Neville Goddard

Neville Lancelot Goddard was born on February 19, 1905, in Fontabelle, Saint Michael, Barbados, the fourth of ten children born to Joseph Nathaniel Goddard, a merchant, and Wilhelmina Goddard, née Hinkson. Among his siblings was John Goddard, who became a cricketer and businessman. At seventeen, Goddard emigrated to New York City in 1922 to study drama, launching a theatrical career that began at the Hippodrome in 1925, where he worked as a dancer.

By the mid-1920s, Goddard had become an established performer in a professional act billed as "Amerique and Neville," appearing at prominent vaudeville venues including the Palace Theatre and Loew's Rochester Theater. Theatrical critics of the period frequently noted his physical resemblance to silent film star Rudolph Valentino. In 1925, he traveled to England with his dancing partner to perform at Ciro's in London, and the tour extended to the Winter Garden in Berlin and the Ambassador in Paris. It was during this international engagement that he encountered a Scotsman named Arthur Begbie, who introduced him to spiritualistic séances and sparked his interest in metaphysics and psychical research. Goddard concluded his professional dancing career in 1929 following the onset of the Great Depression. His Broadway career included an appearance in 1930 in the revue Hello, Paris.

Between 1929 and 1936, Goddard studied under a teacher he referred to as Abdullah, identified through historical research as Modeste Abdallah Guillaume, also known as G. Mahmud Ahmad Abdoullah, a former baritone who had performed with the Williams and Walker Co. Glee Club between 1905 and 1910. By 1928, Abdoullah had established a study center at 30 West 72nd Street in New York, where he taught Kabbalah, Hebrew, and esoteric Bible interpretation to both Goddard and Joseph Murphy, who also acknowledged Abdoullah as his primary teacher. During this same period, Goddard became associated with Max Heindel's Rosicrucian Fellowship. Records from The Rosicrucian Fellowship Magazine identify him as a visiting lecturer from New York who was teaching esoteric Christian mysteries at their Cleveland Study Center as early as 1931, predating the public lectures he is often cited as beginning in February 1938 at the Old Actor's Church.

In 1942, at the age of 37, Goddard was drafted into the United States Army and stationed at Camp Polk, Louisiana, with the 11th Armored Division. After nine months of service, he received an honorable discharge from Battalion Commanding Officer Colonel Theodore Bilbough Jr. Following his discharge, he was naturalized as a United States citizen, having previously held British citizenship. During the 1940s and early 1950s, Goddard lectured extensively across the country, including a prominent series at The Town Hall in New York and various venues in San Francisco. After establishing a substantial following during a West Coast expansion in 1948, he relocated 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. The program comprised 26 half-hour segments airing on Sunday afternoons at 1:00 PM, during which Goddard spoke extemporaneously on biblical esotericism while seated at a desk. A single initial telecast generated 5,000 letters from viewers, prompting the station to secure him for a full series. The program reached a reported weekly audience in excess of 300,000, though no video footage of the broadcasts is known to have survived, as the programs were either performed live or recorded on tapes that were subsequently recorded over. Goddard also made frequent appearances on The Joe Pyne Show between 1965 and 1967, where he was noted for his ability to recite and interpret the Bible in original Greek and Hebrew from memory. In the 1960s and early 1970s, his lectures were largely confined to Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Goddard authored 14 books addressing spirituality, religion, and the human mind. His philosophy centered on the power of human imagination, which he identified as the divine force described in religious texts, and he taught that the external world reflects an individual's internal mental state. His primary method, which he called the Law of Assumption, held that assuming the feeling of a wish already fulfilled would cause that assumption to materialize in physical reality. He interpreted the Bible not as a historical document but as a psychological drama enacted within individual human consciousness, drawing also on the poetry of William Blake in developing his teachings. In the later phase of his career, he introduced a concept he called The Promise, describing a series of mystical visions he claimed to have experienced that revealed the individual's ultimate identity as the Creator.

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. The couple had one son, Joseph Neville Goddard. Among those who have acknowledged Goddard's influence are Rhonda Byrne and Wayne Dyer. Jonathan L. Walton has contended that Frederick Eikerenkoetter, known as Reverend Ike, adopted theories rooted in Goddard's ideas. Margaret Runyan Castaneda, ex-wife and biographer of Carlos Castaneda, introduced Castaneda to Goddard's work. Goddard died on October 1, 1972.