Conflicting Spiritual Path Of Aaron C. Donahue

By James Donahue

Among the more complex parts of the story of Aaron C. Donahue is the strange spiritual path he appeared to be following during the years we spent with him.

He began as a devoted follower of the late Aleister Crowley, became the Hopi “purifier” or Panaha, established Luciferianism promoting the idea that Lucifer was really an alien and the progenitor of the human race, then declared himself to be the long awaited Mahdi and spiritual messiah of all Islam.

In the midst of all of this, Aaron proclaimed the 72 Goetia Spirits as the leader of the world's legions of demonic forces, said the demons were really the good guys while the angels were the true evil force in the spirit world.

Putting this part of the story into words is not to be an easy task. There were many twists and turns that we believe began when Aaron joined the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), a secret society once led and given its prominence by Crowley during the early part of the Twentieth Century.

The way Aaron told the story is that he joined a major OTO temple in San Francisco, and so astounded the members he was allowed to conduct a high mass that broke out into a sexual orgy with the blue energy or orgone swirling around in the room like fog. He said he did not know how he knew the words, but they flowed from his lips as if he had been there many times before. The mass was attended by many high dignitaries including the late Robert Anton Wilson, who shook Aaron's hand at the door.

Aaron also told of going through extreme initiations, including being buried alive, and being able to recite secret and guarded statements known only to the high priests within the O.T.O., thus proving to the members that he was the long awaited new leader of that organization, as foretold by Crowley. It was said that Crowley prepared that organization to receive and give assistance to the one who was to come later and assist mankind in surviving an apocalyptic future event. Aaron made it be known that he was this successor to Crowley, sent to Earth to be the “key” for this amazing transition.

We later learned that Aaron did, indeed, join the O.T.O when he lived in the San Francisco area, but he only got to first degree before drifting away and having nothing more to do with it. Aaron's story was that he found the organization so polluted with drug addicts and fanatics that the group was incapable of assisting him in his work. He vowed, at least to us, that he would come back and destroy that organization.

When Aaron was kicked out of his home in California, and his wife filed for divorce, he joined us in Arizona at a time when my wife and I were keenly interested in learning the Hopi, Navajo and Apachi cultures. We had most strangely met a Hope two-horned priest named Ted Kootsawatewa, who not only befriended us, but agreed to show and teach us many things about the Hopi people that few Americans have ever seen.

Ted came to our home in Sedona one day just after Aaron arrived, and something interesting happened during that encounter. We believe it involved Aaron's ability as a black magician to “get into” people's heads and manipulate their thoughts. Whatever it was, Ted was overwhelmed by Aaron, and we think he may have been convinced that Aaron was the long awaited Pahana, or wandering white brother who was to return to the tribe in the last days as a purifier.

There were several synchronicities that occurred that led Ted, Doris and I to think that Aaron might, indeed, be this Pahana, or at least he was fulfilling a prophecy about such a person returning among the Hopi in what is termed “the last days.”

When we rented a small cabin on a bluff overlooking Sedona, we noticed the emblem of the Sun Tribe painted over the door. Ted was a member of the Sun Tribe. We met Ted during a festival in which the locals of Sedona were celebrating the Summer Solstice, and learned that Ted was camping that very day on a crest right over the place where we lived. When Ted left town for a week on a spiritual trip to Peru, he left behind a carved stone image of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, and a second carving depicting a plate with four ears of corn on it. Doris placed them on a hearth before a wood burning stove in the living room, and the way they were positioned was depicted by Aaron as an altar. Quetzalcoatl also was a white man who came among the Aztecs, taught them many things, and then promised to return at the end of days.

In the weeds growing along the road directly in front of where we lived, there appeared that summer a stand of several stalks of maze, or purple corn, which is a main staple of the Hopi. No one could explain how that happened.

Aaron claimed that when he and Ted met together in the kitchen, Ted's eyes lit up as if he observed something that shocked him. Aaron said Ted saw a bright light come from Aaron. Ted never spoke of it.

Before we moved to Sedona, we lived for a while with a Navajo medicine man and his wife near Red Rock. It was a remote area. Aaron and a friend from California made a trip to the area and attempted to find us, but got lost. They went to a house to ask directions, and were ordered away at the point of a shotgun. They camped that night on a bluff where they found an ancient pot. Aaron told of taking out his anger by smashing the pot. In my research I came upon a Hopi prophecy that told how the Pahana, if improperly received, would first smash a pot.

