World Famous Cults and Fanatics Read online

  Martin Harris mortgaged his farm to provide the cash for publication, and The Book of Mormon appeared in 1830. Meanwhile, the gold plates had been returned to the angel Moroni, no one but Smith having even glimpsed them, although a young schoolteacher named Oliver Cowdery helped with the translation from the other side of the screen. The first 116 pages of the manuscript had already been lost when Martin Harris’s indignant wife threw them on the fire.

  Reviews of the book were contemptuous; no one had any doubt that Smith was a confidence trickster who had invented the whole story. But the critiques at least aroused curiosity, and Smith soon began to accumulate followers. He also began to accumulate enemies, and decided to move to some less hostile state. The Latter Day Saints – as the Mormons now called themselves – decided to move west. The “missionaries” had already established a church in Kirtland, Ohio. There Smith received a revelation that declared that all members of the Church should deed their property to the community, and a bishop would give each family back what he felt they required. As with John of Leyden, it was a kind of Communism in practice.

  Problems arose. The citizens of Kirtland objected to the Saints as the citizens of Munster had objected to the Anabaptists. In 1836, the Saints established their own bank and printed their own money; in 1837, it collapsed, causing much hardship; five of Smith’s twelve “apostles” denounced him as a fallen prophet, and left. Smith saw it all as a test of the faithful.

  Other Saints had already established themselves in Missouri; Smith joined them there. By now even Martin Harris and Oliver Cowdery had left in disillusionment. When angry mobs drove the Mormons out of Missouri – after Smith had spent several months in jail – they moved on ‘to found the town of Nauvoo in Illinois. But Illinois’s inhabitants proved to be as hostile as those of Missouri. Smith may have made things worse in July 1843 by publishing a document declaring that God had ordained polygamy, or “plural marriage” – although at this stage it was not openly announced. (Smith himself must have been practising plural marriage long before he announced its legality, for he seems to have married at least twenty-seven women, and possibly as many as forty-eight.) Finally, a dispute with the governor became so bitter that, early in 1844, Smith decided it was time to go further west to found a City of the Saints.

  Governor Ford was worried as the surrounding communities armed themselves and talked about massacring the Saints. In June, Smith and his associates – including his brother Hyrum – were charged with “riot”. Convinced that he would be killed, he decided to flee, but then changed his mind and returned to give himself up. This seemed to defuse the threatened violence, and Joseph Smith, his brother Hyrum, and two followers were lodged in Carthage jail.

  On 27 June 1844, at four in the afternoon, a hundred men rushed the jail. Governor Ford had marched his forces off to Nauvoo to restore order, and there were only eight men in charge of the prisoners. Hyrum was shot by a bullet that came through the window, and collapsed on the floor. Joseph Smith opened the door and emptied his six-shooter into the mob. Then the attackers flung open the door and began shooting. One of the disciples, John Taylor, tried to jump out of the window, but was hit by a bullet. Joseph Smith attempted to leave the same way, and was hit several times; he fell out of the window, twenty feet from the ground. Staring out of the window after him, the other disciple, Willard Richards, saw that he seemed to be dead.

  A cry of “The Mormons are coming” caused the crowd to scatter, and Taylor and Richards managed to take refuge in a safer part of the jail. In fact, no Mormons were coming. But since Joseph Smith and his brother were now dead, the crowd dispersed.

  It was left to Smith’s chief lieutenant, Brigham Young, to lead the Saints on their great trek westward, to the place where, in 1847, they founded Salt Lake City. With tremendous energy they irrigated the desert, and arranged the transportation of thousands of converts from Europe. (The Mormons always attached great importance to proselytizing.) When Young announced the doctrine of polygamy in 1852, he was deprived of the governorship of the territory. “Plural marriage” was finally disowned by the Church in 1890, but when Young died in 1877 he had seventeen wives and fifty-six children.

