Universal Gnostic Church: On Stranger Tides

2026-05-21T17:48:08Z

One of the people currently studying for the Universal Gnostic Church ministry -- tip of the bishop's mitre to Gnosticlombe -- did some digging into the literature of the Independent Sacramental Movement, the tradition of free-range bishops with apostolic succession to which the UGC belongs. In the process he found something quite unexpected.

One of our many lineages of apostolic succession comes to us via that astonishingly colorful figure Bishop Michael Bertiaux, author of The Voudon Gnostic Workbook and presiding bishop of the Neo-Pythagorean Gnostic Church. Bertiaux's lineage entered ours in 1993, when one of the bishops of his line consecrated Bishop John Gilbert sub conditione -- at that time there was some question about the origins of the UGC's original lineage, though that's been cleared away since then.

Bishop Bertiaux was an indefatigable collector of lineages and initiations, which he passed on to his students -- a worthwhile task at a time when many such traditions faced the risk of extinction. One of his many consecrations, however, came from a figure even more colorful than he is.

William C. Conway was born in 1865 in Redondo Beach, California, where he spent most of his life, and died in 1969 at the age of 104. He was raised in the Latter-Day Saints (Mormon) church and became a bishop in the Aaronic priesthood and a high priest in the Melchizedek priesthood. In the early 1950s, however, he broke with the Salt Lake City branch of the Mormon movement to found his own independent Mormon church. He had connections with Native American spiritual teachers in Mexico, and somewhere -- I have not been able to trace the details yet -- made contact with the Druid Revival, whereupon he founded a Christian Druid church called the Ancient Irish Church of IESU.

In 1954, this remarkable figure consecrated his student Roland Merritt Shreves as a bishop of his church, and in 1967 Shreves and Michael Bertiaux exchanged consecrations. Follow it down from there and the UGC has inherited Conway's lineage -- as well as that of the Latter-Day Saints, though admittedly in a schismatic and heretical form.

The Mormon tradition is among the most colorful and complex of homegrown American religious movements. Alongside the church based in Salt Lake City, there are many dozens of smaller churches in the Latter-Day Saints tradition, which differ from the Salt Lake City church in various ways, some minor, some much more significant. Two good scholarly studies, D. Michael Quinn's Early Mormonism and the Magic World View and John L. Brooke's The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology 1644-1844, provide solid evidence that Christian occultism had a major role in Joseph Smith's life and the founding of the Latter-Day Saints faith. I'd been interested in the esoteric dimensions of the traditions, in an outsider's sort of way, for many years...and now it turns out that I, and the rest of the clergy of the Universal Gnostic Church, were schismatic Mormon elders all along and didn't know it.

I'm not at all sure what to make of this, but I thought my readers -- and even more, present and prospective members of the UGC -- would like to know about it. Strange days...

Edit: It gets better. Conway was also a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis and its Gnostic church, the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica. He received the XI°, the highest degree in the OTO, on January 1, 1945. I wonder where else he'll turn up as I keep digging!

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Universal Gnostic Church: On Stranger Tides