World Famous Cults and Fanatics Read online

  The only real problem was the attitude of the outside world. The American constitution allowed for religious freedom but flagrant sexual immorality was quite another thing. One of the community’s chief enemies was Professor John W. Mears, of Hamilton College, who denounced it as “a Utopia of obscenity”. The Presbyterian Synod of Central New York appointed a committee of seven to investigate the activities of the community, but was unsuccessful in destroying it. Eventually, the community began to decay from within. Many younger members thought that Noyes’s religious doctrines were absurd; some were even agnostics (Noyes allowed members to study Huxley and Darwin). Noyes wanted to retire and appointed his agnostic son, Dr Theodore Noyes, to take his place but this caused dissension. Some members of the community even sided with the puritanical Dr Mears. Noyes finally slipped quietly away from Oneida and moved to Niagara Falls in 1876 at the age of sixty-five. It became clear that if Oneida wanted to survive, it would have to stop outraging the outside world with its sexual freedom. “Complex marriage” was abandoned; the alternatives offered were celibacy or marriage and most preferred marriage. But to try to suppress “complex marriage” was tantamount to removing one of the main foundations of the community. “The Community sank step by step into its own Dark Ages,” says one historian. The old generosity of spirit vanished, so that “it was almost impossible to borrow a hammer from one’s next door neighbour”. In 1881, the Oneida Community was reorganized as a joint stock company, and “Communism” was abandoned. Children were still educated free until they were sixteen, then they were given $200 to give them a “start in life”. “An arid commercialism” replaced the old communal spirit and the community began to split up. Yet the original Oneida branch remained commercially successful.

  Noyes died in 1886 still believing firmly that the community had been ordained by God; praise and violent criticism continued long after his death. One English visitor had described him as “a tall, pale man, with sandy hair and beard, grey, dreamy eyes, good mouth, white temples and a noble forehead”. But the secularist Charles Bradlaugh was to describe him as “singularly unloveable, with his protruding, stuckout lower lip, his tired satyr like leer . . . an eccentric goatish half-inch stripe of beard running from ear to ear”. Yet fifty-three young women had once signed a resolution declaring that they belonged to him as “God’s true representative”, and that they were perfectly happy for him to decide which of the male members of the community were to father their children. It cannot be denied that Noyes was one of the most remarkable visionaries to come out of America in the nineteenth century.

  Bernard Shaw commented about Noyes that he was “one of those chance attempts at the Superman which occur from time to time in spite of the interference of man’s blundering institutions”. If this study has taught us anything, it is that messiahs come in all shapes and sizes and psychological types, from the genuinely inspired to the self-deluded, from saints to conmen. And in just a few cases, it is virtually impossible to decide which category a messiah belongs to.

  Henry James Prince

  This is the dilemma that confronts us in considering the case of the Reverend Henry James Prince, one of the most remarkable preachers of the “Spirit of Love” in the nineteenth century. After graduating from theological college in 1837 – when he was twenty-six – he became curate of Charlinch, near Bridgewater, Somerset, and was soon drawing enormous crowds with his fiery sermons. He was permanently surrounded by adoring female disciples, and when ugly rumours reached his bishop, he was forbidden to continue preaching. He left the Church of England and began preaching in barns and open fields. One day he announced he was the Prophet Elijah, and his followers accepted the revelation without question.

  Prince moved to Brighton – then a fashionable resort – and became the most popular preacher of his day. With £30,000 collected from disciples, he bought an estate at Spaxton, near Bridgewater, and turned it into Agapomene, or the Abode of Love. Disciples who wished to join him had to sell all they had and contribute it to the community. About sixty followers, mostly women, accepted the invitation.

  Unlike his American contemporary, John Humphrey Noyes, Prince did not actually preach Free Love; but he certainly practised it, regarding his female disciples as Brides of the Lord. He himself did not mind being addressed as God, and letters addressed to Our Lord God, Somerset, reached him without difficulty. One day he summoned all his disciples to the billiard room to watch a public act of worship – his intimate union with a Miss Patterson – on the settee.

