QAnon supporters gather in downtown Dallas expecting JFK Jr. to reappear

Some believe the reappearance of John F. Kennedy’s son, who died in a plane crash in 1999, will bring about the reinstatement of Donald Trump as president.

Read the full article on The Dallas Morning News

 

Rev Jim Jones - People's Temple Christian Church, Los Angeles, CA

stock footage of a sermon and faith healing 

1970s

 

Abimael Guzmán, Leader Of Shining Path Insurgency In Peru, Dies At 86

LIMA, Peru — Abimael Guzmán, the leader of the brutal Shining Path insurgency in Peru who was captured in 1992, died on Saturday in a military hospital after an illness, the Peruvian government said.

Read the full article on NPR

 

The Brotherhood

 

The Brotherhood

documentary film about the Universal Brotherhood

Holy Ghost People

 

Holy Ghost People

documentary film about snake handling Christians

directed by Peter Adair (1967)

Sun Myung Moon: Emperor Of the Universe

 

Sun Myung Moon: Emperor Of the Universe

documentary film about the Unification Church

Blank Space QAnon. On the Success of a Conspiracy Fantasy as a Collective Text Interpretation Game

QAnon – the movement according to which Donald Trump wages a secret war against satanic and pedophilic elites – is not just a run-of-the-mill conspiracy belief, but functions as a collective text interpretation game. This is also the reason for his ridiculous success, which now includes the German Reichsbürger [people who believe that the German Reich still exists and that the Federal Republic of Germany is a company with no legal basis registered in Frankfurt] and the Corona denier scene. The fact that QAnon’s origin story was collaged from literary and popular cultural sources – among them a collective novel published in 1999 also by the co-author of this article – does not throw off its followers.

Read the full article on Giap

 

UFO Cults

UFO Cults

documentary film (circa 2000)

 

Book Review

Book Review

Scientologist! William S. Burroghs and the Weird Cult

by David S. Wills

     The lifestyle and literature of William S. Burroughs were both equally unorthodox in practice. The strange life lived by the author of Junky and Naked Lunch was often as surreal and inexplicable as the themes and imagery of those two classic and disturbing novels. Burroughs’ literature and the detailed biographical portraits we have of him can be bound together to form what could be called the Burroughs mythos. Up until recently, one piece of the Burroughs mythos has not been given proper attention; the missing piece is the time he spent as a member of The Church of Scientology and how it influenced his works. David S. Wills fills in this gap in his book Scientologist!: William S. Burroughs and the Weird Cult.

     This book is broken into four sections. The first is a general overview of Burroughs’ life up until the time he started to seriously pursue a career as a writer. Wills covers his childhood in St. Louis, the sexual abuse he suffered as a young boy, his introduction to the occult by his mother and nanny, his fascination for quack cures and pseudo-science, and a few other traumatic events along the way. The years of his early adulthood were just as strange. Burroughs began experimenting with drugs, traveled in South America, got involved in criminal activities, tried and failed to operate a grapefruit farm in Texas, and met up with future Beat Generation superstars Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. And, of course, there is the time Burroughs shot his wife in the head in Mexico City. In short, this section is a standard overview of William S. Burroughs’ life. There is one hitch, though. The author David S. Wills has an annoying approach and takes every chance he possibly can to take swipes at the man for either doing stupid things or having stupid beliefs. It’s not that Burroughs lived an exemplary life or had infallible views; Burroughs fans take these things for granted. Wills fails to understand that these are what makes Burroughs such a mythical character and beating up on him just makes Wills look like a smug and condescending asshole.

     The editing in this book is poor. I will mention it but won’t dwell on it too much. The text is permeated with spelling errors, improper word usage, awkward grammatical constructions, and poorly organized paragraphs. Sometimes it gets bad enough that I had to go back and reread a sentence or two to figure out what Wills was actually trying to say. At least William Burroughs was intentionally trying to confuse his readers. Wills just accomplishes this through carelessness.

     The author also adds some sporadic details that don’t quite fit the narrative. For example, he mentions Brion Gysin’s creation of the Dream Machine and the sad details of Burroughs’ relationship with his son; while these events are true and also represent significant details of the general biography, they have nothing to do with Burroughs and his relationship to Scientology. They are not well incorporated into the narrative. Most readers already know these things anyways. These parts stand out in uncomfortable ways like pieces of broccoli in a bowl of ice cream.

     And couldn’t he have come up with a better title than Scientologist!: William S. Burroughs and the Weird Cult? That sounds like something you would find in the National Enquirer.

     Moving on to the second section, as Burroughs’ life continues, he begins making waves with his second novel Naked Lunch then heads off for more exotic locations where the police won’t be breathing down his neck. He ends up in Tangiers, Morocco and that is where he meets Brion Gysin, the man who introduces Burroughs to both the cut-up method of writing and Dianetics, a new form of therapy devised by science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, the future cult leader of The Church of Scientology. The two men were not impressed with each other at first but they later struck up a friendship in Paris where Gysin was running the now-legendary Beat Hotel.