  Mormonism – as can be seen – always aroused fierce opposition. As early as 1834, E. D. Howe, an investigative journalist of the period, published a collection of affidavits from friends and neighbours of Smith who described him as a lazy and mendacious religious conman. Another investigator discovered a novel by the Reverend Simon Spalding that was alleged to be the true source of The Book of Mormon. In the mid-1920s, Brigham H. Roberts, the official historian of the Mormon Church, appealed to Church leaders to “help him resolve problems” about The Book of Mormon, one of which was that it contained so many similarities to a book called A View of the Hebrews published in 1823 by the Reverend Ethan Smith. Another problem was that The Book of Mormon refers to the ancient Hebrews’ use of steel, and to domestic animals that were unknown in ancient times. Referring to many similar discrepancies, Roberts concluded: “The evidence, I sorrowfully submit, points to Joseph Smith as their creator.” Whether or not this is true, Smith remains one of the most charismatic and influential messiahs of the nineteenth century.

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  Dr Cyrus Teed, known to his followers as Koresh, believed that the earth was hollow, and that life existed only upon the internal surface. He had been led to this conclusion by a personal conviction that the universe could not be infinite. If it was not, then, surely it must have form and boundaries? The boundary, Teed concluded, was the earth beneath our feet. Everything above our heads was contained within the earth, with the sun being the cosmic centre.

  Dr Teed travelled America during the 1870s, spreading his message and accumulating devotees. In 1888 the Koreshan Unity was formed in Chicago, a community of “cellularists” who also believed in earthpower and the possibility of immortality and resurrection. Like the Flat Earthers, the Koreshan community carried out scientific experiments on a straight section of canal, eventually concluding that the earth’s apparent convexity was caused by optical illusion. Fired by a need to experiment further, “Koresh” moved his following to Estero in Florida, where a flat coastline provided an ideal testing ground. There, a carefully made series of wooden frames were extended across the water, beginning at 128 inches above sea level and carrying on for 4¼18 miles. If the experiment was carried out on the outside of a globe, the distance between the end of the line and the water should increase; Teed found that it decreased, proving to his satisfaction that he was standing inside the earth.

  The Koreshan community, despite antagonizing Florida locals by block voting for their own candidates, thrived. In 1908, three days before Christmas, Dr Teed died. The Koreshans were expecting him to rise on Christmas Day, but when he did not, they were ordered by the authorities to get his body in the ground before it became unhygienic. A large tomb was built on Estero Island and Koresh deposited within.

  A few years later the entire tomb was washed away, leaving no trace. The Koreshans continue to live in Florida, having built a college to continue their ideas.

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  The Oneida Community

  Smith’s advocacy of plural marriage was undoubtedly one of the chief causes of later hostility to the Mormons. Another prophet from Vermont whose views caused equal indignation nevertheless succeeded in avoiding martyrdom, and established one of the most successful and prosperous communities in the history of religious dissent.

  To his disciples, John Humphrey Noyes was an inspired prophet and a great spiritual leader, but to most of his contemporaries he was a libertine whose doctrines of free love and “complex marriage” were a danger to the community. There were many strange religious communities in America in the nineteenth century: the Shakers (so called because they went into convulsions of religious ecstasy that made them shake all over), the Ephrata, the Rappites, Zoarites and many others. Most of these were “Perfectionists” – that is, they rejected the notion that man is a mis
erable sinner as unnecessarily pessimistic and taught that, through Divine Grace, man can achieve perfection. The Shakers believed that God is both male and female by nature, so women were as important as men in their religious rites, many of which looked like orgies. But the Shakers taught the importance of strict chastity.

  The Oneida Community

  The 1830s and 1840s were a time of tremendous religious revivals in America, to such an extent that one portion of New York State was known as the Burnt Over Region because the fires of revivalism had burned so fiercely there. Men like Hiram Sheldon, Erasmus Stone and Jarvis Rider preached their gospel in the cotton village of Manlius and their converts adopted the name of the Saints. One of the subjects that fascinated them was whether the old marriage vows would still be binding when the New Heaven and New Earth arrived. (Most of the great religious revivals were based on the conviction that the Day of Judgement was just around the corner.) It was John Humphrey Noyes who provided a startling and controversial answer to that question.

