Feet of Clay

No doubt his powers of oratory went some way to compensate him for his isolation, but Jones remained pathologically anxious about being deserted by such friends as he had, and later by his disciples. As a youth, he invited an acquaintance for dinner. When the lad said that he must leave before Jones wished him to do so, Jones fired a gun at him, narrowly missing him.

Jones, who was always a neat dresser, was obsessionally preoccupied with cleanliness, and avoided anything which might make him sweat. Like many people of obsessional personality, he had a strong wish to bring everything under his own control, including those around him. His wife Marceline, whom he married in June 1949, soon regretted her choice because she found him so dominant and overbearing.

In 1956, he set up his People’s Temple in Indianapolis. The emphasis was on racial equality. Jones and his wife were the first white couple in Indianapolis to adopt a black child. At the time, mixed congregations were a rarity, and many of his black congregation felt that their status had been enhanced by Jones’s refusal to discriminate. Much of his early preaching was concerned with calling up individuals from the congregation and ‘touching them in the name of the Lord’, at which point some entered a trance-like state. In the early days of the People’s Temple, Jones undoubtedly did some good. He established soup kitchens for the poor, and also provided coal and clothes for them. When he moved the Temple to Redwood Valley in California in 1965, Jones operated a ranch for mentally handicapped boys, nursing homes for the elderly, homes for foster children, and a day-care centre. These enterprises apparently provided excellent services. Jones was skilful at cultivating important people, and succeeded in impressing Jane Fonda, Angela Davis, Daniel Ellsberg, and Rosalynn Carter, with whom he once shared a platform.

Jones claimed divinely inspired clairvoyance, which he invoked as explaining his knowledge of the personal histories and secrets of those whom he called up. In reality, he employed spies who discovered these secrets by passing on information gleaned from personal enquiries, unauthorized entries to homes, and even from combing through dustbins.

Jones specialized in services of healing, for which he claimed he had a divine gift. Many of his so-called cures were faked. People brought in in wheelchairs would be told they were healed and could walk. In fact, these were disguised members of the People’s Temple who had been trained for the role. Jones had no hesitation in claiming to cure cancer. An individual would be told that he had cancer of the bowel and instructed to go to the lavatory. Then, a bloody mass of animal intestine would be produced as evidence that the cancer had been miraculously evacuated. Complicity in his deceptions as a healer was one way in which Jones gained control over the members of his cult. Sexual confessions were another. Some were compelled to sign confessions to crimes which they had not committed. Members of the Temple had to abrogate anything which ministered to their sense of individuality: possessions, children, spouses, and ownership of their own bodies. Everything was to be held in common. Jones, like many other gurus, was good at raising money. By 1975 the Temple’s assets were rated at $10 million.

Jones was more obviously a confidence trickster than many gurus, but this did not prevent Eugene Chaikin, a Californian attorney who became a member of the Temple, from describing him as the most loving, Christ-like human being he had ever met. Another law graduate, Tim Stoen, called Jones ‘the most compassionate, honest and courageous human being the world contains’. In 1972, Stoen signed a paper requesting that Jones sire a child by his wife, since he himself was unable to do so. As lawyers are not generally noted for being particularly gullible, these opinions are impressive testimony to Jones’s powers of persuasion. Jones acceded to Stoen’s request, and a later legal conflict about the custody of the ensuing child was one factor leading to the exposure and downfall of Jonestown. Because Jim Jones would not give up John Victor Stoen, as a San Francisco judge ordered, the little boy perished in Jonestown along with the others.

