Father Yod Gets Our Nod

File under: The Siddhi of PR

Folks came together in Los Angeles recently to celebrate the publication of a book about the "Source," the hippified commune which constellated around one Father Yod. He was the apparently benign leader of a polyamorous cult full of hot, sexy people who used the heavenly herb as a sacrament. That's three marks on the right side of the pros/cons column in our book:

Imagine your fantasy commune, the one you'd find only in the movies, where everyone is young and beautiful; the clothes are fabulous; the leader benign; and home is a mansion in the Hollywood Hills. Chances are it probably looks a lot like the Source Family, whose 140 members "dropped out" right in the middle of Los Angeles. Led by a bearded, hunky, 6-foot-3 former war hero who called himself Father Yod and, later, YaHoWha, this vibrant group of men and women embarked on a wild social experiment, turning all their material possessions over to the group and supporting themselves serving gourmet vegetarian cuisine at their popular Sunset Strip restaurant, the Source. Living communally in a Los Feliz mansion owned by the Chandler family (former owners of this newspaper) and then in a house built by Catherine Deneuve, many of them formed polyamorous relationships; not surprisingly, the most extreme example was Father Yod, who took 14 "spiritual wives."

Sigh! We missed out on that one as it was about a decade before our time. But chances are we would have been spit out like a worm in a bite of an apple had we set about to remove the occluding ideas about self-realization which almost certainly condensed around the self-proclaimed deity who ran the show.