Spiritual Group Delves Into Past Lives for Answers

She believes she was Mary Magdalene and that her husband, who died in 1971, was Jesus Christ. She is also convinced of having been, among her 54 other lives on earth, Socrates, Buddha, Charlemagne, King Arthur and Peter the Great.

In this life, she was a Pasadena girl who dropped out of grade school and took a series of hard jobs to help her parents and five brothers and sisters. Her father was a tough, laconic man whom she came to fear. Three of her siblings died young, and talk of their deaths touches her even today.

Now 86, Ruth Norman is founder of the Unarius Academy of Science, which claims 10,000 members around the world. She is also known as Uriel, which stands for Universal, Radiant, Infinite, Eternal Light. Her “cosmic visionary, new world teachings” form the core of what she calls “the dawning of the age of Unarius.”

Unarius students--and San Diego County has about 450--believe in past lifetimes on this and other planets. Most attend meetings three times a week and pay $5 almost every time they enter the door. They believe in working out the traumas and tragedies of the present--such problems as drug addiction, alcoholism and sexual promiscuity--by delving into lives lived long ago and finding out what Norman calls “the angels or devils they used to be.”

Unarius’ block-long headquarters has been in El Cajon since 1972, though Norman said she and her husband conceived “the mission” after they met at a Los Angeles “psychics’ convention” in 1954. Unarius centers can also be found in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Toronto (which has five); Vancouver, Canada; Nigeria, and Poland.

The group has a book list of 89 titles, and its only paid employee is a printer.

Ranging in age from 14 to 85, Unarius students work at occupations as varied as waiter and registered nurse. Some contribute more than $450 a month, and Norman said that one, who lives in New York, mails in $1,000 each month. She said the same person is now preparing a $25,000 donation.

Life Changed

“Any time I have extra savings, I give it to Unarius,” said Daniel Smith, a waiter. He insists the $5 meeting fee isn’t mandatory “if you lack the ability to pay.”

Smith, 40, moved to San Diego from North Carolina in 1975. He had read about Unarius in an “occult” bookstore in his native Greensboro. He says he was “a serious drug addict,” having been hooked on LSD, marijuana and speed before Unarius “found a cure.”

He had tried religious movements and once labored as the protege of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in France. Nothing worked, he said, until Unarius.

Decie Hook, 37, said she and her husband, Gordon Hook, 45, are also

Unarius students. Decie Hook works as a hairdresser.

“My whole life changed because of Unarius,” she said. “When I went there 11 years ago, I couldn’t work, couldn’t drive a car--I was on the verge of being committed to an institution. I was alcoholic. When I started understanding what energy was, how past lives influence present life, I encountered immediate change.”

Hook repeated almost verbatim a description Norman gave of how past-life therapy works.

“It’s done by mental attunement, not hypnosis,” she said. “We read and study the Unarius texts. These are written through higher minds--higher beings on higher planets--which are channeled through Uriel (Norman). The answers come naturally, as you see the words and pictures on the pages.” She said psychodramas--improvisational plays acted out in class--and stream-of-consciousness writings are also part of the process.

Only two students (the term they prefer to members) live with Norman in her $2,000-a-month rented home in La Mesa. They are Dorothy Ellerman, her personal secretary since 1964, and Louis Spiegel, Norman’s “aide-de-camp” and business manager.

Spiegel is the author of “The Confessions of I, Bonaparte,” his autobiography of life as Napoleon. In another life, he was Satan, Norman said, pointing out that she “overcame” Satan--converted him to good--in 1984.

Asked how she knew that her husband, Ernest Norman, who died of a throat infection, was Jesus, she replied, “He showed me his hands. He had psychic nail hole scars.”

Many Critics

She’s aware that some people have trouble believing all of this. Norman said “the large majority” of criticism has come from fundamentalist religious groups. She believes critics were the ones who fired a bullet through the window of the center a few years ago, “shattering the glass and scaring us all to death.”

But other critics are materializing. Although authorities in El Cajon, including the mayor and the Police Department, say Unarius has never caused problems and seems “harmless,” a local scientist has formed a committee to investigate Unarius, seeing its “new age” teachings as potentially destructive.

Dr. Sheldon B. Zablow, a San Diego psychiatrist who treats former cult members, called Unarius one of 2,500 cults operating in the United States. He said it isn’t unusual for people with problems to see improvement--initially--while following a cult.

