Church of Light (1932), Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects, and New Religious Movements

This entry on the Church of Light, incorporated in 1932, comes from an online implementation of the reference work Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects, and New Religious Movements, a tertiary compilation summarizing new religious movements for general reference use. The underlying facts it reports, that Los Angeles astrologer Elbert Benjamine incorporated the church in response to local ordinances restricting astrology's teaching and practice, and that it traces its lineage to the 1915 Brotherhood of Light, are corroborated by the movement's own institutional history and independent occult-studies reference sources. As a brief encyclopedia entry rather than a monograph, it is useful for orienting basic facts and founding chronology, and a reader wanting deeper treatment of the group's specific astrological teaching system should follow its own published curriculum and independent scholarship on American astrological religion.