Preacher, Theosophist, profligate pamphleteer, commune leader, librarian, mystery man—and kind of a Fortean.
It’s the last, of course, that’s the subject here: Fortean. But it’s the penultimate that made this difficult: mystery man.
As it happens, I got to this name just at the right time. A few months ago, journalist Charmaine Ortega Getz sorted out a lot of the confusion--here and here--surrounding this Fortean’s origins. I am still not sure where the confusion started—and I am not going to take the time to identify it—but he’s been identified by the wrong name, and the wrong birthdate, for several years, as well as having some accomplishments attached to him that have no documentary support. And, even with Getz’s quite good research done and out there, more remains to be said: indeed, he deserves a rigorous study; there seem to be documents that would make such a study possible. But it is beyond the scope of my research to really dig into this material, particularly the transition he seems dot go through in the 1930s.
At any rate . . .
It’s the last, of course, that’s the subject here: Fortean. But it’s the penultimate that made this difficult: mystery man.
As it happens, I got to this name just at the right time. A few months ago, journalist Charmaine Ortega Getz sorted out a lot of the confusion--here and here--surrounding this Fortean’s origins. I am still not sure where the confusion started—and I am not going to take the time to identify it—but he’s been identified by the wrong name, and the wrong birthdate, for several years, as well as having some accomplishments attached to him that have no documentary support. And, even with Getz’s quite good research done and out there, more remains to be said: indeed, he deserves a rigorous study; there seem to be documents that would make such a study possible. But it is beyond the scope of my research to really dig into this material, particularly the transition he seems dot go through in the 1930s.
At any rate . . .
Sonia Swanander, 1924, from her passport. Maurice Doreal was born Claude D. Dodgin in the not-ye-state of Oklahoma 25 August 1902. Standard sources on the occult and metaphysics—The Gale Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, Jerome Clarke’s “Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds—spell the last name Doggins and place his birthdate around 1898. As I say, I’m not sure where the mistake originated. With the correction opening up standard genealogical records, and with Getz’s thorough research, some light is shed on Dodgin’s past. His parents were Thomas and Alta Belle (Corbin). Likely, Claude was born on Chickasaw Nation land. (Later he would claim partial Native American ancestry, but there is no hard evidence of this.) Thomas and Alta were in there thirties when Claude was born, married for about seventeen years. According to the 1910 census, Alta had given birth to seven children, only five of whom were living. Claude was the youngest of those. That year, the family was in Childress, Texas.
Some reports put Claude in World War I as part of the Signal Corps, but the evidence weighs against this. He was too young, for one. And the 1930 census marked whether someone was a veteran, and Claude was put down as a non-Veteran. There is also no draft card for him. In 1918, as the war came to a close, Thomas and Belle (at least) were in Sherman, Texas, according to that city’s directory, Tom working as a laborer for the Gladney Milling Company. Two years later, the couple were back in Oklahoma. Tom had returned to farming, which had been his earlier occupation. Claude was the only child at home. According to the census, he was seventeen and attending school. Belle did not work, at least not officially.
Two years later, the Dodgin were in Wichita, Kansas, according to the city directory. Tom was a laborer. Claude was there, too, also a laborer, and living in the same house at 2421 N. Waco Avenue. This record is the last mention I can find of Belle; presumably, she passed on some time soon afterward. She was in her mid-50s at the time, and had a rough life. Claude, though, is traceable through city directories. He seems to have followed his father’s footsteps, working a number of hard jobs. Two years later, he and his dad were listed as landscape gardeners in Wichita, living together at 2508 Arkansas Avenue. (The entry is the last one I find for Thomas; seemingly, he followed his wife into the grave, Thomas in his mid-60s.) In 1927, according to Getz, on 4 September, Dodgin, then 25, ended his loneliness, and married Ruth Proctor, aged 20, in Altus, Oklahoma. The service was conducted by a Baptist minister.
The marriage would not last long. The 1929 city directory had them in Wichita, Claude doing indoor work, now, as a clerk. They were living on N. Topeka. They had a son. The 1930 census found them still in Wichita, the family now grown by a daughter. Claude was working as a cab driver. (And, as already mentioned, was a non-veteran.) He seems to have been moving between jobs quickly, or perhaps had more than one, as the city directory for 1930 marked him a salesman for the Kansas Brokerage company. A year later, the family had relocated to Oklahoma City, where Claude was a salesman for a department store. Claude was still there in 1932—though with no job listed, and no longer married. (Getz discovered that Ruth remarried, and took the children with her.) He was still unmarried in 1933, but there had been big changes.
The Oklahoma City Directory had him as a President—quite the jump from cab driver and salesman in two years, especially considering Oklahoma was so hard hit by the Depression and the Dust Bowl. Dodgin styled himself as President of something he was calling “The Brotherhood of the White Temple.” There is a separate entry for the Brotherhood in the city directory. It was located at the Terminal Arcade. Lee E. Roberts was given as the secretary and point of contact. The Brotherhood of the White Temple would become inextricably linked to Dodgin in time; this is the first I can verify it being used—despite some publications that seem to date it to the period from 1929 to 1931—and, as far as I can tell, it was not widely used again for a while. The city directory the following year listed Dodgin as being associated with a “Metaphysical School.” The directory does not have an entry for the Brotherhood of the White Temple. In 1935, he was listed as a teacher, and again no mention of the Brotherhood of the White Temple.
