Dealing with cult members: yet more warnings

More crucially important points to bear in mind:

- Spend enough time with cult members and they may come to think of you as one of them, behave as if you are theirs to command and expect you to abide by their rules. They may even try to stop or punish you if you speak or behave in ways that they find unacceptable.

- You may become public enemy no.1 if you are seen as a threat or start to confront them.

Being lied to and left stranded, both literally and metaphorically, is bad enough; being let down and betrayed when a favour is needed and being dropped and avoided by someone you thought was a friend is even worse. Worse still is being turned against and attacked by cult members because they consider you insubordinate or a criminal, traitor and enemy - and this only because you are standing up for the truth and speaking out against evil.

Dealing with cult members: some warnings

There are some crucially important points to keep in mind when dealing with cult members. Here are two of these points:

- They will lie to you
- They will let you down and leave you stranded

I learned this from personal experience, experience for which I later found independent confirmation online and in books.

Lying
Not only do cult members conceal much of the truth about their organisation, they will also often lie about it, brazenly and repeatedly.

I am not talking here about people on the periphery who don’t know anything so pass on wrong information in all good faith, nor am I talking about members who are so confused and in such a terrible state that they no longer know the difference between truth and lies: I am talking about people who lie knowingly and deliberately.

They will lie about their beliefs and practices and procedures inside the organisation, denying for example that members are obliged to hand over their earnings and take part in auditing sessions where they are forced to give sensitive personal information and confess to misdeeds. 

They will dismiss allegations made against the cult, saying that they come from liars, enemies and traitors. 

They will brazenly lie about where donated money is going, saying for example that it will help children when much of it really goes to buy support from politicians and pay the travelling expenses of a rent-a-crowd mob.

They will lie about the purpose of an impending gathering, saying for example that it is entertainment when it is really political.

Leaving a cult - much easier said than done

“Why don’t they just leave when they find out what they have got into?”

It is much easier to ask why people don’t just leave when they learn what happens behind the scenes in a cult or cult-like organisation than it is to find acceptable and comprehensible answers. It is not easy for outsiders to understand the external pressures and techniques and internal thought processes that keep people inside.

The best sources of answers and explanations are ex-members. They are the ones with the excruciatingly painful personal experience of cult life, and some of them may be able to explain what was going on in their minds and in their lives in terms that ‘civilians’ can understand.

The deeper in that people go, the worse life often gets but the harder it is for them to get out. I am not talking about people on the fringes and in the outer circles who may wander in then drift away or drop out: I am talking about long-term, hard-core members.

I am also mainly talking about people who might think about leaving, not those few who genuinely feel at home in their organisation or the large number of unfortunates who have lost all sense of self and self-preservation.

People are discouraged and prevented from leaving

The message given, overtly or covertly, to many cult members is, “Don’t you dare leave, you traitor. It will be much the worse for you if you do!”

Cults make it difficult for members to leave in as many practical, guilt and fear-based and emotional blackmailing ways as possible. They use manipulation,  intimidation and coercion to keep dissenting members in line.

Life after leaving a cult: predictable paths people take

There is a lot of information available about cults, cult-like organisations, cult leaders and cult members and ex-members. I compiled some ideas and information myself from personal experience, ideas for which my researches found much independent confirmation. 

I made posts on a forum that no longer exists. I want to overhaul the material and put a few extracts on here, in the hope that they will be of use to someone.

I will start at the end, with a short account of what I know about people who have left one of these sinister organisations.

Groups most cult leavers fall into

Many people who leave a cult just want to recover and get on with whatever lives they can make for themselves, perhaps after telling their stories to a few people.

A few high-profile people may expose the practices and describe their experiences mainly for the money, attention and publicity. I am thinking of celebrity ex-members of organisations such as Scientology here. One of them has a TV show.

Then there are those who go into the mechanics of cult leadership and operation in great detail. They take action on an intellectual level. They do a lot of reading and research and consult a variety of sources. They want to understand what forces were at work, mainly for their own benefit. They may also hope to educate others and deter them from joining; some write very helpful books and articles. This is possibly the best option, but not everyone has the necessary resources.

Most ex-members will think that they are lucky to be out of it, but a few may feel lost and miserable and blame themselves for not being able to meet the (unrealistic) requirements and (outrageous) demands. They feel that they failed to make the grade. They feel inferior, not good enough for the elite organisation. They have let the leader and the cause down.

