a substantial New York City following of her own, heard about the Brooklyn housewife who hosted ethereal visitors in her bathroom. At meetings in churches and homes throughout New York, Charlton began introducing her newfound protégé to groups of yoga students with the urgent whisper: "A saint is coming! A saint is coming!"
     The saint would relate the story of her mystical encounters. Sometimes she would meditate, or single out audience members and speak to them about intimate matters of the heart.
     Her career as a spiritual leader was thriving, but her marriage foundered. Her husband divorced her. By then counterculture followers from all over the country were coming to meditate with the saint from Brooklyn, establishing a series of communal homes. Gail Malloy, now an advertising executive in New York, lived in one of them.
     "In those days, she would go into such deep trances that we were convinced she was in danger of dying," she says. "Sometimes we had to stay up all night with her to keep the energy from getting sucked out of her body. It was all very seductive, all very exciting, all very dramatic. How could you even think of the outside world? It was such great theater, everything else seemed boring by comparison."
     Soon, a higher consciousness heavyweight got caught up in the drama. His name was Richard Alpert. He was a Berkley psychology professor who had collaborated with Timothy Leary in an infamous series of LSD experiments.
     Leary, who was convinced the drug could elevate consciousness, went on to deliver the famous hippie-era sound bite: "turn on, tune in, drop out." But Alpert became disillusioned with drugs. He traveled to India in search of enlightenment, was given the name "Ram Dass" by his guru, and in 1971 became a counterculture godfather when he wrote Be Here Now, a hippie how-to.
     Then he heard about the saint from Brooklyn. He moved to New York to study with her and give classes by her side. They were the mom and pop of consciousness raising.

Jaya Hanuman came to Ma's hospice weeks before he died of AIDS. 

her way to the front of a public reception line and held up a scrapbook filled with pictures of 
 infants with the disease. The startled pope blessed the book.
Ma's followers think of Ram Dass as the misguided one. Most of them simply believe he had a crush on Ma and was rebuffed. They also dismiss the other criticisms and incidents. Some, they say, are lies. Some bespeak prejudice against a strong-willed, flamboyant woman. And some, they say, are bitter lashings out from people who couldn't measure up to the self-sacrifice she demands.

     Peaceful as it seems, the ashram is a demanding place.
     Devotees who live there submit themselves to a religious vocation. Many, like Ma, are converts to Hinduism. They worship together near the woodsy temple of Hanuman, in ceremonies called "fire pujas" that begin with chanting and conclude with participants throwing rice into a blaze, symbolizing the release of pettiness and selfish cares. They  take a vow of chastity, work long volunteer hours, and assume a new, spiritual name. And they like to pamper the matriarch who oversees their spiritual growth. Ma likes to play roller hockey, so the ashram became perhaps the only religious retreat in the country with a hockey rink, complete with scoreboard and nets. Ma often can be found playing matches with ashram teenagers.
     She is equally adept at accumulating respect in high places and millions of dollars in donations.
     Her work with AIDS patients has inspired victims and volunteers - including an anonymous donor who recently gave $6 million to the ashram for a new 40-bed care center.
     Many AIDS sufferers have died in her arms. She keeps their ashes in her apartment or scatters them across the lake. She has their names engraved on a boardwalk at the ashram. The names go on and on - Little Toby. Sonny Boy Pete. Rocky. Winston. Deena. Brooklyn. It's a memorial of lost souls, stretching from the woods to the Sebastian River.

THE KASHI ASHRAM IS A '70S flashback of incense and idealism, tucked into a wooded swatch of land between the Sebastian and Indian rivers. In the center of the complex is a lake, dug by Ma and her followers when the property was still mostly scrub brush and trees, surrounded now with an array of statues and shrines.
     This may well be the only place on Earth where Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary rub shoulders with Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction and creation, and her consort Hanuman, the monkey-faced god who comes to Earth to serve humanity. There is a Buddhist temple and a Jewish enclave with a wooden replica of the Ten Commandments.
     It's a spiritual Epcot - an open-air religious sampler featuring belief systems from all over the world. Its matriarch lives in an apartment decorated with a wall-to-wall faux leopard skin rug, travels in a bus with a bumper sticker that says, "I am a goddess! Back off!" and has a habit of peppering her conversation with four- letter words.

     Nobody blends the sacred and the profane like Ma Bhagavati. Her combination of chutzpah and 

compassion has enabled her to quietly thrive for more than two decades.
     In spite of the rift with Ram Dass.
     In spite of a melee at a supermarket, soon after she moved to Florida, which resulted in her being charged with three counts of battery.    

     In spite of a successful lawsuit by a mother who claims that Ma, and other members of the ashram, brainwashed her into giving up her child, even falsifying the birth certificate.
     In spite of charges by a former high-ranking member of her staff that she spends money lavishly - even gambling away thousands in a visit to a New Orleans riverboat casino.
     In spite of all this, dozens of followers have remained devoted to Ma.
     One of them is Muksha Ram, who teaches in the ashram school. Muksha Ram first met Ma during her New York years. Like many other ashram members, he is a thoughtful, well educated person, disillusioned with traditional Western religions. "I was always interested in saints who didn't appear to be saints," he says.
     He believes he found one in Ma.
     She interrupts speakers at sedate religious conferences, shaking her finger at them for not paying more attention to AIDS. She even cornered the pope, flying to Rome to convince him that the Catholic Church should do more about AIDS. Miffed when she didn't get a private audience, she worked 

The boardwalk with names of people who died at the ashram.