Revisiting Jonestown: An Interdisciplinary Study of Cults 1498552706, 9781498552707

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Revisiting Jonestown

Revisiting Jonestown An Interdisciplinary Study of Cults

Domenico A. Nesci

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2018 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nesci, Domenico Arturo, author. Title: Revisiting Jonestown : an interdisciplinary study of cults / Domenico A. Nesci ; foreword by Nancy McWilliams. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017044236 (print) | LCCN 2017047821 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498552707 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781498552691 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Jonestown Mass Suicide, Jonestown, Guyana, 1978. | Jones, Jim, 1931-1978. | Peoples Temple. | Mass suicide. | Cults. | Psychology, Religious. Classification: LCC BP605.P46 (ebook) | LCC BP605.P46 N466 2017 (print) | DDC 289.9—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017044236 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Foreword by Nancy McWilliams

vii

Acknowledgmentsxi Introductionxv 1 Jim Jones: Psychobiography of a Cult Leader

1

2 Peoples Temple and Placental Leadership

25

3 Peoples Temple and Syncytial Membership

47

4 From Miracles and Exoduses to the White Night

67

5 Interdisciplinary Reflections

95

6 The Death Ritual of Jonestown

101

7 Fractals123 Conclusion137 References141 Index151 About the Author

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Foreword

Who is not fascinated by collective suicide? Individual self-destruction is hard enough to fathom, but most of us can at least imagine conditions under which we could take our own lives. Severe, chronic, unrelenting depression can make the relief of suicide attractive; terminal illness may inspire the wish to end it all before one dies by inches; heroic self-sacrifice to save a child or comrade-in-arms is not utterly unthinkable. But acquiescing to a leader who insists that all the members of a beloved community kill themselves is inconceivable to most contemporary minds. Domenico Nesci’s erudition has made it conceivable, however. This readable book, blending psychoanalysis, anthropological research, religious studies, the arts, and historical scholarship, makes profound sense of the mass suicide in Jonestown, a catastrophe that staggered the imaginations of those in the “civilized world” when they first learned about what had happened at the Peoples Temple. It is always dangerous when some human act seems completely beyond our imaginings. Incredulity bars access to the parts of ourselves that are capable of such behavior. As psychotherapists know, dissociation of one’s dark side precludes compassion for those who have “gone there.” And because such disavowal prevents our appreciating the power of regressive temptations, it prevents conversations about how not to go there ourselves. I first heard about Jim Jones in the 1970s, when he transported his flock to Guyana because the United States was becoming inhospitable to his vision of paradise on earth. I remember thinking, “There goes another would-be Jesus, looking for a place to be a Big Fish.” There were many cults and gurus springing up at that time among counterculturally inclined people about my age. But when the Peoples Temple destroyed itself under Jones’s direction (and murdered an acting US congressman in the process), it was stunning. vii

viii Foreword

There were few other examples of mass suicide known to me or most of my contemporaries. The closest phenomena to self-immolation on a large scale that we knew of were the suicidal plunges of the Japanese kamikaze pilots, who we understood to have volunteered to give their lives for the war effort. That felt extreme, but comprehensible. We thought Jonestown was a fluke, the perverse creation of the twisted soul of a limited-edition madman. The scholarship of Dr Nesci has made clear, in contrast, not only that this historical event was not unique, but also that it belongs to a recognizable class of similar, repeating experiences that originate in universal, deeply unconscious, primitive fantasies that can still be aroused in human beings— notwithstanding our conceit that we have “evolved” reliably from preliterate cultures and their quaint beliefs and sometimes gruesomely violent rites. There are powerful psychological forces behind the fact that games like “World of Warcraft” and stories like “Game of Thrones” engage our imaginations; we are recognizing something horrifying about ourselves, located conveniently in beings we can construe as “other.” Dr Nesci has drawn on every extant artifact of Jonestown, examined every photo, talked with every survivor he could manage to interview. He knows the story as well as, or better than, any other authority on the disaster whose work I know of. There is much material in this book that has not been available to previous writers. In addition, the expanded data have been subjected to a disciplined, integrative interpretation that is entirely original. This book goes far beyond a new solution to the puzzle of Jonestown. Thanks to its truly interdisciplinary approach, it opens new perspectives on other fascinating riddles: the origins of human awareness, the dawns of religion, the hidden roots of self-destructive communal acts (collective suicide) and destructive death rituals (genocide and war). Dr Nesci’s collaboration with his artist son in some sections, a welcome addition to the text, brings the material to life via our perceptual as well as our intellectual senses. At the same time, the artistic use of fractals (natural and universal patterns) to “glitch” the pictures from Peoples Temple, helps to bridge the gap produced by collective disavowal between us and the victims of Jonestown. A word to readers who may be put off by the language of placental leaders and syncytial longings—concepts that may be too readily dismissed as at the fanciful end of the spectrum of psychoanalytic thought. Bear with the author, follow his arguments, and listen with your “third ear” to the underlying themes that propelled the otherwise incomprehensible behavior of the members of the Jonestown community. Remember that Dr Nesci is limited by the medium of written language; that is, he must use words to describe infantile psychological experiences that predate the capacity to put experience into words. He is exploring species-specific potentials for which rational,

Foreword

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consensual verbalizations can give only the palest evocations of the archaic, all-too-human phenomena he is exploring. If he is right—and I think he has made the case here—that the psychological processes that destroyed Jonestown are instigated by unbearable fears that one’s whole community and identity are about to be destroyed by outside attackers, promoting a regressive flight to an illusory safety in a fantasied utopia, then in our current era we are in danger of seeing more mass-selfdestructive behavior. Increasing numbers of people seem to be feeling deeply threatened by world events. Individuals of even the humblest backgrounds now have the technological savvy, and the means, to carry out devastating acts on a massive scale. To cope with their fear, many today are framing their politics in terms of conflicts between two or more mutually exclusive world views and voicing homicidal intent toward cultures different from their own. We are seeing elected world leaders, not just petty tyrants and crazy cult figures, who treat demonstrated facts as matters of opinion and insist on alternative realities. We would do well to try to understand, from every angle of vision and as soon as we can, the danger of societal self-destruction when communities feel their core identities and values are under siege. In this book Dr Nesci has shed some needed light on a disturbing but potentially illuminating page of history. Nancy McWilliams, PhD, ABPP Visiting Full Professor, Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Acknowledgments

This book comes to light after almost 40 years from the poison ordeal of Jonestown, where about 900 members of Peoples Temple died drinking a deadly potion of cyanide and Kool-Aid. This long “gestation,” allowed me to write a text that is “impregnated” with all the thoughts, reflections, ideas, and clinical experiences that come only with time. Furthermore, distance in space and time (my research dates back to the 80s and was carried out in Rome, Italy, once I had collected my “data” in America) helps working through the trauma which is inevitably associated with the violence of the event itself: the last “white night,” the death ritual of Peoples Temple. It was mostly in the 80s that I was able to find and study numberless documents from the California Historical Society and the office of Charles Garry (the lawyer of Peoples Temple) in San Francisco, as well as from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in Washington. Since then, I began to visit the States almost every summer, teaching at American universities (Stanford, Dpt. of Psychology; UCLA, Dpt. of Political Science; and Harbor-UCLA, Dpt. of Psychiatry) on war, genocide, and mass suicide. During those years I was able to know personally Tim Reiterman, Charles Garry, Margaret Singer, Philip Zimbardo, Louis West, and many other people who were involved in the tragedy or in the study of cults. Tim Reiterman is the first person I want to thank since he helped me a lot. He not only authorized me to quote extensively from his Raven—The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and his People in all my books and papers on Jonestown, in Italian and in English, but he also accepted to teach to my students during my course at Stanford University, in the summer of 1986, at the department of psychology. In fact, the book he wrote in collaboration with John Jacobs is still the best reconstruction/interpretation of the catastrophe of Peoples Temple and is the point of reference for any serious study on this topic. xi

xii Acknowledgments

Also, Sandy Larson and Bruce L. Johnson (California Historical Society) have my gratitude for having authorized me to make copies of any document they had in their archives regarding Peoples Temple and for having allowed me to use them in my scientific papers and books. They even introduced me to Charles Garry which allowed me to spend many days in the basement of his office, in San Francisco, and make copies of any document and picture I found and considered of interest for my research. A great support came to my work from Californian friends and colleagues: Samuel and Grace Eisenstein, Jim and Helen Zukin, Robert (Bob) Pasnau, Warren Procci, Milton Miller, Ira Lesser, Maria Lymberis, Nicole Poliquin, Herbert Morris, Thomas Gonda, René Girard, Jerome Oremland, and Peter Loewenberg. During the time of my writing of this book, a great support came also from my colleagues at the International Institute for Psychoanalytic Research and Training of Health Professionals (IIPRTHP) and my students at the Scuola Internazionale di Psicoterapia nel Setting Istituzionale (SIPSI) in Rome, Italy. On March 10, 2017, I organized a half-day workshop on Jim Jones, Peoples Temple, and Jonestown for the students of SIPSI, a four-year program in psychotherapy credited by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MIUR). Davide D’Ambrosio, an anthropologist and psychotherapist (SIPSI), introduced my lesson with a review of the anthropological literature on religious cults, while Antonella Di Paola and Arianna Tamilia opened the workshop with a review of the psychological literature. Among my students in psychotherapy, Emanuela Gamba, Dario Maggipinto, and Giulia Radi made interesting comments in the discussions which followed all presentations, in the second part of the workshop. Among my colleagues, I am happy to thank my wife, Simonetta Averna, a gynecologist who teaches psychology of pregnancy and prenatal life at SIPSI, for her feedback on all issues regarding prenatal life and her strong encouragement to accept the contract offered to me by Lexington Books to write this book, about two years ago. Tommaso A. Poliseno (a psychiatrist and group analyst who is the secretary of IIPRTHP and the co-director of SIPSI) also gave me moral support at the time of this decision. Elisabetta Corona, and Vezio Savoia, two alumni of SIPSI who now are also members of my research team on multimedia psychotherapy, were very close to me, during the whole time of my writing. Special thanks are due to my daughter, Valentina, who encouraged me when I was thinking to abandon the project, since I was too busy with my patients, my students, and my collaborators of DREAMS onlus (a cooperative of psychotherapists/psychoncologists, trained at SIPSI or at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore) who were at the risk of losing their jobs due to the severe crisis of the National Health Service, in Rome.

Acknowledgments

xiii

I am grateful to Bob Pasnau, Maria Teresa Hooke, and Ludwig Janus for having read my manuscript and given me a positive feedback. Ludwig Janus even sent me a picture of “The Tree of Life” by Cornelius Fraenkel, to whom also goes my gratitude for having authorized me to reproduce his enlightening painting on the placental imago. As for my previous book on Multimedia Psychotherapy: A Psychodynamic Approach for Mourning in the Technological Age (published by Jason Aronson a few years ago), the person I have to thank most is my artist son Filippo Arturo. With the same spirit that allowed him to help my patients who had lost a beloved person (by editing their images and producing a “psychodynamic montage” to promote their elaboration of loss and grief), he found an original way to digitally edit the pictures of the ex-members of Peoples Temple. Multimedia psychotherapy is a new form of treatment he and I created together to help people mourning their beloved ones. Filippo edited the pictures of Peoples Temple members with the same care he dedicated to help my patients in multimedia psychotherapy to mourn their lost “love objects” through the universal language of digital art. I am confident that his work will be useful, and help us all to bridge the gap that collective disavowal built, about 40 years ago, between us and the victims of Jonestown. Last but not least, I want to thank my editors: Amy Kings who published my book on multimedia psychotherapy, when she was working with Jason Aronson, and then envisioned this manuscript as a book on the psychology of religious cults, when she moved to Lexington Books; but, particularly, Kasey Beduhn, who replaced Amy when she left Lexington Books. Thank to Kasey, the initial project was changed to focus on Jonestown. This shift allowed me to revisit my previous research on Jim Jones and portray Peoples Temple as the cult “par excellence,” through which the dynamics of all cults could find an interdisciplinary frame of reference and open new perspectives on the study of contemporary death rituals. Becca Rohde, assistant editor at Lexington Books, was also very helpful, patiently and accurately following up the complex process that turns a manuscript into a real book, that everyone can finally read and enjoy.

Introduction

Peoples Temple was an official affiliation of the Christian Church of the Disciples of Christ. However, it is considered the cult “par excellence” for its tragic end in a poison ordeal that took the lives of about 900 American citizens, on November 18, 1978. The event took place in Guyana and was covered by the mass media worldwide. Still today, it attracts interest (Osborn, 2016). According to IGN news, in fact, it seems that “Breaking Bad” creator Vince Gilligan and director Michelle MacLaren are planning to produce “Raven,” an HBO miniseries about Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple, following the story by Tim Reiterman with John Jacobs (1982), the most accurate reconstruction of the tragedy. Why? My answer is: because we are living in a historical moment in which the anxiety of extinction of humankind is very high, so that the theme of collective suicide is always present, consciously or unconsciously, in our mind: pollution, global warming, nuclear war. Finally, we are beginning to understand that the end of human life on planet Earth is more likely to take place by our own self-destructive behaviors, rather than by any natural catastrophe. And since we want to prevent such a global tragedy, we are seriously interested in understanding what is hidden in the dark side of our human mind, what lies at the roots of our self-destructive behaviors. Jonestown taught many uncanny lessons. A central one is the close relationship between religious cults and collective death rituals. Thus, I will approach this uneasy issue through the interdisciplinary case study of Peoples Temple and its leader. In my view, revisiting Jonestown can teach us much more than any academic book on religious cults in general. All the more so, if we consider that a review of the scientific literature on religious cults brings us into a xv

xvi Introduction

labyrinthine maze, since scholars in this field do not even agree on the legitimacy of the use of this term. For example, in a recent book, a well-known scholar (Beit-Hallamhi, 2015) maintains that the psychology of religion does not need the term “cult” assuming that religion is “one unified, psychological field of experience” (9). Although I agree that traditional religions, new religious movements, and cults (Atkins, 2014; Barker, 2014; Bigliardi, 2015; Lewis and Tollefsen, 2016) should be considered along a continuum of experience, the term cult is mostly applied, in the popular sense, to define new religious movements centered on the absolute power of its leader and the abuse of “brainwashed” followers (Reichert, Richardson, Thomas, 2015; Introvigne, 2014; Singer, 2003; Olson, 2006; Goldman, 2006; Barker, 2014; Cowan and Bromley, 2007; Eichel, 2015; Hassan S., 1989; 2000; 2015). I don’t think it is good to encourage a splitting between popular and academic language. Having done research on Peoples Temple and suicidal communities for many years (Nesci, 1983; 1986a; 1986b; 1989; 1991; 2006) I have found myself in a privileged position to revisit Jonestown with a new perspective: identifying the essential features of Peoples Temple as the prototype of a religious cult and endorsing the scientific use of this term, with a new interpretation of its meanings and features. In fact, I think that religious cults do exist and should be identified to protect their members, their families, and society from their destructive and self-destructive behaviors. In my view, cults are the regressive return to a universal primordial collective organization (“placental leadership” and “syncytial membership”) that was developed during the evolution of humankind, in our prehistory, at the dawn of religion. While it was a precious and lively organization, at that stage of human evolution, it is now obsolete and dangerous since it can trigger destructive and self-destructive behaviors in critical environmental psychosocial situations. What is a placental leader? What is a syncytial group? In the next chapters, we will see it in detail. However, I think it is useful to anticipate at least a brief answer to these questions. Let’s introduce the concept of placental leadership, first. In the archaic language of our unconscious mind, the fetus is equivalent to the people, the womb to our homeland, and the leader to the placenta that allows the embryo to implant successfully into the womb. The placenta is the organ that allows the fetus to grow and develop by filtering its blood, supplying nutrients, and preventing the unborn baby from becoming poisoned by itself into the womb. In human prehistory, the placenta was universally conceived as the double of the child: its twin. Anthropology described extensively archaic leadership and the institution of the sacred king in the same way, as the double of the people. Sacred kings were of paramount importance to the health of the social

Introduction

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body. In fact, they were believed to have made possible the implantation of the people/child in their homeland. For this reason, cities and territories usually were named from their mythical first leaders. For example, Rome is supposed to have taken its name from Romulus, its legendary founder. Similarly, Jonestown took its name from its founder: Jim Jones. Sacred kings were believed to have the power to control the environment: rain, bountiful crops, the breeding of animals, and the life of the people depended on their activities and on their well-being. At the same time, they were supposed to have the power to heal the community from its inner evil. Like the placenta, at the end of their transient service, they were ritually discarded inside the womb of their homeland. Archaeology documented through excavations at Ur, about 3,000 years before Christ, an ancient ritual during which the sacred king and his court were “put to sleep” all together in underground pits, so that a new sacred ruler and courtiers would replace them (Woolley, 1955; 2012) and the cycle of life could be resumed. In the next chapters, we will analyze the story of Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple through documents and pictures that will clearly show how he had unconsciously crafted for himself the public image of a sacred king. In this way, we will be able to build an interdisciplinary theory of placental leadership. Let’s go back to our second question, now: what is a syncytial group? In the human species, the syncytium is a biological tissue where individual limits of the single cells are lost and one fusional structure has replaced them. This organization is present in the placenta, where it plays vital functions. In fact, at the beginning of life, at the stage when the human being is a blastocyst (a spherical mass of cells derived from the first cell of the new individual) the external layer (the syncytial layer) is able to infiltrate the uterine mucosa and let the whole blastocyst be implanted into the maternal womb. Then, this external syncytial layer becomes the “intelligent” filter of exchanges between maternal and fetal circulatory systems so that nutrients are able to flow from the maternal blood to the fetal blood while waste substances are removed. This exchange allows the internal layer of the blastocyst to develop, from embryo to fetus, inside the womb, until delivery. The biopsychosocial metaphor of the “syncytial group” formed by fusional “group-individuals” is important to help us understanding the essential role played by this primordial collective organization for the survival of our species. For example, the syncytial group was able to compensate for any maternal death since the child was nursed by all other group-individual mothers. It becomes then meaningful that Jones, while portraying himself as a tree of life (which is one of the symbols of the placenta), used to refer to his Peoples Temple as a “mother of children,” up to his last speech at the Jonestown pavilion during their death ritual.

xviii Introduction

Placental leadership and syncytial membership made sense at those stages of anthropological development, when human beings were “group-individuals” (Briffault, 1927) living in a “syncytial” cultural milieu (Nesci, 1989; 2006) based on “orality,” since “literacy” had not been yet invented (Ong, 1982). Today this organization is inevitably dysfunctional and can trigger destructive behaviors. Thus, we need to identify it, so that we can prevent its dangerous reenactment. After having described placental leadership and syncytial membership as the two features of religious cults, I will describe the psychosocial pattern of the poison ordeal of Peoples Temple (as well as of other collective suicides by different religious cults) and discuss how and why these death rituals are always associated with a placental leadership and a syncytial membership. A psychosocial pattern of collective suicide will become visible linking the “White Night” of Peoples Temple with the explosion of the poison ordeal in Africa, during the slave trade, and other group tragedies, such as the selfpoisoning of the members of O-Dae-Yang (in South Korea, in 1987), of Heaven’s Gate (in California, in 1997), the massacre of Bekeranta (a utopian community who extinguished itself in Guyana in the 1840s not far from Jonestown) and other death rituals of human history. Revisiting Jonestown, from this new interdisciplinary perspective, will help us to recover, from the ruins of Peoples Temple, something precious and alive: the placental imago with all its dynamics, usually covered by collective denial, repression, and disavowal. We will go beyond the historical event and extract something good and beautiful out of the tragedy of Jonestown: a new understanding of vital issues, such as the origins of human awareness and religion. At the same time, we will finally shed new light on human death rituals (collective suicide, genocide, and war) and their mutual relationships. Finally, we will be able to find meanings into the holocaust of Peoples Temple, and mourn it properly. Western civilization will not suffer any more from an uncanny skeleton in its closet. Our course will design a sort of identikit of a religious cult through analyzing multimedia documents of the story of Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple. The choice of studying multimedia documents is meaningful from a methodological point of view. I conceived this book, with the help of my artist son Filippo Arturo Nesci, as a complex work that should be understood at different levels. It requires to be rationally read, metaphorically “listened to,” and emotionally “experienced” by the conscious and unconscious mental layers of all persons who will approach it not just as readers but also as active interpreters and decipherers of its multimedia documents. The written text is addressed to the adult individuals that are only a partial component of ourselves and that are able to read. The visual documents and the audio

Introduction

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evocations are addressed to the group-individual that lives within every one of us, from time immemorial, and is completely illiterate. Sometimes, the pictures will be presented in the forms of new digital art. This is to place emphasis on several themes: the motif of mutation and change, and the motif of remix and what it means, not just in the arts, but from a philosophical perspective. We are all a remix. In fact, we do know now, thanks to the hard work of Prof. Pääbo and his research team, that Neanderthal man genes are part of our own heritage (Kay Prüfer et al., 2014) just as traumatic experiences are sedimented in what Freud called “phylogenetic memory” (1911a; 1974) and Jung later theorized as the “collective unconscious” (1916). Pictures from Peoples Temple have been edited by my son, the same artist that helped me to conceive multimedia psychotherapy, a therapy created to help patients suffering from grief (Nesci, 2012–2013). This was done to promote reparative dynamics, in a subliminal way, as will be later discussed. So, I hope my work will not only offer something new and valuable to all scholars and upper level students who do research on the psychology of religious cults, but will also help relatives and friends of the victims of Peoples Temple (to whose memory this book is dedicated) to mourn their loved ones.

Figure I.1  The choir of Peoples Temple. By Peoples Temple, courtesy of Charles Garry, edited by Filippo A. Nesci.

Chapter 1

Jim Jones Psychobiography of a Cult Leader

Freud always maintained that poets reach the deepest insights on human nature. So, let me introduce the uneasy issue of the psychology of a cult leader with my own psychoanalytic interpretation of “Numbers” by Carlo Alberto Salustri (1944; 2012), a man who wrote poems in Roman dialect only, during his whole life. He was used to sign his texts as Trilussa (the anagram of Salustri) to defend himself from the possible attacks of all kinds by powerful men of his time, who might resent his satirical verses. In this poem, Trilussa describes an imaginary dialogue between two numbers: number one (who actually is the only one speaking) and number zero, who remains completely silent. At the beginning, number one acknowledges that he doesn’t count much. But he immediately humiliates number zero saying that it doesn’t count anything at all since it is void and inconsistent in action and in thought. From this advantage point, number one adds that if he leads a row of five zeroes, he suddenly becomes one hundred thousand. It’s a matter of numbers. Then number one completes his assertion of his own pride by a simple allegory: he compares himself to a dictator who rises in power and value according to the number of zeroes that just follow him. I am proposing this summary of Trilussa’s poem to begin reflecting on leadership and the deep motivations one can nurture inside to find or mold a certain number of “zeroes” and line them up, one after the other. From the point of view of the Roman poet, one needs some zeroes (void and inconsistent followers) in order to become a valued and powerful leader, and reduce one’s own feeling of inadequacy (at the beginning, in fact, number one admits that he doesn’t count much). Thus, the imaginary dialogue reveals itself to be a monologue, at the end, since the subjectivity of the other (number zero) is suppressed by number one, the “traumatizing narcissist” (Shaw, 2014). 1

2

Chapter 1

For Mr. Salustri, when the defeat of dictator Mussolini and Fascist Italy was becoming obvious, in 1944, and World War II was going to end with the victory of the Allied, it was possible to reach this insight and express it in a very effective way. The reason why I am introducing the summary of his poem here is that it seems to anticipate the theory of a contemporary psychoanalyst who came out with an interesting hypothesis on the psychological dynamics of cult leaders (Shaw, 2014). According to the author of Traumatic Narcissism there are a lot of situations (not only in religious cults but also in other organizations, families, and couples) where a system of subjugation is acted out. The secret aim is to produce the objectification of people in a relationship, to enforce the dominance of one person on others, to annul the subjectivity of the traumatized follower/ child/partner. Narcissism is not just a personality disorder, but the result of the trauma of subjugation, in which one person is required to become the object for a significant other who demands hegemonic subjectivity. A number one who needs others to annul themselves and play the role of zeroes. According to Shaw, the leader of a religious cult pretends to partake of the perfect nature of what is divine and so to be exempt from all rules and moral limits. Such individuals are classified by this author as “pathological narcissists, with paranoid and megalomaniacal tendencies” (Shaw, 2003). From this perspective, a cult leader is someone who needs to believe that he is “dependent on no one.” From a developmental point of view, the cult leader’s problem consists in the fact that he/she was raised in a family setting that inflicted on him/her repetitive traumatic experiences of shame and humiliation. This produced an identification with the aggressor (Ferenczi, 1949; A. Freud, 1966) which compels him/her to abuse others, inflating himself/herself by deflating his/her followers. The cult leader needs desperately to have followers. He/she sees dependency as being “weak and shameful,” that is why all of his/her life is compulsively devoted to reverse his original painful situation, find followers, and induce them to depend on him/her. In this way, the cult leader can disavow his/her own dependency and nurture his/ her delusional idea (Shaw, 2014) that only followers are needy zeroes, while he/she is number one! According to Shaw all these dynamics take place unconsciously. The cult leader is not aware at all of his/her contempt of dependency, interpreted as weakness, just as is unaware of the difference between vulnerability (a normal condition) and fragility (Caramazza, 2017). The very existence of normal human dependency on other human beings is disavowed. The cult leader cannot trust anyone, cannot depend on anyone, unless it is a follower who blindly accepts to be fully controlled and completely submitted. Cult leaders have been traumatically molded into becoming masters in the perverted art of exploiting universal human basic needs of dependency and attachment rooted



Jim Jones

3

in our childhood, when we all depended completely on our caregivers/parents to survive. It was there and then that we all learned to regard other human being as Godlike figures. Cult leaders take this role on themselves and try to induce their followers, by all means, to unconsciously re-experience and act out again the old play of early childhood. These dynamics explain why followers of cult leaders so often behave in a regressive and infantile way, as if they believed that their own lives were in the hands of their leader. At the same time, these reflections help us in understanding why followers enter cults when they are experiencing difficult periods in their lives and, in a corresponding way, why cult leaders continuously try to weaken their followers’ capacity to think and behave independently as autonomous individuals (Shaw, 2003). This is a good psychological starting point to begin telling the story of Jim Jones as the victim of such a relational (transgenerational) saga that inevitably condemned him to play the subsequent role of abuser/traumatizer for the next generations. In fact, as we will see in this chapter, he was traumatically molded into a “number one” by his mother who, during her life, was also repeatedly traumatized (by the fact that her father was an adopted child, by the financial downfall of her father’s foster father, and by the death of her parents) up to the point that she transferred to her only son the same traumatic narcissistic model of subjugation. This topic, transgenerational trauma and its transmission from one generation to the next (M. Fromm, 2012), must be integrated with what we know today about prenatal influences on the future development of human beings. In 2016, the scientific documentary “In Utero” (directed by Kathleen Man Gyllenhaal) began to be broadly released, making available to everyone the state of the art of prenatal psychology and medicine. The international team of experts interviewed by the director of “In Utero,” presents, with the aid of movie scenes, how prenatal events can shape our future lives, and emphasizes that caring for the baby from conception (or even before) is essential if we want to develop a better world. In their words, world ecology starts from the womb. We are not born when we come to light. We are born from the very beginning, from that chain of events that precedes the mysterious moment when a woman decides she wants to bring a new life into the world and looks for a man to make it happen. We grow up, after we have been biologically conceived, immersed into a symbiotic relationship not only with the womb and the body of our mother but with the whole extended anthropological environment around us. And what happens during these prenatal stages of development matters, much more than we were used to think. Let me summarize some useful ideas expressed by two experts of the international team of “In Utero”: Rachel Yehuda and Gabor Maté.

