librarian in Opdal was delighted to have a young reader with such an avid desire to learn, and through interlibrary loans, ordered whatever he requested that her shelves did not have.
Perhaps most impressive of all, for someone so young, he became the devotee of none of the great men whose books he read. He read critically, absorbing and analyzing, gradually evolving his own basic cosmology, his own metaphysics. Listening to ex-schoolmates reminiscing on his boyhood, one might wonder if he hadn't been born with his philosophy and metaphysics. The closest thing he had to a real confidant was Morten Jacobsen, an older was three times promoted. But business success was not what he was looking for. The experience was useful, as was the modest investment portfolio he acquired, but after two and a half years he quit, having arranged employment as a staff assistant to Congressman Harvey Lingdal of Wisconsin.
The congressman might not have hired the energetic youngster if he'd known of Haller's association with witchcraft on Long Island, in a coven that ritually used drugs and hypnosis in an era when drug use was rare. Haller and his Long Island friends saw witchcraft as a way, or hopefully the way, to expand their individual powers. Hypnosis and drugs were tools in their witchcraft.
Leif Haller had no more intention of climbing to power via a political ladder than he'd had in doing it via the stock market. Later he'd tell friends he took the job for the knowledge, experience, and insights it could provide. He was already fixated on becoming the world's most powerful man by other means: He intended to develop psychic powers to go with his remarkable intelligence.
By the time he moved to Washington, he was already disenchanted with witchcraft. It's not clear how much he'd ever really expected of it. After his Long Island experience, he still considered that there was validity in some of its principles, but he'd concluded that the subject was based too largely on erroneous theories, and too cluttered with superstitions, to be useful as it stood.
Besides, it is clear that he planned to build his own system. He would write that its two branches, theory and practice, would grow simultaneously and in parallel, practices being based on theory, with further theory growing out of experience with practices.
The
Haller soon found his job as a congressional staff assistant too demanding on his time; sixty- and eighty-hour weeks left far too little time for study and experimentation. So after five months he left the capital and went to Los Angeles, there to try his hand at applying the procedures he'd concocted.
The first thing he did was grow a beard—a rarity at the time. It's been suggested he grew it to camouflage his youth, but more likely it was to project a specific image. People who'd known him as early as his university days say he looked more mature than his years. While he grew his beard, he worked as a warehouseman for an auto parts chain. Finally, suitably bearded, he rented a tiny office on Melrose Avenue, and opened for business as a mystic counselor, under the name Swami Suvarnananda;
He regarded these as necessary learning projects, and tried to see them through to successful conclusions, continuing to work with people who could no longer pay. Later he would say that it was during his Swami period that he refined his cosmology and his theories (he called them 'the laws') of the soul and mind, as well as his basic principles of counseling.
With experience and a modicum of success, he moved to a better office, shared a secretary with a chiropracter, billed himself as Dr. Karl Mogens, psychoanalyst, and affected a cultured Danish accent. The diplomas on his wall, he once said, were the best that money could buy. As the good doctor, he had numerous rather impressive successes, and through word of mouth developed a profitable practice. Within six months he'd moved to a still nicer office, with a secretary of his own.
In working out his early procedures, Haller borrowed heavily from the work of others. He was influenced by Freud's early work in regression, work done before Freud became fixated on sex as the key to the psyche. And by Jung's work. Though Haller rejected Jung's concept of archetypes, he adapted his use of the psychogalvanometer in compiling and evaluating, with the patient, lists of psychologically charged words as a wedge and lever in analysis. He was also strongly influenced by Alfred Korzybski and Edgar Cayce.
Some of these works he'd read in his teens, others in the UCLA library. Later he would mention reading case histories of idiot savants. There is no evidence that he borrowed any practices from witchcraft.
It seems clear that his tenure as a swami and bogus Danish analyst was the first project in a long-term plan. It also seems clear that the plan was to culminate in himself as superman, surrounded by an expanding corps of supermen who would be subordinate to himself. The phase after the swami/Mogens phase was the establishment of the Institute for . . .
There was a knock at my door. It was Carlos, with some questions about a case I'd handled earlier. As he was leaving, Hamilton called; it was his lunch break. 'Is this a good time?' I asked him. 'It may take twenty or thirty minutes.'
'Go ahead,' he said. 'What you're doing is more interesting than eating at Hannery's. If necessary, I'll catch a sandwich and juice from the snack machine later.'
I told him what Molly Cadigan had said about the leaders of the church believing in Ray Christman's theories on reality and the alternative futures of mankind—some kind of doom on the one hand and presumably a golden age on the other, with the church being the difference. That they were scared because Ray wasn't around to feed them new procedures and keep the thing going; that basically they were fanatics who might go off the deep end if they thought someone was going to show that Christman was dead.
'Does she have something there?' I finished. As I said it, I remembered what Hamilton had told me about a hole in his own life, a sort of pointlessness, since he'd left the church.
It took him a minute to respond. 'She has a point. Three kinds of people get to the upper echelons of the church. One kind is cynical predators. Another is dedicated fanatics. I'm not sure which kind Lonnie Thomas is; some of each, maybe, incompatible as they seem. And the third kind is people who honestly believe but don't behave like fanatics, people who can get things done and who can get others to get things done, in spite of confusion and stupidity.
'As for their running scared . . . With due respect to Molly, I doubt it. Worried maybe, but not scared. They've been without Ray Christman for about half a year now, and I think they've probably gotten used to the situation. And I saw no evidence that Ray was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born unto a virgin. What he did, other people should be able to do, especially when they have his lead to follow. I suspect that before long they'll start coming out with new procedures they've invented themselves, and say that Ray sent them. And the faithful will cheer themselves hoarse, and start transfering credits to pay for them.
'Whatever; Molly's point is well taken. If I were you, Martti, I'd be careful not to let the church know what you're interested in.'
We disconnected then, and I sat there sorting out who I'd told. Nobody in the church. The biggest danger seemed to be that Armand Butzburger might get a guilty conscience and unload it on his confessor or whatever they have.
* * *
At quitting time I got in my car and drove east down Beverly. I'd only gone half a block when I saw a guy behind the wheel of a parked DKW sport coupe. I'd have sworn it was the same guy I'd seen that morning across the street from the Neophyte Building, but wearing a white soft cap now—a cap like a lot of merchant seamen wear, with a small, snap-down bill and a button on the top. And it occurred to me that someone didn't need to drive
