THE ROYAL FRATERNITY OF MASTER METAPHYSICIANS & THE IMMORTAL BABY
Who wants to live forever? Well, going by the interest in immortality from time immemorial, just about everybody. There was one man, though, who actually set out to try and achieve it. As the head of a little-remembered American cult of the 1930s, James B Schafer took an otherwise ordinary child and through a combination of specialist diet, constant love, and the power of positive thinking attempted to turn her into an immortal being. It might have begun as a well-intentioned endeavour, but it was to end in legal complications, jail terms, and – ultimately – suicide. What would the price be for immortality? James B Schafer’s Royal Fraternity of Master Metaphysicians did everything they could to find out.
THE MASTER METAPHYSICIANS
Established sometime in the mid-1920s, the Royal Fraternity of Master Metaphysicians was founded by James Bernard Schafer, a con man who found his niche in the new ‘self-improvement’ movement. The organisation didn’t really prosper until the 1930s, when they set up home in Oak Dale, Long Island, close to New York City. Schafer was born around 1896 (accounts differ on the precise date) in Fargo, North Dakota, and had come from Michigan, where he’d qualified as a medical doctor, to New York on a Holy mission. A charismatic speaker, Schafer had developed a series of stirring speeches about the “spiritual potential” concealed within the material world. Between the wars, people were searching for meaning, and Schafer was more than ready to welcome them to his Fraternity. He billed himself as simply a “messenger” whose sole purpose was “the joyous work of helping others to help themselves”.
Every Sunday morning, he gathered huge crowds at New York’s Carnegie Hall, where he sought to persuade his audience that everything material could be affected by the power of the human mind. For Schafer, anything anyone could imagine – from good health to a million bucks – could be made real through the power of thought alone, as long as the supplicant was willing to master secret techniques only he could teach them – for a price. It has been estimated that Schafer was able to gather around 10,000 dedicated followers before the decade was over.
Joining the Royal Fraternity of Master Metaphysicians was easy enough. If anyone were so inclined, all they had to do was cough up the $250 fee (about $4,000 in today’s money). This cash donation was labelled a “love offering” to be freely given by the faithful. Younger members could join the “cosmic network” by making donations of stamps. In return for their hard-earned cash, those who joined were issued “fellowship certificates” in the name of the Inexhaustible Bank
