The Story of Beale Downer
Michael
Brant, I forgot, give me an Esoteric Medicine-17 roll when you get a chance.
Brant
>>>> SUCCESS by 4
Michael
So thanks to your Esoteric Medicine, combined with Philosophy (Hinduism), you can tell that basically the diet that Beale Downer's follower describes in his book is the sattvic/ayurvedic diet.
As mentioned last night as Marshall and/or Mitch had a quick flip through the salient points of the life story of Beale Downer, owner of the Downer Health Ranch and Sanitarium and leader of the religious/health movement known as Pruism (also known to the locals at the time as the "Downerites"). I'll give a more complete review of the slim 80-page bespoke Downer biography/hagiography here; we can say Marshall and Mitch (and anyone else in URIEL) read it that evening or on Tuesday, whatever.
The book was written by one of Downer's follower named William Albert, who briefly describes himself in the Downer biography's introductory matter as "loyal follower of Pruism, adjutant and amanuensis to Mr. Downer, and Chief Concierge of Downer Ranch." Albert opens with a description of a Pruist "mass concerted diaphragmic breathing calisthentic": two hundred or so Pruists and spa-goers out in the orchards breathing rhythmically... completely in unison, under Downer's instruction, as apple and pear blossoms flutter through the crowd on the late spring Central Valley breezes. Albert paints a picture of the height of Pruism and the ranch with this first chapter, then goes back to Downer's early years in Connecticut.
Downer's father, Matthew, a "long-chance man and tout," according to Albert (Downer's father does not come off well in this book) headed to California in 1849, leaving his pregnant wife Jessica behind. For ten years Beale's father was a continent away, dutifully sending funds back to his wife and only child, funds which became scarcer as the years went on. Then, in 1859, on the eve of the Civil War, the elder Downer called for his son, "Your calling is here, blood of my blood," Matthew Downer wrote his 10-year-old son, "as the ranch I have purchased requires every hand that can be spared. You will learn your life's work here," Albert quotes Matthew as writing, in one of many pieces of mystical foreshadowing throughout the book.
Albert describes the young Beale as a "diffident child, wary of the wildness of the frontier he had discovered," and especially its religious wildness. Albert takes a diversion to talk about the "lack of propriety and piety" amongst the early American settlers in California, "if one were not being charitable, one could call the desperate farmhands, busted prospectors, and violent filibusters of the California of this era." These wild men, says Albert, are a contrast with the quiet and devout young Beale, who had found solace in religion as a young child from his "fatherless existence."
By the time he was 13, Beale was a dedicated ranch hand, but he found himself more comfortable among the dairy cows and draft oxen than the broncos and on the ranch. One day, Albert says, he witnessed the cowhands' castration of a young bull. "'The creature's eyes cried out louder than its screams,'" Albert quotes Beale as telling him, "'and in his gaze I swore I could hear the cries of our Savior on the cross. "Why have you forsaken me?" screamed this innocent animal. It was from then forward I swore never to eat the flesh of God's creatures, to the derision and eventual anger of my father and his cow-boys. The vaqueros would never let me forget how I blanched at this routine ranch task; my father took out his disappointment in me much more corporally.'"
Beale returned to the East after the war and matriculated at Yale as a divinity student in 1867. He trained to be a "preacher and divine, like the Puritans of old," Albert says, but his theology was already deviating from orthodoxy. In this era, amidst the revivalism of the post-Civil War period in what would eventually become known as the Third Great Awakening, religious Americans were not only rediscovering the fire of evangelical revivalism, but mixing and matching these traditions with other, more esoteric belief systems. Beale himself studied Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism at Yale as the followers of the various "New Thought" movements from before the Civil War burrowed into the Ivy League divinity faculties like "ticks in a log." Amidst all of these streams of religious fervor was also a largely progressive political impulse that would eventually feed into both the Temperance and "social gospel" movements. Beale consumed all these as he finished his degree and spent his post-college years a wandering preacher who brought the good news of vegetarianism, pacifism, a vaguely postmillenialist "let's make Heaven on Earth to prepare the way for the Savior" eschatology, and "a belief in a kind of Christian metempsychosis," in Albert's words, Beale's theology clumsily integrating bits of Eastern religions' reincarnation beliefs with Christian ideas of Heaven and Hell, again, being "on Earth already." It was not a hit in the rural areas of the long-since smoldering regions of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and upstate New York's Burned-Over District. So Beale thought back to the godless cowhands of his youth and the churchless towns of the Central Valley and realized, well, California was a "much more fertile ground for the seedling of Pruism."
