Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

For The Record  

FTR #909 A Different Kind of Tea Party: More about Fascism and the New Age

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This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

Intro­duc­tion: NB: One should not nec­es­sar­i­ly con­clude that all or most of the folks at Celes­tial Sea­son­ings are eugeni­cists, although that may be the case. The dis­cus­sion here is under­tak­en to illus­trate the extent to which fas­cist and Nazi ide­ol­o­gy has infil­trat­ed the so-called New Age. In our opin­ion, the New Age, for the most part, is a syn­the­sis of Nazi occultism and the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty’s mind con­trol pro­grams.

Con­tin­u­ing dis­cus­sion about the pro­found fas­cist influ­ences in the so-called New Age, this pro­gram high­lights strong links between peo­ple involved in launch­ing Celes­tial Sea­son­ings herbal teas and the Uran­tia Book. The lat­ter is a volu­mi­nous New Age tract that main­tains that human beings descend­ed from fair-skinned, blue-eyed space aliens.

” . . . . But there might be anoth­er rea­son they named it ‘celes­tial.’ Mo Siegel and John Hay, two of the founders, were avid believ­ers in a new-age bible called The Uran­tia Book, which fol­low­ers call ‘an epochal rev­e­la­tion authored sole­ly by celes­tial beings.’ The book touch­es upon every­thing from mind con­trol to a eugen­ics plot to elim­i­nate the ‘infe­rior races’ of our great nation. . . . The Uran­tia Book, a 4.3‑pound, 2,097-page tome, pub­lished first in 1955, is a mod­i­fied Sev­enth-Day Adven­tist text sup­pos­edly com­mu­ni­cated to an anony­mous man in a trance by aliens. . . . ”

The gen­e­sis of the book appears to lie with peo­ple asso­ci­at­ed with influ­en­tial Amer­i­can elite play­ers who sub­scribe to the eugen­ics phi­los­o­phy. ” . . . . In real­ity, it was like­ly authored in the ear­ly 1900s by a psy­chi­a­trist named William Sadler who used it as a ves­sel for his racist ideas. . . .”

Assert­ing that humans evolved from the blue-eyed, fair-skinned, extrater­res­tri­al Adam and Eve, the book man­i­fests an out­look that is not only racist, but could clear­ly lead to geno­ci­dal poli­cies.

” . . . . On every plan­et through­out every uni­verse, fair-skinned, blue-eyed aliens named Adam and Eve appear to ‘upstep’ the natives. When their prog­eny mate with the accept­able inhab­i­tants of the plan­et, the ‘infe­rior stocks will be elim­i­nated and there will be one puri­fied race, one lan­guage, and one reli­gion,’ as Gard­ner explains it in Uran­tia: The Great Cult Mys­tery.

But before that can hap­pen, Paper 51 of The Uran­tia Book says, ‘the infe­rior and unfit are large­ly elim­i­nated… it seems that you ought to be able to agree upon the bio­logic dis­fel­low­ship­ing of your more marked­ly unfit, defec­tive, degen­er­ate, and anti­so­cial stocks.’

This process hap­pens on every plan­et when Adam and Eve appear. But on Uran­tia (i.e., earth), it didn’t go accord­ing to plan. Adam and Eve messed up. So, ‘hav­ing failed to achieve race har­mo­niza­tion by the Adam­ic tech­nique,’ Part II: The Local Uni­verse sec­tion of book tells us, ‘you must now work out your plan­e­tary prob­lem of race improve­ment by oth­er and large­ly human meth­ods of adap­ta­tion and con­trol.’

‘Bio­logic ren­o­va­tion of the racial stocks — the selec­tive elim­i­na­tion of infe­rior human strains,’ Paper 70 of The Uran­tia Book says, will ‘tend to erad­i­cate many mor­tal inequal­i­ties.’ . . . . ”

William Sadler, the patron of the Uran­tia text, was a well-known, avowed eugeni­cist, who moved in elite cir­cles: ” . . . . While Hitler didn’t have any­thing to do with writ­ing The Uran­tia Book, William Sadler did. One of the most well-known psy­chi­a­trists of his era, Sadler got his start work­ing for Dr. John H. Kel­logg at the famous Bat­tle Creek San­i­tar­ium, which treat­ed celebri­ties like the Rock­e­fellers, Mont­gomery Ward and even Thomas Edi­son. Kel­logg was a noto­ri­ous eugeni­cist and found­ed the Race Bet­ter­ment Foun­da­tion, whose goals were ‘to call atten­tion to the dan­gers which threat­en the race.’

