Benjamin Percy
Approaching The Shelter Cycle
Posted by Peter Rock, March 20, 2013 2:00 pm
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Filed under: Original Essays.
I was being driven up some steep gravel roads in a pickup truck, above Paradise Valley, in Montana. This was back in 2007. Below, the Yellowstone River snaked back and forth, Highway 89 running parallel. The driver of the truck was a man I'd just met, a friend of a friend; somewhat taciturn, he didn't seem to know what to make of me. He seemed suspicious of my interest in where he'd agreed to take me.
Seventeen years before, this man and several thousand other people were members of the Church Universal and Triumphant, a sect led by the Messenger Elizabeth Clare Prophet. With the help of the Ascended Masters, a group of deities who spoke through her, the Messenger had proclaimed the late '80s a particularly dangerous time. Preparations would have to be made, for it seemed quite possible that the world might end.
The landscape around us showed those preparations. Here and there, the ground had caved in on what had been shelters for families or groups of families. Steel doorways were cut into the sides of cliffs. The ground rose up in rounded, paranoid humps, and ...
