You may be wondering if there are any confirmed members of this group, well I’ve been able to locate a few. As I was searching for information I discovered the following in the autobiography of jazz/swing singer Anita O’Day writing about the time period circa 1936:
One night as I came off stage, Tut suddenly grabbed me and kissed me. As he let me go, he said, “I’ll never forget that. I saw stars! But l’ll never do it again.”
I wondered why, but he didn’t, even though most nights he walked me to Mom’s apartment after work. The very fact that he wasn’t trying to get me in bed was enough to separate him from most of the other guys around taverns. He explained that he was delving into the occult and belonged to a group known as The Mystic Brotherhood of Tampa, Florida. One of their tenets prohibited sexual relations. Not outside of marriage. Prohibited them. Period. Tut said he was having a hard time living up to that rule and envied another one of the Brothers. His name was Don Carter and he was more ascetic.
— Anita O’Day, “Hight Times, Hard Times,” pg. 49.
This quote is of particular interest due to the reference of sexual abstinence being a requirement of MB membership. It’s odd as through all my reading of the material I’ve never once encountered anything at all like this. As a matter of fact, any mention of sex in the MB material seems to be absent entirely. Oh well, it’s hard to say if these fellows were actually only involved in the MB, as this could have been teachings from another group or book being combined with the MB teachings. Either way, apparently the MB was anti-war as well, or at least some of it’s members were, as we see from this article from “The Gazette Montreal” Nov 3, 1939:
Besides those original 100 or so lessons of the MB I purchased on eBay, I also found online a seller who had a much larger collection of material. This collection has some interesting background that I’ll get into in another post, but needless to say, this set is _almost_ a complete series of their primary lessons from start to end. It’s missing a few numbers here and there (if anyone has a full set, please let me know!!!) Anyhow, this set ultimately comes from a woman named Ann Manser of Oldsmar, Florida. She’s mentioned briefly on this page as one of the authors teachers. She also created a deck of fortune telling, tarot-like cards called the “Pages of Shustah.” I haven’t found a deck of these yet for myself, though I’ve yet to really try searching hard for them. From an image I found online, they apparantly look something along the lines of this:
Besides the woman whom the original lessons I purchased belong to I can’t say who else was a member of the MB. Ann Manser, in a letter that was included amongst the lessons (writing in 1946), states something to the effect of “When I was living on the west coast I met Brotherhood students all the time, but since moving to Florida, I haven’t met a single one.” She also points out how odd this is since she lives rather close to Tampa, which was the home of the MB. So from her statements we can deduce that there were several other members, but who knows who those people might be.