In large measure -- because of the draconian control exerted by the I AM Movement's Saint Germain organization over what it perceived and perceives to be its intellectual property -- the Bridge to Freedom Activity is primarily responsible for the spread of "Ascended Masters" hierarchies and teachings among a host of modern occult groups like the Church Universal and Triumphant, the Astara organization and the Rev. Wayne Hannibal Taylor's City of the Sun project. An incomplete lineage of the organizations whose teachings, and in come cases leadership, stem from Innocente's Bridge to Freedom Activity is provided in the diagram below.

(larger version)

The founding members in the Bridge to Freedom Activity were I AM members and relatives of I AM members, disaffected by the I AM Activity after Guy Ballard's death in 1939, and further put off by the I AM Activity's organizational, public relations and legal difficulties between 1940 and 1945. Some of the Bridge's founding members went so far as to flatly deny that Edna Ballard, and the Ballards' son Donald, were "accredited messengers" of the Ascended Masters; all agreed that Geraldine Innocente was an accredited messenger of those Ascended Masters.

The Bridge's own origin story involves some of the Ascended Masters' attempts to recall both the Theosophical Society and the I AM Activity to their true-and-original purpose of disseminating the messages of the AMs, before starting the Bridge to Freedom Activity through Innocente's messengership as in effect a choice of last resort: for "[h]ow can a Hierarchy direct the progress of the race, unless it can reach the consciousness and outer mind of the lifestreams who are in distress, unless there is a bridge, a link, a connection over which our counsel may reach the intellect of the personal self[?]" That story is told in many Bridge and AMTF documents, and is widely available.

The human founders of the Bridge to Freedom Activity included at least:

1. Geraldine Innocente (1916-1961)
2. Mary Lehane Innocente (1880-1960), Geraldine's mother, and an I AM member
3. Gustav Innocente (1884-1963), Geraldine's father
4. Frances Kurtz Ekey (1899-1968), a former leader in the I AM Activity and reputedly a former follower of William Dudley Pelley, in the 1920s and early 1930s
5. Mary Myneta (Mildred Myneta Taylor Boos 1903-1983)
6. Roger Ancona (1905-2001)
7. Earle E. Fellows (1889-1985), the husband of Zora Swingley (1895-1984), a prominent midwestern I AM leader
8. Charles Crick
9. Carson Miller
10. (Clara) Louise Kienenger (1883-1970)
11. Lucy (Latham Wilson, later Bennett) Littlejohn (1901-1995), one of two partners with Geraldine in a nursery school in the late 1940s and early 1950s, for a time a member of the Innocente household, and the leader of the Bridge Activity after Innocente's death. Littlejohn acted as Innocente's business and financial manager, during Innocente's lifetime.
12. Alice Schutz (1905-1994), a close associate of Guy Ballard, Innocente's recording secretary and later known as A. D. K. Luk -- primarily responsible for the line of texts and teachings embodied in Werner Schroeder's Ascended Masters Teachings Foundation, which are widely circulated today
13. Frank (Francisco) C. Pita (1917?-?), the Cuban-American publisher of the early Bridge materials: monographs and periodicals
14. Marguerite Dahm (a leader of the German branch of the Bridge to Freedom Activity)
15. Julian Campos
16. Frances Goodhue Farrar (1898-1980), the third partner, with Geraldine and Littlejohn, in a nursery school in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and for a time also a member of the Innocente household
17. Lita Henning
18. Shirley Hart
19. Vera Lisle (possibly Vera E. Lisle, wife of Kenneth P. Lisle)

The Bridge to Freedom Activity splintered as early as 1958, with Mary Myneta, Frances Ekey and Alice Schutz all leaving the Bridge in that year to form their own organizations. Myneta and Schutz were, in effect, sole practitioners for the remainder of their lives; Ekey's Lighthouse of Freedom was absorbed into the Summit Lighthouse organization of Mark L. Prophet (a former Bridge to Freedom Activity leader), which, on his death, was transformed by his widow Elizabeth Clare Prophet, into the Church Universal and Triumphant.

During Geraldine Innocente's lifetime, the Bridge published from: Halesite, NY; Flourtown, Pennsylvania; Phiadelphia, Pennsylvania (where lived Frances Ekey); Charlottesville, Virginia; and St. James, Long Island, New York.

After Innocente's death in 1961 -- improbably ruled a suicide by local law enforcement -- Lucy Littlejohn led the Activity, until at least the late 1980s, and perhaps longer (Littlejohn died in 1995), losing control of the group at least once, to the chancer and con artist Peter Leach-Lewis, who attempted to forcibly baptize Bridge Activity leaders in his spur-of-the-moment New Age Church of Christ, and whose tiny and episodic Foundation for Higher Spiritual Learning claimed to be the only true inheritor of the teachings of the Bridge to Freedom Activity.

After Littlejohn's death, the Bridge to Freedom Activity seems to have further splintered, and (it appears) died as several different and by some accounts warring small groups, in places as diverse as Long Island and Arizona, in the early 2000s, with at least part of the Bridge Activity operating as The Bridge to Spiritual Freedom, lately in Arizona.

The Bridge to Spiritual Freedom suggests, on its web site, that the lineage and timeline is as follows: "the Bridge to Freedom (1952-1979), the New Age Church of the Christ (1979-1986), and the Bridge to Spiritual Freedom (1986-today)."

The list of materials below is incomplete; we add to it as we capture or discover authentic Bridge to Freedom materials. Much of the Bridge material circulating on the Internet appears in OCR'd-and-reformatted forms that are unreliable, textually and historically. The materials in this archive are, without exception, photofacsimiles.

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