Cults Are Always Dangerous

Author:
Rupert Taylor
Updated:
Apr 22, 2024

Some people consider the Church of Scientology a cult.
PictorialEvidence, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Destructive Cults

The Church of Scientology, the Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gate, and many other well-known cults have ruined the lives of a lot of people.

However, lurking in the dusty corners of religion are myriad smaller groups that have destructive methods. They range from simple money scams to murderous conspiracies.

How Cult Leaders Manipulate Followers

When news of a new cult bust appears, the reaction is “How could the members be so stupid?” The answer is that cult leaders use proven techniques of psychology to ensnare their victims. It's a four-stage process.

Step one is the selection of targets. They are people who “are stressed, emotionally vulnerable, have tenuous or no family connections, or are living in adverse socioeconomic conditions” (The Big Think). Those with substance abuse issues, learning disorders, vivid imaginations, on the autism spectrum, or with other vulnerabilities are singled out.
The Moonies coined the phrase “love bombing” to describe the way in which potential recruits are softened up through flattery and affection. This works wonders on people who may have had a troubled childhood and are desperate for comfort and understanding.
Next comes isolation in which the target is persuaded that old attachments are getting in the way of developing a healthy mind. A weekend retreat and immersion in the cult's ideology mixed with more love bombing can secure membership.
The last step is control. Cult leaders want total obedience so followers are taught that there is safety inside the cult and danger outside it. This is where the term “brainwashing” makes an appearance. Through rituals and other strategies, the followers learn to depend on the leader for everything and to suppress their independent thought. In this way, they are persuaded that even outrageous actions are acceptable because they are done in the service of the great master's needs.

Dr. Steven Hassan has spent decades studying cults. He says that cult leaders are typically malignant narcissists—people who are highly skilled at manipulating and controlling others.

What follows is a random selection of cults that illustrate these points.

Angel's Landing

When a man claims to see into the future he's likely to attract a few gullible people to his side. So it was with Daniel Perez (aka Lou Castro), who set up a 20-acre commune near Wichita, Kansas in about 2000.

Perez convinced his followers that he was an angel, but his health was a little fragile. In order to stay alive, he needed to have sex with children, whose parents appeared ready to surrender their offspring to Perez's perverted demands.

Perez, who didn't appear to have a job, also needed to drive around in high-end cars, as angels do.

Police first took an interest in Angel's Landing when one of the sect's members, Patricia Hughes, fell into the swimming pool and drowned. Three years later, Patricia's widowed husband, Brian, died in a freak autobody shop accident.

Detective Ron Goodwyn of the Sedgwick County Sheriff's Office thought something didn't add up. According to oxygen.com:

“Goodwyn found a disturbing pattern of expensive life insurance policies being taken out on people in Perez's circle, then cashed in by members. About every two and a half years, bank account balances would get low in the makeshift family, then someone would die.”

With the help of the FBI, a case against Perez was put together; horrific stories of the child rape and murder emerged. He was convicted on numerous charges and sentenced to 80 years in prison.

Palo Mayombe and Mexican Drug Dealers

Put traditional African religion and Roman Catholicism into a blender and you get Palo Mayombe and its cousin Santeria. These belief systems have many gods that involve sorcery and animal sacrifice.

Born in 1962 in Miami to a widowed Cuban mother, Adolfo Constanzo was fascinated by Palo Mayombe from an early age. He got into drug dealing and the occult in his early teens. After several arrests for shoplifting and other petty crimes, he moved to Mexico where he recruited followers to Palo Mayombe.

He had a charismatic personality and began to establish himself among the city's superstitious drug dealers. His fame spread to the leaders of drug cartels, politicians, and celebrities. This helped Constanzo acquire an $80,000 Mercedes-Benz among the other goodies a high income provided.

He and his cult members built a profitable business casting spells that they said would protect dealers.

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Animal sacrifices were needed and came with varying degrees of strength from a simple $6 rooster killing up to $3,100 for a lion cub. For really powerful magic a human body was required—and it needed to be a fresh one.

Bits and pieces of the recently killed were put into his blood cauldron (called an nganga), suitable spells were cast, and an impregnable, magical shield would be erected around his client.

What better way to establish the effectiveness of his spells than to put the limbs and gizzards of those who refused his services into the nganga? Cartel leaders started to notice some of their rivals were disappearing. Obviously, Constanzo's juju must be working.