  When she became pregnant, Prince told his followers that there would be no birth – just as there was now no death – but when a baby arrived, he had to explain it away as a final despairing act of the Devil. Then lawsuits began to cloud his horizon. In 1860, three female followers sued for the return of nearly £6,000, and the revelation of the goings-on in the Abode of Love startled and shocked Victorian England. After the case, Prince’s actions became more discreet; but he continued to live happily, surrounded by his private harem, until his death, aged eighty-eight, in 1899.

  Two years before his death, Prince had acquired an influential disciple: Hugh Smyth-Pigott, another spellbinding preacher. Smyth-Pigott took over the Agapomenite Church at Clapton, a suburb of London, and his sermons were soon producing the same effect as Prince’s had done half a century before. On Sunday, 7 September 1902, Smyth-Pigott announced from the pulpit that he had become divine, and that he would shortly walk on water. The next Sunday, 6,000 people waited for his arrival, cheering and booing. Showers of stones followed him back home.

  Smyth-Pigott decided to move to the Abode of Love, and in 1904 he took up residence, together with his wife and a mistress, who soon bore him a child. When, in 1909, a Bishop’s Court found him guilty of “immorality, uncleanness and wickedness of life”, he commented: “It doesn’t matter what they do. I am God” and in the following year a daughter was born to him by another disciple.

  He went preaching and gathering more disciples in America and Scandinavia; when he found particularly attractive girls, they were dubbed “soul brides” and sent back to Spaxton to await his arrival. Smyth-Pigott died in 1927, disappointing the expectations of his followers, who were convinced he was immortal. One woman, who had been brought up at the Abode of Love revealed that when the Reverend Prince had died he had handed Smyth-Pigott a “Horn of Power” and authority to carry on his mission. The exact nature of this horn of power is not known, but the symbolism seems apt.

  ***

  The Church of the Subgenius, a Texan cult and money-making organization, worships Bob “JR” Dobbs. “Bob” is a Fifties father icon, pipe firmly held between perfect teeth and hair brilliantined back. The only requirement of adherents, apart from a large donation, is that they immediately reject the views of all other “Subgenii”, becoming heretics, and form their own sect.

  ***

  Chapter Six

  Manic Messiahs and Twentieth-Century Cults

  The twentieth century has witnessed an unusually rich crop of messiahs, although it must be admitted that most of them have been conmen. A few of these have aroused such indignation among their disillusioned disciples that they have met a violent end.

  Franz Creffield, or Joshua the Second

  The man with the enormous tangled beard raised his arm above his head and cried in a deep voice: “Bring a curse, O God, on San Francisco, on Portland, on Corvallis and on Seattle.” With which, he turned and clambered on board the train from Seattle. It was the morning of 17 April 1906. The next day, when he arrived at his destination – Newport, Oregon – his followers met him with the incredible news: San Francisco had just been torn apart by an earthquake, and was now burning to the ground. “Yes, I knew that God would respond,” said the prophet quietly.

  The man’s name was Franz Edmund Creffield. He spoke with a German accent, and in the year 1906 he was thirty-one years old. He enters the history of false prophets and cranky messiahs in 1903, shortly after he had been thrown ou
t of a Salvation Army group in Corvallis, Oregon. According to the historian Arnold Toynbee, all major prophets follow a cycle of “withdrawal and return”, retreating from society to the solitude of forest or desert, and returning with the Great Message finally crystallized. Franz Creffield was no exception; early in 1903 he vanished into the forests of Oregon. When he emerged, a few months later, he had grown a beard like a briar patch full of birds’ nests, and his hair fell over his shoulders. He had also acquired a new name: Joshua the Second.

  Like another prophet who was making a reputation at that time – Grigory Efimovich Rasputin, the “Russian monk”– Franz Creffield held a remarkable fascination for women. There the resemblance seems to end. Rasputin undoubtedly had genuine powers of thaumaturgy, or “spirit healing”, and his diaries reveal that his mystical faith was deep and genuine. Creffield, on the other hand, was a born deceiver. The best that can be said for him is that he was self-deceived.

