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THE SEEKERS

Anne was born Evelyn Grace Victoria Edwards in an Australian country town called Sale, two hours east of Melbourne, in 1921. Sale was so small then that it wasn’t even classified as a town — just a farming settlement with a main street.

Birth records show that her mother, Florence Hoile, was from Wandsworth, in South London. She spent 27 years in mental hospitals in Australia, and eventually died in one. Florence was rumoured to have set her hair on fire in the street in Sale in the 1920s. She claimed to be a medium and psychic who could speak to the dead.

Anne’s father, Ralph Edwards, was born in an inner-Melbourne factory suburb in 1892. He went to Europe to fight in World War I, and while he was there his first wife died giving birth to their child. He married Florence upon his return from the front.

The couple had seven children, with Anne the oldest. Records show that Anne was at the Old Melbourne Orphanage for some time as a child, with her father classified as ‘whereabouts unknown’ after running away from an unpaid war veteran’s debt. When Anne was three, he turned up in a small Victorian fishing port a long way from Sale.

In 1929, at age eight, Anne was enrolled at Sunshine Primary School in the working-class suburbs of Melbourne’s west. Then things become obscured. Most of Anne’s life was documented, but there is a gap in the 1930s, the period when she entered her teens. It is as if she disappeared, and maybe in some ways she did. With her mother already showing signs of mental illness and her father itinerant, perhaps she became the stand-in mother for her siblings. It’s tempting to fill the void with speculation and think that these were the lost years that changed her, or made her, or unmade her.

Anne’s mother was first put into an asylum around 1941, while her husband was in the army, and just as Anne, aged 20, married a man called Lionel Harris. He came from a tiny place on the state’s northern border and worked on fruit farms. Anne seemed to have had a magnetic power over him because after the army posted him interstate, he went AWOL for nearly eight months and was arrested by military police after being found with Anne back in Victoria. He served another year before being discharged on compassionate grounds.

When World War II began, Anne’s father again enlisted, describing his religion on his army forms as Methodist. He was stationed in and around Melbourne as an officer and an engineer, but developed health problems — both his heart and lungs were poor — and was discharged in 1944. By that time, he gave his religion as ‘spiritualist’ and his number of children as none. Anne later said she considered her father to be a Buddhist. Ralph worked as a railway clerk in Melbourne after the war, moved to Brisbane in 1955 and died there, in hospital, in 1966.

Almost half of Florence’s life was spent in asylums in and around Melbourne: the Royal Park mental hospital, Mont Park, Ararat, and Sunbury. Florence died in 1971, just as her daughter’s strange cult was booming.

It seems clear from this history that Anne’s parents were distant and troubled. Yet according to Anne, her parents were worldly and enlightened. They went to India on a spiritual journey after the war, she has claimed, visiting an ashram opened by Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore. She often told cult members that her father was friends with Lord Nuffield — Sir William Morris, the famous British Morris cars millionaire and philanthropist.

There were also stranger claims. In a sermon to her followers — or a ‘discourse’, as she called them — Anne said that her mother wrote dead people’s stories after channelling their spirits, and this was why she had been classed as mentally ill. Yet Anne claimed her mother was ‘quite happy, she didn’t mind. She taught us a great deal … to show others how to be quiet and how to live and how to stop mocking the divine life.’

Anne also said her entire family could astral travel out of their bodies and into the spirit world. She claimed she was three when she realised that ‘Mummy was different’ and started seeing her not only as her mother but also as a spiritual teacher. And ‘Mummy’ had her own teacher: a Tibetan guru who was instructing her in yoga. ‘There was no doubt about it: my mum was with a guru at the time. A lot of spiritual polishing had to be done … to gain the necessary and deeper understanding of this thing called yoga.’

However, Florence’s death certificate gives her religion as Church of England, and there is little documentary evidence to support claims that she had a Tibetan guru.

