The Mystical Brotherhood of the New Dawn

An esoteric and intellectual website dedicated to objective, rational analysis and discussion of major esoteric and intellectual subjects: reincarnation and past lives--spirits and a spirit world--the prophecies of Nostradamus--depth psychology: Freud, Jung, Erich Fromm, Alice Miller, John Bradshaw and others--history and sociology--Medjugorye and Fatima--American Indian, Hindu and Buddhist spiritual beliefs--the "End Times"--and others.

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Greetings to you all. My name is Chris, I'm an aspiring writer and esotericist. My aim with this website is to create a forum for informing people about and discussing major esoteric and intellectual subjects. You can contact me here, send an e-message, with any questions or comments you may have, and request more information on any particular issue, if you would like.

My background is in general culture and thought. I began 36 years ago with both literary and scholarly writing on many different subjects. I am applying now for journalistic work with The New York Times, The Washington Times, The Imaginative Conservative magazine and a few other places. I hope to be able to do part-time journalism and continue with this website at the same time, writing interesting and intriguing articles and commentaries on the subjects I mentioned above. My goal is to inform you, the people, give you information I think is relevant and important.

I was born in New Orleans in 1962. My father, George Howard Hampton of Crystal River, FLA, was an Air Force medic in the early 1950's, then a physical therapist. He worked at Carville Hospital in Louisiana in the early 1960's and mid 1970's, his boss there was Sir Paul Brand, M.D. and F.R.C.S., a British surgeon who was knighted by Elizabeth II in 1961 (a few other notable family members or friends: my great-great-great-great-great grandfather, Revolutionary War officer, Col. Andrew Hampton of Virginia--my mother's sister's father-in-law, Eric Lotz, of Sherman Oaks, Californa, who was some kind of high ranking official (my father said it was in the L.A. Fire Department) in Los Angeles in the 1960's and early 1970's--Harry Hillman Gleaton, a nephew of one of my great-grandmothers, Elizabeth Gleaton. Harry was a member of the Florida legislature in the 1950's--Nancy Sylvester, IHM, a well-known Catholic cleric in the United States and a former president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. Nancy is a niece of my maternal grandmother, Gladys Sylvester. There's an interview of Nancy now on You Tube--Saul Roseman of New York, who was one my father's college roommates at University of Florida in the 1950's. Saul was an athletic coach at a New York City high school, and his wife Lenny was a guidance counselor there. They were interviewed on CBS's 60 Minutes or one of the national news programs in the early 2000's). My mother was the daughter of an immigrant from Germany and grew up in the United States.

Ours was a typical upper middle class family. I went to high school here in New Orleans and then college in the 1980's, travelled alot in Europe. In 1991 I started to find out about some of the things I mentioned above. I was amazed, because up to that time I had been a typical "materialist"--I thought that past beliefs about the otherworldly and mystical were just superstition or mythology, and the material universe was all there was. But evidence I saw convinced me, finally, that that was not true.

This began an extraordinary odyssey. The first thing I investigated was the Catholic phenomenon of Medjugorye in former Yugoslavia. At first I thought it would be obvious religious hysteria, the power of suggestion, something like that. But as I read, I eventually concluded, no, there is no other possible explanation, this must be some kind of supernatural or "paranormal" occurrence.

I was surprised to find out that this was not the first such occurrence in the history of the Catholic Church. Other notable ones included: Fatima, Portugal, 1917--Garabandal, Spain, 1962--Zeitoun, Egypt in 1958 and Lourdes, France in 1856. The most astonishing to me was Zeitoun, Egypt.

On the central plaza of the city of Zeitoun there is a large Coptic church. One day that year, '58, people noticed a strange light near the top of that church. This went on for about a week and the mayor, police chief and other city officials and many thousands of the people witnessed it, a radiant, luminescent figure of what appeared to be a woman in a white robe with a blue headcovering. Sometimes the woman appeared to be holding an infant. Another figure was seen, that of a young man holding a book. It is believed that this might have represented John the Evangelist, thus the book. The fact that tens of thousands of people all saw this apparition at the same time goes against the idea that it was just hallucination or an atmospheric anomaly.

I kept on in the early 1990's like a detective on a case. One clue would lead to another. Soon I was lost in a world of strange facts, startling reports and mysteries I never even knew existed. I read books on Edgar Cayce, Nostradamus, books by prominent New Age authors, all kinds of things. It was a completely new and different world--the person I'd been before had just about ceased to exist.

So for years I studied, read, did research. There were many extraordinary books, at bookstores and libraries. One great one was Angels Dark and Light by Gary Kinnaman. This book said that some angels (I think "angels" are just spirits of high degree, beings which tend to be far beyond just ordinary human beings in intelligence, power and other qualities) are good and try to help you, while others "war for your soul". What might that mean, I wondered. Did "angels" actually exist, and were some of them of an inherently malicious nature? I read Michael H. Brown's books on Medjugorye and other similar Catholic phenomena. Brown is an excellent author and I think an important figure in this. He was from a secular background, to begin with, as I was. He became nationally known in the late 1970's when, as an investigative reporter, he did investigative work on a chemical company that had been polluting a suburban neighborhood (somewhere in the northeast United States, I think), which led to many cancer deaths. Then in the early '80's he went to Yugoslavia to report on the amazing events there, in the town of Medjugorye. At first skeptical, eventually he was won over and converted to Catholicism and became one of the foremost investigative authors on Catholic mysticism and paranormal events.

In 1992 I met a woman who had been part of the late 1960's counterculture movement and she told me some interesting things. She was into Eastern religion and mysticism--Buddhism and anything related to that (one thing she told me was to read a book called Autobiography of a Yogi, so I did. An interesting book, by Yogananda Paramahansa, an Indian yogi--i.e.,"spiritual master"--who travelled to the United States in 1920 "to bring Yoga to the West"). She told me about reincarnation and "past lives". She said that she had found out--I'm not sure how--about one of her own past lives, that she had lived in Ireland in the 19th century. The source, whatever it was, of this information had even given her name in that life. I was flabbergasted by all this. Things were turning out to be alot more than the "pie in the sky" and vague, far-fetched religio-spiritual "mumbo jumbo" I'd expected. Many things I'd regarded, til that time, as outlandish, improbable, preposterous and "kooky" were turning out to be true. There was solid evidence for them. I could hardly believe it. Before, I'd looked down on people who believed these kinds of things, took them seriously. But I was finding out that in many cases, I'd been wrong. I was humbled, confounded. "My apologies, folks--I was wrong."

This gives you an idea of that "odyssey" I began in '91, and what I would like to do with this website. You can send questions or comments to this site via the "comments" box, and I will answer them, best I can. I'm not a complete expert on this, not an authority, I don't have a college degree in religion or anything like that, or any official sanction as a commentator on these kinds of things--I'm strictly a self-taught investigator, observer and commentator on these subjects. Also, I'm completely independent--I don't belong to any particular religious organization, this is my own project, exclusively. I'm an independent scholar and researcher. I decide things for myself, "call them as I see them", and try to be objective and fair to all parties, all points of view.

So, I hope this website, this project, succeeds, and very soon, because there is alot of amazing information I'd like to give you, the people.

May you all have peace and happiness.

Mr. C. F. Hampton