Serpent in Eden The final utopia of Thomas Lake Harris and What Happened There
A segment from a work in progress
Gaye LeBaron 
The responsibilities that weigh heavily on the founder of a whole new dimension in the relationship of God to Man must have sat stone-like on the slight shoulders of Thomas Lake Harris in that winter of 1874-75.  Some serious soul-searching surely preceded the transcontinental move from Brocton, New York, on the shores of Lake Erie, to Santa Rosa, California, just 30 miles from the Pacific Ocean.  For if you are a prophet, you must have weighty reasons for your every action.  A prophet cannot, or does not, just pick up and move across the continent like anyone else – or for anyone else’s reasons.  He must have motives that transcend worldliness.  And if you are the Primate and King of the Brotherhood of the New Life, bent on resettling the center of your all-new, all-harmonious world from one end of the United States to the other, you cannot say simply that the climate is better or the farm land is good or the grapes will grow well.  These are worldly reasons.  Thomas Lake Harris was many things but he was rarely mundane.  He was the Father; the Pivotal Man in a whole new concept of Christianity.  And Being a handy man with words he was not hard put to find extraordinary explanations for a move that his disciples were later to explain in the simplest of terms.  Harris scholars have had no difficulty collecting Harrisian prose that applies to the relocation of the Brotherhood of the New Life.  Out home centre was removed to California in 1875, ten years after it had been shown that a place of final retreat had been prescribed, in these regions, then almost a wilderness.  This was made apparent, visually no less than mentally, whilst composing The Great Republic.  Returning from these wonderful solar experiences, the writer saw himself pictured, in future time, as dwelling in the vicinage of the great forests of sequoia, near the Pacific, where, mingled with the sighing winds among the evergreens, might be heard the murmur of the not far distant ocean…
In other published references Harris lays it all in the lap of his favorite celestial influence, Queen Lily of the Conjugal Angels- his “mate” in the counterpartal world:  After remaining and laboring over three years in the service of the group at Brocton, Lily herself, by the immense effort of her persistence and holding in and for my external, became depleted of the substance of energy in her ultimate luminous body and I, in my own social labor had become so wasted of the fine elements forming for my own new naturehood that she finally said that, ‘she was losing her power of hold, and that I must perish outwardly, if I remained longer here;’ –a fact of which I was well convince in my own organic knowledge.  The newspaper serving the Brocton area couched the news of the new colony in much less highflown language: “Harris left town in February to avoid the severity of our winters and is now located in California.  Several of the members here are soon to join him in his new location.  It is rumoured that his possessions in Portland, 2,000 acres, will be sold, but of this nothing definite is as yet known.  Everything in regard to this singular people to outsiders is a mystery.”  There is little doubt that the harshness of the Eastern winters had some influence on Harris’s decision, celestial