On the outskirts of Paris, there lies what was promise of a better future in an unlikely shape: ten cylindrical towers, each 15 stories tall, with curved concrete balconies, known as Les Choux de Créteil– the Cabbages. Designed by architect Gérard Grandval and completed in 1974, the Cabbages are housing blocks with a difference. Their unique shape, as seen in the above photo, also has a function: the apartments’ living spaces are closer to the windows and the balconies – each of which are 2 meters tall – provide both direct outdoor access and privacy.
The Cabbages are one of the designs featured in the new book The Tale of Tomorrow: Utopian Architecture in the Modernist Realm. Drawing inspiration from the space age, and materials like concrete and glass, the designs suggested an idealistic future full of promise. Or as Sofia Borges writes in the introduction, "The future never looked better than in the past."
From Eero Saarinen to Le Corbusier, Oscar Neimeyer to Lina Bo Bardi, along with other major 20th century architects, the book explores this futuristic, elegant architectural movement. Here is selection of images from the book:
Scientists in Argentina have unearthed one of the largest meteorites ever discovered on Earth, and there's no way an alien blob creature is incubating itself inside. According to Science Alert, the giant rock could be the second largest meteorite ever discovered.
Found on the border of the Chaco province in Argentina, the massive boulder looks like the kind of meteorite we usually only see in films. The rocky extraterrestrial sphere weighs in at a whopping 30 tons, not quite as large as the world’s largest meteorite, Hoba (apparently large meteorites get names), which was found in Namibia, and weighed 66 tons.
This latest meteorite, which has been dubbed, “Gancedo,” was discovered in the Campo del Cielo, an area that has dozens of impact craters. A different, even larger meteorite named “El Chaco” was also recently found in the region.
Despite all of the excitement over the find, researchers still need to conduct a number of tests on Gancedo to make sure it is actually a meteorite. It remains unclear, also, if there are any aliens inside.
Vibrant murals, lush greenery, and whimsical eco-buildings line the narrow streets of Christiania, Copenhagen’s infamous squatted freetown. It’s often billed as the world’s largest and most long-lived autonomous commune, and perhaps it is: governments elsewhere surely wouldn’t have tolerated a non-rent-paying, openly-cannabis-trafficking, freewheeling community establishing itself in the heart of their nation’s capital.
It’s mind-boggling to imagine such an iconoclastic paradise—home to roughly 900 residents—functioning within one of Europe’s most modern and upscale cities. Scenic waterways flank both sides of the 84-acre strip of land (read: prime real estate) that the community occupies, and an idyllic lake cuts through the center. Just blocks away is Noma, the famed two-Michelin-star restaurant that draws affluent gastronomes from all over the world.
The juxtaposition sometimes seems too jarring and bizarre to be real. In 2010, I experienced my own reality-check moment in Christiania, rollicking the night away at a rare performance by 1970s British anarcho-punk legend Steve Ignorant at the commune’s live music club, Loppen. Upon exiting the freetown’s premises, I was abruptly returned to my normal life as an exchange student by a sign that read, “You are now entering the EU.”
How does such a place work? Who earns the privilege to live there, and how do they maintain one of the foremost utopian communities in the world? The nitty-gritty, as it tends to be, is more complicated.
Before the commune was established, the area had served as a military zone with a defense history dating back to the 1600s. It was abandoned and fenced off in 1971. In September of that same year, would-be squatters tore down the fences, occupied the vacant barracks, and declared the area a freetown.
The spirit of global counter-culturalism was high, and the city’s lack of affordable housing had made young Danes restless. The squatters formulated a vision for an outsider utopia: they would go on to develop their own rules (consensus democracy being a key tenet), introduce their own currency, and fly their own flag.
In the beginning, the government allowed the commune to exist without interference as a “social experiment.” Residents planted gardens, constructed DIY living spaces, and developed Christiania’s “Common Law,” which outlines prohibited items such as weapons and hard drugs.
The bohemian sanctuary grew into a tourist hotspot, frequented by foreigners and Danes alike. Pusher Street, where cannabis was openly sold — and photography strictly prohibited — was particularly alluring to young travelers and exchange students.
The brightly-colored exterior of a house in Christiania. (Photo: Athena Lao/CC BY 2.0)
But behind its tourist appeal and eccentric charm, Christiania is fundamentally still a home for a sizable population that must work to sustain the community.
According to Christiania spokesperson and lifelong resident Tanja Fox, inhabitants span all age groups, including families with children. They hail from virtually every corner of the world, though the majority are Danish or Scandinavian. The Danish paper Politikenreported that a significant portion of the residents are aging — an assertion that Fox confirms. Invoking typical Danish black humor, she adds, “And you know what happens to elderly men? They die.”
And so, younger people are moving into the commune. When a room opens up in Christiania, it is advertised in Ugespejlet, the commune’s newspaper. In spite of more residences becoming available, demand is high; often, dozens of people will apply for a single room. Some wait years for a space.
Christiania itself is divided into 14 neighborhoods, and each neighborhood is responsible for vetting its residents. Like Christiania as a whole, the housing process is governed by a consensus democracy. Neighborhood meetings are held to determine who the room or home is given to, and a unanimous decision must be reached.
“It’s a very serious business,” Fox says, noting that meetings can take up “more than 300 or 400 man hours” to approve a single resident. Part of the weight of the decision can be attributed to the lack of rent: residents are liable for monthly membership dues and utilities but otherwise live in their homes for free.
When asked what qualities an ideal candidate possesses, Fox notes that she prefers individuals who are eager to be part of a community, who think “we” instead of “I,” and who pursue creative endeavors.
In addition to housing administration, neighborhoods within Christiania make their own decisions in terms of upkeep, conflict resolution, and general maintenance. Five childcare centers are operated in Christiania’s neighborhoods, along with cafes, shops, galleries, and other small, collectively-run businesses. Only larger issues, such as the annual budget and serious disputes, are taken to the Common Meeting, Christiania’s highest forum, in which all residents participate.
Earlier this month, an emergency convening of the Common Meeting was called to address the future of Pusher Street. Two police officers had been shot on the community’s grounds while attempting to arrest a drug dealer. (Both officers survived, and the suspect was not a resident of Christiania.) Residents voiced their concerns of organized crime infiltrating the community, and in the end, voted to remove the long-standing cannabis booths on Pusher Street.
In an assertion of autonomy amid what could have been interpreted as a concession to the state, residents asked Danish police to stay away: they would do the dismantling themselves.
Graffiti on a wall in Christiania. (Photo: Tiws/CC BY 2.0)
Besides the drug trade, the most serious issue facing the Common Meeting in recent history has been government pressure to “normalize” the community. While the state has mostly tolerated Christiania’s existence for decades, occasional scuffles have been a near-constant part of the commune’s 45-year-long history, whether in the form of police raids on Pusher Street, selective bulldozing, or new laws and normalization plans.
In 2011, Christiania briefly closed its doors to the public in order for its residents to discuss ongoing negotiations with the government. The Danish government had offered Christiania residents the opportunity to buy areas of land and legally obtain ownership of their buildings at a significantly below-market rate. Ultimately, Christiania agreed to buy the property for 76 million kroner (nearly $13 million), and took out loans to make a substantial down payment.
Private ownership is at odds with Christiania’s core ethos of shared property, and many still view the opportunity as the government’s way of forcing Christiania into the system. Barny Holmberg, a resident of Christiania since its inception in 1971, cites the gentrification of the surrounding neighborhood as a root cause for government action, explaining, “In ‘71, Christiania was far away from the city. Now it’s very close. It’s different. We are surrounded by very, very expensive housing.”
To preserve a sense of collective autonomy in the purchase of their property, Fox and several other residents began a crowdfund called Folkeaktie, or Christiania Share. The fund offers symbolic “shares” of Christiania to anyone, for as little as 100 kroner (about $15). As of this writing, the fund has raised 12.6 million kroner.
As for the future of Christiania, Holmberg tells me that he hopes new residents will carry on the spirit of spontaneity and sovereignty that the community engendered at its outset. “I hope people will worry less,” he says.
“If we had followed the rules, we would never have been here.”
In the 1970s and ‘80s, hundreds of women in New Orleans, Louisiana found bliss at their local dive bar, swaying to the jukebox amid clinking glasses. They held hands, they plotted protests; they kissed. Away from the prying eyes and very real dangers of the outside world, lesbian bars were cultural centers for many women in New Orleans for decades. This scene, however, shines faintly in the past: today, in a city with one of the most concentrated and vibrant gay bar scenes in the country, there are exactly zero lesbian bars left.
Across the United States, lesbian bars are disappearing at an alarming rate, but there was a time when the lesbian bar scene was very much alive. Through the mid 1980s until many closed in the ‘90s and 2000s, there were over a dozen lesbian bars that peppered New Orleans’ streets, though learning what they were like takes some detective work. Last Call: The Dyke Bar History Project is an oral history and performance project focused on this history. The team behind it is currently unearthing and performing a musical based on diverse stories about former lesbian bars in New Orleans.
“These spaces held much more than social power and places to meet each other,” says indee mitchell, one of the contributors and organizers of Last Call (who does not use capitalization in their name). “They were also places where people could organize; there are a lot of intersections of activism and political work that occurred in these spaces too, and that’s something that’s been kind of lost or relocated.” Found through word of mouth or magazines and guidebooks, lesbian bars united like-minded women who would organize, fall in love, and make friends in the same space, where generations of women from all walks of life could meet.
Last Call Nola has created a musical about the lesbian bar scene that used to exist in New Orleans. (Photo: Melisa Cardona)
Activism was an important part of New Orleans bar life for some; women gathered over cheap beer to plan movements and protests, including one where thousands of people participated in a national effort to denounce the efforts of homophobic singer Anita Bryant. Sometimes women would gain access to social and political activism for the first time in bars. In an era where cops would arrest gay and lesbian people for obstruction of the sidewalk and “alleged lesbian activities” was an actual cause for arrest, a safe space was a necessity. A lesbian bar was the one place that guaranteed an automatic welcome: a small slice of utopia.
But the existence of lesbian bars in New Orleans didn’t mean lesbians were generally accepted, or even allowed to be in bars. The former most deadly attack of a gay space happened in New Orleans in 1973, and homosexuality had long been strictly illegal. Bars were frequently raided, with lesbian patrons falling under “lewd behavior” laws; it was illegal for them to dance, to hold hands, to be out as lesbians while drinking. One article from the Times Picayune includes the report of a raid in 1963, where six women and a man were arrested for “a variety of charges including loitering and homosexuality” at 2:25 in the morning, after officers had staked out the bar for two hours.
Last Call’s oral history interviews flesh out the details excluded from news reports, including how lesbians subverted police. “You would just be sitting in a place and the police would come in and the paddy wagons would come up after that … the next thing you know you would be put in the paddy wagon and taken down and being booked and everything,” said restaurateur Ellen Rabin. One bar flashed a light to warn patrons of police so they could rearrange their seats, hiding the lesbian scene. Rabin once labeled cash at her business with a stamp that said “gay money” which was later circulated around the city, causing a stir. Women who knew a police officer learned and kept note of upcoming raids to avoid targeted bars.
From The Times-Picayune Police Report section in 1968, a notice about the arrest of dancing couples, which included Charlene Schneider. (Photo: Times-Picayune)
“When people were outed, they would start tending bar,” explains Bonnie Gabel, who works with mitchell and the rest of the Last Call group as an organizer and contributor. When a large raid was reported in the newspaper, pictures and full names could be listed for all to see. One victim of a raid named Charlene Schneider had a high-security clearance working for the government, and lost everything she worked for when she was arrested in a raid in the 1970s. Her response was to open a bar called Charlene’s, which became a cultural staple until it closed in 1999.
