This week we’ll be replaying some of our best episodes as we countdown to 100 episodes of this iteration of the podcast. To kick it off, when the famous property on a small island near Nanaimo hit the market, we took a dive to discover the story of the infamous cult that once owned it.
This week we’ll be replaying some of our best episodes as we countdown to 100 episodes of this iteration of the podcast. To kick it off, when the famous property on a small island near Nanaimo hit the market, we took a dive to discover the story of the infamous cult that once owned it. Â
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Disclaimer: This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Jackie: This week is a big week for the podcast. This iteration of the show is counting down to our 100th episode. We’ve been publishing every Monday to Friday since February 11th. It’s been a lot of work, and we’ve had a lot of fun. So now it’s time to take a break and look back on 5 of our best episodes since we started. Everyday this week will be a rerun of one of our most well received episodes. This also means if you’re new here, it’s a great time to jump in and see what you missed. Today is our 96th episode, which makes Friday our 100th. So, these final five will push us to 100, and from there, we’ll continue to do exactly what you’ve been enjoying for the past 4 months. Today we’ll kick it off with a piece of dark but fascinating history from the Island. We tell you the story of Brother 12. And if you listened to the first time we ran this one, you’ll notice a treat at the end. A local artist from the Nanaimo area named John Gogo has given us permission to play his folk song about the Brother 12 cult. That will air at the end of the episode today.
Jackie: My name is Jackie Lamport. Today is Tuesday, May 18th. Welcome to the Capital Daily Podcast. De Courcy Island, just off of Nanaimo, is up for sale. The same property that used to be the home of one of Canada’s most notorious cults. Today’s episode features alleged murders, black magic, and hidden treasure as we tell the story of Brother XII.Â
Jackie: One of British Columbia and all of Canada’s most notorious cults existed in the early 1900s just off of Vancouver Island. The cult called a small gulf island just off of Nanaimo home from its inception in 1926 until its dramatic end in 1932. Today, we tell the story of Brother XII. To do so, we’re joined by Justine Brown, author of All Possible Worlds: Utopian Experiments in British Columbia. Edward Arthur Wilson, who would soon be known as Brother XII, was born in England in 1878. Wilson travelled the world as a naval captain and then eventually settled temporarily in British Columbia in 1912. As Justine explained to me, Wilson’s early life seems to have foreshadowed his future.
Justine: He grew up in a Christian family who were a little bit off the beaten path. And it's kind of relevant because of what he did later. They followed a kind of charismatic Scottish preacher who was an apocalyptic kind of millenarian type preacher. And so he told his followers that the Second Coming, the end of the world, would happen within their lifetime. And this is also something that Brother XII incorporated into his sort of stick later on. And so I think that's something that's not often mentioned. He reported having angelic visitors from the age of six or so. And he later said that he believed that they were angels for a long time. He later decided that they were these spiritual masters, entities that he believed were members of twelve masters of his inspiration Madame Blavatsky; we’ll talk about her as well, called the Great White Lodge.
Jackie: Wilson eventually abandoned his wife and two sons to travel the world and study mysticism and occults around the world. In 1924, Wilson settled in France after years of travelling. This is when he has his vision where he claimed to have been visited by the 11 brothers in the ethereal “White Lodge.”Â
Justine: He had a vision in the south of France, which I'm associating with the gods of Cyrus. And at night, he claimed that he saw one of those Egyptian symbols floating in the air before him. And at that stage, he decided to kind of form his own group. And his idea was that his group should go and retreat to what was definitely thought of as the ends of the earth, British Columbia, and go to this island, which would become the centre of the world for the enlightened as they waited for them the up apocalypse. So you see that him picking up that theme from childhood there. And so I do think that quite, you know, his, that apocalyptic theme probably formed his early thinking.
