Marxist optimism and that of liberal optimism this religiosity of the void in which we are steeped has invaded even the thought of the so-called Left.
But if this is the case, then the return to the sacred long preceded the orphan syndrome of the disillusioned, who were becoming paranoid because they discovered that the Chinese were neither infallible nor totally good. The “betrayal” by the Chinese, if anything, gave the final (very exterior) blow to those who for some time had been feeling that beneath the world of rational truths proposed by science (both capitalist and proletarian) there were hidden rifts, black holes. But these same people lacked the strength to conduct a lucid, skeptical criticism, with a sense of humor and irreverence towards the authorities.
In the coming years it will be worthwhile to ponder these new negative theologies, the liturgies they inspire, their effect on revolutionary thought. And to see to what extent they, too, remain susceptible to the criticism of Feuerbach, for one thing. In other words, to see if through these cultural phenomena a new Middle Ages is to take shape, a time of secular mystics, more inclined to monastic withdrawal than to civic participation. We should see how much, as antidote or as antistrophe, the old techniques of reason may apply, the arts of the Trivium, logic, dialectic, rhetoric. As we suspect that anyone who goes on stubbornly practicing them will be accused of impiety.
1979
The Suicides of the Temple
The strangest thing about the story of the People’s Temple suicides is the media reaction, both in America and in Europe. Their reaction is: “Inconceivable, an inconceivable event.” In other words, it seems inconceivable that a person long considered respectable, like Jim Jones (all those who knew him over these past years, who contributed to his charitable activities or exploited him for garnering votes, have unanimously defined him as an altruistic preacher, a fascinating personality, a convinced integrationist, a good democrat, or as we Italians would say, an “antifascist”), could then go mad, turn into a bloodthirsty autocrat, a kind of Bokassa who stole the savings of his faithful followers, used drugs, indulged in the most promiscuous sex, hetero and homo, and commended the slaughter of those who attempted to escape his rule.
It seems incredible that so many nice people followed him blindly, and to the point of suicide. It seems incredible that a neo-Christian sect, gentle, mysticalcommunist in its inspiration, should end up transformed into a gang of killers, driving its escapees to seek police protection against the menace of murder. It seems incredible that respectable pensioners, students, blacks eager for social integration, should abandon beautiful, pleasant California, all green lawns and spring breezes, to go and bury themselves in the equatorial jungle, teeming with piranhas and poisonous snakes. It is incredible that the families of the brainwashed young could not make the government intervene strongly, and that only at the end poor Congressman Ryan started an inquiry, which cost him his life. All, all incredible, in other words, unheard of, what’s the world coming to, what next?
We remain stunned not by Jim Jones but by the unconscious hypocrisy of “normal” people. Normal people try desperately to repress a reality that has been before their eyes for at least two thousand years. For the story of the People’s Temple is old, a matter of flux and reflux, of eternal returns. Refusal to remember these things leads us then to see in terrorist phenomena the hand of the CIA or the Czechs. If only evil really did come always from across the border. The trouble is that it comes not from horizontal distances but from vertical. Certain answers, that is, must be sought from Freud and Lacan, not from the secret services.
What’s more, American politicians and journalists didn’t even have to go and read the sacred texts on the history of millenarian sects or the classics of psychoanalysis. The story of the People’s Temple is told in one of the latest books of that sly operator Harold Robbins (sly because he always concocts his novels with bits of reality, whether it’s the story of Hefner or Porfirio Rubirosa or some Arab magnate). The book in question is Dreams Die First. There is the Reverend Sam (who happens to bear a very close resemblance to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon), who has founded a laboratory to which the young initiates bring all their money; he then invests it in shrewd financial speculations. Sam preaches peace and harmony, introduces his young people to the most complete sexual promiscuity, sets up a mystical retreat in the jungle, where he imposes rigid discipline, initiation through drugs, with torture and persecution for those attempting escape, until finally the borderlines between worship, criminality, and rites a la Manson family become very faint. This is the Robbins novel. But Robbins invents nothing, not even at the level of fictional translation of real-life events.
Some decades ahead of him, in The Dain Curse, the great Dashiell
Hammett portrays a Holy Grail cult, naturally set in California— where else?—which begins by enrolling rich members and taking their money: The cult is not at all violent, even if the initiations (here, too) involve drugs and sleight of hand (among other things, the staging recalls that of the Eleusinian mysteries). The prophet, according to Hammett, was an impressive man: When he looked at you, you felt all confused. Then he went crazy and believed he could do and achieve anything. . . . He dreamed of convincing the whole world of his divinity. . . . He was a madman who would see no limit to his power.
You can almost think you are hearing the interviews published during the past few days in the New York Times: He was a wonderfully sweet and kind person, a magnetic personality, he made you feel you belonged to a community. And the lawyer Mark Lane tries to clarify how Jones was seized with paranoia, by thirst for absolute power. And if we now reread the book, The Family, that Ed Sanders wrote about Charles Manson’s California cult and its degeneration, we find everything already there.
So why do these things happen, and why in California? The second half of the question is fairly ingenuous. There are certain reasons why California is specially fertile in producing cults, but the basic scenario is far older. In brief, Jones’s cult, the People’s Temple, had all the characteristics of the millenarian movements throughout Western history from the first centuries of Christianity down to the present. (And I speak only of these because there would be no room to talk about Jewish millenarianism or analagous cults in the Orient, or various corybantisms in the classical age, or similar manifestations on the African continent, found, unchanged, today in Brazil.)
The Christian series probably begins in the third century A.D. with the extreme wing of the Donatists, the Circoncellions, who went around armed with clubs, attacking the imperial troops, assassinating their sworn enemies, those loyal to the Church of Rome. They blinded their theological adversaries with mixtures of lime and vinegar; thirsting for martyrdom, they would stop wayfarers and threaten death if they refused to martyr them; they organized sumptuous funeral banquets and then killed themselves by jumping off cliffs. In the wake of the various interpretations of the Apocalypse, tense with expectation of the millennium, the various medieval movements arose, the fraticelli and the apostolics of Gherardo Segarelli, from which was born the revolt of Fra Dolcino, the brothers of the free spirit, the swindlers suspected of satanism, the various Catharist groups who sometimes committed suicide by starving themselves (the “endura”).
In the twelfth century, Tanchelm, endowed with impressive charisma, had his followers give him all their wealth and he scoured Flanders; Eudes de l’Etoile dragged his followers through the forests of Brittany until they all ended on the pyre; during the Crusades the bands of Tafurs, all hairy and dirty, took to sacking, cannibalism, the massacre of the Jews; insuperable in battle, these Tafurs were feared by the Saracens; later the sixteenthcentury Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine fiercely pursued the massacre of ecclesiastics; in the thirteenth century flagellant movements spread (the Crucifers, Brothers of the Cross, the secret Flagellants of Thuringia), moving from one village to another, lashing themselves until they bled. The Reformation period witnessed the mystical communism of the city of Munster, where followers of Thomas Münzer, under John of Leyden, set up a theocratic state, sustained by violence and persecution.
Believers had to renounce all worldly goods, were forced into sexual promiscuity, while the leader increasingly assumed divine and imperial attributes, and any recalcitrants were locked in church for days and days until they were all prostrate, bowing before the will of the prophet; then finally everything was purified in an immense massacre in which all the faithful lost their lives.
It could be observed that suicide is not the rule in all these movements, but violent death—bloodbath, destruction on the pyre— certainly is. And it is easy to understand why the theme of