There was a change in his situation, though. Dodgin was married. According to Getz, a justice of the peace wedded Dodgin to Margaret Chadwell (the former Ambling Margaret Wallace) in Oklahoma City on 21 July 1933. The difference in the officiant may be of significance, given that Dodgin was now associating himself with America’s metaphysical tradition. Again according to Getz, Margaret was a little older than Claude, divorced as he was, the mother of three sons, who may or may not have lived with their stepfather. Again, the marriage would not last very long. During this time, he may also have lived for a time in Denver—for the 1934 Denver city directory has a listing for C.D. Dodgin, psychologist. Reasons to believe this refers to Claude are the unusual name, that the same psychologist does not appear in any other Denver directories, to the best of my knowledge, and that he would later start referring to himself as a doctor. Against this, there is no mention of Margaret. (It’s worth noting, though, that the 1934 Oklahoma City Directory had Margaret and Claude as two separate entries.)
By 1937, the two had relocated to southern California—this was still early in the development of Los Angeles’s metaphysical scene, which would come into its own after World War II. (Anthony Boucher, the science fiction editor and writer, was in L.A. around this same time, and fictionalized the early lineaments of the community in his 1942 mystery, “Rocket to to the Morgue.”) He may partially have been drawn there by a relative—an uncle, I think—Doctor L. Dodgin, who was managing an apartment in the city. Doctor had come to Los Angeles from the Pawnee Reservation in Oklahoma. Work might also have drawn him, of course: he wouldn’t have been the first Oklahoman to move to California during the depression. The city directory has him with an office, but no mention of what the office was. There is also no mention of the Brotherhood of the White Temple in the directory.
Still, he had metaphysical ambitions. A brief wire story put out by the UP on 21 June 1937—and carried int he Santa Ana Register that day—read,
“Claude D. Dodgin was an authority on the occult, ‘lord of the cycle’ and the ‘living Buddha’ to his cult disciples, but to his wife he was just a ‘fake’ and a runaway husband, according to Dodgin’s cross-complaint in Mrs. Amboline Margaret Dodgin’s divorce suit. He complained that she denounced him before his disciples; and she declared that he ran around with other women.”
The divorce, it seems, went through. (Getz discovered that Margaret died in 1944.) And two years later, he had left southern California for the Midwest. In October of 1939, I find the first advertisements for the Brotherhood of the White Temple—finally, again!—based in Kansas City, with a Maurice Doreal lecturing on mental science, psychology (that possible Denver connection!), philosophy, and ancient Eastern wisdom, among other topics. This ad—which ran in the Des Moines Register, at least, and probably elsewhere—makes sense of Getz’s uncovering of a “M. Doreal” in the 1940 Kansas City directory. A copyright also also locates him here, in Kansas City during the late 1930s. Under the name M. Doreal are the works “Textbook for Teachers and Students of the Brotherhood of the White Temple” (10 November 1938) and “Masters Visible and Invisible” (30 August 1939), both copyrighted to the Brotherhood of the White Temple, inc., Kansas City, Missouri.
I don’t know why Claude chose the name Maurice Doreal. There could be a clue in the etymology, Maurice a derivative of the Latin word for Moorish, Doreal a play on the Arabic “dar-al” or “house of,” as in house of Islam or house of wisdom. There’s nothing to suggest in what I’ve read of his teaching that Dodgin relied very heavily upon Arabic or Islamic sources, but may have more generally been looking for a name that conjured up “exotic” (In Said’s Orientalist sense) Eastern ideas. It is clear, though, that at this time he was still experimenting with the name. It is not mentioned in the 1937 newspaper article—though it may have been one of the titles he used—and his employment of it in the 1930s and early 1940s was quite inconsistent. It’s also possible, more prosaically, that Doreal was his middle name.
At any rate, he could not have been very long in Kansas City. The 1940 census, conducted in April of that year, had a Dr. C. D. Dodgin living in Bancroft, Colorado (near Denver). Apparently, the Doreal name had not yet stuck. His 1935 residence—this category was noted in the 1940 census for everyone—was given as “transient across country,” which fits to some extent with the changing addresses between Oklahoma City and Denver in 1934 (at least), but does seem to oversell the amount of moving that he did. HIs occupation was now traveling minister; the industry missionary work. He said he had four years of college study—though, obviously, the evidence for that is missing. It’s also well worth noting that he was living with someone: Sonia Dodgin. Nominally his wife, Sonia was five years younger, had also done four years of college, and, in 1935 had the exact same residence as Dr. Claude Dodgin, suggesting they may have been together during that period.
