Cults and the inversion of values

This article contains two examples of people who neglected or abandoned personal responsibilities in favour of working for the cause. Both cases involve the same, Catholicism-based, cult. 

The material is based on posts on the old Conservative Conspiracy Forum; it consists of extracts that I found online and comments that I made at the time together with a few afterthoughts.

Abandoning the sick and dying
“...I slowly realized that behavior opposite to my natural self was the most rewarded....When I as a devoted physician would leave my duties for a weekend, to cook for 80 people on a weekend meeting, that seemed to be the ultimate proof of my trust in the voice of Jesus in our midst. 

When I left a dear person who was dying and I had promised to assist, to help out practically in the movement and that person died when I was absent, that was the proof of my love for the forsaken Jesus.”

This is very horrific indeed, all the more as Christians are enjoined to heal the sick and comfort the dying.  Where are the Christian values of love and compassion here? 

The worst aspect is that not only are members encouraged or ordered to perform such actions, they are commended for it. They are told that it shows how superior and committed they are; it really shows how far under the evil influences they are. 

Neglecting children 
“We missed our son's confirmation, left a teenager for 3 weeks alone while we went to school in Rome because we were told it was the will of God. We missed so many family events and were told that 'we had to leave the family in order to follow God. We would find them again in Heaven.'”

This is typical of many cults. It confirms what I have seen and experienced for myself: “We must make sacrifices.”

May Sinclair, Jean Rhys, L. M. Montgomery and the Brontës

After producing some articles about May Sinclair's novella The Flaw in the Crystal, I decided to investigate her background in the hope of finding some more material of interest. 

I found some very familiar biographical elements and other connections when reading about her life. I mentioned a blueprint for writers in an article in the Context and the Total Picture series; if I created a template for writers of interest, May Sinclair would tick many of the boxes.

I have seen, for example, the Celtic Connection in the biographies of many novelists, so it was no surprise to learn that May Sinclair had an Irish mother and a Scottish father.

It also came as no surprise when I found that she had some other things in common with Jean Rhys and L. M. Montgomery. May Sinclair too was interested in and inspired by the Brontës, whose works she may have first encountered in her father's private library rather than the local public library.

May Sinclair and Jean Rhys
May Sinclair was a very different person from Jean Rhys, but they had a few things in common:

They both wrote under assumed names. 

Both novelists lived for a while in Devon.

They both read voraciously as girls, partly for escape, and both later wrote Brontë-inspired books. 

They both had unsympathetic mothers who tried to force them to conform to the norm. They had some things to say about their childhood experiences that sound uncannily similar. 

Just as Jean Rhys's work is mostly autobiographical, so are some of May Sinclair's novels, Mary Olivier in particular. Mary Olivier's mother wants her to behave like a 'normal' girl:

“...you should try and behave a little more like other people.”

"You were different," she said. "You weren’t like any of the others. I was afraid of you.”

Cults and the restricted reading scenario

 A distressing article that I came across recently reminded me of yet another feature that is often found in cults of all kinds. 

This is the discouragement or even prohibition of the reading of unauthorised material. In some extreme cases, members are allowed to read only a few 'bibles' or the writings of the founder. 

By imposing such rules and practices, cult leaders make themselves into Sole Suppliers of information.

Censorship of a few controversial works is one thing; not permitting members to read anything much apart from the organisation's propaganda and other material that the cult is based on, generates, approves of, endorses and promotes is something else. It is criminal when any information Not Invented Here is banned because it is considered to be useless, irrelevant, distracting, dangerous or corrupting. 

Discouraged from reading literature

First, some past coverage. This is from one of my cult-related posts on  the old CC Forum:

This extract from an old blog by an ex-member is very upsetting:

“When I was a young girl, I was very interested in literature and poetry and I loved reading everything by many different authors, which, over time, gave me a lot in terms of maturation and culture. I wanted to talk a lot about this and I remember when, at one of my first meetings with pre-GEN (when I did not know to be a pre-GEN), I told that I read one of these books. I think it was a text by Erich Fromm. 

The girl who was the "white" smiled, almost casually, then dropped the subject and immediately turned to another girl. Over time, I realized that this was the way they were taking control of our interests. They encouraged us to read books by Chiara and the other members of the movement, while they subtly discouraged all the others.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20200920023204/http://blogfocolare.blogspot.com/

This has been translated from Italian, but the meaning is very clear. This is evil, just like their insistence that an enquiring mind is a handicap. 

Luckily the author got out at the age of 24, so there was plenty of time for her to make a life for herself in the real world and catch up with her reading.

Changing or dropping the subject and ignoring what was said are very familiar techniques. 

A last look at Walter de la Mare's Return

Walter de la Mare suggests several possible futures for Arthur Lawford, the main character in his horror story The Return. The ghost of the wicked Frenchman who is possessing him could slip away and he could be his old self again, free from the malign influence; his wife's circle of friends could declare him hopelessly insane and have him put away; he might leave his family entirely and go off somewhere else; he might even die, perhaps by his own hand.

The final outcome is unclear; the story ends suddenly without Arthur Lawford's fate being spelled out. However, there is still some miscellaneous material to comment on.