In 1972, Jones again moved the Temple, this time to San Francisco; but disquieting rumours about his claims to heal the sick and raise the dead, combined with accusations of misappropriating funds, soon made him think it advisable to leave California. By 1974, an advance team was clearing an area of jungle in Guyana which Jones had bought from the government for what he called an agricultural project. In May 1977 a massive exodus of Temple members from San Francisco and Los Angeles resulted in the establishment of Jonestown, a settlement so remote from the coastal capital, Georgetown, that it took thirty-six hours to reach it by steamer and river boat. Guyana was chosen because it had a history of offering sanctuary to a variety of fugitives, including a number of criminals and the black leader, Michael X.* Jones himself became permanently resident there from July 1977. About seventy per cent of those who followed Jones to Guyana were black; about two-thirds were female. As Eileen Barker has pointed out, the membership of the People’s Temple was unlike the typical membership of most contemporary cults. Jonestown was originally called an agricultural commune, and the People’s Temple was not classified as a new religious movement until after the mass death of its members.3

The settlement which Jones established was publicized as utopian; a place from which disease had all but vanished because of Jones’s efforts as a divinely-gifted healer: a paradise of racial equality, economic equality and communal bliss. In fact, as some reported it, it was more like a concentration camp presided over by a cruel and ruthless commandant. Jones’s need to bring everything and everyone under his own control came near to fulfilment in this remote place.

According to Deborah Blakey, a former financial secretary of the Temple, who managed to get out in April 1978, the commune lived under a reign of terror. She told Shiva Naipaul that most people were required to work in the fields for eleven hours a day on grossly inadequate rations.4 As a result, extreme loss of weight, chronic diarrhoea, and recurrent fever affected half the inhabitants. Medical treatment was practically non-existent. One middle-aged ex-merchant seaman was forced to work until his shoulder was raw from humping lumber and he broke down sobbing. He was beaten up and forced to crawl in front of Jones to beg forgiveness. The settlement was constantly patrolled by armed guards. Jones threatened that anyone who tried to escape would be killed, forbade telephone calls to the outside world, ensured that mail was censored, and confiscated passports and money. He also told them that the settlement was surrounded by mercenaries or by the Guyanese Army, who would capture and torture any defectors and castrate any males who attempted escape.

Jones himself, together with some favourites, enjoyed a varied and more than adequate diet from foods stored in his personal refrigerator. He considered himself entitled to have sexual relations with anyone of either sex, although it was noted by his son Stephan that nearly all his father’s partners were white. Some were undoubtedly given drugs to make them more amenable. Jones affirmed that he was the only truly heterosexual male in the settlement, and alleged that many of the other males had not come to terms with their homosexual feelings. To demonstrate this, he found it advisable to bugger some of them. One such victim is reported as saying: ‘Your fucking me in the ass, was, as I see it now, necessary to get me to deal with my deep-seated repression against my homosexuality’.5 This man seems to have had no realization of being exploited, no consciousness that Jones might be exercising power over him and, at the same time, gaining personal sexual satisfaction. ‘Father’ could do no wrong, and sex with Father was generally reported as an incomparable experience.

Punishments were generally carried out in public on the stage of the church. Beatings were inflicted with a three-foot paddle, and some beatings lasted half-an-hour. Grace Stoen saw her son John Victor beaten in public, but when she finally escaped from the settlement in July 1976, she had to leave the child behind. Victims of beatings had their cries amplified by microphones held to their lips. A child who soiled his pants was forced to wear them on his head, forbidden food, and made to watch others eating. Children were sometimes tossed into a well near Jones’s bungalow and pulled down into the water by aides who were already swimming there. Their screams of fear could be heard all over the settlement. Another punishment was a boxing match in which the offender was made to fight with a much stronger adversary who beat him semi-conscious. Other offenders were forced to eat hot peppers, or had a hot pepper stuffed up the rectum. Jones’s son Stephan recalled that his sixteen-year-old friend, Vincent Lopez, was forced to chew a pepper. To save him from being compelled to chew another, Stephan caught his friend’s vomit in his hand so that he could swallow it again. Another punishment was to be confined in a crate too small to permit standing for days at a time. Some offenders were given electric shocks from a machine known as Big Foot. As Jones himself deteriorated, both mentally and physically, Jonestown appears to have come close to resembling Belsen.