These lesbian spaces were not perfect, however. “They were places of huge solidarity, but all of the oppressions of the external world were mirrored inside of the dyke bars,” says Gabel. This was more jarring in what was considered a safe space. Alcoholism and addiction surface in the oral histories, and “domestic violence was something that people talked about as well as racist aggressions and issues around gender,” says Gabel, though these spaces, whatever their faults, were still safer than the outside world.
Les Pierres, opened by loving couple Leslie Martinez and Juanita Pierre, was the first to fill the void in lesbian bar night life for women of color, and many more followed. According to the oral histories, music was a huge difference of Les Pierres versus white lesbian bars, some of which wouldn't play black music. Black lesbians could feel at home at Les Pierres without being tokenized, allowed to relax and enjoy the atmosphere.
At Les Pierres, drag became a big part of their home-built community; drag queens would show up early Sunday morning after their Saturday night performances in the French Quarter. The first drag king group in New Orleans first appeared at and because of Les Pierres, and Martinez and Pierre went all out for their shows. If someone was using a beach scene, they brought in sand. They focused realistic sets for a park bench so someone could perform “Secret Lovers” by Kool & the Gang. “We wanted to do a lot of props so you really actually felt you were in that setting,” Martinez said to Last Call.
Despite social separation, the bars helped each other; Les Pierres, which was at the corner of Pauger Street and Rampart until the late ‘80s, could rely on the predominantly white bar Charlene’s if their soda water ran out. Charlene’s could do the same, and they drank at one another’s bars. Even among the sub-scenes of the lesbian community, these bars were connected to each other and their patrons. Schneider lent cash to customers who couldn’t afford a door charge. Women who got too drunk at Les Pierres could rely on Martinez and Pierre to bring them home; children were welcome on Saturday morning when they were closed.
The last lesbian bar in New Orleans, Rubyfruit Jungle, closed in 2012; some could argue that it was not solely a lesbian bar at all, a far cry from the environment of New Orleans’ lesbian scene in the ‘70s and ‘80s. As such a rich and important cultural standby, the question is why they’re going away.
The last lesbian bar in New Orleans, Rubyfruit Jungle, closed in 2012. (Photo: Gary J. Wood/CC BY-SA 2.0)
The issue is complicated, though one challenge past and present is making enough money to survive. Many women had children, so drinking at a bar nightly was not an option. “It was rough because women don’t come out like the guys do, they don’t tip like the guys do, they don’t drink like the guys do,” Juanita Pierre told Last Call. Even Charlene’s bar, which is frequently mentioned in the oral histories as a beloved home away from home for white lesbians, was described dated from day one, and never generated enough funds to renovate.
Some Last Call participants had theories, including that “women just don’t like to drink, or lesbians just want to make a home, and I think a lot of those are pretty reductive,” says Gabel. mitchell adds that internet dating is rumored to have replaced the need for lesbian bars. “The implication is that lesbians only go to a bar to meet a partner, which isn’t always the case,” mitchell says.
As the plurality of sexual identities became more visible in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the pool of potential customers for identity-specific spaces may have shrank. Last Call spoke to some women who conceded that they might have identified as bi; another is trans. Today, more women are identifying diversely and claiming their spaces in an increasingly openly diverse world, where inclusivity is important for business.
Whatever the reason, night culture for lesbians and all queer women has changed. In Girls in the Back Room: Looking at the Lesbian Bar, Kelly Hankin writes that “the sexual availability of lesbian bar patrons for men, male and female heterosexual tourism of lesbian bar space” made lesbian bars less palatable for lesbian women. In an ethnographic study about gay bar night life, Kimberly Eichenburger argues that “female heterosexual diffusion has helped push lesbian women to the periphery of the subculture, leaving them with little space of their own.”
Today, queer, bi and lesbian nights in New Orleans happen in gay bars, with activism, dating and general socializing inhabiting mostly different spheres. Online meetup groups help LBTQ women network and organize informal get-togethers; some bars social groups hold live events, which have ranged from drag shows to a monthly barbeque and picnic for queer people of color. Gabel and mitchell reason that maybe a bar, necessitating alcohol, isn’t always the answer to safe spaces for LBTQ women to meet, necessarily. Since the 2003 Supreme Court ruling against anti-sodomy laws, it has been officially “legal” to be lesbian, bi, queer, or gay. Theoretically women can dance, with one another, in any place they want. While some women who once frequented New Orleans lesbian bars in the 1970s and ‘80s do occasionally meet, it’s still vague what the future holds for aging LBTQ women who are pushed back into the closet, or how to meet others beyond the internet.
“[Lesbian bars] became this nexus of community support, and we have a lot of stories about them being that way—it’s hard to find that kind of nexus of community support in the digital world,” Gabel says. Mitchell agrees, adding that “it’s about finding space to just exist as your full self as well...just a place to go when you think ‘I just need to go somewhere, that I don’t have to necessarily abide by all the constricting rules of the world penned up against us.’”
Now, Last Call is performing a musical based on these stories in New Orleans through September 15th, with plans to later tour nationally and collect more stories as they go. While Gabel says these memories are sometimes hard to talk about, the Last Call group is mending a gap that has existed since these bars closed; we no longer often get a chance to learn about queer identity from elders. “By being in this community that is big and diverse and multigenerational—it connects the past to the present,” Gabel says.
In the oral histories, that connection between history and identity is reinforced, over and over. “They were singing something beyond just a good beat,” one participant says, reminiscing of what that community meant to her on a busy, music filled night. “It was like: I’m in a lesbian bar, damnit. I’m a gay woman, I’m a lesbian woman, and I’m gonna sing out loud and I’m gonna survive, honey. I’m going to flourish, and I’m gonna have a good time—I’m gonna be out and loud and proud. I’m here, you can’t bug me.”
The annual Mid-Autumn Festival begins tomorrow in China, a celebration of many things, but, principally, the moon, which has long been an important totem in East Asia.
The moon is also given form here on Earth in many different ways, most famously with moon cakes, but, also, as seen in the video above, with giant moon balloons.
This one got loose in Fuzhou, on the southern coast of the country, blown away by strong winds that have arrived ahead of Typhoon Meranti, which could be the strongest typhoon to hit China this year.
The video comes from the state-controlled Xinhua News Agency, which didn't say if anyone got hurt. From the looks of it though, the balloon seems relatively harmless, just a big, dark blob, softly bowling over anyone in its path.
In Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, people are celebrating the important Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha, with an annual feast to honor Ibrahim, who was willing to sacrifice his son for divine purposes until God had an angel intervene.
Part of that celebration, traditionally, is the sacrifice of an animal, which can be a bloody process. Dhaka's streets bear proof: pictures on social media and elsewhere revealed rivers of blood from sacrificed animals.
The red-hued rivers are not all blood, as heavy rains in recent days had previously flooded the streets. But there was enough of it to make for some dramatic and gory imagery.
According to the Dhaka Tribune, locals blamed the city for not fixing drainage problems ahead of the feast, leading to the flooded (and probably unsanitary) conditions. There was also, apparently, a problem with communication. Many celebrants ignored designated slaughter spots, instead opting to kill animals in the streets near their homes, according to the Tribune.
Before computers it was difficult to map out things like geography and topography. Illustrated maps were useful but hard to translate to the physical world. Enter the scale model. Tiny terraforms and mountains in miniature allowed us to observe the natural world from an omniscient perspective.
Some of these models were made for science, some just for entertainment. In the age of satellite imaging we rarely use scale models for utilitarian purposes anymore, but they're still out there. These little worlds help us to visualize and understand things much bigger than we are, as well as the added flattery of making us feel like giants.
The Bay Model was built by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1956 and '57 to see what would happen if the South Bay were dammed and filled in. The scale model of the Bay mimicked the tidal motion of the Pacific Ocean, and the Corps were able to prove that the results would be disastrous for the local environment. This spurred a local "Save the Bay" movement, the plan was shelved, and now the model is maintained as a museum exhibit.
Miniature foresters observe a miniature forest at the Fisher Museum. (Photo: Daderot/Public Domain)
Since 1907, Harvard University has managed 3,000 acres of woodlands in western Massachusetts that serve as the field lab and research center for the university's graduate forestry program. In the midst of this forest is the Fisher Museum, home to a series of dioramas that tell the history of forestry itself. Twenty-three exquisitely detailed miniature dioramas portray a variety of scenes of New England forest land. Seven of the dioramas chronicle one area of the forest over a period of 300 years, from pre-colonial tree growth, to clearing for farm land, to abandonment by humans, and finally to the return of the wild, natural forest.
A tiny Grand Canyon. (Photo: Atlas Obscura user michelle)
When visiting the Hoover Dam, it's worth stopping by the Old Exhibit Building. It's a small room packed with old wooden theater seats arranged stadium style and directed toward a huge topographical map model of a number of southwestern states, made in the 1930s. Major cities, geological spots, and various dams and reservoirs along the Colorado are meticulously labeled, and places like the Grand Canyon or the Valley of Fire are lovingly depicted in the diorama. The overheads dim, and the map lights up. A rather dry but pleasant voiceover pipes through the speakers, and proceeds to tell about all of the places that the Hoover Dam has benefited, the map lighting up each place as it is mentioned.
Mississippi River floods used to displace thousands, bust through levees, and ruin farmland. Herbert Hoover called a 1927 flood “the greatest peace-time calamity in the history of the country." The problem was that the Mississippi river was massive and the issue was being approached place-by-place in individual localities, but never addressed as a whole. What was needed was a way to see what would happen to the Mississippi given a certain set of inputs, to have some way to model the entire river system in total.
The Army Corps of Engineering (the same organization that built The Bay Model) set about constructing the largest small-scale model ever. The Mississippi River Basin model took 26 years of P.O.W. labor to build and was only used for six years, but the simulations run in it provided information that prevented major floods. The site also became a tourist destination for a time, drawing over 5,000 people a year to stride like giants along walkways above the banks of the tiny Mississippi. Once the 1970s brought about easier and more accurate computer simulations, the model was abandoned and left to decay.
Unlike the Mississippi River Basin Model, Memphis' river walk exists solely for entertainment purposes. It would take you months to walk the length of the Mississippi River from Cairo, Illinois to New Orleans, but at the 5-block long replica on Mud Island you can do it in an afternoon. A 30-inch stride is equivalent to one mile on the actual river. The walk along the mini Mississippi is dotted with signs marking historical events and geographical transformations. The "1,000" mile journey concludes at the Gulf of Mexico, represented by a one-acre enclosure that holds 1.3 million gallons of water. Here, visitors can conclude their walk with a pedal boat ride around the Gulf with the Memphis skyline in the background.
If you've ever wanted to see Colombia in less than an hour, this is the place to do it. In the hills above Cali is a smaller-scale, scalable map of Colombia with hanging gardens, ponds, and statues of animals. Fundación Andoke is a group of folks who designed an eco-centric educational program for kids and adults alike in order to promote and conserve Colombia's biodiversity with regards to its natural environment, hydrography, and other natural highlights. It also features a Mariposario, where visitors can see and hold some of the butterflies native to Colombia.
Verdenskortet is the fruit of Søren Poulsen's decades of hard work. Using a pushcart, a wheelbarrow, and various small tools, Poulson molded a peninsula on Lake Klejtrub into a to-scale map of the world. It took him over two decades, and he worked on it up until his death in 1969. The map remains a popular tourist destination. Visitors travel from far and wide to hop from Iceland to the United Kingdom, play mini golf in Antarctica, and paddle around the Pacific Ocean.
