Word: barham
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...dabble in spiritualism at her retreat north of San Diego. Now Kübler-Ross, who refers to herself as an "immortal visionary and modern cartographer of the River Styx," has apparently lost any remaining credibility with her professional colleagues. The reason: her close association with Jay Barham, who claims to be a psychic and conducts séances that include sexual intercourse between participants and "entities" from the spirit world...
...Barham, 50, is a former sharecropper and aircraft worker who founded the Church of the Facet of Divinity four years ago. In his first meeting with Kübler-Ross, he introduced her to her own personal entity, Salem. Greatly impressed, she talked her husband into buying 42 acres of land just across a lake from a nine-acre ranch used by Barham and his wife Martha. Kübler-Ross called her property Shanti-Nilaya ("Home of Peace" in Sanskrit) and made it a center for workshops on death and dying. One result, says a defector from the center...
...Barham conducts group sessions where, he says, spirit entities materialize by cloning themselves from cells of his body. The entities are unusually interested in sex, sometimes pairing off the living participants for fondling or mutual masturbation. In private sessions women are selected for sexual intercourse with an entity. Participants in the sessions, many well-educated, if gullible, middle-class professionals, have had occasional doubts about the entities. One woman says her entity burped during sex, raising the question of whether spirits can have stomach gas. Four women in the group developed the same vaginal infection after visiting an entity...
...major complaint was brought up by the men: Why weren't female entities visiting them? Females were then given a role. Barham recruited them to engage in sexual relations by acting as "channels" for entities. Said one: "Jay told me if I practiced hard enough the entities would really come through me. He had me thinking it wasn't really me out there." Barham also taught participants that they had all lived during the time of Jesus and had been among his disciples. Says one woman, recruited as a channel: "He appealed to my ego and really hooked...
Edmund Wilson, who wrote those lines almost two decades before his death last year at 77, obeyed the bell to the end. The ten essays and reviews collected in The Devils and Canon Barham are the last turns in what he once called the All-Star Literary Vaudeville...