Yoga was important to Anne: to her, it was a form of ‘soul travelling’. Yoga — and the search for inner peace and majesty and stillness that underlies it — kickstarted her cult. But she brought untold baggage and esoterica to it, and her practice of yoga quickly transformed into something dangerous. ‘The conclusion I finally reached is that anyone can practise this whether they are under a spiritual teacher or not, although it is always better to have a guru,’ she noted in a recorded sermon.

Anne said she met her mother’s guru at age 14. ‘Some students follow the inner master who never shows himself on this plane, Mother said, and in the physical form others will find a guru in the earthly body who spends a lot of time on all planes teaching their disciples how to leave the body and helping them if they become entangled in a morass of psychic difficulties.’

From this, she said, ‘Freedom, wisdom, kindness, lovingness and caring — what they call charity in the churches’ would follow. Her promise was to be liberated from ‘matter’. The Jesus in the Bible tried his best but the world wasn’t ready. So he had come again, this time to Melbourne in the 1970s, through her. ‘Christ did say “Come follow me!” but very few knew what he was saying, and he wanted them to go with him into the worlds beyond. And they were not prepared to take the journey. So he turned away from them, leaving an eternal message, and you all know it,’ she told her followers.

Anne started teaching yoga in Melbourne and in Geelong, a satellite city close by, in the late 1950s. This was just as yoga was emerging in the post-war west. The Gita School of Yoga was opened in 1960 in Melbourne by Margrit Segesman, under whom Anne trained and with whom she worked. Segesman was the daughter of a Swiss banker; she lived in Indian ashrams and followed a Tibetan guru. She also claimed to have lived in an Indian cave for five years. Anne’s story was that she met Segesman in the street on a windy, rainy day in Melbourne and helped her pull some awnings down outside her school; Anne introduced herself as a physiotherapist and nurse.

According to Barbara Kibby, who, like many, would become a cult member through Anne’s early yoga classes, Anne was an excellent teacher. Many who crossed Anne’s path say this; that in the very early days, she was wonderful. She gravitated towards teaching middle-aged women in wealthy suburbs. These women were going through a mid-life crisis, Kibby said: ‘Children grown up, husbands having affairs, but it was in the days when divorce was not as normal as it is today. Divorce was a very big deal. There were a certain number of Jewish women and she targeted them, mainly because they were very vulnerable due to their situation in society at that time and because they came from wealthy families.

‘She knew if she could get them to leave their husbands, their families would disown them — she’d have them for life,’ says Barbara. ‘There was nowhere for them to go.’

Anne encouraged such women — and men, though in fewer numbers — to turn their backs on their previous lives. ‘There’s no own family,’ she would say. ‘Only love. Great love.’

Middle-age was the perfect time, she said, to begin their real journeys. ‘It is very important and rather advisable for any individual who is midway through their physical incarnation to sever their ties with old things that they do by erecting a new home which will contain new facilities and furnishings which are symbolic of new life powers and blessings and beauties into which you have consciously entered.’

‘There’s no ifs or buts in that at all,’ Anne told her followers. ‘Also remember making changes like that are going to involve human and financial sacrifice, but it is a small price to pay, remember, for the fullness of the benefit to be gained by living in agreement with that you know. What must come to you before everything else are the imperishable gifts of the divine spirit through your training.

‘I know a tremendous effort has to be made to break the old habits of fear and all the holding back of the self and false economies,’ she said. ‘Where you are now is like a season. It is a season of your unfoldment.’

Yoga, all kinds of yoga, was a booming craze. It was the thing to do in Melbourne through the 1960s for wealthy women who had raised children. But Anne and her aggressively spiritual — almost occult — approach was gaining attention in the yoga community. At Segesman’s school, she cast a spell on a young man in a class who disagreed with her. The incident caused Segesman to break all ties with Anne. ‘Anne went into the kitchen when they were clearing up,’ says a former cult member, ‘and she muttered, “He’s not going to be here tomorrow, he’s going to be very sick.” And of course the next day the man was. Now you can say that’s coincidence, it probably is coincidence, but she already was gaining that intention and that reputation of having influence over people’s wellbeing, for good or for bad. It made you pretty wary. You stood back. You were careful.’