Jackie: This is when Wilson drops his given name and starts referring to himself as Brother XII. As the claimed twelfth brother of the Great White Brotherhood occult, he begins writing down lessons and teachings he says are being transmitted to him.Â
Justine: So there's this concept that there were the spiritual masters, and there were 12 of them because he was a follower of the twelfth master. He called himself Brother XII. What we know about him is that he became a naval captain. And he travelled the world, and he went around to a lot of places. While he was travelling, he educated himself as a kind of Magnus, a magician in both the sense of learning, hypnotism, trickery and stage magic and was also in the sense of a renaissance man. I guess that he studied esoteric religion. He studied kind of more arcane and mysterious traditions. And at the time, as I mentioned, there's this lady, Madame Blavatsky, who was a Russian German mystic who became extremely famous and popular at the end of the 19th century. And she founded a religion called Theosophy, which means the study of divine wisdom. This term goes back to the Renaissance, but that's what she called her religion. So it was kind of a combination religion in that syncretic religion. So the idea was that they would they blend all the great world's great religions and came up with a formulation that they saw as this kind of modern answer. And this laid the groundwork for the modern New Age Movement. So what we know is the New Age Movement is that it’s more kind of in the last 30 years or so, it goes back to the 19th century. Prior to founding the religion, she was a Spiritist. So one of these people into seances. But she later kind of renounced that and went on to found this other religion. So Brother XII saw himself as carrying on her tradition. He was maybe one generation later than her. And so, in the 1920s, he was promoting her vision of the world. And he collected a group of followers around him.
Jackie: He starts publishing articles and gaining an audience in theosophical and occult circles around Europe. In 1926, he arrived back in England and discovered his following was growing. That year he began plans on The Aquarian Foundation, the colony in British Columbia for him and his disciples. He returns to Canada but first travels around building support and gaining followers, and as a charismatic man, that did not come with much difficulty.
Justine: He came to British Columbia in the 1920s. But prior to that, earlier in the 20s, he was in the States. He was in Toronto as well, fundraising, and he was just a very charismatic person. And there always is a charismatic person at the centre of these cults. I've talked about Brother XII’s colony of truth in the context of utopian communities more broadly, and British Columbia and other places. There are different kinds of utopian communities, and usually, a utopian community is defined by a kind of idealism. It's probably a degree of isolation and usually some kind of communalism which may be the idealism that animates the community. And it's like kind of artificial in the sense that it's very created intentionally, and that's why modern-day utopians prefer the term “intentional community.” So very often, these communities need something glue to hold them together. And if they don't, they don't have anything more than a single charismatic person; they usually fail. But while they have that one person at the centre of the community, they stay together. Unfortunately, that person usually has some kind of grandiose tendencies that lead him and sometimes her to sexually molest the other members generally, become violent, steal everything from them, or something like that. So the person usually has some kind of psychopathic tendencies. And that was the case with Brother XII.Â
Jackie: In 1927, he purchased property on the de Courcy Islands just off of the coast of Nanaimo for the colony of The Aquarian Foundation.
Justine: What I understand is that there's a kind of hierarchy of islands. So there was one that was kind of for the new initiates, one for the next stage for the initiated, and one that served as a prison. I forget which one was served as a prison, but there was a story about a man who had been in prison there and had escaped and then got to Vancouver Island. It was reported to the police who investigated, but I don't think they took any further action at that time.Â
Jackie: The islands themselves only had a couple hundred people at the peak, but Brother XII was gaining a large following that translated to donors internationally, specifically in California.
Justine: He was very good at getting people's money as well. It's always hard to establish when you study these kinds of figures, like to what degree are they consciously criminals who are just scamming people or to what degree do they believe their story or, are they hearing voices are they being visited. I think it might be a combination, but it's certainly easy to be suspicious about somebody who tells people that one of the ways that they have to prove themselves is to give them all their money. He was very good at fundraising and started fundraising heavily with his network of very influential people. So he had these followers; there were wealthy industrialists and silent film actors. There were sort of society people, Mayflower kind of society types, people who are descended from the original Mayflower ship that arrived in America. Very wealthy and ambitious people. People like this are often attracted to this type of religion because they seem they feel like they're getting in on something secret that other people don't have access to. So it's not just any old religion; it’s not a faith like Christianity that everybody knows about. But it's a special thing that you only you have access to sort of this esoteric mystery, and it kind of confirms your elite status to be involved in this kind of secret. I don't know a lot about the Masons, but I think that the Masons have a similar kind of appeal and that they have secret knowledge, esoteric knowledge that they impart to people as they progress through the ranks, and then, of course, they're very networked as well. So he collected this group of wealthy and influential people. I think there was a novelist in there and people with with with loot.