  He preached his mission in Corvallis, and acquired a few dozen followers, male and female. For some reason, the males dropped out; it was their wives and daughters who remained. Joshua’s religious faith became more fervent and compelling. Surrounded by adoring women, he would call upon the “full spirit” to descend on them. They would all sway and chant, clapping rhythmically, and as the excitement became hysterical, Joshua would cry: “Begone vile clothes,” and start to fling his robes around the room. The women would do the same, some of them modestly stripping down to their shifts, others flinging off every stitch. Then they would all roll on the floor, moaning and crying out.

  Inevitably, the men of Corvallis began to feel uneasy, and some of the more respectable wives left. Joshua had announced that he was seeking for a woman who would become the Second Mother of Christ: he, of course, was to be the father. He searched conscientiously; many candidates were rigorously tested, and if the Holy Spirit finally indicated that none was suitable, they at least had the satisfaction of knowing they had been engaged in the Lord’s work.

  This quest for the Second Mother took place on Kiger Island, in the middle of a river, and throughout the summer the prophet and his followers held prayer meetings by night and danced naked in the woods by day. When the winter came, Joshua moved back into Corvallis, into the home of a man named O. P. Hunt, whose daughter Maude was one of the prophet’s warmest admirers. A notice over the door said: “No Admittance Except on God’s Business.”

  The prayer meetings finally aroused so much hostility that Joshua was summoned to the courthouse; together with his chief male disciple, Brother Brooks, for a sanity hearing. He was found sane, but advised to leave town. He ignored the suggestion, and went back to the Hunts’ house. Then someone began to circulate photographs that had been taken on Kiger Island. They showed naked women – most of them recognizable as Corvallis housewives – romping in the bushes.

  On 4 January 1904, a deputation of male citizens called on the prophet, escorted him to the edge of town, tarred and feathered him, and turned him loose. He was found by Mrs Hunt and her daughter Maude and brought back home; shortly afterwards, he married Maude. But he soon felt the old compulsion to continue with the Lord’s work. He went to Portland to visit one of his chief female disciples. One day, the lady’s husband found the prophet performing the Lord’s work without his trousers on. He took out a warrant for adultery. Joshua’s angry father-in-law offered $150 for his capture, but Joshua could not be found.

  Three months later, a child ran under the Hunt house – which was built clear of the ground – looking for a lost ball. He saw a bearded man dressed in a blanket, and ran out yelling. The police were called, and Joshua was dragged out. It seemed that he had been living under the house since he fled from Portland, supplied with food by his wife and her mother. In court, he admitted adultery with the Portland disciple, but explained that he could not be judged by secular law; after all, Jesus had often broken the Sabbath. He was sentenced to two years in jail, but was released after fifteen months.

  His ex-wife Maude, now divorced, was living in Seattle with a brother, Frank, and sister-in-law. Joshua wrote to her, asking her to remarry him. She agreed, and they were joined again in Seattle. The brother and sister-in-law were deeply impressed by the prophet – so much so that when Joshua ordered them to sell their home and worldly goods, and move with him to a “Garden of Eden” near Newport, Oregon, they did so without hesitation. It was as he left Seattle that Joshua pronounced the curse that “caused” the San Francisco earthquake.

  Once established in his Eden, facing the Pacific Ocean just south of Waldport, the prophet sent word to former disciples in Corvallis, including a pretty girl named Esther Mitchell. Without hesitation, half the female population of Corvallis left home and streamed towards Eden. One husband rushed after his wife, pausing only to buy a revolver and cartridges.

  As he reached the ferryboat across Yaquina Bay, he saw the prophet standing on deck surrounded by disciples; he pointed the revolver, and pulled the trigger five times. Nothing happened. When the outraged husband examined the pistol, he discovered the shop had sold him rimfire cartridges for a centre-fire gun, but the female disciples were not surprised; they knew Joshua was immortal.