Three days before Christmas 1962, a Saturday, Dr Raynor Johnson heard the doorbell ring. He was in his study, at his home in the grounds of the University of Melbourne — the academic heart of the city’s establishment.

‘A day of destiny for me,’ Johnson wrote later in a strange, unfinished manuscript that has become a sort of hidden manifesto for the cult.

Johnson, who was 61 in 1962, was the English-born head of the university’s Queen’s College, a brilliant physicist but a most peculiar man. He was something of a marquee signing for the university: a venerable and very liberal English academic with impeccable pedigree. By the early 1960s, however, he was on the tail-end of his career and had moved in his mind from physics into metaphysics. He was the archetypal seeker.

‘A young lady of perhaps 30 to 35 years of age, of fair hair and complexion, of medium to slender build, of clear grey sparkling eyes and a quiet attractive voice, addressed me,’ he recorded.

In fact Anne was nearly 41, but may have looked younger as she had begun what was to be a long regime of facelifts.

‘I don’t think you know me,’ she said, addressing Johnson by name, ‘but I know you well. My name is Anne —.’

She called herself Anne Hamilton, but Johnson’s diary is very coy about names; he either doesn’t give them, doesn’t give them in full, or uses just initials. For many years to come in speeches and writings, he referred to Anne as an anonymous male.

He invited her in, leading her into his study and showing her to an easy chair. ‘She said, “I understand you are shortly going on a visit to India?”’

He was indeed to embark, with his wife, Mary, on a six-week trip involving a lecture on ‘science and spirituality’ at a conference, followed by some travel. ‘I think I felt a little surprised that this was known.’

This was one of Anne’s main ploys: to find out about people surreptitiously and then dazzle them with her insight. Two men she was said to know well were in and around Queen’s College at the time and were likely feeding her information about Johnson. One was John Champness, a Melbourne psychologist who had studied at Queen’s. He was a friend, possibly boyfriend, of Anne’s before she first married, and he knew Johnson. Later, she told followers she met Champness while singing at the British Empire Society in Melbourne. The other was Michael Riley, her soon-to-be second husband, a South African ex-navyman who would marry Anne for a year, in 1965. He was in charge of catering and then gardening at Queen’s. He was very keen on Johnson’s increasingly esoteric mysticism, and the two were friendly. Riley later claimed to have awoken Anne sexually, and the two were said to be in a relationship of some sort when he initially told her about Johnson.

It was Anne’s first masterstroke — to court and recruit a man of influence in Melbourne. By 1962, as shown in his academic writings, Johnson was so deep into transcendence, the paranormal, and the promise of bliss that he wanted a teacher — a guru, in the Eastern sense — to guide him. She wanted to be that guru.

Johnson was from Leeds, and he went to university in Oxford and London. His specialty in physics was spectroscopy: the science of radiation and light. He worked in London with Ernest Rutherford, who split the atom and discovered the proton during World War I. In 1934, he came to Melbourne with Mary. He was looking for more, more, more, always more to the physical dimensions of life. In the United Kingdom, he had been involved with the Society for Psychical Research, exploring things such as telepathy, poltergeists, and mediums. He was also a poet and had begun to publish arcane books on mysticism. Former student Ian Weeks remembers him as a mischievous, impish man with constantly twinkling eyes, large ears, and buck teeth: ‘Perfectly cast for the role of the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland. He had a disproportionately large head. His head was somewhat like an egg turned upside down.’

But he was very open. He was a friend to his students, many of whom he invited back to his home on the university grounds for late-night discussions on philosophy and religion. He was known as having very liberal beliefs, and the students called him Sam. ‘Raynor was always very gentle to human beings, to others,’ says Weeks, a Melbourne academic specialising in the history of religions, himself from a family of noted Methodists. ‘Very thoughtful, and always took you seriously, even if you were speaking utter rubbish. He was extremely polite.’