Yet, as Shiva Naipaul indicates in his book Journey to Nowhere, there was another side to Jonestown. Some reported that their lives had been radically changed for the better; that Jonestown, because of its insistence on racial integration, had removed the stigma of being black, and had given them a new dignity. Others who had previously been alcoholic or drug addicts claimed to have been ‘saved’ by the Temple or by Jones himself. Dr. James S. Gordon, a psychiatrist who interviewed a number of survivors over a period of ten years, was impressed with the fact that none regretted their stay in Jonestown. It is evident that some people who had been alienated from conventional society felt themselves part of a new community in which they were for the first time accepted and valued. Naipaul writes that some experienced Jonestown as a paradise, while others found it a nightmare.

Jim Jones’s confidence in himself was not based, as it is with most of us, on feeling loved and appreciated by friends and family, but on his ability to impress others with his fluent oratory. I have no doubt that this isolated youth early convinced himself, as he convinced others, that he was endowed with special powers and spiritual insight. Like the dwarf Alberich in Wagner’s Das Rheingold, Jones abandoned the search for love in favour of the acquisition of power. The savage punishments described earlier are a demonstration of his misuse of power. It is hardly credible that mothers could have tolerated such physical abuse of their children, or that adults would submit to such public pain and humiliation; but, as we shall see, Jones was not unique in his punitive methods. His sexual behaviour indicates that he used sex as a way to dominate others rather than as an expression of love. His corrupt sexual behaviour went hand in hand with his elitist conviction of his own superiority. Jones felt entitled to be well fed when his followers were half-starving, and was better housed than they were; but, although the People’s Temple accumulated considerable funds, he does not seem to have been attracted by conventional trappings of wealth in the shape of Rolls-Royces, yachts, or gold trinkets. What fascinated him was the exercise of power over other people.

Jones perfectly illustrates the difficulty in defining the borderlines between conviction, delusion, confidence trickery, and psychosis. Perhaps more overtly than any guru with whom I am concerned except Gurdjieff, Jones was a confidence trickster. He had no scruples about faking cures of illness, or himself pretending to collapse when it appeared desirable, or in inventing attacks from imagined enemies. He once broke a window and claimed that a brick on the floor had been thrown at him. Unfortunately for him, the absence of broken glass within the room demonstrated that the window had been broken from inside. In Jonestown, he claimed that enemies had fired at him, and produced bullets in evidence. In fact, his adopted son Jimmy had fired the shots, and was seen to do so by Vincent Lopez, whose punishment by forced eating of a hot pepper was referred to earlier. Jones was always inclined to suspect that he was being persecuted by agents of the United States Government including the Internal Revenue and the CIA, no doubt because he was in reality guilty of financial misdemeanours, and also because he outspokenly condemned the administration as fascist and racist. However, as he got older, his suspicions took on more and more the colouring of paranoid delusions, until, in Jonestown, his tediously long broadcast harangues amounted to the ramblings of a psychotic. This mental deterioration was undoubtedly promoted by the large quantities of drugs, including both amphetamines and anti-depressants, which he took for a variety of ailments, both real and imagined. During the 1970s, Jones drove home his paranoid message with increasing force. He alleged that the San Francisco authorities were preparing concentration camps for ethnic minorities and, by the mid-1970s, he had accumulated at least two hundred guns. In Jonestown, he added to this armoury by smuggling more weapons in crates containing machinery. These were generally obtained from the San Francisco Gun Exchange (or ‘Bible Exchange’ as it was known in Jonestown).

Jones began to announce himself as God around 1974. Before this, he had generally claimed to be a messenger from God with a divine gift of healing: later, he said, ‘I come as God socialist’. Drugs made him more inclined to claim divine status but how far he believed in his own divinity is an open question. According to the New Yorker of 22 November 1993, his wife Marceline tried to persuade their son Stephan to talk his father into giving up drugs. Stephan replied: ‘You’re talking about going to God and telling him he’s a drug addict?’