Influ­enced by Kellogg’s ideas, Sadler pub­lished three eugeni­cist books: Long Heads and Round Heads; or, What’s the Mat­ter With Ger­many (1918), Racial Deca­dence: An Exam­i­na­tion of the Caus­es of Racial Degen­er­a­tion in the Unit­ed States (1922) and The Truth About Hered­ity (1927). The Uran­tia Book echoes the ideas pre­sented in these books, and in some cas­es, it repro­duces the text word for word.

In Racial Deca­dence, Sadler express­es, among oth­er notions, that the ‘unfit’ should be ster­il­ized, that ‘moral­ity is hered­ity’ and that ‘some races are more moral than oth­ers.’ And in The Truth About Hered­ity, Sadler writes that mar­riage between races ‘is to be deplored when one of the races would be infe­rior as com­pared with the oth­er, which hap­pens to be the bio­logic fact as con­cerns the White and Negro races in this coun­try.’ . . . .”

Com­pare the advo­ca­cy con­tained with­in Uran­tia Book and the views of Hitler: “ . . . .‘Bio­logic ren­o­va­tion of the racial stocks — the selec­tive elim­i­na­tion of infe­rior human strains,’ Paper 70 of the Uran­tia Book says, will ‘tend to erad­i­cate many mor­tal inequal­i­ties.’

Com­pare that to Hitler’s words in Mein Kampf: ‘The demand that defec­tive peo­ple be pre­vented from prop­a­gat­ing equal­ly defec­tive off­spring rep­re­sents the most human act of mankind.’ . . . .”

There are indi­ca­tions that the Uran­tia crowd have tak­en the eugeni­cist teach­ings of the text to heart. Note that Ker­mit Ander­son, direc­tor of the genet­ic screen­ing pro­gram at Kaiser Per­ma­nente is asso­ci­at­ed with the group” . . . . The [Uran­tia] Fel­low­ship is putting its mon­ey where its mouth is, too. In a 2010 email sent to “read­ers with advanced infor­ma­tion and for­ward look­ing per­spec­tives that are not suit­ed for being post­ed on the web­site,” a fol­lower named Mar­tin Green­hut writes that the trustees have con­vened a pan­el on eugen­ics. He names all of the pan­el mem­bers, the most strik­ing of which is Ker­mit Ander­son, who at that time was the genet­ic screen­ing pro­gram direc­tor at Kaiser Per­ma­nente in Cal­i­for­nia and the author of much genet­ics research.

In FTR #908, we reviewed the evo­lu­tion­ary pro­gres­sion of the over­lap­ping men­tal hygiene move­ments and eugen­ics move­ments. Grad­u­at­ing from the­o­ry to prac­tice and involv­ing ster­il­iza­tion, legal pro­hi­bi­tion against “inter­mar­riage,” and euthana­sia, that evo­lu­tion led to the Nazi exter­mi­na­tion pro­grams derived from the T‑4 pro­gram.

With tech­nol­o­gy fore­cast as on track to replace large num­bers of work­ing peo­ple in years soon to come, the issue of what hap­pens to “excess” pop­u­la­tion is one to be addressed.

The infil­tra­tion of out­right Nazi ideas into the intel­lec­tu­al realm of the New Age phi­los­o­phy embraced by oth­er­wise gen­tle and alto­geth­er unsus­pect­ing indi­vid­u­als is to be viewed with alarm.

There is abun­dant evi­dence that so-called “UFO’s” are real and come from right here on earth, NOT from out­er space. Peo­ple who have been manip­u­lat­ed into believ­ing in the supe­ri­or wis­dom of “space aliens” who advise us to embrace “kinder, gen­tler geno­cide” may well be paving the way for a cat­a­clysm.

Pro­gram High­lights Include:

  • Review of “The Nine”–a New Age man­i­fes­ta­tion that also posits that life on earth descend­ed from blue-eyed, fair-skinned space aliens and which incor­po­rates a racist, eugen­ics-ori­ent­ed phi­los­o­phy.
  • Prog­nos­ti­ca­tion about the pos­si­ble impact of polit­i­cal, eco­nom­ic and envi­ron­men­tal cat­a­stro­phe on the incli­na­tion of human beings to resign them­selves to being dic­tat­ed to by “our broth­ers from space.”
  • Review of the Nazi/Operation Paper­clip gen­e­sis of the U.S. space pro­gram.
  • Review of SS offi­cer Wern­er Von Braun’s role in launch­ing the Insti­tute for Noet­ic Sci­ences, a major epi­cen­ter of New Age think­ing.

