Still at the helm today, Deborah Szekely looks back at the genesis of the modern health movement
On Christmas day, 1939, I, a 17-year-old Brooklyn-born girl, became the bride of Edmond Szekely, a 34-year-old Hungarian scholar, philosopher, prolific writer, and natural-living experimenter. The following summer, we hosted a small but fascinating international clientele at a health camp hastily assembled at Tecate, Baja California. At that time Tecate was a secluded Mexican border village of 400 inhabitants just across the international Line, chosen by my husband for having the finest year-round climate in North America.
My first sight of Rancho La Puerta...
June 6, 1940, I rolled down a Tecate dirt road in our vintage 12-year- old Cadillac –still a touch elegant with its plush interior and cut-crystal bud vases at the windows. Fastened to the car's trunk and rear bumper were all our worldly possessions, packed in a single silver-painted wooden box. The car was a wedding gift from one of the happy participants in a previous health camp Edmond had conducted at Rio Corona in Tamaulipas, Mexico. Experienced and indefatigable in his chosen specialization, Edmond had directed and learned from natural-living experiments at Nice in France; Tahiti; Lake Elsinore in California; Rio Corona; Leatherhead in Surrey, England; Spanish Town on the island of Jamaica; and Uruapan in the Mexican state of Michoacan. It was in Tahiti that he first met my family, fruitarians who had chosen to ride out the Great Depression's early years by escaping to what was still a true tropical paradise. Thereafter, my parents, together with my brother and me, attended and actively supported his projects, wherever they might take us. Now married to Edmond, I still supposed Tecate would be another temporary Living/Learning venture. For $10 a month, Edmond rented a one-room adobe hut sitting in the middle of a vineyard called Rancho La Puerta. That seemed like a lot of money to us then, since the war in Europe had cut off his income from his publishers there. After pulling up in front of the Tecate adobe and learning that our house consisted of a single room 10- by 30-feet wide with a dirt floor and holes for windows and doors, I could hardly hold back my tears.
From simple, honest beginnings...
We soon discovered that until our arrival the adobe hut had been used to store hay. Cattle believed there was still food inside and noisily rubbed against the walls at night. I had precious little time for tears or worrying about annoying night sounds, since the arrival of our first guests was imminent. We hastily planted lettuce, green onions, radishes, and tomatoes, using the organic farming methods my husband had learned from Sir Albert Howard's Agricultural Testament. From a neighboring rancher we purchased a goat – the first of many. By 1943 we were milking 90 goats and offering fresh goat cheese to guests. Our camp's policy was one of absolute simplicity: $17.50 per week, bring your own tent, no running water, no electricity, neither gym nor swimming pool. But we had a great mountain (historically called Mount Kuchumaa by the Indians, it appears on U.S. maps as Tecate Peak) for climbing, a river for swimming, and our organic vegetable garden yielded a generous harvest.
The Essene School of life...
It would be several years before our camp reverted to using its Spanish land-grant name, Rancho La Puerta. At the start we called it the Essene School of Life. Even before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, my husband had studied the sect of the ancient Essenes and their Dead Sea colony in minute detail. At the time of Christ they taught a kindly philosophy and led a practical, peaceful life. They were, as my husband explained in his books and lectures, the world's first great agriculturists and natural healers. Until the 1950s, and the revelations of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Essenes were an obscure part of history. They have since been elevated to their rightful place in the early hierarchy of the Holy Land.
Lectures beneath the oak trees...
Daily, our guests listened to the "Professor," as Edmond was affectionately known, lecture on the rules for vibrant good health, long life, and a caring philosophy that recognized the interdependence of mind, body, and spirit. And they lived those rules 24 hours a day. The thrust of my husband's message was amazingly prophetic. He warned against herbicides, pesticides, and artificial fertilizers. He criticized food processing and packaging. He emphasized the dangers of cigarettes and alcohol, and the crucial need for pure air and pure water. He recognized the potential threat of cholesterol and fats in the American diet. And he pinpointed the exact rules now advocated for safe sunbathing and proper absorption of Vitamin D.
