World Famous Cults and Fanatics

by Colin Wilson

  Aimée was not, in fact, “pulchritudinous”; her features were too heavy, and her legs were like those of a Welsh dresser (so she always wore long skirts). But by the usual standards of female evangelists, she was a welcome change. Within a week of arriving in Los Angeles, she was able to rent the Philharmonic Auditorium, which held over 3,000 people. Suddenly she was a celebrity. The rich contralto voice could hold the multitudes. On a new wave of confidence, she travelled to Canada, New Zealand and Australia. It seems to have dawned on her that American sales techniques could be used to sell religion. Back in California, this time in San Diego, she scattered evangelical tracts from an aircraft and held meetings in a boxing arena.

  It was in San Diego that Aimée suddenly became far more than a successful preacher. San Diego was full of old and retired citizens and the suicide rate and the statistics for mental and physical illness were far higher than in the rest of California. At an outdoor meeting in Organ Pavilion, in Balboa Park, a middle-aged paralytic rose from her wheelchair in front of 30,000 people and took a few halting steps.

  Suddenly, hundreds of people were hobbling towards the platform, tears streaming down their faces, praising the Lord and Aimée Semple McPherson. The next day, everyone in San Diego was talking about the miracle.

  Aimée embarked on another triumphant tour of the Pacific coast. Then she realized it was time to stop moving around like a travelling showman. She would build a temple in Los Angeles. In 1923, Los Angeles was not the world’s most sprawling city; it was still an enormous village, full of country folk. They welcomed the idea of an evangelical temple, and contributed generously. On 1 January 1923, trumpets blared, and Aimée unveiled the floodlit, electrically rotating cross that formed the heart of the Angelus Temple; by night it could be seen fifty miles away. The Temple, and Sister Aimée’s house next door, had cost about $1½ million. The Temple had a seating capacity of 5,000, a broadcasting station, a theological seminary, an enormous organ, and a “Miracle Room” full of discarded crutches. Groups of disciples engaged in non-stop prayer, participating in relays. Aimée, with a genius that owed something to Hollywood (and to which Billy Graham undoubtedly owes some of his own methods), held pageants with music, picture-shows of the Holy Land, and dramatized sermons, all accompanied by a vast choir. Her neighbour Carey McWilliams remarked felicitously that, “Aimée kept the Ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds of religion turning night and day.” At the end of her sermons, she asked sinners to come forward to be saved; as the lights were lowered, and soft music soothed the audience, hundreds rose to their feet and moved down the aisles. Then Aimée would shout, “Turn on the lights and clear the one-way street for Jesus,” and suddenly the music would turn into a brazen blare. Aimée was one of the earth’s great showmen. For sheer entertainment her meetings surpassed anything that could be seen in the cinemas.

  It was in 1925 that a new radio operator took over the Temple’s radio station. His name was Kenneth G. Ormiston and he had a soothing, cultivated voice. At first, Aimée spoke to him only over the headphones; then they met by the Temple steps and she drove him home to his wife. But soon Ormiston was no longer hurrying home to his wife once the programmes were over. Instead, he went to a room in the Ambassador Hotel, where Sister Aimée was waiting. In 1926 Aimée went on a visit to the Holy Land, financed by “love offerings” from her followers. Ormiston was absent from California during this period, although it is not known for certain whether he travelled with Aimée. She was back in Los Angeles in May 1926, and continued her clandestine meetings with Ormiston in various hotels. On 14 May Ormiston rented a cottage in Carmel, told the landlord that he would be returning with his “invalid wife”, and went back to Los Angeles.

  Four days later, Aimée disappeared. She had gone to the beach at Venice for a swim. She sat in a beach tent, working on sermon notes, and after a while, she sent her secretary off on some errand. When the secretary returned, Aimée had vanished. Her mother proclaimed from the steps of the Temple, “She is with Jesus – pray for her.” For the next thirty-two days, her followers mounted a frantic search. Aircraft flew close to the waves; men in diving suits looked for her body on the ocean floor. Two followers committed suicide – a young man yelled “I’m going after her” and leapt into the sea. Aimée’s mother had flowers scattered from an aircraft on the spot. A collection of $36,000 was taken for a memorial.