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Rachel Yehuda, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience as well as director of the traumatic stress studies division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine (which includes the PTSD clinical research program and the neurochemistry and neuroendocrinology laboratory at the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center), explains, in one of her interventions, that today the new dynamic concept of epigenetic has changed our previous static, traditional way of interpreting genetics. Today we don’t think any more that nature (our genetic make-up) is unrelated to nurture (our environmental influences). We have nature and nurture interacting to form something new in order to continuously adapt to the environment. Bad environmental events may cause change, good environmental events may cause change too. What we should try to do is provide a caregiving environment in which human beings have enough good events. Professor Yehuda does research on post-traumatic stress disorders and its effects on trauma survivors and the next generation. She is interested in understanding individual differences and how they impact interaction with the environment and more specifically with traumatic events. She has been studying adult children of Holocaust survivors and has found very interesting and important results showing the effects of this phenomenon of having a traumatic change passed from mother to offspring. This change might be very helpful, if the child will live in a similar traumatic environment, but it might be maladaptive if the child will live in a completely different environment. Gabor Maté, a renowned speaker and bestselling author, including of the award-winning book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, presents himself as a suitable case of this situation. He recalls in the documentary his own story, from being conceived during World War II, in Budapest, Hungary, in 1943 (at a time when Hungary was in the war on Germany’s side but there were a lot of anti-Semitic laws), to the historical period when the Germans marched into his country, in March 1944. His narrative is very moving when he recalls that his mother, the next day, just after the invasion of Hungary, phoned the pediatrician to say that her baby was crying all the time, and that the doctor should come and see him. In Gabor’s memories, according to his mother’s account, the doctor would have said, “Sure I’ll come, but I should tell you: all my Jewish babies are crying!” In Gabor Maté’s words, his existential fears were molded in the cast of his mother’s terror during the periods of her conception, pregnancy, and nursing during World War II. With this in mind, we can get in touch with the story of why and how Jim Jones was psychologically conceived, many years before being biologically generated, for a tragic destiny, not to be and become a free and healthy human being but just to be shaped into a traumatic narcissistic relationship as a special “number one” of the Trilussa kind.



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So, it is from this new perspective that I am now going to revisit the bits of information I had collected in the aftermath of the Jonestown tragedy, for many years, from different sources, and approach the puzzle of the prenatal roots and transgenerational traumas of the story of Jim Jones. LYNETTA (A CULT LEADER’S MOTHER) Let’s begin with a sketch of the cult leader’s mother, and let’s emphasize that her name was Lynetta, that Lynn was the name of the town where the Jones moved when little Jim was a child, and that Marceline was the name of the woman he married. The root “lyn” or “lin” (from Scottish linn = waterfall or pool) seems to have been imprinted on the baby as an indelible stamp, from the very beginning. Born near Princeton, Indiana, Lynetta [ . . . ] grew into a rather odd combination of fanciful dreamer and aggressively ambitious achiever. Full of imagination, she felt almost as much kinship with animals as people: she even looked upon snakes as her friends. She evidently picked up her ambition from her father’s foster father, a businessman [ . . . ] who became her paternal role model when her father died. [ . . . ] Lynetta respected him because he blended business acumen with a big heart—and she blamed his financial downfall on his generosity and humanitarianism. [ . . . ] She attended Jonesboro Agricultural College in Arkansas for two years before dropping out in 1921. A few years later, she enrolled at Lockyear Business College in Evansville, Indiana, where she also stayed for two years. Then, in 1925, her mother died of typhoid fever. Somehow this death reversed Lynetta’s thinking about marriage and motherhood. Even before Lynetta’s engagement to a Hoosier road-construction worker named James T. Jones, she resolved that she would bear a single child, a boy, and he would resemble the most admirable man she knew—[her father’s foster father]. Although in doing so she denied a part of herself, Lynetta married James T. Jones in the late of 1920s. He was sixteen years her senior [ . . . ] a native Hoosier with family ties to nearby Lynn, a community of about nine hundred where his father was living out his final years. [ . . . ] A road-construction foreman before going to France to fight in World War I, he had returned home with lungs scarred by mustard gas. With no more than a grade school education and cursed with bad health, [ . . . ] Jones had become a semicripple in the land of the work ethic. (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982: 10–11)

Some years after her marriage, Lynetta Jones, “after her own bout with typhoid” (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982: 10), became pregnant. Some recurrent dreams supposedly preceded her pregnancy. In the last one, “from the far side of a river, Lynetta’s mother called to her that she would bear a son who would right the wrongs of the world” (Axthelm et al., 1978: 54). Other

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dreams, after the child was born, were supposed to have confirmed his future greatness. [Lynetta] was a firm believer in the transmigration of souls, and allowed herself to believe the polite fiction that she actually had travelled the world in some previous incarnation. She filled her son’s bedtime with “memories” of her last-life voyages—long, vivid, first-person accounts of voyages up the Amazon and life among the headhunters. The supernatural fascinated her—signs, spells, spirits, omens, and—most of all—dreams. Dreams, she believed, were visions of the future, and she dreamt often about her son. They were dreams which foretold greatness. James Warren Jones, she told the boy, was destined to grow up into a man who would leave his mark on the world. (Feinsod, 1981: 16)

Jim Jones was born in Crete, a small settlement in the state of Indiana, on May 13, 1931. At birth the baby was anything but beautiful. “The olivecomplexioned child might have been a conglomeration of every nationality in the world. His eyes were slanted, almost oriental, his face round, his hair shiny, black and straight like an Indian’s. She thought he resembled most a baby Eskimo, and an ugly one at that” (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982: 10). Here we have a first critical point: the moment when a mother is confronted with the “real baby” versus her “fantasmatic” and “imaginary” baby (Lebovici, 1988). In the past, it took place immediately after delivery. Today, with obstetrical ultrasound, we are beginning to monitor this process along a continuum, up to the point that a psychological tool has been recently developed to study the differences in perception by mothers during their ongoing dialogue with their baby (fantasmatic, imaginary, and real) before and after delivery (Chagas et al., 2015). In Lynetta’s case, it is reasonable to assume that the perceptive differences between her fantasmatic and imaginary baby versus her real one, immediately after delivery, might have been traumatic for both, mother and child. In fact, as we have seen, the real baby looked “ugly” and very different from her mother’s expectations. “Also, the historical time he was born in was definitely ugly. [ . . . ] As Lynetta Jones wrote [ . . . ] in 1974 [ . . . ] my son was born right in the midst of the Depression and all he had seen of this world since had been the grinding aftermath of depression” (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982: 582). Lynetta managed to disguise her disappointment and rejection of little Jim and attributed her neglect of her own baby to the fact that she had to work very hard to support her family. From a psychological point of view, we might rather think that her post-partum disappointment reactivated her original ambivalence toward motherhood. The gap between the all-too-human reality of the creature she had given birth to, and the heroic dreams and fantasies she had been nurturing during her pregnancy, was a dizzy abyss.



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Lynetta’s hypomanic work schedule can be interpreted not only as her struggle for life “in the midst of the Depression” but also as an unconscious defense against her own post-partum depression. And the catastrophical worldview that Jim Jones was to develop, can be interpreted as the reflection of what he saw in his mother’s eyes when she looked at him and fell into the abysmal blues of her disillusionment; “all he had seen of this world since had been the grinding aftermath of depression.” From a psychodynamic point of view, we can add further considerations. The apparent outcome of accidental negative circumstances (to be born of an invalid father in the middle of a severe economic depression) might be interpreted as the artful result of Lynetta’s disavowal of her own maternal ambivalence and of her consequent incapacity to make a correct evaluation of reality. The manuscript written by Lynetta and quoted earlier (by Reiterman with Jacobs) carries evocative evidence of such an interpretation: “I was of limited strength, but according to my philosophy, nothing was impossible and my ambition for my son knew no bounds. I had chosen what I had considered a favorable time to bring him into the world, and my judgment had been at its lowest ebb at that moment” (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982: 581–582). It was only after the birth of her son that Lynetta realized she was living “in the midst of the Depression.” Had she been aware of these problems earlier, she would have found herself at a crossroads: looking for another husband, and/or waiting for better times to conceive a baby. Either way, Lynetta would have had to renounce the perverted gratifications that only that particular husband and that untimely maternity could provide her. Only in those peculiar circumstances could she play both parental roles and belittle the father in the eyes of the child. Only there and then could she get her son to idealize her and make the child suffer from the inevitable privations he would undergo. If Lynetta had been aware of the inherent ambivalence in her decision to marry and conceive a child with an invalid, she would have taken her part of responsibility, and her unconscious rejection of her son and scorn of her husband would have been reduced. She would have had to work through the depressive dynamics of separation (from her husband or from her own grandiose self). She would have had to lose something of her narcissism, and renounce her philosophy of “no bounds” and “nothing impossible.” I assume her mental structure was so fragile that it would have been impossible for her to take either road. So, it was better to not even see them. The disavowal of this reality (internal and external) provided her, instead, with an exalting alternative. She could now project her own denied inadequacies on her disabled husband. And she could face the Depression heroically, by nurturing the illusion of molding the redeemer, her “godlike child” on whom she had transferred her own narcissistic omnipotence.

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Lynetta resolved her own existential crisis (after a series of traumatic events: downfall of her father’s foster father, death of her father, dropping out twice from college, death of her mother) adopting a perverse solution, by massive use of disavowals, projections, and idealizations (ChasseguetSmirgel, 1984). Man has always endeavoured to go beyond the narrow limits of his condition. I consider that perversion is one of the essential ways and means he applies in order to push forward the frontiers of what is possible and to unsettle reality. I do not see perversions only as a disorder of a sexual nature affecting a relatively small number of people. [ . . . ] I see perversion more broadly, as a dimension of the human psyche in general, a temptation common to us all. [ . . . ] The bedrock of reality is created by the difference between the sexes and the difference between the generations. [ . . . ] The perverse temptation leads one to accept pregenital desires and satisfactions (attainable by a small boy) as being equal to or even superior to genital desires and satisfactions (attainable only by the father). Erosion of the double difference between the sexes and the generations is the pervert’s objective. He is generally helped to reach it by his mother who, by her seductive attitude towards him and her corresponding rejection of his father, fosters in him the illusion that he has neither to grow up nor to reach maturity, thereby taking his father as a model in order to be her satisfactory partner. [ . . . ] The abolition of differences prevents psychic sufferance at all levels: feelings of inadequacy, castration, loss, absence and death no longer exist. (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1984: 1–6)

Fully immersed into this unconscious universe of perversion, where everything was possible and there were no limits, Lynetta felt that the human being she had delivered was not her own. He might have been the son of her dead mother or the reincarnation of her father’s foster father, he might even have been a supernatural creature, as she described him in “World on Fire,” a manuscript where little Jim speaks like Jesus Christ and looks like Buddha; he might have been anyone—except her own child generated with her husband. This estrangement is recorded by Lynetta herself in a footnote of “world on fire”: “It made me feel he was ‘only loaned to me’ for a time . . . which could be only a brief time” (Jones L., n.d. document n. 1). So, it happened that Lynetta molded this child, “loaned” to her by an impersonal entity, like a piece of inanimate clay, as we discover reading one of her poems, published on Peoples Forum in 1977, approximately one year before the tragic end of Jonestown (Jones L., 1977). In this uncanny text, Lynetta speaks of herself as the molder of her child who is devitalized and compared to clay, that is, to inanimate matter. The association with God shaping the first human being from clay, in “Genesis” as well as in other tales, inevitably comes to mind.



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In pagan Rome, for example, the Goddess Cura was told to have made with clay the first human being, but that was a team-work to which two other Roman Gods contributed as well: Jupiter, giving his spirit, and Tellus (mother Earth), donating her own matter. In the ancient Roman story, the Goddess Cura did only the molding of the new “thing.” That is why at death the body goes back to the earth (where it is buried) while the spirit flies back to heaven, where Jupiter reigns (the father of all Gods). As long as human beings are alive, they belong (body and spirit) to Cura (the Goddess of the Cure) and she has to take care of them (and re-mold them as epigenetics does, in our contemporary view of the interactions between nature and nurture, genes and environment) until their last breath. In the version by Lynetta, instead, it seems she was thinking about herself as if she were an omnipotent Goddess, a supernatural being who had the power to mold a child into a Godlike creature just as one can give a permanent shape to a piece of plastic clay! Lynetta is doing all the work by herself. She doesn’t need a husband. It seems she is lost in her grandiose self as well as in her attitude toward reality and life: “nothing impossible” and “no bounds,” as we have previously remembered. In her poem, Lynetta’s love object is treated by manipulation and abandonment. For the piece of clay, it is a matter of days. For the child, this abandonment is a matter of years. Manipulation and abandonment are the two instruments of any perverse upbringing or education. Manipulation stimulates absolute dependence and requires total and passive submission to the will of the molder, while abandonment forces the child to become prematurely independent in order to take care of himself, somehow: he must become a leader, a number one. Abused by manipulative and neglecting parents, the child deeply feels it is useless to grow up and get involved in the triangular scene of the Oedipal complex nor to comply with the rules of society. Instead, he lives in a “perverse universe” (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1984), where the mother rejects the father, idealizes the son, and disavows her own ambivalence. This environment molds the child as a man/fetish over which the adult world (and reality) have no hold. After this treatment, he is a Godlike man that no one could ever change, anymore. He is the ruler, the number one, just as his molder was, before him. The accurate reconstruction of the life of Jim Jones by Reiterman with Jacobs provides many detailed accounts of the perverse relationship between mother and child. By her frequent absences and by her direct and indirect influence, Lynetta was the dominant force in young Jim’s development. Along with her canny

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aggressiveness, she passed on to the child a general irreverence toward the world; and a certain self-righteousness and grandiosity that allowed him to see himself as an independent spirit proudly pushing against the prevailing flows of society. Along with a certain sensitivity, she gave him a mission—a sense of wrongs to be corrected, a feeling of persecution, a resolve to fight back for his mother and himself. Most important, Jim inherited a set of family circumstances that reminded him that life had cheated him. He felt deprived by birthright of a loving, close-knit family. (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982: 581–582)

“I was ready to kill by the end of the third grade. [ . . . ] Nobody gave me any love, any understanding. In those days, a parent was supposed to go with a child to school functions . . . There was some kind of school performance, and everybody’s fucking parent was there but mine. I’m standing there. Alone. Always was alone” (transcript of a tape recorded by Jim Jones in 1977 and quoted by Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982: 16–17). In this transcript, Jim’s parents are not an expressed subject but only an understood one. Jim Jones is neglecting them in his words as they neglected him in their life. As a child, I was undoubtedly one of the poor in the community. I had less of material comforts, although my mother made every effort to give me what she could. My dad was ill; an invalid from World War II, World War I, very bitter, a cynical person. He spent much time being engrossed in his own pain, that he finally debilitated his health, finally his health . . . was destroyed. There’s a little town in Indiana. The moment I think of it a great deal of pain comes. I don’t think I shall mention it at all. (Jones J., September 1977)

By making unconscious use of ambiguity and reversal, Jim Jones places his own father and his own motherland in an indefinite space-time scenario (“World War II, World War I, [ . . . ] There’s a little town in Indiana [ . . . ] I don’t think I shall mention it at all”). It is the same nowhere where he had felt abandoned without even having being procreated by a genital parental couple (only the other children had “fucking parents,” not he, since Lynetta made him believe his father was impotent). Thus, I acted out against the conformities in community. First way, because I was never accepted, I didn’t feel accepted. I joined a Pentecostal Church—the most extreme Pentecostal Church—“The Oneness,” because they were the most despised. They were the rejects of the community. I found immediate acceptance. [ . . . ] They were persecuted beyond measure for their beliefs. (Jones J., September 1977)

If the ugly newborn child was not accepted for what he was (so different from the expectations of his parents, particularly of Lynetta) it is no wonder



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that his need to “belong” led him to join a church of “rejects of the community.” He felt he was like them, a rejected and persecuted outcast. He longed for that “Oneness”: going back to prenatal life and fulfilling the unconscious fantasy of returning into the womb. That was the only space-time setting where his mother still accepted him because she could imagine him exactly as she pleased without the unsurmountable obstacle of being himself (a real child) and not her dream (a fantasmatic or imaginary baby). That was where and when he was not yet ignored by his father, since he had not been totally ignored by his wife, as a result of the child’s birth. The atmosphere in the pentecostal church abolished all differences. The believers claimed to “speak in tongues” (i.e. to speak unknown languages) and yet to understand each other. The confusion of the evolved codes of communication (words as shared rational meanings) and the revival of the more archaic ones (words as emotional sounds) helped them to feel united and be amalgamated. Babel here was the place of fusion rather than of differentiation and separation, Paradise Regained, where human beings could re-establish the lost symbiotic union after the fall of painful delivery and birth, after the vicissitudes of “separation-individuation” (Mahler, 1968). “But after some time, intellectually, I outgrew Pentecostalism, but still a rebel, still not a part of society, never accepted, born as it were on the wrong side of the tracks” (Jones J., September 1977). Jones often used this expression, which corresponded with the house of his childhood after they moved from Crete to Lynn, in the poorest part of the town, near the railway tracks. It was not just a memory, but an unconscious metaphor of how he felt: he felt he had not come into the world at the right place, on the right time, in the right way. The tracks were also associated with an old traumatic experience. “Jimmy learned to walk very early, using a red wooden cart the way some children use the supportive hands of their parents. One day when Lynetta was at work and Jimmy was playing by the railroad tracks behind his house, he was nearly moved down by a passing train; his cart went riding out of Lynn on the cowcatcher” (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982: 13). The central element of the myth of the birth of heroes (Rank, 1909; 2004) returns here: exposure and miraculous salvation. But these events do not follow the classical pattern. The parents abandon their child, but not definitively—they are present/absent. And the hero finds “a red wooden cart” instead of adoptive parents or nurturing animals (like the she-wolf of Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome). The substitution of the inanimate for the animate is a leitmotif in the perverse universe. Here it returns twice: in the “red wooden cart,” and in the mechanical persecutor of the hero (the train replacing the father as the first threat to his life). In the myth of Jim Jones, we have other uncanny substitutions: the classical hero abandoned on the water is replaced by a child raised among the feces.

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“Even before he was toilet-trained, Jimmy would toddle around unsupervised with a dirty face and bare bottom. At times, he was seen walking around unattended with dried excrement on his bottom. Mrs. [ . . . ] or other neighbors cleaned him up a little, sometimes clucking about what a neglectful mother Lynetta was” (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982: 13). Estranged from her son, Lynetta “created” two dolls: “Ms. Bear” and “Ms. Samantha.” I had created Ms. Bear and Ms. Samantha from whole cloth in rare idle moments. [ . . . ] They had been smooth and expertly stuffed with something soft and firm and tempting to the touch. [ . . . ] There was an enchantment and an aliveness about these remarkable toys that puzzles me to this day. They seem to repudiate inanimacy and kinship with distant culture. They were definitely a part and parcel of the “now” generation. I often discussed with them the vexations of our times and the trials and tribulations of my days. I missed them when they were absent [ . . . ] as I missed young Jim.” (Jones L., n.d. document n. 3)

According to Chasseguet-Smirgel (1984: 87–88), puppets, mannequins, waxworks, automatons, dolls, painted scenery, plaster casts, dummies, secret clockworks, mimesis and illusions: all form a part of the fetishist’s magic and artful universe. Lying between life and death, animated and mechanic, hybrid creatures and creatures to which hubris gave birth, they all may be likened to fetishes. [ . . . ] The fetish is like a magic wand. Its presence modifies reality. The theatre where the human drama is performed—with its mourning, deprivations, injuries, renunciations—thus becomes a fairyland where feeling of inferiority, loss, and death exist no more.

“Ms. Bear” and “Ms. Samantha” were fetish-objects, in the world of Lynetta. Made, not generated, and eternally alive, they could stay with her forever precisely because of their inanimate nature. They could absorb her emotional investments because they were much more reassuring than a living child. They did not dirty things up, they did not eat or drink or protest, they did not ask for anything beyond what Lynetta herself would make them ask in her projective “play,” they would never abandon her, and they were always available. Little Jim, jealous and envious of the treatment his mother/molder reserved for her creatures/dolls, managed to make them disappear one day for good. This “enterprise” was chronicled by Lynetta in a short narrative where the little hero (her own son) is placed alongside the great Mao: “Jim Babe’s Adventures on the Long Walk.” Let’s read Lynetta’s text: A psychiatrist would dub such conduct on my part as a departure from the norm, no doubt just as I, on the other hand, have always entertained a deep conviction



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that the theory advanced by the doctors of psychiatry is merely the outward manifestation of deep-seated disturbance in the mind. There is no verification of the claim that psychiatry ever ‘cured’ anything or anybody (Jones L., n.d. document n. 3).

Lynetta herself seems to have been aware of the abnormality of her relationship with the dolls. But in a typical perverse procedure, she turned the situation upside down and accused the psychiatrists of mental disturbances, inadequacy, and mystification. After this preamble about the truth of that which seemed false (the dolls) and about the falsehood of that which seemed true (psychiatry), the actual account begins. Restless over the absence of young Jim and the dolls, I walked out on the front porch and was startled to find all the village dogs stretched at full length in deep sleep of exhaustion from the morning run with Jim. [ . . . ] At that moment there was a frightful scream from the direction Jim had gone. All of the dogs leaped up at once, knocking me down on my knees as they charged away at break-neck speed in the direction of the sound. I leaped to my feet and took off behind the dogs. Tearing my way through green briars, tall weeds, and dead branches, there in the vacant lot I came to a high fence of chicken wire. The dogs had torn the sturdy gate down so it was flat on the ground. The air was a fog of chicken feathers. Chickens were running madly about. [ . . . ] Unfortunately, some had been killed. Pal Dog, a capable leader and an astute strategist was indeed a formidable adversary when young Jim was being either embarassed, harassed, or harmed. He was a large snow-white Eskimo Spitz. Pal had taken a firm grip on the back of Jim’s sunsuit and had dragged him out of the path of the dogs and the panicked chickens and was comforting him with his large wet tongue. [ . . . ] the dogs [ . . . ] formed a circle around young Jim. As I tested his flesh for injuries, the dogs observed me closely. Had he let out a yell of protest, the dogs would have jumped me, in mass, as readily as they had rushed the chickens. Jim’s flesh was pitted with triangular breaks. The fowls, in the desperation of hunger and thirst, had attacked him and bitten out small pieces of his flesh. I hurried him to our house which was only a short distance away, where I disinfected his wounds. Jim Babe was pitching hissie fits over the disappearance of Ms Bear and Ms. Samantha. I was also troubled about that and the plight of the surviving chickens. [ . . . ] I laid a trail of cracked corn from my chicken lot back to the scene of the conflict in hopes the surviving birds might return and follow it to the safety of my house. I also put food and water there, where they had lived so long and suffered so much. This place had not been visible from the Long Walk because of intervening weed growth. My inquire established that no person had knowledge of the fowls been penned up there without food or water, or even a notion as to who might have done such a cruel thing or for what reason. Little Jim and I searched the lot often, hoping to rescue some of the surviving chickens and find some clue to the disappearance of Ms. Bear and Ms. Samantha.

