Glass Hive, The.
An American Group Book.
1927--1932 Monthly except July and August
South Pasadena, CA.
Editor: Will Levington Comfort.
1/1, September 1927-March 1932.
$2.00 a year, 20 cents a copy.
18-20 pp., 8 x 10.

The Glass Hive was a spiritualist and Theosophical colony founded in the late 1920s in Southern California. The colony and this journal grew out of the correspondence and articles Comfort (1878-1932) published on what he called "The Mystic Road." He believed that man could attune his own (his mind's) vibration to the finer, more potent vibration of the spirit. "In most of us there are sparks of contact; in the teaching of Avatars alone so far, is spiritual vibration sustained for utterance through the mind. We enter the silence -- that is, we still the craving of the body and the clamor of the mind -- in the hope at last of hearing the Voice of the Silence, of lifting ourselves to the pitch wherein we may consciously respond to the vibration of the Spirit," etc. He was enthralled with trying to understand and "objectify" the way in which the vibration of world-change (visible in astrology, trends in art and government, etc.) was molding and producing the new world order. Comfort also was the author of novels and short stories, most notably on the American West (Apache: The Saga of a Fighting Indian Chief of the Old Southwest, for example) The Glass Hive was frequented by avant garde and craft artists and magicians and seems to have practiced a form of Agni Yoga. The journal consisted mainly of the chatty ruminations of Comfort, but also included articles by "Rudhyar" (Daniel Chenneviere, 1895-1985) and poems by Helen Bell Mercier. William Dudley Pelley in the New Liberator, 1931, said of his friend Comfort, "I consider that Will Levington Comfort is doing on the western side of America what I am trying to do in the east. His Magazine THE GLASS HIVE catches the true character of The New America that I see ahead." Comfort's articles were published in Alice Bailey's The Beacon, the Brownells' Aquarian Age, Hayes Beasley's The Occultist/Occult Life, and other journals. He also was, until he broke with him in 1928, a follower of Brother XII (Edward Arthur Wilson), one of the governors of his Aquarian Foundation (with Joseph Benner, editor of Inner Life, Coulson Turnbull, et al.,) and a contributor to his The Three Truths and Foundation Letters. On Comfort's involvement with the peculiar cult of Brother XII, see for color British Columbia Magazine's essay, "Brother XII: Occult Leader of a 1920s Bizarre BC Colony" (https://www.bcmag.ca/brother-xii-occult-leader-of-a-1920s-bizarre-bc-colony/) and Stephen Ruttan's "Brother XII: Seer or charlatan?" (https://www.pressreader.com/canada/times-colonist/20121209/282033324505944). On the Glass Hive circle, see Nancy Strow Sheley, "Intellectualizing Ecstacy: The Organic and Spiritual Abstractions of Agnes Pelton," online at http://dsc.gc.cuny.edu/part/part9/ modernism/articles/shele.html. Hamilton College; Stanford University.

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