Anne dazzled Johnson that Christmas of 1962 in his study. He found that both he and Anne — this wonderful, attractive woman who appeared on his doorstep and knew the future — were enamoured with Helena Blavatsky, a Russian medium who co-formed the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875. ‘Madam’ Blavatsky said she was taught esoteric wisdom by a spiritual teacher in Tibet: she was interested in cosmology, transcendental meditation, and the paranormal, but her main message to followers, who included Rudolph Steiner and Thomas Edison, was of a single ancient wisdom in the form of an energy. Her star pupil, Annie Besant, helped set up the first World’s Parliament of Religions an organisation aimed at cultivating harmony among members of the world’s different religious and spiritual communities.

Anne had in fact hosted homeopath Thomas Maughan, the head of Britain’s The Druid Order, in her home a couple of years earlier. Maughan quoted Blavatsky in his books. He said he could talk to the dead. The link was so direct that Maughan married a Family cult member, briefly.

This mysticism aligned entirely with Raynor Johnson’s headspace. Anne also told him that she was making her early followers read a Greek-Armenian guru called George Gurdjieff, who, with help from wealthy patrons, set up an institute in a French chateau. He preached that the universe was created by cosmic matter called Etherokilno, and referred to the god within it as ‘Our Almighty Omni-Loving Common Father Uni-Being Creator Endlessness’. Followers said that he gave off a strong blue light, which could be used to cure mental and physical illnesses.

Then she talked to him about India. ‘There will be many on this side — and elsewhere — who will be interested in your visit.’

Johnson later wrote that he suspected right away she had extrasensory perception; that she knew things other people could not. He failed to recognise that all she had likely done was ask around about him and what he was up to. He seized on her use of the word ‘elsewhere’. ‘I formed the idea that “elsewhere” might be conveying something of “beyond this plane of existence,”’ he wrote.

Anne told him that he would need to be careful of his wife’s health on the trip. ‘I can see there is danger here,’ she said.

She had pushed three crucial buttons in just a few minutes: she apparently knew the future, she knew how important India was to him, and she sensed that his wife was in danger. Johnson asked if Mary could join them in the study. Anne told them that Mary would get so sick on their trip they would have to come back to Melbourne early.

‘I asked Mrs Johnson if she believed in clairvoyants,’ said Anne in a recorded sermon, ‘and she said, “Oh yes!” and I said, “Well, look, it comes to me clairvoyantly” — it came to me as a shock in my solar plexus — that she would die, when she got there, of eating fish. I said, “It will weaken you for a long time to come even if you stay alive, so if you don’t eat it you won’t get the tummy poisoning.”’

They took the trip, and Mary got acute dysentery.

‘She was in a very bad way,’ said Anne later. ‘It was very, very close. She had to come home and she was very ill. She was not quite herself for a long, long time, as prophesised.’

This event was an important marker in Anne’s power over Johnson. He was her first believer, and he was crucial in building the cult she would head, based in part on the strength of his name.

‘It is scarcely necessary to say that upon our return in February 1963 the person we were most looking forward to seeing again was Anne,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘It was for us the beginning of a friendship in which weekly visits were interchanged between our homes — and wonder deepened.’

She returned to the university several times to see Johnson. Ian Weeks saw her one day walking in a quadrangle, waving flowers around at the entrances of buildings, in a ritual. He says that she was clearly grooming Johnson. ‘She was a very attractive woman. He was naïve. He did not have a very strong sense of the real nature of evil in the world. I think he was misled by her. She was very capable, very intelligent, with a spiritually active and interested persona, and the combination of those two people came to have considerable force.’

