June 11

Ruth Montgomery: Journalist of the New Age

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She covered six presidents and attended FDR’s funeral—the only woman among twelve invited reporters. Earlier, in 1959, she had ridden with Nixon’s press corps through Soviet Russia, filing dispatches to the Hearst syndicate, an accomplishment that only added to her later post as the president of the Women’s National Press Club. By any measure, Ruth Montgomery was one of the most accomplished political journalists of her generation.

A cursory glance through Montgomery’s credentials and it’s a wonder she isn’t as well-known as contemporary, Barbara Walters. But something happened to Montgomery that took her out of mainstream journalism and put her in a, somewhat, class all her own: one day, she sat at her typewriter, cleared her mind, and let the spirits do the writing…

A Born Journalist

The first half of Montgomery’s life was entirely of this world, and it was a remarkable life even without the metaphysics…

Ruth Shick Montgomery—born this day in rural Sumter County, Indiana, in 1912, is not a household name in the Western esoteric tradition in the way that Crowley or Blavatsky or even Edgar Cayce are; rather, she pivoted towards a different demographic entirely: the mass-market paperback and the airport bookstore spindle rack. But that was also a large facet of her brilliance, as her years within mainstream political reportage had taught her the invaluable lesson of knowing her audience, and recognizing the changing zeitgeist. Although the two are not otherwise linked, this element, in itself, places Montgomery in the same occult lineage as yesterday’s blog subject, Hélène Smith.

As the first journalist to understand what the “Age of Aquarius” would mean not only to esoteric practitioners, but to an entire generation opening its collective consciousness towards the mystical and the unknown, Montgomery was, in her day, the bestselling author of “objective” studies aimed at the occult. She wrote the books that introduced millions of ordinary Americans to the idea that consciousness survives death, that reincarnation is real, and that benevolent intelligences from beyond the visible world are available for consultation. And (quite inspirational to this particular writer) she did all with a typewriter. Apparently, Montgomery’s own spirit guides comfortable with modern technology.

Montgomery began her career as a cub reporter at the Waco News-Tribune while still a student at Baylor University, then Purdue. Ambitious to a fault, she moved to Washington in the late 1930s and, in 1943, became the first female reporter in the Washington bureau of the New York Daily News, navigating its inert “boys club” mentality. By 1950 she was president of the Women’s National Press Club, a syndicated columnist for Hearst and UPI, and a fixture of the Washington press corps.

Following an illustrious thirty-year career, Montgomery retired from active mainstream journalism in 1969—but her fame as a bestselling author was only beginning. The spirits were waiting to tell their own stories to her.

A Reporter Becomes a “Messenger”

Montgomery’s rather shocking career change occurred thanks to Arthur Ford—one of the most celebrated mediums in mid-twentieth century America, and one of the most controversial. Ford had achieved international fame in 1928 when he allegedly received a posthumous coded message from Houdini confirming the late magician and escape artist’s survival of death—a claim that Houdini’s widow initially confirmed and subsequently denied, leaving the case permanently disputed. And, like Edgar Cayce before him, Ford claimed mystical access to the Akashic Records.

Montgomery met Ford in the early 1960s and, under his guidance, began practicing automatic writing. Initially using a pencil (the conventional instrument of the automatic writing tradition stretching back through Hélène Smith and the Spiritualist movement of the 1850s) she eventually moved to her true weapon of choice: the typewriter. Sitting quietly, fingers resting on the keys, she would enter a light meditative state and allow her hands to type without conscious direction. The resulting text, she claimed, came from discarnate intelligences she called “the Guides”: a group of evolved spiritual entities who communicated through her in order to educate humanity about the nature of death, reincarnation, and the soul’s journey. Where was Hunter S. Thompson when you needed him; it doesn’t get more “Gonzo” than automatic writing at a typewriter!)

When Ford died in 1971, Montgomery continued to receive communications she attributed to his spirit. Her book A World Beyond (1971) presented these mystical messages in the same rich detail that had been Montgomery’s journalistic style. Ford’s alleged descriptions of the afterlife—its landscapes, its social structures, its relationship to the living world all held the tone of a good reporter filing from an assignment—even a strange one.

The “Walk-In”

While Montgomery’s contributions to American journalism have already solidified her reputation and legacy, her additions to modern occult canon are equally-impressive. Of all, however, was her coining of the term the “walk-in”:

First introduced in her 1978 book Strangers Among Us and developed throughout her many books, the “walk-in” theory proposed that a person’s soul could, under circumstances of extreme suffering or at a significant life transition, choose to depart the physical body—and that a different, more evolved soul could enter and inhabit that body in its place. (It would be quite a few decades before the Marvel Cinematic Universe would adapt such a concept as “dreamwalking.”) According to Montgomery, once the “original” soul had completed its tasks, the “walk-in soul” would then take over with a new mission, a new personality, and, crucially, no memory of having entered the body it now occupied.

As outlandish as the claim may have seemed to casual readers, Montgomery was a born journalist, and presented historical and contemporary examples: people who had experienced near-death episodes or profound crises that had emerged with very different personalities, new skills, and a profound sense of purpose. In her account, several American presidents had been walk-ins! (And she would know, having covered six administrations during her career.) The concept proved extraordinarily influential in UFO and New Age communities, where it provided a framework for interpreting experiences of radical personal transformation and the emergence of apparently “alien” personality traits. (Insert any U.S. president here for a joke of your choosing…)

But Montgomery, having weathered years of the regular scrutiny facing the mainstream political press, was ready with further examples: the Theosophical tradition’s concept of mayavirupa—the illusory body in which advanced Adepts can project their consciousness into physical incarnation—carries related implications; likewise, the Spiritualist tradition had always maintained that discarnate entities could temporarily overshadow or influence the consciousness of living individuals.

The New Age and Cultural Shifts

The New Age movement as a cultural phenomenon during the 1960s and 1970s—reinvigorated interests in Astrology, Tarot, passed-life regression, and psychic mediums—came along just as Montgomery’s second wind as a writer took hold. Wisely, she had used her years as a hardworking cultural historian and “deadline artist” to her advantage, deliberately reaching audiences that had no prior connection to occult publishing houses or esoteric bookshops. Her books were on the shelves at drug stores and supermarkets, and were condensed in Reader’s Digest. Ultimately, they sold in the millions. A Gift of Prophecy, her 1965 biography of psychic Jeane Dixon, sold over three million copies alone. Quite amazingly, her books even inspired Sammy Hagar to write the 1985 Van Halen song “Love Walks In,” based on the “walk-in” concept outlined in Aliens Among Us. This fact—one of the stranger cultural footnotes within the histories of either hard rock or New Age spirituality—is perhaps the most precise measure of how widely her ideas penetrated popular consciousness.

What distinguished Montgomery from many of her contemporaries in the occult world was the discipline she brought from her previous career in mainstream journalism. She was never credulous, and fact-checked everything; she was known to demand sought verification and genuinely troubled when her predictions didn’t come about. (Her “Guides,” she explained, operated within a framework of human free will: events could be altered by collective human choice, and their predictions were tendencies rather than certainties.)

Whether one finds this explanation satisfying depends on personal belief. But what the record shows is that Montgomery continued to refine and revise her understanding rather than simply doubling down, and that her journalist’s instinct for accuracy and self-correction never left her methods, even as the subject matter moved far beyond anything the Washington press corps had prepared her for.

She died on June 10, 2001—one day before her eighty-ninth birthday, and, astoundingly, seventy-two years to the day of Hélène Smith’s passing in 1929.

Perhaps a few of their “Guides” were the same.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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