August 23, 2019

"Tucked away in their home on the shores of Australia's Lake Eildon, behind heavy foliage and barbed wire, seven children in matching outfits and bleached blonde haircuts..."

"... were finishing their morning hatha yoga practice when they heard a commotion on the stairs. Suddenly uniformed police officers stormed into the room and gathered the children up. Moments later they whisked them away from the five-acre compound, into a new reality that would take 15-year-old Ben Shenton years to fully understand. Up to that moment in August 1987, his world had been shaped by Anne Hamilton-Byrne, a glamorous and charismatic yoga instructor who, in the late 1960s, had persuaded her followers to join a cult she called The Family. Members believed that Anne was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and that when the world ended they would be responsible for re-educating the survivors. Ben and the other children were told that Anne was their mother. She taught them to avoid outsiders and if any approached them - on the shore of the lake perhaps - to follow the mantra Unseen, Unheard, Unknown."

From "The Family: 'Raised in a doomsday cult, I entered the real world at 15'" (BBC).

17 comments:

Danno said...

Better than Charles Manson's cult is a high standard.

Danno said...

Laslo will have a blast on the stiletto heels punishment.

mesquito said...

I can confidently predict that at least three-quarters of the comments will be about Trump because of course they will.

traditionalguy said...

As Trump would say, PM Modi is a friend of mine. This does highlight that Yoga is a religious spiritual exercise.And lo and behold the Yoga devotees become vegetarians that would never eat a cow.

Howard said...

Yoga + Christ = Witches Brew

Darrell said...

Unseen, Unheard, Unknown

Lefty integrity.

Howard said...

no, that's Schrodinger's Cat morality not a variable

Glen Filthie said...

Pass. If it’s the BBC, this crockumentary will feature bad acting and fat slags in the starring roles, peppered with queers for extra social justice.

Before it was perverted, yoga was a good and wholesome thing that let women perform for their men in skin tight yoga pants.

RNB said...

"...a glamorous and charismatic yoga instructor..." I think I see yer basic problem right here.

Saint Croix said...

Yoga + Christ = Witches Brew

I've done yoga at my church before. So far I've avoided the blonde hair and the LSD.

JML said...

They should have sent the kids to a different camp. A camp where children could learn how to operate within a group where the culture is to "jokingly insult each other" and in one where that's not the etiquette at all. Understanding social cues and adapting and getting along — these are good skills!

Seven! Seven verifications - is that a corner of a traffic signal? Should I click on that square or not....?

MadisonMan said...

Kudos to the teacher for rescuing Ben and pointing out the obvious. He's done a whole lot of work to succeed given his start. What a remarkably forgiving man!

Dude1394 said...

If they had only also taught fix-gender they would have been left alone.

Fernandinande said...

The BBC seems to have omitted something -

++
Newhaven

During the late 1960s and the 1970s, Newhaven Hospital in Kew was a private psychiatric hospital owned and managed by Marion Villimek, a Santiniketan member; many of its staff and attending psychiatrists were also members.[4][10][11]

Many patients at Newhaven were treated with the hallucinogenic drug LSD.[12] The hospital was used to recruit potential new members from among the patients, and also to administer LSD to members under the direction of the Santiniketan psychiatrists John Mackay and Howard Whitaker.[13] One of the original members of the Association was given LSD, electroconvulsive therapy, and two leucotomies, also called lobotomies, during the late 1960s.[7]
++

RobinGoodfellow said...

Village of the damned

h said...

I want to share this from an LA Times oped by Princeton History professor, Sean WIlentz, April 6, 1997


"The cult’s charismatic leader called himself Matthias the Prophet and claimed he was the latest incarnation of the Holy Spirit--a descendant of the ancient Hebrew prophets and patriarchs, including Jesus Christ. He lived communally with about 20 of his disciples--men, women and children--in a fine suburban house adjoining a spacious, well-manicured estate. Every day, the disciples listened intently to Matthias’ furious, meandering sermons about the rapidly approaching Doomsday; and they obeyed his every command, including his rearrangements of the group’s sexual pairings. Not surprisingly, the bearded prophet took the prettiest of the women, the wife of a wealthy disciple, as his personal “match spirit.”

Outsiders suspected that awful things were happening at Mount Zion, the name Matthias gave to the commune. But only after a sickly member of the cult died under mysterious circumstances did local authorities apprehend the prophet and confirm some of the worst of the rumors.

The affair quickly became a media circus. Tabloid newspapers reported sensational details about the cult’s sexual depravity and religious brainwashing. Editorial writers bemoaned Matthias’ alluring fanaticism, and commented darkly about the state of the American psyche. And the public eagerly awaited the prophet’s public trial in connection with his follower’s strange demise.
...
As it happened, Matthias was acquitted of murdering his follower, though he wound up serving time on some lesser charges. He was last seen preaching to Indians in Iowa Territory in the early 1840s.

Yet, that was not quite the end of the affair. After the prophet’s release from jail, his most loyal disciple, the ex-slave Isabella, heard new commandments from God. Some years later, she became a famous advocate of abolitionism and feminism, under a new heavenly name: Sojourner Truth. "

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-04-06-op-45883-story.html

n.n said...

Catastrophic anthropogenic climate change, planned children, medical corruption, dodo dynasties, conflation of sex and gender, and other cultish (e.g. conflation of logical domains, conflation of ethics and religion) things.