Jackie: At its height, Brother XII claimed to have about 8000 members. In 1927, Brother XII had his first known mistress, a young follower named Myrtle Baumgartner. He convinces her that he and her will bear a son who will be the reincarnation of the Egyptian god Horus. This does not happen, and the end of that relationship is still shrouded in mystery.
Justine: By that time, he didn't have a wife and children. He had a mistress, a young lady. Unfortunately for this young lady, he developed this idea that he had to have a kind of princeling, which he imagined is Christ’s child. So she was going to be carrying his divine offspring. She had a series of miscarriages, and after that, she had a kind of had a breakdown, and she was disposed of. She didn't die, although actually, there were rumours that a murder happened. There was a skull discovered that was later identified as the skull of a 25-year-old woman. So I believe the lady who had the miscarriages was named Myrtle Baumgarten. I don't know for sure if that was her skull, but it's possible.
Jackie: Brother XII had earned a large following in America and wanted to extend that reach. He began publishing a magazine called The Chalice, which was an attempt to influence American politics. He also attempted to gain control of the White House. In the 1928 election, he threw his support behind a third-party candidate that he believed could be used to defeat Hoover.
Justine: He was connected with a political campaign in the US; I believe that he had there. He was supporting a candidate that he preferred to Herbert Hoover. And he was saying that if Hoover got in, that would be the end of freedom and the beginning of a terrible age in the US. Hoover won, and that candidate disappeared.Â
Jackie: I asked Justine what the colony would have been like for someone living there.
Justine: I, myself, as a child, lived on a commune near this place, and it, it kind of sounded familiar to me because we as we spent time on Cooper Island, which is close to Chemainus, and that's where we used to go for our groceries. On that island, it wasn't as dramatic, but there were some similar themes that developed. And when I looked at the pictures of the followers, and there are some very beautiful pictures, which I wish we could show people of, people had to work hard, so they had to build the structures. They didn't have any kind of skilled workers with them. So you had all these kinds of people who were not used to hard work building cabins and things. And of course, I'm sure that as many people who come to British Columbia for the first time, they probably arrived in the summertime and thought they were in paradise. It was sunny, and everything was going great. And then, around the end of September, the rains came, and then they were sort of drowned. They probably had felt that life was kind of easy when they could live in tents, but I think life got a bit harder when that when winter came; they weren't really prepared for that. So they had to do a lot of hard work, but they didn’t have full self-sufficiency. I know for a fact that they got supplies in Chemainus like we did. There was a great deal of ritual, and that's what they were there for; they were interested in being part of this intense religious kind of experience, mystical experience. And so, brother XII would have put a lot of energy into creating a powerful experience for them. And then the thing is that in these groups, weird politics always start to break out, and power games between people apparently met him as he was quite hard on the people. He was violent towards them. So I think life was probably exciting at first and they would have felt strongly that they had been chosen. To be at the center of this incredible millenarian experience where the end of the world would come and they would be kind of highly placed to usher in the next stage of things. They would have been kind of thrilled, and it probably took a lot of energy to keep the excitement high.
Jackie: During this time, a woman who began as a follower becomes his newest mistress and begins to take on a role of leadership herself. This is Madame Zee.