1. The broad­cast high­lights strong links between peo­ple involved in launch­ing Celes­tial Sea­son­ings herbal teas and the Uran­tia Book. The lat­ter is a volu­mi­nous New Age tract that main­tains that human beings descend­ed from fair-skinned, blue-eyed space aliens.

The gen­e­sis of the book appears to lie with peo­ple asso­ci­at­ed with influ­en­tial Amer­i­can elite play­ers who sub­scribe to the eugen­ics phi­los­o­phy.

“Cults, Con­spir­a­cies and the Twist­ed His­tory of Sleep­y­time Tea” by Megan Giller; Van Win­kle’s; 2/1/2016.

Its calm­ing com­bi­na­tion of chamomile, spearmint and oth­er herbs might seem benign, almost bor­ing — the ide­al for­mula for lulling you to sleep. But there’s a pecu­liar sto­ry lurk­ing in your cup of Sleep­y­time tea, one that con­cerns invol­un­tary trances, com­mu­ni­ca­tion with aliens and a eugen­ics plot to elim­i­nate the “infe­rior races” of our great nation.

Before Sleep­y­time became the crown jew­el of Celes­tial Sea­son­ings, with 1.6 bil­lion cups sold per year, before the com­pany became the largest tea man­u­fac­turer in North Amer­ica, the tea was noth­ing more than a dream in the heads of a few flow­er­chil­dren hik­ing up the Rocky Moun­tains in search of herbs.

One of the friends, Mo Siegel, was serv­ing an Asian herbal tea to cus­tomers in a local shop to much suc­cess in 1969. The con­cept that “tea” could be herbal was inno­v­a­tive in itself, since up until then, all tea in Amer­ica and Great Britain was made of the plant Camel­lia sinen­sis. The group want­ed to get into the busi­ness.

On those first hikes, the team har­vested enough herbs for 500 pounds of a blend they called Mo’s 36 Herb Tea, and the sleep-con­jur­ing tea made of chamomille, spearmint and oth­er herbs soon fol­lowed. In no time the friends were saun­ter­ing into the local bank to get a loan for their new busi­ness, “wear­ing jeans, smelling of herbs, and armed with Tup­per­ware con­tain­ers of Mo’s 36 and Sleep­y­time blends.” They called their com­pany Celes­tial Sea­son­ings, after co-founder Lucin­da Ziesing’s flow­er­name.

But there might be anoth­er rea­son they named it “celes­tial.” Mo Siegel and John Hay, two of the founders, were avid believ­ers in a new-age bible called The Uran­tia Book, which fol­low­ers call “an epochal rev­e­la­tion authored sole­ly by celes­tial beings.” The book touch­es upon every­thing from mind con­trol to a eugen­ics plot to elim­i­nate the “infe­rior races” of our great nation.

In fact, the reli­gious text is respon­si­ble for much more than the name of the com­pany. In You’ve GOT to Read This Book! 55 Peo­ple Tell the Sto­ry of the Book That Changed Their Life, Siegel dis­closes that the ideals he gath­ered from The Uran­tia Book guid­ed how he ran Celes­tial Sea­son­ings from the begin­ning and pro­vided a moral com­pass for him­self and his employ­ees. “I had want­ed bold; I found bold,” he wrote. “I want­ed spir­i­tual adven­ture, and I was on the ride of my life. I was search­ing for truth and the book was loaded with it.”

The Uran­tia Book, a 4.3‑pound, 2,097-page tome, pub­lished first in 1955, is a mod­i­fied Sev­enth-Day Adven­tist text sup­pos­edly com­mu­ni­cated to an anony­mous man in a trance by aliens. In real­ity, it was like­ly authored in the ear­ly 1900s by a psy­chi­a­trist named William Sadler who used it as a ves­sel for his racist ideas. (You can down­load the entire thing for free: Because the Uran­tia Foun­da­tion asserts that its author­ship is super­hu­man, an Ari­zona court ruled in 1995 that it’s not pro­tected by copy­right and is, thus, in the pub­lic domain.)

