On Fairies, Sex Magic and Stuffed Potatoes
FROM HIS FONDNESS FOR THE DIVINITIES OF ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS AND CULTS, AND THE GROWTH OF WORLDWIDE CONSERVATION EFFORTS, AROSE ONE OF HALL’S MOST CURIOUS CAMPAIGNS: TO FASHION AN OCCULT LEGACY ON THE ENVIRONMENT.
Hall took his environmental cues in the early 1970s from seasonal rituals, rites of passage and the worship of the yoni and phallus; acorns and oaks; flowers and fruits as symbols of God’s creative powers.
“A living religion is fortunate indeed if it can meet in a living shrine,” he wrote in a 1973 essay titled The Worship of Trees and Plants, “bring living gifts to its altar, and behold growth even while the rituals are taking place. If man’s church was a grove of trees, it would grow every year as continuing evidence of the wonder and splendor of living energies.
“Perhaps understanding will bring us back again to those sentimental, unscientific beliefs that gave folks not only reason for living but courage to stand firmly, like the ancient tree, against the winds of circumstances. Plants have given us so much that perhaps we can afford to confer upon them the right of survival.”
Plants, particularly trees, were symbolic of life unfolding from its primitive germ, reflections of the nature of the universe and its manifestations.
Jim Baker a.k.a. Father Yod
To Hall, that’s why Jesus said: “For this is the parable. The seed is the word of God.” Buddha was enlightened under the bodhi tree. Laotse was born under a plum tree. Japan’s indigenous religion, Shintoism, builds its shrines out of plain, unpainted timber. The acacia tree was evidence of immortality in Egypt. The Druids of Britain were called “Men of the Oaks.” The first edition of the King James version of the Bible shows the tree of humanity rising through the roof of Noah’s Ark. Alchemists and Cabbalists have their Tree of Sephiroth.
And forests remained places, Hall said, where the devout could commune in dreams and visions with invisible populations ruled by magical elementals, angels, demigods, gods and goddesses. By invoking the names of these supernatural beings—or inscribing their names in amulets and charms—humans could appeal to them for virility, fecundity, success, safety and knowledge of future events.
Hall’s favorite lucky charms included tiny Egyptian figurines of Isis with the infant Horus on her lap and wearing a crown as a reminder of the death of her husband, Osiris. “Apuleius refers to Isis as ‘Queen of Heaven,’ a designation which was later conferred upon the Virgin Mary,” Hall says in another essay published in the mid-1970s. “There seems to be no doubt that Isis with the child in her lap is the Egyptian Madonna. Many feminine divinities, such as Ceres, Athena, and Hera gained large followings and were regarded as the custodians of the gentler and more compassionate emotions of human beings. Isis was a symbol of faithfulness, fertility, and through her son, of human redemption. She also signified the State Mysteries, where the truth seekers were ‘born again.’”
So it was in 1973 that Hall devised a plan to christen members of a local hippie cult led by his friend and dietary consultant, Sunset Boulevard restaurateur Jim Baker, a.k.a. Father Yod. They would be given new first names culled from the divine pantheons of Greece, Egypt, Babylonia, Samaria, India, China and Scandinavia.
The names of these powerful entities would give Baker’s followers the strength to overcome enemies, the instincts to avoid danger, and the extrasensory perception needed to communicate with the essential spirits, which Hall said were aligned with the Earth’s primary elements: earth, fire, air and water.
The Source Family
Baker was a judo expert, ex-Marine and alleged bank robber who may have killed two men with his bare hands. With 14 young spiritual wives and dozens of followers, he ran The Source, a vegan hot spot that catered to top-list entertainers and was often featured in movies, including Woody Allen’s Annie Hall.
Baker, who stood over six feet tall with flowing white hair and beard, also regarded Hall as a master of magic and mysticism. So he rushed over when Hall called to say he had a special gift for the Source family, which shared a nearby mansion in Los Feliz that had once belonged to the Los Angeles Times’ Chandler family.