The inhabitants of Jonestown were well prepared in advance for their eventual death. Jones kept on telling them that he expected the settlement to be attacked by a variety of foes, and that if this happened, the only way out might be suicide. He announced that the community must exist together or die together rather than be split up. If death was to be the final solution, this would not be in vain, for it would vividly demonstrate to the world the evil nature of the U.S. Government. In spite of this, there is some doubt about how many people actually committed suicide and how many may have been murdered. Reports by survivors, and examination of the site of injection in the corpses suggest that more were murdered than was originally supposed. The sheer scale of the Jonestown disaster shocked the world; but tragic events of a similar kind have occurred since and more can certainly be expected.

Let us turn from Jonestown to Ranch Apocalypse. Vernon Howell, as Koresh was originally named, was born on August 17, 1959 to a fourteen-year-old girl. When her lover left her two years later, she placed the baby in the care of her mother and sister. In 1964, she married a former merchant seaman and reclaimed Vernon, telling him for the first time that she was his real mother. According to his own account, Vernon Howell did not get on with his stepfather, who frequently thrashed him. He did poorly at school, where he was put into a special class, and teased for being ‘retarded’. He also claimed that a group of older boys had raped him. He was said to have been dyslexic rather than mentally handicapped; but this does not seem to have prevented him from reading the Bible, since his mother stated that he knew the whole of the New Testament by heart by the age of twelve. Later, this slow learner was to boast that he had more knowledge than all the great scholars could learn in a lifetime.

This is certainly an unfortunate background, but others have suffered worse childhoods without becoming psychotic or monsters of cruelty. By the time he dropped out of school at the age of fourteen, Howell had attained success as an athlete and had overcome his early unpopularity. His reaction was to become arrogant and patronizing; attitudes which precluded his keeping many of the odd jobs which he attempted. Howell was always hypersensitive to rejection, as was Jim Jones. At the age of nineteen, a sixteen-year-old girl whom he had got pregnant refused to live with him on the grounds that he was unfit to bring up a child. This shattered his confidence, and he began to suffer from mood swings of pathological intensity, sometimes believing himself to be uniquely evil, sometimes thinking that he was especially favoured by God. After various abortive attempts to find consolation in religion, Howell joined the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Tyler, Texas, and was baptized in 1979. He became infatuated with the pastor’s daughter, claiming that God had spoken to him in a vision and said that he would give the girl to him. Howell’s behaviour became so outrageous that, in 1981, the pastor and his congregation expelled him.

Howell’s reaction to these rejections is interesting, and follows the pattern of stress or illness succeeded by a new vision which is characteristic of most gurus. His initial periods of depression were succeeded by an ever mounting confidence that he had been specially selected by God; a conviction which may have been reinforced by the drug LSD, which he started to use in his late teens. Following his expulsion from the official Seventh Day Adventist Church, Howell joined a splinter group called the Branch Davidian Seventh Day Adventists. The story of how he became leader of this sect can be read in David Leppard’s book, Fire and Blood, but need not detain us here. In 1988, Koresh managed to establish himself and his followers on a site originally called the New Mount Carmel Center, which occupied some seventy-seven acres ten miles east of Waco, Texas. Within four years, Howell, who had now changed his name to David Koresh, had established a regime closely resembling that instituted by Jim Jones in Guyana. With the aid of his associate, Marc Breault, whose home was in Hawaii, a number of rich businessmen were persuaded to finance the cult. The funds raised were used by Koresh for two main purposes: musical equipment to further his ambition of becoming a rock star, and weapons to protect his cult against enemies. By the time the cult was being investigated by the U.S. authorities, Koresh had spent around $200,000 on weapons.6 His annual income amounted to about $500,000. It was because a delivery man reported that pineapple hand grenades were being delivered to Koresh’s commune that the train of events which culminated in its siege by the FBI and its ultimate destruction by fire was set in motion.

