation both in rituals and in doctrines. Emilia's rich religious imagination was set free to shape a movement more to her temperament and style. Other members of the movement as well, now that communal acceptance of charismatic leadership was well established, were also free to seek direct religious experience and to look for guidance from the gnostic plane. No longer a simple ecumenical group organized for intensive Bible study but a de facto sect, the movement proceeded to develop additional ceremonies and symbols appropriate to its status as the New Religion of the Third Age.

New ceremonies emerged in different ways at different points in the development of the movement. In the earliest period rituals were "given" to Emilia through direct religious experience and automatic writing. Drawing on a mix of biblical myth, Jungian archetypes, and new myths spun from the insights that occurred in the context of religious meditation and prayer, the early ceremonies emerged directly from what must be described either as Emilia's unconscious but powerful mythogenic personality or from direct revelation to her. Emilia, however, was by no means the sole source of new religious practice. Over time, the group became extremely self-conscious of its need to develop a host of new ceremonies, and most of these were products of a group process. They eventually included a complete ritual calendar (a kind of new liturgical year), as well as rituals for some of the major life events of the members. In the earliest period of the New Religion phase of the group's history, rituals were wholly focused on conversion and commitment to the movement-what they called "identification." This focus was a consequence of the millennial expectation that preoccupied the group in this period: the urgency of attracting the mystical one thousand required before the next step would be revealed. All ceremonies in the first three years marked the progress of the group toward that goal. The first and most long-lived of the rituals developed in this period were the Dawn ceremony for women and the Able ceremony for men. This initial phase came to a close in 1965 when the group took on the name New Sphere. Although it had only about three hundred identified women, the group ritualized the symbolic achievement of its goal of one thousand members and began to diversify the style and purpose of its work. It was at this point that rituals devoted to other purposes and goals begin to appear and proliferate.

Because of the ages of the adults identified with the group, children created one obvious group for new ceremonies. As the children of the group matured, a need arose for their religious education and for ritualizing their coming of age. The first such ritual was a "Spring Maiden" ceremony, originally held in 1965, to symbolize the passage of girls from childhood to young womanhood. Preparation for the ritual involved learning traditional women's crafts (macrame, crocheting, flower arranging, etc.), as well as discussions of drugs and sex which inculcated the group's beliefs and values. The ceremony itself was artistically elaborate, as were almost all Creative Initiative activities. Butterflies were used for decoration as symbols of transformation. The central event of the ceremony occurred when the girls were brought from a room decorated in pink (symbolic of girlhood) into a room decorated with yellow roses (symbolic of maidenhood, as gold roses were of full womanhood). Each guest presented the maiden with a gift and gave her a blessing, lighting a candle at the same time. Eventually, as the ceremony evolved, girls were asked to give a short speech on the subject of their intended careers, and the adult women present discussed with them the nature of "the feminine" and motherhood.^[96]

Not to be neglected, boys were given an equivalent to the Spring Maiden ceremony in the "Eagle" ceremony, which ritualized their coming into manhood. Preparation for this ceremony required a series of three annual "ordeals" chosen by the candidate and approved by his father. The boy also had to participate in an Outward Bound style trip, undertake a twenty-four hour solo hike, and hold a steady paying job. Boys were trained in speech and debate and taken on a variety of tours of courts, manufacturing plants, and academic institutions.^[97] The ceremony itself took place in a room with an altar bearing twelve large white candles and the "God candle," and decorated with lions and eagles. The central event, as for the girls, was the lighting of candles and the giving of blessings to the initiate.^[98]

