"This book seeks to reconstruct life at the utopian community at Point Loma from 1898 to 1929, the years it was under the direction of its founder, Katherine Tingley. In considering a group that identified with Victorian American culture and its anxieties while adhering to an occult worldview that most of their contemporaries found strange, if not dangerous, the book explains why these middle-class Americans found Theosophy so persuasive and why they left family and friends behind to take up residence at this California settlement."--BOOK JACKET.