Arthur Lawford attacks a fat man 

There isn't much humour in The Return, but I was amused by one passage. When Mrs Lawford calls in a very fat friend of hers called Mr Danton, the French ghost attacks him through Arthur and makes some contemptuous and offensive remarks:

“Danton at heart was always an incorrigible sceptic. Aren’t you, T. D.? You pride your dear old brawn on it in secret?...Firm, unctuous, subtle, scepticism; and to that end your body flourishes. You were born fat; you became fat; and fat, my dear Danton, has been deliberately thrust on you—in layers! Lampreys! You’ll perish of surfeit some day, of sheer Dantonism. And fat, postmortem, Danton. Oh, what a basting’s there!”

The ghost of the Frenchman sometimes recedes leaving Arthur almost his old self, but the mischievous, saturnine, vindictive Nicholas Sabathier is definitely in the ascendant here. 

Other interpretations of the strange symptoms

It is possible that Arthur Lawford's  bizarre  behaviour was originally caused by a subconscious attempt to break out of his unsatisfactory life, the old 'deadly round'; 'Nicholas Sabathier the dark Adventurer' could be Arthur's shadow self, displaying all his repressed qualities and saying things that Arthur would not normally permit himself to say. 

More about Walter de la Mare's Return

The first article about Walter de la Mare's horror novel The Return ended at the point where Arthur Lawford, whose appearance has changed because he is possessed by the ghost of a dead Frenchman, has convinced both his wife Sheila and the vicar Mr Bethany that he is not an imposter.

They now have to decide how to deal with 'this awful business'.

They call in a doctor; he is not much use, which is not surprising as Lawford gives him only a modified version of what happened in the cemetery. 

They want to avoid comment or scandal so invent some cover stories for their friends and the servants: they tell people that Arthur Lawford is staying in his room and not seeing anyone because he is very tired and ill, and that the 'stranger' who has been seen in the house is a new doctor. 

From this point on, the story itself did not hold much of my attention. I couldn't find much to inspire commentary as I skimmed quickly through the details of the web of deception and Arthur Lawford's impersonation of the new doctor, the descriptions of Arthur's inner state, his disagreements with his wife and his excursions, not to mention the long philosophical discussions about life. I did however find a few more connections and a little incidental material of interest.

Another reminder of Jonathan Stroud's Lockwood 
Arthur Lawford makes a new friend, someone with the strange name of Herbert Herbert. This man believes Arthur's story about being possessed by the Frenchman when he fell asleep in the churchyard, and theorises that Nicholas Sabathier's restless ghost had been lingering on by his grave waiting for someone to ambush because he still has some living to do. 

Then, Herbert says, a godsend in the form of Arthur Lawford comes along. Arthur has been suffering from a dispiriting illness, he is half asleep, tired out and depressed; his weak inner state makes him a suitable vehicle for possession. This is spot on, and similar to what George Cubbins says to Lucy and Lockwood about ghosts homing in on vulnerable people in the previously mentioned article about Jonathan Stroud's Empty Grave.

Something about Walter de la Mare's Return

I like WaIter de la Mare's children's stories and poems very much indeed. I feel much the same about them as I do about the works of Eleanor Farjeon and Nicholas Stuart Gray. 

As is the case with many other poets and writers I like, nothing relevant about WaIter de la Mare came to mind when I was mining the past for people, books and other material of interest. However, I recently learned that he wrote a supernatural novel called The Return, a horror story about possession of the living by the dead that was first published in 1910. I am not a great reader of ghost and horror stories, but this one seemed worth investigating. 

I found a copy and soon saw that while The Return is not a particularly good read, it does contain a small amount of material of interest. There are some elements in it that remind me of May Sinclair's Flaw in the Crystal, and there are a few points and connections that inspire commentary. The Return rambles a bit and the story fades away; the quotable material comes mostly from the early chapters. 

The main character is called Arthur Lawford, who is a rather dull and conventional man. He is the object of psychic possession with its associated horrors.

How the horror starts
Arthur Lawford has been suffering from ongoing ill-health. He has taken to solitary ramblings because he senses that his wife Sheila has been finding his presence irksome and would welcome his absence from the house.

He wanders around in a churchyard and reads some of the inscriptions on the headstones. An unusual grave attracts his attention; the inscription is almost illegible but he tries to decode it. The grave appears to contain the remains of a French stranger called Nicholas Sabathier who died by his own hand in 1739. He kneels down to get a closer look; his heart starts to beat in an unusual way; he feels ill and weak. He decides to go home but falls asleep instead.

Jean Rhys, L. M. Montgomery, Jane Eyre and public libraries

Terry Pratchett has said that he owes a great debt to the public libraries that he used as a boy.

Jean Rhys and L. M. Montgomery are two more novelists who were great readers and had access to a public library when young. As girls they read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, which made a big impression on them and later influenced their writing.

Jean Rhys and the public library

As mentioned in the article about psychological black magic, Jean Rhys wrote a prequel to Jane Eyre: Wide Sargasso Sea is considered to be her finest work. 

Carole Angier says in her biography Jean Rhys: Life and Work that Jean Rhys was a member of the Hamilton Public Library in the British West Indies island of Dominica as a girl, and this was where she first encountered Jane Eyre. The course of her life might have been very different if she had not read this book at an impressionable age, and Wide Sargasso Sea might never have been written.

Jean Rhys had a lot of trouble with this book, which was probably started around 1945 but not published until 1966.

She said that she went to the local public library in Bude in Cornwall in 1957 to get a copy of Jane Eyre. She wanted to re-read it to refresh her memory of Mr Rochester's mad wife, whose story she was telling in Wide Sargasso Sea.