In addition to the youth ceremonies, one might have expected the group to evolve a full set of "rites of passage" for marriage, death, and infancy. For these predictable stages of human growth and development, however, the movement was largely content to make do with ad hoc arrangements. Pixie Hammond, a woman minister ordained by the Unity School of Religion and attached to Methodist churches before joining the Creative Initiative movement, was available to develop syncretistic rituals appropriate to the group. She conducted ceremonies of dedication for infants in which the parents and other adults present committed themselves to the religious and spiritual nurture of the child, and she also performed marriages and funerals. None of these rites, however, was codified into anything that could be called a Creative Initiative ritual. Despite the fact that they evolved a calendar for the full liturgical year, there was no equivalent of a Book of Common Prayer to provide rituals for predictable life transitions. The fear of excessive formalization seems to have prevented the group from stabilizing even those rituals that came to be repeated frequently. Although the Dawn and Able ceremonies did achieve a fairly standard form for a time, the Spring Maiden and Eagle ceremonies varied substantially in detail from year to year. Indeed, individuals were encouraged to develop their own ceremonies for any event of personal significance to themselves. Emilia described the groups attitudes toward the ceremonies by saying, "They have been part of the unfoldment of the movement and they have not stayed permanently."^[99]

Another class of ceremonies involved what appeared on the surface to be public presentations, plays, or programs marking cultural holidays. Whereas outsiders may have perceived these as entertainments or holiday celebrations, to insiders they were profound and mystically efficacious ritual events-collective enactments of religious reality.

The first of these "public ceremonies" was the development in 1965 of a "Tree of Light" event to replace the traditional Christian Christmas. This was the time during which the community was working closely with several black Protestant churches in East Palo Alto. The new ceremony was presented jointly with one of those churches as a "Christmas show" even though the symbolism of the "Secret of Light" program (as it was called) actually presented the movement's theology of the new age. The replacement for the traditional Christmas "bathrobe pageant" was a symbolic children's story entitled "Hark the Harold," Harold being the angel-narrator in the account. Beneath the surface of a Christmas program accessible to all, and close enough in its symbolism to pass as vaguely Christian, the story presented the whole revelation of the New Age.^[100] After two years of pageants in black churches, in 1967 the venue shifted to the Rathbuns' Stanford University home where it was ostensibly sponsored by four organizations, two of which were really different facets of the group itself. The tie to the black community was maintained, however, by including the Strivers (a group dedicated to raising scholarship money for the college education of blacks) and the Stanford Black Student Union among the sponsors. Called the "Christmas House," the home was decorated with seven beautiful life-sized angels representing the seven angels in the book of Revelation, elaborate symbolic banners representing the great world religions and religious leaders, and a prominently displayed Tree of Life crowned with the Cross of Fulfillment. Once again, whereas the casual observer may have experienced merely a festive Christmas display, the group had presented its solution to the world's problems through a synthesis of major religious teachings.^[101]

These colorful public presentations, filled with symbolism at once obvious to the uninitiated yet profound for the insider, were the first of a long series of such events the movement would mount in the ensuing years.^[102] Their function in the inner life of the group was complex. On the one hand, they served (with greater obscurity than the movement probably grasped) to communicate their ideas to the public. Equally important from an internal perspective, however, was the enactment of the ritual for its own sake. The members of the black churches who participated in these events, like many other outsiders who worked with the movement over the years, served in effect as unwitting "extras" in the enactment of a gnostic drama that was far more than symbolic. From the point of view of the group, these events, in the terminology of the movement, "brought down from the cosmic plane" new moral and religious realities, "fixing them in the time stream." More than morality plays, these activities served, in the view of the movement, to literally change the world, to bring about the reality of the third age, even though only the enlightened consciously recognized those realities. Such conscious recognition was desirable but secondary to the metaphysical reality of the ritual performance itself. Emilia called them "shadow plays [of] what will be reality someday."^[103]

It was this belief in the efficacy of the ceremonial enactment of religious truth that motivated a plethora of dramatic presentations and multimedia events in the next few years. "The Universal Song" was a play on forgiveness given three times in 1966, as was a multimedia presentation entitled "People, War, and Destiny," followed in 1968 by "Building the Earth," which presented the idea of a national service corps. Such programs remained an abiding feature of the group even after it secularized. The current Beyond War award ceremonies and convocations are described by some Creative Initiative veterans as "cere monies" to replace those that were dropped. In each case, although accessible as theater to outsiders, the core of the movement experienced them as powerfully effective events whose enactment contributed to world-historical transformation.^[104]

A New Liturgical Calendar

Ultimately more important for the inner life of the movement than these large public events were the rituals with which the movement began to formalize its status as the New Religion. Starting in 1965, and reaching full development in 1977, Creative Initiative elaborated a series of ceremonies and symbols appropriate to the new age. A major impetus to the formalization of these rituals occurred during 1975, when Juana Mueller, Emilia's daughter, remained with the skeleton staff of Creative Initiative as most members temporarily focused their energy on an anti-nuclear-power ballot initiative. Sensing a need to "ground" those working "out in the world" in the deeper religious significance of that involvement, she became especially interested in maintaining the ceremonies.^[105] Her concern led to the production of the first of a series of pictorial calendars that listed the dates for major ceremonies.

