Thank you to Darrell Bell, my colleague at the Nanaimo Museum, for his ongoing Brother XII research support.
Brother XII established one of the most infamous cults in Canadian history on Vancouver Island. He claimed to be a benevolent spiritual leader who channelled ancient Egyptian gods, but Brother XII promoted conspiracy theories, treated his followers poorly, and was embroiled in high-profile court cases and scandals. The story of Brother XII and his cult, the Aquarian Foundation, still resonates today with its complex tangle of fact and fiction, search for lost gold, conspiracy theories, and the enduring question: Who were his followers?
In 1878 Brother XII was born Edward Arthur Wilson in Birmingham, England. As a young man, Wilson worked as a telephone inspector and lived in Birmingham with his parents, Thomas and Sarah, two sisters, Francis and Mabel, and a domestic servant, Sarah Taylor.1
In 1902, 24-year-old Edward Wilson travelled to New Zealand, where he married Margery Clark. They had two children, a son, Rupert, and a daughter, Margery. The young family moved around 1905 to Victoria, British Columbia, where Wilson worked as a baggage clerk for the Dominion Express Company.2 In 1912 he abandoned his family and went to work on a mail ship, leaving his wife and children destitute and forced to rely on her family to pay for passage back to New Zealand.3
Wilson worked on ships that delivered mail and cargo in the Pacific, including the Royal Mail Ship which travelled between Victoria and Australia. Brother XII called himself an experienced sea captain, but according to a 1915 RMS crew list, Edward Arthur Wilson was an able-bodied seaman, among the lowest ranks.4 In his downtime aboard ship, Wilson studied religion with a focus on theosophy, a spiritual movement where people seek to understand