Sweden Solar System with Mercury at Stadsmuseet. (Photo: Stefan Holm / Shutterstock.com)
There are many of models of the solar system (aka "orreries"), but the largest of them is in Stockholm. Something so big as the solar system must be represented in equally grand scale, and this model uses the entire city and its suburbs as its map space. The Sun is represented by the giant dome of the Globe Arena, while Earth and its moon are at the Swedish Museum of Natural History. Jupiter is a flower bed at the Arlanda Airport and Mars lives at a mall in Danderyd. Smaller planetary objects are also represented in the model, like minor planet Sedna, or Halley's comet, artistically depicted on a playground wall.
A view of the proposed community in Sharon, Vermont. (Photo: Courtesy The New Vistas Foundation)
About 140 miles northwest of Boston sits the tiny hamlet of Sharon, Vermont. Built along the banks of the White River, Sharon, with its white steeple church, rustic country store and American flags fluttering in the breeze, is a quintessentially New England town. But Sharon also happens to be the birthplace of Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Latter-day Saints, otherwise known as the Mormons.
Smith was born on the border of what are now Sharon and South Royalton; and in 1905 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints erected a 50-foot tall granite obelisk in his honor. Despite the 80,000 tourists or so who make the pilgrimage, the communities surrounding Sharon and South Royalton remain sleepy towns among pastoral rolling green hills.
That may all change if David Hall’s dream comes to fruition. He wants to build a 21st century version of a utopic development—one with very tiny dwellings.
Hall, a millionaire former Mormon bishop from Provo, Utah, has been purchasing land in the two towns, plus Strafford and Tunbridge to the north, with plans to build a series of communities that will eventually house 20,000 people in an area of less than 3 square miles. Currently, the area has a combined population of roughly 4,500. He’s bought about 1,500 acres of farmland and houses, with a goal of securing a contiguous parcel of 5,000 acres.
“I think it will take 25 years to obtain that,” Hall says from his home in Utah. “I’m not just buying anywhere, but a specific spot, [centered around Smith’s birthplace] and you have to wait for people to be ready.”
Hall is just the latest futurist to try to impose a prescribed community on Vermont. During the 19th century, the Green Mountain state was home to a number of utopian societies, most of them religious in nature. The most notorious was the Oneida community, founded in 1841 by John Humphrey Noyes, of Putney. Also called Perfectionists, members practiced free love (referred to as “complex marriage”) more than a century before the term was coined, and believed that Christ had returned to earth in AD 70. Facing growing hostility from the locals, the Perfectionists moved to Oneida, New York in 1847.
The proposed community layout, consisting of 50 diamond-shaped settlements. (Photo: Courtesy The New Vistas Foundation)
Then there was the group in Hardwick that barked like dogs, and the members of a society in Woodstock that dressed themselves in animal skins and refused to bathe.
“You can imagine how well that went over,” says Jackie Calder, curator at the Vermont Historical Society.
The back-to-the-land movements often associated with Vermont in the 1960s and ‘70s actually got their start in the ‘30s, when Scott Nearing, a communist social activist, and Helen Knothe moved to Winhall. The couple advocated self-reliance and utilitarianism, and in 1954 Nearing and Knothe (who were married in 1947) co-authored Living the Good Life: How to Live Simply and Sanely in a Troubled World.
A cross-section of the residences. (Photo: Courtesy The New Vistas Foundation)
The counter-culture movement of the 1960s and ‘70s embraced the book, and acolytes flocked to Vermont to emulate the Nearing lifestyle.
“In the 1970s there were dozens and dozens of communities, and a whole variety of reasons why they were founded,” Calder says. “A lot were anti-war activists, some were radical collectives. There was the Red Clover/News Reel collective in Putney, which had associations with the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground. They organized Free Vermont, which advocated free services for people in need, [and operated] a garage, health clinic and restaurant.”
Calder points out that people were partially drawn to Vermont because the land was cheap, and a lot of the movements were based around farming. While most of the communes have disbanded, a lasting legacy is the organic farm movement Vermont is known for today.
According to Calder, at the peak of the utopian movement in the ‘70s, there were only about 75 communes throughout the state, and the total number of members was well under Hall’s figure of 20,000. (Eventually, Hall believes his communities could sustain 20 million residents in Vermont.)
“The successful communes had a dozen or fewer people,” Calder said.
Hall has bolder ideas. He is touting his development, called NewVistas, as a 21st century model for sustainable living. Each community will be completely self-sufficient: growing their own food in greenhouses and raising animals on the 1,300 acres Hall says will surround each village. The goal is to bring energy consumption down to 1/10th the current levels with no carbon footprint.
The whole idea is anathema to residents, who are horrified at the prospect of 20,000 people moving in and disrupting their long-cherished rural way of life. Locals are resentful of Hall’s attitude that he knows what’s best for the state—long known as environmentally progressive—and its people. Various groups have sprung up to stop Hall in his tracks, including the Alliance for Vermont Communities, which advocates grass roots, slow growth development..
Different community amenities in housing in one building. (Photo: Courtesy The New Vistas Foundation)
Historical precedence may not bode well for Hall’s regimented vision; while noting that a few communities, such as the Red Bird Lesbian Separatists, were very strict, Calder said that any that were restrictive weren’t successful over a long period of time. NewVistas’ plan is to have residents sign over assets to the corporation, and live in futuristic modular apartments, which provide each person with about 200 square-feet of living space. Hall insists that NewVistas will not be religious in nature—the LDS church has come out against the plan—but residents will be taxed on what they consume, and certain items (such as red meat, sugar, coffee and alcohol) will have high “footprint” taxes.
Hall contends that NewVistas is not utopian.
“There will be all kinds of problems, just like in any other community. There is no objective to be a perfect system. The objective is to have a better system than we currently have,” says Hall.
Mazel tov! Scientist may have just witnessed the birth of a black hole for the first time. According to Science Alert, astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to spy on the creation of a new stellar sinkhole.
The suspected birth took place while the telescope was focused on a red supergiant star affectionately named, N6946-BH1. The star, which is around 25 times larger than our local sun, has been observed since 2004, but as astronomers reviewed the data, they noticed a flare up had occurred in 2009, and ever since the star had faded away. Recent looks at N6946-BH1 indicate that it is no longer emitting visible light.
This disappearance has led scientists to hypothesize that the star has collapsed, folding itself into a black hole. According to their findings, they think that the 2009 flare was the star shedding its neutrinos, which in turn caused it to lose some of its gravity, eventually becoming a black hole.
At the moment, their observations are little more than speculation. More tests will need to be conducted to eliminate other explanations for the star’s disappearance, such as merging with another star, or something simply blocking the telescope’s view. However, should their theory prove correct, it will mark the first time in history that we have actually witnessed the birth of one of the universe’s most mysterious anomalies. How adorable.
A new study looked at basic vocabulary words from around two-thirds of all the languages in the world and considered, more thoroughly than anyone had before, a basic question about language: Do words that mean the same thing sound the same?
Our instincts say no. Words in two unrelated languages have nothing to do with each other. But this group of researchers, whose specialities span cognitive science, linguistics, mathematics, and computer science, found that many basic words are associated with specific sounds, across human language.
As the examples above show, these aren't hard and fast rules. While some words are associated with specific sounds, those sounds don't show up in all languages. The group has resisted the temptation to try to explain why some sounds might be associated with certain words; for now, it is astonishing enough for them to say that the relationship between sound and meaning does not look completely random.
Donating sperm in New Zealand isn't the easiest of processes. For one, you have to submit to a battery of medical tests, some of which can be time-consuming, and, to make things worse, you don't get paid.
You also can't do it anonymously. In 2004, the country passed a law mandating that children, when they turn 18, can ask to reveal the identity of their donor, setting up a possibly tricky situation for donors a couple of decades after they've donated.
All of which has added up to a huge shortage in donations, according to the Guardian. Some women are going overseas to find sperm, others merely just wait, and wait, and wait.
“It’s a very challenging situation," Mary Birdsall, a fertility clinic doctor, told the newspaper. "It’s challenging to recruit donors, and it is tough on the women who are psychologically and biologically ready to start a family, but can’t.”
Pressure has been building on the country to allow the importation of sperm, as England and Australia do, but so far the country has opted not to.
Generally, according to the Guardian, there's enough sperm in New Zealand to treat around 80 women, while, at any given time, over 300 women have usually applied.
A 16th-century vision of Cockaigne as a land of shameful laziness and sloth. (Photo: Pieter Bruegel/Public Domain)
The dream of the common person’s utopia was more than a little bit different during medieval times. Whereas today we have visions of lands o’ plenty like a huge mountain made of rock candy, the common peasant living in the muck and the mire of medieval Europe had a whimsical, satirical dream land known as Cockaigne.
While there have been many different versions of Cockaigne appearing in literature throughout the ages, in general, the Land of Cockaigne was a medieval dream world where the regular order things was flipped on its head. In Cockaigne, the poor would be rich, food and sex were freely available, and sloth was treasured and respected above all else. It was often portrayed as the perfect daydream of the common peasant, a place where the drudgery and struggle of medieval life was nowhere to be seen. However, even though it was depicted as a serf’s perfect world, it’s unclear how aware of the concept of Cockaigne the average person would have been.
This literal land of milk and honey made its mark in the popular imagination thanks to countless poems and writings that began to appear all across medieval Europe from the 1300s onward. “It’s very hard to say how well common people would have known of Cockaigne,” says Karma Lochrie, author of the book, Nowhere in the Middle Ages, which looks at the medieval origins of utopian thought. “We know that visions of Cockaigne existed in all major European languages in the Middle Ages and beyond, but these visions would have only been accessible to elite readers who could read.”
Nonetheless, with the spread of the printing press, tales and poems of Cockaigne became widespread enough that they would eventually reach a wider audience. As Lochrie says, while there are a great number of versions of Cockaigne, the most widely known account is a poem from around 1350 called The Land of Cockaygne. Contained in what is thought to have been a friar’s notebook, the poem details many of the barely imaginable wonders that Cockaigne had to offer, and gives us an unforgettable look into both the nature of the satire and the aspirations of people of the time.
In the poem, Cockaigne is said to lie somewhere west of Spain, but in reality the promised land never had any concrete location on the map. “[L]ike Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516, one of the recurring features of Cockaigne is that we don’t know where it’s located,” says Lochrie. “It’s somewhere and nowhere, in effect.” But although Cockaigne doesn’t have a concrete location, the authors of the poem knew how to get there. As Lochrie pointed out, the final lines of the poem say that in order to reach Cockaigne, one must bury oneself up to their chin in pig shit, as a sort of backwards version of a purifying ritual. Yeesh.
But once a person reaches Cockaigne, what would they find there exactly? According to the poem, some very strange and very domestic pleasures. After first describing the traditional Christian paradise as boring utopia with nothing but fruit, saints, and no alcohol, the poem presents Cockaigne as the ultimate bacchanal, free of the unpleasantries of medieval life. There are no horses, pigs, or other domestic animals, not because they are especially ostracized, but because without them, there is no dung to shovel. Animals that could pose a threat or nuisance to a medieval peasant, like a snake or a fox, are nowhere to be seen. There is no night, no storms, and no one dies. The rivers flow with oil, milk, honey, and wine, and one line in the poem even says that the only use for water is to bathe. Water as beverage simply isn’t decadent enough for Cockaigne.