This trend toward explicit ritual formation increased sharply after the group underwent an episode of intensive introspection and recommitment in 1977. Families who elected to remain in the movement signed a "Book of Life," rededicating themselves to the moral and spiritual goals of the group. In the midst of this process of self-criticism and renewal, a major issue emerged concerning the discomfort of members from Jewish backgrounds with what they perceived to be the essentially Christian symbolism of the movement. To meet those concerns, and to ritualize the reconstitution of the group, an ad hoc ceremony was devised to distinguish those who had made that commitment, or "Passed Over," from the earlier phase in the life of the movement.^[106] As the name indicated, this ceremony was based loosely on the traditional Jewish Passover. Beginning with the sounding of a shofar, the ritual culminated in a passing of the cup as the group affirmed its willingness to "accept the conditions of the new covenant."^[107] Special prayers were included for the Jews indicating their willingness to surrender all separateness and for the Gentiles to confirm their "passing over from Christianity to Universality." It was at this point that Creative Initiative changed its central symbol from the twelve-rayed "cross of fulfillment" to the twelve-pointed "star of fulfillment." The star, actually two superimposed Stars of David, was intended to replace both the five-pointed Christian star and the six-pointed Jewish star with a new universal star.^[108]

This ceremony was viewed as such a success by the group that, in the summer of 1978, Emilia assigned Juana to convene a "ceremony committee" charged with developing rituals for the movement. The result of the committee's efforts was the production for five years of a well-designed and printed liturgical calendar, called the "Blessman Calendar." These calendars listed major religious holidays for the New Religion, along with "preparation periods" during which prescribed meditations and self-examinations were expected.^[109] The calendar began with New Year's Day, but the first uniquely Creative Initiative holiday was February 2, the anniversary of the original Dawn ceremony, when they performed the Dawn and Able initiations. On April 8 they marked the "Adam and Eve" ceremony that subsumed both the Jewish Passover and the Christian Holy Week in a spring celebration. "Mary Day," May 13, was a time to acknowledge the new status of women in the third age as they took on characteristics previously reserved for males. July 4 was Interdependence Day and September 21 and 22 were the Celebration of New Beginnings and the Day of At-One-Ment. These two autumnal equinox holidays took the place of the Jewish High Holy Days and stressed the movement's belief that major historical events took place at thousand-year intervals and that it was preparing for the next great transformation. In addition to these holidays, the calendar displayed the moon phases, solstices, and equinoxes, reflecting the vague but significant function of astronomical (or astrological) motifs in the group. These were described as "a reminder that all nature works in harmony and rhythm."^[110]

Most important and in many ways typical of the regularized rituals during this period was a weekly home ceremony, roughly modeled on the Jewish sabbath eve service but moved from Friday to Sunday night. Instead of the two candles of the Jewish service, four candles were lit in the Creative Initiative version. The first was the large God candle prominent in numerous Creative Initiative rituals. From it, a second smaller candle was lit symbolizing the first age of the "Golden Thread" of divine revelation in the Bible. As it was lit, those gathered "affirmed the light." A third candle, lit from the second candle, symbolized Jesus as the fulfillment of the Old Testament tradition and elicited the response,

"We receive the light." The fourth candle, representing the third age, was lit from the third candle with the response, "We pass on the light." The ceremony concluded with the recitation of the "Shema of the New Age," which read, in part, "Hear, O Sons of Light, The Lord our God, the Lord is One; for He makes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and makes His rain to fall on the just and the unjust."^[111] Dinner followed, along with various activities intended to form a "family night." This ceremony, then, was the most significant way in which the ideas of the movement were communicated and reinforced on a regular and family-centered basis. It provided the mechanism by which each family could affirm its common bond, both as itself and as a family identified with Creative Initiative. Despite the official disbanding of Creative Initiative in 1982, the Sunday night ceremony continued to be a regular event in many older Creative Initiative homes.

