The Witch of Sulphur Mountain: The Supernatural Life of Agnes Baron, Meher Baba's Beloved Watchdog

By David Madison

"Baba, if you want Meher Mount I’ll keep it for you through hellfire and damnation!"

With these words fiery Agnes Baron commences the remaining 46 years of her hard-scrabble life devoted to Indian mystic Meher Baba who claims to be the Avatar (God in human form). She will get plenty of both. Two years prior in 1946, at Meher Baba’s behest, she, Jean Adriel, and other Baba-lovers found and established Meher Mount, an idyllic 172-acre retreat atop Sulphur Mountain in Ojai, CA. By the time she made her vow, Jean and the others had departed, leaving Meher Mount in her hands. But how will she keep “Baba’s Place” out of the hands of covetous schemers? She doesn’t own it. Jean does. And if Jean wants to sell it, there’s nothing she can do. Or is there? It brings out the witch in her. For this Meher Baba nicknames Agnes "Agni," Sanskrit word for fire, and dubs her his “Beloved Watchdog.” For 10 years she worries herself more than any dog its bone that it will be sold from under Baba’s feet. Shortly before his only visit to Meher Mount, on August 2, 1956, Agni gets Meher Mount in her name. But her worries aren’t over. A single woman without means, she finds work as a substitute teacher, and sells strawberries she grows, and lives with the haunting fear she won’t be able to make the mortgage payments, and the bank will seize it. Some who covet the property try to make her a ward of the state.

Agnes Baron’s remarkable life is written in the form of an idyll, a narrative poem in heroic verse. And heroic aptly describes her 87-year odyssey. Shortly after graduating in 1928 with a sociology degree from Antioch College, known for turning out revolutionaries, Agnes departs for war-torn Europe, on fire to help “My Friends Abroad.” Working as a freelance journalist, she chronicles the plight of the Jews fleeing anti-Semitism, and goes to Lisbon where she “bullies” bureaucrats for passports, and shipping companies and captains for passage. She travels the Balkan states, chronicling the plight of the underdogs: the poor, sick, oppressed, and downtrodden. In Spain she graphically depicts the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War, the bombings by German and Italian planes of Guernica and Barcelona. Throughout Europe she raises the alarm of the growing Nazi menace, and with the outbreak of WWII, the mounting horrors of the holocaust. After 13 years, sickened with man’s inhumanity to man, Agnes abandons her faith in God and returns to San Francisco, lost. “I hated humanity. I just wanted everybody to die. Blow them to hell. I just hated everybody. I was so in the deeps of despair that I gave myself arthritis of the spine. Then I stumbled on this lovely Quaker lady, and I went to one of her meetings. She went to Vedanta. I thought, Well if she goes to Vedanta it must be respectable. So I went up the hill and walked into the Vedanta Temple, and for the first time I had a ray of hope. There must be some hope for humanity. . . .”

She embraces Vedanta, and asks the swami of the Vedanta Temple if he will accept her as a nun. “I don’t take women,” he tells her, “but my brother swami in Hollywood does.” She goes there, he accepts her, and she lives the life of a Vedanta nun for two years, but still she does not find peace. Then she realizes why. She has to let God back into her heart. She does. But then she catches the swami in an indiscretion, and leaves him in disgust, telling him, “You're a fallen guru.”

She goes to a nearby Vedanta temple, Ananda Ashrama, is accepted, but then is told her typing late at night is keeping others awake. The swami tells her of another place two miles up the road, the New Life Center, devoted to an Indian guru. She wants nothing more to do with gurus, but she needs a place where she can write in peace. She goes there, rents a little place on a hill, and tells the owner, Jean Adriel, “Look, I don’t want anything to do with your damned [this under her breath] guru.” His name is Meher Baba.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Madison
• Release date: Nov 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463174913

