Balance, The.
Devoted to Monistic Philosophy and Advanced Thought / An Exponent of the New Psychology / A Magazine of Inspiration. An able exponent of New Psychology, Monastic Philosophy and Advanced Thought / A Monthly Exponent of Higher Ideals, Monistic Philosophy and Advanced thought. Choice Literature for Thinking People.
Thou are weighed in the balances, and art found wanting--Daniel, 5:27
Other titles: Balance Magazine
1905--1910? Monthly
Denver, CO.
Publisher: Balance Publishing Co.; Psychic Sciences Company.
Succeeded by: New Balances; Modern Christian; Doorway to Light 1/1, October 1905.
50 cents, then $1.00 a year, 32-40 pp.

Cashmere appears without a trace of prior history -- always a suspicious fact in itself -- in Denver in March 1905, advertising himself as "The World's Greatest Psychic" and author of the nicely named Lost in the Bottomless Pit. Denver at the time was a hotbed spiritual and self-improvement schemes, exemplified by the presence of the primordial spiritualist Ada Hoyt Coan Foye, and by Thomas J. Shelton's Christian, Frank D. Hines's Occidental Mystic and Occult, Spiritual Therapeutics and Sister Republics, A. Victor Segno's Opportunity, J. Edward Hilts' Science of Suggestion, Malinda Cramer's Divine Science, Grace Mann Brown's Constructive Thought, Esoteric Studies/Life Studies and The Essene, and, most notably, by Alexander McIvor Tyndall's The Swastika, which began in 1907. The soil was plowed and ripe for Cashmere to establish his brand through wide advertising, start a journal, found an institute, and reap his reward. In October 1905 he started this journal, "named for the instrument that measures our lack, our wanting, the which shall be filled by the plenitude of unfolded latent powers perfected by New Thought means," as Marc Demarest has eloquently noted. In 1909, Cashmere transfered most of the journal's stock to his new Psychic Science Company, with McIvor-Tyndall's wife as vice-president, to consolidate exploitation of all the phases of New Thought and to certify, credential and defend the practitioners of the various elements:

"All the occult sciences, including clairvoyancy, telepathy, thought transference, mastership, mediumship, etc., and the methods of character reading such will be taught and utilized, not in any sense as 'fortune telling,' for advance thought teachers now hold that 'Faith is Fate and desire is destiny,' but as an aid to a right understanding of the character and trends in the life of those who seek the aid of spiritual and psychic science to assist them to overcome defects of character and other adverse influences and to accomplish their desires and ideals. Spiritual teachers and ministers, upon passing satisfactory examinations as to character and ability, will be formally ordained by the new company and have conferred upon them full authority to solemnize marriages in accordance with the law, to heal the sick, to teach and demonstrate spiritual and psychic science and to perform such other duties as may devolve upon them . . . . The Psychic Science Company will fully protect any and all of its teachers against any adverse ordinance . . . within the United States."

This budding empire, again as Marc Demarest notes, was built in "a scant five years on the money of, largely, seduced women, whom Cashmere has violated sexually, stripped financially and coerced and controlled with promises of money, marriage and psychic unfoldment." It was a sordid, familiar story and Cashmere's world (and this journal) came crashing down in 1910 when several of the duped women brought suit for fraud, leading to his imprisonment for 7-10 and the revelation of his earlier life as the Rev. John Bertrum Clarke, who had run the same scheme in Los Angeles under the name of the Church of Cosmic Truth before his appearance in Denver in 1905. In March 1918, after his emergence from the jail, Cashmere (as the Rev. John B. Clarke) was in Los Angeles as pastor of the Cosmic Center Chapel and later as minister of the Church of Cosmic Truth (apparently under the auspices of the National Independent Spiritualist Association -- which was convicted in 1924 for selling religious credentials for $175 a certificate). In 1920, Cashmere, as John Bertrum Clarke, advertises a new periodical in San Diego, New Balances. The next year he was correspondence editor of The Modern Christian in Los Angeles, and the year after he was publishing the Doorway to Light, also from Los Angeles, and writing under both his Clarke and Cashmere identities for Live Forever magazine. This last was the product of The Live-Forever Folk Association (L.F.F.A.) in Los Angeles, which sought to present to the world "an incomparable and unusual service calculated to develop in each individual member those latent God-given faculties heretofore the possession only of the Elect." This secret process was, as can be deduced from the contributors to the magazine, based on the preservation of sexual energy. In 1924, Cashmere/Clarke was arrested for swindling and attempting to seduce young women seeking secretarial employment and described himself as the "self-marrying love pirate," a wonderful phrase. The newspaper clipping on his arrest listed at length his current interests: "Solar biologist, hypnotist, mesmerist, telepathist, clairvoyant, psychic scientist, mind reader, seer, teacher, healer, physician, author, communicant with spirits of departed people, divine healer, medium, astrologer, palmist, graphologist, fortune teller, philosopher, lecturer, authority on unseen forces, and a good judge of women" -- the last probably because he claimed "I am a woman in man's form -- the highest type of mankind." Clarke had earlier spent a year confined in a state hospital for the insane and after being again adjudged insane in 1924 was again committed, only to escape to Seattle, always a congenial refuge for such, where he was arrested in 1925 for presenting himself as the representative of the Ancient and Mystical Order of Rosae Crucis -- which AMORC promptly denied.

The advertisement for this in The Life, December 1905, says that it "is an exponent of Psychic Phenomena, Monistic Philosophy and Advanced Thought," and the same journal for January 1907, says it is "Devoted to Masonic [Monistic] Philosophy and Advanced Thought." Advertised in The Mountain Pine, 1907 and 1908, and in The Swastika, 1907 on. The advertisement for the journal in Segnogram, October 1906, calls it "a unique monthly magazine, presenting Higher Ideals, the New Psychology and Advanced thought . . . in a manner both original and comprehensive.' Contributions by or excerpts from Maurice Maeterlinck, Edgar L. Larkin, Julia Seton Sears, Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall, Frederic W. Burry, Eugene Del Mar, Eleanor Kirk, George W. Carey, Grace M. Brown, William Colby-Cooper, Eleanor Kirk, Lucy E. Adams, et al. LOC; NYPL.

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