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This quest was unsuccessful. The fate of the dolls and the surviving chickens was never revealed. We have often wondered about it, over the years. (Jones L., n.d. document n. 3).

This narrative is uncanny for more than one reason. I will limit myself to just a few considerations. Above all, some factual information which sheds sinister light on the adventure of the “unknowing” hero and his equally “unknowing” mother. Sometimes [ . . . ] a handful of [ . . . ] children were drawn to Jim’s home. They would troop along the driveway to the left of the Jones house, past the side garden, past the small barn to a small wire enclosure near the back porch. Jim kept all manner of creatures: rabbits, chickens, ducks, a goat, and more—confined in the pen, with a small wooden shed for shelter. [ . . . ] Jim spent many hours talking to his animals, training them and playing with them. He took care of his aversion to dirty tasks by enlisting his visitors to do his chores for him. Like Tom Sawyer, he convinced them that feeding and cleaning was just another form of play. If the kids tired of the “fun,” he scolded them impatiently. [His best friend] never could figure out why Jim wanted animals if he did not enjoy caring for them. The lack of shade, grass and open space seemed inhumane. (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982: 16)

It is unlikely that the place described by Lynetta is the same as the one reconstructed by Reiterman with Jacobs, but the evidence collected by them is precious nonetheless. From it we can deduct that Lynetta could not have been unaware of how her son used to treat animals. Lynetta’s “inquiry” about the disappearance of the two dolls and the “unknown” author of the misdeed seems to have been rather an unconscious game of collusion between mother and son. Each of them pretended not to know and not to understand what the facts really meant. On the one hand, Lynetta could not recognize that her son was the torturer rather than the victim of the chickens, just as she could not admit that she felt more affection for her two dolls than for her own son. This is why she could not figure out that Jim had made his inanimate rivals disappear in an unconscious attempt to call attention to the lack of love he was suffering from, because of her neglect and mistreatments. On the other hand, Jim could not accept his own feelings of dependence on (and resentment against) his mother. Thus, he had to work them through by abusing his own animals/children. He had to leave them without food, without water, without care, without love. He had to reverse the mother-child relationship which he had passively suffered in, by actively treating them as inanimate objects. The perverse relationship between mother and son would manifest itself in their obstinate disavowal of reality (external or internal) any time their actual behaviors or feelings contrasted with their idealized self-images.



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Lynetta’s disavowal, for example, found expression in her ambiguous words “hissie fits.” She had chosen them to describe her son’s supposed concern for the dolls, but they inevitably evoked, instead, the diabolical nature of the serpent. Further support for this hypothesis, that she had understood and also had not understood—due to a split in her Ego, which is what occurs in the dynamics of disavowal—that young Jim mistreated the chickens and lied when claiming he was innocent of the disappearance of the two dolls, comes from other writings where Lynetta seemed to allude to the poisoning of animals (which Jim Jones had been repeatedly guilty of) and to his lies. The fact that she chose not to confront her son directly about his “hissie fits” makes one think that this was the price she had to pay in order to avoid being confronted herself about her own bizarre worldview, based on her supposed previous incarnations. True or false, right or wrong, what did it matter? Better an embalmed relationship than a live conflict. Better to mummify all affections than to recognize the ambivalence inherent in every human generative relationship, in every human birth and death. Even if there was no love, the only important thing was to stay together, “over the years.” To stay together was in fact the recurrent refrain of one of the songs sung by Peoples Temple members in their Ukiah church, during the 60s. The theme put obviously a strong emphasis on the importance of never losing the fusional ties that made them all a whole unit with no separations of any kind within themselves. That is why Peoples Temple was spelled without Saxon genitive. It was not the Temple of the People. It was the one and only Temple of all Peoples of all times and places. As in Lynetta’s philosophy, we are here in the utopic space-time of “nothing impossible” and “no bounds.” With this in mind, we can remember now a few more anecdotes in the life of the leader of Peoples Temple. Toward the end of his junior year, Jim Jones told his friend [ . . . ] that he was moving to Richmond with his mother. He said his parents were separating, and that his mother was dating [ . . . ] a slightly built mechanic whose marriage had fallen apart. He too was moving to Richmond. In all probability Jim was embarassed by his parents’ breakup. In explaining the move to [his friend], he said he was moving because Richmond High had a superior curriculum which would help him get into a university. (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982: 26)

I assume that Jim Jones was more than merely “embarassed” over his parents’ breakup. Lynetta’s relationship with another man had in fact an incontrovertible significance: she had lied to her son during his childhood by making him believe in the primacy of pre-genital sexuality. His whole inner world had been built on that lie. This is why Lynetta’s abandonment and

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betrayal of “Big Jim” assumed catastrophic dimensions in the unconscious of Jim Jones and brought him near to a breakdown. We can reconstruct this crisis by analyzing the “last supper” (which is the metaphorical place of all abandonments and betrayals) between Jim Jones and the best friend of his childhood. Jim asked this friend to supper one evening that spring. [ . . . ] When dusk approached [the friend] started to get up to leave. Two or three times, Jim persuaded him to stay longer. [He] lingered. Finally, he announced firmly that he had to get home to do chores before dark. “Stay a bit,” Jim said. He had adopted an insistent tone. [The friend] stood there a moment while Jim pressured him to stay, then at last he walked out of the kitchen door to the darkened living room. [ . . . ] The light was fading as [he] stepped onto the wooden porch boards and turned. He walked to the end of the porch, stepped down and turned again, following the walkway toward the sidewalk. He glanced back. Jim stood in the doorway, one hand hanging down alongside his leg. His fingers were clasped around the plastic handle of his father’s big black pistol. “I really don’t want you to go,” Jim said. He dropped the words with tremendous weight, as though their friendship hung in the balance. [He] said he had to leave. He proceeded down the walkway at an unbothered pace as Jim pursued him. When he had just about reached the sidewalk, [he] heard a command: “Just stop. Or I’ll shoot ya.” [He] had never heard such a tone of voice from Jim. The disappointment in it was raw. Jim commanded his friend to stop, to return. “Just stop, or I’ll shoot ya,” said Jim. “Jim I’m going home.” Suddenly [he] was worried. He pivoted ninety degrees and headed down the tree-lined sidewalk. Some fifty feet behind him, on the porch, Jim leveled the pistol in his direction. Almost instantaneously, an explosion went off, and a three-inch chunk of bark went flying from a tree [he] had just passed. [ . . . ] He lit out for the cover of a row of shrubs along the driveway. When he was out of sight, he peered back through the greenery. Jim was staring from the porch, the gun dangling at his side. (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982: 27–28)

This episode is extremely significant. It demonstrates how separation was intolerable for Jim Jones. He behaved with his childhood friend like an uxoricide (wife-killer or husband-killer) with his partner who is threatening to leave. He tried to kill his love object in order to avoid having to suffer from abandonment. An event that also suggests an unconscious homosexual orientation in Jim Jones. The psychodynamic interpretation of uxoricide is known (Cormier, 1962; Nesci, 1980). Any time a partner is experienced as one’s own “other half,” separation is intolerable because it is tantamount to self-mutilation. The half that leaves, carries with it a part of one’s own Self, and the resulting narcissistic wound is unhealable. Rather than feeling dismembered or torn to pieces, rather than losing control over the partner (unconsciously experienced as a



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Self-object in which one’s own split and projected parts can easily be confined and controlled), the uxoricide has to kill. In this way, the murderer is able to keep an idealized image of his or her dead partner as a live memory. And this explains the paradoxical claims of eternal love that so many husbands swear for their wives after having murdered them. The crime of uxoricide acts out and reveals something which happens much more often than we realize: the development of a relationship with a simulacrum (a shadow, a projective double, a fetish-object) disguised as the relationship with a love object (a living and separated individual). The crime becomes necessary when the partner disproves the illusion of the subject by behaving like a real person. Death, the extreme criterion of truth (suffice it here to think of the ordeals), restores the fixed order of the uxoricide’s inner world, which had been threatened by separation. Death punishes the love object for the subject’s unconscious anxieties (and we can draw inferences about them through the way the crime itself is committed) while concretely retransforming the partner into the subject’s adored simulacrum (an inanimate fetish-object). The murderer can then continue to live in his illusory world, and prevent his own psychotic breakdown. He can go on disguising himself among the ambiguous population of so called “normal” persons. Going back to Jim Jones, we can hypothesize that he experienced the separation from his childhood friend (and the imminent dismemberment of his nuclear family) as an amputation of his own Self. And we can find macabre confirmation of our interpretation in a number of sinister episodes of his life. Jim Jones had found work at a hospital, in Richmond, and despite his previous homicidal outburst, had convinced his childhood friend to come and work there too. [His friend] had assumed he would be an orderly like Jim, an equal, and could go on his own way. But he found himself acting as Jim’s flunky. On the pretense of training, Jim established a boss-employee relationship [with him] from the first day. [ . . . ] Jim promptly assigned [his friend] to sweep the long, dimly lit tunnel that connected the hospital with the nursing quarters. The predawn cleanup seldom was uneventful. Once [he] was sweeping a dark corner and came upon a human head, and another time someone threw a limb at him from behind a door. These artificial body parts were training aids for the nurses, but the episodes were nerve-racking nevertheless. [ . . . ] The first time [he] was called to the operating room during an emergency surgery, Jim met him at the door. “They have something for you to burn in the incinerator.” [ . . . ] Jim disappeared but not before ordering him to stay with his charge until it was totally burned. On the elevator the paper soaked through, clung and became translucent. [He] could see that he was holding someone’s gangrenous leg. Somehow, he survived the elevator ride and the walk to the incinerator. He tossed it inside and dutifully waited while his

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stomach did contortions. The leg was halfway consumed by flame, stinking as only burning human flesh can, when Jim arrived. “You can sit here with me until it’s completely burned,” he said. (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982: 31–33)

Why did Jim Jones react in such an extreme way to the breakdown of his parents’ marriage and to the separation from his childhood friend? Is it reasonable to assume that he had simply transferred the working through of his own catastrophical past separations (loss of prenatal life, loss of the breast, and so on) from the original situations to the present circumstances? And if so, was there something else hanging in the balance? During the dinner Jim reproached his friend for having purchased a motorcycle as a status symbol. Actually, the motorcycle was a symbol of the diverging roads the two young men were already taking. One of them was spontaneously interested in sports and girls, while the other was trying to mask his psychological difficulties by becoming engrossed in church activities. The friend was progressing while Jim, frightened, was regressing. This friend was, for Jim, another Self, a double who was becoming unfamiliar because he was pulling away from him definitively. Unconsciously he could have represented Jim’s own healthy, adult, genital sexuality which he could not contain in his internal world. This was a world where only the perverse model of infantile (pre-genital) sexuality could be recognized. With Lynetta’s betrayal this internal world had collapsed. Jim needed more than ever to gain control over his adult sexuality through his friend/double. If his childhood friend (his own double, or some split part of himself) abandoned him or escaped from his sphere of influence, Jim could only feel mutilated and lifeless: a dismembered mannequin or a gangrenous limb.

MARCELINE (A CULT LEADER’S WIFE) The uncanny theme of necrophilia must be taken into account at this point. I will introduce it with excerpts from a short paper by a psychoanalyst who analyzed the necrophilic fantasy of one of her patients. I will quote from her study (Segal, 1953) because I consider it important for a deeper understanding of the necrophilic aspects of the relationship between Lynetta and Jim Jones, as well as of the relationship between the future cult leader and Marceline. One day my patient, [ . . . ], a man in his late forties, told me a dream in which he [ . . . ] uncovered a woman to make love to her, and [ . . . ] realized that she was a wooden doll. [ . . . ] He then started extolling the virtues of a corpse as a sexual object. He described with relish the feeling of power and security that he could enjoy in making love to a corpse: it is there when wanted, you put it away when finished with it, it makes no demands, it is never frustrating, never



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unfaithful, never reproachful; persecution and guilt, he said, could be quite done away with. I then suggested that he tried to make real people conform to this ideal, and when I gave some examples of such behaviour, he himself added many more. He did indeed try to get people to behave like this idealized corpse. In sexual relations, he wanted absolute compliance in his partner. He was intolerant of any demour, or, conversely, of any demand. The woman should be ever-willing, responsive in intercourse, but she should not have an orgasm, nor derive any enjoyment other than for his sake. He indulged in various sexual practices demanding immobility and compliance. In his non-sexual relations, he has to have a similar power [ . . . ]. He drew my attention to the pleasures of giving and withholding life. He likes to feel that he infuses life into people as though he were animating corpses. He will lend them money, set them up in business, look after them, console them, feel that he gives them life. But to feel secure he must have the conviction that the moment he withholds his love, interest, money, they must again become lifeless, inert; when he withholds his wish to see them they will disappear. It is also extremely important to [him] that people should not mind any pain which he inflicts on them; they should indeed welcome it. [ . . . ] This demand that the object should not mind became more understandable in terms of the necrophilic phantasy: to be acceptable the object has to behave like a corpse, and corpses do not mind whatever you do to them. All [his] relations to people proceeded in terms of this phantasy. [ . . . ] He [ . . . ] spotted various aspects of his relationships in which people were treated by him as corpses. He was boasting of the fact that he so nearly fulfilled his phantasy in real life. He was indeed showing me that he was like God who could give and withhold life, and I was inert clay which he was animating with his own ideas and associations. (Segal, 1953: 98–99)

This is an essential point. Psychoanalysis brings out unconscious fantasies and dynamics, the early relationships, and the relationships with the first love objects which are reproduced in the patient’s transference. The fact that Dr Segal felt she was being treated like moldable clay by her patient (countertransference) means that the patient was trying to communicate and work through what he had suffered from, by role reversal. As if the patient were saying to his analyst: “Look at this! Can you see what they did to me? Wouldn’t you have felt badly too, in my place?” Necrophilia is the affective referent lurking behind any case of perverse molding (implying narcissistic subjugation of the other) or any ideology of unlimited social control: from autocratic leadership to “total education.” Total Education is the title of an Italian anthology of the writings of D. G. M. Schreber, edited by Ingeborg Walter (1839; 1981). Dr Schreber (a nineteenth-century German physician, deeply involved in educational and political issues), was the author of numerous pedagogical papers in which children were treated without any understanding of their instinctual human needs. Dr Schreber thought that instinctual repression was necessary in order to help them grow up as good members of an ideal society.

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The contemporary readers of his writings did not know that Dr Schreber suffered from compulsive ideas and murderous obsessions nor that three of his own children were mentally ill (his first son committed suicide). Ironically, today Dr Schreber is remembered mostly as the father of Daniel Paul, the third of his sons, who suffered from paranoia and died in an asylum, in 1911, after having published an extremely uncanny book: Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903; 1955) thanks to the social protection granted to him since he was a judge. This book made him become the world’s most famous psychiatric case, which have caused rivers of ink to flow (Freud, 1911b; Niederland, 1985; Schatzman, 1973). A detail in the delusion of this patient (whose first psychotic breakdown followed after eight years of sterile marriage) now assumes particular relevance. One of the patient’s delusional ideas was that God is necrophilic, absolutely incapable of having relationships with living people. From this perspective, the connection between parental necrophilic perversion (the wish to generate a child of clay as moldable as an inanimate object) and filial paranoia finds an interesting correspondence with the theory of traumatic narcissism and its tragic transgenerational transmission (Shaw, 2014). The researches of Chasseguet-Smirgel (1984) on perversion and Fromm (1973) on necrophilia have different theoretical approaches, but also two important points of contact. They consider psychopathological categories (perversions and necrophilia) in a continuum, which extends to normal persons, and put emphasis on the fundamental role played by regression to the anal phase of the libidinal development in both diagnostic situations. In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Fromm (1973) assumes that the manifest forms of this perversion are just the tip of the iceberg and that “Necrophilous character traits” do exist in every human unconscious. Necrophilia in the characterological sense can be described as the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something un-alive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. [ . . . ] It is the passion to tear apart living structures. [ . . . ] The necrophilous person is characterized by [ . . . ] a predisposition for dark, light-absorbing colors [ . . . ] [and] the presence of a necrophilous syndrome [ . . . ] [was observed in] about l0 to l5 per cent of the samples interviewed. (Fromm, 1973: 338–341)

With this in mind, we are ready to see a picture of the leader of Peoples Temple and note his dark hair, his dark sun glasses, his dark bird, chained but kept at a distance by a long wooden stick in the hands of Jim Jones, and imagine his original dark shirt, since the artist’s editing had changed it, giving colors to try to repair his dark necrophilic look.



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Figure 1.1  The leader of Peoples Temple. By Peoples Temple, courtesy of Charles Garry, edited by Filippo A. Nesci.

This double theoretical framework (of perversions and necrophilia as characterological traits that are usually repressed in our unconscious mind) sheds new light on some uncanny episodes in the childhood of Jim Jones. Jim’s pigeons, like some of his other animals, were not in the bloom of health. When an animal died, Jim held a ceremony. [ . . . ] Once he had everyone seated and sufficiently expectant in the loft, he let down the trap door, gently. Everything was done with flair and polished precision, as though rehearsed. He put out all the candles except the one on his little altar. The children, most eight to eleven years old, craned to see as he wrapped the body of the deceased in a shroud and placed the remains in a little cardboard or wooden box. He poured oil on the cloth before closing the coffin lid and leading a reverent funeral procession outside for the burial. (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982: 19)

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Even more disquieting light is shed on the subject by the very peculiar circumstances of the first meeting between Jim Jones and his future wife. Marceline began talking [ . . . ] about a handsome young orderly who had helped her one day with a particularly grim task. A pregnant woman had died of trichinosis. The orderly on call, a handsome fellow named Jim Jones, visibly had seemed touched as they prepared the body for the undertaker. His sensitivity and concern, especially for the suffering of the woman’s family, instantly attracted Marceline. Through their work, the two became better acquainted. Soon they were dating. As he pursued her with flattering diligence, her respect for him grew. Here is a serious young man who spoke so much of truth, honesty, of helping others, who so confidently presented his analysis of social issues and world’s events. How could she not admire a young man who said he had been a star on his high school basketball team but quit because the coach slurred black opponents? How could there possibly be a more compatible man for her? (Reiterman with Jacobs, l982: 30)

Of course, it was simply not true that Jim Jones had ever been a “star” in any kind of sporting event (this was just one of his lies). Likewise, it may be presumed that his ostentatious empathy for the dead woman’s relatives served as a socially acceptable cover for his deep emotional participation in the preparation of the cadaver of the pregnant woman. Jim Jones had already identified himself with the dead fetish-object. He could love mother and child only if they agreed on the impossibility of separating, only if they agreed on dying along with their communal placenta rather than “betray” and discard it in order to go on living. But also for Marceline that double corpse must have had some important unconscious meaning. In fact, their union was established right there, in that encounter. They both shared the same deep emotion toward a dead object that expressed the negation of delivery/birth as a vital separation between mother and child. Fascinated by their own reflections, they lost themselves in common empathy toward a fusional mother-child dyad that would remain eternally united in death rather than be divided in life. Thus, in necrophilia the motif of uxoricide returns: the impossibility of separating. For someone who has no confidence whatsoever in his own ability to exist as an individual, to love and be loved as a person in his own right and not as an extension of another, the transformation of a live being into a fetishobject/corpse is the only safe protection against the risk of being abandoned/ mutilated/dismembered. It is a matter of survival. PRIMARY PARANOIA AND THE DEAD MOTHER As Segal’s patient said, when he was able to open up and reveal to his analyst his necrophilic fantasy: “If I could remember so far back, I know what my



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first memory would be: I would remember realizing my mother’s existence and feeling: ‘It is either you or I’” (Segal, 1953: 101). In the words of this patient, psychological birth (the first event of selfconsciousness) coincides with the first attempt at separation/individuation from the mother. But this, far from being a wonderful moment of discovery of the other person and of oneself (which is what happens in a good parentchild relationship), is experienced as the mutilation of a symbiotic fusional Self. Realizing the actual existence of another human being separated from oneself and trying desperately to nullify this situation, by eliminating one or the other of the two individuals, becomes tragically one and the same process. Then a precedent is established in the unconscious mind. The subject is exposed to the compulsive repetition of this experience of deadly dismemberment of himself or of the other, any time another person appears within his own mental world. This experience, of course, is particularly unavoidable when the subject becomes a parent (specially a mother). Postpartum depression and psychosis can find their unconscious roots in such dynamics. And this makes more understandable why mothers are normally exposed during pregnancy to a situation of “primary paranoia”: the fear of aborting their baby (killing) or being killed by the baby at delivery (Fornari, 1981). So, we are not surprised to find out that Reiterman with Jacobs (1982) correctly pointed out that “motherhood was an ambivalent state of affairs for Lynetta Jones” (9). Ambivalence is the co-existence of love and hate toward the same object. This is a situation inherent in human affective life. When a person is, for any reason, too fragile to recognize his own ambivalent feelings and work them through, a dangerous situation is likely to arise. Looking for a solution to his/ her unconscious emotional conflict, the subject may resort to massive use of defense mechanisms. Disavowal is one of these defenses. Faced with an unbearable external or internal reality, the Ego splits (Freud, 1938). One part recognizes the unpleasant reality, while the other rejects its very existence. Metaphorically speaking, we might say that the right eye does not see what the left eye is looking at, or that the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing. The capacity to cope with reality (by integrating its different aspects) is impaired, while the inclination to distort it (by projecting one’s own unconscious fantasies) is enhanced. In this way, a mother can disavow her feelings of hate toward the child she loves. She can abuse him without even realizing it and therefore, without suffering. Paradoxically, she might seem to be doing the best she can (as Jim Jones said about Lynetta, in a tape recording) to raise her child properly. Disavowing her own ambivalence, a mother can save herself the painful process of working through her conflictual feelings. What is more, she gains

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a double gratification. She satisfies her hatred for her child by abusing him, and her maternal love by spoiling him as a narcissistic love object. She can pretend she is “sacrificing herself,” while she is actually glorifying her own “grandiose Self” (Kohut, 1977) in her child and through her child. Massive use of disavowal implies a regression toward narcissism in the affective life of the subject. This means that the other person, the object, is not recognized as a separate human being. He or she is considered as “a piece of oneself,” a mere projective appendage. The development of a mental space where a more evolved love relationship can take place between two human beings, separate and different from each other, may be severely impaired, as Shaw describes in traumatic narcissism (2014). Thus, the disavowal of ambivalence not only undermines our capacity to face and cope with reality (because it splits/mutilates the Ego), but also cripples our capacity to love. The consequences of these unconscious dynamics can be tragic. They may involve the partial or even total destruction of mind, body, and reality. They can lead us to the total annihilation of ourselves and/ or of other human beings: “Mors tua vita mea” (your death is my life). The relationship with the other person becomes a matter of life or death, a matter of survival. If we go back to the initial poem by Trilussa, to the imaginary dialogue between number one and number zero, we have come full circle. We have begun to understand the perverse psychology of religious cult leaders. We have uncovered their hidden affective lives within a narcissistic system of transgenerational traumatic subjugations. “What is developmentally traumatic is the narcissist caregiver’s rejection of the child’s subjectivity, and the caregiver’s refusal to allow intersubjective recognition to be mutual” (Shaw, 2014: XV). And we have complemented this insight with the study of necrophilia as the dangerous legacy of an unelaborated “primary paranoia” (Fornari, 1981) imprinted on the child during prenatal and perinatal life. Cult leaders belong to the uncanny universe of perversion, as theorized by Chasseguet-Smirgel (1984). Now we are ready to proceed further in our research, and begin to explore the two main features of religious cults: placental leadership and syncytial membership.

