Feet of Clay - Anthony Storr

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days of his life. ‘“We were one big family,” he says. “We all believed in the one belief, and agreed on the same points. We were all one community.”’10

      Koresh was as sexually rapacious as Jim Jones, but his tastes were different. In 1983, Koresh married Rachel, the daughter of an official of the Branch Davidian Church. She was only fourteen years old, but no one objected. She bore him three children. In 1986, Koresh began sleeping with her younger sister, then twelve years old. When Koresh took command of Ranch Apocalypse, he split up families by ensuring that the men slept on one floor, the women on another. Severing family ties was one way of reinforcing allegiance to himself, and also made it easier for him to seduce the women he wanted. Koresh considered himself entitled to have sexual relations with any of the females in the compound, including girls of twelve and thirteen. One child who was too small for penetration was urged to use large tampons in order that her vagina might become able to accommodate him.11

      Koresh, like Jones, deteriorated mentally. He took a variety of vitamins and herbal remedies to cure what he called impotence, but drugs cannot be blamed for the development of his delusions as they can in the case of Jones. He was less obviously a confidence trickster than Jones; but when Breault was asked whether Koresh really believed what he was teaching or was just a con man, Breault replied: ‘I think a little of both. Vernon gets a craving. Then he finds the theology to justify that craving. When others buy into his doctrine, he starts believing it himself.’12

      By 1986 he was teaching that he was entitled to a hundred and forty wives. When Ranch Apocalypse finally went up in flames, 17 of the 22 children who perished had been fathered by Koresh, who claimed that only he was allowed to procreate, and that part of his mission was to fill the world with righteous children.

      At the beginning of the FBI siege, Koresh allowed those children who were not fathered by him to be released. The psychiatrists who interviewed them repeatedly heard stories about dead babies. Some children alleged that the bodies of babies were stored in a freezer until they could be got rid of. It is possible, though unproven, that Koresh sacrificed the children of cult members because he himself was not their father. He certainly tried to persuade his followers that ritual sacrifices of children might be necessary. It is fair to add that reports about the condition of the children who were released varies. In his book The Ashes of Waco, Dick J. Reavis is chiefly concerned with attacking the clumsy way in which the ATF* and the FBI handled the siege, which he considered entirely unjustified. He claims that there is evidence that the children within the compound were well cared for and quotes one psychiatrist who examined the released children as saying that there was no evidence of sexual abuse. When the FBI blasted holes in the compound buildings, they assumed that the mothers of small children would take the opportunity to escape with their offspring. None did so. The final holocaust was initiated by members of the cult, who used kerosene lamps to start the blaze. Not everyone who died was burned alive. Twenty-seven cult members, including Koresh himself, were shot.

      Constructing or adopting a belief system in which one is either God’s prophet or God himself inflates the ego to monstrous proportions. Koresh was more deeply concerned with religion, Jim Jones with racial equality and an egalitarian society. But both compensated for isolation and lack of love in childhood by becoming infatuated with power, and both ended up with delusions of their own divinity.

      It seems almost incredible that either of these gurus could have retained the allegiance of their followers for so long. Koresh made some ineffective attempts to conceal the identity of the children whom he took to bed, but most of the outrageous sexual behaviour and the appalling cruelty of each guru were paraded rather than concealed. There were very few defectors from either camp. It appears that once a guru has convinced a follower of his Messianic status, his actual behaviour, as judged by ordinary human standards, becomes largely irrelevant. Belief in a guru, while it persists, entirely overrules rational judgement. Dedicated disciples are as impervious to reason as are infatuated lovers.

      There is a well-known psychiatric phenomenon called folie à deux. If two people live together and one is mad, the other may become convinced by at least some of the delusions expressed by the psychotic partner. If the psychotic partner is removed to hospital, the other partner usually recovers his or her sanity. Shared delusions are mutually reinforcing, and membership of a sect led by a psychotic leader reassures both the leader and the disciple who has fallen under his spell of the truth of their beliefs. Both Jim Jones and David Koresh kept their followers under close surveillance and made it difficult for anyone to leave. Fortunately, this is exceptional. Contrary to popular belief, most of those who join ‘New Religious Movements’ are not subject to coercion, and many leave such movements without difficulty. But communities like Jonestown which are isolated from normal sources of information become more dependent on whatever information is given them by their leaders, and are less able to question what they are told. Research into so-called ‘sensory deprivation’ has shown that individuals who are cut off from most varieties of sensory input by being placed in sound-proof, light-proof rooms become more suggestible, and tend to be less critical of any information which is fed to them. The same is true of isolated communities. In addition, anyone within the community who dares to doubt the pronouncements of the guru is likely to be treated as a traitor by his fellows. Jones and Koresh, to all except their disciples, appear to have been evil madmen. They exhibited, in exaggerated form, with very few redeeming features, all the worst possible characteristics of gurus. Fortunately, the majority of gurus are not as bad as they were. We need to examine some other varieties.

      GURDJIEFF CLAIMS OUR INTEREST because he, or his doctrines as propounded by his disciple Ouspensky, bewitched so many interesting and intelligent people, including the writer Katherine Mansfield, A. R. Orage, the distinguished socialist editor of The New Age, Margaret Anderson, the editor of the Little Review, and her friend and co-editor Jane Heap; the surgeon and sexologist Kenneth Walker; Olgivanna, the third wife of Frank Lloyd Wright; John Godolphin Bennett, later to become something of a guru himself. The psychiatrists James Young and Maurice Nicoll, and the psychoanalyst David Eder were also followers. T. S. Eliot, David Garnett and Herbert Read intermittently attended Ouspensky’s meetings. Ouspensky, who first encountered Gurdjieffin 1915, became chiefly based in London and was therefore more accessible to interested English people than the guru himself.

      The date of Gurdjieff’s birth is uncertain. Some say 1866; others quote one of his several passports, which showed December 28, 1877. James Moore,1 Gurdjieff’s latest biographer and the author of Gurdjieff and Katherine Mansfield, argues that the earlier date is the more probable. Gurdjieff was secretive about this as he was about so many features of his background. He died on October 29, 1949. His birthplace was Alexandropol (formerly Gumru) in Russian Armenia, in the land lying between the Black Sea on the West and the Caspian Sea on the East, south of the Caucasus mountains. His father was Greek, his mother Armenian. Armenian was spoken at home, but he also learned some Greek, some Turkish, and the local dialects. In his autobiographical memoir, Meetings with Remarkable Men, he claimed to know eighteen languages, but there is no evidence to support this. Throughout his life, he continued to speak both Russian and English incorrectly.

      Gurdjieff was the eldest of six children; he had a brother and four sisters. One of the sisters died young. In Gurdjieff’s early childhood, the family moved to the near-by city of Kars, shortly after the defeat of the Turkish forces there in 1878 by the Grand Duke Michael Niklayevich, brother of the Russian Tsar. The boy Gurdjieff was accepted as a chorister at Kars military cathedral, and being obviously intelligent, attracted the notice of Father Dean Borsh, who helped to educate him. He developed a passion for learning, read widely in Greek, Armenian, and Russian, and began to harbour a wish to find some answer to the problem of ‘the meaning of life’. He resembles other gurus in going through a period of doubt which was succeeded by the revelation which manifested itself in his new cosmogony and his teaching. Why his perplexity was so extreme as to propel him into a search for truth which lasted twenty years is not apparent.

      Gurdjieff’s esoteric knowledge

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