They have been expelled from Paradise and the gates locked behind them. They may be unable to cut their losses and move on with their lives, even when they have support, options and opportunities. They may feel even worse than they did when inside. They may be very depressed and just give up on life. Someone once explained all this to me when I asked about people who had left, but not spoken out against, a cult.

L. Ron Hubbard and Charles Fort: a problem in common

I have noticed that not only do some people not get what they wanted, hoped for or expected, but they may also get exactly what they didn’t want.

One example is when people who want a specific type of audience, follower or reader attract exactly the wrong sort of person.

By coincidence, I came across two examples of this phenomenon just a few hours apart, while I was looking into something else.

I read this about L. Ron Hubbard:

“Hubbard wanted to attract explorers and men of the world. Instead, he ended up with science fiction fans.”

I read this about Charles Fort:

“Fort’s horizons were boundless and in his day he lamented that ‘the majority of people attracted are the ones we don’t want; Spiritualists, Fundamentalists’.”

Very amusing, and rather sad.

It reminds me of an army recruitment centre I often passed; their window display attracted the attention of lots of children and old ladies, but I never saw any young men looking at it!

Benjamin Disraeli: Imperium Et Libertas, death and primroses

Benjamin Disraeli died on April 19th, 1881.

Protocol did not permit Queen Victoria to attend his funeral, but she sent two wreaths of primroses with a simple message attached: “His favourite flowers.”

She used to dispatch many bunches of primroses from Osborne House, her holiday home on the Isle of Wight, to Disraeli, for which he always thanked her effusively. Perhaps he was just being polite; perhaps he really did like primroses more than any other flower.

Queen Victoria sent primroses to Disraeli’s grave at his home in High Wycombe on each anniversary of his death until 1901, when she herself died.

Some people allege that by ‘his’, Queen Victoria meant Prince Albert’s!

Either way, because of what she wrote and sent, primroses became associated with Disraeli’s name and were featured in two legacies, Primrose Day and The Primrose League.

Primrose Day

On the first anniversary of Disraeli’s death, many people in London wore primroses in their hats and buttonholes as a tribute to the great statesman who had done so much for his country and the British Empire.

This established a tradition; for decades to come April 19th was Primrose Day, which became an unofficial national holiday until the First World War.

On the day, people made pilgrimages to Disraeli’s grave and to his statue near the Parliament that was his Mecca.

As late as 1916, Pathé News filmed the laying of a wreath of primroses at Disraeli’s statue outside the Palace of Westminster.

No other Prime Minister’s death has been honoured in this way.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s witch Helen Penclosa: Part I

While doing some research for an article about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s life in Southsea, I discovered that he had written a short novel about occult forces called The Parasite:

“…his dark tale of an evil woman possessed of such hypnotic powers that she is able to induce by remote control not only murder, but passionate love as well, in the mind of her chosen victim.”

From  A Study in Southsea: The Unrevealed Life of Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle by Geoffrey Stavert.

Stavert’s summary made the story sound very interesting indeed: I immediately thought of psychic crime and psychological black magic.

I found The Parasite on Project Gutenberg. The novella, which was first published in 1894, is only four chapters long; the plot is simple and there are only a handful of characters. The language is rather old-fashioned and melodramatic and the story a bit contrived, but I found The Parasite worth reading as a source of inspiration for an article or two. It contains some very familiar elements and provides yet more independent confirmation of some of my ideas.

The characters in summary

The two main characters are Miss Helen Penclosa, the evil woman, and Austin Gilroy, the chosen victim.

Miss Penclosa, who possesses strong hypnotic powers and can project herself into people’s bodies and take command of them, is middle-aged. She is small and frail; she has a pale, peaky face and light brown hair; she has a crippled leg. Her strange, grey-green eyes are both furtive and fierce. 

She is silent and colourless, retiring and lacking presence, except when she talks about and exercises her powers. She is unscrupulous; she has no ethical sense at all; she is evil. Conan Doyle calls her a parasite and a devil woman; I would call her an energy vampire and a witch.

Austin Gilroy is a professor, although he is only 34 years old. Physiology is his field. He is interested only in the material world, and has trained himself to deal only with facts, truth, logic and proof. Yet while he operates on pure reason, he is aware of his real self:

“…by nature I am, unless I deceive myself, a highly psychic man. I was a nervous, sensitive boy, a dreamer, a somnambulist, full of impressions and intuitions. My black hair, my dark eyes, my thin, olive face, my tapering fingers, are all characteristic of my real temperament…”