A Prophet in Wisconsin

Contents

Foreword

Author’s Preface

Acknowledgements

1

2

3

4

5

6

Madonna Discourse I In the Beginning

7

Madonna Discourse II The Path

8

Madonna Discourse III The Handwriting on the Wall: Sin, Karma and Compensation

9

Madonna Discourse IV The Elohim Family

10

Madonna Discourse V Trinity of Triumph

11

Madonna Discourse VI Triangle of Fire

12

Madonna Discourse VII Ascension

13

Madonna Discourse VIII The Bride

14

Madonna Discourse IX The Madonna Concept

15

16

Madonna Discourse X Flames Aloft

Photo credits:

Facing Foreword: Mark Prophet, c. 1950. Copyright: the Prophet family.

Facing Author’s Preface: Mark Prophet with his mother Mabel, 1920s. Copyright: the Prophet family.

Facing Acknowledgements: Phyllis Prophet with Rebecca, Daniel and Beth, 1952. Copyright: the Prophet family.

Facing chapter 1: Footprints in the snow and trees, Jackson Park, Chicago, 1912. Courtesy of The Field Museum Library. No known copyright restrictions.

Facing chapter 2: White barn, Illinois, 1907. Courtesy of the Field Museum Library. No known copyright restrictions.

Facing chapter 5: Helen Gould’s Tarrytown mansion, c. 1910. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, George Grantham Bain Collection. No known copyright restrictions.

Facing chapter 7: Warren Woods fields and scenery, 1914. Courtesy of the Field Museum Library. No known copyright restrictions.

Facing chapter 9: Wisconsin farm house, 1970s. Copyright Rebecca Prophet Lipinski.

Facing chapter 11: Kansas church, 1940, John Vachon, photographer. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. No known copyright restrictions.

Facing chapter 16: Grand Canyon, nineteenth century, William Bell, photographer. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. No known copyright restrictions.

To Mabel, Phyllis, Rebecca, Daniel,

Beth, Marcia and Allyson Prophet

Foreword

My father began work on this novel towards the end of 1950. He had just changed jobs, going from one company that sold aluminum combination storm windows and screens and such, to another. He had not been a great success, failing to meet his quota most months. Money was a struggle, and his wife, Phyllis, had to take a full-time job to help support the family, even while raising their small children. Often he would find himself the house-husband, providing child care when he was not on the road as a salesman.

A year after his job switch, he found himself selling door-to-door magazine subscriptions, surely a step down. And yet, to the detriment of his family life, his finances and his own health, he never stopped reading and talking about the first love of his life: uniting Eastern and Western spirituality.

For several years prior to this project, he had been studying esoteric thought—Rosicrucianism, the Baird Spalding books, and the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda, founder of the Self Realization Fellowship, which all seek to unite Christianity with Eastern thought. It is not surprising, therefore, that Mark Prophet chose a somewhat radical hero for his novel—a half-Indian man who wears a turban and attempts to bring Eastern wisdom to a narrow-minded Wisconsin community. This was a circumstance not unlike that in which my father found himself. He had been forbidden to speak in his own congregation, where he had tried to preach his message of many paths to the summit. It was this message that he would later successfully promote through The Summit Lighthouse, which he founded in 1958.

A Prophet in Wisconsin is the story of a man trying to bridge the gap between the world of the farmhouse, with its fatigman (poor man’s Norwegian pastry), and the rich world of thought Mark was uncovering in his studies of the East. In Hindu thought and Rosicrucian lore, he learned of reverence for God as Mother, which was hardly to be seen in the dry Norwegian Methodist and Lutheran Christianity in which he had been raised. He originally entitled the work Madonna, and in that title we can see Mark’s love and respect for his own mother, Mabel, who had died in 1949, as well as for the mother of Christ as portrayed in some of the lost gospels he read at the time, books of varying authenticity and composition date that were popular among esoteric groups.

In 1952, when he stopped work on the novel, Mark’s eldest girls, Rebecca and Beth, would have been five and two years old. One can imagine them inspiring some of the playful scenes between Madonna and her friend Angie. When they were small, he was fascinated with the idea that forms in nature reflected a higher, more perfect world. Rebecca remembers once pointing out to him a shape that looked like a mother and child etched in ice on a windowpane. He was so excited he got out a paper and traced it.

Sometime in 1951, while still writing Madonna, Mark began planning to get it published. He wrote to the Florida Grapefruit Canning Company for permission to use the image on the label of their Madonna grapefruit juice on the cover of his novel. A representative replied and said that the company was in bankruptcy and permission could not be granted.

