The Source Family

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.

The Source Family left Los Angeles at its peak. Pressured by publicity, school authorities and neighbours, Jim Baker, by then called Father Yod and married within the group to thirteen spiritual wives, sold the Source restaurant's goodwill and moved his white robed household to Hawaii in 1974. The islands were unwelcoming, money ran short, and on 25 August 1975 Baker launched himself from a cliff over Waimanalo Bay on a hang glider he had never flown, landed hard on the beach, refused hospital treatment in accordance with his teachings, and died nine hours later. The Family, deprived of the man its whole cosmology orbited, dissolved within a few years. Its afterlife has been remarkable.

The group's house band, Ya Ho Wha 13, had pressed small runs of improvised psychedelic records in the early 1970s, and those albums became prized by collectors, leading to reissues and even reunion performances decades later. Former members Isis Aquarian, the group's self appointed archivist, and Electricity Aquarian assembled the photographs, tapes and family chronicles into a 2007 book, The Source, and their archive underpinned the 2012 documentary The Source Family, which brought the commune a sympathetic second hearing. Scholars and journalists now treat the Family as a defining specimen of the Aquarian age commune, remembered by many alumni with affection and by others as a warning about surrendering judgment, whose restaurant, incidentally, helped invent health food dining in America.