We, the members of The Holistic, recognize that inconsistencies cannot be perpetuated without causing further divergence in the minds of men, separating man from himself and humanity. In order to preserve and promote human welfare individually and collectively, we are hereby devoted wholeheartedly in representing the cause of Human Integrity and the Realization of Individual Freedom of Consciousness.[1]

In the early 1950s, Wolff and his wife renamed the Assembly of Man and “The Holistic Assembly” was incorporated as a nonprofit corporation on March 6, 1953. Its articles of incorporation state that “its specific and primary purpose” was to carry out and promote religious work, and since “Religious Practice or the Religious Life cannot be separated from activities devoted to the increased Health and Happiness of Man, both individual and collectively . . . the purposes of The Holistic shall include . . . education, advice and training in relation to the ‘Science of Man’.”[2] In particular, the emphasis of the Holistic Assembly would be on healing in the “complete sense,” which includes the Health of the Soul, the Health of Mind, the Health of Feeling, and the Health of Body.[3] Moreover, the Holistic Assembly shall have the power to conduct an educational program that may embrace “any and all aspects of life . . . required for the individual to awaken Holistic Consciousness.”[4]

These activities would be presided over by a board of trustees, who also had the power to see to the “education and ordination of “Holistic Ministers” and “the education and certification of Holistic Healing Practitioners to be known as ‘Holologists’,” as well as Holistic Religious Teachers, and all other members of this organization. [5] In general, its “rules, regulations and discipline” or “ecclesiastical polity” aimed to “preserve and promote human welfare, individually and collectively,” by “facilitating [personal] Realization” and “achieving [social] wholeness based on Holistic Principles of Healing and Health.”[6]

Sarah’s hand is evident in these organizational documents, which also set out the requirements for membership in the group, various levels of membership, the rights of the organization’s individual members, the organization’s “Articles of Faith,” and even a declaration of “What People in the Holistic Think.” She also makes it clear that she, the “founder of the Assembly of Man,” now called the Holistic Assembly, will continue in her position as “Head of the Esoteric Section,” an office that she has occupied since December 21, 1928.

Why did the Wolff and his wife feel that their group work needed to be restructured? A number of factors may have been involved. First, the Assembly of Man’s activities were waning. Indeed, Sarah’s health had begun to fail, and the couple was restricting their activity to lectures and services at their San Fernando home. Accordingly, the new organization may have been an attempt to invigorate this group work. And, given Sarah’s health problems, the fact that the assembly now focused on healing is quite understandable. As for Wolff, he was engrossed in the work of Aurobindo, which he had first discovered in 1949. In particular, Wolff would come to interpret Aurobindo’s “Overmind” as parallel to, if not synonymous with, “The Holistic,” and he labored in both lectures and writings to work out this relationship. All of this work may be accessed from this page, but it is also can found on other pages under the Wolff Archive tab, according to its classification.[7]

Whatever the reason for the incorporation of the Holistic Assembly, it was a short-lived enterprise.[8] Sarah’s health continued to deteriorate, and the couple’s group activity ceased when they moved to Santa Barbara in 1956. After her death in 1959, Wolff would remarry and reactivate this work, but once again under the name of the Assembly of Man.

[1] Sarah A. Merrell-Wolff, “The Holistic Preamble,” 1.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 2

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 1. See also Sarah A. Merrell-Wolff, “Bylaws of the Holistic Assembly,” 2.

[7] This work includes aphorisms, essays, lectures, and audio recordings.

[8] Dave Vliegnethart suggests another possibility for this new reorganization:

I submit that, just as in the late twenties, this reconfiguration of their identity and ideology in the early fifties was—at least, in part, whether consciously or unconsciously—motivated by a rise (in awareness) of similar religious fringe groups, which had itself been motivated in turn by a loss of and a subsequent search for meaning, in the wake of the social crisis of a war. The founders of the Assembly not only intended to distance themselves from socio-religious conventions, which struck them as bankrupt, but also from others who were doing the same. As J.Z. Smith says, “difference or ‘otherness’ may be perceived as being either like-us or not-like-us, [but] it becomes most problematic when it is too-much-like-us or when it claims to be-us”—or the other way around, when we are seen as “too-much-like” them—because “[t]he deepest intellectual issues are not based upon perceptions of alterity, but rather of similarity, at times, even of identity.”

Dave Vliegenthart, The Secular Religion of Franklin Merrell-Wolff: An Intellectual History of Contemporary Anti-Intellectualism In America (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2018)., 179-80.