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The grounds of the farm were also once peppered with buried treasure.

“California and B.C. are hotbeds of off-beat religions,” wrote the historian Pierre Berton in the late 1970s. “Of these, there are none so kooky, none so bizarre, none so preposterous — none so downright evil — as the Aquarian Foundation.”

Brother XII had brought his Aquarian Foundation to coastal B.C. in the mid-1920s to sow the seeds of what he dreamed would become a superior new race of humanity. Once civilization was in tatters, their commune would “serve as a training ground for those selected for work of ‘Restoration,’ that is, the coming New Age.”

Instead, as with so many other cult communes, it devolved into a shadowy enclave of greed, brutality and, by some accounts, attempted murder.

Brother XII, born Edward Wilson, was an English mariner from Birmingham. Very little is known of his early life, aside from a seafaring restlessless that brought him around the world. For instance, he married a New Zealand woman in 1902 and had two children with her, but abruptly abandoned the family 10 years later during a stay in Canada.

During a visit to France in 1925, Wilson had a vision of a glowing Egyptian ankh, the hieroglyphic symbol signifying life. He felt then that he was in contact with what occultists of the era called “the Great White Lodge,” a panel of 12 mystical masters who guided the human race.

“Since Wilson was the chela or disciple of this twelfth Master, he took the name Brother XII,” writes John Oliphant, author of the most definitive book on Brother XII.