David Madison

Canadian by birth, expatriate by climate, David Madison is an inveterate idyller who idylls his time away writing idylls, that is, narrative poems, especially longer ones, such as "The Witch of Sulphur Mountain: The Supernatural Life of Agnes Baron, Meher Baba’s Beloved Watchdog."And yet, as if being an inveterate idyller were not enough to recommend him to you, he is also a tireless fabulist, meaning, a fabulous writer. But if you’ve had the novel pleasure of reading his first published book, "Ms. Spinster’s Novel Grammar: More Novel Yet Her Punctation, Spelling, Style . . . ," you already know that. Each of the 330 tales illustrating a rule is written in the manner of a fable, “a short narrative making an edifying or cautionary point, often employing as characters animals that speak and act like humans.” He is a permanent resident of Belize, which, being situated below Mexico on the Caribbean Sea, is fabulous in its own right. But one look at a map will undeceive you: it is nowhere near as fabulous as he is. When he’s not being fabulous, in one sense, he spends the remainder of his waking hours answering the question What qualifies you to write a grammar book? His ready answer, marvelous for its concision, is that he has some five more years of school learning than Mark Twain, and far fewer cats. While those two seeming disqualifications are sinking in, he is quick to emphasize that he correctly said far fewer, not far less cats.

Book preview

The Witch of Sulphur Mountain

———————————————

The Supernatural Life of Agnes Baron,

Meher Baba’s Beloved Watchdog

A Narrative Idyll

David Madison

Agnes, aged 16, high school graduation photo, 1923.

