It has to be kitsch, at best, or it has to be kind of dangerous.”Fortunately, unlike so many of these groups that formed in the wake of the ’60s and disbanded without a trace, the Source Family had a dedicated Keeper of the Records, Isis Aquarian, who several years ago decided it was time to “come out of the Source closet.” Packaged with a CD of music and interviews, “The Source” is an intimate history narrated by Isis and peppered with the recollections of Electricity, Djin, Sunflower, Damian, Lotus, Goddess and many other exotically named participants.For Wille, the goal was not to put a rosy spin on the tale but to include diverse viewpoints, which she felt was essential to the Source’s historical relevance. “There are voices of dissent in this book, and to me that’s what makes it a very rich document of the time period. You have this deeply personal voice guiding you through it, but [Isis] has the openness to allow people with different opinions to express themselves.”Sex, drugs, and. you knowMost Family members came in through the restaurant, grooving on the rainbow-hued salads and the beautiful people and eventually joining in the 4 a.m. meditations (enhanced by one toke of “sacred herb”) and the daily lectures on everything from Sikhism to Freemasonry to Buckminster Fuller.

Father Yod’s primary message was the idea that the individual can attain God consciousness in this lifetime. For many members, he was both Father and God.”Part of the beauty of Father Yod’s teachings,” Wille said, “was that he did take the prevalent energies of the era — marijuana, sex and rock ‘n’ roll — and he made them sacred. He taught his children to find the sacredness in everything, and I’m not saying that they were always thinking sacred thoughts, but that was the aim: to think of every human being and the food on your plate as sacred. And that’s honorable to me.”Davis, while acknowledging his “kundalini opportunism,” categorized Father Yod as what the religious scholar Robert Ellwood calls a magus — “a Shaman-in-civilization.” Ellwood, speaking from his home in Ojai, noted that this was “an important part of the whole ’60s approach — the idea that the best kind of spirituality is communicated through an individual. Institutional religion is more about the organization, but real spirituality comes from the individual.”Isis, a former beauty queen who left a glamorous life and a fiancé to join the Family in her late 20s, remains a devoted disciple. Although she knew Father Yod when he was still called Jim Baker, she accepted him immediately in his new incarnation and became his oldest wife.

“I knew instantly that he was my spiritual guru,” she recalled “I never looked back And this is something that each one of us felt. There was never any question that this was our destiny.”The sect’s Hollywood beginnings make for a juicy read, with Father Yod at the wheel of a white Rolls-Royce and Julie Christie, Warren Beatty and John Lennon making regular appearances at the restaurant. The so-called Mother House was like a hippie Playboy mansion, where friends came to Sunday socials to listen to Father speak. The much smaller Father House was also a social hub, receiving visitors from the Seattle commune Love Israel.Thanks to the rigorous sex practices, 51 Source Family babies were born — all delivered naturally at home, in keeping with their distrust of traditional medicine. In the end, this would lead to the group’s leaving Los Angeles, when a baby severely infected with staph had to be taken to the hospital, alerting the authorities to perhaps other unorthodox goings on in the three-bedroom house where more than 100 slept, many in stacked pods in the yard.