Johnson’s spiritualism, says Weeks, led him to believe he had been invited by a ‘college of spirits’ to widen spiritual beliefs in the world. He thought that he could ‘speak to his generation’, and the fact that he was scientist would make him more influential. Johnson was an Edwardian liberal who questioned organised religion, societal convention, and the aristocracy; his was a generation looking for meaning, even in the arcane. ‘Spiritualism was very widely held at the time,’ says Weeks. ‘People like Conan Doyle, who wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories, were interested in it. A number of playwrights and writers, and authors of various kinds, used to go to spiritualist places, and in many homes if you had a dinner party, after you’d had coffee and port you’d have a ouija board, and you’d try and connect with spirits beyond. This was really surprisingly widespread in the upper middle-classes particularly.’

By early 1963, Australian troops were in Vietnam but none had yet been killed. The Beatles were about to make their first album. In Australia, there were more suicides that year than ever recorded. It was a time of seeking and questioning. And Johnson was bewitched. Anne had been telling him all about her first husband — Lionel, who had died in a car crash in 1955 — and how sad and tragic her life had been. She told him she had lost three children and had contemplated suicide.

Anne also started to tell him a lot more about her own guru, or at least the one she said she had. Johnson was the only person she ever gave his name to: Sri Yugananda. She said he had been in Australia but was now able to ‘prototype’ to her — in other words, to duplicate himself and be in two places at once. When Lionel died, she said, the guru sent Anne a cable saying Walk on.

She told Johnson that he was part of her grand design and that what she really wanted for him was what she already had — eternal life, to live and die outside of the restraints of humanity. She had travelled with her guru through the cosmos, she said, and she made it sound beautiful and assured: ‘Once you have a glimpse of these superior ones just with your old eyes it will completely change your life. You could look at them for years and years and not know them, then all of a sudden through your training you see them. You find that the supreme ruler god has manifested and given enlightenment and divine wisdom for all creatures.’

It was time for her first miracle.

Anne had a biological daughter called Judith with Lionel Harris. Judith later came to be known as Natasha and now lives in the United Kingdom, but is no longer involved with The Family and doesn’t speak to her mother. In May of 1963, she was 19, and she rolled her car on the outskirts of Melbourne, fracturing her skull and wounding an eye. Doctors told her she might lose her sight. ‘Her mother immediately organised spirit help,’ Johnson wrote, and a week later Judy left hospital much earlier than expected and in good shape. Johnson told his wife: ‘I think this is the most Christ-like person I have ever met.’

Anne quickly proclaimed herself Johnson’s post-retirement ‘teacher’; she told him to slow down his activities, sit quietly for an hour a day, reduce thinking to a ‘vanishing point’, and not eat for two days a week. She told him she often fasted for three-week stints.

A group of like-minded seekers would be formed around him, she said. They would receive revelations and the ‘joy and peace of being really on The Path’. The first seven of her followers were soon to be consecrated, and he was one of them.

Johnson was primed to believe Anne when she entered his life: he had already been drawn in by a succession of odd mentors over the years, which in many ways set him up for Anne’s audacious courtship. As soon as he moved to Melbourne in 1934, he had met one of these: Ambrose Pratt, a journalist, author, and businessman who helped form the modern Liberal Party in Australia.

They had met at Pratt’s 60th birthday party. Pratt was a handsome, goateed man with a twirled moustache. He had retired after an extraordinary multi-tasked career. He had been a lawyer in the Supreme Court in Sydney; he described his younger self as an ‘insufferable coxcomb’ with a monocle. He moonlighted writing left-wing articles for Australian Worker, before moving to England to write novels and work for the Daily Mail. Then he came back and took a job in Melbourne at The Age newspaper.

Just before World War I, Pratt went to South Africa on assignment with the Australian prime minister, Andrew Fischer, a left-wing former coal-miner from Scotland. Pratt ended up writing a book critical of apartheid. He was also heavily into the early thinking on tariff protection, where a country taxes imports to encourage buying local goods — and he became still more politically involved when he joined ‘The Group’, which included future prime minister Bob Menzies, to form what is now called the Liberal Party.

Pratt was also friendly with Sir Reginald Ansett, who would go on to own an Australian airline and a television channel. Pratt introduced Johnson to Ansett.