There are so many wild ideas in The Uran­tia Book that it’s hard to know where to start. “Lucifer, Satan, Melchizedek, Adam and Eve, and Jesus are all extra-ter­res­tri­al beings who have vis­ited earth,” Mo Siegel, who is still inti­mately involved with The Uran­tia Book and the Uran­tia Book Fel­low­ship, tells us in “The Twen­ty Most-Asked Ques­tions”. In fact, Adam and Eve were brought to earth to “upstep the human race” (more on that lat­er).

The first three parts of The Uran­tia Book describe a com­pli­cated uni­verse with invis­i­ble seraphim and spir­it and semi-spir­it beings of all sorts; the last part tells the sto­ry of Jesus’ entire life in detail, all 36 years. Though it has just a few thou­sand fol­low­ers, the book has been trans­lated into 20 lan­guages, includ­ing Ara­bic, Chi­nese, Croa­t­ian and Por­tuguese. There’s even a famous oper­atic cycle based on it, as well as at least four fan­tasy nov­els.

The Uran­tia Book itself does not rep­re­sent a destruc­tive cult,” said Rick Ross, a cult expert who helped in Waco with the Branch David­i­ans. “But some of its self-pro­claimed prophets lead groups that can be seen as destruc­tive cults.”

The book also pur­ports that there have been many, many sons of God like Jesus on many dif­fer­ent plan­ets, because there are a bil­lion worlds. When evo­lu­tion is com­plete, each of these worlds will have 100,000 local uni­verses with 10 mil­lion inhab­ited plan­ets. Our earth is called Uran­tia, and it’s num­ber 606 in a plan­e­tary group named Sata­nia, the head­quar­ters of which is called Jerusem. When we die, we’re rein­car­nated from plan­et-to-plan­et, then final­ly to Par­adise, where the Deity lives. There is a lit­tle piece of the Deity in each of us, called a Thought Adjuster.

The Fel­low­ship will tell you that it’s not a cult, but in The Uran­tia Book, the rev­e­la­tor named the Bril­liant Evening Star of Nebadon calls for Uran­tians to replace Chris­tian­ity with a “new cult” that will be the “true reli­gion” of the future.

“The Uran­tia Book itself does not rep­re­sent a destruc­tive cult. But some of its self-pro­claimed prophets lead groups that can be seen as destruc­tive cults.”

So how did this insight­ful book come to be? Well, there are many ori­gin sto­ries, but every­one seems to agree that it’s a “direct-voice” book, mean­ing that it wasn’t writ­ten by a human. Instead, aliens com­mu­ni­cated the text direct­ly to a per­son, or in the words of the Uran­tia Book Fel­low­ship, “numer­ous super­mor­tal personalities…made con­tact through the Thought Adjuster (indwelling spir­it of God) of a par­tic­u­lar human being on our world.”

Accord­ing to William Sadler, the leader of the move­ment, a “Divine Coun­selor” pre­sented the ideas in a lan­guage called Uver­sa, which had to be trans­lated into Salv­ing­ton and then into Sata­nia before it could be trans­lated into Eng­lish and com­mu­ni­cated to a human being.

The Uran­tia Book, a 4.3‑pound, 2,097-page tome, pub­lished first in 1955, is a mod­i­fied Sev­enth-Day Adven­tist text sup­pos­edly com­mu­ni­cated to an anony­mous man in a trance by aliens.

The most accept­ed sto­ry, found in How to Know What to Believe by Harold Sher­man, quot­ed and sum­ma­rized in Mar­tin Gardner’s Uran­tia: The Great Cult Mys­tery, is that around 1911, a man in Sadler’s apart­ment build­ing began hav­ing fits and spells at night. Even­tu­ally he start­ed speak­ing in oth­er voic­es and revealed that he was “a stu­dent vis­i­tor on an obser­va­tion trip here from a far dis­tant plan­et.” William Sadler and his wife, Dr. Lena Sadler, had con­ver­sa­tions with these voic­es for almost 10 years while their adopt­ed daugh­ter, Christy, took notes.

In the 1920s a group of friends (even­tu­ally called the Forum) put togeth­er a list of 4,000 ques­tions for these beings, and lo and behold, a few weeks lat­er the sleep­ing man furi­ously wrote a man­u­script that answered all of them.