Justine: Her real name was Mabel Scotto. That was her married name. She was married, I think when she came to the island, and she, you know, had an affair with a Brother XII as many women did. Supposedly he was incredibly compelling and magnetic. Again, that's kind of a typical scenario with these types of charismatic groups. There have been a couple of examples recently. Nexium cult comes to mind, and Keith Ranieri doesn't seem like a dream date, but he had apparently had a lot of personal character charisma. And he got all these women involved in getting themselves branded and giving him lots of lots of sex at all times. And this is the sort of thing that was going on in Brother XII as well. I don't think there's much information about Madame Zee; it’s more the person she became. There's a lot of contrast between the kind of names like Mabel and Gertrude and things like this, which sound like old-fashioned names to us anyway. But then they choose these new names for themselves, and they sound very imposing and grand. Most of the characters in the story have chosen new and imposing names for themselves to sound otherworldly. And the stories are very weird. She would dress up in what sounds like a kind of dominatrix attire and go around whipping people trying to garden. It was sort of a slave-like situation.Â
Jackie: The cult’s height would not last long. Some members soon began to develop distrust toward him over his handling of donations.Â
Justine: So they actually had him charged with stealing their money. Embezzlement was probably the formal charge. And it's kind of weird, because you could only imagine what was going on at the island. They were all trying to live there and join together really by being convinced or perhaps not as convinced by this charismatic figure. And then you have this mutiny and he actually gets charged and put on trial. I believe the trial was in Nanaimo but I could be wrong about that. The reports of the trial were shocking. People apparently were in a kind of hypnotic state. So when witnesses attempted to testify against him, they would just kind of bark like dogs and this kind of thing. And it was reported in the paper.Â
Jackie: Wow, so this actually happened?Â
Justine: Yeah, this actually happened, and as a result, they couldn't convict him because the witnesses fell apart on the stand since they were they were hypnotized and frightened of this man. He already had a lot of power over them. While there are debates about what about hypnosis and what it really is, it does seem that some people are more you vulnerable to hypnosis if it's possible that he was able to hypnotize them. He certainly glared at them, stared at them while they were talkin and kind of lost it.Â
Jackie: I just want to go in on that a little bit further, too, because that kind of activity is shocking, even in modern-day. At the time, people were calling it black magic, and he was getting this name as somebody who could practice black magic.Â
Justine: Yeah, right, and that's frightening to me. Yeah. It's frightening to anybody. It's not that it came out of nowhere, because he did study magic in both senses, learning the various tricks and illusions that magicians use, and also in the sense of having this familiarity with ancient esoteric traditions, which gave him a lot of authority. I've read passages of his, of his writings and, he definitely was articulate. He was in command of a number of traditions. It's possible, and people can be quite intimidated. We could say that there are words that people can say that put a spell-like effect on people, without kind of buying into magic per se, into black magic per se. I think you can definitely have an effect on people like if you tell somebody, for example, say I put a curse on you, or somebody has a voodoo doll of you, and you stick pins in it. Even if you are somebody who rejects that type of magic, you don't believe that it's true; it’s still gonna be frightening to you. It still might play into your mind to the degree that you do start having bad luck, right. So that would just be an example of how black magic might actually work on people. So the colony had a bad reputation with the locals, unsurprisingly. And there were stories about orgies on the beach and black magic happening because there were definitely ceremonies happening. A lot of the people in the colony got impatient and angry with Brother XII, but there was a lot of resistance from people around. There's a very interesting novel by the Vancouver Island writer Jack Hodge, and it's called The Invention of the World, in which Brother XII is one of the sources for that. Another source is Matty Corica, who was the leader of the Sointula Finnish Utopian Colony on Malcolm Island. So he kind of created a synthesis of these two figures. Matty Corica was a very different sort of man, but there are some resemblances. And in the book, he says when he was a child, I'll just quote, “Daddy used to tell me there was a black magician on one of the islands around here practicing evil rights.” So growing up on Vancouver Island, there was this talk. It’s like a kind of folk tale that's passed on because people experience this, hearing about it firsthand, or your grandmother, or this man, and this woman. Also, the next part of the story is because it kind of all ended very mysteriously, and there are still some question marks.Â
Jackie: Before we move on from the black magic piece, I've heard that they also tried to murder their enemies, including politicians and such, through black magic. Obviously, this didn't happen, but they attempted to, so they must have believed it on some level. Right?
Justine: Yes, I do think that that Brother XII believed in most of this stuff, but it's not mutually exclusive to be power-hungry and also to believe in black magic.Â
Jackie: Soon after things started to get messy, Brother XII and Madame Zee take off. This is the end of the colony.