The Dissolution of the Ceremonial Tradition

Although there was always a strong fascination with ceremony in the movement from Emilia's days in Methodist Sunday Schools through the establishment of the ceremonial calendars of the later 1970s and early 1980s, there was also always an undercurrent of ambivalence about them. Juana's ceremony committee had conducted its work under the assumption that its rituals would "fix in the time stream" and communicate to succeeding generations the full richness of Creative Initiative's ideas and experience. Yet, as will be discussed in chapter 8, within only a few years all official rituals were abandoned and the secular Beyond War movement initiated. The decision and method of bringing this ceremonial New Religion phase of the movement to an end is remarkable, both in its rationale and in its form.

The ambivalence toward ceremony arose from two conflicting ideas about ritual. On the one hand, there was a sense that rituals were an important way to transcend the flat-footedly rational when expressing ideas and thus served to evoke commitments beyond the ordinary. On the other hand, the group's strong bias against institutional religion led to a deep suspicion that ritual forms tended to become rigid and inflexible, losing their meaning over time. Hence, the quest was always for ways to find sufficient stability in ceremonial form to sustain the movement from year to year, while at the same time insuring that the ceremo-

nies remained fresh and that participants would grasp the significance and purpose of the ritual. This tension was handled during their "liturgical calendar period" by means of highly didactic preparation for and explanation of each ritual. The symbols and ceremonies were explained, rationalized, and studied, thereby attempting to insure that they retained their significance and clarity of meaning for participants. Also, even though there was a period of relative stability in the names of the ceremonies used, there was an annual review and revision of the prescribed symbols and ritual actions.

As Beyond War began to recruit individuals into the movement who had no prior experience of these ceremonies, a new and more difficult issue arose. What relationship should new members of Beyond War have to the ceremonies, rituals, and initiation rites of Creative Initiative- As Juana deliberated about this problem, she said she was struck by the prophecy in Jeremiah 31:31-33, in which the Lord says He will write a new covenant on the hearts of the people. She understood this to mean that Creative Initiative too should "write its tradition on the hearts of the people," lest it be lost in the new and unfamiliar land in which they found themselves. In light of this insight and prophecy, the ceremony committee concluded that it was time to plan a ceremony to end all ceremonies, a ritual that would mark the end of common ritual performances for the group. Referring to the great paradox of Jesus, Juana explained they would "have to lose their lives to save them," giving up the last vestiges of Creative Initiative as an exclusive religious movement in order to become Beyond War wholly and without reservation.^[112] There was an urgency to prepare and execute this termination of the old so that it would not hold up the Beyond War movement. They realized that February 2, which was coming in only a few weeks, would mark the twenty-first anniversary of the first Dawn ceremony. This anniversary struck them as a particularly appropriate one on which to have the ceremony, since the number twenty-one represents adulthood in our culture. That anniversary, therefore, could symbolically represent the "coming of age" of the New Religion. A ritual would be planned that would mark that anniversary and represent the "writing on the heart" of all that had been publicly and overtly ritualized in the past. This would transcend and eliminate' the need for such public ritualization in the future.^[113]

Small groups gathered on the evening of February 2, 1982, in various houses where they found the God candle, gold votives, and globe typical of so many Creative Initiative rituals. Between eleven o'clock and midnight the groups enacted a symbolic ritual by means of guided meditation rather than by literal performance. Different rituals were prescribed for men and women. The women in their ritual imaginatively reenacted the original Dawn ceremony, putting on gold capes of anonymity and bracelets. Then mentally each took a gold rose and placed it on the altar, blessing the world with the light and writing the ceremony on their hearts. Similarly, in guided meditation the men took red roses from the women and their Cross of Fulfillment rings and placed them on the altar, thereby surrendering all external trappings of Creative Initiative to God's will and purpose, which they now believed would be enacted through Beyond War.^[114] Thus, with a single nonliteral ceremony, twenty years of New Religion ritual came to an end.