Dodgin continued to spread the word. There’s a copyright for volume five of his magazine “Light on the Path” from 1940. Three numbers came out in the first three months of the year. In October and November of 1941, the Palm Beach Post ran a series of advertisements promoting a lecture series by him there. Under the name Maurice Doreal, he was to teach on metaphysical topics: prophecies of America’s future, the coming world teacher, Atlantis and Lemuria, occult anatomy and the astral body, sacred symbols, Buddhism, Ayurvedic medicine, Tibetan masters. There was again an ad in the same paper in February 1942; in March 1943, the Suburbanite Economist, a Chicago paper, announced the opening of the Brotherhood’s Chicago Church at the Englewood Orangemen’s Temple, 68th and Green Streets. It was billed as a patriotic rally for soldiers and a ushering in of the “Golden Christ Age.” There is no mention of a Doreal or Dodgin, though, and this may be an ad for a Baptist group that was also around during this time and had the same name—Brotherhood of the White Temple. (It’s worth remembering that Dodgin’s first marriage was conducted by a Baptist pastor.)
In between these various proselytizing events, Claude and Pauline slipped down to Mexico, and made their marriage official. According to a Juárez register, the two tied the knot 18 March 1942. (There’s little doubt this is the correct couple: Claude Doreal Dodgin is said to the the son of Tom and Belle Dodgin, and is the right age.) It is this record that gives us a little insight into Claude’s third and final wife.
Sonia (also Sanja, Sonj)a, Vivian Margaret Swanander was the eldest child of Carl and Signe Swanander, Swedish immigrants. She was born 9 March 1903 in Brooklyn. The family was in New York for the 1905 and 1915 state censuses, but in Allentown, Pennsylvania for the 1910 federal census, where Carl worked as a confectioner. I do not know where she was in 1920 or 1930, but in 1924 she was in New York, applied for a passport to visit Germany, Hungary, and other parts of Europe, then returned to New York in 1925. Likely she married and divorced, accounting for the Eastern European surname she had when she married Dodgin, but I do not have evidence for that. There are hints, too, that the family may have had metaphysical inclinations. Sonja’s aunt, Siri, was part of a 1911 court case involving swamis and a contested will. Perhaps it was through an interest in metaphysical spiritualities that Sonja and Claude met.
It was with his marriage to Sonya that Dodgin seems to have gone all-in on his new persona and his old “cult,” as the UP had it, The Brotherhood of the White Temple. According to Getz, Dodgin incorporated the Brotherhood in Denver, Colorado on 11 April 1942. (It may have been incorporated in Kansas City earlier; I have seen no documents, though. And a newspaper article from 1948 has it that the Colorado incorporation did not take place until January 1946.) Three officers were listed: Dodgin, Dr. Khereb Ramose, and Dr. Kenneth Stahl. (There was a Reverend Kenneth Stahl listed in the 1945 Denver city directory as assistant pastor of the Brotherhood of the White Temple Church. In 1941 he was in the directory as the editor of “Light on the Path.”) It is difficult, from available records, to piece together the early origins of the Brotherhood, but for those interested, there do seem to be resources. The Denver Public Library has material on Doreal and his group. As well, Brigham Young University has early documents in its archives, and there is a collection of pamphlets at the Cleveland Public Library.
Without having gone through this material—and perhaps even after doing so—it is quite impossible to organize the publication history of Doreal’s many publications. Getz arranges the Brotherhood’s publications into two kinds: “an informational series for the general public, available at an individual cost of between 25 cents and a dollar, that outlined various esoteric beliefs, and a teaching series that was designed for ‘neophytes,’ enrolled paying students of the Brotherhood’s correspondence school.” Among the first category were "Symbolism of the Great Seal of the United States” and “Emerald-Tablets of Thoth-the-Atlantean,” the latter copyrighted 20 September 1939. (He would put out a later version, in 1948, with two new tablets.) He also published “Mysteries of Mt. Shasta.” Through the 1940s, there would also be “Mysteries of the Gobi” and “Flying Saucers: An Occult Viewpoint.”
Getz suggests that Dodgin took the idea of a correspondence school on occult topics from AMORC, the Ancient and Mystical Order of Rosicrucians, which had been in operation since 1915, advertising heavily in science fiction and occult magazines—such as Fate. The idea was that one could advance through the school’s hierarchy of Mason-like levels by studying on one’s own. It is very possible. But it is also true that correspondence schools were en vogue—Lilith Lorraine operated something like one, for a time, supposedly—and the Theosophical Society had already routinized occult study, as Gauri Viswanathan has shown; there was an entire subculture of modern occult periodicals, as Mark Morrison has shown. So from wherever Dodgin took the idea, it was not an unusual one.
In September 1946, Doreal announced that he was moving his Brotherhood out of Denver—this was two years _after_ Don Bloch had moved to the city. He was afraid of nuclear war, which he thought was coming soon, and so—as Bloch would suggest to Thayer—was taking to a distant valley so his commune might survive. They were moving near Sedalia, where he would have built a Shamballa Ashrama. The announcement won him some coverage in Time and Life magazines, not very complimentary. Construction may have begun as early as May 1946. There was a bit of squabbling with the government, as wartime shortages meant the grand central building would have to be stopped for a time. Matters were handled by John P. James, an attorney and, according to the “Daily Capital Journey,” a procedural analyst for the Colorado state department of revenue. (Perhaps he was Khereb Ramose?) By 1949, Doreal was barnstorming again—Florida and new York—but a newspaper reporter who showed up at the compound spoke with Lee Roberts, who had been associated with Dodgin and the Temple back in 1933. At some point, Sonya’s mother, Signe, also came to live with the Brotherhood (as early as 1957; Carl died, in 1958).