  On 27 May, a newspaper mentioned that Ormiston had also vanished; his wife had reported him missing. Further probing by reporters revealed that he had also been absent when Aimée was in the Holy Land. As all Los Angeles began to buzz with indecent rumour and speculation, Ormiston strolled into the search headquarters, denied all knowledge of Aimée’s disappearance and vanished again.

  The police of California began to suspect that there might be a connection between Aimée and Ormiston, and that if they could find one they would find the other. Suddenly the search was intensified. On the morning of 29 May Ormiston called at a Salinas garage, near Carmel, to collect his car; he was accompanied by a woman, and later that day, they registered as “Mr and Mrs Frank Gibson” at a hotel in St Luis Obispo. That night their car was stopped by a suspicious newspaper reporter. Ormiston turned and headed back towards San Francisco. Five days later, on 23 June 1926, a resident of a cottage in Agua Prieta, just across the Mexican border from Douglas, Arizona, was awakened by a knocking at the door, to be confronted by a woman who claimed she had been the victim of a kidnapping. It was Aimée.

  Her story was that she had been kidnapped by two men and a woman – Rose, Steve and Jake. She had been taken to a shack in Mexico and had eventually escaped. When she returned to Los Angeles, 30,000 people were waiting at the station and she was carried to her car through lanes of flowers. Her followers showed a tendency to forgive and forget, and the rest of the world might have done the same, if Aimée had not tried quite so hard to prove her innocence.

  She kept asking what the police were doing to find the kidnappers and issued challenges over the radio. A grand jury declared that there was no evidence to indict anyone. Soon after that, someone tracked down her “love nest” in Cannel. Ormiston, who was still in hiding, sent an affidavit stating that although he had stayed in the cottage with a woman who was not his wife, that woman was not Aimée. This seemed to be confirmed when a woman announced that the lady in question was her sister; Aimée publicly declared herself vindicated. But when the lady proved to be wanted by the police for passing bad cheques, the press once again showed a disposition to regard Aimee as an adulterous woman who had decided to brazen it out. Another grand jury was convened; this time, a follower of Aimée’s vanished to the lavatory with a major piece of evidence – a scrap of paper found in the “love nest” with Aimée’s writing on it – and flushed it down the toilet. The grand jury was dismissed. Finally, Aimée was charged with conspiring with others to obstruct justice. She raised a “fight the Devil fund” of $¼ million, explaining to her followers that she was being crucified by the forces of evil. The evidence against her looked overwhelming; chambermaids testified about her sessions in hotel rooms with Ormiston and the hotel registers left no doubt about it. She was identified as the “Mrs Mcintyre” of the Carmel “love nest”, and the cheque-bouncing lady who had supported Ormiston’s story now admitted she had been paid by Aimée, who had carefully coached her in her story. And yet, in spite of all this, District Attorney Asa Keyes suddenly moved to dismiss the case against her – there was talk of a $30,000 bribe. (Keyes was later sentenced to prison for corruption in office.) Aimée announced that the Lord had rescued her and settled down to writing her autobiography, In the Service of the King, in which she repeated the kidnapping story.

  Soon after this, Aimée set out on another lecture tour; this time the subject was her own life and she expected her audiences to pay for admission. To her surprise, few people seemed inclined to do this. It was the same when she went on a European tour in 1928. The faithful continued to regard Sister Aimée as a saint and a wronge
d woman, but the general public seemed to regard her with a cynical amusement. Her publicity stunts, her public quarrels (with her mother, among others) and her lawsuits began to bore even the American press. She chartered a liner for a crusade to the Holy Land but only a hundred followers turned up. For this occasion, Aimée had her chestnut hair bleached to blonde; her mother was indiscreet enough to mention that she had also had her face lifted and this alienated more of the faithful than the kidnapping escapade. In 1931, she decided to ignore her own teaching on divorce – she had always insisted that no divorced person should remarry during the lifetime of the other partner – and married an overweight radio announcer named Dave Hutton. Two days after the wedding, another woman sued Hutton for $200,000 for breach of promise. When the case was tried, Hutton was ordered to pay $5,000. But when she heard the news, Aimée fainted and fractured her skull on the flagstone of the courtyard. She went to Europe to recuperate. Hutton sent her a telegram: “Take your time, honey . . . Daddy wants a well woman.” But she and Hutton never lived together again.