Justine: He takes the money and runs off with it. But before he does that, I think by this stage, some people were starting to leave. And also, he was a bit furious about the trial. So he starts to take revenge by blowing stuff up and burning stuff down. So he and Madame Zee began destroying the compound and go around collecting the jars, and he had a boat, and he escaped on it. They were trying to find him. When you mess with wealthy and well-connected people, on the one hand, they can bring in money, and they can be influential, and they can bring in other people. But the other side to that is if you get them angry, they have resources to try to track you down. So they did try, they tried looking for him, and they sent her investigators after him because he ran off with a great deal of money. The donations were in the tens of thousands, which is a lot of money in the 1920s. So he had probably hundreds of thousands when he left and supposedly in gold. They sailed off and were never heard from again, but he was supposed to have made it to Switzerland. There was a report of his death in Switzerland and even a death certificate. But there were also rumours that he had faked his own death. In fact, he was seen on a number of occasions after that. So no, it doesn't surprise me that he would try to fake his own death if he thought people were after him. There was an investigator who started tracking all the former followers there. And he found the biggest donor who is a lady called Mary Connolly, living in New Zealand. And so this, this investigator went around interviewing people, and he also found someone who he believed was the son of Brother XII. Now, since then, people have gone to these islands seeking buried treasure because they heard that there might still be gold buried around there. And there have been more than one expedition. I think there have been many expeditions and efforts to uncover it. There was one fellow convinced that the money was buried in a specific place, and he picked up a wooden sort of hatch. They didn't find any money, but they did find a note scrawled there saying, “fools and traitors get nothing.” So he was moving the money around before he left because he thought that the followers were not trustworthy. And also, they started to get furious about their money, and that note could have been from when they were still there, and he was just playing mind games with the people who are still on the island.Â
Jackie: Since he left, though, there has been no treasure that's actually been found, right?
Justine: No, it hasn't been, so people can still have a chance.
Jackie: If you want to buy the property and go start an excavation, that's possible now.
Justine: That's right. So since then, I would say like echoes of Brother XII keep happening. There have actually been masses of communes and cults in British Columbia, and there are a few factors why British Columbia has attracted so many such projects. I think there's a sense of British Columbia from the perspective of Europeans, and I mentioned before the phrase “ends of the earth,” because it was actually the last part of the temperate world to be mapped in the old maps that show the kind of gradual charting of the Americas. British Columbia is always the last part because it took that long to make it there, and it was that far away from Europe. So even up until the 19th century, British Columbia wasn't fully properly mapped. So there are all these really interesting images showing like terra incognita, unknown land up here, sort of sea monsters and those kinds of things. And in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, he places the land of the Giants in British Columbia because nobody knew what was there. Sir Francis Drake, the Elizabethan Explorer, he explored up the coast, and he may have gone into British Columbia. We know for sure he went as far as Northern California. But again, it was this kind of a mystery because they were seeking the Northwest Passage, because of this sense of like an unexplored, mysterious territory where anything could happen, and anything could be there. Also, there were lots of lands that were relatively cheap. And you felt like you could do what you wanted and could create a new story in California and the Northwest and the same thing happened there like it was the last kind of frontier, and then the frontier moved up. But British Columbia was even after that. Many Americans are looking for a kind of open place, and there's still a possibility to do experimental things, and they often will go to British Columbia. That's where we see a lot of these kinds of projects in the late 19th century and the 20s. They ease off for a while during World War Two and the 50s. And then they start up again, the 60s and 70s, especially in and around Vancouver Island, because of the relatively temperate weather and so on. That’s why people are attracted to British Columbia for these kinds of projects. I assume they still are, even though BC has become a little more well-known in recent years. I no longer live in British Columbia. I was born and raised in Vancouver and around Vancouver. And nowadays, whereas when I was a kid, people didn't really know if you said you're from Vancouver, people didn't really know much about it. But now they're all kind of like, “Oh, yeah, I've heard that's great” and “I'd love to go there.”Â
Jackie: It creates a very rich and unique history for the area. This is just one story of many that are just like incredibly fascinating to dive into. Justine, thank you so much for all your expertise on this today.
Justine: I really enjoyed it. Thanks for inviting me.
Jackie: Canadian media owner David Black bought the property in 2017. Apparently, the property hasn't been altered in any way since it is now for sale, listed at $2.8 million. You can read more of Justine’s research in her books All Possible Worlds: Utopian Experiments in British Columbia and Hollywood Utopia, as well as her YouTube channel, Justine Brown's Bookshelf. Thanks so much for spending some time with us today. If you enjoyed the podcast, please share with your friends, rate, review and subscribe so that you don't miss anything going forward. We post new shows every Monday to Friday. My name is Jackie Lamport. This is the Capital Daily Podcast. We'll talk to you tomorrow.