  John Humphrey Noyes was born at Brattleboro, Vermont, the son of a Congressman; he studied law, then divinity He was a man of considerable magnetism and remarkable intellect and he seems to have spent the two years following his conversion (at the age of twenty) in religious broodings and wrestlings. He found that he simply could not accept that he was a miserable sinner. Then, when he was twenty-two, the answer suddenly revealed itself to him in a blinding flash of revelation. Reading the Gospel of St John, he could see clearly that Jesus had announced the Second Coming within one generation of his own lifetime – that is, in the year AD 70. But if Jesus had already come to earth, then the Kingdom of God was already here. In that case, why was there so much sin on earth? The answer must be because people were unaware of the Second Coming. This, Noyes could now see and explained why he himself could never feel that he was a sinner. He wasn’t. He was already saved. All he had to do was to live according to the gospels and nothing could go wrong.

  The Bible said that in heaven there would be no marriage or giving in marriage. The Shakers also accepted this and for them it meant an obligation to celibacy. Noyes did not agree. Sex is obviously necessary to continue the race. What the Bible meant was obviously that all men were married to all women and vice versa. In The Battle Axe, the newspaper of the Perfectionists, he published in 1837 a letter in which he explained that “at the marriage supper of the Lamb . . . every dish is free to every guest”. Sexual intercourse is one of the best things of life – men and women were intended to “reflect upon each other the love of God”. Sexual shame was a consequence of the Fall, so all the Saved should now abandon it. Men and women should have sex together just as they felt inclined, regarding it as a sacrament.

  At the age of twenty-three, Noyes returned to his home in Putney, Vermont, and preached his views; he converted a number of his own family. He married the daughter of the State Governor and one of his disciples, J. L. Skinner, married his sister. In 1840, Noyes and a number of disciples founded the Putney Community, which consisted of seven houses and a store on five hundred acres of fertile land. They spent the afternoons in manual labour to support themselves and the rest of the time in debate, prayer, reading, and teaching various subjects; including Latin, Greek and Hebrew.

  Meanwhile, Noyes continued to brood on the problems posed by his doctrines of “free love”. In 1846, he saw the answer. The problem with sexual intercourse was that it often produced unwanted results in the form of children. Mrs Harriet Noyes had produced five babies in six years and four had been stillborn. The answer was simple. Men and women should have full sexual intercourse, with orgasm taking place in the vagina only when they wished to produce children. For the rest of the time, the man must teach himself continence – not abstention. He could place his penis in the vagina but he must exercise severe self-discipline not to have an emission. It was a method that would later become known as the karezza, a term invented by Dr Alice Bunker Stockham of Ohio. Noyes pointed out that this method “vastly increases pleasure” (his italics). This doctrine was complemented by the notion of “complex marriage” – that every man should regard all women as his wives and vice versa.

  Noyes was not a man to keep his ideas secret – religious prophets seldom are – and he preached “male continence” (i.e. the karezza) and “complex marriage” quite openly. His neighbours were naturally outraged at what they took to be a public rejection of all decency. (Even nowadays, a community with these ideas would probably have a hard time of it if they lived in the vicinity of a small town.) There was public outrage and the following year, Noyes was indicted on a charge of adultery. He decided that his great vision was too important to be destroyed by a few bigots. Fortunately, some of his disciples had already set up a community near Oneida Lake, about sixty miles away, with twenty-three acres of land. In 1847, Noyes and his disciples moved there and set up the Oneida Community.