  During the remainder of her life, she was sued fifty-five times in the courts of Los Angeles for unpaid bills, broken contracts, slander and other charges. There were a number of successful suits by relatives of Temple followers who had left their money to Aimée. She was as flamboyant as ever and as she grew older, her style in clothes became increasingly girlish, but the world had ceased to be interested in her.

  On the morning of 27 September 1944, Aimée Semple McPherson was found unconscious in her hotel room in Oakland, California, with sleeping capsules scattered around her on the floor; she died later in the day. It was never established whether she had taken an overdose deliberately or accidentally.

  Krishna Venta

  In 1911, precisely one century after the birth of the Reverend Prince, another messiah, Francis Pencovic, was born in America. Up to the time of World War II he had a curious and chequered career as a boilermaker, shipyard worker and dishwasher, and had served jail sentences for burglary, larceny, passing dud cheques, not supporting his wife, and sending a threatening letter to Roosevelt.

  It was during the war, when he was a conscientious objector, that he organized a cult called the Fountain of the World, followed by the initials WKFL (wisdom, knowledge, faith and love). When he came out of the army he changed his name to Krishna Venta, adopted flowing oriental robes, and explained that he had been born in a valley in Nepal.

  He had visited Rome as long ago as AD 600 – although, on a more recent visit, the Pope’s guards had turned him away – and had been “teleported” to America in 1932. The cult, with a hundred or so members, settled in Ventura County, California, near Box Canyon. According to Krishna Venta, America would be shaken by a Communist revolution in 1965, and in 1975 he and his 144,000 followers would take over the country.

  On 9 December 1958, two disgruntled ex-followers, Ralph Miller and Peter Kamenoff, called on Krishna Venta in his San Fernando Valley retreat, and demanded that he confess that his messianism was basically a cloak for sexual promiscuity – their own wives having been among the messiah’s “brides”. When Krishna declined to confess, one of the men opened a canvas bag – and a tremendous explosion blew the “monastery” apart, killing a dozen people and injuring many more. In a pick-up truck nearby, police found a tape recording made by the two “avengers”, listing the prophet’s misdemeanours, and declaring: “He isn’t Christ, only a man.” The words could serve as the epitaph of manic messiahs in general.

  ***

  The Flat Earth Society flourished in Britain until the early 1970s, when Samuel and Lillian Shenton, its last active exponents, died. The belief of the Society, that the earth is self-evidently not a sphere, has been around far longer than the scientifically sanctioned opposing view. The Flat Earthers’ arguments tend to centre around the “fact” that if our planet was indeed a fast-rotating ball, we would all fly off it into space. Furthermore they stress that the Bible portrays the earth as flat. In order to promote their views, Flat Earthers have always been quite prepared to fight scientists on their own territory. Throughout the nineteenth century, British planists (Flat Earthers) and globularists (round earthers) had experimental showdowns, complete with impartial observers, along a six-mile stretch of canal known as the Bedford Level. The results were often disturbing for orthodox science. In one experiment a fifteen-foot-square blanket was hung from a bridge spanning the canal. Meanwhile, six miles down the straight waterway at another bridge, an observer attempted to focus his telescope upon the blanket. Globularist science dictates that the curvature of the earth over six miles should result in the observer not being able to see the blanket at all. However, a photo taken through the telescope revealed not only the entire blanket, but its reflection in the water below.

  The first photographs of earth from space should have convinced the Flat Earthers of their error, but they had a ready explanation: the entire space programme was a sham, Arthur C. Clarke had been hired to script the moon landing. The Americans had been given the role of space race winners at a Top Secret meeting with the Soviets, in return for handing over Cuba without any fuss.

  The Flat Earth Society still exists in America, crusading against the heathen globularist conspiracy.