In the latter half of the poem the focus shifts from the wider world to a satirical abbey and its jolly monks, which Lochrie sees as a sign that maybe Cockaigne, or at least the concept of it, wasn’t as egalitarian as it seemed. “The fact that the English poem focuses so extensively on the monastery probably suggests it was not a paradise for the common folk, despite its claims that pleasure and culinary delights are available to all,” she says. But still, the antics of the monks are typical of a Cockaigne story.
At their Cockaigne monastery, the monks spend their days flying around until being called to the ground when the abbot spanks a maiden on her bare behind. Their only concern is being frivolous and lazy, when not casually bedding the nuns from a nearby convent. Fully cooked larks fly right into their mouths, and a series of springs that flow over precious jewels pour forth wine and medicine. It is singularly strange, but one can see how someone living in medieval Europe would be focused on such things.
While Cockaigne is not talked about much these days, its spirit lives on in songs like the hobo classic, “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” and even things like Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, although it has morphed away from much of the cultural commentary of the medieval concept. “It’s interesting that Cockaigne becomes a kind of children’s story in contemporary culture, both in Dahl’s story and in the Burl Ives version of the “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” says Lochrie. “Cockaigne, in its early versions and more recently, often includes satire as much as it does a vision of a kind of paradise.”
Still, there is something undeniably romantic about the land of Cockaigne, and its descendants even today. It might not be a real utopia, but sure is nice to dream about.
What's the secret to a long life? No one knows, though maybe it's candy.
That's because the world's current oldest man, Yisrael Kristal, 113, was, for decades, a confectioner. He's survived two world wars and Auschwitz, and has been trying for decades, he says, to "rebuild what is lost."
“I don’t know the secret for long life, "Kristal said in March, when he was officially named the world's oldest man. "There have been smarter, stronger and better looking men then me who are no longer alive. All that is left for us to do is to keep on working as hard as we can.”
Metal chain-making requires intense heat and intense pressure. There is a reason those chains are so hard to break. This machine heats and bends red-hot rods of metal, smoothy linking each piece to the previous one. As the metal loops cool they fade from glowing crimson to glistening silver, clustering into a pile beneath the machine.
Now you need never again look at the chain lock on a door and wonder, "How was that made?"
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
On December 1923, two unlikely travelers arrived in Darjeeling, India intent on finding what could not possibly exist: Shambhala, a kingdom located inside a hollow earth. Along them trailed Soviet spies, Western occultists and Mongolian rebels, all serving their own agendas. Even with so many eyes on them, their expedition still managed to disappear from the face of the earth for months; when they finally emerged, they had a fascinating story to tell and even more secrets to hide.
The travelers were Nicholas and Helena Roerich, two Russian expatriates traveling under a U.S, flag, which they had hoisted upon a Mongolian spear. As they informed the local authorities in Darjeeling, they were leading a scientific-archaeological expedition aimed at cataloguing the art and culture of Central Asia for the first time. Their eccentric behavior quickly raised some eyebrows: Nicholas Roerich, a famed painter and archaeologist, walked around Darjeeling in the robes of a Dalai Lama, held conspiratorial meetings with Tibetan lamas and introduced himself as an American, even though his accent betrayed his Russian heritage.
Still, the couple's reputation as paragons of the Western art world as well as their American sponsors persuaded the authorities to let them pass through the city, and into the forbidden Tibetan plateau. However, nobody was aware of the couple's true destination: the city of Shambhala, a place not to be found in any map.
Helena and Nicholas Roerich. (Photo: Public Domain)
Shambhala is a fabled city-kingdom of the Himalayas, believed by Buddhists, Hindus and local shamans to exist simultaneously on the physical and the spiritual plane. For millennia, the legend of the underground kingdom played an important role in every Tibetan tradition and eventually, rumors of its existence reached the West.
It so happened that Helena Roerich, a writer and philosopher, had translated in Russian The Secret Doctrine, Madame Blavatsky's influential esoteric work which first presented Shambhala as a shortcut to enlightenment. The Roerichs came to believe deeply in the Shambhala myth and at some point, while living in New York, Helena received telepathic instructions from "Master Morya", an otherworldly entity, encouraging the couple to leave the U.S. and seek the city for themselves.
Unfortunately for the Roerichs, the area they aimed to investigate was all but inaccessible in the early 20th century. Tibet was closed to foreigners; moreover, the Soviets, the French, the English, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mongolians and the Germans vied for control of the place. Spies, rebels and rogue warlords clashed daily in the mountain passes making the expedition extremely hazardous. The rivalry between the USSR and the British Empire in particular, was so intense it was nicknamed "the Great Game".
However, it seems that upon arriving in Darjeeling the Roerichs had already managed to turn the hardships of the Great Game into an advantage—by offering themselves as pawns.
After receiving permission from the Indian authorities, the Roerichs set out from Darjeeling towards the colorful monasteries of Sikkim, and then proceeded into the mainland. The couple's eldest son, George, a noted Tibetologist, polyglot and student of military tactics was in charge of the group's safety—not a small task, since the expedition was meant to last for years and cross 25,000 kilometers of previously uncharted roads. The Roerichs knew they would encounter scurvy, extreme weather, bandit groups and blocked mountain passages ahead.
Given the enormity of the task, the fact that they chose to make an unexpected detour through Moscow in 1926, was bound to raise questions. Why would the Roerichs cross into Russia, adding hardship to an already impossible trail? The most likely answer is that they were fulfilling a deal with their true sponsors in the quest for Shambhala—namely, the Soviet secret police.
What sounds like the plot of a particularly imaginative novel, has been extensively supported by scholars of modern Russia and early 20th century history. According to independent research by Richard Spence, Markus Osterrieder and Andrei Znamenski, several other world governments—China, Mongolia, Japan, Great Britain—took an interest in the hidden city, too. One of the reasons was an ancient Mongolian-Tibetan prophecy which, in the explosive political climate of the early 20th century, sounded convincing enough to turn some heads.
The prophecy declared that as materialism spread, humanity would eventually deteriorate. The people of the earth would be united under an evil king, who would soon attack Shambhala with fearful weapons. In time, the 32nd ruler of Shambhala would triumph over the bad king, and usher in a new era of peace and harmony. What today might sound like a standard doomsday prophecy could have had great implications back then, when borders constantly shifted and even great powers needed the support of local warlords.
Chagri Monastery, Bhutan, where the first man to describe Shambhala to a western audience, Estêvão Cacella, stayed. (Photo: Stephen Shephard/CC BY-SA 3.0)
The Chinese and Russian governments in particular knew that among the peoples of central Asia, belief in the Kingdom of Shambhala was strong. Whoever managed to identify themselves with the forces of good, would gain the support of the surrounding peoples and thus gain control of the area. Once this was understood, several states became very interested in unearthing the underground kingdom.
Most of the officials intended to use Shambhala's discovery for propaganda purposes, but some genuinely believed that they could also gain access to the hidden kingdom’s mystical weapons. One powerful man who truly believed in the prophecy was Gleb Bokii, a leader of the Cheka, the USSR's Secret Police.
Bokii genuinely thought that the hidden city would offer him access to advanced weapons and mind controlling techniques, and managed to convince his superiors that the quest was worth looking into. The newly established USSR was receptive to the idea: even if there was no mystic armory to be found, if they managed to identify themselves with the hidden kingdom, they could enlist the help of Buddhists and nationalists in Mongolia and Tibet, thus strengthening their position in Central Asia.
Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Nicholas Roerich, and Mohammad Yunus at Roerich's estate, Kullu. (Photo: Public Domain)
At the very least an expedition to search for Shambhala could spy on British activity in the area. However, Bokii was unable to secure funds for the mission due to internal rivalries at the Cheka, scholars Andrei Znamenski and Ernst von Waldenfels assert, and so he sought a roundabout solution: allying with Nicholas and Helena Roerich, celebrated scholars and Russian expatriates, who were famously planning their own expedition to the area, under a U.S. banner.
The Roerichs were not really political—they had conveniently left their native Russia just before the communist revolution and viewed "the Reds" with great distrust. However, when searching for a hidden underground kingdom one needs all the help they can get. Thankfully, Helena Roerich’s otherworldly pen pal "Master Morya" informed her that business needed to be done with the Bolsheviks in the interest of the world’s spiritual advancement; after receiving this mystical message, Helena wrote in her diary "Lenin is with us."
It is very likely that Nicholas Roerich met with Chicherin, Soviet Secretary for foreign affairs, and Meer Trilisser, head of espionage, in Paris. There, the Soviets agreed to provide the couple with considerable financial and logistical help, in exchange for information on the movements of the French and British spies in the area. Gleb Bokii's team, of course, had much higher expectations than espionage: they expected to get the ancient wisdom of the city itself.
Since the Roerichs were not trained spies, something of their true purpose leaked out while they waited in Darjeeling. Nicholas openly spoke of establishing in central Asia the Sacred Union of the East, a "spiritual commonwealth" uniting traditions of the area into a single state under the Bolsheviks' protection. Several lamas found his cause worthwhile and flocked to him, which alerted other power groups in the area. It has even been suggested by historian Richard Spence, that in Darjeeling, the British contacted the Roerichs and made them a counter-offer—or simply threatened their lives should they continue.
Guests from Overseas by Nicholas Roerich. (Photo: Public Domain)
In any case, the Roerich expedition began its trek closely monitored by the British, the USSR and the Americans, as well as the Japanese, the Mongolians and the Chinese. In search of Shambhala, they would go through 35 mountain passes, cross the Gobi desert, and chart tens of alpine peaks for the first time. But from the beginning, they were beset with extreme weather, local rebel groups, armed bandits, poison grass which took their horses down, and caravan looters they could not avoid.
The couple’s travel diaries, along with Nicholas' extraordinary paintings, provide a picture of the wonder and fear the travelers must have felt when crossing the terra incognita of the Himalayas. “Is the heart of Asia beating? Or has it suffocated by the sand?” Nicholas wondered as the expedition crossed Taklamakan desert.
As they moved on though, towards what they believed to be the hidden city, the trek became harder. The road was littered with animal skeletons—donkeys, mules and yaks. The expedition suffered from mountain-blindness, food was sparse and the U.S. flag was not enough to discourage attacks. The Roerichs remained optimistic: Nicholas was capable of finding beauty even in the blinding snowstorms which almost cost them their lives in the Karakorum mountain passages.
So how close did the Roerichs and Bekii get to their true purpose?
It is said that the closer one approaches to the hidden, hollow-earth city, the more vague their writings become, because Shambhala cannot be described in mere words. In his esoteric book Shambhala the Resplendent, which he was writing along with his more scientific and much drier travel diary, Nicholas began charting another, parallel journey written in stories and riddles. As the expedition went deeper, he increasingly recorded strange manifestations, fires, lights and visions over their camp —though those were mostly left out of his scientifically-minded travel diary.
His paintings also became more esoteric, increasingly depicting the messianic King of Shambhala. It is very likely that communication with the Soviets broke down at this point, after the country refused to provide more help to the Roerichs after the couple's first visit to Moscow in 1926. After the Soviets withdrew their support, the strangest part of the entire journey came to pass: in the summer of 1927, the expedition, still watched over by most major powers of the era, managed to disappear from the eyes of the world for an entire year.
Communication was lost, and the Roerichs were considered dead. Our only source for this invisible year is Nicholas' travel diary —which contradicts his Shambhala the Resplendent narration—and speaks of violent conflict with the Tibetan armed forces. The only thing that is certain is that the last five months of their disappearance were spent in the Tibetan government's detainment camp, where, due to the harsh conditions, five members of the expedition died.
After that, the Roerichs and their son trekked back to India. The closest they had gotten to Shambhala, according to Nicholas' travel diaries, was in the Altai mountains, in the valley of Uimon, when an "Old Believer" proudly showed them the entrance to the subterranean kingdom, now barred with stones. The true denizens of Shambhala would return, he assured the Roerichs, in the glorious time of human purification. Till then, the rest of humanity would only hear the echoes of their chanting.