Chapter 2

Peoples Temple and Placental Leadership

The leader of a religious cult is always fantasized by his/her followers as a contemporary edition of a sacred figure that human beings have been worshipping from time immemorial: the sacred king. I will review some anthropological elements of sacred kingship (Quigley, 2005) from an ethnopsychoanalytical perspective (Nesci, 2006; Parin, Sturm, 2008) focusing on two aspects that are always described in these sacred characters. Sacred kings, in fact, appear in most myths and rituals with double functions: growers and “pharmakoi” (human drugs, healers/scapegoats) of their people. They are believed to: control the environment, let the people grow, and, at the same time, be able to take upon themselves all the evils of the community. For these reasons, I have named such ancient figures “placental leaders,” reappraising an idea that was first introduced in psycho-history by Lloyd deMause (1982). The placental leader is a living metaphor, embodying the filter between the homeland and the people whose relationship is conceived as a prenatal symbiosis. This medium or intermediary has a double function. On the one hand, it lets nutrients through from the environment (the homeland/body-ofthe-mother) into the community (the people/child). On the other, it expels the inner evils of the group in order to prevent its self-poisoning. An ethnopsychoanalytical approach can help us to understand the twofold nature of the earliest placental leaders, that is, the sacred kings, so often described in classic anthropological literature (Frazer, 1913; Westerman, l952; Hocart, 1970). The first distinctive quality of the sacred king lay in his ability to ensure growth. Rain, the fertility of the land, breeding of animals, and the life of the people themselves were believed to depend on his activities. The second 25

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distinctive quality of the sacred king lay in his therapeutic powers. The sacred king was supposed to be able to save and preserve his people by taking their evils upon his own shoulders. The institution of temporary kings is a well-known anthropological example of this second aspect of the sacred king. Temporary kings were used as doubles for their leader, the sacred king, and were doomed to die in his place, periodically, when the real sacred king was about to be sacrificed as scapegoat for the group (Girard, 1986; Vernant, 1988). The widespread custom whereby the sacred king was ritually murdered at the first sign of aging was intended to transfer the vital and beneficial substance (the soul of the people, the growth factor) from the king to his successor before any illness or natural decay might spoil it (Frazer, l913). The ritual murder of the leader, at the earliest sign of physical decay, took place because that sign was seen as an aboutface or betrayal. It revealed the leader in his second aspect, as an aged dysfunctional placenta that might poison rather than purify the blood of the inner baby and should thus be sacrificed as soon as possible to let the people/child be reimplanted within its homeland in a new cycle of symbiotic intrauterine life. The reason why I prefer to use the term “pharmakos” instead of scapegoat has to do with the fact that this ancient Greek word carries a double connotation. Not only does it express the “surmounted belief” (Freud, 1919) in a sacrificial victim that must be immolated for the delivery/salvation of the people (the scapegoat). The word “pharmakos” lies also at the roots of “pharmacy” and “pharmaceutical.” It conveys the idea of what for us, today, is a drug or remedy for illness. What is more, the term, “pharmakos” is twice double since it has two ambivalent meanings. The purifying victim could either be the noblest and holiest person or the most ignoble and sacrilegious member of the community. Similarly, a drug (pharmaceutical substance) can either be a medicine or a poison. Finally, the term “pharmakeus” means both: healer and sorcerer (and poisoner as well). The sacred king was “put to sleep,” that is, was poisoned or strangled (following typical intrauterine death patterns) because he had suddenly turned from a positive filter into a negative one. Now his presence was polluting rather than purifying for the people/child. By this time the sacred king had exhausted his capacity to absorb and neutralize the internal evils of the community. Instead, those evils had begun to take residence in his own body and threatened to spoil the valuable growth substance contained into it. This vital essence had to be transferred elsewhere (into the successor) whereas the body of the old king could now be used only as an uncanny “pharmakos” (i.e., a scapegoat, an ambivalent receptacle for all the evils of the community). That is why in some cultures the sacred king had to die beyond the boundaries of



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the homeland, carrying all evils away with him, beyond the borders of the kingdom and of life. From the perspective of the placental leader metaphor, the sacred king acted as the double of his people. He was considered to be the repository of the people’s soul. Therefore, it was he who acted out the fantasies of the people, in an effort to solve their collective extinction anxieties. It was he who acted out the cycles of growth/expulsion/return-into-the-womb-of-the-homeland. That is why the sacred king was put to death at the very peak of his biological cycle, when he had stopped growing and when the first white hair or sign of sexual weakening had appeared. The wives of the sacred king were not just meant for his pleasure and to make new children/members of the group. They were also controlling his sexual potency, every day. Once the funerary rites were over and death and the internal evils had been expelled from the community, the new king was crowned. Thus, the regenerated soul of the people was metaphorically reimplanted into the body of the motherland, and the growth cycle could begin again. The placental leader metaphor also sheds new light on some uncanny enthronement rituals. The obligation for the future king to reunite with his own mother, or to perform a symbolic equivalent of royal incest (de Heusch, 2009), could be a ritual representation of the re-implantation of the people/ child into the womb of the homeland/body-of-the-mother. Analogously the custom of insulting, soiling, and beating the prospective king could have had the meaning of testing his capacity to absorb and neutralize all the evils of the community. It was not until after the candidate had successfully submitted to such rituals, and demonstrated sufficient emotional detachment, that he could act as the king, the grower/pharmakos of his people, the filter for the exchanges between the homeland/body-of-the-mother and the people/child. This double aspect of the sacred king is symbolized, in the language of the unconscious (which always makes use of mental representations of organs and functions of the body), by the placenta. The placenta is the grower and pharmakos of mankind. It nurtures the developing child, but can also poison it. The placenta is the sacrificial victim of every human delivery, but it can also turn into a poisoner and kill both mother and child. It is used even today in medicine as a “panacea” (a remedy for all forms of illness). For example, there are public and private cord blood banks collecting and cryogenically storing the blood left over in the placenta and in the umbilical cord, after the birth of the baby, for future medical needs. The placenta is also used in cosmetics as a rejuvenating substance, particularly for treatment of skin and hair. So, we are not surprised to discover that, in view of all these characteristics, the placenta lends itself as the bodily symbol of primordial leadership.

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As a matter of fact, the placentae of certain African sacred kings were religiously preserved and worshipped as cult objects. Seligman and Murray identified the royal placenta as one of the insignias of the Egyptian pharaohs. They even went so far as to hypothesize that the existence of two tombs for one and the same pharaoh was related to the separate burials of his body and his afterbirth (Seligman and Murray, 1911). It has been also ascertained that, in Uganda, the Baganda people used to worship the placentae of their sacred king. In fact, all placentae held deep significance in this culture. The Baganda used to bury the afterbirth of every newborn child under a banana tree. The plantain would then be closely guarded in order to prevent any outsiders from stealing the soul of the dead placenta by eating the fruits. Such an event was considered a catastrophe greatly to be feared, a weakening of the whole clan. They believed it would bring about the death of the infant, whose soul would immediately follow the soul of the placenta, its double, which had been consumed by the outsider who had eaten the “forbidden fruit.” In this same culture, the umbilical cord of a prince was kept in a closed container, wrapped in bark cloth and decorated with seeds. This was called a “mulongo,” which means twin. The “mulongo” of the king was exposed to the light of each new moon until his death, when it was reunited with the “lwanga” (jaw bone) inside the “malolo” or temple where it was guarded in a chamber formed by bark cloth curtains (Roscoe, 1911). This metaphorical tree (as I would interpret the bark-enclosed chamber) is somehow similar to the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil in the garden of Eden, since it was from here that the people expected the oracle to come. The placental tree of the Baganda can be also compared to the Biblical Tree of Life (which grows near the Waters of Life, in the garden of Eden); to the mythical plant of life (which grows in Eridu and whose king, according to a Mesopotamian legend, is the owner and guardian); and to the cult tree of the Assyrians (a trunk decorated with metal bands and fillets). My hypothesis is that all these trees express different aspects of the same unconscious fantasy of the fetal-placental unit and its functions. The placental anatomy is in fact reminiscent of a tree: umbilical cord = trunk; main-bodyof-the-placenta = branches and leaves. Widengren argues that the sacred king “exhibits both an active and a passive aspect,” and acts as the representative of a dying and resurrecting tree/ god (1951: 60). I therefore assume that this tree that dies and is brought back to life for the delivery of the people is nothing but the placenta. In fact, from time immemorial, any archaic leader is ultimately identified with the afterbirth (deMause, 1982; 2002). So too is Hitler. According to Keeler (1960; 2010), the swastika was an ancient symbol of the tree of life (the placenta and the umbilical cord) as seen from above, whirling in the midst of the waters



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Figure 2.1  “The Tree of Life.” By Cornelius Fraenkel.

rushing out (the release of amniotic fluid after the breaking of membranes) at the very moment of the surfacing of human life on the earth (delivery). And so too is Jones. He left behind a poem, written in his own hand, entitled “Forever Jones,” in which the motif of the tree, predictably recurs (Jones J., 1969). Jones speaks from the grave, like an oracle, of his power to impart “surging strength” to those who are “forsaken” and “unloved.” The “tall pine” opens “an aging eye” and then falls over his tomb: the tree and the sacred king (who dies and is reborn) are together again by the tomb/womb of mother earth, to represent the double figure of the placental leader. THE PLACENTAL LEADER AS A GROWER OF THE PEOPLE/CHILD The “surging strength” which Jones claimed to possess was actually the first power of any sacred king, that of a grower. One of Jones’s typical “miracle” consisted of collecting money from his followers and making them believe that if they donated a certain amount they would receive it back multiplied according to their needs. Sometimes, in order to induce this conviction, he would fabricate a “miracle,” by sending an unexpected check to one of his

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followers whose needs he knew. This was then advertised in order to collect more money and bring about other “miracles.” In one attractive testimonial letter, for example, there is a picture of one of his followers, with a smiling face and a wad of dollar bills in her hands: “I gave $ 7.00 in an offering when Pastor Jones reminded us that those who gave with a cheerful heart would have their money multiplied. The very next day I received $ 1,738.87” (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 4). An analogous message was published in another testimonial letter, also duly documented with the name and photograph of the person who received the “miraculous” check: I am so glad I was in the meeting the day that you said that if we would give $7.00 our money could multiply. I gave my last $7.00 and went home knowing that more would come from somewhere. Shortly after that I received a check I didn’t expect for $500.00. Now that’s real multiplication! It came just at a time that I needed it most. THANK YOU for knowing my needs and granting my desires before I even need to ask! (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 5)

The members of the Peoples Temple had come to expect Jones to provide for their needs without having to do anything themselves. In this way, the prototype of magic fulfillment of the needs (the fetal-maternal symbiosis) was reestablished, thanks to the placental filter (the leader). The miracles system itself functioned in patterns that matched, on the unconscious level, the placental leader’s fantasy. Between the church and its members there was a continual exchange of messages which were carefully filtered by the leader and then sent back into circulation. Peoples Temple used to send its current and prospective members mimeographed form letters which provided spaces for accounts of “miracles” received and for requests for new “miracles” (“special needs”). Knowing these “special needs” of his followers, Jones was able to fabricate a “miracle” at any time. “Do you have a miracle or blessing to tell about? Share your story here . . . Give inspiration to others and see what additional blessings you receive for yourself!” Directly below this invitation, a blank ruled space was provided in order to ease the writing of the account of the miracle. The first row was already filled in with a typescript which imitated hand-writing: “Dear Pastor Jim.” At the bottom of the page a blank space was provided for the signature and there was also, in fine print, a statement authorizing the “Peoples Temple Christian Church, or Jim Jones, its pastor” to use the writing, wholly or partly, editing it “as is reasonable” (Peoples Temple, July 4, 1976). In the basement of Charles Garry, I found several such pre-printed miraclegathering letters. I assume they were frequently changed so as to rekindle interest, but the message remained essentially the same. Of all the letters



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that were returned, the “best” were chosen and edited by Jones and his staff. Then they were printed in an eye-catching format and mailed out again to all members. What was filtered out and never returned to the believers was the true picture of themselves, a reality full of ignorance, desperation, and misery. The placental leader worked this miracle, the only real miracle he ever performed. Here are three examples of real letters. Dear Belovin [sic] Pastor you are so greatifull [sic] to all of us I do no [sic] my son could have been kill but because of your so lovin [sic] and kind Jim you have heal [sic] me of so many things Cancer strokes and so many other thing [sic] you have done great wonders for me now Jim will you mediate [sic] for my left leg hurts me so bad I ask you to meditate for me please the misery grows so deep at times Jim thank you for your meditation at all times. (Peoples Temple, April 4, 1976) Dear Pastor Jim, I tank [sic] you for saving my life agin [sic] for the time number 42 had the picture you sent in my pokit [sic] wile [sic] the Doctor was pitting a nedle [sic] in my arm with a aera [sic] bubble in it. the arer [sic] just would not go in my—arm. (Peoples Temple, July 4, 1976) Pastor Jim I have your picture hanging in my bedroom and it is so comforting to have it where I can see it 1st thing in the morning and last thing at night. I sure miss being in Los Angeles as I used to attend your meetings before I became ill. I saw miracles being done at every meeting. My problem now is financial and an overweight problem. My husband stays out all night at times and says he is gambling and goes to someplace almost every night. (Peoples Temple, November 29, 1976)

This was the reality in the life of most of the followers of Peoples Temple. The placental leader returned something very different (and infinitely better) to them. It was like freshly oxygenated blood in place of the blood, poisoned with carbon dioxide and other catabolic substances, which flows from the fetus to the placenta in order to be cleared and to obtain vital nutrients. Jones extracted the evil reality from his people and replaced it with a fabricated illusion. A pamphlet from Peoples Temple offers an explicit version of this archaic motif of placental leadership, with Jones represented as a Tree of Life. Inside this pamphlet, in a double page, the world of Peoples Temple opens up as an arboreal universe, with leaves and boughs branching everywhere. On the left, two testimonials are superimposed: “miracles” of growth (multiplication of money) and healing. The double functions (nutritive and pharmaceutical) of the placental leader are also emphasized on the right, where the Tree of Life is praised because it bares always fruits and its leaves have the power to heal.

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Figure 2.2  Cover page of a brochure. By Peoples Temple, courtesy of Charles Garry.

The dotted space at the bottom (the “Dear Pastor Jones,” letter) was left blank on purpose, to enable his followers to express their “special needs” to their leader. In this easy way, Jim Jones was able to know their wishes and satisfy some of them, inducing new “testimonial letters” of “miracles” received. So, the cycle of the placental leader fulfilling the needs of his people/child could go on endlessly.



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Figure 2.3  Inner pages of the same brochure. By Peoples Temple, courtesy of Charles Garry.

THE “MIRACLE” OF PLACENTAL LEADERSHIP Now we are ready to examine one of the first “miracles” of Jones. The two distinctive qualities of the sacred king come up again here, with growth of Good and removal of Evil blended in one single magical transformation. In “No haloes please,” a manuscript typed entirely in capital letters and collecting various testimonials from members of Peoples Temple, we can read two different versions of this “miracle.” I have converted the text from capital letters, to make the reading of these long quotes less uneasy. In the first narrative of the miracle, the author writes that the daughter of the woman who had received it, often speaks of the time when her mother being ill and requesting prayer was told to draw a glass of water from the water fountain and drink it. Just a simple step of obedience, that anyone would be willing to do. But what happened is guaranteed to tax the faith of the incredulous, for in place of the cool clear colorless liquid that ordinarily issues forth when we press the button on the fountain, in her case it was sparkling red wine. Drinking it she was instantly healed of her condition as the prophet had promised she would be. (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 6)

The second version is written as a direct testimonial by the daughter of this woman who claimed to have been healed by Jones.

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One night my mother went up in front of the church and asked brother Jones to pray for her as she wasn’t feeling very well. He said to my niece who was there with me “you are an unbeliever go draw her a glass of water.” My niece did as she was told to do, she went to the water fountain just back of the pulpit and filled the glass. Returned with the water, brother Jones said “water into wine” and the water in the glass turned to a bright red. Immediately. I saw this happen with my own eyes. The water was given to my mother then, and told to drink it for the healing of her body, which she did (I asked her what it tasted like, and she said, “fruit juice”). (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 6)

The turning of water into wine was the visible external sign of an internal invisible transformation: liberation from Evil. We can see another uncanny representation of this presumed metamorphosis in one of the monthly letters sent by Jones from Guyana to the faithful who had remained in the motherland. In this case the “miracle” was performed through the use of the “anointed pictures” of Jones by his followers. Apparently the “anointed pictures” of Jones functioned as his doubles. They provided his presence where and when it was needed. At a deeper level, they acted as the double—as the placenta: they merged the patient/child back into the womb restoring the original symbiosis. The “blood” which covered portions of the photographs and blurred the image of Jones brought back to light the renewal of a primordial blood pact. It signified the return to a fusional state (the status nascendi = the original chaos) in which everything is imaginable because nothing is distinguishable. Jones made several statements denying the importance of the “miracles” in the success of his political-religious movement. Nevertheless, they were one of the central and basic rituals which held the members of Peoples Temple together. “No haloes please” attests to this fact unequivocally, with its interminably boring list of “faith healings.” My mother had a cataract on one of her eyes and brother Jones prayed for her and with his finger wiped the cataract off her eye. That same Sunday afternoon I saw him do the same thing for two other people. To me they resembled small bits of heavy skin and they were white, he pushed them off his finger on to the edge of the pulpit so everyone could see them. One Sunday night a small boy who had a decayed tonsil was brought forward upon the discernment of the fact by the prophet. He prayed for him and the decayed tonsil fell out of his mouth. His sister too was suffering, in her case it was from a growth in her nose, which caused much labour in breathing. When she was prayed for the growth popped out on the floor, and it sounded like a rock striking the floor. Another friend of mine who had a growth in her ear, was prayed for and the growth popped out in his hand. A heavy-set woman who happened to be sitting right in front of me was discerned to have something wrong in her body. Going to the rest room she passed a cancer, a bloody cancer as large as a dinner plate. I saw this with my



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Figure 2.4  Letter to the followers. By Peoples Temple, courtesy of Charles Garry.

own eyes. A small child was brought to brother Jones by it’s [sic] mother with growths all over it’s [sic] head. After praying for the child he took a cleanex and wiped all the growths off the child’s head. This same manner was applied to the cancer on the side of a man’s nose about this same time, Jim prayed and wiped the cancer off, just as simply as that. This concerns still another friend of mine who attended with his girlfriend. Both were asked to come and kneel

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at the altar, which they did. Jim layed [sic] hands on the girl and she spat up a large cancer. She is well today, living in Florida, that time she lived in Indiana. Another woman who had cancer vomited up the large bloody mess which splattered all over the pocket of his suit coat, soiling it so badly that he had to remove it. (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 6)

Where had all this deadly Evil gone—this uncontrolled multiplication of undifferentiated and destructive cells? Where was Jones’s suit coat “removed” to—the one which had been smeared with “bloody” malignant “growths?” The placental metaphor provides an answer to such questions. The thaumaturgical (miracle-working) or therapeutical function of placental leadership irrevocably condemned Jones to project the Evil he had absorbed. The pollution had to go back into the body of the mother (America, or the whole world) all in the hope that it might be metabolized and finally discarded. PARANOIA, OR THE NEED TO PROJECT EVIL OUT OF THE PEOPLE/CHILD These dynamics are clearly evident in the headlines of Peoples Forum, the newspaper of Peoples Temple. There are many different versions of the same message: “Earthquake” (Peoples Temple, 1, 1, April, 1976), “Global Catastrophe,” (Peoples Temple, 1, 2, April, 1976), “Baby Seals Slaughtered” (Peoples Temple, 1, 2, April 1976), “Invasion Of Killer Bees” (Peoples Temple, 1, 3, April, 1976), “Famine Strikes As World Weather Changes” (Peoples Temple, 1, 8, July, 1976), “The Death Penalty” (Peoples Temple, 1, 8, July, 1976), “Bad Omen” (Peoples Temple, 1, 8, July, 1976), “Plutonium Radiation Off S.F.—Unsafe Waters For 250,000 Years” (Peoples Temple, 1, 12, November, 1976), “Torture Epidemic” (Peoples Temple, 1, 12, November, 1976), and so on. Jones was feeding his followers with a paranoid and apocalyptic worldview. He was, in fact, giving them back the same Evil that he claimed to have extracted from their bodies (in the form of cancer or other illnesses). Even after their healings, the members of Peoples Temple would need a “Savior” from this evil world. A world on the eve of destruction. Jones spread this paranoid worldview out over his followers and perpetuated their compulsion to be “saved.” This apocalyptic vision is also captured in an image on one of the many flyers that were distributed to advertise Jones’s “Miracle Ministry of Christ” in the American cities where he took his “Temple Crusaders,” in order to collect supporters and offerings. The Knights of the Apocalypse, hooded and cloaked in white like the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), bring death and destruction over



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Figure 2.5  Cover page of a brochure. By Peoples Temple, courtesy of Charles Garry.

America in a dense, black, and bloody cloud (omen of the White K/Night? An unconscious allusion to the poisonous gases that had turned Jones’s father into an invalid during World War I? To Jones’s repressed sympathies for the KKK?). But in the face of the apocalypse, here comes “Jim Jones the One You’ve Been Waiting For,” with a grim Hitlerian scowl and a parody of the Fascist salute. His body embraces, encompasses, and towers over the Greyhound bus fleet used by the Peoples Temple to travel throughout America. The same message is repeated on the back of the leaflet: “Time is Short!” On the left Jim Jones is promising delivery from Evil, and, on the right, we have America searching for a refuge (Peoples Temple?) and divine protection (Jim Jones?). The “Anointed Prayer Cloth” was a little piece of fabric, supposedly from Jones’s robe. Here it was offered to the believers in exchange for their “Full Measure offering.” This was to be the talisman that would protect them (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 4). Anointed and blessed by “Pastor Jones,” it was supposed to function as the filter between the motherland/body-of-themother, which was becoming increasingly polluted (and polluting), and her people/child. It was the tangible symbol of the placental leader. By means of this apocalyptic fabrication, Jones led a group (composed largely of black people) out of a supposedly racist and Nazi America, in order to stage the very genocide that he had accused the “American Nazis” and the KKK of planning to perpetrate. This leaflet in fact depicts what Jones himself had disavowed and repressed; what he hated and loved at the same time in a

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Figure 2.6  Inner pages of the same brochure. By Peoples Temple, courtesy of Charles Garry.

totally split way. It depicts what he was constructing with his right hand while pretending to destroy with his left and vice versa. Jim Jones had come to incarnate the double figure of the placental leader (grower/pharmakos) thanks to his paranoid personality. In fact, he was psychologically split, absolutely unaware of the disavowed sides of his own character. Traits which he violently condemned reappeared with equal violence in his inner self or in his actual behavior. Hetero- and homosexual, harsh disciplinarian and belligerent transgressor, charitable and merciless, loyal husband and adulterer, atheist and believer, communist and Fascist, always extreme and ambivalent in all his manifestations. His doubleness can be seen in the juxtaposition of two images, one reflected (Jones as seen by his projections in his followers) and one direct (Jones speaking to an audience of supporters). This seems to me the only way to try to reconstruct the whole image of a perverse double. Let us begin with the cold image of another excerpt from “No haloes please,” a manuscript we have already quoted, written by one of Jones’s follower, a man who had been induced to believe he was St. Peter when Jones himself was living as Jesus Christ, in precedent incarnations. Dear reader, you are about to walk into the life of the most amazing personage that has ever graced this planet with his presence. [ . . . ] His life is one of great moral excellence, and the love and compassion flowing from him is not to be found anywhere else on this globe, search where you will. But he never trades



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on his spiritual endowments, humbly esteeming them as mere by-products of surrender and obedience to his guides. Graced with an uncommon umility [sic], Jim stakes no personal claim on any virtue or ability as of his own and originating with himself. Who could disagree that this is a most unique quality and an admiral [sic] one, in a world gone mad with self love and personal aggrandizement? [ . . . ] We deem the recording of the supernatural as pertaining to Jim’s ministry to be a matter of prime importance. And because of the most certain liklihood [sic] that deceivers shall arise to corrupt his word and teachings again, according to the dismal pattern set with him as Buddha, and again as Jesus Christ, it is of the utmost urgency that we who have companied with him, and are immersed in his teachings, should set the record straight once for all. This then is one such attempt in that direction, it is a true rendering of those things which we have heard and seen, while it is in itself an extremely limited treatise the source from whence it was drawn is by no means limited. And while in a sense, at least it is Jim’s story, in a larger and more noble sense it is a running account of the gentle and engaging manner with which the beings of a higher order have dealt with earth dwellers through the agency of the prophet. And without even consulting Jim I am sure that the latter sense is more in accord with his feelings on the subject. For ego fulfillment and inflation have no part nor lot with him, nae, the slightest taint of which, as welcome as the black plague is anathema to his spirit. Not craving the spotlight it nevertheless of necessity must rest upon him throughout this epistle, but only in order to illuminate, never to compliment nor flatter. But if the reader seems to detect an aura of worship unconsciously cast up about him by those whose witness will blend and harmonize with the writer, be not overly alarmed, it is not our studied desire to foster worship of our courageous friend, by his own very often and very solemn affirmation such a thing is completely alien to his own pleasure. But it is only fair in my persuit [sic] [ . . . ] to make it known while I am on the subject that Jim has been so informed by the guides that because of his faithfulness in his former re-incarnations as well as in his present existence, he is worthy of worship at this present time. It is a complement to his lowly self esteem that the very thought of which is utterly nauseating to him. Therefore let no man deceive you. And let nothing be read into this treatise nor be inferred from it that it is the writer’s design to present him as an object of worship. Could you be present in the numerous instances when it has been imperative that his works be extolled as well as his manner of life in order to counterbalance the negativity of hostile unbelievers, and could you behold the most uncomfortable squirming he does at such times you would then most gladly and forever disabuse your mind of any intent to do him homage. A revelation most recently made known to the group, a revelation which came gushing forth in a mighty blaze of annointing [sic] may seem to complicate this issue but let your mind be calmed by one more reiteration, “he does not want worship.” This is the revelation “you’re the finger of god, the incarnate god, the I am that I am that God sent.” This came gushing forth with such an urgent delivery that for a moment Jim himself seemed taken aback. Regaining his breath he said, “that’s the first time I have ever said that.” (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 6)

