IT WASN'T long ago that thousands of members of the Church Universal and Triumphant in Montana followed their leader's call to donate their life savings to build underground shelters against a coming nuclear apocalypse.
Yet Armageddon never came, and after a decade-long decline caused by Alzheimer's disease, Elizabeth Clare Prophet – "Mother" to her followers – died recently aged 70.
As her followers convene at the church's sprawling Corwin Springs compound this
weekend for a three-day memorial gathering, the struggle to lay claim to Ms Prophet's legacy has already begun.
Within days of her death, former church member David Lewis announced he had channelled Prophet's spirit. Lewis said this week he wants to "carry Elizabeth's message forward" and is inviting church members to "make a fresh start" with a spin-off group he started several years ago, the Hearts Centre.
Like Ms Prophet, Mr Lewis claims the ability to channel Jesus, Buddha and more obscure spiritual figures such as St Germain and El Morya.
However, church leaders have denounced him.
Since Prophet fell ill, at least 15 people have stepped forward claiming to be the next messenger, said Neroli Duffy, who sits on the church's 24-member council of elders. None has met with council approval.
"We're moving ahead," Ms Duffy said on Thursday. "She didn't necessarily think there would be another messenger."
In the waning days of Ms Prophet's reign as the church's divinely chosen messenger, its focus shifted from civilisation's end to the development of a New Age publishing juggernaut, producing hundreds of books and recordings drawn from Ms Prophet's mystical declarations.
The church still keeps its 750-person shelters stocked with food – "insurance," its leaders say, against possible dark days ahead. Yet with Ms Prophet gone, it's uncertain if the spiritual movement she embodied will prove as lasting as all the concrete and steel hidden beneath a Montana mountainside north of Yellowstone National Park.
"You had a clear figurehead that became the focus of the organisation, the object of adoration. When that's suddenly removed it throws people into a tailspin," said Robert Balch, a University of Montana sociologist specialising in cults and unconventional religions.
He said Ms Prophet's death sparked a "crisis of succession" over who will take her place.
Ms Prophet led the church since the death in 1973 of her second husband, Mark Prophet, who founded the church's parent organisation, the Summit Lighthouse, in 1958. The couple preached that one's soul progresses through a series of earthly incarnations. His past lives were said to have included Aesop, Lancelot and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Hers included Nefertiti, Queen Guinevere of Camelot and Marie Antoinette.
Soon after her husband died and became an "ascended master," Elizabeth Prophet began to channel his holy dictations. Over the next two decades she attracted an estimated 50,000 followers around the world.
Yet long before Ms Prophet's death, Mr Balch and others who tracked her career had seen her power base beginning to crumble.
The grip she held over her followers first began to loosen after her doomsday predictions went unrealised in 1990.
Members of the church today appear chagrined by those events, which sparked a federal investigation into weapons amassed by Ms Prophet's followers. They contend her warnings never carried a fixed date.