Along with lat­er com­mu­ni­ca­tions from the “rev­e­la­tors,” that man­u­script became The Uran­tia Book. These “direct-trance” medi­ums were huge­ly pop­u­lar in the sec­ond half of the 1800s, and appar­ently even the famed psy­chol­o­gist philoso­pher William James was lured by one. (In the 1990s many fol­low­ers of The Uran­tia Book start­ed to hear celes­tial voic­es of their own, though the Foun­da­tion hasn’t acknowl­edged that any are legit­i­mate but, instead has done quite a bit to dis­credit them.)

“Psy­cho­analy­sis, hyp­no­tism, inten­sive com­par­i­son, fail to show that the writ­ten or spo­ken mes­sages of this indi­vid­ual have ori­gin in his own mind,” Sadler wrote in his 1929 book The Mind at Mis­chief: Tricks and Decep­tions of the Sub­con­scious and How to Cope With Them.

The orig­i­nal human transmitter’s name is nev­er revealed, but in Uran­tia: The Great Cult Mys­tery, from which much of the above is found, author Mar­tin Gard­ner (who for many years wrote for Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can and oth­er legit­i­mate pub­li­ca­tions) makes the case that it was Sadler’s broth­er-in-law, Wil­fred Custer Kel­logg. Sadler had been duped by oth­er chan­nel­ers in the past, most notably Ellen White, the founder of Sev­enth-Day Adven­tism, but he believed his broth­er-in-law was the real thing.

The Spell on Mo Siegel

“I thought that was just the goofi­est thing I’d ever heard,” Mo Siegel wrote of The Uran­tia Book in You’ve GOT to Read This Book: 55 Peo­ple Tell the Sto­ry of the Book That Changed Their Life. “After I read it, I was not con­cerned about who had writ­ten it or how it had been writ­ten because it was so pow­er­ful.”

Siegel, who is now the cur­rent pres­i­dent of the Uran­tia Foun­da­tion and hosts a week­ly study group at his house, dis­cov­ered The Uran­tia Book in 1969, the same year he start­ed hik­ing up the Rock­ies for herbs. In fact, the text was a major rea­son he decid­ed to found Celes­tial Sea­son­ings.

“The ideas [in The Uran­tia Book] were the inspi­ra­tion for the uplift­ing quotes we print on the side of our tea box­es and on our teabag tags!”

“After study­ing the teach­ings in The Uran­tia Book, I knew that it would feel self­ish and waste­ful to sim­ply focus on mate­r­ial suc­cess,” he said. “So, as a young man, when I began think­ing of what I could do to make a liv­ing, I imme­di­ately turned to the health food industry…The ideas [in The Uran­tia Book] were the inspi­ra­tion for the uplift­ing quotes we print on the side of our tea box­es and on our teabag tags!”

“Mo and John used it as a guid­ing prin­ci­pal and con­tin­u­ally quot­ed from The Uran­tia Book,” Car­o­line Mac­Dougall, the company’s fifth employ­ee and the cur­rent founder and CEO of Tee­cino told Van Winkle’s. At staff meet­ings they would even use quotes to bol­ster their argu­ments. “It was a guide for mak­ing sure of the moral val­ues that under­lay the com­pany at that time,” she added.

But which morals? The Hate With­in

In The Twen­ty Most-Asked Ques­tions about The Uran­tia Book, Siegel is care­ful to say that “all per­sons are equal in the sight of God” and that “race should become irrel­e­vant.” But the text itself is weighed down with some of the most racist ideas I’ve read in a long time.

For exam­ple, start­ing around 500,000 years ago, six col­ored races appeared on Uran­tia (i.e., earth): red, orange, yel­low, green, blue, and indi­go

“The ear­lier races are some­what supe­rior to the lat­er; the red man stands far above the indi­go — black — race,” says Paper 51 of The Uran­tia Book, and “each suc­ceed­ing evo­lu­tion­ary man­i­fes­ta­tion of a dis­tinct group of mor­tals rep­re­sents vari­a­tion at the expense of the orig­i­nal endow­ment.” Fur­ther­more, “The yel­low race usu­ally enslaves the green, while the blue man [which cor­re­sponds to Cau­casians] sub­dues the indi­go [black].”

“[The Uran­tia Book] was a guide for mak­ing sure of the moral val­ues that under­lay the com­pany at that time.”

On every plan­et through­out every uni­verse, fair-skinned, blue-eyed aliens named Adam and Eve appear to “upstep” the natives. When their prog­eny mate with the accept­able inhab­i­tants of the plan­et, the “infe­rior stocks will be elim­i­nated and there will be one puri­fied race, one lan­guage, and one reli­gion,” as Gard­ner explains it in Uran­tia: The Great Cult Mys­tery.