Koresh resembled Jim Jones in being a fluent speaker who could hold his listeners for hours at a time. Jones’s vision was of a communist society in which private property was abolished and racial equality established. Koresh’s vision was apocalyptic. As other apocalyptic prophets have done, Koresh laid hold upon the Book of Revelation and claimed that he alone could interpret it correctly. He especially emphasized his unique insight into the Seven Seals. According to David Leppard, Koresh said: ‘If you don’t know the Seven Seals, you really don’t know Christ … The Seven Seals are the acid test for who knows God and who doesn’t.’7

The Book of Revelation was probably written around 95–96 A.D. In it, Jesus is portrayed as a warrior who leads a host of angels to defeat the Satanic forces ranged against him. Following the final defeat of evil, a Kingdom is established in which selected human beings, rendered immortal, live for ever in perfect peace and harmony. The opening of the book or scroll, which is sealed with seven seals, heralds a series of terrible events which, as in other apocalyptic visions, are bound to precede the final establishment of peace and order. When the first seal is broken, a white horse appears ridden by a rider armed with a bow and given a crown, who goes forth to conquer. The breaking of the second seal heralds a red horse and rider who is given a great sword and the power to make men slaughter each other. Breaking the third seal releases a rider on a black horse who carries a pair of scales and who appears to be the herald of famine. When the fourth seal has been broken, a sickly pale horse appears whose rider is Death. He is given power over a quarter of the earth, with the right to kill by sword, famine, epidemics, or wild beasts. After the fifth seal has been broken, the souls of those who have been slaughtered for the faith complain; but they are reassured, provided with white robes and told to wait until the tally of those destined to be killed for Christ’s sake is complete. The breaking of the sixth seal is followed by a violent earthquake. The sun turns black, the moon red, and the stars fall out of the sky. Following the breaking of the seventh seal by the Lamb of God, silence reigns in Heaven for half-an-hour. Then comes the destruction of a third of mankind, followed by the final defeat of the powers of darkness.

Koresh seems to have convinced his followers that he himself had the power to break the seventh seal, thus precipitating the catastrophes described in The Book of Revelation. He taught that God would return to earth with fire and lightning and establish a new kingdom in Israel, with Koresh on the throne. He persuaded his followers that death was only a prelude to a better life to come, in which they would be among the army of élite immortals who were destined to slaughter all the wicked on earth, beginning with the Christian church.

Koresh’s delusional system, like that of Jim Jones, took time to develop. At first, he alleged himself to be no more than a prophet, armed with special understanding of the Seven Seals. As his power increased, so did his claims for himself. When his defected disciple Marc Breault was asked whether Koresh believed himself to be the Son of God, Breault was emphatic that he did. When asked what control this gave Koresh over his followers, Breault replied: ‘Absolute control. I know it’s hard for you to understand this. But just imagine you believe someone is Jesus Christ. He can tell you anything. If you argue, you go to Hell. He’s the Son of God. Who wants to fight against God?’8 By the time that his Texan prairie retreat was undergoing its terminal siege in April 1993, Koresh was claiming that he was God, and signing his letters Yahweh Koresh.

Ranch Apocalypse, as Koresh now re-named the Mount Carmel property, was a squalid enclosure. There was hardly any heating and no running water or proper plumbing. Members of the cult had to excrete into chamber pots and bury the contents in the ground. Water was supplied from a container brought in by truck. As in Jonestown, cult members soon developed a variety of ailments, including Hepatitis B. Koresh considered that seeking medical help was a threat to his authority, and forbade visits to doctors. He constantly imposed a string of varied dietary injunctions of an irrational kind. During one month, bananas were the only fruit allowed. It was forbidden to eat oranges and grapes at the same meal. On some days only vegetables were allowed; on others, food was restricted to fruit and popcorn. There was no hot food, and buying food from outside without Koresh’s direct permission was forbidden. Koresh used starvation as a punishment, and many members of the cult suffered from malnutrition, as members of Jones’s cult had done in Guyana. And, as in the case of Jones, Koresh himself was exempt from all dietary restrictions. His ridiculous rules and prohibitions were merely an added proof of his almost absolute power; on a par with the senseless and meaningless tasks which other gurus require of their followers. Another arbitrary exercise of power was Koresh’s practice of waking the entire compound at night, and compelling them to listen to his protracted expositions of the Bible, which sometimes went on for as long as fifteen hours.