Presumably throughout his life, but certainly in the 1940s, Dodgin was busy putting together a library: he advertised in the Antiquarian Bookman in 1949, for example. At its height, the library reportedly had some 30,000 volumes—a Colorado equivalent of the Manly Hall library in California that Fortean A . L. Joquel rummaged through in search of esoteric knowledge. It had Theosophical and related works, of course, but was wide enough that it also had the works of Stuart X, which Don Bloch discovered to Thayer and the Fortean Society. The library apparently also had a lot of fantasy—by accounts, Dodgin was a fan of pulp fantasy from an early age. He even wrote in to Ray Palmer’s “Amazing Stories” reporting on his group’s search for a nuclear blast-proof home. He supposedly also attended conventions.
Indeed, Dodgin’s mature theories—no one has studied his early teachings, as far as I can tell—was deeply rooted in pulp fantasy, blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. He attested to the veracity of the Shaver Mystery promulgated int he pages of “Amazing Stories”: he knew of the Deros. He, as Theosophists and fantasists, thought Mt. Shasta was sacred—but for him it was hime to the Atlanteans, not Lemurians. There’s little doubt that Dodgin borrowed from Guy Ballard’s I Am cult, which was rooted in a story about Ballard meeting the ghost of St. Germaine there. Dodgin himself said he had been on Mt. Shasta and met Atlanteans. He also said he’d been to Tibet, where he saw a a library that held all of the world’s occult knowledge. That was clearly a rewrite of James Hilton’s “Lost Horizons.” (When pressed about his life story not providing time to visit these sacred sites, Dodgin said he traveled there through astral projection: he was Lobsang Rampa before Lobsang Rampa.)
Other parts of his Theosophical system obviously borrowed from other bits of pulp fiction. He spoke of reptilian humanoids, for example, which clearly borrowed—as Michael Barkun noted—from the work of Robert Howard and would feed into the later work of David Ickes. He said that he prophesied World War II and the atomic war (as science fiction writers had). In fact, he said that he had occult experiences since he was a very young child and predicted both World Wars. Most of this is known from much later dates, though. His fears of the bomb led not only to his moving the Brotherhood deep into rural Colorado, but also the prediction of a new war, a third world war, not an uncommon prophecy, all things considered, although he put a date on it, like the Fortean Carl Payne Tobey, who did so using his astrological methods. Dodgin foresaw nuclear war in May of 1953. Newspapers reported on the original prophecy—a few times admitting that the prediction was worth considering—and then mocking the cult for the missed deadline.
All of this means that Doreal’s biography is complicated to reconstruct. There’s the lack of information. There’s his obsessive moving. There’s the un-investigated lacuna of the Brotherhood’s early years. There’s his rewriting of his biography. And there’s his mixing if fantasy and fiction in radical ways: the was not the ironic imagination, the playing with “as if,” as, say, those involved with the Cthulhu mythos played with that set of ideas, or the Baker Street Irregulars liked to imagine Sherlock Holmes really existed and acted as if he did—even as they always knew he was a fictional character. Dodgin’s Brotherhood is prefatory of a much later modern condition, erasing the boundaries between fiction and fact, as though there is no real difference.
Once the Brotherhood moved to Sedalia, it became family secretive, and there is not a lot known about what was going on the Sedalia commune. Newspaper reports are few, leaving the information to the difficult to parse—and difficult to date—pamphlets being out out by the group. Newspapers do show that Sonia was active in Republican circles, which isn’t surprising given the era and the place. Signe moved in the same circles. Dorsal presented sermons, as did others authorized to lead church. (Some of this was reported in the Douglas County News.) Sonya would outlive her husband—I cannot find a death record, but likely she lived into the late 1970s—and renew the copyrights on his works. As far as I can tell, the Brotherhood still exists, in the same location, though the size of the group is unknown.
Claude D. Dodgin, aka Maurice Doreal, died 28 November 1963. He was 61, and had outlived the Fortean Society by more than four years.
As far as Dodgin’s connection to Forteanism, there is not much to report. A thorough review of his (often hard to find) material may reveal additional connections, but I have found only a few. The most substantive was Don Bloch’s using the library to discover new Fortean materials. (Thayer also compared Robert Spencer Carr’s lamasery in New Mexico to Doreal’s nuclear-free retreat.) Beyond that, Dodgin was a member of the Fortean Society, and was mentioned twice in the pages of Doubt.
