This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Elizabeth Clare Prophet was born in 1939 in Red Bank, New Jersey, and alongside her husband Mark L. Prophet led the Summit Lighthouse, a Theosophically descended "Ascended Master" teaching organization he had founded in 1958. Together the couple taught that they served as messengers who received dictations from a hierarchy of ascended spiritual masters, and her followers came to address her by the title "Guru Ma."
Mark Prophet died in 1973, and Elizabeth Clare Prophet did not let the movement end with him. She reorganized and expanded it as Church Universal and Triumphant, carrying the messenger role and the dictation teaching forward as her own rather than treating them as tied to her husband's life alone.
That reorganization turned a smaller Theosophically descended teaching group into a movement she led in her own right for over two decades, one that kept its core doctrine of ascended masters and messenger dictations while growing under her sole leadership after 1973.
The transition from Summit Lighthouse to Church Universal and Triumphant is, in that sense, the story of one woman carrying a religious movement through the death of its founder rather than letting it dissolve, and it set the shape of the organization she would go on to lead through the following decades.