Holy Order of Mans
HOLY ORDER OF MANS was a prominent New Age spiritual community whose radical transformation into an Eastern Orthodox Christian brotherhood during the 1980s illustrates the instability of charismatically led religious communities during their founding generation. As the renamed Christ the Saviour Brotherhood, the community has shrunk to a few hundred members unified primarily by a commitment to Orthodoxy and a shared odyssey through late-twentieth-century America's pluralistic religious marketplace.
The order had its origins in the cultural ferment of mid-1960s San Francisco. Its founder, Earl W. Blighton (1904–1974), was a retired electrical engineer and social worker whose spiritual explorations in California's alternative religions subculture led him to such organizations as the Theosophical Society, the Subramuniya Yoga order, the Spiritualist church, and the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis. Together with his wife, Helen Ruth Blighton, he opened a prayer shrine in 1966 to minister to the young people who were wandering the streets of San Francisco in search of spiritual enlightenment. The committed core of disciples who gathered around the Blightons evolved into an intentional spiritual community organized according to traditional Christian monastic rules. The Holy Order of MANS (there is some controversy surrounding the meaning of the acronym, which was purportedly revealed only to initiates) was incorporated on July 24, 1968.
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