Uncovering the “Lost Land”: The Archaeology of Brother XII

Caption for Header Photo: Brother XII and the Aquarian Foundation Board of Governors, July, 1927 (photo on file with Nanaimo Archives)

It has been a long time since I’ve written any blog posts, and an even longer time since I’ve mentioned anything about one of the core focuses of my PhD research – Brother XII and the Aquarian Foundation. Generally, I’m interested in the archaeology of conspirituality. Conspirituality itself has been around for a long time, but it was only recognized as a concept or term in 2011. Not that long ago. And while there is a lot of attention being paid to contemporary conspirituality and its presence on the internet (and how the internet helped give rise to conspirituality), there is far less attention being paid to the history of conspirituality. Which is what brings me to Brother XII and the Aquarian Foundation. They’re an interesting pre-internet example of conspirituality. As an archaeologist, I’m really interested in the material culture and landscapes of conspirituality. What kinds of material culture did spirituality lead conspiritualists to create or use, how did it influence their impacts to the landscape? How did the landscape both reinforce AND reflect their spirituality? And the same questions go for the conspiracist side of conspirituality. How did the material culture and landscapes of conspiritualists reflect and reinforce their conspiracism? Questions about the material culture and landscapes of conspirituality are really at the heart of my research, and Brother XII and the Aquarian Foundation gives me an opportunity to explore some of those questions through an archaeological lens. With, of course, a little help from additional disciplines like sociology, history, and political science. My project is very multi-disciplinary and I love that aspect!

I was recently welcomed to give a presentation about Brother XII and the Aquarian Foundation to the Archaeological Society of British Columbia. In this presentation I gave a bit of history about Brother XII and the Aquarian Foundation, and spoke about how I’ve been using a lot of their written sources to help me understand what I’m seeing on the ground. Brother XII wrote a lot, and a lot was written about him. And those written resources provide some really important insight for my research. They’re useful for standard questions like, “how many houses did the Aquarian Foundation construct at Cedar?” “What was this large house at Cedar used for?” “What did the Aquarian Foundation construct on Valdes?” But they’re also useful for finding deeper meanings behind the cultural material and landscapes. For example, from various writings I can learn that that stone gunforts were constructed in certain areas. And from those readings I can also learn that the gunforts were a response from Brother XII’s conspiracism. They were general defensive structures, but they were specifically meant to defend the colony against potential attacks from a secret new world government that Brother XII had special knowledge of. As another example, I can learn that the Aquarian Foundation built their first colony at Cedar-by-the-Sea. Which is generally a beautiful location that anyone can appreciate. But I can also learn that the Aquarian Foundation thought the land may have also been a piece of a mythical lost land written about by Helena Blavatsky, giving them a specific type of appreciation and view of the land. Written sources can tell me both that ten large houses were constructed at Cedar and that the people who lived there were only living there on Brother XII’s invite because they had special ethereal connections to The Work. That is the kind of extra insight the written resources can give to my archaeological work. If you missed it live, the presentation was recorded and is now available for viewing on the ASBC’s Vimeo page!

I definitely didn’t have time to go over every single aspect of Brother XII and his connection to the broader far-right world (for example, he has connections to William Dudley Pelley, leader of the Silver Legion of America and later SoulCraft, that I’m in the process of exploring further, and I only briefly touched on the KKK connections). One Brother XII connection that I realized a bit too late to include is that of the connection to the creation of British Columbia’s archaeology protection laws, currently known as the Heritage Conservation Act. There’s a surprise pseudoarchaeological twist to this story involving the lost continent of Mu.

Members of the Aquarian Foundation took Brother XII to court twice – once in 1928 (he won), and once again in 1933 (Foundation members won). Throughout these two cases, there were two figures deeply involved. One was Bruce McKelvie, a local journalist who did a lot of reporting on the Foundation and formed connections with many of the Foundation members, and the other was Victor B. Harrison, the prosecuting lawyer. Both men were also members of the active Nanaimo chapter of the nativist organization, the Native Sons of B.C. (NSoBC). McKelvie was a grand historian and Harrison was another high level historian. The NSoBC were heavily invested in promoting and protecting a mythologized version of BC’s pioneer history. As part of this they spent a lot of time collecting archaeological belongings of both settler and Indigenous history. In the early 1920s, in one of the areas around where Brother XII would later come to live, a reasonably sized rock carving was uncovered and came to be known as the Hepburn Stone. A few years later the stone was passed into the possession of the NSoBC. Harrison examined the stone for information about its origins (and later McKelvie would talk about the stone in many of his pubic presentations). He determined that the carvings on the stone told a story about the volcanic destruction of a large continent in the Pacific and that survivors of its destruction had settled in BC and carved that historic event onto the rock (and also became the ancestors of the contemporary First Nations people in the province). The continent Harrison referred to was more popularly known as Mu, which was sometimes believed to be an alternative name for Atlantis, other times an alternative name for Lemuria, and sometimes it’s own continent altogether. In the two page report Harrison wrote about the Hepburn Stone he mentioned John Macmillan Brown who had referenced Lemuria in a bit of his work, so I’m thinking that if Harrison didn’t think Mu was its own thing than he may have conflated it with Lemuria.

Now, around the same time all of this was happening (mid-1920s), the NSoBC was lobbying hard for protective legislation for historical and archaeological sites. Part of their preserving BC’s history goals. And it actually worked. They worked with the government to create the province’s first heritage law in 1925, called the Historic Objects Preservation Act, with provided designation of and protection of rock art, sculptures, and other objects designated as historic objects. This was replaced in 1960 by the Archaeological and Historical Sites Protection Act, and then that was replaced in 1977 by the Heritage Conservation Act. A several-times-amended HCA is what currently governs archaeology in British Columbia today!

So there you have it. A little bonus story about the weird connections between Brother XII, pseudoarchaeology, and the practice of archaeology in British Columbia. I’ll definitely be sharing more about Brother XII as I keep going (there may even be a couple of podcast episodes in the future), but in the mean time if you’re curious to learn more, be sure to watch my Brother XII ASBC presentation!

Podcast’s I’ve been on to talk about Brother XII and the Aquarian Foundation:

Wetwired Podcast: Premium Episode 16: The Cult of Brother XII feat Steph Halmhofer

QAnon Anonymous Podcast: Episode 235: Brother XII