  What followed was a typical American success story – success preceded by disappointment and hard work. There were only two log houses, a log hut and an old sawmill; the disciples were obliged to sleep in garrets and outhouses for another twelve years. There were many hardships until an inventor called Sewell Newhouse joined the community; he saved it from bankruptcy by inventing a steel trap which the community proceeded to manufacture. They made travelling bags, satchels, preserved fruit and silk, and their workmanship made them widely known. They acquired more land and more people joined them. Two years after the community was formed, another branch was started at Brooklyn, and then others at Wallingford, Newark, Putney, Cambridge and Manlius. By 1878 there were over three hundred members. They had built a large brick house in which they all lived. They had factories, offices, a school, a carpenter’s shop, barns and stables. The Mansion House – the main building – was centrally heated, with baths and labour-saving kitchens. The community also employed over two hundred workers from outside and treated them well.

  The aspect that has chiefly interested posterity was the sexual innovation. Any man could propose love-making to any woman (or, indeed, vice versa) and she was free to reject him. Oddly enough, direct courtship was not allowed – a man who wanted to sleep with a woman had to approach her through the intermediary of a third person. What “male continence” (or coitus reservatus) meant in practice was that the man put his penis into the woman’s vagina, then they lay still for anything up to an hour and a quarter. The woman was allowed to climax but the man was not expected to do so – even after withdrawal – Noyes denounced Robert Dale Owen’s idea of coitus interruptus as “Male incontinence plus evasion”. The male was supposed to stay in the woman until he lost his erection and this was believed to obviate any frustration and nervous tension. Noyes claimed that his community had a far better record of less nervous illness than the outside community, while failing to recognize that there may have been other explanations for the situation.

  As a system of sexual and moral hygiene “complex marriage” seems to have been highly successful. Boys lost their virginity soon after puberty, girls somewhat later. An older person of the opposite sex was generally chosen to initiate the young – one of the aspects of “complex marriage” that horrified the “outside world”, which felt a mixture of envy and moral indignation at the idea of a middle-aged man or woman being allowed to deflower a fifteen-year-old. One visitor wrote: “The majority of the old women are hideous and loathsome in appearance and it seems to me the most horrible fate in the world to be linked with them.” But Noyes himself, as the father of the community (he was even known as Father Noyes), naturally had a wider freedom of choice than most – after the age of fifty-eight he fathered eight children. It is not clear whether this was accidental or intentional. The community practised eugenics – which Noyes called stirpiculture – and at one stage, twenty-four men and twenty women were selected for an experiment in selective breeding. But “accidents” also happened – on average one every eighteen months.

  Accounts of the community make clear that
it was not a sexual free-for-all. The women dressed modestly, looking rather like the Chinese in long white trousers covered by a skirt. Any tendency by a couple to fall in love was regarded as selfish and “idolatrous”, and was discouraged by the system of “mutual criticism”, which usually meant that the person to be criticized was summoned before a committee, who then detailed his or her faults. People often requested mutual criticism just as someone today might go to a psychiatrist. One historian of the movement, Mark Holloway, in Heavens on Earth (1951) has recorded that it was also used successfully to cure physical ailments, demonstrating that Father Noyes also understood about psychosomatic illness. There was one case in which “mutual criticism” went further: when William Mills, a man in his early sixties – with an unattractive wife – tried to initiate more than his share of teenage virgins with the aid of sweets and alcohol, and as a result was hurled unceremoniously into a snowdrift.

  Close attachments among children were also discouraged as selfish, which caused a certain amount of heartache. Otherwise, the children had an enviably pleasant time. They were allowed to sleep as late as they liked in the morning and there were dances, plays, pantomimes and other forms of entertainment for them. Nor were they deprived of parental affection. A mother weaned her child, then placed it in the Children’s House where, until the age of three, it spent the daylight hours. After that, children also spent the night there but parents could visit them as often as they liked and take them for walks. They left the Children’s House at fourteen, when they were ready for sexual initiation and to join the adult community.

  The adults also had a pleasant time of it once the community was well-established. Most members were supervisors rather than workers and they could change their jobs to avoid monotony. Times of meetings, amusements and meals were also changed for the same reason. There was fishing, hunting, boating and swimming at Oneida Lake, twelve miles away, and they could visit other communities.