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The main feature of this text is its absolute doubleness and ambiguity in form, with a leveling of distinctions through the generalized use of capital letters and the massive recourse to negatives and double negatives, repetitions, and inversions. There is doubleness and ambiguity in substance too, with continual contradictions. The episode at the end of the quote, in particular, is paradigmatic of this structural doubleness. Jones is described as passively transferring a message like a medium or an oracle, as if possessed by a spirit or a god. First, he utters words affirming his own divinity, then he seems surprised about it, as if a dual nature—human and divine—abided within himself. At the same time, the author of “No haloes please” seems to suffer from the same splitting when he contradicts himself by writing that “Jim has been so informed by the guides that because of his faithfulness in his former re-incarnations as well as in his present existence, he is worthy of worship at this present time” and then, just after a few lines, by affirming “let nothing be read into this treatise nor be inferred from it that it is the writer’s design to present him as an object of worship.” The cold ambiguity of this text only becomes comprehensible when linked with the burning ambiguity of the “living word” of Jones. On July 31, 1977, after having taken refuge in Guyana in order to escape an imminent mass media campaign by a group of ex-members of Peoples Temple, who were determined to expose his abuse of his followers, Jones spoke via radio to a group of supporters who had gathered in the Peoples Temple headquarters in San Francisco. His speech is split. Words as sounds and words as shared linguistic meanings are juxtaposed as two separate realities. Jones claimed that the only point of reference, the only criterion of truth lay in the tone of his voice and not in the significance of his words (which were actually condemning him, without appeal). His speech is not only split. It is double too. The choral applause of the group gathered around him, at Jonestown, made up an integral part of it, as in some television shows. In fact, Jim Jones was always supported by his group when he spoke in public. It was the applause of his own group that created a positive atmosphere around his duplistic words. The enthusiastic cheers of his “people” steered the neutral listener in a powerfully emotional direction so that his words would be perceived in a favorable light and nobody would dare to raise any question about their actual meaning. Let us read this uncanny transcript, now. This is ridiculous . . . Such charges that I have preached that I am God and I don’t even believe there is a God. How can you preach that you are God when you don’t even believe there is a Goddam God? [thunderous applause] [ . . . ] We’ve never made any emphasis upon healings though I can heal and I am sure people are on the line listening . . . they can take a voice for it . . . I can heal and



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I have never made any claims about those healings. I’ve said that’s not important whether healing is real or not real. What the hell’s the difference? (Jones J., July 31, 1977)

This is an important point. In classic logic, which Jones adheres to in most of his statements, there is a clear difference between true (real) and false (not real). Jones erases this difference by assuming the implicit postulate that he himself—as the double of the group—is the criterion of truth. “I’ve said that’s not important whether healing is real or not real” makes sense only in this perspective. It was only because he said that the mental function of reality testing could be suspended with regard to the healings, that the group (for which he was the double) actually did so, specifically, on this subject. In other contexts, true and false were neatly and clearly separated. All these lies and concoctions . . . the one that came out pretending to have information about healings . . . tried to blackmail us [ . . . ] They tried to blackmail us . . . [applause] Three of them [ . . . ] I’m telling you . . . You can tell the sincerity in my voice and the whole congregation knows them . . . There’s not one Goddam one of them that isn’t a criminal and did not suggest terrorist actions, killing the police and killing the President of the United States even. What kind of a business is this . . . for establishment media to pick them up and dignify complaints against an institution that’s [sic] done nothing but good and a Pastor that’s [sic] certainly lives as high an ethical life as possible. [ . . . ] I say challenge these bastards [ . . . ] show what these characters are: one of them embezzled money from a bank, another molested a child, another one involved themselves in the making of weapons. We put them out. We were too dam generous: we should have exposed them. We were too kind. They made weapons and bragged about killing police and there’s 100 affidavits to that degree. I notice now they cover themselves with a big lie by saying that they had to sign incriminating things. [ . . . ] Challenge the sons of bitches to take lie detector tests! Challenge them to take polygraph tests! Challenge them to take truth serum! See if they can take it! They can’t because they are all a bunch of criminal provocateurs and this is certainly sounding in my voice . . . The sincerity, you can’t help but detect. I’m telling you: every dam [sic] one of them are blackmailers, criminals and violent terrorists! [ . . . ] This evil upon us and imagine all these kinds of insidious things that they have accused us is because it’s in their own mind and they have done it in their own deeds. You can’t see in somebody else if it is not in yourself. I am appalled. . . . As I said, it is very difficult when reality is worse than your nightmares. (Jones J., July 31, 1977)

Jones accuses his accusers in such a way that he provides clear evidence of the truth of their accusations. The fact that the pastor of a church of the Disciples of Christ called himself an atheist, for example, was tantamount to admitting lack of sincerity. Moreover, it was potentially harmful to himself

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and to his group whose very survival depended upon their religious cover and its related privileges. The admission that there were one hundred self-incriminating affidavits from ex-members of the Peoples Temple was evidence against himself and not his accusers. Those affidavits actually contained the disavowed desires of the leader (such as “killing the President of the U.S.”) just as all the other accusations (bank embezzlement, perverse acts, blackmailing campaigns, etc.) that Jones directed against his accusers were his own projections. For the part of the leader/double that could not or would not recognize the “evil” or “bad” aspects within himself, the “exposé” of his accusers must have been a truly disorienting return of the repressed: a reality worse than a nightmare. FROM GROWER TO PHARMAKOS: END OF A PLACENTAL LEADER In many different cultures, the sacred king was ritually put to death as soon as his capacities as a grower of the people seemed to be diminished. This probably happened even in prehistorical Greece, the cradle of our civilization. According to Vernant (1988) the Greek pharmakos was the double of the sacred king, destined to die in his place in order to purify and regenerate the community just like the carnival kings. Certain aspects of the annual ritual of the expulsion of Evil in ancient Athens now become essential to the understanding of the archaic figure of the placental leader. First of all, the Athenian scapegoat was double: there were two pharmakoi, a man and a woman. For one year, they were treated and revered as sacred figures. They could eat in every home and be served by everyone in the city. Then, when the day of the ritual would come, they were stripped naked (except for garlands of dried figs, black and white according to the sex they represented) and brought in procession through all the streets of the city so that everyone could perform the ritual. Every man should try to touch with a fig branch the naked genitals of the male pharmakos while every woman should try to do the same with the female one, as a good omen for the fertility and prosperity of the community. Through physical contact, they believed they were transferring into the pharmakoi all evils and, specifically, the most dangerous risk for the whole group: extinction. Every citizen was a “child” transferring into the placental leader/pharmakos (through an umbilical cord = branch-of-fig) his/her own impotence or sterility, getting rid from his/her own extinction anxiety, due to the high mortality of babies and mothers at, or immediately after, delivery.



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Once the ritual had been completed, finally, the sacred figures were expelled. In earlier times they were stoned, their bodies burnt, and their ashes scattered to the wind. In historical times, these pharmakoi were the most amorphous beings that could be found, in the sense that they lacked any specific identity. They were the rejects of the community. However, there was a myth connecting the origins of the ritual with the Athenians’ responsibility for the death of Androgeos, son of Minos, king of Crete, who was killed by the bull of Marathon. This would confirm the hypothesis that the pharmakos, double of the sacred king, was originally the king himself and, later, one of his sons, until it was gradually replaced with a marginal figure of the community (Vernant, 1988). Given this premise, we can now trace the Athenian ritual, step by step, in the story of Jim Jones. I will begin by analyzing how Jones was so firmly convinced he had absorbed the Evil that had plagued his followers that, in the last period of his life, he actually accused them of being the cause of his “illness.” On August 8, 1978, for example, he publically claimed he had lung cancer (which was not true) insinuating that it was because he had recently healed his wife of that kind of tumor (which was not true as well). There is a testimonial of this “miracle” because it was used for one of the monthly letters that were sent from Jonestown to the believers in America in order to maintain their faith in Jim Jones (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 12). Above and beyond the text signed by Marceline, the most important thing in my view is the non-verbal message conveyed in the images reproduced on this letter. They suggest the idea of a sun which is about to be covered by the darkness. A death needed for new life to surge forth. The unconscious message conveyed by the letter becomes all the more significant if we recall that the wife is a classic metaphor of the church as a group. It is because the leader has healed them all of cancer that he is dying. The two inside pages of the letter also betray the fact that the leader feels he has reached his peak as a grower (“I know we have lived”). Jones is now ready to turn himself around and reveal his second aspect, he is ready to play out his role of pharmakos. In this sense, the allusion to the Christian Easter miracle is also highly significant. Jesus takes the sins of the world upon himself by dying on the cross and resurrecting, after three days, to eternal life. Through this sacrifice all humanity is saved and the gates of Paradise are opened once more. Pretending to be identified with Jesus at Easter, Jones betrays that he is already speaking as a leader/pharmakos rather than a leader/ grower. The last page of the letter completes the figure of Jones as pharmakos by introducing the motif of persecution. Those who struggle to liberate the world from suffering “are often the objects of harassment.” By the way, all the

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researchers who tried to reconstruct the Guyana period of the Peoples Temple agree on this point: Jones felt overwhelmed by all the Evil he claimed to have absorbed from the bodies and minds of his “children.” He felt that it was killing him, that his body was now thoroughly poisoned and spoiled: “There have been thousands who sought after me because of being a leader wanting me for sex or whatever. But one thing I learned from that experience—People only use you [ . . . ] People drain me down” (Jones J., l978). The uncanny confession of Jim Jones about “thousands who sought after me because of being a leader wanting me for sex” doesn’t make any sense if we think of him as a pastor, but makes sense if we interpret his leadership as that of a sacred king. In this direction, also the move to Guyana (which means the “land of the many waters” in Amerindian language) appears as a regressive escape into the jungle, the primordial motherland, the forest where the Rex Nemorensis studied by Frazer as prototype of the sacred king was reigning, from time immemorial. Actually, Jones was poisoning himself, by taking self-prescribed overdoses of antibiotics and psycho drugs. But, in his own mind, he was the victim of a plot, a scapegoat. Already earlier in his long career in service of the “forsaken” and the “unloved” he had collapsed under the excessive burden he had taken upon his shoulders. But this time it was different; this time there was no longer any chance for recovery. Jim Jones had literally fled to Guyana after having carefully organized the last exodus of Peoples Temple. From there, he was prepared to celebrate the final phase of his placental leadership and make the final move to win the title of sacred king: death as pharmakos. In recent months, we have come to devote more and more of our time to our efforts to get people rehabilitated from lives of crime, drug addiction, or antisocial behavior. [ . . . ] We have been described as one of the most effective groups in San Francisco in fighting crime. [ . . . ] Our efforts in providing structure for young people, and our emphasis on individual responsibility, combined with the healthy lifestyle at our mission abroad, has brought about marvelous transformations in many lives. We didn’t begin the mission program for that purpose; our basic intention was (and still is) to feed, clothe, and house people in accordance with the central teachings of the humanistic Christ. (Peoples Temple, 2, 3, July, 1977)

The mission in Guyana, which had begun as one of the many projects of the leader/grower (“To feed, clothe, and house people”), thus became the crucial enterprise of the leader/pharmakos (“fighting crime”). One month later, with Jones safe and secure in his isolated community in the jungle of Guyana, the Peoples Forum could already publish an article entitled “Hunger in U.S.A.” (the leader/grower had gone away). At the same



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time, they could write, in bold print and surrounded by two rows of stars, “The Temple is saving taxpayers millions of dollars by providing an answer to the youth crime crisis” (Peoples Temple, 2, 4, August, 1977). The pharmakos machine was now in operation and would not halt until Jones had definitively liberated the motherland (America) from all the people he claimed he wanted to rehabilitate, all those outcasts he had collected during his travels throughout the country. And it was to be a morbid story of sex and the ability to procreate that would trigger Jones’s flight from the United States since he refused to go to court regarding his presumed fatherhood of the son of two of his ex-followers (Stoen, 2015). Although sometimes confused, inverted, or in metaphorical form, all the elements of the Athenian ritual can be found again in the story of the leader/ pharmakos of Peoples Temple: gathering and collecting the “evils” of the motherland by traveling through its territory, receiving blows or attacks centered on sex and the ability to procreate, being “stoned,” his body burnt, and his ashes scattered to the wind. For this was ultimately to be, in reality, not metaphorically, the end of Jim Jones. According to recent news (Offredo, 2014), the ashes of Jim Jones were actually scattered along the Atlantic Ocean, from an airplane, in a cold spring day of 1979.

Chapter 3

Peoples Temple and Syncytial Membership

Scholars are studying the relationships between the individual and the group with increasing interest after the events of September 11, 2001, an act of terrorism whose collective suicide aspects have been interpreted by a sociologist as associated with an overwhelming sense of belonging to, and identifying with, the culture of their own group (R. Hassan, 2011; 2014). Working on similar issues, a team of psychologists is doing research on the concept of “identity fusion” and the interplay of personal and social identities in extreme group behavior (Swann et al., 2009). I will quote from their work: Whereas personal identities refer to properties of the individual such as intelligent or extravert, group identities refer to the groups with which individuals align themselves, such as American, Democrat, or family member. Although both personal and group identities are integral aspects of the larger self-system, most people draw a sharp distinction between the two. In fact, just as a physical barrier (the skin) separates people’s bodies from the external world, a psychological divide (the self-other barrier) separates their personal identities from the identities of others. Some individuals, however, may feel one or fused with a group. For fused individuals, the self-other barrier is blurred and the group comes to be regarded as functionally equivalent with the personal self. Instances of fusion are particularly common among members of relational groups, wherein group members have extremely close personal relationships with one another (e.g., family members, close friends, etc.). Nevertheless, people may also become fused with collective groups, even though they are unacquainted with many, if not most, of the other group members (e.g., country or political party). (995)

Interestingly, this research team made recourse to a pictorial measure in order to index fusion. 47

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Such measures typically depict the self and the group as separate entities (e.g., two circles) and ask respondents to indicate how much the two entities overlap. Such measures were ideal for our purposes because they represent a straightforward index of degree of alignment with the group that can draw on conscious as well as nonconscious material. In addition, pictorial measures can offer an option in which an object representing an autonomous self (e.g., a small circle) could overlap completely with the object representing the group (e.g., a larger circle). (997)

Following this approach, “the fusion construct” makes possible the assumption “that personal and social identities may combine synergistically to complement and reinforce one another” and helps understand why fused persons endorse extreme behaviors (Swann et al., 2009; Gómez et al., 2011; Gómez, Vázquez, 2015). This new “fusion construct” parallels the conclusions of my ethnopsychoanalytical research on Jim Jones, where I had defined Peoples Temple as a “syncytial group” using a bodily metaphor. According to Anzieu, the body is the classical metaphor of the group (1976). Even today, in Italy, the children of the elementary schools learn this metaphor from the famous apologue of Menenius Agrippa (494 B.C.). According to the legend, the Roman plebeians were angry at the patricians who enjoyed all sort of privilege. So, they decided to leave Rome and retire to the Sacred mountain nearby. In his allegorical speech, Agrippa compared the greedy patricians to the stomach, and the plebeians to the members/limbs of the social body: only through their cooperation could the whole community live and grow. A similar metaphor was used by Saint Paul in order to strengthen the unity among the proliferating Christian churches, as well as among the members of every single church. For as with the human body which is a unity although it has many parts—all the parts of the body, though many, still making up one single body—so it is with Christ. We were baptized into one body in a single Spirit, Jews as well as Greeks, slaves as well as free men [ . . . ] God has composed the body so that [ . . . ] each part may be equally concerned for all the others. If one part is hurt, all the parts share its pain. And if one part is honored, all the parts share its joy. Now Christ’s body is yourselves, each of you with a part to play in the whole. (1 Cor. 12,12–21)

The extraordinary progress of our biomedical sciences allows us to reconsider this metaphor of the group as body (the social body, with its members/ organs and functions) from a microscopical rather than a macroscopical perspective. In this way, we can reach a deeper insight into the metaphor itself and re-member the biological origins of the human being from a cultural



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perspective—a digression which will prove most fruitful toward understanding the unconscious structure and dynamics of the primordial collective organization: the “syncytial group.” I am indebted with Eugenio Gaddini (the psychoanalyst who translated Winnicott from English into Italian) for the use of this expression. I still have a vivid memory of his clinical seminars at the Roman Institute of Psychoanalysis, in the 80s. During one of these meetings, I talked about my research on Peoples Temple and described their group as a “fusional organization.” On that occasion, he used the term “syncytial” which, as we will see in this chapter, is much more correct and brings us back to a prenatal/prehistorical psychosocial scenario. THE BEGINNING OF LIFE The zygote is the first cell of the new human being, born of the fertilization of the ovum by a spermatozoon. Through a series of cell divisions, it is gradually transformed into a blastocyst. This is a bubble-like cellular organization containing and protecting the cluster of cells out of which the actual embryo will develop. In rapid reproductive activity, the outer cells of the blastocyst become differentiated into two layers, one internal and one external (cyto- and syncytio-trophoblast). The syncytio-trophoblasts have a characteristic which is absolutely unique among all human cells. They transform into a syncytium, that is, a multinucleate mass of protoplasm resulting from a fusion of the original cells. Thus, the syncytium is a cellular organization with no limits. There are no boundaries (membranes) separating its cells. The syncytial layer of the blastocyst can infiltrate the uterine mucosa and allow the embryonic core to be implanted into it. At this stage, the syncytium begins to hollow out a network of empty spaces within itself, where the maternal blood will later flow in juxtaposition with the vascular system of the embryo. In this way, the placenta begins to develop as a double organ formed of maternal cells on the one hand, and embryonic cells, on the other. Its syncytial layer becomes the lining of the tree-like formations that branch into the placental hematic lacunae of maternal origin and provide for the exchange of substances between the mother and the embryo. This syncytium is the essential component of the “placental barrier,” which functions as a filter and prevents any dangerous mixing between maternal and fetal blood. The syncytium lines a garden of trees of life (the “tree-like villi” of the “chorion frondosum”) growing near the waters of life (the “intervillous spaces”). These are real and proper lakes of maternal blood surrounded by the maternal (“decidual”) and fetal (“chorionic”) disks of the placenta.

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So, the structure of the placenta is evocatively reminiscent of the landscape of the Earthly paradise (“paradeisos” means “garden,” in ancient Greek) as we have already seen thanks to the painting by Cornelius Fraenkel in the previous chapter. PREHISTORICAL HUMAN GROUPS With this background, we can look for new insights into the psychological structure of primordial human groups. I consider Briffault’s contribution very important in this regard. One of the most fundamental and startling differences between the mentality of primitive humanity and the current conception of human nature, is the degree, almost inconceivable to us, in which the sentiment of individuality is undeveloped in the primitive mind. [ . . . ] A savage will not only identify himself with an animal, or a tree, or even a stone; he will say that his son or his brother is “himself,” he will tell you with no perception of inconsistency that he is here and that he is at the same time somewhere else. He quite seriously regards any detached portion of his body as a part of himself; his hair, nailparings, spittle are accounted parts of his person, and what befalls them after they are separated from the body affects him also. His clothes and his name are part of himself, and have to be protected from injury just as he desires to be protected. In the same way, an injury to a member of the group to which he belongs, to one who is one flesh with him, is an injury suffered by himself. He resents it not by virtue of magnanimous sentiments or elevated principles of honour, or sublime ethical faiths, but because of the hazy conceptions of individuality which permit his complete identification with the group. He does not think in terms of his ego and its interests, but in terms of the group-individual. (Briffault, 1927: 499)

Briffault’s “primitive” human groups can be re-interpreted as psychologically “syncytial.” The individual boundaries (membranes) between single members (cells) tended to disappear in order to strengthen the group’s ability to implant itself into the environment. In fact, an excess of individualization would have been counterproductive for the survival of the human species during the initial phases of its ecological adaptation. But no dynamic equilibrium is perfect. The obvious advantages of a syncytial organization (such as the implicit possibility of raising children collectively, and compensating for any disabilities of individual natural mothers), could be offset, at times, by the disadvantages. Above all there was the danger that any inner evil would wreak havoc in the whole structure rather than being limited to one single member of the group.



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We arrive so to this uncanny discovery: the syncytial nature of primordial human groups was their best tool to implant and adjust in a difficult environment but also, at the same time, it was their worse risk factor of annihilation. Natural and cultural disasters (floods, maternal deaths, miscarriages, aging or death of a sacred king) were able to trigger an overwhelming emotional reaction associated with destructive (suicidal and homicidal) behaviors by the whole collective structure: the syncytial group formed by its group-individuals. Anthropological literature seems to confirm this risk. Róheim (1945) for example, commenting on Tylor’s studies (1903) on the funerary rites of “primitive” cultures, formulated (and rejected) the “impossible” hypothesis that human groups were originally so fusional in their organization that they were exposed to the danger of collective suicide every time there was a single death in the community. Thus, the mourners may fast or they may deprive themselves of the staple food; they may lacerate their body or cut their hair, or they may cut their finger joints. Tylor has interpreted these customs as instances of sacrificial substitution where the part represents the whole; the amputated finger joint stands for the whole person of the mourner. If this is interpreted as meaning historical sequence it would lead to the impossible conclusion that whole groups of people or even whole tribes were once killed off after every single death. (Róheim, 1945: 35)

Paradoxical as it is, I think this “impossible conclusion” is not impossible at all. In the next chapters, we will deal with some historical precedents of collective suicide which seem to support it. Here I will only try to make this hypothesis more understandable through an analysis of the unconscious dynamics involved in two ancient funerary rites. Among the Warramunga, whenever someone in the group was about to die, all the other members would pile themselves up on top of him in a human mountain. They would then inflict wounds upon themselves and lament incessantly while crushing him to death under their weight. When death occurred, the rite would be repeated and the corpse removed from the village. Eventually, the village itself was destroyed and deserted (Spencer and Gillen, 1904). The natural death of a single member was experienced as a mutilation of the social body, a bleeding wound inflicted on all the members of the group, who did not want to be separated from him but also feared being dragged into death together with him. In a syncytial culture, precisely because of the absence of limits/boundaries, imitation and dramatization were the prevalent psychodynamic mechanisms of the group-individuals. If a death occurred, everything was in jeopardy. The social body, which had been symbolically destroyed (and in some cases even concretely) had to be reimplanted elsewhere.

