A Modern Religion of Light and Sound

Eckankar was founded in the United States in 1965 by Paul Twitchell, who presented it as the ancient "Religion of the Light and Sound of God" made available in a modern form. The name is glossed as ECK, understood as the Holy Spirit or the divine current of Light and Sound that sustains all worlds. Twitchell drew on his own study of Indian Sant Mat and Radhasoami teaching, Theosophy and Western esoteric currents, and scholars of new religions generally read Eckankar as a twentieth-century synthesis rather than the unbroken ancient lineage its own accounts describe.

After Twitchell's death in 1971 the leadership passed through a disputed succession to Darwin Gross and then, from 1981, to Harold Klemp, who remains the living head of the movement. Central to the religion is the office of the Mahanta, the Living ECK Master, held to be the current human embodiment of a spiritual mastership transmitted from teacher to teacher. The Master is regarded both as an outer teacher and as an inner guide encountered in dream and contemplation, and the tradition holds that at any time one such Master carries the full spiritual authority of the ECK.