But before that can hap­pen, Paper 51 of The Uran­tia Book says, “the infe­rior and unfit are large­ly elim­i­nated… it seems that you ought to be able to agree upon the bio­logic dis­fel­low­ship­ing of your more marked­ly unfit, defec­tive, degen­er­ate, and anti­so­cial stocks.”

This process hap­pens on every plan­et when Adam and Eve appear. But on Uran­tia (i.e., earth), it didn’t go accord­ing to plan. Adam and Eve messed up. So, “hav­ing failed to achieve race har­mo­niza­tion by the Adam­ic tech­nique,” Part II: The Local Uni­verse sec­tion of book tells us, “you must now work out your plan­e­tary prob­lem of race improve­ment by oth­er and large­ly human meth­ods of adap­ta­tion and con­trol.”

“Bio­logic ren­o­va­tion of the racial stocks — the selec­tive elim­i­na­tion of infe­rior human strains,” Paper 70 of The Uran­tia Book says, will “tend to erad­i­cate many mor­tal inequal­i­ties.”

In fact, per the text, evil, in the form of ill­ness and dis­ease, exists because “unfit” peo­ples like “Aus­tralian natives and the Bush­men and Pyg­mies of Africa…these mis­er­able rem­nants of the nonso­cial peo­ples of ancient times” haven’t been elim­i­nated. Eugen­ics is the way to cor­rect this error.

“Bio­logic ren­o­va­tion of the racial stocks — the selec­tive elim­i­na­tion of infe­rior human strains,” Paper 70 of the Uran­tia Book says, will “tend to erad­i­cate many mor­tal inequal­i­ties.”

Com­pare that to Hitler’s words in Mein Kampf: “The demand that defec­tive peo­ple be pre­vented from prop­a­gat­ing equal­ly defec­tive off­spring rep­re­sents the most human act of mankind.”

The Urant­ian Phi­los­o­phy

While Hitler didn’t have any­thing to do with writ­ing The Uran­tia Book, William Sadler did. One of the most well-known psy­chi­a­trists of his era, Sadler got his start work­ing for Dr. John H. Kel­logg at the famous Bat­tle Creek San­i­tar­ium, which treat­ed celebri­ties like the Rock­e­fellers, Mont­gomery Ward and even Thomas Edi­son. Kel­logg was a noto­ri­ous eugeni­cist and found­ed the Race Bet­ter­ment Foun­da­tion, whose goals were “to call atten­tion to the dan­gers which threat­en the race.”

Influ­enced by Kellogg’s ideas, Sadler pub­lished three eugeni­cist books: Long Heads and Round Heads; or, What’s the Mat­ter With Ger­many (1918), Racial Deca­dence: An Exam­i­na­tion of the Caus­es of Racial Degen­er­a­tion in the Unit­ed States (1922) and The Truth About Hered­ity (1927). The Uran­tia Book echoes the ideas pre­sented in these books, and in some cas­es, it repro­duces the text word for word.

William Sadler, via Wiki­Com­mons

In Racial Deca­dence, Sadler express­es, among oth­er notions, that the “unfit” should be ster­il­ized, that “moral­ity is hered­ity” and that “some races are more moral than oth­ers.” And in The Truth About Hered­ity, Sadler writes that mar­riage between races “is to be deplored when one of the races would be infe­rior as com­pared with the oth­er, which hap­pens to be the bio­logic fact as con­cerns the White and Negro races in this coun­try.”

His wife, Lena Sadler, who was John Kellogg’s niece, had equal­ly damn­ing words. In a paper called “Is the Abnor­mal to Become Nor­mal” deliv­ered to the Illi­nois Fed­er­a­tion of Women’s Clubs in 1932 and pub­lished in a col­lec­tion called A Decade of Progress in Eugen­ics, she calls for a manda­tory ster­il­iza­tion law and says that if we do not prac­tice good eugen­ics, “ulti­mately this mon­ster will grow to such hideous pro­por­tions that it will strike us down.”

