[ISL] On the apocalyptic cult that held De Courcy Island Farm, British Columbia

[rfmcdonald]

The National Post's Tristan Hopper describes how De Courcy Island, one of British Columbia's Gulf Islands, hosted an apocalyptic cult back in the 1920s.

The real estate ad cheerfully describes the De Courcy Island Farm as a virtual paradise of forest, beach, fertile soil and a “historic workshop and barn.”

“This is an exceedingly rare opportunity to acquire a property of this size and nature within the Gulf Islands,” reads a description for the $2.2 million parcel, which occupies a significant portion of De Courcy Island, a small Gulf Island exactly due west of Richmond, B.C.

Omitted, however, is that this charming 42 hectare property was once a heavily armed “Ark of Refuge” where the several dozen followers of a self-proclaimed prophet named Brother XII would survive the destruction of the world.

[. . .]

“California and B.C. are hotbeds of off-beat religions,” wrote the historian Pierre Berton in the late 1970s. “Of these, there are none so kooky, none so bizarre, none so preposterous — none so downright evil — as the Aquarian Foundation.”

Brother XII had brought his Aquarian Foundation to coastal B.C. in the mid-1920s to sow the seeds of what he dreamed would become a superior new race of humanity. Once civilization was in tatters, their commune would “serve as a training ground for those selected for work of ‘Restoration,’ that is, the coming New Age.”