Annalee Skarin

Annalee Skarin (1899–1988), born Nansela Mathews, was an American mystical author raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, from which she was later excommunicated for unorthodox teaching.

She self-published her first and best-known book, Ye Are Gods, in 1948, followed by Secrets of Eternal Youth, The Temple of God, and others. Her central and most controversial claim was that human beings can attain physical immortality, and even bodily “translation” out of ordinary mortal existence, through the wholehearted cultivation of love, gratitude, and praise.

Skarin’s place in the mind-power lineage is as a mid-century exponent of the most radical version of mind-over-matter: the belief that a transformed inner state can transfigure the physical body itself. Where most New Thought writers applied the power of mind to health and circumstance, Skarin pushed the premise to its limit, teaching that sustained love and praise raise the body’s very substance beyond death, a doctrine she rooted in biblical figures said to have been “translated.” Her work, kept in print by metaphysical publishers, became a touchstone for later New Age teachings of physical ascension and bodily light-transformation, carrying forward the conviction that feeling is the operative creative force and that grace and effort together can overcome even mortality.