Analysis by Keith Rankin.
It’s great that there is a new season (Season 9) of William Ray’s podcast series Black Sheep, which looks at contributors to New Zealander history, many little known, who were of dubious or ambiguous character.
Here I draw attention to a black sheep who I think trumps them all, Edward Arthur Wilson; though he doesn’t really qualify for William Ray’s series, because his black sheepishness only happened after he left New Zealand.
Edward Arthur Wilson, born in Birmingham England in 1878, arrived in New Zealand in 1901. He married Margery Clark in 1902; she was a recent immigrant from Queensland, though her mother had been born in Wellington in 1852. Both the Wilson and Clark families were members of the somewhat messianic Catholic Apostolic Church (not to be confused with the Roman Catholic church), founded originally by Edward Irving in the 1820s.
Wilson’s employment in England (1901 census) had been as a telephone inspector. In Wellington in 1902, he’s listed as a ‘stenographer’. Edward and Margery had two children, in 1904 and 1906.
In 1911 the family sailed to Canada. Margery and the two children were on the Mārama, arriving in May 1911; presumably Edward was already there. In the 1911 census of Canada, Edward is living with his family in Sunnyside, Calgary, Alberta; listed again as a stenographer. His story gets murky after that.
Apparently, he abandoned his family in 1912. He never returned to New Zealand, though his family did. I understand that he has living descendants in New Zealand. Margery identified herself as a ‘widow’ in the 1920s (in Auckland), and was listed as ‘next of kin’ to her co-resident brother during World War One.
Wilson appears to have worked as a shipping clerk for the ‘merchant navy’ for around ten years from 1912; work that seems to have involved lots of travel, much of it no doubt in dangerous waters. He apparently had a major prophetic vision while in France, in the early 1920s. (His apostolic upbringing will have primed him for this.)
Nostradamus meets Rasputin meets Charles Manson meets Bert Potter
Edward Arthur Wilson restyled himself as Brother XII. He created the Aquarian Foundation in 1927, in the context of radical theosophy. In that time in the early-mid-1920s, he wrote many prognostations about the fate of the world. At that time – in the problematic remission phase of the 1914-1945 Great World War, albeit before modern social media – there was a substantial audience for alternative narratives, given the perilous reality of the then world order.
The story of Wilson’s aquarian cult – based at Cedar-by-the-Sea, just out of Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada – is well summarised in Fear, Distrust, and Black Magic, written in 2024 by Kristin D’Agostino for A-B Tech (Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College) in North Carolina, United States. (Follow the link to part one first: How a 1920’s Socialite Fell Under a False Prophet’s Spell; the focus here is on Mary Connally, Brother XII’s principal patron.) While Mary Connally was an heiress, most of her fellow aquarians were also from prosperous families, and many not young – contrast most of the 1960s’ aquarians) searching for some missing insights as to where the seemingly bankrupt world went wrong.
The Aquarian Foundation community existed in two phases, from 1927 to 1928, and 1928 to 1933. In 1928 there was an important court case in which the prosecutors, judge, chief witness and court gallery appear to have been mesmerised by Wilson. The case collapsed when chief witness Mary Connally gave Wilson a glowing testimony instead of the damning evidence anticipated.
In the second phase of the community, Mary Connally became a slave to Wilson and his new paramour and enforcer, Madame Z, aka Mabel Scottowe; aka Edith Mabel Rowbotham, a former schoolteacher. And the cult became increasingly obsessed with hoarding money.
It’s not for me to say much more – others have done that – other than to note that Wilson’s ‘death’ in Switzerland in 1934 was possibly faked, signed-off by a member of the Aquarian Foundation. (Though it would have been hard for a narcissist sociopath like him, if still alive, to have rendered himself completely invisible.) Madame Z later married a man called Edric John Douglas Agate in 1943. In the United States’ 1950 census they were living together in – Eugene, Oregon – as Murray D and Edith M Agate.
Other Material about Brother XII
De Courcy Island farm of notorious cult leader up for sale, 7 May 2021, Times and Colonist.
For Sale: The Former Home of B.C.’s Notorious Apocalypse Cult, 8 June 2021, Montecristo Magazine.
#177 Edward Arthur Wilson, 9 March 2026, BC Booklook.
XII Brother, ABC Bookworld.
5 things you probably didn’t know about the Gulf Islands, 11 Jan 2026, Vancouver is Awesome.
entry in Dictionary of Canadian Biography
The Aquarian Foundation (about 1990), by James A. Santucci, professor of Comparative Religion at California State University; and The Aquarian Foundation, 18 February 2024.
Secrets of Brother XII, episode of Expedition Unknown (S.4, Ep.10) Josh Gates, 28 Feb 2018
The Dream of Brother XII, CBC podcast by Moss, Jennifer, 22 March 2016
ENCORE: Searching for Brother XII—the story of Nanaimo’s infamous cult leader, CBC podcast by Moss, Jennifer, 29 August 2016
The collapsing birth rate becomes front-page news, and a long-foretold financial crash? The Hub predicts 2026, Howard Anglin, a doctoral student at Oxford University
Works by John Oliphant, including Brother XII: The Strange Odyssey of a 20th-century Prophet and His Quest for a New World, 2006, Twelfth House Press
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