Pratt and Johnson, like Anne, loved mediums and the paranormal, and all the quasi-science these things entailed. None of it was quasi then, though, because it hadn’t been tested. It now seems odd that Pratt was front and centre in ‘The Group’: a man who said he could see auras in humans, animals, and trees and considered the human aura a shape-shifting ‘quasi-physical luminescence’.

They only knew each other for ten years; Pratt died in 1944. He was much older than Johnson, but Johnson adored him and was greatly influenced by him.

But it was in death that Pratt spoke loudest to Johnson. The academic became convinced he was still communicating with his dead friend through a series of bizarre series of letters from an infamous Irish medium who claimed to be channelling Pratt. These letters, perhaps more than anything else, told Johnson that a spiritual Master — who materialised for him with uncanny timing in Anne — was what he needed.

The Irish medium was Geraldine Cummins. Johnson had met her in 1953 in London, just after he had published The Imprisoned Splendour, a book that argues science has room for the mystical. Cummins asked him to give her a sample of his handwriting. A few months later, back in Melbourne, he got a letter from Cummins with what she said was a letter to him from Pratt, nine years dead. He had written his name from the afterlife in code. Many more letters followed. Around the same time, Cummins claimed to have found the missing British explorer Percy Fawcett, who had disappeared in Brazil. He was alive but sick, she said, and had discovered the lost undersea city of Atlantis in the jungle.

Johnson treasured the letters. He said his dead friend — who he wrote as ‘[deceased]’ — was intimate and authoritive still, and was instructing him to get a Master. He was advised to look for someone with ‘schooling in the spirituality of the Himalayas’ and special powers, such as the ability to ‘dematerialise’ their physical bodies and then pop them up in another place.

One particular letter in 1958 was about death and real love and the promise of the eternal. It asked if a man’s wife died 50 years before, could he be reunited with her as a young woman, in the beyond?

The answer, Johnson read, was yes — if she was ‘evolved’. Except that someone else, nearer to ‘earth-level’, had taken her personality. If the man loved the woman’s ‘real self’, when he died she would come back down to earth and take back the personality he once knew. Then the pair would be able to renew and relive the ‘ecstasy’ of their love affair because the man would be reborn to live again as a child and she would teach him how it was done.

This was Johnson’s eureka moment. This seemed to him to be the answer to everything he sought. But everything was dependent on the right teacher. Coincidentally, that was when Anne appeared, and it was also her primary message.

By winter in 1963, with the hills in the Dandenong Ranges verdant and wet, the unsealed roads often impassable through the season’s mud and flooding, Johnson was about to be initiated as one of the first seven members of Anne’s new cult.

Aldous Huxley’s Island, a groundbreaking novel in which an enlightened future race live in a paradise with children and psychedelics, had just been published. Pratt had also written about similar subject matter: his novel Lift Up Your Eyes came out in the 1930s, just after Johnson met him. It was about a man who wanted to re-form the world with orphaned children, so he built a compound (called ‘Manuka’) to educate them among the hills and fern gullies. They would be taught to ‘subdue their appetites’ in an atmosphere of spartan, holy living in order to become mentally stronger. In the novel, Manuka was attacked by newspapers for being a privately run asylum educating orphaned children in an un-holy way. The government did not investigate.

Johnson’s moment of promise arrived. Anne told him she had been visited by the prototyping Sri Yugananda, who announced that her star pupil was ready. Yugananda came to her and spoke to her, she said, and then she said she went outside her house in the hills, into the winter night, and experienced ecstasy. She encountered clouds and raindrops containing spirits. A tree spoke to her: ‘We never die: only our mortal shell can perish.’

Yugananda had decreed that Johnson and his wife should be given hallucinogenic drugs — ‘sacred manna’ — because he considered these ‘a divine gift to man imprisoned in this dense physical level’. The group they would join through this induction would be called The Great White Brotherhood of Initiates and Masters. Johnson would begin as a lowly member.