How Doreal came across Fort is unknown, nor is it clear wha he made of Fort or Fort’s ideas. It is not hard to imagine Doreal’s path to Fort, though, given the size of his library and his reading habits: there were plenty of chances to come across Fort’s name in Theosophical, science fictional, and fantastic literature. Nor is it particularly a surprise that Dodgin would choose to join the Society or that Thayer would recruit him. At any rate, his contributions to Forteanism seems slight. In fact, his contributions to esoteric, occult, and Theosophical thought is relatively slight: he may have transmitted some ideas from pulp fiction into metaphysical circles but given the overlap in these communities, it is not clear at all that he was a necessary conduit.
The two mentions of Doreal in Doubt are, this, slight. In Doubt 18, July 1947, Thayer acknowledged that Don Bloch had found Stuart X’s writing while searching through Doreal’s library. (Apparently the Brotherhood was more open to outsiders at the time.) About a year later, in Doubt 21 (June 1948), Thayer was promoting the work of fantasy and science fiction writers as an authentic expression of Fortean ideas by promoting Everett Bleiler’s “Checklist of Fantastic Fiction.” In the course of describing the book, Thayer noted that Doreal received an acknowledgment: presumably his extensive collection had proved helpful. That Doreal’s name appeared was entirely a function of Thayer trying to highlight the work of all Forteans, and didn’t seem to reflect any particular appreciation of Dodgin, or that there had ever been a strong connection between him, his Brotherhood, and the Society.
Some reports put Claude in World War I as part of the Signal Corps, but the evidence weighs against this. He was too young, for one. And the 1930 census marked whether someone was a veteran, and Claude was put down as a non-Veteran. There is also no draft card for him. In 1918, as the war came to a close, Thomas and Belle (at least) were in Sherman, Texas, according to that city’s directory, Tom working as a laborer for the Gladney Milling Company. Two years later, the couple were back in Oklahoma. Tom had returned to farming, which had been his earlier occupation. Claude was the only child at home. According to the census, he was seventeen and attending school. Belle did not work, at least not officially.
Two years later, the Dodgin were in Wichita, Kansas, according to the city directory. Tom was a laborer. Claude was there, too, also a laborer, and living in the same house at 2421 N. Waco Avenue. This record is the last mention I can find of Belle; presumably, she passed on some time soon afterward. She was in her mid-50s at the time, and had a rough life. Claude, though, is traceable through city directories. He seems to have followed his father’s footsteps, working a number of hard jobs. Two years later, he and his dad were listed as landscape gardeners in Wichita, living together at 2508 Arkansas Avenue. (The entry is the last one I find for Thomas; seemingly, he followed his wife into the grave, Thomas in his mid-60s.) In 1927, according to Getz, on 4 September, Dodgin, then 25, ended his loneliness, and married Ruth Proctor, aged 20, in Altus, Oklahoma. The service was conducted by a Baptist minister.
The marriage would not last long. The 1929 city directory had them in Wichita, Claude doing indoor work, now, as a clerk. They were living on N. Topeka. They had a son. The 1930 census found them still in Wichita, the family now grown by a daughter. Claude was working as a cab driver. (And, as already mentioned, was a non-veteran.) He seems to have been moving between jobs quickly, or perhaps had more than one, as the city directory for 1930 marked him a salesman for the Kansas Brokerage company. A year later, the family had relocated to Oklahoma City, where Claude was a salesman for a department store. Claude was still there in 1932—though with no job listed, and no longer married. (Getz discovered that Ruth remarried, and took the children with her.) He was still unmarried in 1933, but there had been big changes.
The Oklahoma City Directory had him as a President—quite the jump from cab driver and salesman in two years, especially considering Oklahoma was so hard hit by the Depression and the Dust Bowl. Dodgin styled himself as President of something he was calling “The Brotherhood of the White Temple.” There is a separate entry for the Brotherhood in the city directory. It was located at the Terminal Arcade. Lee E. Roberts was given as the secretary and point of contact. The Brotherhood of the White Temple would become inextricably linked to Dodgin in time; this is the first I can verify it being used—despite some publications that seem to date it to the period from 1929 to 1931—and, as far as I can tell, it was not widely used again for a while. The city directory the following year listed Dodgin as being associated with a “Metaphysical School.” The directory does not have an entry for the Brotherhood of the White Temple. In 1935, he was listed as a teacher, and again no mention of the Brotherhood of the White Temple.
There was a change in his situation, though. Dodgin was married. According to Getz, a justice of the peace wedded Dodgin to Margaret Chadwell (the former Ambling Margaret Wallace) in Oklahoma City on 21 July 1933. The difference in the officiant may be of significance, given that Dodgin was now associating himself with America’s metaphysical tradition. Again according to Getz, Margaret was a little older than Claude, divorced as he was, the mother of three sons, who may or may not have lived with their stepfather. Again, the marriage would not last very long. During this time, he may also have lived for a time in Denver—for the 1934 Denver city directory has a listing for C.D. Dodgin, psychologist. Reasons to believe this refers to Claude are the unusual name, that the same psychologist does not appear in any other Denver directories, to the best of my knowledge, and that he would later start referring to himself as a doctor. Against this, there is no mention of Margaret. (It’s worth noting, though, that the 1934 Oklahoma City Directory had Margaret and Claude as two separate entries.)
