Ra and the Law of One

The first Ra session took place on January 15, 1981, in Louisville, Kentucky. A voice speaking in trance through Carla Rueckert stated 'I am Ra,' with Don Elkins asking the questions and Jim McCarty recording and transcribing. That specific date and account is consistent across L/L Research's own archive and independent secondary summaries. Whatever you make of the source, the event itself is well documented.

Carla L. Rueckert (later Rueckert-McCarty) was the trance channel, or 'instrument.' Born July 16, 1943 in Lake Forest, Illinois, she earned a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Louisville (1966) and an M.S. in Library Service (1971). She joined Don Elkins' meditation and research circle in 1962, became his full-time research partner in 1970, and served as the instrument for the Ra contact specifically across 1981 to 1984. She married Jim McCarty in 1987 and died on April 1, 2015 in Louisville.

Donald Tully 'Don' Elkins was the questioner. Born February 27, 1930 in Louisville, he held engineering degrees and taught as a Professor of Physics and Engineering at the University of Louisville from 1953 to 1965. He then left tenure to fly as a commercial airline pilot, eventually a Boeing 727 captain, specifically so he could pursue UFO and paranormal research full time. He had begun that research in 1955 and formalized it as L/L Research with Rueckert in 1970.

James Allen 'Jim' McCarty was the scribe. He joined the group in 1980, shortly before the Ra sessions began, and recorded and transcribed every session. He married Carla Rueckert in 1987 and still leads L/L Research from Louisville today, now channeling other claimed 'Confederation' sources rather than Ra.

Between January 1981 and late 1984 the group ran 106 recorded sessions, in which Elkins put roughly 2,500 questions to the entity. Every session was taped and later transcribed by McCarty. Whatever the voice was, the practice around it was disciplined, dated, and archived, which is exactly why the claims inside it can be examined rather than just believed or dismissed.

Inside the material, the entity describes itself as a 'sixth-density social memory complex': a group that began as a third-density civilization on the planet Venus roughly 2.6 billion years ago before evolving into a single unified mind. This is a claim made entirely from within the channeling. There is no evidence or corroboration for it outside the trance statements themselves, and we treat it as exactly what it is, an assertion the voice makes about the voice.

Rueckert's 2001 book A Wanderer's Handbook built out the material's idea of 'Wanderers': souls said to originate in higher densities who incarnate on Earth, forgetting their origin, to help humanity through a coming planetary 'harvest.' It is a purely metaphysical, single-source doctrine with no external verification, though it has been influential in later New Age thought and clearly parallels the modern 'starseed' idea.

Start with the settled history. In mainstream Egyptology, Ra was one of ancient Egypt's most important gods, worshipped from at least the Old Kingdom (about 2613 to 2181 BCE) at his principal cult center of Heliopolis, near modern Cairo. He was depicted chiefly as the falcon-headed Ra-Horakhty crowned with a solar disc, secondarily as the scarab Khepri or the sacred Mnevis bull, and his cult ran for roughly two millennia until Christianity eclipsed it in the Roman period. This is standard Egyptology, not a matter of dispute.

And here is where the story simply breaks. Worship of the god Ra at Heliopolis is solidly attested from the Old Kingdom, from about 2613 BCE onward, well over a thousand years before Akhenaten's reign (about 1353 to 1336 BCE). That means the 'Ra' name and the sun-god identity the material blames on post-Akhenaten priestly corruption were already firmly in place more than a millennium before Akhenaten was born. This is not a difference of interpretation. It is a straightforward date contradiction: the effect the channeling describes predates its own stated cause by over a thousand years.

The material frames Ra as one voice within a larger 'Confederation of Planets in the Service of the Infinite Creator': a coalition of higher-density, ostensibly benevolent non-physical beings operating under a 'Law of Free Will.' That vocabulary and framework was later absorbed by New Age and UFO channelers (from the 1990s onward, for example Sheldan Nidle) into what is now widely known as the 'Galactic Federation of Light' mythology. When a modern channeler invokes a benevolent galactic federation, they are, knowingly or not, drawing on this lineage.

But do not overclaim the paternity. The 'federation' idea in contactee lore has an older, independent root as well, traced by ufology historians to 1950s contactees such as George Van Tassel, decades before the Ra sessions began in 1981. The honest framing is that the Law of One is one major tributary that helped popularize and name the benevolent-alien-federation trope for later channelers, not its sole point of origin.

The active Ra sessions ended at 106 when Don Elkins died on November 7, 1984, after roughly a year of declining physical and emotional health. L/L Research's own published materials, including its epilogues and a 'Note about Don Elkins,' describe a period of illness and depression. Some independent secondary sources, such as Exopaedia, describe the death more directly as a suicide. We treat the specific cause-of-death framing as source-dependent, attribute each version to its source, and handle it with the care the subject deserves rather than asserting one account as flatly settled.

L/L Research is still an active organization today, based in Louisville, Kentucky under Jim McCarty's direction. It distributes the Law of One texts as free downloadable PDFs from its own library alongside paid print, ebook, and audiobook editions sold through its 'Bring4th' store, and it now channels other claimed 'Confederation' sources distinct from Ra. The contact ended in 1984; the practice around it never did.