Ted invited us to a dance on the Second Mesa. It was being held in the town square, I believe in old Shungopavi. The dances were a public event and popular with tourists so there were bleachers set up around the square for people to sit on. The dancers were dressed in the garb of the colorful Kachinas, and the show was just beginning as we arrived. We found a place at the end of the square on one of the bleachers, but Aaron sat on a large rock on one end of the public seating area. A few minutes later a woman, an American tourist, approached Aaron and complained that he took her seat. She asked him to get up and let her have it. Aaron got up, told us we were leaving, and led us away from the dance. As we descended the bluff toward where our car was parked, he kicked his foot high in the air and performed what appeared to be a little ritual. He said he was calling forth the red cloaked entity Huk-tuk-tu. I also knew of an old prophecy that the Pahana would give the people a second chance, and if they failed this test, he would kick a shoe.

On the return trip that day, Aaron told us that he planned to give the Hopi access to the second half of a fabled broken stone tablet, thus fulfilling the rest of the Pahana prophecy. He said he had remote viewed this tablet and knew that it was buried with a Hopi elder on the reservation. He said he also knew the message inscribed on it. All of this convinced me that Aaron was, indeed, the fulfillment of that old prophecy. I went to a newspaper job I then held in Show Low, Arizona and filed a sensational story about how the Hopi rejected the Pahana. The paper carried it on the front page, and it really angered the Hopi.

We believed for years that this story was correct. It was only later that it occurred to me that if I could find out about these Hopi prophecies through intense research, Aaron also could find it. Also a friend suggested that by using remote viewing to find the missing half of the tablet, he could thus create a situation where he could become the Pahana, when in reality, he may not have been this person at all. By fulfilling this prophecy the way he did, he made it impossible for the real Pahana to make an arrival.

Aaron learned his remote viewing skills from Ed Dames, who was part of a once secret military experiment in psychic functioning. He spent the next year or two working to enhance his skills and setting a goal of finding a way to acquire great wealth, either by finding lost treasure or foreseeing lottery numbers before they were drawn. He got Doris and me involved in this work, and later our daughter Jennifer and her new husband, Chad Sharp, joined us at Show Low. After this, Aaron decided we needed to return to Michigan and carry on the work there. He went first and found us a place to live at Port Hope, only two miles from the place where I grew up.

Doris and I settled in Bad Axe, where I took a job on a county weekly newspaper, and Doris found work at the local hospital, where she worked as a medical technologist. We rented an apartment over one of the downtown stores. Jennifer and Chad stayed with Aaron in Port Hope, and Chad also took work in Bad Axe. Later, we purchased an old Masonic building in nearby Cass City and Aaron moved into it with the idea of doing major restoration work. Jennifer and Chad moved in with him and she became his daily helper in spiritual and building projects.

It was during this time that Aaron claimed to have raised the 72 Spirits of the Goetia in an upper room in that haunted old building. He told of working alone in the room, calling forth each spirit, and then drawing their portraits as they appeared to him. He produced what appeared to be some amazing images. I was then producing a website and I posted all of his pictures, with some information about each spirit as found on line. The Goetia stories were among the most popular on my site during the time they were posted. I suggested that they would make a very good selling book if we could get improved art images to go with the stories. Aaron said he liked the idea and would find an artist to do the work. It never happened.

Later, while living in California, I met occult writer Lon Milo DuQuette, who had produced a book in 1992 called Aleister Crowley's Illustrated Goetia. I purchased a copy and discovered, to my horror, that Crowley had raised and drawn images of all the same spirits. It appears that Aaron merely copied all of Crowley's drawings and convinced us they were his own works. This is why there was no cooperation when it came to publishing Aaron's work. He did not want to be found out.

It was after Jennifer and Chad were living in California that the UMMO web site was launched, and Aaron began appearing every Sunday night in his own special radio show. It was a unique show with a special spiritual message. At the time Jennifer was exploring her own spiritual pathways and got interested in Gnosticism. While chatting on line with Gnostics, she began communicating with a group in Arizona calling itself Luciferian. She said she learned all she could about this group, and told Aaron about it.

Not surprisingly, Aaron suddenly declared himself a Luciferian. He exploited the idea on his radio show, declaring Lucifer to be a member of an alien race who manipulated the DNA of a primitive Earthly primate, thus becoming the father of the human race. The idea was so shocking it drew a lot of attention, got Aaron two invitations to appear on Coast-to-Coast Radio, one televised segment about “Psychic Spies” that eventually aired on the In Search Of series, and invitations to appear on a major television station in Japan.

Aaron cleverly build an entire cult following with his Luciferian movement. He declared the Masons to be secret Luciferians, and said this was an ancient belief system with its origins dating back hundreds of thousands of years to the very time when Lucifer was on the planet and doing his work. It was a story so plausible that people raised under the umbrella of Christianity could find value in it. Yet this same story did not pop up in Aaron's head out of nowhere. When you look around, popular writers like Zecharia Sitchin, Barbara Hand Clow, and the late Roman Catholic Priest, Fr. Charles Moore, all promoted a similar story involving an alien race called the Anunnaki that come to Earth from a black star in our galaxy called Niberu.