Table of Contents

A Narrative Idyll

I. My Friends Abroad

1. Saint Agnes

2. England: the Early Miracles

3. Saint-at-Large: Lisbon, the Balkans

4. The Holy Land

5. Shedding Gypsy Blood

6. Hitler, Reign of Terror

7. Spanish Civil War

8. Guernica

9. Sigmund Freud

10. Night of Broken Glass

11. Prague

12. Barcelona

13. Voyage of the Damned

14. Poland, WWII

15. Operation Barbarossa

16. Gargzdai

17. Babi Yar

18. Pearl Harbor

19. Joan of Arc

20. Human Tide

21. Christopher Columbus

22. The Phoenix

23. Ghost Ship

24. Torpedoed

25. Land!

II. The New World

26. Provincetown, Cape Cod

27. Plymouth Rock

28. Plymouth

29. John Dark

30. Train to Boston

31. Train to San Francisco

32. San Francisco

33. Homecoming: No One Ever Steps in the Same River Twice

34. Eleanor Roosevelt

35. Vedanta

36. Humanity Might Be Worthwhile After All

37. Hollywood Vedanta Temple

38. The Nun’s Life

39. Hindu Faker

40. Ananda Ashrama

41. New Life Center

42. Hitler Dead; Germany Surrenders

43. Hiroshima

44. Nagasaki; Japan Surrenders

45. WWII Ends

46. Avatar

III. A World Apart

47. Meher Mount

48. Jean Adriel Purchases Meher Mount

49. Bosford Purchases Meher Mount

50. John Cooke

51. John Cooke Goes to Africa

52. John Cooke Returns from Africa

53. John Cooke Purchases Meher Mount

54. John Cooke Returns to Africa

55. Agnes Meets Meher Baba in Myrtle Beach

56. Baba’s Car Accident, Prague, Oklahoma

57. Trail of Tears

58. Legend of the Cherokee Rose

59. John Cooke Returns from Africa with Polio

60. Beth and Tom McNell Purchase Meher Mount

61. Child Harold Purchases Meher Mount

62. Agnes Purchases Meher Mount

63. We Shall Walk the Land Together

64. The Hands of God

65. Baba Walks on Water

66. Doghead Greeting Godhead

67. This Land Is Very Old; I Walked It Long Ago

68. Buddha Belly

69. Baba Speaks

70. No More Grapes on Earth

71. Baba’s Limits

72. The Baba Tree

73. Baba’s Moods

74. Baba Sets Conditions for Agnes’s Drive to San Francisco

75. Waves of Joy and Sorrow

76. Sanskara Sparks

77. Put It in Agni’s Name

78. One Almighty Perfect Wave

79. Agnes Drives to San Francisco

80. Agnes, It’s the Cops

81. Baba Wards off a Catastrophe

82. Around San Francisco

83. Alcatraz

84. Lombard Street

85. Fisherman’s Wharf

86. The Painted Ladies

87. Completely Mad with Love

88. Professor Chatterjee Receives a Shock

89. Don Stevens is Shocked Utterly

90. Baba Discusses the Trip to India

91. The Golden Gate

92. Muir Woods: Another Baba Tree

93. Flight of Tears: Baba Flies to Australia

94. Baba’s Work

95. Indian Blood: Baba’s Car Accident, Udtara, India

96. A Walk with God

97. Baba’s Last Trip to the West

98. John Cooke: The Greater His Release

99. I Love Saints, But Sinners I Adore

100. The Trail That Leads to Reawakening

101. Pushing Me Along Upon His String: the ’60s

102 A Drop to Fill an Ocean

103. I Am Being Crucified Each Moment

104. Beloved Watchdog

105. Man on the Moon

106. Baba’s Best Shooter

107. The Me Decade

108. The ’80s

109. Hellfire and Damnation: The New Life Fire

110. Will You Let Meher Baba Burn You Out?

111. Chimneys of Fire

112. Burned-out 1949 Ford Woody

113. Walking on a Cloud

114. Cherokee Rose (Rosa laevigata)

115. Deluge

116. Silver Lining

117. New Life

118. Super-Bloom

119. No Bed of Roses

120. No Super-Bloom

121. Saving Breath

122. Guardian Angels

123. Did He Send You?

124. There Will Be Another Fire

125. Trust

126. Welcome Center

127. A Third Guardian Angel

128. Devil’s Island

129. Escape

130. Welcome Home

131. Candles in the Wind

132. A Witching Formula

133. Agnes, Rest

134. Silence

135. Breath Comes Hard

136. One Last Time

137. Emergency

138. A Vivid Dream

139. Independence Day

140. Funeral Pyre

141. Life Everlasting

Photos

Agnes, aged 16

Agnes, aged 21

Meher Mount, circa 1956

Agnes with Meher Baba

Agnes with Kali

Agnes and Margaret Craske

The Blue Marble

Agnes talking in tongues

Chimneys of Fire

Burned-out Woody

Cherokee Rose

Ken, Len, Agnes, and Tom

Topa Topa Bluffs

External Photo Links:

Agnes, Baba, Myrtle Beach, S. C., May, 1952 or July, 1956

Agnes, Baba tour MM, August 2, 1956

Photos of Baba at MM, August 2, 1956

Meher Baba’s Life and Travels: Meher Mount, August 2, 1956

Agnes articles and photos

Meher Mount Website

Acknowledgments

Author

Copyright

A Narrative Idyll

What is a narrative idyll? It is redundant, a repetition of the same thing. An idyll is an epic or romantic narrative poem. Thus a narrative idyll is a narrative narrative poem. So why have I chosen to redundantly classify this work a narrative idyll? Two reasons: first, few today know what an idyll is; by prefacing it with narrative, it at least says that it is something that tells a story, which gets one closer to an understanding; second, it serves as an intensifier, such as the adverbs very and awfully in the sentences That is very good and That is awfully good. So why didn’t I just call it a narrative poem, which most everyone understands, and avoid this awfully pedantic preamble? Well, because I think it is a very awfully beautiful and evocative word that has wonderfully romantic connotations, but has woefully fallen out of favor. Then, too, because it carries the alternate meaning of "an extremely happy, peaceful, or picturesque episode or scene," as exemplified by its adjective idyllic: "So, Evangeline, how was your romantic weekend getaway in the dreamy countryside? Oh, Samantha, Evangeline gushed with romantic intensity, it was perfectly idyllic!" Victorian poet Alfred Lord Tennyson well understood the romantic connotations of idyll when he entitled his cycle of twelve narrative poems retelling the legend of King Arthur, his knights, his love for Guinevere and her tragic betrayal of him Idylls of the King. He knew that had he entitled it Poems of the King or, more catastrophic yet, King Arthur’s Poems, tragically avoiding every connotation of romance, we would not be talking of him today. So why didn’t Tennyson entitle it The Narrative Idylls of the King, and up the intensity? Because the Victorians well understood idyll, with all its romantic connotations, being common parlance, and Tennyson knew that to call them narrative idylls would be gilding the intensity lily. But we are not Victorians, and so must get our intensity and romance where and how we can. Note that I favor the British spelling idyll over the American spelling idyl. That second l is called a tail-end intensifier, which intensifies the romance going every bit as well as narrative intensifies it coming, with the desired effect of intensifying the romance all around. You might call that second l a redundancy, but I call it an intensifying godsend. Without it narrative idyl appears shortchanged come to romance, whereas it has been shortchanged going. And here is where the romance gets in between the two:

Agnes Baron was very real, and the truth about her may be said to be stranger than fiction. Nonetheless, for romance, The Witch of Sulphur Mountain: The Supernatural Life of Agnes Baron, Meher Baba’s Beloved Watchdog is a hybrid of fact and fiction, a based on a true life account. So remarkable are the facts of Agnes’s life, that I thought it would be instructive to the reader if I were to list all the facts herein that the reader may understand what is factual and what is supernatural. And I set about that errand. But after a page, and I hadn’t gotten beyond her birth in New Kensington, Pennsylvania on January 17, 1907, I realized that the sum of the facts was greater than the whole of the story; moreover, I would essentially, redundantly, be telling the story of her remarkable life before I ever got to telling the story of her life. Also, I saw that I would so have to pepper the text with Spoiler Alert! throughout that the whole would be four or five times the length of the supernatural story, and would run the risk of taxing the reader’s patience. So I saw that I would have to give it up, and I did. I wouldn’t be that redundant for anything.

Agnes, aged 21, Antioch College Yearbook photo, 1928, (by permission of Antiochiana, Antioch College).

The Witch of Sulphur Mountain

Folks think a witch who has familiar spirits

She could call up to pass a winter evening,

But won’t, should be burned at the stake or something.

Summoning spirits isn’t ‘Button, button,

Who’s got the button,’ I would have them know.

—Robert Frost, The Witch of Coös

All is, if I’d a-known when I was young

And full of it, that this would be the end,

It doesn’t seem as if I’d had the courage

To make so free and kick up in folks’ faces.

I might have but it doesn’t seem as if.

—Robert Frost, The Pauper Witch of Grafton

I. My Friends Abroad

1. Saint Agnes

No spells, no incantations. One sharp look

was all it took to turn that flaky

La-La Land know-nothing-about-love

lot into Baba-yahoos—just like that!

No wart of toad, no milk of hog-nosed bat.

But long before I ever was a witch

I was a saint. I wasn’t named one though.

Plain Agnes Baron’s what they christened me.

It wasn’t till in 1923,

some 71 years ago, I saw

my first sure sign of budding sainthood,

turning chastely hallowed sweet 16.

And yet as roundly perfect and as purely

glowing as it was, my parents, though

I turned it every which way, couldn’t see

just how divine, becoming was my halo.

So I left home, San Francisco, free,

to find myself in Yellow Springs, Ohio,

for God’s sake, and enrolled in Antioch,

small Midwest boot-camp college better known

for revolutionaries than for saints,

on fire with sociology, and full of

young compassion for My Friends Abroad.

Professor Chatterjee knew sweet 16

was just the right idealistic age

to inculcate Far East philosophy

so 5-years deep in me he’d turn me out

a saint, a great degree (compassion for

the poor) in hand, more burning in my mind.

(If I’d known there’d be millions of poor souls

throughout America inside a year,

could I have but foreseen, I might’ve stayed.

That’s proof right there I wasn’t then a witch,

or I’d have seen—as sure as I can see

through those who only talk of loving Him—

the Great Depression, Dust Bowl, Dirty Thirties,

breadlines of the dirt-poor coming on).

Idealism’s fire so burned in me

to help the poor, downtrodden, and oppressed

that I’d have made a cauldron boil and bubble

(if I’d had one). There’d have been witch trouble.

But back in June of ’28 Black Tuesday

was a year and four months off. Still, don’t

you think, if I’d then been a witch, as some

suspect, that I’d have seen it coming on,

especially being black, and stuck around?

Instead, I found myself drawn to the light

of God, the which, as everybody knows,

is his especial way to draw a saint,

and gave myself to it without restraint.

2. England: the Early Miracles

So there I was, before the month was out,

on fire onboard the RMS Olympic,

sister ship to RMS Titanic,

bound for post–war-ravaged Europe via

Liverpool, and more devoutly bound

to be the patron saint to all the poor.

Yet all across I knew, though I was born

of Heaven, I was of this world enough

to know that even saints are not above

their crying need of earthly patron-love.