  ***

  Brother Twelve

  With Brother Twelve – whose real name was Edward Arthur Wilson – we again encounter the paradox of a messiah who cannot be dismissed entirely as a self-receiver. Born in 1878 in Birmingham, England, Wilson was the son of “Irvingites”. Edward Irving was a Scottish minister who was appointed to the Caledonian Church in London’s Hatton Garden in 1822; convinced that the Second Coming was imminent, he induced in his congregation tremendous transports of religious fervour. When, in 1830, they offered up prayers for some “sign” or miracle, his congregation began “speaking in tongues” – that is, in strange languages, sometimes gobbledegook, but sometimes foreign languages with which they were unfamiliar. The “voices” told Irving that he was to be the new Isaiah, and that in forty days’ time, he would have the power to work miracles. But the forty days passed, and the miraculous power failed to descend. General disillusion followed; in 1833 he was dismissed, and in the following year died of tuberculosis.

  As to Edward Wilson, born almost half a century later, he had been “in touch with super-physical beings” from an early age, but this did not prevent him from going to sea and working as a “blackrider” – transporting kidnapped negroes to Turkey where they were sold as slaves. In 1912 he deserted his wife and children and became a wanderer. And twelve years later, at the age of forty-six, he found himself in a village in the south of France. On 19 October 1924, he woke up and saw a “Tau” – a cross with a circle on top – suspended at the end of the bed. Thinking it was some kind of after-image, he closed his eyes and looked again; now there was also a five pointed star below it. Slowly, they faded away. But as he lay in the silence, he heard a faraway voice, “clear and wonderfully sweet”, which told him that he had been a pharaoh in Egypt (the Tau, or ankh, is the Egyptian symbol of life), and ordered him to prepare his heart for illumination.

  In the following year, he began to practise “automatic writing”, whose author identified himself as a “Master of Wisdom”, a spiritual being who, according to the teaching of Madame Blavatsky (founder of the Theosophical Society), is part of a Great White Lodge whose purpose is to guide human destiny. The result was a book called The Three Truths. This Master gave Wilson the name “Brother Twelve”. When he sent an article called “The Shadow” to the Occult Review in London, it was immediately accepted, and when it appeared in 1926, it created a considerable stir. Wilson foretold that a new age would begin in 1975, but that before that the world would have to struggle through an abyss of horror – a prophecy that was, on the whole, remarkably accurate.

  In May 1926, at the time of the General Strike, Wilson went to London, and called on the Occult Review. The editor was so impressed by him (Wilson was a small man with a po
inted beard, twinkling eyes, and a manner of self-evident sincerity) that he accepted a book called The Message, and lost no time in printing it. As its fame spread, Brother Twelve began to acquire disciples. In January 1927 he informed thern, (through a “general letter”) that he had been ordered by the Master to go to Canada.

  In Ottawa, Wilson lectured to a packed meeting of the Theosophical Society, where he announced that the Masters had ordered him to form an “Aquarian Foundation” and to prepare for important work. The talk was received with enthusiasm, and dozens of members announced their eagerness to join. It was the same when he lectured in Toronto, where – to the disgust of the Theosophical Society – crowds of members signed up. In Windsor, Ontario, his charm won over a publisher who agreed to act as intermediary between the messiah and his growing audience. In Vancouver he was met off the boat by another admirer, a lawyer, and was soon living in a small rented house and selecting members for the governing board of the Aquarian Foundation (seven of them, including himself).

  Appeals for funds brought a flood of donations to build a Centre in Nanaimo, British Columbia. This was run by Wilson and his common-law wife Elma. Their aim, he told members, was to fight the Empire of Evil that had been engineering catastrophes for mankind since ancient times – it had caused the downfall of Rome, and its latest effort was Bolshevism. Brother Twelve also shared with Hitler the conviction that the Jews were part of an international Communist conspiracy. But his detestations were impartial, and included the Roman Catholic Church.

  As the money poured in, Wilson decided to buy four hundred acres on nearby Valdes Island, and build an “ashram”. He also made a determined attempt to become a political force, sending his representatives to talk to US senators, and publishing pamphlets urging the importance of forming a “Third Party”, to be called the PPL, or Protestant Protective League. But the attempt to gain the support of a minority group called the Prohibition Party foundered at a Chicago convention in 1928, and Wilson reluctantly relinquished his political ambitions.