CULT WATCH

PEOPLE’S TEMPLE

Mass suicide is associated with cults. Without doubt the most famous mass suicide was that of the People’s Temple in November 1978 at Jonestown, Guyana. Headed by the Rev Jim Jones, US Congressman Leo Ryan had gone there with journalists to investigate claims that the thousand strong congregation was being held in slavery.
On the fateful morning, whilst travelling to a local airstrip with a handful of members who had decided to leave, Jones’s henchmen gunned them down. Many died, including Ryan. Meanwhile, back at Jamestown, vats of poison were brought out and they killed themselves. Those who refused were gunned down.
Jones was born in a small farming community in Indiana in 1931. A poor but deep thinking boy, he turned to the Bible at an early age, preaching to passers-by by the age of twelve.
Appalled to discover his father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, he suffered much abuse by standing up for racial minorities. Gaining a small following, the People’s Temple began with good intentions in a ghetto in Indianapolis.
Determined to set up a socialist community based on the Blble, Jones’s growing power began to corrupt. Moving to California, and eventually Guyana, he became a fake healer and abuser. By the time Jonestown was set up in 1977, he had become a dictator.

(c) Anthony North, Jan 2007

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ORDER OF THE SOLAR TEMPLE

On 22 December 1995, sixteen corpses were discovered on a plateau in the French Alps in the shape of a star. This was the second mass suicide of the Order of the Solar Temple, a cult formed by fraudster Joseph de Mambro and homeopath Luc Jouret. The first had been fourteen months earlier, involving infernos in two Swiss chalet complexes, proceeded by the suspicious deaths, by fire, of five members including a young mother and child in Canada.
The Solar Temple was based on a mix of Knights Templar mythology and new age mysticism, with a distinct apocalyptic nature that would lead to a new spiritual existence. But what brought their apocalypse so soon?
It is interesting that Di Mambro had a daughter called Emanuelle, known as a Cosmic Child. However, the child that died in Canada was a boy called Emmanuel. Di Mambro was known to be affronted by this boy being named after the Cosmic Child, branding him the antichrist. Whether out of revenge, or the naming being a signal for Armageddon, the suicides seem to be mixed up with the boy.

(c) Anthony North, Feb 2007

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HEAVEN’S GATE

The Higher Source computer cult, better known as Heaven’s Gate, killed themselves over three nights in March 1997 in their ranch near San Diego. Made up of short-haired, zombie-like computer wizards, they went out for a final meal and then helped each other to take vodka and drugs aided by strangulation.
They were led by elderly, white haired Marshall Appplewhite and his wife, known together as Bo and Peep. He had met her in 1975 after she nursed him through mental illness, and they had set up many cults previously.
However, they did not see themselves as dying over those nights. Rather, they were simply shedding their bodies to go to a flying saucer that was hidden in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet, thus surviving the coming end of civilisation.

(c) Anthony North, Feb 2007