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  #11  
Old October 1, 2021, 09:57 PM
Dien Rice Dien Rice is offline
Onwards and upwards!
 
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 3,358
Default The time I (willingly) stayed at a cult-run hotel...

Quote:
Originally Posted by GordonJ View Post
Thanks Glenn, my head is still spinning from our chat, you sent me down many rabbit holes.

In my very first electronic book, circa 1985, I wrote about starting a CULT, or a club if cult offended one...

And I wrote about getting rich via starting your own ASSOCIATION. I thought about starting two of them way back in the 1970s, one for NON PGA golf instructors and one for RESUME writers. Alas, I did NOT.

But in your post is the GOLDEN TICKET to recurring passive income, make them RENEW every year. I had that idea for the SQ1 Trainers too, but that isn't one I want to pursue.
Gordon's "How to start a cult for fun and profit" was what first brought Gordon's attention to me, back in the late 1990s...

I've had a long fascination with cults...

Let me go off on a tangent... About the time I stayed in a cult-run hotel...

In 1994, I was a post-grad student. I attended a conference at Drexel University, in Philadelphia...

The conference had the exciting title of "The 4th Drexel Symposium on Quantum Nonintegrability"... (I just looked it up.)

(My initial background is as a quantum physicist...)

When you attend conferences like this, you organize your own accommodation. However, they usually provide you with a list of suggested places you can stay, which are near the conference venue...

One of the options was "The Divine Tracy Hotel"...

I read about it... It was pretty weird...

It was run by a group called "The International Peace Mission Movement."

That was an organization started in the 1920s, by a man who called himself "Father Divine"...

Father Divine was an African-American man, but his following was mixed race, where people of different races lived together in harmony... Quite revolutionary for the time.

His story was that Jesus was the "Son," but now Father Divine claimed that he was God the "Father" who had come down to earth...

He forbade his followers from marrying. However, at age 65, he married a white Canadian woman who was 21 years old, or 44 years younger than him... However, they apparently never consummated their marriage... She became known as "Mother Divine"...

Being much younger than him, she outlived him by quite a long time. She was still alive when I stayed at the Divine Tracy Hotel... Rumor was that she could sometimes be seen hanging around the hotel...

There's also a Jim Jones connection. It's said that Jim Jones was inspired by Father Divine's multi-racial following, and incorporated this into his own cult...

After Father Divine died, Jim Jones also tried to take over the International Peace Mission Movement... However, Mother Divine fought him tooth and nail to prevent that from happening...

The Divine Tracy Hotel itself was quite strange...

Men and women had to stay on separate floors!

Also, women were not allowed to wear trousers at all... they had to wear (long) skirts...

It was also very cheap...

So... of course, I stayed there!

Apart from having no women on my floor, it was really just like a regular hotel...

Oh, with their own holy literature in the drawer of the bedside table...

(I browsed through that literature at the time... I think I remember reading that Father Divine had predicted that the USA and Australia would merge as nations...)

Just thought I'd share the story!

The Divine Tracy Hotel is no more... it was later sold in 2006...

Mother Divine has also since passed away (in 2017, at the age of 91)...

Because Father Divine's followers were not allowed to marry, that means there were no kids... And by the time I stayed in the hotel, it was really a cult of old ladies...

The International Peace Mission Movement was reported to once have had millions of followers... But now, it's reported to have dwindled down to around 12 to 15 members...

Best wishes,

Dien

Last edited by Dien Rice : October 1, 2021 at 10:07 PM.
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