  All the same, the prophet could see that he was courting danger if he remained in Eden during the next week or so. The sensible course would be to allow the husbands to simmer down. As they converged on Eden, Joshua and Maude disappeared. George Mitchell, brother of the prophet’s favourite disciple Esther, reasoned that they would probably be making for Seattle again. He tracked them there on 7 May 1906. At eight o’clock that morning, Joshua was looking in the window of Quick’s Drug Store in First Avenue, while Maude was weighing herself on a machine. George Mitchell stepped up to the prophet, placed a gun against his ear, and pulled the trigger. Joshua collapsed without even turning his head. Maude flew at Mitchell, screaming. When a policeman came running up, she told him: “That is my husband Joshua. He will rise in three days.”

  But Joshua stayed dead, and Mitchell was tried for his murder. The defence argued that Joshua was “a degenerate of the worst sort”. The jury agreed, particularly when Mitchell stated in court that Joshua had taken the virginity of both his sisters. George Mitchell was acquitted. His sister Esther listened impassively.

  On 12 July 1906, George Mitchell stood at King Street station, waiting to take the train home. His brother Fred saw Esther standing nearby, and asked her to come and speak to George. Esther walked over to the rest of the group, and as they moved towards the ticket barrier drew a small revolver from under the folded coat on her arm. She placed it against George’s ear and pulled the trigger. Like Joshua, he collapsed without a word.

  Esther Mitchell and Maude Creffield were both held – they admitted planning George’s murder together. Maude took strychnine in prison; Esther was tried, but found not guilty by reason of insanity, and was committed to the Washington State Asylum. Three years later she was released, looking very thin and ill, and died at the home of friends shortly afterwards. She was just twenty.

  One problem, of course, is that all “messiahs” are, by definition, persons of high dominance, and persons of high dominance are usually highly sexed. This is as true in the case of female as male messiahs – the best illustration being the career of a woman who was often called “the world’s most pulchritudinous evangelist”.

  The Downfall of Aimée Semple McPherson

  She was born Aimée Elizabeth Kennedy, on a small farm in Canada, near Ingersoll, Ontario, on 9 October 1890. Her mother, a highly dominant woman, had been a Salvation Army lass until she married a devout farmer many years her senior. Aimée, like her mother, had a determined character, and there was a great deal of conflict between them in her childhood. Minnie Kennedy – later known as “Ma” – found marriage to her elderly husband boring and frustrating and took it out on her family.

  At the age of seventeen Aimée fell in love with a young English evangelist named Robert Semple and married him, in spite of her moth
er’s objections. Semple intended to become a missionary and apparently felt that she would make an ideal wife. She joined her husband in his evangelist activities in Chicago, then they went to England to see his parents. But when they arrived in Hong Kong, where he intended to begin his missionary work, Semple was stricken with fever and died in the English hospital. Aimée gave birth to a girl soon afterwards. The China mission provided funds to send her back to America.

  She joined her parents, who had moved to New York, tried life on the farm in Canada, then returned to New York and married a grocery clerk named Harold McPherson, by whom she had a son. Marriage bored her and within eighteen months she was on the move again, following the only profession she knew – that of evangelist. In Canada, she attracted a crowd by standing on a chair at a street corner, her eyes closed and her arms raised in prayer. As the crowd waited in silent expectation, Aimée suddenly opened her eyes and yelled, “Follow me!” and rushed to the revival hall. Once the crowd was in she shouted, “Shut the doors. Don’t let anyone out.”

  For the next few years, it was a rather discouraging routine of travelling around the country in a battered old car with a tent in the back. Her mother joined her and took the collections. Aimée preached the literal truth of every word in the Bible and the personal return of Jesus Christ. Slowly, she acquired a following. She began to hire lecture halls. Then, in 1917, at the age of twenty-seven, she made the momentous decision to head for California. In her old car, with her mother and two children, she made her way slowly across the country.