If we prac­tice eugen­ics cor­rectly, she con­tin­ues, we’ll elim­i­nate “at least 90 per­cent of crime, insan­ity, fee­ble­mind­ed­ness, moron­ism, and abnor­mal sex­u­al­ity, not to men­tion many oth­er forms of defec­tive­ness and degen­er­acy. Thus, with­in a cen­tury, our asy­lums, pris­ons, and state hos­pi­tals would be large­ly emp­tied of their present vic­tims of human woe and mis­ery.”

Lena Sadler’s speech was writ­ten near­ly 100 years ago. Maybe things have changed for such mod­ern-day fol­low­ers of The Uran­tia Book as Mo Siegel?

Unfor­tu­nately not.

“Ill­ness and dis­ease result from evil and cause suf­fer­ing,” Siegel writes in “The Twen­ty Most-Asked Ques­tions” on The Uran­tia Book Fel­low­ship web­site. “Unfor­tu­nately, sev­eral fac­tors hin­der progress toward the devel­op­ment of a dis­ease-free world. The laws of genet­ics are immutable, and form the phys­i­cal cor­ner­stone of evo­lu­tion. At the present time mankind los­es about as much progress as it makes by ignor­ing eugen­ics.”

Lit­tle infor­ma­tion on the panel’s cur­rent activ­i­ties could be found, and repeat­ed attempts to reach Mo Siegel and the Uran­tia Foun­da­tion were met with resound­ing silence.

The Fel­low­ship is putting its mon­ey where its mouth is, too. In a 2010 email sent to “read­ers with advanced infor­ma­tion and for­ward look­ing per­spec­tives that are not suit­ed for being post­ed on the web­site,” a fol­lower named Mar­tin Green­hut writes that the trustees have con­vened a pan­el on eugen­ics. He names all of the pan­el mem­bers, the most strik­ing of which is Ker­mit Ander­son, who at that time was the genet­ic screen­ing pro­gram direc­tor at Kaiser Per­ma­nente in Cal­i­for­nia and the author of much genet­ics research.

Lit­tle infor­ma­tion on the panel’s cur­rent activ­i­ties could be found, and repeat­ed attempts to reach both Mo Siegel and the Uran­tia Foun­da­tion were met with resound­ing silence.

Celes­tial Sea­son­ings Today

So where does this leave Celes­tial Sea­son­ings? The com­pany also declined to com­ment for this piece, which means we don’t know if The Uran­tia Book still guides their busi­ness deci­sions. Most like­ly not: Siegel retired in 2002, and John Hay, the oth­er Uran­tia Book believ­er and co-founder, left even ear­lier, in 1985, pushed out by Siegel’s desire to become a big com­pany “like Coca-Cola,” Car­o­line Mac­Dougall recalled. (Hay went on to be the CEO of Rudi’s Organ­ic Bak­ery, White­Dove Herbals, and more than a few tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies.)

Siegel got his wish: Since 2000, the com­pany has been part of Hain Celes­tial Group, a mas­sive multi­bil­lion-dol­lar cor­po­ra­tion that also includes Arrow­head Mills, MaraNatha, Spec­trum Nation­als and Jason. Celes­tial pret­ty much invent­ed an entire cat­e­gory that we now take for grant­ed: nat­ural health foods. And they do it well. How­Good, which rates pack­aged food prod­ucts, told me that Celestial’s prod­ucts receive a “great” rat­ing, which means that in terms of social and envi­ron­men­tal impact, accord­ing to How­Good, they’re 85 per­cent bet­ter than all of the food pro­duced in the Unit­ed States.

Like any big com­pany, though, over the years they’ve faced a few class-action law­suits. The largest one is still ongo­ing: It accus­es Celes­tial of false­ly label­ing prod­ucts includ­ing Sleep­y­time Tea as “all nat­ural” even though they alleged­ly con­tain pes­ti­cides. Propachlor, which is said to be in Sleep­y­time Kids Good­night Grape Tea, is “a Bad Actor Chem­i­cal (mean­ing it is tox­ic, car­cino­genic, or a known repro­duc­tive or devel­op­men­tal tox­i­cant), a car­cino­gen and a devel­op­men­tal or repro­duc­tive tox­in.” Hain has coun­tered that it had teas test­ed by the Nation­al Food Lab, but there’s been some con­tro­versy about whether or not it is impar­tial, as the Nation­al Food Lab lists Celes­tial as one of its clients on its web­site, say­ing, “some­where along the line, we have had a hand in their suc­cess.”

That may be. And the same could be said for The Uran­tia Book and its racist celes­tial and not-so-celes­tial cre­ators.

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