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I paged thru these two books.  They were full of Plumes of Energy, Angels holding American Flags, Cosmic Presences, Jesus, talk of Ascended Masters in Switzerland, and George Washington.

To say the least, I could provide no context for this stuff.
I'd heard some pretty strange stuff in my time, but this was off the scale.

Nowhere in my mental map of the 20th century did I have a place for this level of weirdness, nor the particular details of it.

The books were printed in 1970 or 1971, and were copyright 1964. But they were printed in a oddly spaced font, something like Courier, in dark purple ink; and the full-color picture plates were dated in the 1940s and early 50s.

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When you want to know about history, ask someone older than you.

So I asked a professor of mine, almost an emeritus, who had grown up in California in the 1930s.  Had he ever heard of these Saint Germain "I Am" people?

"Oh lord yes!  My aunt..." [or was it his great-aunt? some other relation?] "...fell in with them before she died..." ...this was in the 1950s?... "The Saint Germain people had this idea that you could receive messages from Higher Consciousnesses or somesuch by listening to static on the radio."

While their notions of financial probity were apparently even more surreal than their art and literature, the I Am folks did at least provide entertainment.  "...and at her funeral, the presiding priest was one of these Saint Germain folks... halfway thru the eulogy he had an episode. [imitation of someone swooning while spouting melodrama] 'I am receiving a cosmic message that higher spiritual beings will speak thru the radio tonight in the static just above KFI!!!'"

And I thought, "well don't that beat all."