By this time, the late 1870s, Beale's father was an old man before his time; decades of the hard ranch life on horseback had ruined his health, his back a twisted wreck. Beale offered to take over the ranch from his father, desiring to turn it into a "sanitarium" like the one Dr. Kellogg had just opened in Battle Creek. The ranch's waters were heavy with healing minerals, the ground primed in Northern California for a transition from meat and milk factory to a much more vegetarian-friendly orchard and vegetable farm, as Beale showed a "near-prescient" ability to predict California's transformation from a supplier of wheat and meat to one producing fruit and vegetables. Downer's father died the month before the ranch reopened as a "san."
Brant
Thumbing through the book as they walk toward the Post Office, Marshall smirks: "Every couple of decades, some wayward Christian reinvents Vajrayāna Buddhism."
Michael
The core of Pruism were Beale's employees at the san, Albert among them. He describes his first arrival, as a 20-year-old "nervous exhaustion" patient in the spring of 1880, as "the kind of experience one would imagine Saul of Tarsus having as the glimmering glow of enlightenment was laid upon his head on that Roman road two millennia ago. Father opened my eyes." Of course Albert wasn't calling Beale "Father" just yet as a patient. It took him a year and a half to come back to Downer after graduating from the University of California to offer his services to Downer. He and a couple dozen other employees of the Ranch began listening to Downer's late-night harangues, in which he predicted a future "covered in soot and garbage, the ground where good things grow contaminated by mining poisons, the air made noisome with the exhalations of machine, man, and beast, the seas with no fish or weed or coral growing within." During these late-night sessions, he would go into trance states where he would see this foul, sickening future and describe it in horrifying detail to his followers. "There are poisons you cannot even imagine, invisible ones that travel through the air as rays, that can kill a man after a minute's exposure, or leave the twisted seedling of cancer within to kill him twenty years hence." This horror was blended with the promise of the dual missions of the nascent Pruist sect: healthy eating and taking the Biblical command to "be fruitful and multiply" seriously. "'If there is to be a human race left to receive Christ in the third millennium,' our Father told us, 'they will need to be strong, upright, morally and heritably pure, and populous.'"
To this end, as the Pruist sect codified its beliefs and began tentatively stepping out of the shadows in the late 1880s, Downer's nationwide network of health food, social gospel, and postmillenarian believers were enticed west with promises of "land to work, a mission to undertake, and complete equality between the sexes and races of man." Keeping in mind that this book—written in 1910 when the sect was past its peak—was casting even these early days of promise with rose-colored glasses. It's clear from what the historian at Dixon said that the truth was far more... ambivalent.
Albert describes the initiation of a new Pruist in gentle terms; they're treated like new guests at the health ranch, with an intake that comprises a full physical examination, stress tests to check the new members' constitution, a "mental and moral examination" to make sure the new member is compos mentis in making their decision to dedicate themselves to Pruism, and an oath that they will never consume the "flesh nor product of any living animal for as long as they shall live or reincarnate or resurrect on this terraqueous globe." After the multiple-lifetime contract is signed, a great feast is given in honor of the new member(s). And here's where Albert can't help but obliquely describe the, er, ickier practices of the Pruists.