What wasn’t clear from our research was how much Johnson led Anne on. Who preyed on whom? We know she seduced him spiritually, but did his leap of faith mean that he encouraged her to go further too? It’s not clear from his journal, which is in essence a propaganda piece. Ian Weeks thinks he probably did knowingly influence Anne. Johnson was a man very sure of his own pedigree in both science and religion. ‘Raynor would have thought of himself as more knowledgeable than the clergy, the professors of the New Testament or Old Testament or theology or church history. He would have believed deeply that he himself was close to the real spiritual world. This would have played into what some might call a God complex.’ After all, he was already viewed as a kind of guru himself within the university. ‘My first reaction,’ says Weeks, ‘was that this was just an extension of the sort of nuttiness that I’d seen at the university. But it soon became clear it was more than that.’

Whether naïvely or with some degree of knowingness, Johnson agreed. He considered Anne by now a ‘mystic of a high order … unquestionably the wisest, the serenest, and the most gracious and generous soul I had ever met.’

‘I had met my Master,’ he wrote.

When he was initiated, Raynor saw grand visions. ‘The screen of my mind unfolded its panorama,’ he wrote. He saw ‘prison cells passing rapidly before the eye like hundreds of pages of a living picture book allowed to turn over between fingers and a thumb’. He took the prison cells to mean ‘eons of time and oceans of suffering’. Anne presented herself to Johnson — and his daughter Maureen, who was also being inducted — as Jesus. ‘Anne decided to rise into that high state of consciousness known to Masters and God-conscious souls as “Samadhi” — one form of God-consciousness,’ he wrote. ‘Her face became, to my human eyes, supernaturally beautiful and She spoke with authority and divine power as one might imagine the Christ would do if speaking in the first person to each person there. Looking around slowly from one person to another, and then at each of us individually, She said, “Do you know who I am? I and my Father are one. My peace I leave with you. You will be my gurus, all of you.”’

Johnson knelt at her feet. Anne said her own Master had already told her that she should die — ‘last Thursday’ — but she had decided to stay alive to help him and others, that she needed to stay for the ‘needy, sad and distressed souls’. She said to him that he would never again experience such a visitation from her as Jesus, but to know that she was Him, ‘the Master of Masters Himself’.

Johnson was awestruck. ‘I shall never, never forget the look on Anne’s face — the power and challenge of Her eyes as Christ spoke through Her. I feel it was the supreme experience of all my incarnations,’ he wrote. Johnson believed at this point that he had already lived seven times. ‘I thank God for so unspeakable a privilege.’

Anne told Johnson about the Biblical Jesus’s life ‘1900 years ago’. He had come to Earth then as a revered figure with a beard, and, according to Johnson, she said that if he had come with a beard again he might have been recognised and persecuted once more. So he had come as her.

Anne named Johnson ‘John The Baptist’. She told him the world would end in 1983, and that he needed to stay silent about everything that had happened between them. To do otherwise — to betray — may kill her. ‘To disclose her Mastership to others outside The Path might do irreparable harm and might even lead to her death,’ he wrote. ‘The forces of evil were always looking for ways to frustrate the work. The plan for Her was to work unseen, unheard and unknown.’

After his induction, Johnson started taking drugs in Anne’s presence. He would kneel at her feet high on either LSD or psilocybin. ‘How can I describe these sacred hours with Anne? Her face became divinely beautiful with sublime authority, always loving and radiant, but at times stern, and sometimes anguished and sorrowful.’ Yet privately, he confessed ‘spiritual shock’. He couldn’t quite believe that ‘a turning point in history’ — Jesus in the Melbourne hills in Anne’s body — was taking place before his eyes. He had doubts. ‘Was I being fooled by a “delusional?” Was the incredible setting and its story true — or was I led “up the garden path” by someone, however good and admirable, who had a gift for making the incredible credible?’

He convinced himself that it was all true. He said Jesus’s disciples in the Middle East must have also been confused and doubtful. Also, if Jesus were to come back, it would have to be incognito. ‘We must therefore go forward,’ he wrote. ‘Walk ON.’