Aletheian, The.
Written in the Spirit of Truth / Devoted to the Uplift of all Beings. World Peace, Brotherhood and the Science of the Soul. Psychology, Philosophy, Ethics, Verse, Inspiration, Illumination.
Where Truth Is, Fear Is Not / Be One of Us
Other titles: Aletheian Liberator
1911--1919? Quarterly, monthly, bi-monthly
New York, NY, then Somerville, MA, Annapolis, MD, Somerville and Boston, MA, Pasadena, Los Angeles, and Oakland, CA.
Publisher: Aletheia Society of America / Frances A.H. Dilopoulo. Editor: Aletheia (Frances Head Rogers).
1/1, November 20, 1911. 28-48 pp., $1.00 a year (which at some periods also obtained for the subscriber the right to have three questions answered psychically).

Liberally sprinkled in its early years with photographs of Aletheia, usually with a gauzy veil and labeled "Psychic," and her husband Aleko, labeled "Grecian Telepathist." The journal's boast that it was "the most widely read publication of its kind in the United States" can have been true only if the definition "kind" was extraordinarily narrow. Frances ("Fannie," "Jennie") C. Heaston Head Dilopaulo Rogers Cook was a notable eccentric and a dynamo of energy and creativity. As John Buescher has discovered, she began as a reporter in Washington, D.C. but by the early years of the twentieth century she had turned to vaudeville and then appeared as the "Grecian Mystic" in a code-cue mind-reading act put on by her (as "Aletheia"--"truth" in Greek) and her then-husband Dilopaulo ("Aleko"). By 1917 she had figured prominently in several widely reported lunacy proceedings in California and was committed for a time at her family's request to an asylum, apparently for claiming not only that she had predicted Woodrow Wilson's election but had psychically engineered it. She regularly touted her A.S.A. (Almighty Spirit Ascendant) League of Universal Love (which was the earthly manifestation of the supernal Temple of Truth represented by Aletheia) and lectured on topics like "Invisible Government vs. Spirit of Truth." She also conducted the All Light Spiritual Assembly for All Souls Advancement that she ran in Los Angeles and in the other cities where she lived. The Assembly held weekly services and sold lessons on self-improvement, and her role appears to have been as the Prophet of the society, voicing the laws of the Temple. The Aletheia Society, as it was known, was, as noted in World's Advance Thought, 1914, in praising the journal's new appearance, "devoted to the promulgation of Truth, teaching, Soul Science or Psychology in its spiritual significance." The advertisement in the Spiritual Alliance Weekly, December 11, 1915, proclaimed that the journal was "Spirit of truth, Torchbearer of Light, Love and Peace, devoted to the Human uplift and the Science of the Soul. Standing for truth in all things, for the Brotherhood of Man and for good government, including equal citizenship for all intelligent people, regardless of sex. To be an Aletheian signifies that you are endeavoring to be one in the harmonious whole; an active unit in the great Kosmos." The Occult Review, 1914, was more scathing in its notice of the journal's intentions: "We have received The Aletheian, which is the organ of an Aletheian Society, and this has its centre at Boston. It teaches that all truth finds expression through the science of the soul and lays down the momentous maxim that 'where truth is fear is not.' Therefore he or she who is or would become an Aletheian must be 'immune to error,' besides being 'deaf to criticism' and 'unmoved by praise.' These things notwithstanding, the little highly-priced quarterly is sentimental rather than stoical, as many other inanities show. It is right, however, to add that the Society is 'part of the Great Brotherhood, visible and invisible, existent from all time'--what part those who read must be left to judge as they can. This kind of thing and the little pretenses at the back of it are too weak for serious criticism; but one is inclined to wonder how they are born into being and much more how they are maintained therein." The journal was largely written by Aletheia and devoted to her romantic novelettes (including a dramatized version of one of her sanity trials and the tale of her woes at the hands of a theatrical producer called "Davasco," obviously David Belasco), vaudeville clippings, and stage recollections, and to prophecy and self-mastery as the method for overcoming the hypnotic influence and control of others or the unconscious hypnotism of the self--a preoccupation that is perhaps revealing of Aletheia's mental state. It included a series of articles on the "Psychic Syndicate" of fraudulent psychics in New York which Aletheia sought to distinguish herself by her authentic powers. The journal carried contributions by Marguerite Head (perhaps Aletheia's daughter or the former sister-in-law who brought the insanity proceedings), W.J. Colville, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Agnes C. Cassidy, Thomas W. Woodrow, Lida Briggs Amerige, Janet Bolton, John H. Eagleton, Lydia E. Lang, and other disciples, and of course, poems by Ella Wheeler Wilcox. At times it also carried an astrological section and a Prophetic Section (with a prize of $10.00 for the best true prophetic vision submitted), as well as an "Aletheian Directory" of teachers and psychics who were members of the A.S.A. Noted in American Rosae Crucis, 1916, in Upton Sinclair's Profits of Religion (1918), and in the exchanges of The Master Mind, 1918. LOC; Harvard University (microfilm); San Diego State University; University of California, Santa Barbara.

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