The Original Branch Floridian???

When Vernon Wayne Howell legally changed his name to David Koresh in 1990 and grabbed international headlines three years later, the name “Koresh” became a household word for fifteen minutes.  Sadly, few people — including the ATF and FBI — bothered to ponder the significance of Howell’s choice for a new name, as it offered a good insight into the man’s mind.  For those who don’t know, the term “Branch Davidian” is a dual reference to Jewish patriarch King David.  “Davidian” means “of David,” of course, and “Branch” is a highly-charged term throughout the old testament referring to an offshoot of the “root of David.”  Thus, Vernon Howell choosing David as his first name makes sense as an homage to his personal beliefs and his sect.  But who or what is “Koresh”?

Despite popular opinion to the contrary, the Old Testament anticipates and even nominates a number of “messiahs” to come fill the gap created by the Babylonians when they killed the last king of Israel (Zedekiah) and put an end to David’s blood lineage monarchy.  Haggai 2:23 suggests it will be Zerrubbabel, for instance, but Isaiah 44:28 - 45:1 banks on a conspicuously non-Jewish figure, king Cyrus of Persia.  Cyrus did the world, and especially the Jews, a favor by conquering the Babylonians and returning the Diaspora Jews to Israel, and he even had a policy of rebuilding religious structures in his kingdom, and this included the Jerusalem Temple.  Isaiah 44:28 - 45:1 pretty much says that Cyrus is the (or at least a) Messiah.

“Cyrus” is a Persian word (meaning “throne”,) and in Hebrew the name Cyrus is transliterated to “Koresh.”  Thus, Vernon Howell knew what he was doing when he legally changed his name.  Most people missed the symbolism and significance, but the right people (the Branch Davidians) got it immediately.

However, Vernon Howell was not the first Koresh to come along on the American religious scene.  Over one hundred years previously, another religious figure deliberately chose the name for himself when he started his own sect.  What’s more, this same person set up shop in Florida to run his intended theocracy.

Cyrus Teed was born on October 18, 1839 in Trout Creek, New York.  He was a distant relative of Mormon patriarch Joseph Smith, but Teed seemingly showed no religious interest in the first half of his life.  After a brief stint with the Army of the Potomac (from which he was discharged due to sunstroke) he moved to New York City and began studying medicine at Eclectic Medical College.  After graduating, Dr. Teed moved to Utica and set up practice with his uncle, who was an allopathic doctor.  A sign hung outside their office: “He who deals out poison, deals out death”.  This might have been a dig at the tavern on the ground floor of the building they were in, but curiously there is no record of Teed ever writing a prescription for his patients.

Aside from medicine, Teed seemingly dabbled in some dubious pseudo-sciences, and this included alchemy.  At one point he actually claimed to have turned lead into gold, though apparently chose not to repeat this feat, as financial problems plagued his practice for the rest of his endeavor.  Still, while working on these experiments in the autumn of 1869, Teed claimed to have achieved some sort of epiphany.  While detractors will doubtless claim he snorted too many chemicals in his lab, Teed seemingly believed that he had achieved what he referred to as “illumination” (eweige blumenkraft!) into the real nature of the universe.  This illumination came from God Herself, and yes, Teed claimed to have seen a physical manifestation of the Almighty that was distinctly female.

God was nice enough to lay out a number of details about things to Teed, and this included his own place in the Grand Schemata.  For instance, he learned that he was the fulfillment of the above-mentioned Isaiah passage, and almost immediately thereafter, Cyrus Teed began referring to himself as Koresh.

Another revelation passed on was the true meaning of Isaiah 40:12.  Teed/Koresh learned that the Earth was not the usual globe that we all have come to think of, but exactly the opposite.  The universe was actually solid rock except for one hollow pocket at the center, at the center of which was the sun.  Keen readers up on their science fiction can equate this with a dyson sphere; but if you have no idea what that is, think of the Earth as a giant balloon, except we’re living inside on the inner skin.  Teed actually went on to “prove” this was the case (to his satisfaction, anyway) through complex “scientific” experiments, mostly with a contraption he invented called a rectilineator, but curiously (since a negative number times a negative number equals a positive) any proof that we are on the inside of the balloon also equals proof that we are on the outside.

Teed began to spread the word of his revelations, and understandably, his medical practice dwindled to almost nonexistent as his clientele began seeking saner help.  Locals referred to him as the “crazy doctor.”  However, Teed was rapidly moving from medicine to the ministry, and soon set up a small denomination known as Koreshian Unity.  

