Prophet’s Daughter

My life with Elizabeth Clare Prophet inside the Church Universal and Triumphant

Erin Prophet, 2009

Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press

ISBN 978-1-59921-425-2

286 pages, $24.95 hardbound

 

Review by Joe Szimhart, October 2008

Ten years ago journalist Scott McMillion interviewed Erin Prophet for his article "Prophet’s daughter is writing a book" (Bozeman Chronicle, March 16, 1998). In that interview, the author projected that her book would be out in 1999. Prophet’s Daughter eventually saw publication in September of 2008. That delay may have been a good thing. The author’s life took many turns in the past decade until she settled in the New England area. During that gestation period she refined this memoir of an extraordinary journey through and beyond her mother’s cult.

I mean "cult" in the ordinary sense because no other word describes the reverence and ritual surrounding the "mantle" of Elizabeth Prophet as “Mother” and “Mother of the Universe.” If you read this account you will appreciate the difficulty any author would have to “keep it real” while writing about a past that resembles a fantasy novel. Erin grew up believing she was Mahatma Gandhi reincarnated. Her siblings Moira, Sean and Tatiana believed in past lives as John F. Kennedy, King Arthur, and Helena Roerich. They believed this because their mother and father told them it was so. Elizabeth Prophet (born 1939) no longer functions as a guru due to early onset of Alzheimer’s, diagnosed by 1998, but her mythic and symbolic status remains strong among Summit Lighthouse followers. 

Summit Lighthouse was the earlier name of the Church Universal and Triumphant; a New Age religion founded in 1958 by Mark Prophet, the author’s father who died in 1973. Erin was the second of four children born to Mark and Elizabeth after they wed in 1961. Mark trained Elizabeth to be a spirit medium or "Messenger" for a host of nearly forty disembodied Ascended Masters who guide the affairs of humanity and the entire cosmos. Erin was in training to be the next Messenger until she gradually defected from the Teachings of her parents starting in 1993. True to its title, the book focuses on this unusual, exhilarating and difficult relationship between mother and daughter/guru and disciple. The book is also a privileged insider’s overview of life in the group as it faced social, legal and political conflicts in its growth from nearly a thousand members when Mark died to well over ten thousand at its peak under Elizabeth (group members estimate over 25,000).

Erin Prophet opens her story with perhaps the most pivotal event of the group’s history. On March 14 of 1990, around two thousand church members went underground into survival shelters to avoid annihilation from a predicted nuclear strike. Unknown to the general membership, Erin as junior messenger or "seer" had an integral role in revealing the specific dates related to her mother’s prophecy of a "doom cycle" based on a form of astrology. We learn from Erin just how tenuous these predictions were yet thousands of devotees moved everything from locations around the globe to be in Montana by the late 1980s. The church members spent millions of dollars and volunteered many man-hours to build several large underground shelters, including one that held over 700 people. They stocked these with provisions to last over a year, all because Elizabeth through the "Masters" said they must to survive. After all, these “Keepers of the Flame” might be responsible for reconstituting a devastated planet with a culture based on Ascended Master teachings. 

Although CUT leaders spun the non-event of doomsday as merely a "drill”, most members saw it differently. Erin makes it clear that they fully expected to survive a nuclear hit that night. As they all emerged the next morning, they saw nothing on the surface had changed. It was a beautiful day. Inwardly, many hundreds did change that day and over the following few years they would withdraw from participation, defect or gradually drift away from the "Teachings." Splinter groups formed led by former members who claimed to channel the “Masters.” Faith in Guru Ma or Mother as prophet was shattered except among the most devoted. Nevertheless, CUT reorganized as a less fear-laden New Age religion governed by committee by the late 1990s as Mother lost all ability to function as Messenger. Since then CUT has enjoyed new membership more aligned with goals of personal ascension than fear of annihilation.

Erin reveals another theme regarding her mother’s medical condition that contributed to the guru’s odd religious obsessions and the direction the group took. Elizabeth suffered from petit mal seizures or blackouts from an early age. This disorder may have contributed to her profound visionary experiences throughout her life. The magical way Elizabeth perceived the illness also contributed to her various phobias of bad energy and psychic attack. Indeed, as Erin confirms throughout her story, Elizabeth and her followers used an elaborate book of “decrees” (chanted mantras or a form a casting spells with words and swords) to “clear” just about any problem imaginable. With the decrees Mark and Elizabeth Prophet combined elements of Theosophy, New Thought and the older “I AM” movement to spiritualize everything real and imaginable. Keeping the dark forces at bay with constant chanting is a core activity of CUT. This feature called decreeing was carried over from CUT’s primary foundation group, the “I AM” Activity founded Guy and Edna Ballard in the 1930s.