By 1952, Mark had turned his writing in another direction, letters from a master named Morya, which he called the Ashram Notes. This led directly into his work as a messenger, taking dictation from unseen masters who were believed to be a group of highly evolved spiritual beings. In other contexts his work would have been called channeling, although he did not use the word. My father never returned to Madonna; it lay unfinished upon his sudden death from a stroke in 1973. He left nine children, five with Phyllis and four with my mother, his second wife, Elizabeth Clare Prophet. My mother went on to edit and publish much of his work, but she also never found time to edit or publish Madonna before her own diagnosis with Alzheimer’s Disease in 1998.

It has been in my mind for at least fifteen years to publish my father’s novel, ever since I discovered the typed manuscript among his papers. I could imagine him sitting in his living room, his big body hunched over his manual typewriter, giving birth to this story. He must have stopped now and then to change a diaper or play with and tickle his children.

I want to draw attention to my father’s choice to call this work a novel. Clearly he meant the story to be fiction. The characters of Angie Powers and her family are drawn from his own growing-up years, set in the days, as he tells us, before rural electrification. The half-Indian teacher Maris becomes the most prominent of his characters. Maris gives sermons, The Madonna Discourses, published herein. A few years later, my father had begun writing similar messages as dictations from such masters as Morya and Kuthumi, said to be the masters M and KH who inspired Helena Blavatsky, founder of the Victorian-era Theosophi-cal Society.

By 1958, my father had gathered a following from other esoteric groups that had formed around previous messengers, also known as contacts. Participants in these groups often argue and debate which contact, or messenger, is the truest and clearest conduit for the messages of the masters. I have written in my book Prophet’s Daughter about the difficulties that arise from this thought world.

I have come to believe that messages from masters should be judged by their content, rather than their claimed source. Although Madame Blavatsky’s Mahatma Letters were said to have been precipitated into railway coaches and under cushions when Blavatsky was nowhere to be found, some of her work was also dictated by the masters and written with her own pen. The process of receiving dictation becomes an important component of the thought world. During the past century, other amanuenses, scribes and messengers have continued in Blavatsky’s tradition, writing, typing or speaking aloud these messages under the names of various saints and sages.

In calling his project a novel, my father was shifting the focus of his work away from the source of the ideas—whether from masters, from earlier works, or from his own creative genius—and towards their implications. He used the device of Maris to state what he considered to be essential truths—the unity of East and West, the power of positive thinking, communion with an indwelling divinity. His expression of these ideas is beholden to earlier books like Dweller on Two Planets and Life and Teachings of the Masters of the Far East. And those books themselves are based on others.

Baird Spalding, who wrote the Life and Teachings books during the 1920s as a purported diary of a scientific expedition to India, did not visit that country until after completing the first two volumes. To some, this dissimulation on his part discredits the work. But I believe that his books should not be viewed as frauds but as didactic fiction. The ideas should be put to the test for their utility and application in human life, not for their source, whether Emil, Maris, or, as many of these ideas were later presented, from El Morya or Saint Germain. In choosing to call his later work dictations and identifying their source as masters, my father was fulfilling a genuine spiritual need, fitting himself into a predefined role, perhaps not realizing where it might later lead.

The work also offers insight into my father’s growth and development as a spiritual teacher. Careful readers of his later work will glean from these pages an idea of what my father’s thought was like before he connected with the publications of the I AM Religious Activity, the Bridge to Freedom and others.

As you read A Prophet in Wisconsin, I hope that you will appreciate the flavor of my father’s youth, which I have preserved, as well as the timeless truths, those which resonate with you as well as those that may now seem quaint. In 1950, they were a radical departure from the ideas my father must have heard from the pulpit, and it took courage to promote them.

A note on style: especially in his early years, my father tended towards the flowery and effusive, a reflection of his Victorian-era influences. I have left his work largely as he wrote it, but did adjust language that he would most likely have changed if he had the luxury of a word processor and a few more years to improve on his tenth-grade education.

I celebrate my father as a pioneer in a work that has been carried on by many others. I hope that this book, finally published more than fifty years after it was written, will provide its readers with the inspiration and fulfillment he intended.—ERIN PROPHET

Author’s Preface

I remember how my mother would stand in the window and watch as I left the house or as I returned. It is particularly wonderful to think of her at twilight with a light in the window framing her figure, giving it an aura of holiness.

Everyone has—or had—a mother; most of us can appreciate this love that watches our goings and comings. Together with this thought comes another. I remember back in 1938 we bought our first car, a second-hand 1930 Chevrolet. Mother loved to ride around with me at dusk, just looking at the lighted windows in homes all over our town. It seemed to us, observing the lights in the windows, that it was always bright and cheerful inside—and that in the hearts of the people, peace reigned.

This was the wisdom she taught me. As the years rolled by and the war years came and passed, it was impossible not to realize that behind those lighted windows there was not always peace.