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> *The "I AM" Experiences of Mr. G. W. Ballard*, by Gerald B. Bryan, Los Angeles, 1936. The receipts, filed three years before Guy died and eight years before *U.S. v. Ballard*. Currently on archive.org under shelfmark `iamexperiencesof00brya`. BYU's Harold B. Lee Library holds the physical copy.
> Bryan did the work no court was going to do. He read the books and compared them to the source material. The federal prosecutors in 1942 worked from his analysis without crediting him. — from the file
Bryan was a Los Angeles freethinker working in the skeptical tradition that ran through the *Truth Seeker* and the city's small constellation of anti-occult writers. He bought the Saint Germain Press volumes in the mid-thirties and sat down with Baird Spalding's *Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East* open beside them. The plagiarism mapping was straightforward. *Unveiled Mysteries* tracks Spalding's narrative architecture closely enough that the sequence of events does not survive comparison. *The Magic Presence* extends the same scaffolding. The *I AM Discourses* graft a New Thought affirmation grammar onto Theosophical taxonomy and serve them under a fabricated channel.
Followers did not read Bryan. Followers had already chosen. The book did its real work later — quietly, on the desks of the Justice Department attorneys preparing the 1942 indictment, who needed a narrative for how a religious movement of three hundred thousand could be charged with fraud and worked their way through Bryan's footnotes to get one.
The Supreme Court ruling that ultimately spared the Activity rendered Bryan's analysis legally irrelevant. Doctrinally it has never been refuted. The Saint Germain Press has spent ninety years pretending it does not exist.
The book is free. Most of what gets said about the I AM by its critics is downstream of Bryan and most of what gets said about it by its defenders ignores him. The 1936 Los Angeles imprint is the source code of the debunking and the source code of the prosecution at once.
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No connections recorded.
— C., FROM THE FILES