ORIGINAL ARTICLE The Power of Place: the Transfer of Charismatic Authority to an American Ashram Lauren Miller Griffith 1 Published online: 30 May 2019 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 Abstract It has largely been assumed that when an intentional community loses its charismatic leader for one reason or another, the group will most likely disband unless that individual’ s charisma has become routinized. The Kashi Ashram in Sebastian, Florida, is a spiritual community that was established, thanks to the vision of their Guru, Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati. Her students were so devoted to her that her physical death in 2012 could have initiated a crisis in the community. Although bureaucratic offices had been established to carry out some of the necessary functions of the Ashram, no one came close to filling her role as a spiritual teacher. And yet, more than 6 years later, new members are still joining the community and the way they describe Ma’ s presence in their lives is little different from how older members that knew Ma in this lifetime talk about her. While I do not disagree that the routinization of charisma is an important step in ensuring the longevity of new religious movements, in this paper, I argue that an individual’ s charisma may be transferred to a geographic place such that the Ashram becomes an active agent in the attraction and retention of new members. Keywords Ashram . Charisma . Intentional community . Hinduism “There is a grace that brings you here. It is called the grace of mutual consent. It comes from a very deep place. It’ s like a magnet.”–Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati November 16, 2001 By afternoon on my second full day at the Ashram, I felt awful. Even one of the visitors from Atlanta, who was there for the annual Guru Purnima celebration during which Journal of Dharma Studies (2019) 2:95–111 https://doi.org/10.1007/s42240-019-00040-3 * Lauren Miller Griffith Lauren.Griffith@ttu.edu 1 Department of Sociology, Anthropology & Social Work, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409, USA