Koreshian Unity preached a life of asceticism, celibacy, and equity.  His views on women’s rights were very progressive for the time, undoubtedly because of his Feminine Deity epiphany.  Reincarnation also played a factor in his theology, but he also believed in a Heaven and Hell.  However, these were not physical places, but states of mind.  Teed attempted to sum up his beliefs in a small newspaper he started called “Herald of the Messenger of the New Covenant of the New Jerusalem,”, eventually renamed “Flaming Sword.”  He sold copies, and supplemented his income with a small business selling home-made mops.

Alas, the mops flopped, but he managed to attract enough followers willing to tithe to him to keep Koreshian Unity fiscally solvent.  A small flap occurred in 1884 when Teed was sued by the Cobb family of Camden, New York, for obtaining money from them falsely — by claiming he was the Second Coming of Christ.  Teed agreed to return the money ($25 dollars, including $5 in change from Mrs. Cobbs’ son’s piggie bank) and the matter was dropped, but the negative fallout was enough to prompt Teed and his followers to seek a new location to set up shop.  Small Koreshian Unity churches were eventually set up in California and Illinois, and Teed spent most of his time shuttling between them, giving academic lectures (seasoned with his own beliefs) at Universities and slowly culling new converts.

At its height, it is estimated that between 3,000 and 4,000 people had joined the movement.

In 1893, while scouting locations in Illinois, Teed met a fellow traveler on a train who told him about a “choice” piece of property available for sale: Pine Island in southwestern Florida (near Fort Meyers.)  The whole island was available for $150,000 — too pricey for Teed, but after checking out the area, Teed left some copies of “Flaming Sword” behind at the train station.  Gustave Damkoehler, a local homesteader in near-by Estero, found one of the copies, and deeply impressed, invited Teed back to the area.   Damkoehler joined Koresh’s congregation, and sold his 320 acre ranch to Teed so he could set up a “New Jerusalem”.  Teed promptly started a Koreshian colony there, which eventually became the spiritual headquarters for the movement, with about 250 members migrating down to the new spiritual hub of Koreshian Unity.  Over the next ten years they were able to buy up most of the area at dirt cheap prices (and since this was the edge of the Everglades, that actually wasn’t too hard).  Since they were the major population of this small corner of swamp, they were able to legally incorporate the area as a town, and ran it accordingly.  This enabled them to collect taxes and tolls, and was the major windfall of the movement that kept it fiscally afloat for the rest of its run.  Within a year, Estero was self-sufficient and well on the way to becoming the Utopia Teed envisioned it to be.

Teed spent much of his time at his new Floridian capital, but would periodically make pilgrimages to other Koreshian Unity sites to check up on progress and proselytize for new converts.  He was also attempting to expand his political empire, to the intense distrust of other, unfriendly local politicians.  On October 13, 1906, he was about to leave for Baltimore when a fight broke out among several members of his flock and unsympathetic government employees at the Fort Meyers train station.  Attempting to break up the fisticuffs, Teed himself was severely beaten, and never fully recovered.  His health almost immediately took a turn for the worse, and it is generally held that complications from the injuries directly contributed to his death two years later on December 22, 1908.  He was buried at the southern end of Estero, where his tomb and a small museum to the Koreshian Unity movement still stand to this day.

Cyrus Teed’s death was also the death knell of the Koreshian Unity movement, especially since he failed to reincarnate/resurrect, as was widely expected of him.  The group did attempt to struggle on without its leader, but quickly dwindled to nothing and was effectively flatline three decades later when the last members died with no new blood coming into the movement.

Curiously, Teed’s teachings did survive on after his personal death and the effective death of his sect.  In 1920s, a German named Peter Bender came in contact with them, and was deeply impressed with certain parts of them — specifically, the hollow Earth aspect.  Herr Bender had served in the Luftwaffe during World War One, and was a personal friend of Herman Göring.  He kept the contact active as Göring rose to power with the Nazi party, and was able to interest him in Koreshian cosmology.  Bender explained to the Reichmarshall, “An infinite universe is a Jewish abstraction.  A finite, rounded universe is a thoroughly Aryan concept.”

Göring was apparently sufficiently impressed that he was able to set aside funds, resources, and personnel to further investigate this.  Their first attempt was to fire a rocket into the sky, which in theory would hit the other side of the hollow Earth.  The rocket exploded on the launch pad, and while not providing any information about the hollow Earth, did help some of the scientists there when they were reassigned to Peenemunde a few years later to work on the V-1 and V-2 programs.

