Saint Germain, the I AM Activity, and the Line After It

The teaching was rebuilt in the 1930s in the United States. Guy Ballard reported meeting the Count of Saint Germain on the slopes of Mount Shasta in California, and with his wife Edna founded the I AM Activity, which grew rapidly through public lectures, decrees spoken aloud, and a distinctive use of colour and light. Where Theosophy had described living adepts, the I AM teaching described masters who had ascended, leaving the body entirely, and it made Saint Germain rather than the Tibetan adepts the central figure.

The movement produced a Supreme Court case. After Guy Ballard death, family members were prosecuted for mail fraud on the theory that they knew their religious claims to be false. The Court held in 1944 that a jury may not be asked to decide whether a religious belief is true, only whether the person holding it was sincere, and the decision has been foundational in American law on religion ever since. A group that most Americans have never heard of therefore set the terms on which every later claim of religious fraud has been argued.

The line continued through the Bridge to Freedom in the 1950s and then through the Church Universal and Triumphant, founded by Mark Prophet and led after his death by Elizabeth Clare Prophet, which added a large body of dictations. A great deal of later New Age teaching about guides, channelled masters and the ascended hierarchy descends from this sequence, usually without the institutional history attached.