Aaron took the best of the Anunnaki story and turned it all into his Luciferian cult story. Jennifer said she was working closely with Aaron at the time and objected to the idea of getting people to worship an entity called Lucifer, even if this entity was not Satan, as Aaron argued. Aaron told her the whole idea was designed to make people aware of the silliness of their own religious beliefs by creating a religion that mocked Christianity through the worship of a dark force like Lucifer. He also argued that there was a need for this kind of darkness in the light to create a balance in the world. Thus the Luciferian project was launched.

We all played the story to the hilt, even creating a radio news show that looked at the world through Luciferian interests. Aaron proved to be a skilled public speaker who had a quick wit that allowed him to stand up to challenges from such skilled interviewers as Art Bell and George Noory.

At first the radio shows went well. Aaron went on the air at 6 p.m. Eastern Time each Sunday. Our news show went on every Saturday, and within a while, we had a few other radio shows, mostly featuring music, playing as well. The whole Luciferian idea was catching on and it looked like it was taking off.

Then something happened. Aaron began going on the air later and later. After a few months he was becoming irregular, sometimes not getting on the air until long after midnight, and even waiting until four in the morning. His listeners began slacking off, although Aaron insisted that he was so popular, he believed they would wait for him because they were leaning on his every word. His ego was out of control and it was impossible to convince him that anything was wrong with his line of thinking.

Because he was going on so late on Sunday night, a lot of people who had jobs started depending on the archived recordings of his shows, and downloading them from the UMMO site the following day. But then they suddenly stopped being available. Those of us who refused to stay up all night stopped hearing Aaron altogether. It was just as well, however, because this was when he banned Jennifer from the show (she was holding a job and couldn't stay up either), and started speaking in tongues, and presenting his shows in backward speech. Only people who had the capability of recording what he said and then playing it in reverse could hear those messages. We began worrying about Aaron's sanity.

It was not long before the number of listeners to Aaron's few remaining rants dropped off to no more than a handful, the UMMO site and radio show was closed because Jennifer ran out of money to keep it running, and Aaron began broadcasting from another site that few people knew about. He established some low-cost or free web sites where he made regular entries for a while. But his popularity was waning fast.

We were in the midst of the Iraq war then, and President Bush was making threats about bombing Iran. This was when Aaron suddenly dropped the Luciferian concept and declared himself to be a Muslim. He announced one day that he had received an e-mail directly from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and that the Iranians recognized him as the long awaited Mahdi, or Islamic messiah. He said the Iran people were building a magnificent mansion for him to live in and he was going to eventually have to move there.

At first Aaron said he thought it was funny that President Ahmadinejad would think of him as this great holy man, but later, Aaron began believing it himself. He concocted a story about a blue light that came from his head at the moment of his birth. He said he was born fully aware when he came into the world, and that the blue light caused the doctor who delivered him to go insane, and caused the attending nurse to drop a bottle of ether in my wife's face, almost killing her and causing her to fall unconscious for at least 24 hours. Actually, the doctor had a history of mental illness prior to the delivery. We do not know what happened to him after the delivery. Doris had the ether dropped on her during delivery by an inexperienced nurse. There was no blue light.

Aaron instructed everyone in the house to begin learning Farsi, the Iranian language, so they could be prepared to go with him when the time came to move there. He also declared a willingness to go to Iran and stand in a holy temple near where the first American bombs would fall. He believed that his presence there, as the Mahdi, would keep the Iranians safe.

It got so bad during this time that one day, as a form of discipline because we did not appear to be paying Aaron the respect he thought he deserved as the savior of the world, he ordered Heather to write the word Mahdi on our bedroom wall, where we were being held captive. We were instructed to spend the day staring at the word and contemplating its meaning.

On one occasion, when the gang of three had the police called in yet one of many complaints about our neighbors, Aaron told the police he could not come out and make a statement because he was involved in an important telephone conversation with President Ahmadinejad.

Aaron by this time was so deep into the Islamic belief, he expected everyone in the house to start living the Islamic faith. He insisted that our diet, our behavior, and everything we did be done in allegiance to Mohammad and that our thoughts be turned to Mecca. Everything Luciferian was suddenly tossed in the trash. This was the epitome of nuttiness.

This was Aaron's mental state at the time Doris and I fled the house. It will help explain the e-mails sent to us during the first hours and days following our escape. We will post them in following text.

Hate Letters From Aaron And Julie