From the Brotherhood of Light to an Incorporated Church

Elbert Benjamine, an American occultist who wrote under the pen name C. C. Zain, founded the Brotherhood of Light in Los Angeles in 1915 as an initiatory order dedicated to teaching a systematic body of astrological and hermetic knowledge, drawing on earlier nineteenth century American occult teaching lineages that traced themselves back to European hermetic and Rosicrucian sources. Over the following decade and a half Benjamine wrote a projected set of correspondence courses meant to present the Brotherhood's teaching in a structured curriculum rather than the looser lodge based instruction common to older fraternal occult orders, organizing the material into branches covering astrology, alchemy, and magic including tarot and kabbalah.

The Brotherhood's standing changed abruptly in 1932, when Los Angeles County passed an ordinance prohibiting both the teaching and the practice of astrology within its jurisdiction, directly threatening Benjamine's correspondence course business and public teaching activity. Benjamine responded by incorporating the Brotherhood as a religious body, the Church of Light, on 2 November 1932, reasoning that a church's teachings and practices would fall under religious liberty protections the county ordinance could not reach, a strategic reorganization that succeeded in preserving the organization's ability to teach astrology openly in California.