By 1937, the two had relocated to southern California—this was still early in the development of Los Angeles’s metaphysical scene, which would come into its own after World War II. (Anthony Boucher, the science fiction editor and writer, was in L.A. around this same time, and fictionalized the early lineaments of the community in his 1942 mystery, “Rocket to to the Morgue.”) He may partially have been drawn there by a relative—an uncle, I think—Doctor L. Dodgin, who was managing an apartment in the city. Doctor had come to Los Angeles from the Pawnee Reservation in Oklahoma. Work might also have drawn him, of course: he wouldn’t have been the first Oklahoman to move to California during the depression. The city directory has him with an office, but no mention of what the office was. There is also no mention of the Brotherhood of the White Temple in the directory.
Still, he had metaphysical ambitions. A brief wire story put out by the UP on 21 June 1937—and carried int he Santa Ana Register that day—read,
“Claude D. Dodgin was an authority on the occult, ‘lord of the cycle’ and the ‘living Buddha’ to his cult disciples, but to his wife he was just a ‘fake’ and a runaway husband, according to Dodgin’s cross-complaint in Mrs. Amboline Margaret Dodgin’s divorce suit. He complained that she denounced him before his disciples; and she declared that he ran around with other women.”
The divorce, it seems, went through. (Getz discovered that Margaret died in 1944.) And two years later, he had left southern California for the Midwest. In October of 1939, I find the first advertisements for the Brotherhood of the White Temple—finally, again!—based in Kansas City, with a Maurice Doreal lecturing on mental science, psychology (that possible Denver connection!), philosophy, and ancient Eastern wisdom, among other topics. This ad—which ran in the Des Moines Register, at least, and probably elsewhere—makes sense of Getz’s uncovering of a “M. Doreal” in the 1940 Kansas City directory. A copyright also also locates him here, in Kansas City during the late 1930s. Under the name M. Doreal are the works “Textbook for Teachers and Students of the Brotherhood of the White Temple” (10 November 1938) and “Masters Visible and Invisible” (30 August 1939), both copyrighted to the Brotherhood of the White Temple, inc., Kansas City, Missouri.
I don’t know why Claude chose the name Maurice Doreal. There could be a clue in the etymology, Maurice a derivative of the Latin word for Moorish, Doreal a play on the Arabic “dar-al” or “house of,” as in house of Islam or house of wisdom. There’s nothing to suggest in what I’ve read of his teaching that Dodgin relied very heavily upon Arabic or Islamic sources, but may have more generally been looking for a name that conjured up “exotic” (In Said’s Orientalist sense) Eastern ideas. It is clear, though, that at this time he was still experimenting with the name. It is not mentioned in the 1937 newspaper article—though it may have been one of the titles he used—and his employment of it in the 1930s and early 1940s was quite inconsistent. It’s also possible, more prosaically, that Doreal was his middle name.
At any rate, he could not have been very long in Kansas City. The 1940 census, conducted in April of that year, had a Dr. C. D. Dodgin living in Bancroft, Colorado (near Denver). Apparently, the Doreal name had not yet stuck. His 1935 residence—this category was noted in the 1940 census for everyone—was given as “transient across country,” which fits to some extent with the changing addresses between Oklahoma City and Denver in 1934 (at least), but does seem to oversell the amount of moving that he did. HIs occupation was now traveling minister; the industry missionary work. He said he had four years of college study—though, obviously, the evidence for that is missing. It’s also well worth noting that he was living with someone: Sonia Dodgin. Nominally his wife, Sonia was five years younger, had also done four years of college, and, in 1935 had the exact same residence as Dr. Claude Dodgin, suggesting they may have been together during that period.
Dodgin continued to spread the word. There’s a copyright for volume five of his magazine “Light on the Path” from 1940. Three numbers came out in the first three months of the year. In October and November of 1941, the Palm Beach Post ran a series of advertisements promoting a lecture series by him there. Under the name Maurice Doreal, he was to teach on metaphysical topics: prophecies of America’s future, the coming world teacher, Atlantis and Lemuria, occult anatomy and the astral body, sacred symbols, Buddhism, Ayurvedic medicine, Tibetan masters. There was again an ad in the same paper in February 1942; in March 1943, the Suburbanite Economist, a Chicago paper, announced the opening of the Brotherhood’s Chicago Church at the Englewood Orangemen’s Temple, 68th and Green Streets. It was billed as a patriotic rally for soldiers and a ushering in of the “Golden Christ Age.” There is no mention of a Doreal or Dodgin, though, and this may be an ad for a Baptist group that was also around during this time and had the same name—Brotherhood of the White Temple. (It’s worth remembering that Dodgin’s first marriage was conducted by a Baptist pastor.)
In between these various proselytizing events, Claude and Pauline slipped down to Mexico, and made their marriage official. According to a Juárez register, the two tied the knot 18 March 1942. (There’s little doubt this is the correct couple: Claude Doreal Dodgin is said to the the son of Tom and Belle Dodgin, and is the right age.) It is this record that gives us a little insight into Claude’s third and final wife.