If the Roerichs were spying for the British or the Soviets, the U.S. did not hold it against them. They remained close to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a correspondent of Helena, whose administration sponsored the couple's next Asian expedition in Manchuria in 1933. Roerich used the opportunity to keep searching for Shambhala, this time touting American leaders as the messianic figures soon to lead the war against evil, which was now represented by the Bolsheviks.
Helena Blavatsky, c. 1875, the Russian spiritualist whose works introduced the Roerichs to Shambhala. (Photo: Public Domain)
The second time around though, those who thought Nicholas Roerich to be a Soviet spy and a weird mystic were much more vocal. Eventually, their concerns forced the government to recall the couple early, despite the scientific success of the expedition. At the time, being suspected of collaboration with the Soviets could prove fatal so the Roerichs left the U.S. and settled in India.
However, the scientific worth of their expedition cannot be underestimated: no matter their motives, they had trekked miles of unchartered lands, unearthed lost artifacts and catalogued flora and fauna previously unknown to the West. Despite the controversy surrounding his name, Nicholas would garner three Nobel Peace Prize nominations, and also establish the Roerich pact, an inter-American treaty protecting cultural artifacts in times of conflict; the Roerichs even had a planet named after them in 1969.
As for Shambhala, it still awaits the next explorer, hidden inside a hollow earth.
Ruth Norman, a.k.a. Archangel Uriel, and some Unariuns dressed up for a psychodrama.
In the early ‘80s, American channel surfers began to encounter some pretty out-there public-access programming from a California collective known as Unarius. Led by a woman named Ruth Norman, a warm and maternal figure who appeared on-screen dressed in a variety of fluffy, sparkly, over-the-top costumes, the videos were known by their creators as psychodramas. The narratives often included aliens, UFOs, and historical settings, and the performers appeared to be making up their lines as they went along.
The participants in these psychodramas, which continued to air on public access channels into the ‘90s, were not professional actors, but members of a UFO cult re-enacting their memories of past lives on film. They were part of Unarius, a self-described “spiritual school” that offers self-improvement “based on the interdimensional understanding of energy.”
Founded in 1954 by Ruth Norman—alias Archangel Uriel—and her husband Ernest, Unarius continues to exist today, headquartered in El Cajon, California. They're even hosting a publicly accessible 33rd annual Interplanetary Conclave of Light from October 8-9 this year, complete with dove release and tour of a future alien landing site.
Ruth Norman died in 1971, but her nurturing spirit certainly lives on, most recently in the form of We Are Not Alone, a short documentary that features Unariuns talking about their departed leader and includes footage of those compelling but confusing psychodramas.
We spoke to the film’s director, Jodi Wille, about Unarius, its entrancing leader, and the wide-ranging nature of cults.
Unariuns on set.
How did you first encounter Unarius?
I first came across them in the '90s, when their videos aired on public access stations in Los Angeles. Some people I knew, mostly obscure film and record collectors and discriminating stoners, raved about their videos and would record them off the public access channels in L.A. and other cities and trade tapes with each other. The VHS bootlegs were highly coveted in certain circles. Back then, those collectors and underground writers basically thought of Unarius as a bizarre and preposterous but essentially benign cult, valued largely for their kitsch appeal. I even thought of them that way at first.
Uriel surrounded by angelic adherents.
What made you think, “I need to make a documentary about this”?
A few years ago, I was co-curating an exhibition called “The Visionary Experience” for the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. I wanted to include Unarius films and artwork in the exhibition, and so I visited the Unariuns at their center in El Cajon a number of times. I was invited to examine their archive of self-produced films and videos, self-published books, audio recordings, student paintings, photographs, and costumes—a massive collection that completely left me slack-jawed, mind completely melted. I discovered inspired and aesthetically potent work, the output of a dynamic, outlandish, psychically guided creative collective who created transcendent artwork for the purposes of spiritual healing.
I spent time hanging out with the Unariuns, staying overnight and sharing meals and wine with them, and was struck by their self-awareness, sense of humor, kindness, generosity, and basic sense of decency. In many ways they appear to be typical suburban San Diegans, yet they can fit some of the most radical, far out conceptions of the universe into their brains. They’ve found a way to live functionally in our dysfunctional society by cultivating rich and meaningful inner worlds and a community to support each other. I found myself wanting to hang out with them more and more and hear more of their personal stories. I discovered the colorful history of the group and their leaders is far wilder, weirder, and more beautiful than I could have ever imagined. I became obsessed. I still am.
Performers on set during the filming of a psychodrama.
How is Unarius similar to and different than other cults, particularly ones involving aliens?
Well, cult is such a charged word, colored by the corporate media’s anti-cult backlash of the '70s and '90s, which brainwashed so many people into believing wildly inaccurate and negative ideas about alternative spiritual groups, which religious scholars insist are largely benign and have proven to be an important part of cultural and spiritual renewal in times of decline throughout human history. I like to describe Unarius the way they describe themselves, as an educational foundation; a non-profit organization collectively run by volunteers.
Unarius has quite a bit in common with a long tradition of metaphysical groups that go all the way back to Pythagoras, but more recently include the Theosophists, the I Am Movement, and Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s Church Universal and Triumphant to name a few, who have clairvoyant founders, believe in principles of reincarnation, and who interact with spirit guides.
But they are unique in a number of ways. Their cosmology is collectively created—and continuously growing. All members contribute to the narrative as their own past life memories unfold (they recognize that they have a shared history with each other throughout lifetimes as a soul group).
What also distinguishes Unarius from the others is their emphasis on spiritual healing through past life therapy and reenactments on film. Their prodigious creative output related to this peaked in the mid-'70s to the mid-'80s when several very talented and impassioned young artists were in the group, resulting in three feature films, 80 television shows, as well as scores of student paintings, hundreds of handmade costumes, thousands of photographs, and over 200 self-published books. To me, Unarius in those golden days was the ultimate DIY spiritual creative collective.
Ruth Norman in two of her typically flamboyant outfits.
Ruth Norman fascinates me! People get so emotional talking about her. What’s your take on her and her appeal to Unarius followers?
Well, she was such a lover. She was a cosmic visionary cloaked in a rainbow cape and platforms. She was exuberant, self-made, wildly creative, fearless, and radically benevolent; a super powered, bawdy fairy godmother who helped dozens of awkward, inhibited, drug-addicted, and otherwise screwed-up individuals transform their lives and build community through self-examination and creative expression. She’s a true American original.
A UFO moment during the filming of a Unarius psychodrama.
Was anyone watching these psychodramas on public access TV? Did they create any sort of splash or get any media attention at the time they aired?
Unarius pioneered a self distribution system through public access stations across the country, ingeniously networking with mail-order students in various cities to get their programs in regular rotation on public access stations in 20 states during the '80s and '90s. But even before that, Ruth Norman became a minor media star in the '70s and '80s when she made a series of predictions regarding the imminent landing of [advanced extraterrestrial beings known as] the Space Brothers. The Brothers never showed up, but she was able to spread the Unariun messages of love and the positive future of the universe to millions through interviews on several national shows including Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow Show and Real People. She was a marketing genius.
The voluminous cosmic generator outfit.
Favorite Uriel outfit?
There are so many showstoppers in her closet….but if I had to choose only one, it would have to be her cosmic generator outfit [above]. She couldn’t walk it it—she actually had to step into it and then sit on a chair to wear it, it was so large and elaborate, bedecked with 33 of the planets from the interplanetary confederation protruding from her skirt and elaborate, electrified flames shooting from her hands, shoulders, and beehive hairdo.
Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle. (Photo: Public Domain)
No one could get into philosophical argument with Lady Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and walk away unchanged. Born in 1623, Cavendish was an outspoken aristocrat who traveled in circles of scientific thinkers, and broke ground on proto-feminism, natural philosophy (the 17th century term for science), and social politics.
In her lifetime, she published 20 books. But amid her poetry and essays, she also published one of the earliest examples of science fiction. In 1666. She named it The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World.
In the story, a woman is kidnapped by a lovesick merchant sailor, and forced to join him at sea. After a windstorm sends the ship north and kills the men, the woman walks through a portal at the North Pole into a new world: one with stars so bright, midnight could be mistaken for midday. A parallel universe where creatures are sentient, and worm-men, ape-men, fish-men, bird-men and lice-men populate the planet. They speak one language, they worship one god, and they have no wars. She becomes their Empress, and with her otherworldly subjects, she explores natural wonders and questions their observations using science.
And Cavendish starts it all by addressing the women in the audience. “To all Noble and Worthy Ladies,” she begins, and lets us know about the strange trip in store for them:
“The First Part is Romancical; the Second, Philosophical; and the Third is meerly Fancy; or (as I may call it) Fantastical. And if (Noble Ladies) you should chance to take pleasure in reading these Fancies, I shall account my self a Happy Creatoress: If not, I must be content to live a Melancholly Life in my own World, which I cannot call a Poor World, if Poverty be only want of Gold, and Jewels: for, there is more Gold in it, than all the Chymists ever made; or, (as I verily believe) will ever be able to make.”
But when Cavendish put her pen to paper, she didn’t just aim to tell a fun story. She also examined popular theories about science. In the 17th century, scientists began asking new questions about how the natural world worked, using the slide rule, telescope and microscope. Researchers dissected animals, interested in understanding their many parts. They also began to question the role of spirits, and God. Cavendish was fascinated by all of it.
The frontispiece for A Description of a New World, Called: The Blazing World, published in 1666. (Photo: Public Domain)
Cavendish “understands that fiction better accommodates speculation and imagination,” writes English professor Anne M. Thell, and just like all good sci-fi, she uses her imaginative world to flesh out ideas about politics, mock and muse on scientific theories, and weave it all into a poetic landscape. In Cavendish’s literary world, souls can inhabit different bodies, man can’t comprehend God, and souls are genderless, traveling as thoughts on “vehicles of the wind.”
Growing up during the English civil war, Cavendish had an unusual upbringing for a woman in the 17th century. Described as a “shy” child, she lived for years with other royals in exile. But upon her return to England as a Duchess, she gained entry to a scientific world that most women of her time could not access. Her husband, who was also involved in natural philosophy, supported her interests and connected her with Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle, and René Descartes.
Cavendish was recognized as the first female natural philosopher, or scientist, of her time. She was also the first woman to be invited to observe experiments at the new British Royal Society, a forum for scientists, in light of her contributions to natural philosophy in her poems and plays. (Unfortunately, she was the last woman for over a century: a ban on women was soon instituted, lasting until 1945.)
Despite her shyness and “melancholic episodes,” Cavendish challenged society’s view of women, which made her subject to ridicule. She wore her own inventive style of dress, and was seen as too outspoken and bawdy for a true Lady. She not only believed in animal rights, she criticized values of her society, including its obsession with constant technological advancement. This, among other beliefs, earned her the nickname “Mad Madge.”
But none of that discouraged her from participating in natural philosophy. She wrote volumes, sending them to contemporaries in her field without shame. In The Blazing World, written six years after the British Royal Society formed, Cavendish’s protagonists question popular beliefs about the universe and use reason to examine scientific theories. The two main characters are both women, known as the Empress and the Duchess.
