Neville Goddard


Neville Goddard was a Barbadian writer, speaker and mystic in the New Thought movement. He grew up in Barbados and moved to the United States as a young adult. He taught various self-help methods for testing his own claim that the human imagination is omnificent, therefore rendering human imagination to be God. He achieved popularity by reinterpreting the Bible and the poetry of William Blake. He authored 14 books on this topic, covering spirituality, religion, and the human mind.

Early life

Neville Lancelot Goddard was born in Fontabelle, Saint Michael, Barbados, on February 19, 1905, to Joseph Nathaniel Goddard, a merchant, and Wilhelmina Goddard. Neville was the fourth of ten children. He was also the older brother to cricketer and businessman John Goddard. At age 17, Neville emigrated to New York City in 1922 to study drama and began his theatrical career as a dancer at the Hippodrome in New York City in 1925.
Between 1929 and 1936, Goddard was mentored by a teacher he called Abdullah. Historical research identifies him as Modeste Abdallah Guillaume, a former baritone who performed with the Williams and Walker Co. Glee Club between 1905 and 1910. In 1929, his "Religion of Love" ministry was featured in an exposé by Harry Houdini's lead investigator Rose Mackenberg, who published an ordination certificate signed by Abdoullah. During this period, Abdoullah was a prominent figure in the "Three-Fold Movement", representing Islam on panels alongside Paramahansa Yogananda and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise. By 1928, he had established a study center at 30 West 72nd Street in New York, where he taught Kabbalah, Hebrew, and esoteric Bible interpretation to Goddard and Joseph Murphy, the latter of whom also acknowledged Abdoullah as his primary teacher.
In 1942, at the age of 37, Goddard was drafted into the army and stationed at Camp Polk, Louisiana, in the 11th Armored Division. After serving just 9 months, he was granted an honorable discharge from his Battalion Commanding Officer Colonel Theodore Bilbough Jr. It was after this brief stint in the Army that he was naturalized as a United States citizen, having been a British citizen up to this point.

Career

Goddard began his theatrical career as a dancer in 1925 at the Hippodrome. By the mid-1920s, he was an established performer in the professional act "Amerique and Neville," headlining prominent vaudeville venues such as the Palace Theatre and Loew's Rochester Theater. During this period, theatrical critics and newspapers frequently remarked on his striking physical resemblance to silent film star Rudolph Valentino.
In 1925, Goddard sailed for England with his dancing partner to perform at Ciro's in London, as well as the Winter Garden in Berlin and the Ambassador in Paris. It was during this international tour that he developed an interest in metaphysics and psychical research after meeting Arthur Begbie, a Scotsman who introduced him to spiritualistic seances. Following the onset of the Great Depression, he concluded his professional dancing career in 1929 and shifted his focus toward the study of mysticism.
Upon returning to New York, Goddard became associated with Max Heindel's Rosicrucian Fellowship. While he is often cited as beginning his public lectures in February 1938 at the Old Actor's Church, records from The Rosicrucian Fellowship Magazine identify him as a "visiting lecturer" from New York who was already teaching esoteric Christian mysteries in their Cleveland Study Center as early as 1931.
During the 1940s and early 1950s, Goddard traveled extensively throughout the United States, holding a prominent lecture series at The Town Hall in New York and various venues in San Francisco. Having established a significant following during his "West Coast Expansion" in 1948, he moved permanently from New York City to Los Angeles in 1952.
In the mid-1950s, Goddard hosted a television series titled Neville on KTTV Channel 11 in Los Angeles, which local media described as "something new and provocative". The program consisted of 26 half-hour segments airing on Sunday afternoons at 1:00 PM, where Goddard spoke extemporaneously on biblical esotericism while seated at a desk. Following a single initial telecast that generated 5,000 letters from viewers, the station secured Goddard for a full series of talks. Despite reaching a reported weekly audience in excess of 300,000, no video footage of these broadcasts is known to have survived. The series was produced during the transition to videotape technology and the programs were either performed live or recorded on expensive tapes that were subsequently recorded over.
Goddard also made frequent appearances on The Joe Pyne Show between 1965 and 1967. According to contemporary accounts, he was noted for his ability to recite and interpret the Bible in original Greek and Hebrew from memory, often engaging in debates with fundamentalist theologians without the use of a physical text. In the 1960s and early 1970s, he confined most of his lectures to Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Teachings

Goddard's philosophy centers on the power of the "Human Imagination," which he identified as the divine spark or "God" described in religious texts. He taught that the external world is a projection of an individual's internal mental state, a concept often summarized by his phrase "everyone is you pushed out."

Law of Assumption

Goddard's primary method for manifestation was the "Law of Assumption." He argued that to change one's circumstances, one must "assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled" where the individual must mentally and emotionally inhabit the state of already possessing what is desired. He emphasized that "an assumption, though false, if persisted in, will harden into fact." Unlike other New Thought teachers who focused on willpower, Goddard emphasized the use of a "State Akin To Sleep", a drowsy, meditative state used to impress the subconscious mind with a specific sensory image of a desired outcome.

Biblical Exegesis

Goddard viewed the Bible not as a historical record, but as a psychological drama taking place in the individual human consciousness. He interpreted biblical figures as personifications of different states of mind. For example, he taught that Jesus Christ is a symbol for the human imagination, and the "Crucifixion" represents the spirit's "burial" within the human body, from which it must eventually awaken.

The Promise

In the later years of his career, Goddard introduced a concept he called "The Promise." He claimed to have experienced a series of mystical visions that revealed the ultimate destiny of humanity: the realization that the individual is actually God. He taught that after achieving "The Law", a person would eventually experience a spiritual birth that confirms their identity as the Creator, a process he described as the "resurrection of the Christ" within the individual.

Legacy

has contended that Frederick Eikerenkoetter, best known as Reverend Ike, in particular adopted theories and teachings rooted in Goddard's ideas. Rhonda Byrne and Wayne Dyer have noted that Goddard shaped their views. Margaret Runyan Castaneda, ex-wife and later biographer of Carlos Castaneda, was interested in Goddard's work and introduced Castaneda to Goddard's ideas.
The teacher and mystic Arunachala Ramana credited Goddard's lectures at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre and books such as Your Faith Is Your Fortune as primary factors in his own spiritual awakening in 1973.

Personal life

Goddard married Mildrid Mary Hughes in 1923. Hughes was born on March 29, 1901, in Lancaster and Blackburn, England, and died on November 9, 1979, in New York City. Goddard had one child with Hughes, a son named Joseph Neville Goddard, who was born on May 19, 1924 and died in March 1, 1986.
In 1942, Goddard married Catherine Willa Van Schmus. Van Schmus was born on February 2, 1907, in New Jersey, and died on January 1, 1975, in Los Angeles, California. They had a daughter, Victoria Goddard, born on June 28, 1942, and died on September 25, 2024 in Santa Monica, California.

Death

Goddard died on October 1, 1972, aged 67, from an esophageal rupture. In 2022, historian Mitch Horowitz corrected the record of Neville's death, previously misattributed to a heart attack; the author's death certificate cites the esophageal rupture. He had been a resident of Los Angeles for roughly 20 years.

Works

  • At Your Command
  • Your Faith Is Your Fortune
  • Freedom for All—A Practical Application of the Bible
  • Feeling Is the Secret
  • Prayer—The Art of Believing
  • Out of This World
  • The Power of Awareness
  • The Creative Use of Imagination
  • Awakened Imagination
  • Seedtime and Harvest
  • I Know My Father
  • The Law and the Promise
  • He Breaks the Shell
  • ''Resurrection''