     Wills really cocks up the narrative by going into a muddled account of when Burroughs first heard of Dianetics. He goes into some detail based on letters exchanged between Burroughs and Ginsberg because he wants to prove that Burroughs never accurately stated the proper date when he learned of the technique. Why should we care what the exact date was? The very fact that it happened is more interesting and relevant to the story. Wills is, once again, making a petty attempt at debunking Burroughs. This section of the book is also annoying because Wills writes about how Burroughs was condescending to Ginsberg in his letters, something that didn’t appear to bother Ginsberg much since the two maintained a close friendship until both of them died. Wills also expresses a lot of contempt for Brion Gysin, who he obviously doesn’t like. There are times when Wills’ cheap shots almost ruin the whole book.

     Nonetheless, William Burroughs, with his penchant for occultism and fringe science, took to Dianetics and its use of the E-meter/lie detector to erase language and memories of traumatic experiences from the unconscious mind. The goal is to become “clear”, a state of mind where a human reaches their full potential because all the junk they have accumulated in their thoughts throughout their life is no longer there. One strong point about this book, and one that Wills deserves credit for, is demonstrating how the traumas of childhood, the drug addiction, the manslaughter, the homosexuality, and failed attempts in psychoanalysis made Burroughs a prime candidate for membership in L. Ron Hubbard’s cult, as if it were tailor made for Burroughs to begin with.

     At about the same time, Gysin introduced Burroughs to the cut-up technique. In this method of slicing up written texts and randomly putting them back together again, Burroughs saw a useful counterpart to Dianetics therapy. He saw it as a way of tearing through the clutter of language to recreate the relationship between the individual person, time, and space. Burroughs went on to use cut-ups as a writing technique which he employed in the novels of the Nova trilogy. Wills runs into some more trouble here. He tries to make the case that since Burroughs saw a connection between Dianetics and cut-ups that he somehow lifted the idea of cut-ups from L. Ron Hubbard. But it was Burroughs who conflated these two practices, not Hubbard. There is, as far as I know, no mention of anything resembling cut-ups in Hubbard’s literature.

     There is another aspect of cut-ups that Wills overlooks. The technique was less likely to have come from Dianetics and more likely to have originated in modernist, avant garde art, particularly the technique of Analytic Cubism. A direct line can be traced from that seminal movement to Brion Gysin who was briefly a member of the Surrealists before their final demise. Surrealism grew out of Dadism which grew out of Cubism with Pablo Picasso being one of the connecting threads through all three movements. Brion Gysin in Here to Go: Planet R-101 stated that painting is always fifty years ahead of writing. Backtracking from 1960 to the pre-war years, we arrive in the neighborhood of Analytic Cubism, which depicted the fracturing of physical surfaces, and Dada collages and montages which made combinations of unrelated found objects and images. The Dadaist poetry of Tristan Tzara was randomly constructed word-salads meant to be nonsensical. The Dadaists sought to destroy language because language means logical structures and logic is what led to the atrocities of World War I. Therefore disrupting all lines of communication would liberate humanity from future atrocities. That idea brings us full circle back to Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs. Cut-ups are the application of Analytic Cubism and Dada techniques to the physically realized literary text.

     “Rub out the word” and “language is a virus” are quotes that Burroughs reiterates throughout his writings. According to Scientology, the reactive mind and engrams act like tape recorders in the mind by constantly replaying language associated with, and accumulated by, traumatic experiences in life. They unconsciously control a person’s outlook and behavior. This idea is a key theme in understanding Burroughs’ literature and it is correct to attribute Scientology as a source of his inspiration. The problem for Wills is that he overplays his hand in this matter. Burroughs had discovered the theory of General Semantics as proposed by the linguist Alfred Korzybski long before he had discovered Dianetics. This concept is also prevalent in the theories underlying hypnotism, psychoanalysis, and the system of magick developed by Aleister Crowley, all of which Burroughs had toyed around with before he knew about Scientology. Wills says as much in the first section of his book. Therefore, his assertion that Burroughs borrowed his ideas about language from the cult is overemphasized. It did play a role in the development of Burroughs’ themes but there is a lot more to it than that. Wills makes it sound like the Nova trilogy is a treatise on Scientology and this is not entirely off the mark but inaccurate nonetheless.

     The third section of Scientologist! Is the strongest part of the book. Wills really gets to the heart of the matter here by telling the story of how William S. Burroughs actually joined The Church of Scientology in London, going through the auditing sessions with the e-meter, taking their classes, and eventually reaching the stage of clear. Burroughs eventually lost interest in the cult and published some scathing articles about their shady practices, authoritarian nature, and obsession with making money. They once conducted a high level auditing session with Burroughs in a broom closet. A clear picture of what it would be like to be in this church is given to those of us who would never consider joining.

