When author and journalist Mouni Sadhu died at the age of seventy-one on Christmas Eve 1971, he left his personal property – his furniture and household effects, his 1966 VW microbus, his AWA Radiola radiogram, his records and books and just over $1200 cash – to three friends, one of whom who had been nursing him and paying the rent on his flat at 20 Beaver Street, East Malvern, since March that year.

Mouni Sadhu in the 1940s

Mouni Sadhu was the author of several books including Theurgy, The Tarot, Concentration, Samadhi, In Days of Great Peace, Mediation and Ways to Self-Realisation. In Other Temples, Other Gods (Methuen, 1980), a history of the occult in Australia by Neville Drury and Gregory Tillett, Mouni Sadhu is described as “one of the most elusive and mysterious figures of Australian occultism”. Originally from central Europe, he had been involved with occult groups in France before arriving in Melbourne where he formed his own group. After visiting India, he became a follower of the guru Ramana Maharshi. Drury and Tillett report that “two members of his original Melbourne group…knew little of his life before coming to Australia, and not a great deal of it since he lived here”.

Mouni Sadhu was an ASA member, and he left the copyright in his books and manuscripts and his royalties from the date of his death to the Society, stating in his will: “They shall be able to conduct the relations with my different Publishers abroad as well as complicated accounts etc, which is impossible for non-specialized in that matter people”.

In January 1972, the ASA received a letter advising of Mouni Sadhu’s bequest, but legal problems with the will and the document setting out his grant of copyright and the ASA’s change of name (when it was incorporated) were not resolved until 1993. When the ASA finally received the Sadhu bequest it had grown to $107,000. In 2007, Mouni Sadhu’s books were still selling in many countries around the world, earning over $7000 in royalties, and the total value of his bequest stood at over $200,000.

For more information on Mouni Sadhu, click here.