On English soil, by rail and prayer I made

my way to London where, by grace of God,

I soon worked up my debut miracle:

as easily as Moses the Red Sea,

I parted wide the London Times’ great doors,

and held them back for all the time it took

to make them see I’d make a surefire foreign

correspondent. Done, I parted with

a burning zeal in me to be God’s witness,

see their plight, and help the underdogs

in every land, so didn’t waste a second

working up my second miracle:

as was the iron axe head made to swim

the River Jordan, so I made the iron

prow chop through the waves and swim me high

across the English Channel to Calais,

the hallowed land of young Saint Joan of Arc,

Blest light unto the medieval dark.

3. Saint-at-Large: Lisbon, the Balkans

If I’d not sensed her saintly spirit watching

over her beloved France’s poor,

I’d there and then have taken up their cause;

but knowing they were in the saintliest

of hands, I looked afar to distant lands,

and shrank for fear: You cannot go that far.

But my heart spoke out strong: "I’ll go that far!

A journey of ten thousand ills begins

with the first step." So, starting with the right

of persecuted souls to some compassion,

I followed tears to Lisbon, Portugal

where Jews were fleeing to escape the growing

anti-Semitism, catch a ship

to somewhere, any country with a heart,

with pity, that would take them; but few would,

as if their persecuted lot was treyf,

to use their own not-kosher unclean word

against them too. And I threw my whole heart,

its blood, against the heartless through my fingers

meant to wring the heart of those who claimed

to have one, to accept, to save these desperate

refugees. And I heard other cries

afar raised to indifferent, distant skies.

My heart’s blood not yet dried upon my fingers

(Christ!), I bent my missionary zeal

toward the poorer war-torn Balkan states,

made abject all the more in being bounded

by the wealth of seven seas—all full,

from Black to bluest Mediterranean.

Still, even if I’d been a witch back then

I don’t see how I could have seen a tenth

of all God had in store for me, although

I guess I’d have foreseen, as clear as day,

I’d have to work my every occult power

doing all I could to help poor Transylvanians,

pale as ghosts for Dracula’s long having

sucked the Gypsy lifeblood out of them,

which even the most hard witch would condemn.

On foot more often than on some poor beast,

or cart drawn by it (ease its heavy load),

I wandered from one abject Balkan state

to one as mountainously poor, bereft,

alone as much as not (except for God),

my passion always for the underdog:

the orphans, refugees, the handicapped,

the poor, the sick, and, most untouchables

of all, the lepers in their colonies

of rotting flesh (Get thee apart from us!).

I did all in my power to not let

the rich world go on turning its blind eye,

the more its deaf ear to long suffering

Croatians, Slovenes, Serbs, Romanians,

Bulgarians, Albanians, and Greeks,

who, in despite the Treaty of Versailles,

were rich almost beyond imagination,

having a whole country to their names,

while Montenegrans, Macedonians,

poor Bosnians and Herzegovinans

and Jews had no land they could call their own;

poor stateless underdogs without a bone.

Some say I never walked, but rode a broomstick.

What they saw was me up in the air,

astride my walking stick, and bristling more

and more each outraged bristle I stuck on

for all manunkind’s inhumanity

to man—they couldn’t help but see me

making angry arcs across the sky,

and riding all the rich for all their heartless

treatment of the poor, I holding on

for dear life: all the poor, downtrodden, banned,

oppressed, forsaken souls in every land;

they saw me flying off the handle, bristling,

flying madly at the dirty, mean,

uncaring world a new broom would sweep clean.

I rode it all the more so travelling with

Albanian bandits, they on horseback, robbing

rich to feed the poor, I chronicling

their Robin Hooding exploits, moved by their

unwritten code of honor. High upon

a mountain we were faced, these men and I,

with spending all night in a one-room cabin.

God knows that, in chasteness, I could not.

I’ll fly back down the mountain on my broom,

I didn’t say, though that was understood.

It isn’t safe for you to go alone,

they said, this, to a man, writ on each face,

insisting they must go back down with me.

In darkness, one of them, a happy youth,

so full of life, was shot, and in my arms

he died unseen. I could not even look him

in the face, less for the darkness I felt

deep inside; nor could I bear the guilt,

the shame, nor face the grieving villagers,

so got up in the dark of night and fled,

a thing the meanest saint would not have done;

and in