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1929 Blackburn Cult... religouis movement...
1929 Blackburn Cult... religouis movement...
Item # 701834
October 07, 1929
THE DETROIT FREE PRESS, Oct. 7, 1929
* The Blackburn Cult
* The Great Eleven Club
* May Otis Blackburn
* Queen & High Priestiss
* Willa Rhoads corpse
The bottom of the front page has a one column heading: "'Princess' Buried With 7 Dead Dogs" with subhead. (see image)
Complete with 26 pages, light toning and some wear at the margins, generally good.
wikipedia notes: The Blackburn Cult, officially the Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven, or the Great Eleven Club, was a new religious movement started in 1922 by American woman May Otis Blackburn. She started the group on Bunker Hill in Downtown Los Angeles, California, and later formed a retreat in the Southern California Simi Valley.
Blackburn was said to have received revelations directly from angels, and, along with her daughter Ruth Wieland Rizzio, believed that she was charged by the archangel Gabriel to write books revealing the mysteries of Heaven and Earth, and life and death.
Newspaper articles from the period reported strange rituals including the sacrifice of animals, sex scandals and attempts to resurrect a dead 16-year-old girl. Police found the corpse of young woman Willa Rhoads under the floor at the Rhoadses' residence, wrapped in spices and salt, and surrounded by the bodies of seven dead dogs. Mr. and Mrs. Rhoads later confessed to the police that they had placed their daughter in the tomb fourteen months earlier at the suggestion of May Otis Blackburn. The cult was also accused of killing a member in an oven, poisoning another during a "whirling dervish" ceremony, and making several other members disappear.
Category: The 20th Century
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