     Burroughs’ motives for joining are also examined. This section culminates with a dispute between Burroughs and a spokesperson for the church that plays out in the pages of the pornographic magazine Mayfair in which Burroughs had been writing a monthly column on the cult for some time.

     But despite this well-detailed and well-researched section, David S. Wills still manages to drop the ball on a couple significant points. One example is his assertion that Burroughs was so enthusiastic about Scientology that he failed to recognize its darker aspect of being a mind-control cult. But this contradicts what Wills says about Burroughs approach to Dianetics in the second section; he claims that Burroughs was initially skeptical of L. Ron Hubbard’s motives, seeing him as being a money-grubbing, power hungry conman. This also contradicts Burroughs’ statement that he joined Scientology as an anthropologist, also mentioned by Wills. It might be more accurate to say he joined as an investigative journalist. But anyhow, my contention is that Wills misinterprets Burroughs’ motives because his own underlying intention is to prove that Burroughs was stupid. From my vantage point, I think Burroughs knew from the start what he was getting into. I do agree that he naively joined the church to reap the benefits of their therapy and come to terms with the nightmarish memories he had accumulated. Burroughs was about the age of 40 when he joined and it appears to me that this might have been the onset of his midlife crisis, a detail that Wills never considers. I also think Burroughs joined because he needed a new angle for his writing. It is not uncommon for authors to feel they have run out of ideas and go in search of something new, especially as they approach middle-age. Scientology was new territory, not just for Burroughs, but for everybody else as well since it was so new. I think Burroughs did know they were dangerous and joined for that reason. He was not a man who was averse to risky behavior, whether it be a matter of playing with guns, exploring the jungles of Colombia and Panama, experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs, or even buying a citrus farm in Texas hoping to get rich. Even his novels were daring; he possibly even wrote Naked Lunch with the intent of getting it prosecuted for obscenity; it is a work that takes extreme artistic, as well as, legal risks. It is part of the Burroughs mythos that he was attracted to danger while maintaining a calm, cool exterior. Wills never seems to put two and two together to get four; he lists all the separate pieces of the equation but never calculates them in order to come up with the correct answer.

     Wills also overemphasizes the role Scientology played in its influence over Burroughs’ writing. As previously mentioned, the place it holds in the narratives of the Nova trilogy is significant but the claim that The Wild Boys is a novel directly influenced by Scientology is a stretch. Wills points out two minor and densely opaque passages in that book that refer to Scientology but the novel overall has little of anything to do woth that subject matter. The story celebrates a group of young men who live in the wilderness of Morocco. They reject society for the sake of living a free life of unrestrained indulgence in drug use and gay sex. They form an international cabal that sabotages the machinations of the puritanical American establishment. This anarchic vision is more like a direct contradiction of the end goals of Scientology rather than an affirmation.

     The fourth part of Wills’ book simply narrates the remaining years of Burroughs’ life and how aspects of Scientology continued to linger in his thoughts. A glaring omission in this section is the influence of Burroughs’ theories on the early industrial music scene of the mid-1970s which is indirectly related to Scientology. Not only did Burroughs work with Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle but his theories of language, social control, his cut-ups, and his audio tape experiments provided the theoretical framework for industrial music. P-Orridge and Christopherson released a record of cut-ups on their Industrial Records music label long before the two of them went on to form their own cult, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth which bore some similarities to Scientology via their practice of magick, an original influence on L. Ron Hubbard. Genesis P-Orridge was also influenced by The Process Chruch Of the Final Judgment, a cult that spun off from The Church of Scientology. The original idea behind industrial music was to bring hidden cultural taboos to the surface of consciousness for the sake of erasing them and liberating the individual from the mechanisms of control imposed by the establishment in modern culture. As Michel Foucault would say, the structures of cultural power and domination are largely invisible to the people who are manipulated by them. The idea that language is a virus means that language, as a mechanism of control, is hidden in the way Scientologists conceive of engrams and the reactive mind. Alexander Reed’s book Assimilate: A Critical Analysis of Industrial Music gives a comprehensive account of how industrial music grew out of William S. Burroughs. His involvement with Scientology did play a significant role in this.

