“Despite having no previous hang gliding experience….”

Father Yod, or YaHoWha, born James Edward Baker (July 4, 1922 – August 25, 1975), was an American new religious movement founder and owner of one of the country’s first health food restaurants, on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. He founded a spiritual commune in the Hollywood Hills known as the Source Family. The Source Family was heavily influenced by the teachings of Yogi Bhajan and the astrological age of Aquarius. The Family practiced communal living in Southern California and later in Hawaii. He was also the frontman of the commune’s experimental psychedelic rock band, Ya Ho Wha 13.

Wikipedia / Photos Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, Charlene YHVH/Isis Aquarian – Original publication

Death
On December 26, 1974, the Source Family sold their restaurant and moved to Hawaii. On August 25, 1975, despite having no previous hang gliding experience, Yod decided that he would go hang gliding. Yod used a hang glider to leap off a 1,300-foot (400 m) cliff on the eastern shore of Oahu. He crash-landed on the beach suffering no external injuries, but was unable to move and died nine hours later. He was 53 years old. The Source Family refers to this day as “Black Monday”. After three days of vigil, Yod was cremated and his ashes put to rest at Lanikai Beach in Hawaii.
Wikipedia

Born in Ohio in 1922, James Edward Baker led a colourful life as an adult. He shot down 13 Japanese fighter planes in the second world war. He auditioned as Tarzan for a Hollywood movie.

He killed a man using judo in 1955, and then killed another man in 1963 and was convicted of manslaughter. He had his hands legally registered as lethal weapons. He robbed anywhere between two and 11 banks^[1]. He became a successful restaurateur and a pioneer of vegetarian dining, with customers including John Lennon, Joni Mitchell and Marlon Brando. And in the early 70s he founded a utopian cult in the Hollywood Hills, reinventing himself as the supreme godhead Father Yod. Almost inevitably, in 1973 he started an extreme psychedelic rock band, Ya Ho Wha 13.

They were rejected by every major label they approached, but self-pressed nine LPs, which they sold from the back of Father Yod’s wildly popular Sunset Strip vegetarian restaurant the Source.

“It was music that enlightened him to go on his spiritual journey,” says Source Family archivist and documentarian Isis Aquarian, co-author of The Source Family Scrapbook and one of Father Yod’s 14 wives. She cites the Moody Blues and Jethro Tull as his main inspirations: music was an outlet to “connect with the younger people”, she says, the aim “to help promote spirituality and the betterment of all humanity for the planet”.
The Guardian

^[1] [ed. note: a lot of his exploits are unverifiable, and frankly, don’t pass the sniff test.]

There’s a Book!

What’s Going On Here?

In a nutshell, it appears to be a generic cult of personality. Nothing really new or novel. Check out any of the following to completely understand Father Yod.