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The dead person and the deserted village had become the double placenta of the group, the pharmakos, the tangible sign of collective disavowal of the painful aspects of human existence. Here we have the disavowal of death (the natural limit of life), of the individual (the natural limit of the group), and of ambivalence (the natural limit of our affective life). The syncytial group needed to experience itself as an evil-free community, so it claimed to love the man it was killing. This was their way of perpetuating the group illusion of symbiosis with the homeland/mother. Actually, the ritual murder of the dying member prevented the group from becoming aware of natural death as the inherent limit of human life. Death was transformed from a natural and individual event, which was passively experienced, into a collective and cultural event which was actively provoked. A slightly more developed pattern (based on the dynamics of oral introjection, in addition to imitation and dramatization) can be found among the Duau people of the Normanby Island. In Duau society we have the susu (breast), the group of those who are descended from the same uterine ancestor, as the social unit. [ . . . ] The members of this fictive unity have “one body” and are supposed never to harbor any hostility against each other. But after each death, that is whenever the mother-child unity is disrupted, they are tested by eating bwabware [the poison, author’s note] which will automatically kill them for any hostile emotions against the members of their own susu. (Róheim, 1945: 87)

The poison ordeal after each single death was so widespread in Africa during the period of the slave trade as to bring about a considerable depopulation (Frazer, 1919). And yet it continued to be practiced until it was suppressed by the European colonizers. The people in fact submitted to it willingly, convinced that they were demonstrating their own innocence both to the dead person and to the group. The disavowal of dying as the natural limit of every individual life, contributed to the cultural interpretation of death as murder by magic. Any death represented a sign of hostility within the group. It was experienced as a threat of dismemberment for the whole community. The casualties of the poison ordeal neutralized the painful scandal of limits (natural death, individuality, ambivalence) by reconstituting a metaphorical placenta which could be discarded. In this way, the syncytial group could be regenerated, like a snake that molts its old skin. It could then be reimplanted into the womb of the mother (the homeland of the people). From this perspective, it becomes possible to hypothesize that primordial human groups may have tried to circumscribe the dangerous experience of syncytial (unlimited) mourning through the institution of a subgroup: the sacred king and his court, that is, the placental leader and his own syncytial



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group. In this way, the only really catastrophic mourning occurred in the case of the sacred king, and the only people really hit by his death were the members of his own syncytial group (his court, his closest relatives, his slaves, and so on). The primordial human groups thus began to detach themselves from “the mothers” (Briffault, 1927) and take birth as newborn children. They became gradually and progressively more separated from the body of the motherland, in which they had been contained and nurtured in ever returning cycles by means of symbolic placentae that had to be periodically sacrificed. FROM COLLECTIVE SUICIDE TO GENOCIDE AND WAR This cultural passage from primordial human groups (which were instinctually maternal and syncytial) into a new organization, where the placental leader and his own syncytial group were separated as a subgroup from the main stream of the community, had an important consequence. The imitative pattern of syncytial mourning (like that practiced by the Warramunga, who experienced every single death as the end of their own world) was limited to the restricted circle of the sacred king and his court (who acted as the pharmakoi of the people), while the rest of the community could resort to much more liberating collective defense mechanisms: from collective suicide to genocide and war. These three death rituals are deeply interconnected. They imply different degrees of introjection or projection in the working through of in-group hostility. Collective suicide is based on the incorporation of an external destructive object (e.g., poison), while genocide and war are based on the paranoid construction of an enemy in order to prevent self-destructive behaviors. Reviewing the studies of Strehlow (1908), Róheim (1945), and Fornari (1974), it is possible to understand war as the paranoid (projective) elaboration of mourning. In my terms, genocide and war transfer the catastrophical experience of syncytial mourning onto a subgroup (genocide of a minority) or onto an external group (war), in order to limit self-destructive behaviors (collective suicide rituals, like the poison ordeal). In this perspective, collective suicide can be interpreted as the other side of the coin of war. This would be the most ancient side, which refers to the psychology of the group-individual and is based on symbiosis and imitation, that is on the disavowal of limits within the syncytial structure. It is only with the progress of individuality that genocide and war become possible. In a community of group-individuals the death of one must be imitated by all. Collective suicide could have developed as a mourning ritual. The institution of a subgroup consisting of a placental leader and his own syncytial

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group could only have limited collective suicide, not abolished it. In the attempt to overcome it, new rituals had to be developed: genocide and war. They have been cast in the same mold. They are both close copies of an ancient sacrificial pattern: the killing of a double in place of oneself. This is a pattern born out of the ritual ambience of the poison ordeal where, in many cases, substitutes were chosen (relatives, friends, slaves, animals, etc.) to replace the original subjects. Here I will report one example of this ritual, as practiced by the Angoni and the Mokololo in Africa. Sometimes the poison is taken by proxy, being administered to a dog or a fowl, instead of to the accused man or woman, and according as the animal or bird survives or perishes, so is the accused innocent or guilty. To indicate or to establish the relationship between the two, each dog or fowl is tethered by a string [a concrete metaphor of the umbilical cord, author’s note] to the person whom it represents. This mode of demonstrating innocence or guilt by deputy is, or was, often resorted to among the Angoni and Mokololo, when the somewhat despotic chiefs of these tribes commanded the inhabitants of a whole village or even district to submit to the ordeal for the purpose of discovering a real or imaginary criminal. (Frazer, 1919: 381)

Through a series of progressive shifts, the familiar victims (the friendly doubles) were replaced by unfamiliar ones (the strangers/enemies) who then became the symbolic placenta of the group. Indeed, the doubles/victims of the poison ordeal (witches and sorcerers) may be placed along a continuum with the victims of genocide (always accused of poisoning or polluting the pure blood of the majority) and with the victims of war (the external enemies). Under different names and in different forms, but with monotonous repetitiveness, the social body seems to reconstruct and discard a double/placenta in the attempt to resolve the disavowed problem of its in-group hostility. From this perspective, we can better understand why so many “primitive” cultures considered war as a means for providing themselves with sacrificial victims/doubles. And why rumors of mass poisoning are so frequent in times of crisis (Loewenberg R., 1943). The disavowed myth and ritual of the poison ordeal is always ready to reemerge and be acted out during historical periods of collective regression. A spectacular example of the process of replacing human victims with inanimate doubles has been unearthed in Asia: the Terra Cotta army of Ch’in Shih-Huang-ti, or “First August Emperor of China.” In 221 B.C., this emperor unified the country, universalized the writing system and the law code, and standardized weights and measures throughout the empire. He was responsible for the construction of the so called “Straight Road” (Chic Tao), as well as the renowned Great Wall (Ch’ang Ch’eng, literally the “Long



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Wall”). When he died, in 210 B.C., many of his concubines were obliged to follow him in death. Many of the men who worked on the building of his monumental tomb were buried with him also, so that no one could learn its secrets. But his powerful army was “mercifully” allowed to survive. In grandiose (if double-edged) response to a contemporary trend according to which funerary victims were gradually being replaced by wood or pottery figurines, Shih-Huang-ti ordered the construction of a terra cotta replica of his entire army, complete with officers and warriors in battle array, horses, chariots, and weapons. These life-like figures were to be buried along with him, in a gigantic mausoleum, in lieu of the real living and breathing human beings and animals that would otherwise have been sacrificed. “It was filled with valuables of all kinds, surrounded by underground rivers of mercury, and lined with bronze. On the ceiling of the vault were depicted the constellations of heaven and on the floor the extent of the emperor’s empire” (Twitchett and Loewe, 1986: 82). Metaphorically, the dead emperor was put to rest somewhere between heaven and earth. He was isolated in this neutral and marginal position, so that his sacred power could remain within the country/womb-of-the-motherland without endangering the homeland and the people. For all his immense power while living, in death he was treated like all the other taboo persons of “primitive” cultures—sacred kings, murderers, mourners, menstruating or lochiating women. LEVIATHAN Now we can approach the biological metaphor with further accuracy. In the social body, the placental leader represents an organ of boundary. Structurally double, it belongs both to the body-of-the-mother/motherland (the “decidual” disk of the placenta) and to the fetal-placental unit/people (the “chorionic” disk). Moreover, it plays a twofold function: grower and pharmakos of the people/child. An artistic representation (by Abraham Bosse) of this unconscious fantasy, in a more evolved (individualized) version, can be found in the frontispiece of the first edition of Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes, 1651; 2010). The king is depicted as being born out of the territory of the motherland, consisting of city and countryside. His arms and hands are holding the double symbols of power (political and religious), and his body consists of an infinite number of individual members. This image documents and clarifies the double nature of the placental leader, as well as his double function of growth of the people and elimination of its inner evil. The vividness and immediacy of the image make it easier

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Figure 3.1  Frontispiece of Leviathan. By Abraham Bosse.

to understand the catastrophic anxieties of the people whenever a king died. Unconsciously, that death was experienced as the dismemberment of the social body and the consequent pollution of the body of the motherland. The English jurists tried to resolve this periodical crisis (the turmoils and struggles for succession after the death of the sovereign) by working out the theory of the two bodies of the king (Kantorowicz, 1957; 2016). This is an extremely interesting theory, which confirms the double pattern of placental leadership by constructing a new version of the archaic sacred king. The King has in him two bodies, viz., a Body natural, and a Body politic. His Body natural (if it be considered in itself) is a Body mortal, subject to all Infirmities that come by Nature or Accident, to the Imbecility of Infancy or old Age, and to the like Defects that happen to the natural Bodies of other people. But his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government, and constituted for the Direction of the people, and the Management of the public wealth, and this Body is utterly void of Infancy, and old Age, and other natural Defects or Imbecilities, which the Body natural is subject to. (7)

Translating the theory of the king’s double body into archaic terms, we could say that the “Body politic” contained the soul/life principle of the



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people which, on the death of the king’s “Body natural,” would be transferred into the body of the successor, making him double in turn. Another document of the same period explains the fundamental characteristics of the king’s “Body politic.” As to this Body the King never dies, and his natural Death is not called in our Law [ . . . ] the Death of the King, but the Demise of the King, not signifying by the Word (Demise) that the Body politic of the King is dead, but rather that there is a Separation of the two Bodies, and that the Body politic is transferred and conveyed over from the Body natural now dead, or now removed from the Dignity royal, to another Body natural. So that it signifies the Removal of the Body politic of the King of this Realm from one Body natural to another. (13)

The theory of the double body of the king was a sign of (and probably contributed to) the reduction of the catastrophic anxieties of the people in relation to the death of their leader. It was a process that had begun in ancient times, with the institution of the sacred king/double of the people in a social body which was much more syncytial (and therefore more exposed to selfdestruction) than the one represented by the consciousness of the Tudor age. In the image of the frontispiece of the first edition of Leviathan, in fact, the king’s subjects are individualized, separated by boundaries/cellular membranes. The original syncytiality of the primordial human group is by now conveyed into the king and his court (the placenta = placental leader and his own syncytial group, forming together a subgroup of the people/child). And it had already been elaborated through centuries of written culture. The court was no longer obliged to follow the king on his last journey. And those who had been close to him in life were no longer expected to accompany him in death. They had become the syncytial group of a non-material “Body politic.” They no longer belonged to the king’s “Body natural [ . . . ] subject to all Infirmities that come by Nature or Accident.” The internal evil (in-group hostility) could no longer affect a social body consisting of separate cells/subjects/individual members and protected by a double sovereign whose natural body was clearly separated from the soul of the people (the “Body politic”). PEOPLES TEMPLE AS A REGRESSIVE GROUP My hypothesis is that the institution of the placental leader and his own syncytial group was established in order to limit the risk of self-destruction. This was necessary among primordial human groups, which were in danger of collective suicide because of their excessive syncytiality. If my hypothesis is correct, it would follow that any community could regress to this

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evolutionary stage if it were exposed, or felt exposed, to the risk of a catastrophe that was unconsciously experienced as collective annihilation. The risk of collective suicide could then be foreseen and evaluated, because its enactment would presuppose the re-creation of a syncytial organization and a placental leadership. This is the theoretical framework in which I will place the Peoples Temple. I will describe it as a group which felt exposed to total annihilation and tried to defend itself with a regressive flight into the archaic syncytial matrix of the first human communities. A paradoxical flight, indeed. Reenacting a syncytial organization, the group exposed itself to the very danger it was trying to avoid. And even if the placental leader, who was the organizer of the collective defenses against evil (the rituals of the group), managed to filter it, sooner or later he would become old or begin to lose his power. Then the death ritual of syncytial groups (collective suicide) would reemerge, and would be acted out again. A Bantu legend clarifies the relationship between placental leadership, syncytial membership, and collective suicide. Two clans of the Ba-ila people were contending for the right to leadership. When one of the two clans lost that privilege, all its members decided to commit suicide. They tied a long rope around their necks, gathered on the shore of a lake, and drowned themselves all together. A woman who was married to a man of a third clan happened to be the last link in this human chain. Her husband snatched her from the clutches of death by cutting the rope and delivering her to dry land (Smith and Dale, 1920). Within the syncytial subgroup (the suicidal clan), the loss of the privilege of leadership was equivalent to the aging of a sacred king. It was as if all members of the clan had become white-haired and impotent. Therefore, the only way to regain their own social identity (the privilege of leadership) was to sacrifice themselves. They literally had to render themselves sacred in the second aspect of the placental leader, dying together as pharmakoi of the whole people. One last clarification. My interpretation of collective suicide fits right into the anthropological hypothesis of Briffault (1927) about the primordiality of maternal groups. In his perspective, the mothers and their children were at the center of the community, while men were in a marginal position and forced into exogamy (marrying outside their own clan or tribe). The distinctive character of the human species [is] the unparalleled development of social instincts which [ . . . ] depend in turn upon the prolonged association of the offspring under maternal tutelage; and mankind is, in fact, marked physiologically by a development of the maternal functions [ . . . ] which exceeds anything of the kind [ . . . ] in the animal kingdom. [ . . . ] The earliest human assemblages [ . . . ] were not the manifestations of the sexual impulses of the male, but of the maternal instincts of the female. (195)



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In the care and rearing, and even in the nursing of children, the closest cooperation takes place; the maternal instincts operate, as it were, collectively. [ . . . ] Among certain tribes of Chitral “it is customary for every infant to be suckled in turn by every nursing mother of the clan; consequently, there is a constant interchange of infants going on among the mothers, for the purpose of strengthening tribal unity.” Throughout the Hindu Kush the interchange of children and the practice of adoption are an established institution. [ . . . ] Collective clan-relationships thus appear to be more primitive than the family-system of relationship. (597–605)

Peoples Temple tried regressively to reenact the ancient pattern of collective clan relationships. At Jonestown, the family-system had crumbled into a system of relationships resembling the “primitive human groups” as described by Briffault. Due to a systematic breaking up of matrimonial ties and a massive recourse to adoptions, the Jonestown community fundamentally consisted of mothers and children (see the cover picture of this book)— apart from the elderly. The male adults were a marginal and emarginated group. A meaningful expression of this situation is the fact that the young men of the Peoples Temple basketball team allowed themselves to be sent out of the commune during the crucial days that led to the holocaust. They had been scheduled to play a game in the capital of Guyana, ostensibly an important role. Actually, they had been “relegated to the bench” so that they could do nothing to interfere with the acting out of collective suicide. The decision-making group of Peoples Temple consisted mostly of women (like the leadership of “O-Dae-Young,” another group that committed collective suicide in South Korea, in 1987), and most female followers of Jim Jones practiced foster-motherhood. The earlier human groups, as hypothesized by Briffault, and Peoples Temple, find another significant correspondence here. Not by chance was the Ba-ila pattern acted out again on the Jonestown scene. It was only thanks to a third party (Congressman Ryan and his group) that a handful of people overcame the suggestion of dying together and managed to detach themselves from the syncytial group. Like the Ba-ila clan, the Peoples Temple members had also lost the privilege of leadership. The intrusion of Ryan and the decision of a small group of members to leave Jonestown had inflicted an intolerable wound to the group narcissism. It was their leader’s demise. Inner evil (individuality and in-group hostility) was about to poison the syncytial group. Dismemberment or collective suicide were the two only alternatives. If the group broke up, then each member would have lost his identity as a group-individual. In collective suicide, instead, the illusory oneness of the group could be preserved through the death of all.

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And so, it happened that the members of Peoples Temple molded themselves into a syncytial mass of embracing bodies (a “placental disk” rather than the Ba-ila’s “umbilical cord”) poisoning themselves as a protest against the world. In the aftermath of the holocaust, it took time to understand that under the first layer of corpses there was a second layer with all elders and children of Jonestown. The umpteenth sacrifice to a primordial cultural matrix which is still far from being deconsecrated. COMMUNITY UNITY When Jones founded his first church in Indianapolis, he called it “Community Unity.” This name (which recalls the “Oneness”—the church of Lynn where he had felt loved and accepted for the first time) sounds like a tautology. A church is a church in that it is a community characterized by the union of its members. Nevertheless, the name of this church, which was later to become the Peoples Temple, conveyed a profound message. It was an explicit statement of what was secretly and unconsciously being proposed for adoration. Inside the Peoples Temple, the group itself was the sacred object to be worshipped. The community unity, obtained by abolishing individual limits, was the only thing that was sacred. Along the way from Community Unity to Peoples Temple, this message became cosmic. The “Community” turned into “Peoples,” while their “Unity” became a “Temple.” “Peoples Temple” was not spelled with an apostrophe. It was neither the temple of one specific people, nor of all the peoples. In the expression “Peoples Temple” it was impossible to figure out whether it was the temple that contained the peoples, or the peoples who constituted the temple (a temple consisting of building blocks/peoples). This ambiguity disoriented the neophyte and initiated him/her into the emotional message implicit in the direct union of the two terms: “Peoples” and “Temple” are one. This was why, when a follower told Jones he wished to find people with whom he could share his life “one hundred percent,” Jones could reply: “Well, if you don’t find it here, you won’t find it anywhere in the world!” (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982: 53) According to Mircea Eliade (1948; 2008) every temple is an “imago mundi” (image of the world), it is the signifier and signified, the container and content of the universe, at the same time. The double etymology of the word temple (from Latin “tempus” = “time” and “templum” = “temple”) denotes a sacred dimension in which space and time lose their profane, secular, and common limits. Entry into the “church family” of Jones was proposed as the experience of going to live inside his body/temple. This was an available space, because it was without a Self (the much-praised “selflessness” of Jones). Therefore, it



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was inhabitable by everyone, regardless of space-time limits. Not by chance does the metaphor of the body as a “temple of clay” recur so often in the texts of Peoples Temple, Lynetta’s molding of her son of clay had to be repeated with all the members of the group if “Peoples” and “Temple” were to become one and the same thing! Becoming a member of Peoples Temple offered much more than the feeling of being part of a broader social body, such as the community evoked by “Community Unity.” “Peoples Temple” suggested the possibility of experiencing the oceanic feeling of disembodiment by merging into the infinite crowd of the living and the dead of all the history of humanity, reunited in the unlimited dimension of sacred space-time. To make the “oneness” sacred means regressing to the prenatal universe where the mind is not yet developed as a separate function of the body and the unborn child lives within a liquid, nocturnal, and sonorous environment (the fetus can hear, learn, and remember music as well as voice qualities). Inside Peoples Temple, the primacy of the word as sound (the spoken word) over the written word, was strongly reestablished. Hearing is a sense that unifies, and this is why, according to Ong (1982), the “primary oral cultures” (those having no knowledge of writing) had the experience of the universe as an ordered cosmos. In this oral universe, the primordial human groups always conceived themselves as living at the “umbilicus mundi” (navel of the world), right at the center. There, the group-individual could experience close (and closed ) communion with all the other speakers of their own mother tongue. Writing about Peoples Temple as a syncytial group, thus calls for beginning with the word/sound par excellence: singing. The Peoples Temple’s Song Book (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 2) does not contain all the songs which were usually sung at the services. Nevertheless, a careful reading of the lyrics can help us to rediscover the leitmotif of unity in all its different configurations. “We all are one; we all are one; We have the same heavenly Father. We all are one; we all are one; We are sisters and brothers. We come from every nation and creed To dwell on this kingdom plain; We stand as one in God, you see, One for eternity.”

Peoples Temple sets itself up as a micro cosmos in the macro cosmos, made up of members “from every nation and creed,” all unified by the same relationship with the Father (song 144: 42). An Eternal Father, capable of

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containing the multitudes, beyond the limits of time and space, but also a God in flesh and blood, a Father who reincarnated many times in history. Thus, Peoples Temple placed itself at the border between two worlds: the world of external reality (history with its linear time and geographical places), and the world of internal reality (the timelessness of the unconscious and its infinitely indefinite space). As we will soon see more clearly, it lay within the dimension of illusion, in the universe of utopia. Peoples Temple attempted the impossible enterprise of constructing a concrete and stable configuration of that universe which is imaginary and transient. “God surely has returned, He surely has returned. He said He would come again; In mercy and compassion, In this dispensation, He surely has come again.”

God had returned here and now, “in this dispensation” (song 99: 28), and it was always the same God who reincarnated for the salvation of humanity. “I thank you, Buddha; I thank you, Gandhi; I thank you, Jesus; I thank you Bab; For you brought me, yes, you brought me A mighty long way, a mighty long way. (repeat all) You’ve been my father. You’ve been my mother; You’ve been my sister, my brother, too. For you brought me, yes, you brought me A mighty long way. You’ve been my doctor; you’ve been my lawyer; You’ve been my preacher, my family, too, For you brought me, yes, you brought me A mighty long way.”

As the choir repeated all the names of the divine incarnations: Buddha, Gandhi, Jesus, Bab (song 105: 30), so Jim Jones had repeated their lives. He was supposed to be everything (doctor, lawyer, preacher, family) to his Peoples Temple members. He was the only protagonist of the song 105 (actually of all the songs of Peoples Temple). Following the placental leadership of Jim Jones and his “oceanic” theory of reincarnation, each syncytial member of the group could repeat the same “mighty long way” in his/her own life. He/she could expand his/her own individual limits and discover the multitude within himself or herself, a people of successive reincarnations. Thus, for



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example, one woman was able to claim to have retrieved one of her previous incarnations as Genseric, king of the Vandals, a man as Saint Peter, the first pope of the Catholic Church (Jones was Jesus Christ, at that time); a young lady as Inessa Armand, one of Lenin’s lovers (Jim Jones claimed he had been Lenin in one of his previous incarnations. When he became the lover of this young lady he told her about their past life relationship. Through this “revelation,” Jones pressured her into breaking up her marriage with one of his followers); another young woman as one of the daughters of the Pharaoh Ikhnaton (another incarnation of Jones who claimed he had also been married with Marceline, at that time. Marceline, in her turn, was supposed to have been incarnated in Nefertiti, the wife of Ikhnaton). In Peoples Temple, God and the Peoples interpenetrated and constructed the absolute mixture of primordial Chaos. The followers of Jones were pressured into regressing back to the mythical time of the origins. There and then the omnipotence of thought could not be considered an illusion (song 117: 34) at last. “Behold the people are one! Behold the people are one! And they all have one language! And they all have one language! And this they began to do! And this they began to do! The Lord says that Nothing (nothing), nothing (nothing), Nothing shall be restrained from them. Nothing shall be restrained from them, Which they have imagined to do.”

Significantly, this text in which group omnipotence is described as the omnipotence of collective imagination is structurally double (each verse is repeated.) And the only single verses, united together, might as well be a recitation of Bion’s hypothesis about the leader as the automaton of the group: “The Lord says that [ . . . ] Which they have imagined to do.” According to Bion (1955), the leader is a subject whose personality makes him particularly sensitive to the obliteration of individuality. He is an individual/empty-container who accommodates the unconscious fantasies of all the members of the group within his inner world, and then acts them out in the external world. I will only report a few examples. Our Pastor’s great desire to serve as a channel for the Spoken Word and to lead his people out of bondage became such a passionate urge that he sacrificed the Individual for the Universal Principle. Through this unselfish and unfeigned

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passion, the Holy Spirit fell upon him; the gift of prophecy became a living reality; and the Principle of Christ was renewed in him. Pastor Jim Jones has come to personify this Infinite Spirit and Mind that was [sic] in Christ Jesus. (Peter, The Living Word, l, l, 1972)

Like most mistakes (in grammar, syntax, and punctuation) of the Peoples Temple documents, “this Infinite Spirit and Mind that was” could be interpreted in an evocative way. The singular instead of the plural is an unconscious expression of the leitmotif of oneness. Moreover, making two entities become a single one is a repetition of the dual-unity (the symbiotic union of mother and child) theorized by one of the fathers of ethnopsychoanalysis (Róheim, 1945). However, I do not intend to write a book within a book. So, I will just report all such mistakes without interpreting them, except when I feel it is useful for our discourse, like in this case. Let me emphasize here that the many errors that will be found in my quotes of Peoples Temple documents are original mistakes. I am reporting them to help my readers to reflect on their possible unconscious meanings as slips of the tongue. Under the headline “selflessness,” the Temple Reporter (another newspaper prior to the Peoples Forum) published this testimonial. “[He] was so impressed with the integrity and selflessness of Jim Jones and the works of his church, that [ . . . ] immediately quit his position to work full time in the ministry of the Temple” (Peoples Temple, 1973). In 1977, during the time when the Peoples Temple was under scrutiny by the press and Jones felt attacked, Marceline published a brief article in the Peoples Forum, in defense of her husband. She concluded: “I could write a volume of examples of Jim Jones’ concern for individuals, animals, and even plants. [ . . . ] His totally selfless life has been an inspiration to me” (Jones M., 1977). Lynetta’s perverse molding (treating her child like “a piece of plastic clay”) inhibited the natural development of little Jim Jones, and turned his Self into just an empty container. It was her “fumbling art” which molded in him this quality of automatically feeling the unconscious needs and desires of others. As an adult, Jim Jones was able to comply immediately with the unconscious fantasies of his group in the same way he had been able to adapt to his mother’s dreams during his childhood. After all, is not the mother the first audience of her child? I would define the charisma of a placental leader as a perverse failure in both, Self-development and the process of “separation-individuation” (Mahler, 1968). It was due to this “godlike” quality of Jim Jones that the members of Peoples Temple could be molded as a syncytial group, via “projective identification” into the empty space of their placental leader. Then they could not leave him without experiencing painful feelings of loss of their own individual Selves. They could not separate from him anymore.



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To stay together was in fact the leitmotif of a beautiful song, which was sung in most services of the Peoples Temple, even though it was not published in their official Song Book. Together, placental leader and syncytial group were able to construct their fetish (Jonestown = the town of Jones). And together, by dying in mutual embrace, they revealed the tragedy which they were all coming from: perverse love. In song 69 (20) the plan for group unity is further revealed: “There’ll be no brotherhood Until the Fatherhood’s established. A real true union that the world Might see the twain are one. We are all of one accord For we’re children of the Lord Members of this holy, Happy family of God.”

