UMarmot(SCUA)

Michael Metelica, ca.1973

In June 1968, a teenaged high school dropout Michael Metelica (1950-2003) returned from a disillusioning sojourn in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district and moved into a tree house in Leyden, Mass. Looking to create a new way of living, he and seven friends began living as a commune and rapidly began to attract fellow travelers.

In rural Leyden, this growing throng of “hippies” was met with suspicion and in some cases hostility, including the torching of the treehouse in the late summer 1968. Although the commune had originally planned to limit its size, it numbered 21 by the winter of 1968-69 and its numbers continued to rise through moves to Charlemont, Guilford (Vt.), and Heath, before settling in Warwick in the spring of 1970. In ensuing years the Brotherhood of the Spirit, as they called themselves, added to the original 25 acres in Warwick with the acquisition of a house in Northfield (signed over by Beth Bachman), 80 acres in Gill, and a number of commercial and residential buildings in Turners Falls. With almost 350 members at its peak, the Brotherhood was the largest commune in the eastern states.

The Brotherhood described themselves as an “unintentional community,” a group of individuals who gathered without hierarchy and without leadership. Metelica, however, was generally acknowledged to be the center. Early on, the members adopted a distinctive philosophy centered on four rules — no drugs, no alcohol, no violence, and no promiscuity — and they added an equally distinctive spiritual dimension in 1970 when Metelica was introduced to a local trance medium Elwood Babbitt (1922- ). As a channel for the higher spirits of Vishnu, Kishamet, and Christ (among many others), Babbitt became the group’s spiritual adviser, helping Metelica to explore his own psychic ability. In turn, late in the summer 1970, Metelica began to channel, claiming to be the reincarnation of St. Peter and Robert E. Lee. Several members of the Brotherhood credited him with helping initiate a “spiritual renaissance” and with revealing a “purpose in life.”

The Leyden Commune, 1968

But local opposition to the commune, a constant from the Leyden days, reached a crisis point in 1972, in part due to Metelica’s behavior. The revelation that many members had signed up for welfare checks raised local ire and the fact that Metelica had required members to sign over their assets while he could be seen driving expensive cars added fuel to the generic mistrust of their esoteric beliefs. Metelica’s increasingly erratic behavior and drug and alcohol abuse became points of further contention, both between the Brotherhood and the local community and within the Brotherhood.

Changing his last name to Rapunzel, Metelica responded to the fray by dissolving the Brotherhood and forming in its stead a for-profit corporation that he called Metelica’s Aquarian Concept, requiring members to apply for admission and insisting they take jobs and sign over their income. The commune’s rock band (Spirit in Flesh, founded in 1970) was later rechristened Rapunzel shortly thereafter, and the members of the commune embarked on a diverse series of commercial enterprises, including a highly successful greeting card company, a music store, bus service, vegetarian restaurant, and pizza shop.

The commune was reorganized again as the Renaissance Church in 1974, and following a turbulent decade in which supporters and opponents of Metelica repeatedly clashed and numbers dwindled, Metelica was disassociated from the community in 1988. The Renaissance Community continues today on the 80 acres of land they acquired in Gill, concentrating on self-reliant organic farming.

Beth Hapgood and Elwood Babbitt

Seemingly poised near the center of several movements for social change and spiritual growth, Beth Hapgood (1918- ) was the daughter of the diplomat and writer Norman Hapgood and his wife Elizabeth Reynolds. Educated at Wellesley College, she moved several times with her husband and growing family before settling at 88 Main Street in Northfield, Mass., in 1952. In 1966, Beth met Michael Metelica shortly before his journey to the west coast, and she was introduced to Elwood Babbitt later that year through her cousin, the writer Charles Hapgood. Beth remained close to both Metelica and Babbitt until their deaths.

The Hapgood Collection includes approximately 30 linear feet of materials relating to Beth Hapgood’s life and interests. In addition to a rich archive relating to the Brotherhood of the Spirit and Renaissance Church, the collection includes valuable information on Babbitt, Hapgood’s interests in the Arcane School, graphology, and some material on the Hapgood family.

• View images from the Daniel A. Brown Collection
• Read Daniel A. Brown’s History of the Brotherhood of the Spirit and Renaissance Community.

Charles Hutchins Hapgood (1904-1982) was working toward a doctorate in French history at Harvard when the Great Depression derailed his plans. After a succession of jobs and wartime service, however, Hapgood returned to the academy, teaching history at Springfield College and Keene State for over three decades. He is best remembered as an advocate of several scientifically heterodox ideas, arguing that the earth’s outer crust shifts on geological time scales, displacing continents, and that the earth’s rotational axis has shifted numerous times in geological history. A long time friend and supporter of the medium Elwood Babbitt, he was author of several books, including The Earth’s Shifting Crust (1958), Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (1966), The Path of the Pole (1970), and Voices of Spirit : Through the Psychic Experience of Elwood Babbitt (1975). Hapgood died in Fitchburg, Mass., on Dec. 21, 1982, after being struck by an automobile.

The Hapgood Papers contain a small grouping of correspondence and writings that offer a glimpse into some of Charles Hapgood’s late-career interests. Although the correspondence is relatively slight, relating primarily to publications in the last two or three years of his life, the collection is a rich resource for the lectures and writings of Elwood Babbitt.

Elwood Babbitt, 1970
Photo by Gary Cohen

Clairvoyant from his youth, Elwood Babbitt developed his psychic abilities at the Edgar Cayce Institute, and by the mid-1960s, was well known in Western Massachusetts through his readings and lectures, often opening his home to other seekers. Charles Hapgood, a professor at Keene State College, worked closely with Babbitt studying the physical effects of the medium’s trance lectures, and by 1967, he began to take on the painstaking process of transcribing and copying them. With communications purporting to come from Jesus, Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, and the Hindu god Vishnu, among others, these lectures formed the basis for several books by Hapgood and Babbitt, including Voices of Spirit (1975) and Talks with Christ (1981). Babbitt ultimately established a non-profit, alternative school, the Opie Mountain Citadel, which was essentially run out of Babbitt’s home in Northfield.

The collection consists of proofs of publications, lectures, some correspondence, film reels, and transcripts of spiritual communications for which Babbitt was the medium.

Beth Hapgood and members of
the Brotherhood, ca.1969

Daughter of a writer and diplomat, and graduate of Wellesley College, Beth Hapgood has been a spiritual seeker for much of her life. Her interests have led her to become an expert in graphology, a student in the Arcane School, an instructor at Greenfield Community College, and a lecturer on a variety of topics in spiritual growth. Beginning in the mid-1960s, Hapgood befriended Michael Metelica, the central figure in the Brotherhood of the Spirit (the largest commune in the eastern states during the early 1970s) as well as Elwood Babbitt, a trance medium, and remained close to both until their deaths.

The Hapgood Papers contain a wealth of material relating to the Brotherhood of the Spirit and the Renaissance Community, Metelica, Babbitt, and other of Hapgood’s varied interests, as well as 4.25 linear feet of material relating to the Hapgood family.