The very simple, very fresh idea behind "spa food"...
Our pioneering Rancho La Puerta menu was exemplary, revolutionary, and wonderfully simple. Breakfast was fresh raw milk from our goats, whole-grain bread from wheat that we grew and germinated, and wild-sage honey. Luncheon often consisted of goat milk cheese, a ripe homegrown tomato, sprouted wheat with watercress, and green sprouts from our sprouting room. Legumes were almost always the main dish at dinner. With them we usually served a whole-grain cereal, an ear of corn or a baked potato, green salad, and fresh fruit for dessert. Most of this vegetarian bounty came from our gardens, just as the gardens and orchards at Rancho La Puerta supply our guests today. In the summer of 1940, and for several years afterward, everyone chopped and carried firewood. Everyone performed farm chores. Everyone took part in the do-everything-from-scratch kitchen detail. Nobody complained too much about "having the duty" of taking the goats onto hills. Besides assisting my husband with supervisory details, I also ground wheat, watered sprouts, made cheese – and the beds. I would certainty have set the communal table, had we possessed one. Instead, we tagged every plate and placed it on a shelf in a large bin, and guests retrieved their own. They then went to eat alone in some choice nature spot free from interruption. We encouraged them to reflect while they ate and to consider all the vitality this simple natural food would supply – enhancing their oneness with nature and giving meaning to the cosmos that they absorbed with each breath and mouthful. Today, you would call it meditation. To inspire positive thoughts, we gave our guests cards printed with the Essene Communions. Everyone focused on the special communion for the day. Some messages are simple thanksgiving and celebration, and some are supplications. Many communions anticipated present-day biofeedback and other recent techniques for bringing into focus certain parts of the body.
Always, the mountain watched over the Ranch...
Participants at our first Ranch camps joined us at dawn for a meditation hike up our mountain to greet the morning sun. At sundown we paid a similar tribute to the evening star. Whenever I look back upon those early days, it seems to me that Rancho La Puerta must have been predestined. How else to explain its survival in a place (at that time) only slightly less inaccessible than Ultima Thule, in a world preoccupied with history's most widespread war? Before long, travel restrictions prevented many of our faithful United Kingdom friends from revisiting our Essene School of Life. Obviously, we needed to make a bridge to the world.
Spreading the news...
We established a newsletter to inform, educate, and celebrate all that was going on. For $10 per year, subscribers received our monthly mind-body fitness bulletin as well as individual advice in response to their write-in questions. By the end of W.W.II, we counted over a hundred members in a half-dozen countries who ensured that our annual six-week summer school was over-subscribed. To publish the newsletter, my husband lectured and dictated in French or Esperanto. I translated, typed, and cut stencils. Guests helped out with the mimeograph machine set up under one of the two arching oaks that formed a natural doorway at Rancho La Puerta ("Ranch of the Door"). Now fragile and precariously hollow, one of the trees is still very much alive-a testament to the tenacity of nature. The bulletin was crucial in enabling my husband to continue his work. Within a few years it provided the wherewithal for acquiring our own small printing press, and its revenues contributed to the physical growth of the Essene School of Life. Besides turning out a monthly many-paged bulletin, Edmond also wrote a large number of books and pamphlets. After an English publishing house brought out his world-view "Cosmos, Man and Society" when Edmond was only 33, he continued to amplify what many consider his master work. A Renaissance man who read in eight languages, he drew information from all that was new in philosophy, science, and medicine. At the same time he reached back to retrieve the great verities of antiquity. Rancho La Puerta fuses all he admired in the ancient and modern worlds. In addition to writing many pamphlets on Essenes, Edmond's other subject groups included the humanities and scholarly comparative studies of religions. He also wrote about herb uses at a time when they had been nearly forgotten; and about vitamins and minerals before their Recommended Daily Allowances were well known. Young people of the 1960s revived interest in his works. His books are proving to be equally relevant today.