The motif of the two that become one (the same as in the slip “this Infinite Spirit and Mind that was”) can be interpreted at different levels: human and divine, individual and group, syncytial group and placental leader. The human and divine nature of Jones was the prerequisite for the union between the leader and the members of the group. Jones accused “the god of King James”—that is, the God of the king during whose reign the classic English version of the Bible was approved—of “atrocities,” “slavery,” and “indecencies.” The members of Peoples Temple were no longer the forsaken creatures of an ambivalent god (the God of King James). They were now the children conceived, loved, and adopted by a God (Jones = the “Father”) in flesh and blood. Thanks to this bond they could become one, like musical notes resounding together to make up a chord (“we are all of one accord”). With the individual members being amalgamated into a harmonious unity, leader and group could finally become one and the same (“the twain are one”). This total union did not suffer any limits. It could be unconsciously fantasized as the reenactment of the original fusional relationship. The happiness of Peoples Temple was born out of the emotional experience of being readmitted into the lost Paradise of symbiosis. And we must remember that it was this happiness, this syncytial feeling of reassuring familiarity, that lured and enticed so many people to their death. This “psychic state,” which can be observed in all kind of groups, was called “group illusion” by Anzieu. It is usually verbalized in such a way: “We feel good together, we are a good group, and our leader is a good leader!” (Anzieu, 1976) In Peoples Temple, this feeling became a song (174: 50).

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“We are happy people, yes we are! We are happy people, yes we are! All day long we sing this song, Father loves us, every one, We are happy people, yes we are!”

Written words alone cannot recreate this atmosphere of “happiness.” We have already shown, in the introduction, a picture of the Peoples Temple’s choir: a large group of smiling young people. The image highlights the choir as an important organ of the group: the organ of its disembodiment (as a group consisting of cells/individual members) and of its re-embodiment (as a syncytial group, made up of group-individuals). Choral singing fulfilled this unconscious function: to animate the group, molding the individual cells/members into a syncytium (by unifying their vital breaths/spirits/voices) and, at the same time, to orient the projections of the group toward its placental leader, in order to amalgamate the two into one. This was why every religious service started with collective singing which lasted for quite a long time. The atmosphere had to become warm enough for the development of the following stage: the testimonials of the believers about the “miracles” received from the Father (Jim Jones) and their happiness about being part of the family (the Peoples Temple). At this point the choral singing would come up again to prepare for the triumphal entrance of Jim Jones and his performance, which would be crowned with new “miracles.” Just as the choir overcame the limits of the individual voice, so the syncytial group offered its members the illusion of overcoming all limits (the “miracles” of Jim Jones). Choral singing was the prelude to the fusion of all individual members into a syncytial group, and the incorporation of the group into the body of its placental leader. The original symbiosis had been restored. In choral singing, the leader and the group sought the communion of their vital breaths/spirits and the loss of their own individuality. As we will see in the next pages, this was to be the leitmotif of all the rites of the Peoples Temple, from the “miracles” to the “prophecies,” from the cathartic sessions to the exoduses and the “White Nights,” all the way to the final fusional embrace in death.

Chapter 4

From Miracles and Exoduses to the White Night

To speak of Peoples Temple means to speak of “miracles.” The Peoples Temple was a real “miracles factory.” Most of the correspondence between the church and its members and sympathizers were about “miracles,” those already received and/or those desired. The following document is only an example among many others which I found in an archive in the basement of the office of Charles Garry (a former lawyer of Peoples Temple, who kindly allowed me to make photocopies of all the materials I was interested in). In 1986, when I paid my last visit to Charles Garry, his basement was still chock-full of such metal archives containing what remained of the Peoples Temple files. The document I am going to describe now consists of an elegant sheet of paper showing the picture of a young black woman standing by a door. The door is ajar, only kept closed by a thin chain. The hand of an unknown person is insinuating its way through the crack. The woman is holding up a photo of Jim Jones and looking at it. Under the heading “Oh! Thank you for saving my life!” we can read: “Express your gratitude—to receive the Greatest Miracles!! These letters [ . . . ] show dynamically how this works. Each time she said ‘Thank You’ and expressed appreciation for God working through Pastor Jones, she was blessed again” (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 8). The texts of some of the woman’s letters are superimposed over her picture. Dear Pastor Jones, I am a new member in your church and I want to say thank you. This might seem like a small miracle to some, but to me it means a great deal. When you asked for questions in the service I held up my Anointed Picture of you and asked if you would autograph it for me. Very lovingly you explained that since thousands of pictures were in circulation, if you would do this for 67

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me you would be obligated to autograph all the other pictures, because of your equalitarian beliefs. I know that you felt my disappointment because when I got home that night something told me to turn my picture around. Although it had never left my hand throughout the evening, your signature appeared on the back side of my precious picture. I will treasure this for the rest of my life. Thank you so much.

Even if we take the point of view of the believer and her faith in the “miracle,” the letter contains a basic contradiction. On the one hand Jones is described as “equalitarian,” while on the other he demonstrates absolute partisanship by creating a privileged relationship between himself and his new “daughter”: his signature does not appear on the back of all the “thousands” of “Anointed Pictures” in circulation, but only on the one belonging to the believer who wished to have it. This is a critical point. The “true believer” of the Peoples Temple had to become detached from common sense. The omnipotence of wish had to become the only logic, so that any contradiction could be resolved. If the other members did not find the signature of Jones on their anointed pictures, it was not because Jones was partial in his love, but simply because they did not “truly” want it! Another basic question is left undecided here: Where did the autograph come from? From the outside (Jim Jones) or from the inside (the believer’s wish)? The implications of this area of non-definition will soon be analyzed making recourse to some concepts by pediatrician/psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and to other documents from Peoples Temple. However, before proceeding in this direction, let me go on quoting from this document: Well, my Miracle Picture caused an even greater miracle in my life. Someone was trying to break into my house. I heard him tampering with the door, and I made up my mind to find out what was going on. I went to open the door to try to scare the person away, then I thought about my Anointed picture of you. I placed it near the door and said, “I am in your care.” The prowler left and never returned. Later you told me of your protection, and that had I gone out the door that night I would surely been killed. You saved my life! (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 8)

The Anointed Picture was placed “near the door” not only in a spatial sense. Its position between the external world and the internal world had a deep meaning. It was meant to be a placental filter between the womb and the fetus, the external and the internal world. The unknown hand or external reality was trying to break into the house or internal world of the new member/ newborn child.



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Like other objects sold by the Peoples Temple (especially cloth items, such as the “Anointed Prayer Cloth”), the “Anointed Picture” brings us to compare “transitional” object and phenomena (Winnicott, l953) with “fetish” objects, to analyze the subtle difference between illusions and lies.

ILLUSIONS AND LIES Donald Winnicott was a pediatrician and a psychoanalyst who did a lot of research on children and connected it with the issue of culture and society. I will quote here from his famous paper on transitional objects and phenomena. Perhaps some soft object or type of object has been found and used by the infant [ . . . ]. The parents get to know its value and carry it round when traveling. The mother lets it get dirty and even smelly, knowing that by washing it she introduces a break in continuity in the infant’s experience, a break that may destroy the meaning and value of the object to the infant. [ . . . ] From birth, therefore, the human being is concerned with the problem of the relationship between what is objectively perceived and what is subjectively conceived of, and in the solution of this problem there is no health for the human being who has not been started off well enough by the mother. The intermediate area to which I am referring is the area that is allowed to the infant between primary creativity and objective perception based on reality testing. The transitional phenomena represent the early stages of the use of illusion, without which there is no meaning for the human being in the idea of a relationship with an object that is perceived by others as external to that being. The idea [ . . . ] is this: that at some theoretical point early in the development of every human individual an infant in a certain setting provided by the mother is capable of conceiving the idea of something that would meet the growing need which arises out of the instinctual tension. The infant cannot be said to know at first what is to be created. At this point in time, the mother presents herself. In this ordinary way, she gives her breast and her potential feeding urge. The mother’s adaptation to the infant’s needs, when good enough, gives the infant the illusion that there is an external reality that corresponds to the infant’s own capacity to create. In other words, there is an overlap between what the mother supplies and what the child might conceive of. To the observer the child perceives what the mother actually presents, but this is not the whole truth. The infant perceives the breast only in so far as a breast could be created just there and then. There is no interchange between the mother and the infant. Psychologically the infant takes from a breast that is part of the infant, and the mother gives milk to an infant that is part of herself. In psychology, the idea of interchange is based on an illusion. [ . . . ] The transitional object and the transitional phenomena start each human being off with what will always be important for them, i.e. a neutral area of experience which will not be challenged. Of the transitional object, it can be said that it is

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an agreement between us and the baby that we will never ask the question: “Did you conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?” The important point is that no decision on this point is expected. The question is not to be formulated. [ . . . ] The transitional object is [ . . . ] the thing created by the infant and at the same time provided from the environment. Its fate is to be gradually allowed to be decathected so that in the course of the years it becomes not so much forgotten as relegated to limbo. [ . . . ] It loses meaning, and this is because the transitional phenomena have become diffused, have become spread out over the whole intermediate territory between “inner psychic reality” and “the external world as perceived by two persons in common,” that is to say, over the whole cultural field. At this point my subject widens out into that of play, and of artistic creativity and appreciation, and of religious feeling, and of dreaming, and also of fetishism, lying and stealing, the origin and loss of affectionate feeling, drug addiction, the talisman of obsessional rituals, etc. (Winnicott, 1953: 9l–95)

Figure 4.1  Meditation Folder, page 1. By Peoples Temple, courtesy of Charles Garry.



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The miracle picture worked like Winnicott’s transitional object precisely because of this “agreement” between the leader and the members of the group that no one would ever “ask the question” about the origin (internal = the single member, or external = the leader) of its power. Both possibilities remained practicable. The same ambiguity characterized other “contacts” promoted by the Peoples Temple by means of correspondence. In this case, the believer is invited to touch a precise spot on the sheet of paper sent to him from Jonestown, and then to write down his/her needs in the blank space set out for that purpose. The accompanying letter explains that this must be done at six o’clock (morning or evening, it did not matter) with or without the help of the usual Anointed Picture, and that nobody else is to touch the special “Meditation Folder” which is to be sent back to the Peoples Temple. Jones would receive it, hand-carried, and at six o’clock he would touch the same point of contact that had been touched by the believer. He would then meditate on the needs of the follower, which would be fulfilled. The second part of the letter completes the ambiguity of the message by expressing the “desperate need” of the “Mission Hospital” of Jonestown and asking for $23.77 from the follower to continue its work. On whose side is the need? On whose side is the magic power to fulfill it? The answer is provided by the “Meditation Folder” itself. Here we can read a short story about an Amerindian woman who was supposedly saved from death in childbirth thanks to the care she received at the “Mission Hospital.” And we can see two doves. One is light-colored with blue borders, the other is dark-colored and violet inside, unconsciously suggesting the oxygenated blood of the mother and the toxic blood of the child in her womb, which come into contact so that the polluted blood can be cleared. Together they frame a space whose shape recalls that of a placenta. Within this very space, a Biblical quote is used to justify the “Meditation Folder” itself: “If any two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they ask,—It shall be done for them—” The “Meditation Folder” made the magic of contact possible, for the believers of Peoples Temple. We can compare it with a transitional object because no one, by tacit agreement, would ever question where its power came from. This comparison suggests the hypothesis that the placenta is the precursor of Winnicott’s transitional object. From this perspective, the placenta could embody all the characteristics of the first “not me possession” (Winnicott, 1953), precisely because it is the mysterious mediator of all contacts between the mother and her unborn child. All the more so, since obstetrical ultrasound has shown us very clearly that the baby seems to “play” with its placenta and umbilical cord, into the womb (Averna, 2017). An anthropological example of such an “object” can help our understanding of this important concept. The Australian tjurunga was conceived as the

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Figure 4.2  Accompanying letter, page 1. By Peoples Temple, courtesy of Charles Garry.

double of the placenta by the aborigines. Even though they went on personally and concretely producing tjurungas at the birth of every child, they would never have challenged the belief that these tjurungas came from another dimension, from the “eternal ones of the dream,” from their “wandering ancestors” (Róheim, 1960; 2010). The motif of the Australian “wandering ancestors” evokes the “doppelganger motif” (literally = the double-goer) studied by Rank (1925). It leads us back to Jones and his followers, who were always traveling “throughout the Nation” with their fleet of eleven buses. It also reminds us of the magic



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Figure 4.3  Accompanying letter, page 2. By Peoples Temple, courtesy of Charles Garry.

objects of Peoples Temple, which had to “travel” between leader and members before attaining their thaumaturgical (miracle-working) power. In “No haloes please,” even the text seems to have to wander back and forth between contradictory statements: the group is the maker of the miracles, the miracles come almost exclusively from Jones. Never under estimate the wonderful gift that operates in Jim. Nor entertain the thought that it’s [sic] performance requires the atmosphere of many amens and allelujahs [sic] [ . . . ] a healing atmosphere is one of harmony and love, and without this divine medium he is unable to effect the cures and the protections so necessary to the health and the survival of a group in this robust age. The fate of one individual after another is determined by the degree of harmony resident

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Figure 4.4  Meditation Folder, page 2. By Peoples Temple, courtesy of Charles Garry.

in the group, Jim, therefore, urges each one in the face of such awesome responsibility, to yield to the flow of divine love and under no circumstances to hinder or thwart it. To do so might very well mean failure to a divine plan for healing or protection and in certain circumstances death to some member of the family might result. Very often we are reminded that the aggregate of our combined spiritual effort is no more imposing than a trifling 3%. (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 6)

Approaching the syncytial culture of Peoples Temple from the point of view of the transitional phenomena also sheds new light on the issue of questioning. It is, in fact, clear that if anyone asked himself or herself a question, the miracle itself would vanish—like a transitional object. In fact, the transitional object



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is normally abandoned by the child as his/her capacity to wonder and question matures. The beliefs in fairy tales, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny, at a later stage of development, are also recognized as illusions and abandoned as well. In this specific case, the miracle would have boiled down to a banal and awkward burglary attempt by a miserable thief, who had hoped the apartment was empty and had run away as soon as realized there was somebody at home. The Anointed Picture would have had no part in the event, neither in attracting the thief nor in getting rid of him. Regression toward the syncytial group only becomes possible through an implicit agreement among the members to suspend all “reality-testing” (Freud, 1911c) as to the origins of things. In place of observation and questioning, a cultural pact of ignorance is established. A chain of collective disavowals disguises the limits of human existence (birth, death, separation, individuation, sexual reproduction, ambivalence) in order to restore the symbiosis between mother and child, group and group-individuals, environment and people. The popular feeling of autochthony, of being born in and of the place (quite literally in those cultures where newborn babies are believed to come from the trees or stones of their native land), dates back to the times when the individual was not yet born. At that stage, the group-individuals were still living in symbiosis with their group. They were contained in the group and the group was contained in them at the same time. They felt the way a child feels as long as the psychological symbiosis with the mother lasts (Mahler, 1968). In the regressive path offered by Peoples Temple, the abodes/bodies of its members were gradually abandoned by their own individual Selves because the emotional requirement of the syncytial group was that they should become spaces inhabitable by a new Self: the “group-individual” of Briffault. The body of each neophyte was molded as a part of the “Temple”—that privileged location where the transformative miracle of a rediscovered symbiosis could ultimately take place. Where I had a sick, broken body before, now my problems have vanished. I was going blind and you healed me of glaucoma. You healed me of a deteriorated vertebra and disc. Now my back brace is sitting in the closet—a constant reminder of the mighty Power of God that works through you. I had had three heart attacks before I met you, and the main aorta was twisted like you twist a piece of paper. Now the heart murmer [sic] that I had is completely gone and my heart is like new again. The crippling arthritis I was suffering with is gone. How can I say thank you for giving me a new life? I am trying to show my gratitude by working hard to help others, by practicing brotherhood and equality, following your example. (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 8)

The creature had been recreated. The “temple of clay,” the body of Jones’s new daughter, had been relieved of its individual Self. Now she was ready to

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live in brotherhood and follow the model of her molder. But here was where the process arrived at a critical point. Regression cannot wipe out development. By regressing, a neurotic person cannot regain the “paradise lost” of childhood, but only a pathetic travesty of it. In the same way, an individual member of a group cannot regain the paradise of the archaic cultural matrix. Once the passage from the syncytial group to the cellular group has been accomplished (mentalized and “culturalized” by the individuals/members) once the “people” is born as a child and the umbilical cord has been cut, it is no longer possible to turn back. One can try to pretend, make believe, or act as if, but there is no way at all to actually go back in space and time. What can be reached via regression is not the same thing we experienced during our childhood (or our ancestors felt in prehistorical ages). It is something different: a combination of illusion and lies. The attempt to hold on to the transient and flowing experience of the “group illusion” (Anzieu, 1976), and make it steady and solid (the institution of Jonestown as paradise on earth), will only cause it to precipitate into the perverse universe. The new adept is “used” (actually is abused) for the “Cause,” perhaps signing letters of “miracles” received, or simulating a false healing in front of the group, or providing Jones with information that would make him seem clairvoyant, and so forth. The regressive attempt to institutionalize transitional phenomena can only crystallize them in their unsolved forms: the unconscious dynamics of the perverse universe. There, the transitional object has lost its original function. It has become emptied of the creativity of illusion and filled with the destructiveness of lies. The transitional object has become a fetish. It works always and in any case. If any accident or anything untoward happens while the believer is wearing it, that does not mean that its protective power is false. On the contrary, it has surely lessened the damages! Never before had I known such love! Not only have you lifted all my burdens, but you have reached out to my loved ones who are not even members of your church. My son had just received a new car for graduation and he took two of his friends for a ride. A swarm of yellow jackets came in the car and he became so frightened that his car veered off the road. It hit a steel pipe which was the only thing that kept the car from following hundreds of feet down to certain death. He was wearing the “Anointed Prayer Cloth” that you had sent to him through me just a short time before! (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 8)

The fetish distorts the reality-testing capacity of the new Peoples Temple member. All the more so since the group leader is putting his followers in a condition of inferiority with respect to the external world by depicting it as becoming more and more persecutory. Thus, the member/group-individual is



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more and more tied to the church family, which progressively becomes the only inhabitable social body/“Temple.” The unconscious aim of the “miracles” was to blur the limits of reality, so that the ephemeral phenomena of illusion could permanently crystallize into the perverse universe. Visions and prophecies played the same role, in Peoples Temple, as we will see now. WORLD DESTROYED BY FIRE As the incarnation of Lynetta’s dream, Jones had the gift of prophecy from early childhood. So, we are not surprised to find little Jim as a prophet in a short narrative (“world destroyed by fire” or “world on fire”), drafted twice by Lynetta and never completed. A psychoanalytic approach to this narrative will help us to proceed in our exploration of the uncanny (and unconscious) fantasies and dynamics of the tragic end of Peoples Temple. And little Jimba came bounding into the house with all the village dogs at heel. It was between 12.30 and 3:00 am. I was putting the finishing touch on a goodly lot of dishes that had accumulated in the sink. I had worked two jobs that day. The clock hands had passed the “witching hour” of midnight. The village was wrapped in sleep. There was excitement in the eyes of every dog. Jimba was behaving as routinely as was his usual stance, just before some sort of havoc broke out in our lives, and havoc was not a stranger. It sometimes shaped up subtly, and at other times like an explosion—but never fragmented or traveling at a “slow” pace. Jimba was not one to do things by halves. Neither was I. Jimba smugly said: “Since you did not believe me when I told you the earth would be destroyed by fire in our lifetime, I think you had best come with me and see for yourself.” [ . . . ] I chanced to look at the sky. If there sh [sic] should have been a moon, it would have paled into obscurity confronted by such startling phenomena. The sky looked like a huge block wash kettle such as I’d often seen in the yards of southern families, and which was used to boil their linens out doors [ . . . ] which they always referred to as “bilin” [sic] their whites in strong lye water.

In this expression, there is the idea of purifying the linens, that is one’s own white skin, with a violent treatment: boiling in acid. “Biling” evokes bile, and black bile is the substance of melancholy and moon craziness as well as of witchcraft. Lye has exactly the same pronunciation as “lie.” The lie of purification—the world destroyed by fire—is therefore the unconscious leitmotif running through Lynetta’s text and running ahead of the White Night of Jonestown. The final oxymoron of the White Night is also prefigured in the image of “the moon” that “would have paled into obscurity.”

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Having seen, I yet could not have believed except there sat Jimba like the Buddha [ . . . ], folded legs akimbo, wearing a colorful headband and a square of cloth to match knotted around his xxx [sic] middle [ . . . ]. I leaned against a tree. The dogs formed a ring around us [ . . . ] Great licking flames mounted from earth into the heavens and met at the apex over the pot which was the earth. A remarkable display it was indeed—less frightening to watch because it seemed not to advance [ . . . ]—nor did the flames give off the appearance of heat having in fact a “cold” look, instead. [another oxymoron—cold flames—lurks here, author’s note] [ . . . ] I did a lot of enquiry [ . . . ] but found no one who had seen the startling development in the heavens. [ . . . ] But a small news item in a paper I picked up some days later reported that the Northern and Southern Borealus [sic] had “displayed” at the same time which happened only at long intervals apart, it was said. (Jones L., n.d. document n. 1)

In the universe of perversion inhabited by the mother-child dyad (LynettaJimba) the motif of Apocalypse “was not a stranger.” In the extended family of Jones, in his Peoples Temple, the end of the world was at home too. The exodus of the group from Indiana to California in 1965 had in fact been motivated by the “prophetic vision” of a nuclear holocaust. The transcript of one of the tapes on which the oral history of Peoples Temple was recorded, provides an account of his “visions” in adulthood. [Jones] started speaking up about the errors in the bible and I think it was 1963. [ . . . ] I think in 1963 or 64, almost sure [ . . . ] that’s when he had the vision, he came in the house and started up the stairway and saw a big flash of light, he turned it was coming from the North, Chicago, it was so bright that it almost blinded him, and it was a picture of a nuclear holocaust, the bomb blasted so bright that he saw it all the way in Indianapolis, the bomb had exploded in Chicago and it burned clear down within miles of Indianapolis. Eventually Indianapolis would also come under the attack of nuclear bombs. [ . . . ] At the same time he received a vision of a place he could take us, the church-family, to escape that holocaust, and it led him right [ . . . ] to Ukiah. (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 10)

Between Lynetta’s narrative and this oral testimony we have the whole gamut, from the illusion of the child (a celestial phenomenon interpreted in a distorted way) to the lie of the adult (the fabrication of a vision). Just as the illusion of Jimba to be a prophet gratified the dream of the mother, so the lie of Jones as an adult expressed the unconscious wish of the group: to live right in the center of the world, within a unique and unrepeatable time, and be invested with a supreme mission. Inside Peoples Temple, “prophecies” and “miracles” were connected in such a way that the non-fulfillment of “prophecies” (including the one about the nuclear holocaust—which had been modified many times!) was irrelevant. The following quote from “No haloes please” explains it plainly.



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This is a crucial hour with another introductory sign having been given which will help to usher in and set in motion the world wide destruction by nuclear annihilation unless there is sufficient countering force, of divine love released by those who claim to be the children of the kingdom. (People Temple, n.d. document n. 6)

Out of a collective thought/emanation could come the destruction or salvation of the world. A thought which not only belonged to the Peoples Temple but to every human group. This is very important for understanding the paranoia of Peoples Temple, which was triggered by Jones every time he was criticized by the mass media. Any unfavorable article published in a newspaper was unconsciously experienced as an evil spell. Like primordial (syncytial) human groups, the cultural matrix of the Peoples Temple was based on the pattern of magic: thoughts and uttered words had the power to save or kill. On December 5, 1966, shortly after having been one of the victims of a car accident in which his black adopted son was seriously injured, Jones sent a message by telephone to one of his followers. The member was assigned the task of spreading the message among the believers. “No haloes please” reports one version of it: I am aware of the conflicting thoughts as to why the accident happened. My admonition to you, is that you cease and desist immediately by changing activities and your thought patterns as soon as questioning thoughts arise. [The inadmissibility of questioning within the People Temple is clearly stated here, author’s note] for example: when we make attacks on the old idolatries such as the personality of Jesus of Nazareth or the literal bible, we must realize that the only thing that can counter the reverberations of our declarations of truth on such matters is that we revere our revelations and revelator [underlined, not italicized, in the original text, author’s note] in a greater love and faith conciousness [sic] than others hold for their idolatrous symbols. Let this be heard at this stage, and I mean no condemnation about it, but we do not hold our revelations and revelator in such an esteem which can safeguard us from devious mortal thought. Remember well, “thoughts” can appear as “things.” Mortality and it’s [sic] consequent illusions can’t hold up against godly thoughts, but we are still primary students in the school of spiritual positivism. [ . . . ] Let us balance these kinds of problems (and there are more which I won’t go into detail about in order to avoid giving them life) [ . . . ] There has been too much contention, pouting and unkind words in our homes. We must maximize the positive and especially the gratitude realm. Speak nothing of our teachings that entails telling who I have been or anyone else who they have been in a former personality demonstration. [ . . . ] You can never get further out in controversial issues than you have a love demonstration to balance the conflicts that arise from such presentation of truth. (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 6)

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For a group that was regressing toward syncytiality, keeping their own beliefs under cover was a matter of life or death, a matter of survival. The non-syncytial culture of the surrounding cellular social body, in which people are encouraged to live in nuclear families or even as “singles,” could never accept the regressive “truth” of Peoples Temple: the unquestionable belief in the concrete influence of thought. An influence that had been real when the behavior of the group-individuals was controlled by their collective emotions, phantasies, and thoughts at the early stages of human development. I would even suggest that the very idea of magic was conceived by primordial human group-individuals as an extension of the actual experience of their own imitative behavior in relation to the world. To regress to group-individuals and reenact a syncytial organization, the members of Peoples Temple had to found their own world (Jonestown) and hide into the jungle. Only in a distant and isolated utopia, safe from prying eyes, could they keep their extended family together and protect their regressive cultural matrix. Let me now emphasize another important aspect which was implied in the idea that the prophesied catastrophies could be reversed. This was the indissoluble union (or symbiotic relationship) between the macro cosmos (the universe) and the micro cosmos (the “temple”). Through their placental leader and his syncytial group, the members of the Peoples Temple felt they were participating in a matter of life or death on a planetary level. In this collective experience, they could certainly rediscover something of the archaic sacredness of primordial human groups. They were re-immersed in a world of magic where omnipotent collective thought was the determining force. “Miracles,” “visions,” and “prophecies” established the Peoples Temple as a fictional space. It was a game “for adults only” which made it possible to regress to infantile stages, where reality could still be conceived as magically influenceable. “Thought” was a material, fluid emanation of the “group-individual.” However, Peoples Temple could in no way restore a steady configuration of the lost paradise of this syncytial culture which had been surmounted. All that was left was a regressive version, adapted to the more evolved cultural patterns of the American “melting pot” and contaminated by the unconscious dynamics of the perverse universe. Prophecy, the possibility of predicting the future as if it were an actual definite and objective entity, existed. But it was also possible to undo it, if everyone, together, felt a really strong wish. “Think positive!” is one of the slogans of the “Californian dream.” In Peoples Temple, it was manipulated to fit their regressive belief that any prophesized catastrophe (from illness or death of “some member of the family” to “world wide destruction by nuclear annihilation”) could be reversed. It was going to happen, but since they knew about it, and “meditated,” they decided not to let it be.