“They sometimes give up drugs and alcohol but sacrifice the ability to think and reason,” he said. “The group becomes the focus of their entire lives. The most disturbing thing is, these are people with serious emotional problems.”

“Cults are big numbers and big business,” he said, adding that because of its “liberal tax and finance structure,” California is an “easy target.”

(Norman denies that Unarius is a cult. “They all deny it,” Zablow said. “If they admit they’re a cult, they deny the reality of what they believe.”)

Spaceships Coming

Unarius has received publicity in the past for one particular aspect of its beliefs. Norman has predicted that a fleet of 33 interlocking spaceships bearing 1,000 aliens each will land on an isolated patch of wilderness near Jamul, in the southeastern part of the county, in 2001. She purchased the 73-acre plot several years ago, saying “a spirit from the past” entered the body of one of her aides and told him “this was the place.”

But Norman knows the spaceships are coming, having received a message, she said, from Lycenius, who lives on the planet Vixall.

The message arrived Oct. 12, 1984. Thus, the two-year anniversary of Interplanetary Confederation Day is fast approaching. She said that the 32 planets of the “esteemed” confederation have asked Earth to join, thus necessitating another spaceship.

Parked in the garage of Norman’s home is a Cadillac with a miniature spaceship bolted to the roof. Painted on the side of the car is the message: “Welcome Your Space Brothers!”

She recently installed a $3,000 satellite dish on the roof of her rented home, and a few days after that ordered a $500 “descrambler.”

“That’s what we’re doing,” she said cheerily, “descrambling our space brothers’ messages.”

Norman said she has lived 55 lives on Earth, which she called “a lowly way station, a kind of General Motors Proving Ground for the cosmos.” In other lives, she claims to have been Bathsheba, Johannes Kepler, Mona Lisa and Maria Theresa.

Unarius students talk often of having been world leaders in former lives--at the least, pivotal public figures around whom history turned. Has anyone ever been, say, a plumber from Schenectady, just trying to make a buck?

Norman seemed irritated by the question.

“I’ve also been a scrubwoman,” she said, “but it’s been so long ago, it’s no longer in my subconscious memory. Hey, buddy, nobody gets to start out at the top. No way!”

Another Story

Norman punctuates many of her sentences, written or spoken, with exclamation marks. Her smile, which is radiant, is disarmingly youthful for her age. Her students call Norman endearing, charismatic, loving.

But one former student, Stephan Yancoskie, 35, says of Unarius: “It is a cult.” Yancoskie, an artist who was “excommunicated” by Norman in 1984, painted almost all of the surrealist paintings that adorn the walls of the El Cajon center.

His departure from the group was so bitter that Norman later published a book about him called “Effort to Destroy the Unarius Mission Thwarted.” Yancoskie said he has contemplated legal action for accusations made against him in the book.

He said he sought out Unarius in 1977 at a time when he was troubled and drinking close to a quart of bourbon a day. He said Norman “immediately latched onto me,” prizing his ability to paint. Norman says she was only trying “to bring out his best” as an artist.

“Stephan just couldn’t come to terms with who he was in his former lives,” she said with a shrug.

In past lives, he was usually her lover or spouse, and according to her, “almost always the woman.” At one time, she said, she was King Arthur and he was the queen.

Norman is drawn “to just about anyone who has money or talent or both,” Yancoskie said. Such a person is then used, he added, for the gain “of the corporation. And Ruth is a dynamite businesswoman. She got a lot of free labor out of me and a lot of other people--the books, the paintings, all of it.”

After occupying a room in Norman’s house, he found that behind closed doors “the loving woman of eternal light” was different. She continually criticized other students, Yancoskie said, so much so that “I finally realized she was a fraud.”

“She’s obsessed with her own myth, her own sense of power,” he said. “She put me in a position where people were exalting me, worshiping me (for his talent as a painter). It was sick. I had to get out.”

Yancoskie was billed as Vincent van Gogh incarnate. One night in 1984, his temper flared. Alcoholics Anonymous and private therapy “had shown me it was time to put away childish things,” so he stood, renounced the group and walked.

Overnight, Van Gogh turned, as Norman sees it, into a devil.

San Diego Skeptics

Another critic is Elie A. Shneour, director of the Biosystems Research Institute of La Jolla and a former faculty member at Stanford and UC Berkeley. He also heads San Diego Skeptics, a local branch of a national group called Committee for Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.

