Ms. Schumacher said that she spent the next decade preparing her channel for Yeshua. She meditated daily, cut out sugar and caffeine, and limited her diet to five foods: broccoli, cauliflower, turkey, chicken and watermelon. “If someone’s channel is diluted,” she said, “there’s a kind of film or gunk that the energy gets stuck in and can’t push through.”
Ms. Schumacher, who dated men and women in her 20s, assumed she would also have to be celibate. But then she kept getting a message, “David with a black dog.” She signed up for Match.com. Mr. Carnell’s profile, which had a photo of him with a black dog, was the first one that popped up. When she took him to a John Mayer concert for his birthday, he understood when she suddenly had to go channel the dead lover and brother of a woman in another row. “That’s love,” she said.
By 2013, Ms. Schumacher had started channeling for friends, then friends of friends, and eventually put on free events. She also received a message in a dream to lead her followers into the desert. She began hosting journeys to Sedona, Ariz., where she invited clients for meditations in caves and occasionally channeled their dead relatives.
Ms. Mara attended such a journey in 2018. She first wrote to Ms. Schumacher under an alias when she had just finished filming “Mary Magdalene,” a 2019 film in which Ms. Mara starred. “The first session was just out of this world incredible,” Ms. Mara said. Other mediums were more vague, making generalized statements that could apply to anyone. But Ms. Schumacher, she said, knew specifics about her family that no one could have known. “Even if she did somehow figure out who I was,” Ms. Mara said.
Ms. Schumacher then invited her to Sedona. “I was definitely scared and slightly resistant to it,” Ms. Mara said. “I think I pulled up and almost turned right back around. But after a few hours I was like, ‘Nope, I can trust these people. We’re all just human here, searching for something.’”
Ms. Schumacher thinks of her referral system like trees, with each person referring six others. Rain Phoenix, Joaquin’s sister, referred Ms. Mara, who then referred the director David Fincher — “we had a really ‘wow’ session,” Ms. Schumacher said — who then referred Brad Pitt. Mr. Pitt also didn’t write his real name, but signed his initials. “I thought he was Brad Paisley,” Ms. Schumacher said. (Mr. Fincher could not be reached; Mr. Pitt declined to comment.)