The joy of sects

A beautifully produced guide to 30 barmy, and sometimes deadly, alternative religions

Cults

Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know

Kim Cooper, Brian Rau

Herb Lester Associates, 2019 £12, ISBN 9781999343903

This isn’t a book about cults, but a beautifully designed map and fold-out guide: on one side is Brian Rau’s representation of the United States (and southern Canada), with the primary locations of a wide variety of cults marked with numbers and graphics; on the other are capsule summaries giving the names, active dates, core beliefs and potted histories of 30 cult organisations, big and small, active and defunct.

The drily amusing text is by Kim Cooper, a novelist and historian of the darker side of Los Angeles who runs offbeat history tours of the city; which might explain why southern California gets its own inset map, although that can be attributed equally plausibly to the sheer volume of kooks – from Charles Manson and his ‘Family’ to the Buddhafield cult – who have called the region home over the years.

There’s an intriguing – or terrifying, depending on your point of view – range of beliefs on display here. While, unsurprisingly, most of these groups are lunatic chips off the old blocks of the Religions of the Book (killer Mormons, sex-crazed Seventh Day Adventists), others illustrate the fall-out from the Western counterculture’s turn Eastwards (Rajneesh, ISKCON), the ‘occult explosion’ and the New Age (the Process Church, Conscious Development) or the call of extraterrestrial wisdom (Heaven’s Gate, The Order of the Solar Temple). What tends to link such disparate groups – aside from more-orless completely bonkers belief systems – are the things we’d usually perceive as markers of ‘cult’ activity: millennialism, charismatic leaders, curtailment of followers’ individual freedom, dodgy financial practices, and the sexual abuse of women and minors.

Most of the heavy-hitters get a look-in, including the Branch Davidians and Jim Jones’s People’s Temple, but it’s nice to see some less obvious choices. I’d forgotten about the Nuwabian Nation, the wildly eclectic black sci-fi religionists who built Egyptian pyramids in rural Georgia before their leader Dwight York was arrested and imprisoned on child sex abuse charges, but apparently they are still out there, awaiting his release. And who could resist the Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven, whose Californian matriarchs offered the secrets of resurrection and mineral wealth? As Cooper tells it: “A ragtag community hung around awaiting the revelations. In the craggy hills above Los Angeles, they danced naked, rubbed cheese behind their ears, mummified their dead, and in at least one horrible case got ‘cured’ in a brick oven.” Yikes!

If you’re looking for a sober and non-judgmental source of information on these and other groups, then you should probably get hold of a copy of our own David Barrett’s The New Believers: Sects, ‘Cults’ and Alternative Religions. If you’re looking for an attractive fortean gift, though, this would do nicely. David Sutton

★★★★★