Shangri-la, Colo.

Two hundred men, women & children sweated away last week to convert an isolated Colorado canyon into an atomic foxhole. They hurried to finish roads, houses, power plant, workshop and administration building before atom bombs rained down to wipe out civilization. Dr. Doreal had said it would be "soon, probably sooner." When the radioactive dust had settled at last, they--the Brotherhood of the White Temple--would emerge from their hideout, help set civilization going again.

Dr. Doreal is a chubby, bald little man with glittery eyes who turned up 17 years ago in Denver, Colo, and incorporated a new church: the Brotherhood of the White Temple. He said he was part Choctaw, born on an Oklahoma reservation and that, after serving in the Signal Corps during World War I, he had gone to Tibet and been received into the inner circle of the Royal Order of Shamballa Priests.

To goggle-eyed followers he told still more: about the subterranean Great White Lodge, 75 miles beneath the Forbidden City of Lhasa and reached by a "gravity-neutralizing" elevator, where a twelve-man Supreme Council met in a white-metal hall to plan world strategy. "Archbishop" Doreal assured brotherhood members that he kept in constant touch with the council by sending his soul back to Tibet by "astral projection."

Under the leadership of Dr. Doreal and his astral remote control, Denver's Brotherhood of the White Temple prospered. By 1942 it had acquired an imposing downtown mansion. Here, pink-cheeked Prophet Doreal, garbed in a gold-trimmed robe of purple silk, addressed his followers from a throne that had once belonged to Mexico's Emperor Maximilian (see cut).

Men & women came to hear Doreal talk of "onement with the universal mind" or "full illumination," and to be bound together by the "thaumaturgic power that was exercised by Christ and his disciples." Members of any faith were welcome, were not required to abandon their previous beliefs or their minor vices. Leader Doreal supplied them with his own interpretations of the Gospels.

But as to the religions with which the brotherhood would lead the postatomic world, "Archbishop" Doreal took care last week to be as misty as the distant Himalayas. Said he: "Our foundation is Christian, but our interpretation differs from that of the orthodox groups. . . . We're reasonable people, not fanatics." His most explicit expression of faith: "I am a Republican."

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