Albert drops hints about what a day in the life of a Pruist consists of: farm work, of course, although higher-placed members of the sect work in "the big house" doing laundry (with non-animal fat soaps, of course), preparing meals for the paying patients, doing administrative work, packaging seeds to go out to simpatico farmers all over the country. But the most "august and reverend responsibilities are reserved for Our Father." Downer, Albert tells us, had to ensure the survival of the human race. To this end, he would "gently and with much serious thought and consultation (Albert does not say with whom), decide which Pruists would be 'introduced' to their mates at one of the monthly new moon 'cotillions'. Father had admired the Oneida Community's dedication to the principles of both 'free love' and 'stirpiculture,' and given the challenges the human race in the next hundred years and beyond, it was important to breed a superior, resilient breed of man. Not based on principles of skin color or culture (at least that's what Albert says), but on strength, intelligence, tenderness and mercy, and most importantly the 'Pruist aura.'" What this aura is Albert does not go into much detail on, as "that vision was vouchsafed to Father alone." But on a functional level what this meant was that while much of the community was free to choose their sexual partners, when it came to conception of babies, Father Downer was in charge of who fucked who.
The first generation of children born at the ranch in the 1890s were called "Miracle Children," educated from birth in the precepts of Pruism. But by the middle of the first decade of the 20th century, Downer Ranch's neighbors, led by orthodox religious leaders from Dixon, Davis, Sacramento, and other neighboring communities, excoriated the so-called "Downerites," calling them heretics, "Roman pagans," and wondering just who was going to take care of all those children at the Ranch. Again, Albert's narrative is wholly loyal to Father and these individuals' concerns are dismissed as "pure religious persecution. They crucified a man two thousand years ago for going against the priests of his time, as well." But Pruist membership, even by 1910, was on the decline. Reading between the lines it's clear petty jealousies among the men and women encouraged to engage in "free love" took a toll, as did the children, whose presence on the Ranch was a communal burden the Pruists couldn't seem to handle... let alone how they turned off paying Ranch customers. Downer believed that this new miracle generation would be "a shining example to all" but mostly on a practical level (Albert saw a lot of this as Chief Concierge) it seemed to dissuade wealthy spa-goers, most of whom were probably trying to go away on a relaxing vacation from their own kids. Albert blames these patients' rejection of the Ranch as "ignorance" in a couple of ill-advised paragraphs about the Ranch's lack of clientele by 1910.
The rest of the history that Mitch and Marshall have comes from the oral history provided by Tim Daniels, the historian they talked to at the Historical Society: the decline of the Pruists was slow and protracted—no Great Disappointment or apocalyptic ending—just an old man slowly dying on the same ranch his father did, his formerly beautiful young followers (few in number) now themselves middle-aged, with profoundly damaged children who were told they were the glowing glorious future their entire race depended on, but now lived on a weed-choked, widely-ostracized ruin of a ranch. As mentioned, Beale Downer died in early 1929, alone, unloved, unworshipped, and flat broke.
Brant
“Grim,” Marshall says as he closes the book. “If it happened that way.” The only other agenda item I have for Marshall in Dixon is to find out what he can about when the mail gets picked up by the company. I imagine someone comes regularly to get it — that’s how a normal company would operate. But maybe not! That would be good intel too. Anyway, we don’t have to play it out, I’m thinking Marshall would probably just walk into the post office, find someone behind the counter, Mind Probe the question, “When does someone usually come to get the mail in P.O. Box <company number>?” and leave.
Michael
So I think it makes sense for Marshall (and Mitch, if he wants to act as backup) to go into the Dixon Post Office near closing time at 5, to get the clerk at their most distracted (and, if any of the Beale Farms folks have been by, confirmation that they perhaps came by today and when). So let's see... Mind Probe with the hearing modifier. It says here you can use either IQ or Interrogation, whichever is higher. So Interrogation-17 vs. an employee of the United States Postal Service's Will.
Brant
>>>> CRITICAL SUCCESS by 12
Michael
“When does someone usually come to get the mail in that P.O. Box there?” Marshall asks the postal clerk. The Voice causes him to answer the question congenially and without reservation, like Marshall was an old friend or colleague and they're just shootin' the breeze. "Well sir, those hippie kids—nice hippie kids, not layabouts, they got jobs, y'see—come by most days first thing in the morning on their way to their office... I think it's one of them new office buildings over in Vacaville."