Sect Leader Continues to Spread Word Despite Uproar Over Forecasts : New Age: People were alarmed when Elizabeth Prophet’s group set up in Montana amid talk of nuclear holocaust. She says fears arose from media distortion.

With eyes closed, Elizabeth Clare Prophet stood stylishly dressed in a white silky jacket and dress and white boots, intoning with drawn-out syllables, “Let the walls of doctrine come tumbling down. . . . I have come to make you whole, resist not your wholeness. . . . Truly, the Divine Mother does weep over the Middle East. . . .”

Her 20-minute discourse at a recent Whole Life Expo in Pasadena delivered not her words, but those of Jesus--live from heaven, claimed the sect leader who blends apocalyptic forecasts with teachings about Jesus and Eastern ideas of karma and reincarnation.

Jesus’ “dictation” through the 51-year-old Prophet was not Earth-shattering in content. If anything, it reinforced points she made during her just-concluded, two-hour lecture on “The Lost Teachings of Jesus on Women’s Rights.”

But it was just such a purported message from the beyond, given to her in 1986 in Los Angeles by an “ascended master,” that would eventually cast Prophet in the news as a doomsayer.

Prophet, one of the best-known figures in the broad New Age movement, lectures and sells her books throughout the English-speaking world. When her Church Universal and Triumphant moved from the Los Angeles area to Montana in the mid-1980s, she stirred fears in neighboring towns about the sect’s weapons-stocking “survivalist” nature and whether the group would seek to dominate local economic and political issues much as the controversial Rajneesh commune tried to do several years ago in Oregon.

News organizations swooped down on the Montana ranch last March and April as her church worked to finish a large underground bomb shelter. Drills were conducted by the church for 700 people--staff members and their children. More than 1,500 other sect members living on the 30,000-acre ranch streamed into private shelters amid news media reports that she expected an imminent nuclear attack by the Soviet Union.

Her trip to Los Angeles last weekend--to publicize a new book, appear on talk shows and give seminars--was designed partly to counteract what she said were misimpressions that she had created a fearful frenzy nearly a year ago at her Montana ranch headquarters.

It all started, she said in an interview, when St. Germain, a principal figure in her church’s heavenly pantheon, warned of a possible nuclear war in a dictation to her on Thanksgiving 1986 at a Los Angeles hotel. Then, in 1989, St. Germain declared further that between April 23, 1990, and the year 2002 it was very likely that the Soviet Union would launch a nuclear strike on the United States and invade Europe simultaneously, she said.

“He told us that we should build fallout shelters and have food reserved for seven months, but members of our organization were dragging their feet,” said Prophet, who is addressed as “Mother” or “Guru Ma” by followers.

She said that the weeks just before April 23, 1990, coincidentally marked a “danger period” in astrology and a time when many followers had arrived for a peace prayer vigil at the sect’s Royal Teton Ranch north of Yellowstone National Park.

“The newspapers took my statements about the increase in mankind’s karma beginning April 23 and distorted it, literally fabricating that I had predicted the end of the world,” Prophet said.

“Even if there is a nuclear war, I believe we can survive it,” she added. “I don’t think it’s the end of the planet.”

She also denied that she advised her followers, called “keepers of the flame,” to liquidate their holdings in light of a coming nuclear disaster, as some publications reported.

Prophet, her close associates and followers started moving to Montana in 1983, she said. The church sold its Calabasas estate and property for $15.6 million in July, 1986, to the Buddhist-run Soka University.

One unforeseen problem beset the Montana complex last April: A fuel leak of thousands of gallons was discovered at three storage tanks, compounding the complaints of Montana residents that the presence of the religious sect already posed environmental threats. The church later reported that most of the fuel was recovered and removed from the site.

Prophet said her church now would have to obtain permits to install new fuel storage tanks. “We’re not ready to do that at this time,” she said. “We don’t intend to use our shelters except in the case of a confirmed nuclear strike on the United States.”

She says the danger of nuclear holocaust has not diminished. Asserting that astrology “corroborates” the dictated information from her ascended masters, Prophet said the period around 1994 will be particularly dangerous.

“But I believe that anytime between now and 2002 there is a high probability, a likelihood, of a war between the United States and the Soviet Union,” she said.

Observers say, however, that her popularity among spiritual explorers in the broad New Age movement will not rise or fall on the accuracy of her carefully hedged predictions.

“She is one charismatic person,” said Ted Peters, a professor at Pacific Lutheran Seminary in Berkeley who engaged in a theological debate with her in Montana last October. “She has a mesmerizing ability with a voice that carries both authority and sophistication,” Peters said.

Prophet, a self-taught student of Christian Science during her adolescent years, in 1961 met Mark L. Prophet (his real name) and eventually married him. He had founded the Summit Lighthouse in Washington, D.C., in 1958 after brief associations with Self-Realization Fellowship and a Rosicrucian order. After his death in 1973, she assumed the leadership of the church and its growing publishing arm.

She said she has sold 1.4 million books and that several of them have sold more than 100,000 copies. Her latest is “The Astrology of the Four Horsemen, How You Can Heal Yourself and Planet Earth,” a 620-page paperback published by her own Summit University Press.

“All the royalties and lecture fees go to the church,” she said, adding that all she receives is a monthly salary of $1,700.

Murray Steinman, a public relations aide to Prophet, said that her “keepers of the flame” are spread around the world but that no membership figures are disclosed.

“I would love to see her places all around, but all you can do is read her books or go to her lectures,” said Marilyn Bircher of Monterey. Bircher, who said she was raised a Catholic but has tried many churches as an adult, added that she came down to Pasadena specifically to hear Prophet’s lectures and dictations.

In expounding on the “lost teachings of Jesus,” Prophet cited legendary material about Jesus’ early years and relied heavily on Christian Gnostic accounts of Jesus and his favored women disciples found in 1,600-year-old manuscripts discovered in 1945 near Nag Hammadi, Egypt.

Speaking before 200 admirers, Prophet also said the Roman Catholic Church’s policy on priestly celibacy was “sick” and that “Mother Mary told me in a dictation that celibacy is the source of trouble for the (Catholic) church.” Celibacy and the Christian teaching of original sin “are doctrines of the devil,” Prophet declared.

Elizabeth Clare Prophet “is saying what I always knew, especially about the Catholic Church,” Bircher said.

As for Prophet’s dictation from Jesus Christ, Bircher said she accepted it as the authentic voice of Jesus. “I have no reason not to believe it,” she said.