A Los Angeles Commune Around a Health-Food Restaurant

The Source Family was a communal spiritual group in Los Angeles in the early 1970s centered on Jim Baker, known to followers as Father Yod and later YaHoWha, a former restaurateur and martial artist. Unusually, the community supported itself through a genuinely successful and influential business: The Source, a popular health-food restaurant on the Sunset Strip that was among the pioneers of natural-foods dining in America and drew a celebrity clientele.

The group blended an eclectic mix of Eastern mysticism, esoteric and Western spiritual currents, meditation and breathing practices, and communal living, and it produced a body of privately released psychedelic-rock recordings that later gained a cult following among collectors. Father Yod took the role of spiritual father to the community and, in a practice that drew criticism, had multiple "spiritual wives." The community was relatively short-lived: after relocating to Hawaii, it dispersed following Baker's death in 1975 from injuries sustained in a hang-gliding accident. The Source Family is remembered as a distinctive artifact of the Southern California counterculture, documented in a later book and film drawing on former members' accounts, and is generally discussed as a communal experiment of its era rather than as a group associated with the kinds of criminal harm found in some others.