Don’t drink the Kool-Aid: Inside the deadly world of doomsday cults
Key topics:
Infamous cult leaders and their deadly influence
Mass suicides linked to doomsday beliefs
The warning behind “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid”
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By Athalie Russell Besseling
Doomsday cults and their deadly messiahs
We all have some idea of what a cult is. There is usually a male leader, often with a female sidekick. The leader is a power freak. He exerts a strange, inescapable control over his willing followers. He often has a ferocious sex drive and uses his acolytes at will.
Charles Manson of the 1969 Hollywood murders that shocked the world had mostly female followers (they would commit multiple stabbing murders at his bidding, including the brutal slaying of beautiful and heavily pregnant Sharon Tate, the actress wife of world-famous filmmaker Roman Polanski). Although ‘Charlie’s’ word was law and he was indeed their messiah, the Manson ‘family’ is remembered for its awful acts rather than its messiah’s garbled doomsday philosophy, which involved a supposed approaching race war, and nothing much else that’s comprehensible. The last of the women convicted of the murders has just been released after 50 years in prison. The other perpetrators are dead. Cults are often found living secretively in isolated areas like the compound near Waco Texas, where whacko leader David Koresh led his followers to their fiery deaths in a world-televised firefight with the FBI. But they may also be found living communally in a dull suburban area, like the sad corpses of the Heaven’s Gate sect.
Heaven’s Gate was an American new religious movement whose members committed mass suicide; the founders in 1974 were Bonnie Nettles and Marshall Applewhite, known as Ti and Do (Tea and Dough).
The belief system was primarily around UFOs although there was a bit of Christianity thrown in at first. The core of it was that the group would deny their human existence and transform themselves into immortal extraterrestrial beings. They would then be physically lifted up via UFO to heaven, referred to as the “Next Level”.
Joint founder Nettles’ unfortunate death from cancer in 1985 was a setback. The group had to adapt their belief that they would ascend alive on a UFO to the idea that their bodies were just vessels for their spirits and that they would return to life in new, alien bodies aboard the UFO.
In 1997, Santa Fe Sheriff’s deputies made the gruesome find of the bodies of 38 group members and leader Applewhite in a rented mansion.
This ritual suicide had been timed to collide with the closest approach to earth of the newly discovered Comet Hale-Bopp. Throughout history, comets have been associated with strange behaviour from humans who think comets are messages from gods or other religious incarnations.
The cult left their website with the message: “Hale–Bopp brings closure to Heaven’s Gate... our 22 years of classroom here on planet Earth is finally coming to conclusion - ‘graduation’ from the Human Evolutionary Level. We are happily prepared to leave this world...”
(www.heavensgate.com still exists.)
The year before mass suicide, the group invested in alien abduction insurance. This would pay out $1 million per person (the policy covered abduction, impregnation, or death by aliens). Who would be around to collect the insurance is not clear and presumably no claim was ever made.
In their ritual suicide, members took anticonvulsant seizure medication mixed with apple sauce, followed by vodka. Then they tied plastic bags over their heads to suffocate themselves.
All were dressed in identical black shirts and sweat pants, brand new Nike Decades shoes, and armbands reading “Heaven’s Gate Away Team”, an example of the group’s fondness for “Trekkie” terminology.
After each one died, a living member rearranged the body by removing the plastic bag from the head, then posing the body in its own bed, face and torso covered by a purple cloth for privacy. The identical clothing was a uniform representing unity for the mass suicide, while the Nikes were chosen because, so said a surviving member of the cult, they “got a good deal on the shoes”.
The 21 women and 18 men aged 26 to 72, seem to have died in three groups over three days, with those still alive cleaning up after the earlier deaths. Leader Applewhite was the third last member to die; two people remained after him and were the only ones found with bags over their heads and no purple cloths.
A final note. The cult’s motto was “Just do it”.
Don’t drink the Kool-Aid - Jonestown
Before September 11th, the cult mass murder-suicide of over 900 civilians was the greatest single unnatural event to kill the greatest number of Americans. It took place in the jungle hideout of the People’s Temple in little-known Guyana, a South American country of cowboys, wildlife, waterfalls and the Amazon but also a Caribbean country famed for cricket, music and rum.
The Jonestown tale begins of course with Jim Jones. A white minister, he evangelised unconventional socialist-style ideas to his predominantly black congregation. In the 1970s there were thousands of members, but by 1977 media interest in the Temple’s peculiar ways caused Jones to move his cult, now much smaller, to a settlement in Guyana.
In 1978 mounting apprehension about what was happening in Jonestown instigated a visit there by US congressman Leo Ryan. There were rumours of slave labour, enforced drug use to ensure obedience, beatings and even planned mass suicide. And after the congressman and four others had visited the cult premises, they were murdered as they left, at an airstrip by gun-wielding Temple assassins.
Once this had happened, the inevitable came. The congregation were urged by their leader to drink Kool-Aid, a powdered ‘just add water’ drink - laced with cyanide. Since not everyone acquiesced easily, the cult’s armed guards also gave forcible injections. Jones began the suicide orgy by commanding that the children drink first. More than 900 died, including Jones who was shot in the head. His nurse Annie Moore may have killed him before shooting herself. We will never know. Since the terrible events at Jonestown, “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid” has joined our lexicon as a warning of something dire to come, and against blind following.
Aum Shinrikyo, the “Supreme Truth” cult – and Japan’s worst domestic terror attacks
Death sentences have finally been carried out on thirteen members of “Supreme Truth”, the doomsday cult that launched the 1995 sarin gas attacks on Tokyo’s underground, felling 5000 people on their way to work.
Perhaps it is some sort of justice for the thirteen people killed in the nerve gas clouds, although others were left blind or disfigured, with damaged lungs and more.
Aum Shinrikyo was started in the ‘80s by a former yoga teacher, Shoko Asahara, who claimed to have reached enlightenment in India. When the Tokyo attacks took place, Aum had thousands of followers, including some of Japan’s wealthy and influential citizens. But Asahara had become paranoid, obsessed with Armageddon and convinced World War III was imminent. He began to order attacks on those he thought were enemies.
His increasing paranoia culminated in the sarin gas attacks, using a chemical weapon invented by the Nazis, which was recreated by cult members with the scientific knowledge to do so.
The judges have judged and the Supreme Truth has met its own doomsday. All through recorded history there have been doomsday cults, some as harmless as the old cartoon character who carries a sign saying, “The end is nigh”, others deadlier than most of us could dream of. What drives the leaders… or the 5followers… may never be clear.
Just remember, whatever you do… Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.
REFERENCES:
https://airmail.news/issues/2023-7-22/the-cult-around-the-corner
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Gate_(religious_group)
https://www.intrepidtravel.com
https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/jonestown
https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/jonestown-13-things-you-should-know-about-cult-massacre-121974/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-15815056