Nonplussed, Bender persuaded Göring to give him one more try.  Nazi Scientists and Naval officers assembled at Rigen Island in 1942 with some powerful telescopes trained upwards, and attempted to locate the British Navy.  All they saw was sky, and the project was quickly abandoned.  Furious at Bender for wasting their time, the Reich arrested him and his family and sent them to the Treblinka death camp a year later.

The only other revival of Teed’s teachings came from Dr. Raymond Bernard, who incorporated some of the mathematics Teed pioneered into “proving” his own hollow Earth theory.  Other than that, Teed’s teachings are but a footnote of obscure history.  

Still, I think everyone will agree that he does qualify as honorable mention as the first Branch Floridian, mostly for reasons of intense irony that I am sure he would sternly disapprove of.

Jonestown Video Analysis
Part III

Back in April we ran an update on the Jonestown massacre which contained an analysis of the NBC Jonestown video.   In it, it is hoped that an end was put to a persistent myth/opinion about Jonestown: that the hit team that assassinated Representative Leo Ryan and several others at the Port Kaituma airstrip were not from Jonestown but some type of “professional” hit squad.  I offered up a number of counterarguments, based on the tape, hopefully exposing the theory for the chum it is.

The analysis offered was apparently impressive enough that Drs. Rebecca Moore and Fielding McGehee, who run an excellent Jonestown website, wished to include it in their annual Jonestown Report.  This an annual newsletter contains updates and developments in research into this tragedy, and with 2003 being the 25^th anniversary of the massacre, the issue was a special one.  I am pleased to be a part of it.

Not surprisingly, Laurie Efrein Kahalas has taken exception to my conclusions about the NBC video.  After all, she was the one who first came up with the thesis that the tape shows heavily armed soldiers in fatigues and running a squad diamond formation.  She has informed Drs. Moore and McGehee that she wished to offer a rebuttal to my piece.  Obviously, she is entitled to do so, and I will make it known when it is available.

Of course, this is all about ‘think for yourself!’ so I encourage anyone to see the video and draw their own conclusions.  Thanks to kindred spirit Flaming Faggot, the video has been digitized as an mpeg and is now posted on our sister storage site here.  Unfortunately, for complex technical reasons, the conversion came out poorly, and viewing it doesn’t do much for my offer to people to watch it and draw their own conclusions.  Flaming Faggot assures me he is on the problem and hopes to have a better copy available sometime soon.  

Jonestown Audio Analysis
Part II

While we’re on the subject of Jonestown, let’s take a moment to (re)explore another dark corner of this conspiracy-rich subject, the “Death Tape.”  Jim Jones recorded over 700 sermons, and this included the final, fatal performance on November 18, 1978.  I have a copy, and in my original piece on Jonestown delved rather extensively into an analysis of an especially disturbing dialogue that takes place between Jones and some followers when some type of fracas occurs:

A lot of people, myself included, wonder what the hell Dwyer was doing back at the camp, and why Jones was so concerned about his safety.  Dwyer was wounded in the turkey shoot at the airport, and since a few minutes later on the tape we hear that the hit squad has just returned from that same airstrip, we are left to ponder how Dwyer could have gotten back so quickly.  The obvious answer is that Dwyer was not back at Jonestown, and that Jones himself was mistaken.  However, we are still left to ponder that Jones specifically mentions Dwyer by name, so even if our favorite CIA agent were seven miles away at Port Kaituma at the time, Jones thinks he is present at his little colony, and is taking steps to ensure the man’s safety.

This makes no sense, and raises some disturbing questions about Jones’s potential connection to the bad boys at Langley.

However, Dr. McGehee, who runs the above-referenced website, has offered what is probably the best explanation into this conundrum.  I paraphrase from his larger commentary:

The key to understanding this is the initial comment, “Take Dwyer to the East House.”  Later in the tape, Jones makes the comment, “Make sure the attorneys stay where they belong.”  Jim Jones had two attorneys: Mark Lane (who independently is famous for his research into the JFK conspiracy) and Charles Garry.  Both remained in Jonestown during the mass suicide, until they eventually snuck out.  In his autobiography of the incident, The Strongest Poison, Lane recollects that Jones had ushered him and Garry to the East House for safe keeping while everyone else was lining up for Kool Aid.  You will recall that this is where Jones had instructed his followers to take the person he identified as “Dwyer.”

As you can see in the picture at right, at a first glance there is a bit of resemblance between Charles Garry and Richard Dwyer.  Enough that, if someone is under a lot of stress, it might be possible to confuse the two, or at least get their names mixed up. 

At least, that’s Dr. Fielding McGehee’s theory.  There are some obvious problems with it, but given the stress and duress Jones was under, to an extent it is plausible.

At least until a better, or at least less bizarre, theory comes along...