Sonia (also Sanja, Sonj)a, Vivian Margaret Swanander was the eldest child of Carl and Signe Swanander, Swedish immigrants. She was born 9 March 1903 in Brooklyn. The family was in New York for the 1905 and 1915 state censuses, but in Allentown, Pennsylvania for the 1910 federal census, where Carl worked as a confectioner. I do not know where she was in 1920 or 1930, but in 1924 she was in New York, applied for a passport to visit Germany, Hungary, and other parts of Europe, then returned to New York in 1925. Likely she married and divorced, accounting for the Eastern European surname she had when she married Dodgin, but I do not have evidence for that. There are hints, too, that the family may have had metaphysical inclinations. Sonja’s aunt, Siri, was part of a 1911 court case involving swamis and a contested will. Perhaps it was through an interest in metaphysical spiritualities that Sonja and Claude met.
It was with his marriage to Sonya that Dodgin seems to have gone all-in on his new persona and his old “cult,” as the UP had it, The Brotherhood of the White Temple. According to Getz, Dodgin incorporated the Brotherhood in Denver, Colorado on 11 April 1942. (It may have been incorporated in Kansas City earlier; I have seen no documents, though. And a newspaper article from 1948 has it that the Colorado incorporation did not take place until January 1946.) Three officers were listed: Dodgin, Dr. Khereb Ramose, and Dr. Kenneth Stahl. (There was a Reverend Kenneth Stahl listed in the 1945 Denver city directory as assistant pastor of the Brotherhood of the White Temple Church. In 1941 he was in the directory as the editor of “Light on the Path.”) It is difficult, from available records, to piece together the early origins of the Brotherhood, but for those interested, there do seem to be resources. The Denver Public Library has material on Doreal and his group. As well, Brigham Young University has early documents in its archives, and there is a collection of pamphlets at the Cleveland Public Library.
Without having gone through this material—and perhaps even after doing so—it is quite impossible to organize the publication history of Doreal’s many publications. Getz arranges the Brotherhood’s publications into two kinds: “an informational series for the general public, available at an individual cost of between 25 cents and a dollar, that outlined various esoteric beliefs, and a teaching series that was designed for ‘neophytes,’ enrolled paying students of the Brotherhood’s correspondence school.” Among the first category were "Symbolism of the Great Seal of the United States” and “Emerald-Tablets of Thoth-the-Atlantean,” the latter copyrighted 20 September 1939. (He would put out a later version, in 1948, with two new tablets.) He also published “Mysteries of Mt. Shasta.” Through the 1940s, there would also be “Mysteries of the Gobi” and “Flying Saucers: An Occult Viewpoint.”
Getz suggests that Dodgin took the idea of a correspondence school on occult topics from AMORC, the Ancient and Mystical Order of Rosicrucians, which had been in operation since 1915, advertising heavily in science fiction and occult magazines—such as Fate. The idea was that one could advance through the school’s hierarchy of Mason-like levels by studying on one’s own. It is very possible. But it is also true that correspondence schools were en vogue—Lilith Lorraine operated something like one, for a time, supposedly—and the Theosophical Society had already routinized occult study, as Gauri Viswanathan has shown; there was an entire subculture of modern occult periodicals, as Mark Morrison has shown. So from wherever Dodgin took the idea, it was not an unusual one.
In September 1946, Doreal announced that he was moving his Brotherhood out of Denver—this was two years _after_ Don Bloch had moved to the city. He was afraid of nuclear war, which he thought was coming soon, and so—as Bloch would suggest to Thayer—was taking to a distant valley so his commune might survive. They were moving near Sedalia, where he would have built a Shamballa Ashrama. The announcement won him some coverage in Time and Life magazines, not very complimentary. Construction may have begun as early as May 1946. There was a bit of squabbling with the government, as wartime shortages meant the grand central building would have to be stopped for a time. Matters were handled by John P. James, an attorney and, according to the “Daily Capital Journey,” a procedural analyst for the Colorado state department of revenue. (Perhaps he was Khereb Ramose?) By 1949, Doreal was barnstorming again—Florida and new York—but a newspaper reporter who showed up at the compound spoke with Lee Roberts, who had been associated with Dodgin and the Temple back in 1933. At some point, Sonya’s mother, Signe, also came to live with the Brotherhood (as early as 1957; Carl died, in 1958).
Presumably throughout his life, but certainly in the 1940s, Dodgin was busy putting together a library: he advertised in the Antiquarian Bookman in 1949, for example. At its height, the library reportedly had some 30,000 volumes—a Colorado equivalent of the Manly Hall library in California that Fortean A . L. Joquel rummaged through in search of esoteric knowledge. It had Theosophical and related works, of course, but was wide enough that it also had the works of Stuart X, which Don Bloch discovered to Thayer and the Fortean Society. The library apparently also had a lot of fantasy—by accounts, Dodgin was a fan of pulp fantasy from an early age. He even wrote in to Ray Palmer’s “Amazing Stories” reporting on his group’s search for a nuclear blast-proof home. He supposedly also attended conventions.