A portrait of Portrait of Margaret Cavendish, from the frontispiece to her 1653 work Poems and Fancies. (Photo: Public Domain)
Change some of the wording around, and The Blazing World resembles a modern science fiction story. While the Empress enters a “portal” in the book, today’s sci-fi tales might say she enters another dimension. The people of the Blazing World, as her universe was called, came in colors ranging from green to scarlet, and had what we might now call alien technology. Cavendish writes that “though they had no knowledge of the Load-stone, or Needle or pendulous Watches,” Blazing World inhabitants were able to measure the depth of the sea from afar, technology that wouldn’t be invented until nearly 250 years after the book came out.
As if that weren’t enough, Cavendish then describes a fictional, air-powered engine that moves golden, otherworldly ships, which she says “would draw in a great quantity of Air, and shoot forth Wind with a great force.” She describes the mechanics of this steampunk dream world in precise technical detail. All at once, in Cavendish’s world, the fleet of ships links together and forms a golden honeycomb on the sea to withstand a storm so that “no Wind nor Waves were able to separate them.”
The Empress is, of course, inquisitive. She employs the ape-men, worm-men and others to investigate how snow forms from water, and why the sun gives heat. Intellectual History professor Lisa T. Sarasohn notes in her book The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish that the Ape-men, the “chemysts” of the world, “foolishly waste their time trying to find the philosopher’s stone.” All at once, Cavendish criticizes science, politics and society at large.
In the middle of the story, when the Empress is offered the soul of anyone living or dead as a trusted advisor, she rejects Plato and Aristotle. Cavendish goes meta: she inserts herself as a character called the Duchess in her own book, and befriends the Empress as “platonic friends.” The Duchess and Empress then learn to create mini-worlds of their own using their thoughts.
Title age and frontispiece from Cavendish's Grounds of Natural Philosophy. (Photo: Public Domain)
At one point the story becomes partly autobiographical: the souls of the Empress and fictional Duchess leave their bodies and travel from the Empress’ world to Cavendish’s home world, to counsel her husband by entering his body as spirits, in an effort to help him with his sociopolitical woes. As divisions and wars enter the plot, the Duchess wonders why her world “should prize or value dirt more than men’s lives, and vanity more than tranquility.” Back again in her own home world, the Empress then uses Blazing World technology to defeat enemies that threaten her country, using a “firestone” that explodes ships like bombs.
As Cavendish’s critiques of science mingled in her own fictional universe, she imagined a place where women could rule and were respected. She was well aware of the limitations placed on her gender, and as one of the first science fiction authors and characters, she was up for the challenge. “I am not Covetous, but as Ambitious as ever any of my Sex was, is, or can be,” she writes.
The reader is meant to conclude that when the beliefs of others do them no good, they might as well create their own worlds. And 350 years later, The Blazing World is still relevant.
Here’s the prologue written by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and trailblazing sci-fi author, back in 1666:
“That though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second; yet, I will endeavour to be, Margaret the First: and, though I have neither Power, Time nor Occasion, to be a great Conqueror, like Alexander, or Caesar; yet, rather than not be Mistress of a World, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made One of my own. And thus, believing, or, at least, hoping, that no Creature can, or will, Envy me for this World of mine,
I remain, Noble Ladies, Your Humble Servant, M. Newcastle.”
The view from Mount Sunflower, Kansas's highest elevation. (Image: CC0)
Geographer Jerry Dobson had barely started his new job at the University of Kansas when a realization hit. Whenever he told friends and colleagues about his gig, people would smile, congratulate him, the works. But then, almost inevitably, they'd make some crack about his new home state: specifically, how flat it was. Over his years-long tenure, this did not change.
"Everytime you meet someone, they say it—and it's not true," he says. "I always looked around and saw hills."
But Dobson is a geographer, able to translate this frustration into motivation. A few years ago, he and his colleague Joshua Campbell—a born and raised Kansan—undertook a project. They set out to measure the flatness of every state in the union, using an algorithm designed to calculate how flat each one looks from different points in its interior—what Campbell calls "that feeling of total flatness." When they got the results back, Kansas was in a respectable seventh, behind Delaware, North Dakota, and the clear winner, Florida. Since then, Dobson and Campbell have toured their results around, using them to argue against the flat-Kansas mythology.
So how did Kansas get this reputation? Andy Stuhl, a musician who recently moved there by car, bets it comes from East Coast road-trippers, who spill out onto the plain after miles and miles of woods. Sam Huneke, a historian who grew up in Lawrence, points to a lack of particularly large hills, but insists that "the day-to-day experience is not one of flatness." What is clear is that, like Dobson, they don't much like it. "Of course it affects our reputation," says Kelli Hilliard of the Kansas Tourism Board, pointing towards efforts to change that, like a set of scenic, rolling byways; an Instagram account called "kansasaintflat."
But Branden Rishel, a California-based cartographer, has a different, more radical idea: If everyone already thinks Kansas is flat, why not lean in? Why not just make it flat—totally, completely flat?
Rishel is very familiar with the Kansas flatness question. He was a student of Mark Fonstad, a Texas State geographer who, in 2003, set out with some colleagues and a laser microscope to determine which was flatter: Kansas or an IHOP pancake. The resulting study, titled "Kansas Is Flatter Than a Pancake," likely added to the public misconceptions that rankle Dobson and Campbell. (They also point out that, if you use the particular mathematical approach of Fonstad et al, "there is no place on Earth that is not flatter than a pancake.")
Despite his academic parentage, Rishel doesn't disagree with Dobson and Campbell—"if Kansas is a sloped and hummocky lawn, Florida is a parking lot," he says. He also agrees that perceived flatness is probably bad for the state's reputation. He just thinks the best solution involves less fact-checking and more literal digging. "Kansans should reclaim and celebrate flatness," Rishel says. "Kansas should become more flat than flat."
Kansas, in Rishel's ideal future. (Image: Branden Rishel)
About a year ago, Rishel posted a mocked-up map of Totally Flat Kansas on his blog, Cartographers Without Borders, along with a skeleton of his plan. The image, in which a smooth, sleek Kansas sits embedded in the bumpy continent like a tooth in a gum, is immediately appealing. It gives the sense of a state that has taken charge of its own destiny and has ended up several thousand years ahead of the rest of us, in a state of David Bowie-esque aesthetic precision. It makes Kansas look cool.
The plan, which he elaborated for me, goes as follows: Start in the middle of the state and dig west, towards Colorado. Send that excavated dirt due east, and lay it out as you go, filling in all possible nooks, crannies, valleys, etc. By the end, you will have moved 5,501 cubic miles of soil—over 9 million Olympic swimming pools' worth, Rishel points out. To even begin to do this, you'd need a whole lot of technology that hasn't been invented yet (moveable pipelines, huge nuclear-powered mining machines, all that jazz). But the state would end up flat enough to test a level on, separated from its neighbors by enormous cliffs.
Rishel is a great evangelist for this plan. Besides the obvious recreational benefits—interstate cliff diving, endless ice skating in wet winters—total flatness would make Kansas a geographically fascinating spot, he says. There would be new plant life under the giant cliffs, which wouldn't see the sun until noon. The Arkansas River would plunge down from Colorado, free-falling into the western edge of the state. "Tourists could take an elevator into Kansas and play bocce," Rishel imagines, his enthusiasm palpable. "The region would turn into a giant puddle after storms... Visitors would discover that flat is never boring."
I'm sold. But I'm not from Kansas—and, like so many aspirational developers, neither is Rishell. Even if flattening is the sincerest form of flattery, Dobson, Campbell, and the other real Kansans I talked to would be sad to lose their hills, which help them take advantage of the good parts of being on the level. From the top of Lawrence's Mount Oread, for example, "the view reaches far enough to fade away," says Stuhl. "It's awe-inspiring to stand on top of one of our hills and see a squall line moving in," adds Sam Huneke, a history student who grew up in the state.
That is, until the mining machines roll by, bringing the future with them. Then, you'll just want to get out of the way.
“I have seen the future”: these words appeared in blue capitalized letters, across a white circle, on a button worn by visitors to the “Futurama” exhibit at New York’s 1939-40 World’s Fair. With a theme full of promise—“Building the World of Tomorrow”—an estimated 26 million visitors streamed into the site in Flushing Meadows, Queens, in the first year alone to look at the newest technologies and to be entertained.
The site at Flushing Meadows was re-commissioned for New York’s 1964 World’s Fair, which saw the debut of color TV and the “picturephone”, a new video conferencing medium decades before Skype. The 650 acres where this all took place is used today as a public park, and the well-known Unisphere, a symbol of the fair’s theme “Peace through Understanding,” still stands.
But not all of the World Fair exhibitions have been quite so lucky. At Expo ‘86 in Vancouver, the idealistic-sounding "Friendship 500 "was a McDonalds restaurant on a floating barge, nicknamed, the McBarge. It remained abandoned ever since, a floating relic, until earlier this year, when reports surfaced of the barge’s revival.
Vancouver 1986 World’s Fair, World Exposition on Transportation and Communication, McBarge, View with Flowers, 2014.
These places—monuments, parks and buildings—that were once filled with promise are the focus of Jade Doskow’s new bookLost Utopias. Doskow began photographing former World Fair sites in 2007, and her book is an intriguing, beautifully photographed collection of World’s Fair architecture. Some are decayed, some have been graffitied and some, like the Eiffel Tower and Brussels Atomium, are perennial tourist attractions.
For Doskow, the fascination also comes with what the buildings represented. "It’s because of the utopian and dystopian characters of these sites; because old buildings falling apart are not just old buildings falling apart," she writes in the book. "There is so much vision that was put into these daring structures." Enjoy a selection of lost places below:
Paris 1937 World’s Fair, Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, Nudes, Palais de Tokyo, 2007.
St Louis 1904 World’s Fair, Louisiana Purchase Exposition, Flight Cage, View 2, 2013.
Montreal 1967 World’s Fair, Man and His World, Habitat ’67, Day View, 2012.
New York 1964 World’s Fair, Peace Through Understanding, Airplane, 2011.
Chicago 1933 World’s Fair, A Century of Progress International Exposition, Site of North Lagoon, 2008.
New York 1964 World’s Fair, Peace Through Understanding, Port Authority Heliport, 2014.
San Diego 1915 World’s Fair, Panama-California Exposition, Moreton Bay Fig Tree, 2013.
Buffalo 1901 World’s Fair, The Pan Am Exposition, Site of Japanese Village, 2009.
The view from Ayahuasca Healings' Elbe retreat. (Photo: Gabriel Ng/Just 2 Guys Creative)
When people drink ayahuasca tea, the psychoactive, plant-based Amazonian drink, they have visions. Sometimes, those are visual hallucinations: these ceremonies happen at night because the spirit of the plant is supposed to speak most clearly in the dark.
Sometimes, though, they are inspirations—big ideas about how to change the world. Like many who are “called” to ayahuasca, Trinity de Guzman had a vision of spreading the gospel of the plant. But where for many that might mean proselytizing to their friends, for de Guzman, it took the form of a more specific idea.
In 2015, de Guzman was Skyping with an ayahuasca ceremony leader he admired about setting up a venture together, and the leader mentioned she could see herself living in the Pacific Northwest. “I was sitting a lot with the medicine”—ayahuasca—“at the time, maybe two times a week,” de Guzman says, leading a “small, private ceremony” for himself and a friend. “That's when the clarity came through.” He would start a church—an ayahuasca church—the first public and legal ayahuasca church in the United States.
That was how Ayahuasca Healings began. Soon, the message had been pushed out, on Facebook, on message boards, all over the internet. Ayahuasca Healings was coming to America, and they promised that their ceremonies would be “100 percent legal."
