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39.
MESSIAH'S WORLD CRUSADE: UNIVERSAL COMMUNICATOR.
Np. (San Francisco), nd. (1969). Newspaper format, printed in different colour inks. 16pp. One-shot (?) newspaper produced by the Messiah's World Crusade, a commune based on Oak Street in San Francisco whose leader, UFO watcher Allen Michael (aka Allen Noonan), claimed to have received his Cosmic Initiation in 1947. In the twenty years since, the paper states, he "has been working, writing, and finally creating a dramatic demonstration of the New Age Life" (though at the time of publication he was in jail, for the third time, following a pot and peyote bust).
After an alleged encounter in 1954 in the Mojave Desert with extraterrestials, who assigned his name change from Noonan to Michael, he established a communal experiment in Long Beach in the 1960s and opened a coffeehouse, The House of Meditation, where (he claimed) Jackson Browne got his start. Sometime in 1967, the story goes, telepathic guidance led him to San Francisco, where he started the One World Family commune and married commune member, Dian.
The paper's articles include Dian's account of "Living in the Messiah's World Commune"; "New Age Cosmology"; "What To Do About The Draft" ("become a Universal Soldier with the Messiah's World Crusade…."); "Music's True Purpose"; "Who Are The Hippies?"; "Why Vegetarianism?"; "Cosmic Cookery"; and a text by "the Cosmic Messiah Allen" himself ("Capitalism is bringing forth the ideas of free enterprise and the Communists, the ideas of the Communal State. The synthesis of these two polarities will herald the New Age.") The centrespread prints 'The New Covenant Bill of Rights', representing the foundation of the group's thinking and their guidelines for living.
Michael helped fund his commune from health food restaurants in the Bay Area, such as The Mustard Seed on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and The Here and Now on Haight Street, staffed by unpaid commune members. Much like Father Yod's community in Los Angeles, which also ran its own vegetarian restaurant (item #195), the commune gave rise to its own bands, and Sundays at The Mustard Seed (as reported in the Berkeley Barb, December 19, 1969) saw the Angels Own Social Grace and Blessed Deliverance from the Demons of Dualism Double Band, and Chorus of the Messiah's World Crusade, perform songs such as "The Flying Saucer Cloud", "The Ballad of Brotherhood", and "Warn Warn Zoo Zoo".
Faint central horizontal crease; short tear to lower right corner of front cover; o/w Very Good plus.
An obscure publication from the outer edges of the spiritual commune subculture, to be filed somewhere between The Process Church and The Source.