Indeed, Dodgin’s mature theories—no one has studied his early teachings, as far as I can tell—was deeply rooted in pulp fantasy, blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. He attested to the veracity of the Shaver Mystery promulgated int he pages of “Amazing Stories”: he knew of the Deros. He, as Theosophists and fantasists, thought Mt. Shasta was sacred—but for him it was hime to the Atlanteans, not Lemurians. There’s little doubt that Dodgin borrowed from Guy Ballard’s I Am cult, which was rooted in a story about Ballard meeting the ghost of St. Germaine there. Dodgin himself said he had been on Mt. Shasta and met Atlanteans. He also said he’d been to Tibet, where he saw a a library that held all of the world’s occult knowledge. That was clearly a rewrite of James Hilton’s “Lost Horizons.” (When pressed about his life story not providing time to visit these sacred sites, Dodgin said he traveled there through astral projection: he was Lobsang Rampa before Lobsang Rampa.)
Other parts of his Theosophical system obviously borrowed from other bits of pulp fiction. He spoke of reptilian humanoids, for example, which clearly borrowed—as Michael Barkun noted—from the work of Robert Howard and would feed into the later work of David Ickes. He said that he prophesied World War II and the atomic war (as science fiction writers had). In fact, he said that he had occult experiences since he was a very young child and predicted both World Wars. Most of this is known from much later dates, though. His fears of the bomb led not only to his moving the Brotherhood deep into rural Colorado, but also the prediction of a new war, a third world war, not an uncommon prophecy, all things considered, although he put a date on it, like the Fortean Carl Payne Tobey, who did so using his astrological methods. Dodgin foresaw nuclear war in May of 1953. Newspapers reported on the original prophecy—a few times admitting that the prediction was worth considering—and then mocking the cult for the missed deadline.
All of this means that Doreal’s biography is complicated to reconstruct. There’s the lack of information. There’s his obsessive moving. There’s the un-investigated lacuna of the Brotherhood’s early years. There’s his rewriting of his biography. And there’s his mixing if fantasy and fiction in radical ways: the was not the ironic imagination, the playing with “as if,” as, say, those involved with the Cthulhu mythos played with that set of ideas, or the Baker Street Irregulars liked to imagine Sherlock Holmes really existed and acted as if he did—even as they always knew he was a fictional character. Dodgin’s Brotherhood is prefatory of a much later modern condition, erasing the boundaries between fiction and fact, as though there is no real difference.
Once the Brotherhood moved to Sedalia, it became family secretive, and there is not a lot known about what was going on the Sedalia commune. Newspaper reports are few, leaving the information to the difficult to parse—and difficult to date—pamphlets being out out by the group. Newspapers do show that Sonia was active in Republican circles, which isn’t surprising given the era and the place. Signe moved in the same circles. Dorsal presented sermons, as did others authorized to lead church. (Some of this was reported in the Douglas County News.) Sonya would outlive her husband—I cannot find a death record, but likely she lived into the late 1970s—and renew the copyrights on his works. As far as I can tell, the Brotherhood still exists, in the same location, though the size of the group is unknown.
Claude D. Dodgin, aka Maurice Doreal, died 28 November 1963. He was 61, and had outlived the Fortean Society by more than four years.
As far as Dodgin’s connection to Forteanism, there is not much to report. A thorough review of his (often hard to find) material may reveal additional connections, but I have found only a few. The most substantive was Don Bloch’s using the library to discover new Fortean materials. (Thayer also compared Robert Spencer Carr’s lamasery in New Mexico to Doreal’s nuclear-free retreat.) Beyond that, Dodgin was a member of the Fortean Society, and was mentioned twice in the pages of Doubt.
How Doreal came across Fort is unknown, nor is it clear wha he made of Fort or Fort’s ideas. It is not hard to imagine Doreal’s path to Fort, though, given the size of his library and his reading habits: there were plenty of chances to come across Fort’s name in Theosophical, science fictional, and fantastic literature. Nor is it particularly a surprise that Dodgin would choose to join the Society or that Thayer would recruit him. At any rate, his contributions to Forteanism seems slight. In fact, his contributions to esoteric, occult, and Theosophical thought is relatively slight: he may have transmitted some ideas from pulp fiction into metaphysical circles but given the overlap in these communities, it is not clear at all that he was a necessary conduit.
The two mentions of Doreal in Doubt are, this, slight. In Doubt 18, July 1947, Thayer acknowledged that Don Bloch had found Stuart X’s writing while searching through Doreal’s library. (Apparently the Brotherhood was more open to outsiders at the time.) About a year later, in Doubt 21 (June 1948), Thayer was promoting the work of fantasy and science fiction writers as an authentic expression of Fortean ideas by promoting Everett Bleiler’s “Checklist of Fantastic Fiction.” In the course of describing the book, Thayer noted that Doreal received an acknowledgment: presumably his extensive collection had proved helpful. That Doreal’s name appeared was entirely a function of Thayer trying to highlight the work of all Forteans, and didn’t seem to reflect any particular appreciation of Dodgin, or that there had ever been a strong connection between him, his Brotherhood, and the Society.