He and his cult members may have killed as many as 100 people, but they chose their victims carefully; they were drug dealers, the homeless, and prostitutes—marginalized folk the police applied few resources into investigating.

In 1989, police found disturbing remains at a ranch near Matamoros, Mexico, across the border from Brownsville, Texas. Cultural anthropologist Rafael Martinez took a look at the grisly bits still lying around and knew immediately this was the site of Palo Mayombe rituals. The ownership of the ranch was traced to Constanzo.

Surrounded by police, Constanzo ordered one of his followers to kill him and the man obliged. Most of the rest of the cult were tried and found guilty of murder.

Love Has Won

Mother God appeared in the most recent of her 534 lives over a period of 19 billion years in Dallas, Texas in 1975.

Otherwise known as Amy Carlson, she said she had previously been Jesus Christ, Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Marilyn Monroe, and Pele—no, not the Brazilian soccer player, but a Hawaiian deity.

She was also the queen of the lost continent of Lemuria that supposedly sank somewhere in the Indian Ocean. The cherry on the top of this impressive resume was the claim that, in a previous life, her father had been Donald Trump.

In the early 2000s, she met up with someone called Amerith WhiteEagle through an internet forum. That led to the formation of the Galactic Federation of Life, which, in turn, became Love Has Won.

The idea did not catch on in a big way and seems to have gathered no more than a few dozen followers. But hey, Jesus started out with 12 disciples and look where that went.

The divinity was a mish-mash of faiths, promising that 144,000 people would be led to some sort of “higher consciousness level.” That number is plucked from the Book of Revelation and has to do with the 12 tribes of Israel.

Woven into this bit of Abrahamic theology, Carlson borrowed twaddle from QAnon conspiracies. And, she ranted on about how the non-existent Illuminati work to ruin everybody's lives except for the very wealthy. Of course she did.

In case you are a tad confused, the group's spokesperson, “Aurora from the First Contact Ground Crew Team,” explains:

“If you don’t know, we are in a full-blown planetary ascension and this is basically a full evolution of consciousness. Humanity as a collective is evolving from a third dimension to the fifth dimension.”

That certainly clears everything up.

Carlson and her followers used YouTube and other media to recruit members, solicit donations, and sell useless vitamin supplements and New Age rubbish. “Etheric surgery,” at $88 per treatment was a cure-all therapy that didn't work. The money that rolled in was used to enrich the Mother God.

Videos emerged of Carlson getting into drunken and abusive rages with her followers.

The end came in 2021, when Carlson's mummified corpse was discovered in a sleeping bag swaddled in Christmas lights. Her eye sockets were empty and her face covered in glitter.

And that marked the end of Love Has Won, which, it seems, did not win.

MAGA

The leader of the "Make America Great Again" movement is Donald Trump. His rise to power appears to have many of the characteristics of a cult.

In the 2017 book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, mental health professionals speculated on the condition of Trump's mind, with many concluding he is a malignant narcissist.

He has exploited the insecurities of his followers who fear they are falling behind economically and struggling to understand their place in a rapidly changing world.

In an interview with Scientific American, forensic psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee noted:

“[Trump], hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence—while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure. When such wounded individuals are given positions of power, they arouse similar pathology in the population that creates a 'lock and key' relationship.”

Trump also used thought control by labelling objective analysis as “fake news” and directing his followers to sympathetic media such as Fox News, One America News Network, and Newsmax.

Here comes the question.

Bonus Factoids

NXIVM (pronounced NEX-ee-um) was started in 1998 by Keith Raniere. It was marketed as a self-help organization, but in reality, it was a sex cult with “master” and “slaves.” Raniere mustered a following of 18,000 members, mostly women. Cosmopolitan tells us that “the new members were told to undress and the 'master' branded them with a design that included Raniere’s initials right above their pelvic area. Each woman was instructed to say: 'Master, please brand me, it would be an honor.'” In October 2020, Raniere began serving a 120-year sentence.
The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God got underway in Uganda in 1989. Its leaders claimed to have had visions of the Virgin Mary. Soap and sex were forbidden among members, who were also encouraged to refrain from talking in case they broke the ninth commandment: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour." The leaders said that the world would come to an end as the clock ticked over to start the current millennium. A calendar readjustment proved necessary, and, when that failed to deliver the hoped-for apocalypse, the leaders set their church on fire. The 530 people inside the building died.

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The Negative48 Conspiracy Cult
Even QAnon found this radical group outrageous.
Is Brainwashing Possible?
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