     Scientologist!, despite its obvious flaws and amateurish writing, is a book that had to be written in order to fill a gap in the mythos of William S. Burroughs. David S. Wills does a good job of detailing this story. He does a bad job of interpreting what it is all about. He comes across as some douschebag millenial with a chip on his shoulder who wants to prove that baby boomers suck; if that is his hidden agenda, he has failed. William S. Burroughs may have believed in things that weren’t real but he does prompt his readers to question the realities of the world we live in. In the end, he wasn’t a scientist or a philosopher, he was an artist and a writer of fiction. If believing in bullshit resulted in him writing novels that are truly profound in the effects they have on the reader, then so be it. Burroughs is iconic because of his beliefs, not in spite of them. Behind his fringe ideologies is a stubborn insistence to reject the miserable conditions of the world and create a better way to exist, a way of life that embraces pleasure, freedom, peace, and the ability to be who you are while minding your own business. Besides, I know from experience that while under the influence of drugs, things like orgone energy, Dianetics, and famailar spirits can make a lot of sense. It’s just that when you come down from whatever high you are on, the illusions wear off. How can you get yourself permanently into that ecstatic state of mind? Burroughs never figured it out. Hopefully someday somebody else will. 

Wills, David S. Scientologist!: William S. Burroughs and the Weird Cult. Beatdom Books, United Kingdom: 2013. 
 

THE ANT HILL KIDS: Break Your Legs With A Sledgehammer Or Go To Hell

Roch Thériault was a man with a mission: to save himself and his followers from the coming apocalypse. As a child, Thériault dropped out of school and started teaching himself the Old Testament. He was convinced that a war between good and evil was about to come, and that this would bring about the end of the world. Thus, he converted to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and lived by their rules: no tobacco, no unhealthy foods, no alcohol or drugs. Thériault was a charismatic man, good at persuading others to do his bidding. While organizing seminars for the Adventists, he convinced an entire group of people to quit their jobs and form his religious following called The Ant Hill Kids (named for their ant-like hard work). He was no longer Roch to the world, he was ‘Moses.’ It was 1977, and Thériault and his followers formed a commune that was free of sin and stood for equality and unity. Of course, just as with every other cult, the good times would quickly come to an end, which started when the Adventists kicked them out for their weird-ass behavior. Thériault forbid his followers to contact their families, and against Adventist rules, developed a drinking problem. Rules for followers became stricter and stricter, up until the point where the members were restricted from speaking to each other without Thériault present.

Read the full article on Cvlt Nation here

The Church of QAnon: Will conspiracy theories form the basis of a new religious movement

Followers of the QAnon movement believe in wild and dangerous conspiracy theories about U.S. President Donald Trump. Now a faction within the movement has been interpreting the Bible through QAnon conspiracies.

Read the full article on The Conversation here

The Day Police Bombed a City Street: Can Scars of 1985 Move Atrocity Be Healed?

Eleven people, including five children, died and a Philadelphia neighborhood burned down in the airstrike against a black liberation group. Now an effort at reconciliation is under way

Read the full article on The Guardian here

Uganda's Kanungu cult massacre that killed 700 followers

Judith Ariho does not shed any tears as she recalls the church massacre in which her mother, two siblings and four other relatives were among at least 700 people who died.

Read the full article on BBC News here

R.I.P. Genesis P-Orridge

R.I.P. Genesis P-Orridge

(1950 - 2020)

member of Throbbing Gristle & Psychic TV

founder of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth

Coronavirus and South Korea’s Cults

COVID-19 has brought a spotlight to the peculiar prevalence of cults in South Korea.

Read the full article on The Diplomat here

Leading Santa Muerte Expert Interviewed on the Fastest Growing New Religious Movement in the West

What prompted your interest in the Santa Muerte phenomena?*

I am a specialist in the religious landscape of Latin America and was conducting research for a book project on the Virgin of Guadalupe when in March 2009 I saw the news that the Mexican army had demolished 40 Santa Muerte altars on the border with Texas and California. I have more than 3 decades of experience in Mexico so I was already familiar with the Mexican folk saint of death but had no idea that she had become religious enemy number one for the then Calderon administration. I saw that very little had been published on Santa Muerte, particularly in English, so I decided to put the Guadalupe book project on hold and write the first book in English on “Saint Death,” which I did. Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint was first published in 2012 and the second edition in 2017.

Read the full article on Cult News 101 here

Satan, the FBI, the Mob-and the Forgotten Plot to Kill Ted Kennedy

During the 1980 presidential campaign, a notorious Hollywood satanist was linked to a plot to murder the third Kennedy brother, uncovered documents show.

Read the full article on Cult News 101 here

I had coffee with a San Francisco Satanist group and this is what I learned

“Bagel with tomato, avocado, cucumber and onion,” yells the heavily-tattooed barista at the kink café & boutique Wicked Grounds.
 
Tabitha Slander shakes her head. “I didn’t ask for onion,” she says to her friends. They tell her not to worry about it and she picks up her food, then places it on the table, a foot away from a black pentagram tablecloth and miniature bronze statue of the goat demon Baphomet.

Read the full article on SF Gate here

Sabbath Assembly

I Satan

from the lp Quaternity