A Scripture Claimed Older Than Writing

Twitchell published the Shariyat-Ki-Sugmad in two volumes beginning in 1970, close to the end of his life, presenting it not as his own composition but as a transcription of a text that Eckankar teaching holds has always existed on the inner Akashic Records, older than any human language and accessible only to a Living ECK Master travelling to that plane. This framing places the Shariyat-Ki-Sugmad in a different relationship to its own community than most scriptures: rather than a book a founder wrote and a tradition later canonised, it is presented as a discovery, the same rhetorical move the Bab and Joseph Smith each made about their own central texts in different traditions, though by a different mechanism in each case. Eckankar continues to treat the work as its central scripture and restricts its full study materials to initiated members at various levels, a structure that keeps much of the text's detailed content out of general public circulation independent of ordinary copyright.