Elizabeth Prophet’s NYT obit
I really ought to save this one for my “favorite obit of the week” this week, but I simply can’t resist mentioning it.
Elizabeth Clare Wulf, a.k.a. Elizabeth Prophet died last week, and rated an obit in the NY Times this weekend.
Elizabeth Prophet was the founder of a church called “Church Universal and Triumphant,” which, as far as I can tell, seems to have been a conglomeration of a bunch of different religious aspects from a variety of traditions; she mixed her Christianity with her Buddhism, a little theosophy, and, from the sound of it, a little bit of greek mythology for good measure.
She got some press in the ’80s for predicting a nuclear doomsday due to war with the Soviet Union, and she made that classic mistake of cult leaders and actually named the date of the apocalypse.
From the NYT obit:
In the late 1980s, Mrs. Prophet issued warnings of an impending nuclear strike by the Soviet Union against the United States. More than 2,000 of her followers left their homes and gathered at the church’s compound near Corwin Springs, Mont., near the northern edge of Yellowstone National Park. There they began stockpiling weapons, food and clothing in underground bomb shelters.
Mounting tensions with local residents subsided when the predicted attack did not occur, and church members began returning home. At the same time, a looming face-off with the United States government was averted when church leaders agreed not to store weapons in return for a reinstatement of the church’s tax-exempt status, which had been revoked in 1987.
So, why is this interesting to me? I first encountered Prophet through audio recordings that were made at some of the ceremonies she presided over. Those recordings became somewhat well-known when they first were sampled by Negativland in their song “Michael Jackson,” and then later re-sampled by pop star Fat Boy Slim for a breakbeat song of the same name.
The audio in question comes from a bootleg recording called “Sounds of the American Doomsday Cult, Vol. 14″. It can be downloaded in it’s entirety here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?myethnymmzy
It seems they were quite upset about rock music, and were calling on the powers that be to provide protection against the harm they perceived and to condemn, in Prophet’s own words, “the misuse of the 4/4 time signature”.
Here’s the way I encountered it. (Note, this is a collage piece that incorporates some of the doomsday recordings; it contains other bits and pieces as well.)
I saw this too late to use it for my favorite obit of the week, which is a shame because I know a few things about Elizabeth Prophet and the Church Universal and Triumphant. A good friend of mine and her family where members when the group was located on the North side of Chicago in the 1980s. When she and her twin sister where born, Elizabeth Prophet gave them their names, Martha Mary and Mary Martha, because one could not be complete without the other. When she talks about her memories of that time it sounds way more like a hippie commune than a scary doomsday cult. Luckily, her family moved out before the stockpiling of weapons and moving to Montana happened.