Word: psychiana
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History is sprinkled with the relics of religious sects that flamed and flickered out - brief candles of faith that were lighted by a charismatic leader and died within a short time after he died. Where are the Novatianists, the Rappites, the Robinsonian Psychiana devotees of yesteryear...
...began to regret it. Author Marcus Bach, writer on offbeat religions (Strange Altars), was treating his subjects so sympathetically that sect-shopping Century readers were writing in to ask how they could get in touch. Managing Editor Theodore A. Gill, a staunch Presbyterian, grimly published all the articles-on Psychiana, Jehovah's Witnesses, Unity and Baha'i; then he tore off an editorial taking the sects apart...
...proliferation of the sects," he writes in the current issue, "[is a] judgment upon us all. But accepting the judgment has never necessarily entailed embracing the instrument of judgment." Psychiana, a mail-order course in positive thinking, showed how "pathetic an expedient" it was when it collapsed completely upon Founder Frank B. Robinson's death in 1948. As for the doctrine of the ubiquitous Witnesses: "What response but horror can there be to this conversion of profound myth to lurid legend"-the bloody Armageddon which they eagerly anticipate between 1970 and 1980. The eclecticism of Unity (a self-help...
Moscow, seat of the University of Idaho, population 5,000, was a second-class post-office town when Doc Robinson settled there. It has jumped to first class, Psychiana having sent out more & more mail-$14,852.63 worth last year. A beginners' Psychiana course of 20 lessons costs $20, includes an examination and the right to ask Doc Robinson for personal advice. (On a typical day last week he voiced 387 replies by dictaphone, which three stenographers took down.) Advanced courses of ten and 40 lessons cost respectively $10 and $50. Sending these out keeps 60 Psychiana employes busy...
...same thing: make people think." A top-notch salesman. Doc Robinson has never forgotten how, in his behind-the-counter drugstore days, he once sold five one-gallon jugs of mineral oil to a man who came in to buy a pint. Besides its own building in Moscow, Psychiana owns three drugstores, a daily paper, the News-Review. An accomplished organist, the founder has an 800-pipe Wurlitzer in his big Moscow home, invariably includes organ solos (preferably Brahms) in his infrequent lectures. Though in those lectures Doc Robinson is inclined to blast the Christian churches, thus annoying many...