As scientists, Shneour and his colleagues are concerned over the boom of what he called “new age” enterprises, terming them “nothing more than frauds.” Shneour recently formed a committee to investigate Unarius.

“First of all, it’s important to note that this is a free country,” he said. “Essentially, these people have the right to do what they want. Having said that, I will also say this: This isn’t just serious, it’s dangerous.

“Our national group recently found that the American public pays $10 billion annually--not million, billion --on weight-loss scams and health-food hoaxes. I put this in that category. People simply can’t afford it, emotionally or financially.”

Shneour said Unarius is comparable to such scams because it promises what it can’t deliver--therapy through a study of past lives and, once discovering those lives, overcoming this life’s problems. To claim that past lives even exist or that such an exercise is science is, he said, preposterous.

Shneour said “there is not one single, solitary iota of evidence, which any scientist today or in the past, working from the top of the Nobel pile to the dregs of the heap, can come up with to support such claims.”

Norman, however, said Unarius is a science “of cause and effect.” She said the cause of what a person was in past life--whether dope addict or dictator--is a reflection of what they are, what they’re struggling to go beyond.

Students Loyal

Unarius students seem, for the most part, sensitive and kind. They disavow worship of Norman--though Yancoskie says that’s what they’re doing--and deny, sometimes heatedly, that Unarius is a cult.

“That was a crazy thing that happened in Jonestown,” Norman said. She referred to the mass suicide inspired by San Francisco cult leader Jim Jones in which 913 people died in Guyana on Nov. 18, 1978. “That was a cult. We are not a cult. We’re as scientific as anything can be. We don’t worship anything . . . not even God.”

Norman said she is “not a religionist” but “a Christian, in the truest sense of the word.” As Mary of Bethany (the name she prefers to Mary Magdalene), she was “engaged to Jesus,” whom “they crucified before we could (wed).” Jesus was sentenced to die, she said, by Spiegel, her aide-de-camp, who in another life claims to have been Pontius Pilate.

Strict Father

Ruth Norman--born Ruth Emma Anna Nields in Indianapolis at the turn of the century--says she has always been “an ambitious gal.” Her parents moved to Pasadena when she was 3. She was the oldest of six children. Norman’s father worked as an upholsterer and interior decorator.

She talks of her father only reluctantly and with pain evident on her face.

“He didn’t really abuse me,” she said slowly, haltingly. “He was just too strict. He wanted everything just perfect. He would spank us, he would whip us. At times he would whip us . . . really hard.”

As long as she lived at home--and she rushed out to marry as soon as she turned 18--he ordered her never to speak to neighborhood boys, much less see them on dates. She was soon sneaking out to go to dances, and one night met a boy who not very long afterward asked her to marry him. The union lasted 2 1/2 years and she gave birth to a daughter. But a split soon followed, spurred, she says, by her husband’s extramarital affairs. She gave him custody of the child.

She appeared near tears in telling of times she would see her daughter on short, grimly unsatisfying visits. As she drove away, she watched in the rear-view mirror, “my little girl’s legs moving as fast as they’d go, her running helplessly after the car, sobbing, ‘Mommy, Mommy, please don’t go!’ ”

Norman’s daughter has given her four grandchildren and one great-grandchild. She and her daughter “just haven’t had the kind of close relationship I’d like.” She then dropped the subject and refused to go on.

She did say three siblings died tragic, early deaths. A brother fell from a tree and punctured his kidney. Another died of what she called “bone decay.” Her sister Esther--Joan of Arc, Norman said--succumbed to tuberculosis. It is evident that the sister’s death, by far the most troubling, somehow shadows her even now. She finally said, “No more questions about my background.”

Norman dropped out of school in the eighth grade, saying she couldn’t see (and still can’t) how algebra and geometry were important. She worked a variety of jobs--domestic, short-order cook, nanny to a flock of children--and did so before her 18th birthday.

In 1954, at a psychics’ convention, she met the moderator, the man she would marry--the man she now sees as Jesus. She believes their mission won’t be complete until the spaceships fall out of the sky, when she’ll be 101.

She expects to live another hundred years--in this life.

And how does she know this?

“Why, the spaceships,” she said with a dazzling smile. “I wouldn’t miss those for the world!”