Elizabeth kept her condition hidden from members as much as possible especially after she began having "tonic-clonic" seizures, a.k.a. grand mal, that required hospitalizations. I recall in 1980, while I was still peripherally involved with CUT, strong rumors of Mother’s "epileptic" condition. Later, in a 1982 interview, the estranged parents of Betty Clare, as they called their only child, confirmed this. I understood Mother’s affliction then as petit mal events. Erin clears this up for us as she had access to the medical report and was witness to some of her mother’s worst seizures. Elizabeth used several medications to control her affliction as well as turning to a host of alternative diets and treatments including high colonics, mustard plasters, chiropractors and massages. She did not like the side effects of more effective seizure drugs like Depakote that can cause a sluggishness and weight gain.

Although Erin does not use the phrase in her book, her mother referred to some dark forces as "malicious animal magnetism," a concept taken from the Christian Science of Mary Baker Eddy. Christian Science was Elizabeth’s religion when she met Mark Prophet around 1960.

The author describes a good example of Mother’s paranoid projections that occurred during the “Mull trial.” Erin devotes considerable attention to CUT’s lawsuit against and countersuit by Gregory Mull who was an architect on staff with CUT for six years. During a personal dispute over money and the guru’s behavior, Mother dismissed Mull from the group in 1980. Erin reveals that Mother Prophet wanted to retrieve around thirty thousand dollars “loaned” to Mull that he claimed was due him as wages by the group. Erin does not report that Mull also challenged Mother’s private ethics after he discovered that the guru kept a file of confession letters sent by group members. These letters should have been burned after the guru read them. Mull eventually won over one million dollars awarded by a jury in 1986 for, among other things, “involuntary servitude.” An appellate court upheld the verdict in 1989.

On page 101, Erin reveals how this loss in court created a “catalyst” for the group to shut down most of remaining church activity in the Los Angeles area and move the entire headquarters to Montana. Mother saw Mull, her ex-husband Randall, and anyone else involved in the litigation as aligned with “fallen ones” and “black magicians.” The doom themes that attended group beliefs from the early 1970s now came into sharper focus. Erin and CUT members decreed continually to stop the dark energies and to hurl the “karma” back upon the attackers. Erin muses over what would have happened if “mom” had merely settled with Gregory for what he initially asked. We learn how that was not likely because Mother was stubborn and entitled. The trial had serious reverberations in more ways than a loss of money.

The trial enabled Elizabeth’s ex-husband Randall to testify under oath to crucial, damaging facts about group behavior and the guru’s character. He revealed for example, that he had an affair with Elizabeth before Erin’s father died. At the time Erin and all the Prophet children were incensed that Randall would “lie” under oath. Purity in sexual behavior was a fundamental teaching if not an obsession in CUT. As Erin reveals later in the book, when her mom knew she was losing her battle with dementia, Elizabeth confessed a host of personal failures to her family. One of the more significant was that she indeed had an affair that entailed “mutual masturbation” with Randall before Mark died. With the pile of other conflicts already stressing the Prophet children as they grew into adulthood, this was a last straw. Something emotionally unraveled after that for all of them. In Erin’s words, “She had just undermined so many of the decisions I had made in my life” (248).

 

For the most part, Erin Prophet fulfilled her task to write this book with a keen and at times raw honesty. As the short reviews (21 at this writing) on amazon.com reveal, ex-members who were there before and during the “shelter” period found Erin’s testimony rich with insight and meaning. CUT sympathizers reacted with disgust as if Erin were a confused traitor with one reviewer calling her book a “hall of mirrors.” Any reader familiar or not with CUT must appreciate the utter weirdness and difficulty of such self-exposure—after all, this is about her mother, her father and her siblings. Add to that the complex if confusing, not to mention comical richness, of the CUT teachings that borrow from and violate a host of religions and myths.

Erin left out hundreds of pages of story. What she included is enough to make her point clear. Her mother may have exhibited a certain leadership charisma and an extraordinary talent for channeling but the world of CUT Masters was essentially all in Elizabeth’s head. That world was primarily dependent on one woman’s stability in reason, ethics, and health. Perhaps as memes (cultural artifacts transmitted by repetition analogous to biological transmission of genes) the same Masters continue to speak through hundreds of other channels today but Elizabeth Prophet’s Masters are gone, if indeed they were ever there. Erin leaves little doubt that the Ascended Masters of CUT depended on her parents the Prophets for their very existence. None of the Prophet children could get their heads into it to continue the legacy.

Overall, I think this is a well-written book that serves a niche purpose beyond the author’s personal story. For those thousands whose lives were personally impacted for better or for worse by Elizabeth Prophet’s movement, Erin provides a valuable testament. I was among those thousands when I participated in CUT conferences from 1979 to 1980 before rejecting the “Teachings.” However, when Erin departs from her family and personal story, her commentary is much less compelling. For example, the failed deprogrammings she describes reflect solely the self-report of the “heroes” who returned to CUT after the interventions. My personal knowledge of these events (I was involved in one) undermines Erin’s assumptions that these were “forced” interventions. Without qualification, Erin says, “Deprogramming was, in my opinion, an ultimate violation of freedom of religion.” Perhaps her attitudes were shaped by her reading of certain scholars she references (e.g., J.G. Melton, L. Streiker, L. Dawson) who tend to stereotype the “anti-cult movement” much as outsiders tend to stereotype cult members. I address both these issues elsewhere.1