At Ayahuasca Healings, anyone seeking an ayahuasca experience could apply to join the church. There was no need to travel to Peru, where ayahuasca tourism is booming, or to worry about prosecution for possessing or consuming ayahuasca's active ingredient, DMT, a Schedule 1 controlled substance in the U.S. As a religious organization, the founders believed, Ayahuasca Healings had the constitutional right to use ayahuasca in their ritualized ceremonies.
The market for such a place certainly existed. Virtually unknown in America until a decade or so ago, ayahuasca has been embraced by a broad swath of curious adventure-seekers, from Bay Area tech types to the Brooklyn creative class. After de Guzman started pitching Ayahuasca Healings online, towards the end of 2015, news of the group's upcoming retreats was broadcast everywhere from psychonaut forums and YouTube channels dedicated to psychedelic and spiritual experiences to popular media outlets including Vice, Complex, Medical Daily, and The Daily Beast.
The Elbe land. (Photo: Gabriel Ng/Just 2 Guys Creative)
It distinguished itself quickly as the most brazen and ambitious ayahuasca outfit of its kind. Most organizations serving ayahuasca work quietly. Few require as substantial a financial commitment as Ayahuasca Healings was asking—a donation of as much as $1,997 for a four-day retreat that included one ceremony with ayahuasca and another using San Pedro, a cactus that contains mescaline.
It was the group's claim to legality that attractedthe most skepticism, though. The founders of Ayahuasca Healings believed their activities were protected by their relationship with the controversial Oklevueha Native American Church, though neither de Guzman or Marc Shackman, Ayahuasca Healings' church director and chief medicine man, is from the U.S. As a chapter of Oklevueha, Ayahuasca Healings called itself a Native American Church and assumed that legal exemptions that had been provided to native religious groups in the past made their retreats legal.
They were not. Two religious groups in the United States have won, through legal action, the right to serve ayahuasca, but the Drug Enforcement Agency evaluates petitions for such religious exemptions from drug laws on a case-by-case basis. Ayahuasca Healings did not have an exemption and, after the Drug Enforcement Agency took an interest in their work, quickly shut down operations, leaving church "members" who had signed up for future retreats out thousands of dollars. In online forums, the group has been called a cult and a scam, and its leaders accused of narcissism and delusions of grandeur. Both de Guzman and Shackman say their intentions have always been sincere and that, as soon as they've won permission from the DEA to serve ayahuasca, they will be able to make good on everything they've promised. "We want to show the DEA that we are committed to bring this to America in a controlled and safe way," Shackman says.
The DEA is not eager to permit the use of Schedule 1 drugs. The churches that are exempt from laws restricting peyote and ayahuasca fought long, expensive battles for years to win that right. In the past decade, ayahuasca is the only drug for which any religious group have been granted new exemptions; arguments for cannabis as a religious sacrament have not succeeded. Ayahuasca Healings is testing the boundaries of government tolerance for ayahuasca consumption and, in the process, stumbling through knotty questions: For a generation less drawn to traditional churches and temples, what counts as religion? Can spirituality be sold without compromising its integrity? In America, who is allowed access to psychoactive plants is anything but clear.
Before Trinity de Guzman found ayahuasca, he had immersed himself the world of business and online marketing, where the gurus were people like Harv Eker, whose teachings are about connecting mind and money. De Guzman first started learning about DMT in 2011, while he was working with a life coaching company in San Diego; a mentor there introduced him to the drug, and he tried smoking it. "That opened so much up within me," he says. "Once that happened, it was like the seeds were planted for experiencing ayahuasca." He had to share this with the world. In May 2015, while living in Mexico, he had the ayahuasca-inspired vision that he was "meant to bring it to the United States."
Shackman and de Guzman had met a couple of years earlier, through, of course, ayahuasca. They had both been spending a lot of time in Peru, in the Urubamba Valley, which has become a center of the drug's tourism. Shackman had grown up in a town in the west of England, where he never felt he fit in, he says, and as soon as he was able, he started traveling, to Africa, Asia, and central and South America. "I always put my self-exploration first," he says. At first he worked as a scuba instructor, but as he began to learn "about the universe and spirit and the spirit world, who I was in the human way and who I was in an inhuman way, in terms of my soul and spirit," he spent more of his time on meditation, yoga, and spiritual retreats. "It took over my life," he says.
Where de Guzman is slight and trim, with shining white teeth and a controlled, practiced way of speaking, Shackman is tall, his face often surrounded by a frizz of light hair, and expansive in conversation. When they started working together on Ayahuasca Healings, they divided the responsibilities, with de Guzman focused on attracting people to their group, drawing on the marketing skills he'd honed earlier, and Shackman starting on-the-ground work, beginning with the search for a retreat site. The land he found, 160 acres in Elbe, Washington, south of Seattle, had almost everything they were looking for. Water running through the land. Isolation, to a point—there were no neighbors but there was an international airport within a two hour drive. The snowy peak of Mt. Rainer was off in the distance.
Marc Shackman and Trinity de Guzman. (Photo: Gabriel Ng/Just 2 Guys Creative)
Shackman had never lived in the continental United States—he had spent time, on and off, in Hawaii and passed through California—but this was his first time in the Pacific Northwest. He was open to living anywhere, though, in pursuit of the vision he and Trinity now shared: They could bring the positive influence of the plant to harried, modern-day life. America needed ayahuasca.
Also, there were more practical reasons to set up their organization in the United States. "We knew we were here to target people who were not able to go to Peru," says de Guzman. "There are a lot of people who are called to this medicine, but can't take the time off work to go for a week." He also believed that there was a provision in American law which would cover the activities the group was planning—which, in his words, "gives Americans or anyone in the United States the constitutional right to practice their religion, whatever they deem that to be," even if that religion includes the consumption of otherwise illegal substances.
Despite their outward confidence, the Ayahuasca Healings founders did realize that the law they were depending on, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, did not offer blanket protection for spiritually inflected drug use. They could not just show up in America and start distributing ayahuasca as a religious sacrament. (If the law were that broad, there would, presumably, already be groups serving the growing demand.) De Guzman was aware that two groups, União do Vegetal and Santo Daime, were allowed to serve ayahuasca legally, though. The question was exactly how they did it.
União do Vegetal, or UDV, began in the early 1960s, after José Gabriel da Costa, known as Mestre Gabriel, drank ayahuasca tea while working on a rubber tapping crew in Brazil. He tried the tea in 1959 and started distributing it to others shortly after; within a couple of years, he had formed this new religious order, rooted in Christianity and awe of the spiritual awareness ayahuasca tea enables.
In the early 1990s, Jeffrey Bronfman, an environmentalist whose wealthy family once owned the Seagram Company, first encountered ayahuasca when he traveled to Brazil, to consider a request from a spiritual organization "looking to preserve an area of land in the Amazon, because of the numbers of plants central to their religious practice," he later said. Inspired by what he saw, he trained as a UDV mestre, a clerical role carrying the charge to distribute Mestre Gabriel's teachings, and began holding ceremonies in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1999, the U.S. Customs Service seized a shipment of ayahuasca sent to the UDV Santa Fe office, and Bronfman served as the lead plaintiff in the decade-long legal battle that ultimately won UDV the right to serve ayahuasca tea as part of its religious rituals.
Bronfman and the UDV argued, all the way up to the Supreme Court, that the government did not have a good enough reason to interfere with their religious practice. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) holds that the government should not "substantially burden a person's exercise of religion"—if the person has demonstrated that their actions are sincere and part of their religion, they can get out of laws that apply to everyone else. (The 2014 Hobby Lobby case that exempted the business from certain requirements of the Affordable Care Act invoked this same law, for example.)
Thinking about this standard—what is religion? what makes its exercise sincere?—can get heady quickly, but over the years U.S. courts have come up with some relatively straightforward ways to answer these questions. Not all beliefs are religious, for instance. If they're better characterized as philosophical or secular, RFRA doesn't protect them. Courts have also come up with “indicia” of a religion—a religion takes on “ultimate questions having to do with deep and imponderable matters,” offers a comprehensive moral or ethical belief system, and has some set of ceremonies, rituals, clergy, writings, holidays, prescribed clothing, and other signs usually associated with traditional religion.
The question of sincerity is perhaps even harder to assess, but if a set of beliefs is gathered together, ad hoc, to justify a lifestyle choice, that's one strike against sincerity. Commercial motives are another.
In UDV's case, the government lawyers conceded that the church was, essentially, a real religion, but argued that the danger to members' health and the possibility they'd distribute ayahuasca outside of a religious context outweighed the church's right to use the tea. The Supreme Court sided with the UDV, setting a precedent for applying the RFRA to the use of controlled substances.
Even before the UDV decision, RFRA was tied up in the sacramental use of plants considered dangerous under the law. In the 1980s, two members of the Native American Church were fired from their jobs for using peyote, as part of a religious ritual. In that case, the Supreme Court ultimately held, in 1990, that the religious context did not outweigh the violation of the law against consuming peyote—it seems that freedom of religion expression only went so far. Religious groups of all kinds saw that decision as a danger, and by 1993, Congress passed RFRA to reaffirm and extend protections for the free exercise of religion.
UDV was the first religious group to successfully win an exemption for the Controlled Substances Act under the principles of the RFRA, and after the court issued its opinion, in 2006, the DEA faced an influx of petitions from groups trying for their own exemptions. In 2008, the DEA issued its first rejection in the wake of the UDV decision: the Church of Reality, “a religion based on believing in everything that is real" that considered marijuana a sacrament, had not met the legal standard for sincere religious exercise.
According to the DEA, since 2006, "at least two exemptions have been granted in the course of litigation"—the UDV exemption and one for Santo Daime, another church that draws on Christianity and ayahuasca rituals, that was founded, like UDV, by a Brazilian working in the rubber tapping industry.
Part of the court's reasoning in the UDV case was that there was relatively little risk of the group distributing ayahuasca to non-believers. A decade ago, there was less demand for it, and up until a few years ago, ayahuasca was usually assumed to have no potential popular appeal. (It makes many people vomit violently, for one.) Even as more Americans have been "called" to ayahuasca, as they put it, the court's reasoning has held out. UDV remains a small and its ceremonies somewhat secret; Santo Daime ceremonies are seen as more easily accessible to outsiders looking to experience ayahuasca, but many people are put off by the group's strong connection to Christianity.
"We were more of all an overall package," says Shackman, of Ayahuasca Healings' pitch, a modern approach to ayahuasca, with less dogma. "There was a lot more freedom."
After Ayahuasca Healings announced its intentions online in 2015, applicants came pouring in. Clients were looking for vision quests, a cure for depression, shamanic training, resolutions to setbacks in life; some had done ayahuasca before, and some knew very little about it. The fact that the retreats would be held in Washington State was a selling point for some people; the idea of attending a legal retreat appealed, too. And although it might seem like ayahuasca ceremonies are everywhere these days—the New Yorker recently quoted one expert who estimated that there were 100 ceremonies being conducted each night in Manhattan—one retreat participant said her other attempts to find an ayahuasca ceremony to attend were either rebuffed or ignored.
While they worked with volunteers to prepare for the retreat—waterproofing tent poles, erecting tipis, cleaning and repainting the few buildings on the property, buying enough supplies that one Walmart clerk asked if they were preppers—Shackman and de Guzman were also shoring up the legal structures of their new organization. They applied for and were granted nonprofit status (the IRS lists a public charity named "Ayausca Healings" registered under Shackman's name in Elbe, Washington); they sent a letter to the local prosecutor introducing the church and outlining its activities. Most importantly, they made an arrangement with the Oklevueha Native American Church that they believed would grant their group legal cover.