Baker and a handful of devotees clad in white robes and sandals were not sure what to expect when they all squeezed into Hall’s cramped office at PRS. Hall, wearing a blue suit, white shirt and tie, was sitting behind his massive wooden desk and smiling as he waved a yellow piece of ruled paper covered with handwritten names. [1]
Surrounded by teetering stacks of books, mostly rare original editions, Hall slid the paper across the desk toward Baker. With these names, he declared, Source family members would be born again as a true religious order with supernatural attributes.
A few days later, Source family members, who already shared the same last name, Aquarian, gathered in their mansion’s meditation room, where Baker assigned each one a sacred name from Hall’s list.
Bickering, however, took the shine off the inaugural ceremony. Some members hated their new names. Others wanted to swap theirs for a hipper name with more verve.
No problem. Baker started over, this time handing the list around so that Family members could choose names for themselves—men first.
“Then we went to the California Department of Motor Vehicles in Hollywood to change our driver’s licenses to reflect our new names,” Robert Quinn, 64, recalled with a laugh. “In my case, it was Omne Aquarian, which drove the DMV bureaucrat behind the counter nuts.”
“That’s not a name!” she sighed in exasperation, as 30 other Source family members in white terrycloth robes waited patiently in line. Among them were women nursing babies.
“Eventually, she yielded and we were declared officially street legal,” Quinn said.
But apprenticeship in practical magic had only just begun for Baker’s tribe of mostly seekers and high school dropouts who had dedicated their lives to the middle-aged guru who tooled around town in a Rolls-Royce and homeschooled his followers by having them read books by Madame Blavatsky and Hall.
Now, armed with new sacred names, Baker led them through a four-day initiation that Quinn described as “ceremonial magic by the seat of the pants.”
It started with a private early morning ritual that included writing one’s aspirations on a piece of paper, then setting fire to it in the flame of a candle. It ended four days later with a sexual magic exercise that involved filling potatoes with orgasmic body fluids, then burying them under a full moon.
“The goal was to blend the four sacred elements with the genetic material and positive thoughts, then stuff them into a cored potato,” he said. “Then plant that potato so that it would grow and manifest the visions we had infused it with.”
“The absurdity of it all was not lost on me at the time,” he said.
Here’s how it worked:
Source family couples found private spaces in the mansion in which to have intercourse on top of a drawing of a pentagram: closets, dark stairwells, washrooms and pantries. At the moment of orgasm, they yelled “God!!!”
Then, “we clumsily tried to fish back some of the mixture of vital materials from the women and put it inside the cored potatoes. Then we stuck the cores back in the potatoes and headed outside to bury them.”
Quinn was among several participants who ventured into neighbors’ yards to plant their potatoes. “I crawled under a hedge,” he recalled, “then dug a hole with my fingernails, plopped my potato in it and covered it up.”
Quinn said they never returned to see whether their potatoes were growing, or if they had been unearthed by dogs.
But Charlene Peters, who was then known as Isis Aquarian, insisted in an interview that “the potatoes didn’t have to sprout to work.” [2]
“Filled with a kind of a magical elixir of semen and a woman’s body fluid produced at the moment of orgasm,” she said, “the potatoes manifested on another plane. That’s how magic works. The elementals did what they wanted to with them.”
The ritual’s closing ceremony was a show-stopper.
“At the end of the four-day process, we gathered in the mansion’s meditation room,” Quinn recalled. “The gray light of dawn filtered through the curtains as Baker declared the initiation ceremony officially over. Then, after an eerie pause, that entire big-ass mansion began shaking like a bowl of Jell-O from top to bottom.
“At that moment, my brain was rewired. Permanently,” he said. “All nagging doubts about the very idea of reaching out to invisible spirits were replaced by a hard conviction: Nature had talked back to us. Wow.”
The blessings, however, were short-lived. The Source Family moved to Hawaii, where Father Yod went hang-gliding for the first time in August 1975. He crashed, broke his back and died soon after. He was 53.
The Source family, which included 51 children born through natural childbirth, fell apart.
Quinn went on to get a job as a mailman.