Perhaps the first crack in their confidence about the legality of their plan was when they aligned themselves with ONAC. Originally, they had formed a relationship with the New Haven Native American Church, which will perform a “spiritual adoption” of people who believe in the religious power of ayahuasca. After Ayahuasca Healings started getting attention online, James Mooney, ONAC's founder, wrote a post about the group on Facebook, saying that Ayahuasca Healings was not completely protected from the law. He could fix that. They got in touch.
Even as reporters spread the word about the "first legal ayahuasca church" in the country, people interested in ayahuasca or other psychoactive drugs, as well as people on guard for cult-like groups, started voicing skepticism about the new church, in particular its claim to legality. What de Guzman and Shackman treated as a unique vision, others saw as a common reaction to ayahuasca—many people who participate in ayahuasca ceremonies feel strongly that "everyone needs to experience this" and that it's their calling to help save the world. Plenty of people in the ayahuasca community supported the idea of bringing ayahuasca to the U.S. but they weren't sure these two audacious men, with their questionable claims to legality, were going to do that job carefully and safely. If they did not—if the authorities used this as an excuse to crack down on ayahuasca, if someone died at this high profile retreat—it could not only break the current, relatively tolerant environment, but cut short the growing mainstream interest in ayahuasca as a safe and therapeutic drug.
Mooney has his own band of skeptics and legal battles. "Most of the Native American Churches hate my guts," he says. The reason: Oklevueha says it can protect the use of plant-based "sacraments" by people who don't belong to federally registered tribes. It also counts many plants as sacraments. In other words, membership is open to anyone, and ONAC will sanction the use of cannabis, san pedro, kava and other plants in ceremonies held by its affiliates.
The government has not always agreed with Mooney's claims to the right to use controlled substances. Fifteen years ago, government authorities seized packages of peyote from Mooney's church and charged him with a number of drug felonies; the federal charges were dropped after the UDV's Supreme Court victory.
Recently, though, Oklevueha affiliates have not met with success in court. Last year, a Michigan judge rejected an ONAC member's claim to religious exemption after he was caught growing marijuana. Earlier this year, ONAC opened a case against the government for seizing a shipment of cannabis headed to a member in Oregon. This past April, the Ninth Circuit upheld a lower court decision to deny the Oklevueha Native American Church of Hawai'i, run by Mooney's son, an exemption from federal laws restricting the use of cannabis.
In this last case, a consortium of Native American Churches filed an amicus brief, which informed the court that "NAC organizations do not recognize Oklevueha as a chapter" or "recognize, condone, or allow the religious use of marijuana, or any other substance other than peyote, in any of its religious services." Earlier this year, in February, the Native American Church of South Dakota released a statement disassociating itself from Mooney. The National Council of Native American Churches released its own statement:
"There is a growing trend in the United States, of organizations adopting the name 'Native American Church' as a means of trying to obtain the protection of federal law which was established by the government to recognize and protect the legitimate indigenous religions that have prospered on the North American continent since long before European settlers arrived..."
"Some of these illegitimate organizations, comprised of non-Native people, are now claiming that marijuana, ayahuasca and other substances are part of Native American Church theology and practice. Nothing could be further from the truth...We reject the attempts to grasp onto our indigenous ways and deceive the public by claiming them as their own for their own personal enjoyment or for profit."
An authentic cultural claim to a religious tradition isn't necessarily part of the legal criteria for exemption from drug laws. Federal law does now allow the possession of peyote for all members of any federally recognized Indian tribe, but in one case involving the ONAC, the court found that a non-tribal person's peyote use could be protected by membership in a Native American Church. Like Ayahuasca Healings' founders, UDV's Bronfman is a non-native person who spent time in the Amazon and felt inspired to bring back ayahuasca to the United States. But American drug laws are tied to the history of persecution of Native American cultures, and by claiming the rights that tribal members fought for as theirs, outsiders threaten that protection.
But Shackman and de Guzman are unswayed by the National Council's objections to naming a group like theirs a Native American Church. "We’re not using ayahuasca for our own personal enjoyment or for profit,” says de Guzman. “To believe in Native American theology isn’t about the color of your skin or where you were born. But it’s about the philosophy of what it’s about...To me the Native American Church is all encompassing.”
"What we really are is an indigenous world culture church," Shackman says. "We fall under Native American church because we're in America and that's the indigenous culture in America. "To be Native American—to fully appreciate Native American culture, you don't have to be Native American. A lot of Native American people have problems with bringing their tradition to white man." Native American Churches who reject groups like Ayahuasca Healings, he says, are "not in touch with their traditional religion," which he believes would not see a separation here.
"We do not expect all native peoples to approach us with such a transcendental perspective, and view us all as one spirit. There are always a few haters," he says. "You can't make everyone happy."
In January, Ayahuasca Healings held its first retreat, of six they would conduct. The first day, after the guests arrived on the land and settled into the white tipis, there was a cleansing sweat lodge; the next morning, they participated in a San Pedro ceremony, and in the evening, after dinner, they went back up the mountain on the property for the ayahuasca ceremony. The second full day, they would spend processing their experience, maybe try acroyoga or other workshops, and by the fourth day be grounded enough to take what they'd learned back out into the world.
A group at Ayahuasca Healings, in Elbe. (Photo: Gabriel Ng/Just 2 Guys Creative)
For some of the retreat-goers and volunteers, this experience was everything they had hoped for; for others, the more time they spent with Ayahuasca Healings, the more uncomfortable they became. Living on the Elbe land could be demanding. The living quarters were basic to begin with, and it was still winter and cold. The ground could be wet, even inside the tents, and as the number of volunteers fluctuated, at times one person was cooking for 20 people.
But their most nagging doubts were about the founders' self-aggrandizing behavior and resistance to feedback. A couple of volunteers say, for instance, that when confronted with the suggestion of possible problems or dangers, the founders told them that as long as they believed everything would go well, it would. And instead of being focused on volunteers and guests having transformative experiences, they kept the focus on themselves: Look at us. Look at what we're doing for people.
De Guzman defended their behavior as a necessary part of running the operation. All members of Ayahuasca Healings are equal, he says, although as the founder, “my voice is what brings people to the organization.""We were under a very specific time crunch, and so, yeah, we are all equals," he says, "and at the same time if we did things in a way where we would just listen to or implement all the volunteers' ideas, very little would get done.”
If one of the markers of a traditional religion is that members believe in, trust and follow the guidance of their leader, the Ayahuasca Healings founders seemed to be having only mixed success. The retreat-goers had dramatically different ideas about whether they were participating in a religion. One guest, who had an overwhelmingly positive experience at the retreat, says she “definitely never thought that it was a religion.” Another, who was so uncomfortable with how the retreat was run that he left early, says he had initially been most excited about finally finding “something that fit what I believed.” One person who helped interview and approve applicants said that while “for me it certainly had a spiritual component...I always felt it was understood, though never mentioned, that the primary reason for calling it a religion was for legal purposes.”
Ayahuasca Healings' blend of spiritualism and online marketing led to confusion over the donations retreat attendees were asked to give, too. Although there was some flexibility in how much retreat-goers gave, the transaction felt enough like buying a vacation package that the church's new “members” expected a retreat in return.
Any concerns, internal or external, about the way the country's "first public, legal ayahuasca church" was being run came to head when the DEA took an interest in the group. At the end of February 2016, the agency sent what de Guzman describes as a "very friendly letter" to the group and inviting them to petition for a religious exemption. "We received it and we really started to sit with it," says de Guzman. They decided to stop holding retreats.
Ayahuasca Healings retreat. (Photo: Gabriel Ng/Just 2 Guys Creative)
This did not sit well with the center’s clientele. When those people received the news that their retreats would be postponed indefinitely—effectively canceled—many were livid. On internet forums dedicated to the group, they traded advice on how to get their money back, by contesting the charges through their credit cards or credit unions, unmoved by the argument made by Ayahuasca Healings' founders, that they had not bought a retreat but made a donation. The money the church received, de Guzman and Shackman say, went to its operation; they could only promise that retreats would resume in the future, or offer a Peruvian retreat as a replacement. During the months Ayahuasca Healings was running retreats, the church did return money to a few people who had to change their plans (de Guzman calls these “gifts of good faith” rather than refunds). Since the group stopped active operations, it has not repaid anyone who sent in their money for a future retreat.
Some people did rebook on the Peru retreat. But for those who had been or become mistrustful of the group, the management of the Peruvian retreats only confirmed their fears. Most alarmingly, on the second outing, Sulastri de Andrade, the owner of the property, had to intervene to help a guest who was sick. The guest was "semi-unconscious," de Andrade says, suffering from altitude sickness and fatigue, which had been exacerbated by the ayahuasca.
De Guzman on a retreat in Peru. (Photo: Supplied)
Deaths, though rare, do happen in connection ayahuasca ceremonies; in the past month, a woman died while attending an ayahuasca retreat in Kentucky, held by another group with a tenuous claim to legality. The tea poses a higher risk to people with heart conditions and who are taking antidepressants and some of the reported deaths have been connected to other drugs used during the ceremonies.
De Guzman says the suffering guest was safe, and the situation under control, a scary-seeming but familiar part of ayahuasca work. The group's safety measures came in the selection of retreat participants—interviewers screened out people with medical counter-indications to taking the drug. A former Ayahuasca Healing interviewer, though, says at least one person initially rejected for their methadone use managed to get another interview and be approved. (After he flagged this, she did not attend the retreat, he believes.)
"No matter what people experience, no matter what it might look like, it’s always as much as they can handle," says de Guzman. “Mother Ayahuasca will only ever give you what you can handle."
The leaders of Ayahuasca Healings are still hoping that the DEA will grant them a religious exemption for their work. In late August, the agency requested more information from the group about its religious practices. "We are very confident that the petition will be granted," say de Guzman. "If it's not handed to us like this, we will take them to court, and we will win the exemption."
The future of the group, though, is murky. They gave up their lease on the land on Elbe; the property's now being run as a mountain resort. They plan to restructure, under a new name, as what Shackman calls a "fresh new start," and de Guzman will step back from his more public role promoting the group. In their petition to the DEA, which one skeptic obtained through a freedom of information request, their lawyer wrote that the Ayahuasca Healings founders "wish to admit that they were previously mistaken about the current state of the law regarding Ayahuasca."
ONAC also says that Ayahuasca Healings is "no longer in good standing with us." "They were treating it like a business. They were advertising and marketing, which is a grievous slap in the face to indigenous medicine people," says Mooney. "When all these people paid them money to do a ceremony they ran off with the money, just like a corrupt business." Right now, he says, he is not renewing their ability to work under the ONAC. "They're really, really nice guys, but it's like these business people have gone into the religious business and it just doesn't mix.
Mooney hadn't communicated this to Ayahuasca Healings directly. “He hasn’t said that to us before,” says de Guzman. But the DEA exemption would be for Ayahuasca Healings, independent of ONAC, he says. “Once we have our DEA exemption, it won't matter anymore.”
There are other groups going through the same process as Ayahuasca Healings. Another ayahuasca retreat, SoulQuest, recently received a similar letter for the DEA suggesting they stop operations and initiate a petition for a religious exemption. Part of the reason that Ayahuasca Healings attracted so much concern from the larger ayahuasca and psychedelic therapy community is because increasing numbers of people do believe ayahuasca can have positive spiritual and therapeutic effects: like de Guzman and Shackman, they want to find ways to give more people access to ayahuasca. Since the DEA evaluates religious exemption petitions individually, the decision on Ayahuasca Healings' legality should not keep the next group from winning an exemption. But the more groups with questionable motives that try to use this exemption, the harder it could be for the next group to prove that their use of ayahuasca as a religious sacrament is truly sincere, both in their hearts and under the law.