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Any thought of aversion or of abandoning Peoples Temple would materialize and be able to provoke “world wide destruction,” especially if it was verbalized. But there was one thing, specifically, that the group was not to think about or emanate: the betrayal of their leader. If the leader was betrayed, everything would be lost. If the placenta was prematurely detached, the unborn child would not survive, and perhaps not even the mother. THE SEPARATION SIN A patient in analysis once said that he could never separate from his mother in his earliest childhood since they were a “dual-unity.” He imagined that life flowed as milk from his mother to him, and then back to his mother as urine (Hoffman, 1935). Had he been able to return to that blissful state, he would have experienced a feeling of absolute omnipotence. Géza Róheim took up the “dual-unity” again when he theorized that any collective situation would be centered around this unconscious fantasy. Human beings join together in groups in order to restore the lost symbiosis of the dual-unity. All of life would consist of separation from and re-entry into the body of the mother through the many rites of passage (Van Gennep, 1909) which mark every significant moment of human existence. This pattern returns in innumerable versions in the play of children, in different cultures, all over the world. In a widespread group of games the plot is that each child in succession is separated from a group but the children are then compensated for the loss by the formation of a new group. The children of Normanby Island play the game as follows: they sit down in a group and one of the children represents the owner of the garden. He sings: “Play, play happy! Thieves their taro I plant.” Then he goes away and the thief comes. One by one he takes the children, i.e. the taro, from the group. Each time a child disappears the “owner” asks “Who stole from my garden?” The children reply “Nothing” [sic] till there is only one child left and this last child from whom the other children or “taros” have been taken away is called the “mother” of the taro. Another game of the group separation kind is called Maremare yapoa, turtle’s eggs. [The children] draw a line in the sand, on the beach, and one of the boys rubs the back of another boy, singing as he does so: “Turtle its eggs, eggs very many, calling, calling, sizzling!” Then the boy whose back has been rubbed runs to the line, turns back again and tries to catch the others who are standing in a group, one by one. Whenever he has caught one he takes him to the other side of the line till he has gathered the whole group on the other side. The turtle’s eggs are the children themselves. As the eggs come out of the turtle children are born from the mother; the group in these games represents the mother and as the “eggs” come out one by one they abreact the trauma of separation and are re-united in another group on the other

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side of the line. [ . . . ] Another widespread group of games combines this motive of separation from the group and the formation of a new group with an archway through which the children have to pass. In English, the game is called “London Bridge is falling down.” [ . . . ] In the Ba-Ila variant of the game, two boys (representing the mother’s two legs) form an archway with their arms while the others march round. The boys who stand in the middle sing: “My children make a circling movement in the forest.” The last boy who is trapped in the archway sings: “The little, little quail scratches about among the herd boys.” The two leaders are the mother and the last child who is caught in the archway is the infant going back into the womb. (Róheim, 1945: 7–8)

These games are repeated over and over again, as if to emphasize that all life is an endless cycle of separations and re-unions in different social situations. According to Róheim, the only real sin in the universe of primordial human groups was the “separation sin,” the breaking of the covenant which was based on the unconscious fantasy of dual-unity. For every single member, the infringement of a taboo (doing something that was forbidden by tradition) meant to separate from the dual-unity. This separation sin was a global betrayal. The group matrix included not only the community as a whole, the leader and the people, but also its territory (land, flora, and fauna). The ecosystem was experienced and fantasized as living in symbiosis with its children/people. Any taboo infringement implied a complete break with the symbiotic equilibrium which the syncytial group was based on. So much so that epidemics, famines, and catastrophies of any kind were universally believed to be the consequence of some obscure human crime against the leader (the placenta) the people (the prenatal child) or the homeland (the body of the mother). Even the Oedipal tragedy was staged within this scenario: the plague, the murder of the king, the suicide of the Sphinx (the placenta) and the search for the guilty criminal in order to clear the pollution of the whole community, people, and country. It is this double betrayal that the syncytial group constructs culturally, in order to disavow the tragic reality of the human condition, as described by Quasimodo (1942). In one of his poems, he says that each one of us is experiencing life alone, on planet earth, and suddenly the evening arrives, in other words, we are all mortal, suffering, fragile individuals. Every psychoanalyst practicing as a medical doctor knows cases of people who died from their own grief, as if emptied of life, when their private dualunity had been irremediably shattered. The loss of one’s country, job, or loved person, can result in more than a merely metaphorical death. However, I am not going to recall any of these clinical stories. When we are dealing with the fragility of human nature, it is always wiser (since it is less disquieting and induces less unconscious resistances) to review examples of extinct



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and/or distant peoples—especially if we were (and unconsciously still are) used to consider them “primitive,” that is, different from us. In this way, in fact, we can detach (from them) and defend ourselves more easily. We can hold on to the illusion that their fragility has nothing to do with our own! Thus, we can avow some uncanny aspects of human nature, and then (later) we can (hopefully) move one, step further, and apply this uneasy knowledge to ourselves. In “primary oral cultures” (which were once called “primitive” since they did not know writing) if any group member is convinced that he has lost “communion, either by magic or through sin, with the sacred powers and things whose presence normally sustains him,” then he or she actually dies (Mauss, 1926: 38). One of the most notable and most tragic cases is that of the Morioris of the Chatham Islands, conquered by the Maori in 1835 and reduced to twenty-five from the two thousand there had been. [Alexander] Shand, who lived among them and was their interpreter, tells how they were transported to the South Island. [There they could not perform their rites properly, and this impossibility killed them off in a very short time, author’s note.] Some of the Maoris said of the Morioris “It was not the number we killed which reduced them, but after taking them as slaves, we frequently found them of a morning dead in their houses. It was the infringement of their own tapus (being compelled by the Maoris to do things which desecrated their tapus) which killed them. They were a very tapu people.” (Mauss, 1926: 52–53)

The expression “mortal sin” is typical of the Maori, and it is based on their belief that whoever breaks a taboo dies within a few days (Mauss, 1926). “The Maori are very sophisticated in questions of morality or scruple. [ . . . ] Death by magic is very often conceived [ . . . ] only as the result of a previous sin. Inversely, death by sin is often only the result of a spell which has made the victim sin. Divination, omens, spirits [ . . . ] may also be involved in the story” (49). These phenomena have been described as “rapidly fatal melancholia,” “thanatomania,” and other similar definitions (W. Goldie, 1904: 77–80). The essence of such cases is that the group-individual lets himself die when he feels he has betrayed the covenant and lost the symbiosis of dual-unity with his homeland and his community. Within a syncytial culture, therefore, death is not a natural event, nor is it extraneous to the moral sphere of the community. It is a sign of betrayal which involves and affects everyone. The Maori system of beliefs is “the same as in Australia” (Mauss, 1926). Thus, the case described by Spencer and Gillen (1904) in their classic account of the Warramunga mourning rite falls within the same pattern. The dying man had been eating taboo food for a long time, and so nobody in the village was

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surprised about his illness or death. At the same time, however, the group tried to discover, through their funerary rites, if his mortal sin had been caused by the spell of an evil sorcerer—an occurrence considered to be quite frequent. The deepest anxiety of the Warramunga was that the architect of the witchcraft might be one of them rather than a member of another tribe. In their uncertainty about the origin of the illness, whether it was internal (sin by the subject or by a hidden sorcerer of the group) or external (a sorcerer’s magic from another tribe), they used to perform therapeutic rites. If these failed, the horrible mass of living human bodies piled up on top of the dying person, sealing his destiny. In this ritual, the group works through individual death and restores the covenant which had been broken: the dying member was a traitor, he wanted to separate himself from his own group and life. By killing him, that is, by making his individual betrayal disappear underneath the human syncytium and be recovered by the flowing blood of their self-inflicted wounds, the group-individuals bring him back into the placental scenario and renew their symbiotic covenant. All this is not enough. In the mourning ritual of the Warramunga, the village was destroyed and abandoned after the death of every single member of the community. They felt that their whole world, their territory as well as their community, had died along with the group-individual who betrayed them. A ritual exodus took place: the human group looked elsewhere for a safe settlement, where death could no longer reach them. The emotional atmosphere of the flight from the destroyed village was drenched with persecutory anxieties. The survivors feared they would not succeed in covering their tracks from the angry spirit of the dead, who was out after them. They feared being caught and struck down by ill-omened magic. They feared an overwhelming, hostile presence. The emotional climate during the exoduses of the Peoples Temple was not dissimilar. Whether the destination was California (and the flight motivated by the “vision” of a nuclear holocaust), or Guyana (with the idea of avoiding a defamatory campaign that would annihilate the group), the exodus always had the same meaning. They had to escape from a world which was no longer inhabitable. A “slaughter of the Innocents” was in the air. Supernatural signs indicated the way. Enemies were lurking everywhere. They had to run away under the cover of the night and in secret. Our particular phase of the exodus was accomplished in the month of June, the church group being broken up into a number of parties who were assigned to one another for mutual protection and fellowship on the journey. Each group moved out separately and individually choosing different times for their departure and travelling various roads, which was according to divine plan so designed as to forestall any evil device our enemies might decide to bring to bear upon us that



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would impede us at the start or while we were making the journey and hinder us in our resettling program. [sic] on our arrival in the land of promise.

But the slips of the pen reveal that the “enemies” that “might decide” to “hinder” the flight to the “land of promise” were not external at all. The inconsistent full stop in the last line of this quote reveals the unconscious wish of the writer of “No haloes please” to block the exodus before the arrival “in the land of promise.” The author of the text does not recognize that his own resistance to follow Jones in the exodus is founded. On the contrary, he interprets it as the sign of a previous incarnation in which he betrayed Christ (he had been incarnated as Saint Peter, at that time) by abandoning Him. The heroic illusion of having been Saint Peter gave the writer such a vital gratification that he ended up following his “Master” to death, in Jonestown. I was with the master at Gallilee [sic], I am that forlorn wretch that followed afar off on that awful night of his humiliation. I even sat down with his enemies. I warmed myself at their fire. [ . . . ] It was not enough, with the master surrounded by his enemies, and all but deserted and forsaken, that I should stab him in the heart with my infamous declaration, “I know him not” but I had to twist the cruel blade in the painful wound. [ . . . ] Disgraced and disowned, they led him away to his fate. But convinced of my innocence of any association with him or any complicity in his deeds, by my angry and vehement cursing, no man hindered my departure. I left therefore with a strange mixture of emotions, ashamed of my cowardly deed of denial, but glad to be free from the vengance [sic] of Roman law which was being applied as a sop to my people, the Jewish nation. (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 6)

Imminent death, the evil sorcerer, the group of enemies, the disavowal, and abandonment of the dying man who had been fatally wounded by those who claimed to love him—all the elements of the Warramunga ritual return, rearranged in a Judaic-Christian version. Then back to the sea and the ships and many re-enactments thereof in the centuries that were to pass [ . . . ] my escape complex ever failed to turn my thoughts or my footsteps back in the direction of the sea. In this life also I must attest to the ever recurring presence of deep, sorrowful moods, I know not where they originated but I have Jim’s prophetic word that they relate to a past karma. Gallilee? [sic] No doubt! [ . . . ] and now that I am again at long last re-united with the master, I am more than ever aware of the dread responsibility to be faithful even unto death. (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 6)

The members of Peoples Temple made up a group of heroes who intended to atone for their past existences and give a special meaning to their present

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lives with a gesture that would lift them up above the rest of mankind, and deify them. The “reunion” they craved was the same as that of the patient of the dual-unity: a desperate attempt to go backward in time, before the “Fall,” before the “casting out” from Paradise, before the Original Sin (the “separation sin”). This was the tragic desire to restore the fetal status, as the studies of Ernest Jones “on dying together” have amply documented (1911; 1912). The regressive flight of Jim Jones and his followers had borne the Peoples Temple into the topos of collective suicide: the utopia of the syncytial group, ambiguous hell and paradise of the dawn of humanity. Within this regressed cultural matrix, the exoduses of the Peoples Temple can find their meaning. In June 1977, the Peoples Forum published an article entitled “Church Exodus From City—Why?” (Peoples Temple, 1, 5, June, 1977). In it both the dynamics of persecution (escape from the social evils of America) and of regression toward syncytiality (the rediscovery of archaic forms of human association) can be detected. The persecutory background is even more evident if we consider that the article was published on the front page alongside headlines such as: “Arms Race Or Human Race: Time Is Running Out . . .,” “Nazi Children On TV: ‘Kill The Niggers! Kill The Jews!,’” and so on. Recognizing the failure of our communities and cities to provide a safe and peaceful environment for senior citizens, a Bay Area pastor has decided to lead his entire flock to a remote hamlet where they can “live a quiet communal life.” [ . . . ] Alternative communities have been a more and more conspicuous feature of the American landscape. Alternative schools and utopian, communal environments have been re-emerging as a rebellion against an impersonal, materialistic, and destructive urban culture that is leaving people of all ages, but especially the youth and senior citizens, by the wayside. The Fremont church’s “exodus” is a sign of the times. These are not faddists, or cultists, nor do they have an extremist theology or political outlook. They represent the frustration of a growing number of ordinary people within a society which has practically lost its spiritual values of caring, compassion, and community. [ . . . ] Another church, our own Peoples Temple, has shared a similar experience. Years ago, Rev. Jones moved with his own flock out of a southern midwestern city where pressures had become intolerable, especially for a mixed race family and congregation, and tried to find a peaceful valley in Northern California. However, growing racist sentiment spoiled what would have been an ideal setting and retreat for a church that emphasizes a close community and inclusive interracial fellowship. The history of Peoples Temple in San Francisco has been marked by many wonderful milestones and successes. But, working directly with the problems of urban society, the church has recognized that it will take a changed environment to overcome the malaise of urban and suburban America. Accordingly, Peoples Temple has looked to its agricultural mission in Guyana, South America, a place of refuge for many young people causing trouble for authorities of every level on the streets of San Francisco. [ . . . ] Under Temple



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supervision large numbers of young people have been able to travel to that beautiful area of the world where they can afford the opportunities of fishing, hunting, and a less competitive life. It is a place of beauty unequalled, and until we pioneered life there, we thought such beauty to be non-existent. It is indeed a tropical paradise. The church has already assisted a number of senior citizens in relocating there, and looks forward to assisting more in the near future. Far from a cheap sort of escapism, the social movements of large numbers of people away from the fast-paced urban centers reflect the desperate need for something to be done, perhaps of an extreme nature, to make our society more responsive to the needs of all its citizens.

Apparently, the Peoples Temple fled every time their symbiosis with the environment appeared to be compromised. Actually, the unconscious dynamic which set off the flight mechanism was the appearance of an internal social evil: group disillusion. When the “miracles” and the cathartic sessions failed to work it through and re-launch the group illusion, the Peoples Temple had to mold some “traitors” and cast them out. This was the same mechanism of the “miracles,” through which Jones caused the presumed individual evil of his followers to be vomited up or evacuated from their bodies. In terms of group analysis, this social evil was the collapse of the group illusion, of that transient and blissful state in which all the participants of a collective experience feel like unborn children in a group/body-of-the-mother that wants to keep them inside, forever (Anzieu, 1976). In my ethnopsychoanalytical terms, the inner evil of Peoples Temple was the failure of their regression toward the syncytial group. A failure as inevitable as it is extremely painful. To avow this failure required the capacity to work through experiences of “syncytial mourning” (Nesci, 2012–2013), of mutilation of the extended groupindividual Self, and of betrayal of the dual-unity with the group matrix. Syncytial mourning is experienced for the loss of a love object that meant the whole world, the whole life, for the subject. The Warramunga resolved these anxieties by dramatization. They acted them out on their physical bodies (by ritual cuts) and on their collective body (by the destruction of their village and the exodus). Similarly, Peoples Temple mutilated itself (by reducing its own membership through the exoduses) when the group illusion ran the risk of collapsing under the blows of reality, any time the social covenant was on the verge of being broken because the leader was no longer able to restore the syncytial matrix. Betrayal was the obsession of Peoples Temple, and the trigger to their exoduses. What did this betrayal consist of? The Warramunga ritual reveals that death was experienced as the effect of a metamorphosis: the homely village, protecting container of the group, allowed Evil to enter. An insidious aboutface in the placental barrier allowed poisonous substances to cross it and poison the people/child. The placenta had to be re-modelled and reimplanted somewhere else, but still in the womb

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of the motherland, which the primordial group had no intention of separating from. The Warramunga corpse had to pass through a series of mourning rituals which lasted two years altogether. These expressed very clearly the idea of the break in the dual-unity as a sudden metamorphosis/betrayal. In order to restore the original state, slow and ritual metamorphosis had to replace the abrupt changes of death. The body was suspended between heaven and earth, nested in a tree, and left there for a long time. Then a bone was taken out and buried, wrapped in a decorated bark cloth. The slow metamorphosis of the cadaver, from human to vegetable (the tree) to mineral (the buried bone), carried the significance of working through the trauma of individual death. This was experienced as an unexpected betrayal/metamorphosis, as an aboutface that made the single member unrecognizable to the group. He had gone from animate to inanimate. He was the one who had changed, who had abandoned and betrayed them. The group had to cure him from this illness in order to reintegrate him into the community and make it possible for him to reincarnate again. For the Warramunga, the souls of the dead were like grains of sand which came down from the trees, entered the navels of women, and developed in their wombs. This cyclical conception of human existence, this philosophy of recycling refuse, seems to me to be derived from the horror of all sudden transformations, which scare children and so called “primitives” more than anything else. An aboutface of the parents/environment has the power to disrupt the illusory world of transitional phenomena. It is a dramatic demonstration that the object is external, coming from the environment and not created by the subject. Even if the placenta is both fetal and maternal, the oxygenated blood is provided by the mother; even if the nursing baby can suck the thumb, the milk comes from the mother. From this Copernican revolution onward, the child starts crying and smiling at his/her parents (or the caregivers). The child’s behavior becomes very different from the automatic expressions and sensory reactions of the beginning of life. Primary oral cultures only are still immersed in the universe of illusion. That is why I would call them the eternal ones of illusion, rather than “the eternal ones of the dream” (Róheim, 1960; 2010). Their syncytial identity and cyclical conception of life allows them to leave open the question of their individual origins: could I not become (or have been) the mother of my father, the husband of my mother, the daughter of my older brother, the son of my daughter? The universe of illusion is the only one where the double difference between the sexes and the generations can be innocently neglected or truly ignored. After the experience of disillusionment, this double difference is more likely to be disowned or disavowed (“I do not know Him”) in the universe of perversion.



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This was the fundamental betrayal perpetrated by the Peoples Temple toward their own reality and the reality of life. Constructing their utopia at Jonestown, they pretended to have definitively detached themselves from their own history and become a mythical group, beyond the limits of time and space, imago mundi and umbilicus mundi (image and navel of the world). UTOPIA OR MENTIRA? The utopia of Thomas More is an important reference for Jonestown. Not only because the work of More maps out the prototype of all communities that try to surmount the historical limits in which they find themselves, but also because Utopia was written with absolute doubleness. This ambiguity has made it possible for the book to be exalted both by the Catholics and the Marxists. A psychoanalytical study of Utopia (Rudat, 1980) allows for a politically non-partisan interpretation, with ambiguity as the point of departure. Let us first recall some of the key elements of More’s masterpiece. Utopia derives from the ancient Greek “ou” = “no” or “not,” and “topos” = “place.” We can find some paradox in all the geographical names of the island, from the river “Anidro” (“a” = “un-” or “without,” and “udor” = “water”) to the capital “Amaurotum” (“a” = “un-” and “mauros” = “obscure,” but also “pale”). The uncanny oxymoron of the White Night lurks at the very core of “Utopia”! Also paradoxical is the name of Raphael Hythlodeus, the ambiguous character who was supposed to have returned from Utopia and told his experience to More himself: Raphael (“God heals,” in Hebrew) Hythlodeus (“non-sensepeddler,” in ancient Greek). The text of Utopia consists of two books, the first of which was written by More after the second. In the first, the social ills of England at the time are reported. In the second the island of Utopia is described, which is closely and ironically reminiscent of More’s homeland, in certain details. Utopia was not an island, originally. Captain Utopus transformed what had previously been a peninsula by cutting an isthmus which united it to terraferma (a sort of geographical cutting of the umbilical cord). In More’s text, Utopia is morphologically compared to the moon, but its descriptions are unequivocally reminiscent of a uterine/placental scenario. Amaurotum, for that matter, was located “tamquam in umbilico terrae” (in the navel of the earth). And its inhabitants lived in a safe and nearly inaccessible environment. They enjoyed the pleasures of a regime of brotherhood where private property and money did not exist. Rudat’s psychoanalytical interpretation

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of the text has made it possible to drop previous attempts to discover “the” interpretation corresponding to the “real” intentions of the author. According to Rudat, More did not mean to give a clearcut and unequivocal perspective. He was rather questioning himself and his readers on his own proposal, in a subtle play of ambiguity and reversal which were amplified by the extraordinary versatility of the Latin language. This discovery of Rudat is important, but there is an even more important discovery in his study: in Utopia More manages a return-to-the-womb fantasy [ . . . ] the retreat into Utopia/the womb as the negation of one’s individual identity. I will now go one step further and call this state what it actually is: death. In fact, this state is not only prenatal but also post mortem if [ . . . ] we make a connection between umbilicus terrae as referring to the womb and tellus-mater, the Mother Earth who receives us all. It is now possible to interpret Utopia, among other things of course, as More’s management of a death wish. (46)

From my point of view, Rudat’s assumption is not only correct but also laden with important consequences. It implies that the wish to construct a perfect world (a society without “Evil”) is associated with a powerful death wish when it takes the form of a regression to the group-individual of Briffault (“the negation of one’s individual identity”). Any time we regret our lost cultural paradise (the syncytial matrix of the dual-unity), the group-individual who still lives in our unconscious is allowed to reemerge and take control of our individual Selves once again. Then we run the risk of disowning our life, along with our own individuality. As if, in order to blur or destroy the painful limits of our psychological and cultural individuality (this latter is intimately connected with writing, which, in contrast to the spoken word of primary oral cultures, implies separation and individuation) we could even go so far as to become victims of the illusion of restoring our original syncytiality through death. This brings us again to Jonestown, Jones’s Utopia, the community without a Bible (“biblia” = books, in ancient Greek), where all members are “living epistles,” where they speak in tongues and sing—always united in brotherhood, and sharing the group illusion of an evil-free collective happiness. Protected by the “green world” (Berger, 1965) of the jungle and enveloped within the “Land of the Waters” (this is what the Amerindian term “Guyana” means), Jonestown attempted to reenact the mythical events of Utopia, where Captain Utopus had led an uncouth and illiterate people up to an extremely high level of civilization. But every utopia seems to be irremediably condemned when it is transformed from an ironic and allusive game into a concrete and delusive reality. Once it has lost its original ambiguity, a single (and perverse) aspect is revealed: falsehood. Actually “Mentira” (from the Latin



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verb “mentior” = to lie, to promise and not to keep the promise) was the first name that More had given to his Utopia. I will now quote from two different texts from Jonestown, and juxtapose them as I did when describing Jones as a “double.” What I intend to emphasize this time, is the gradual collapse of the group illusion of Peoples Temple and the sinister proliferation of lies within their utopian universe. I will begin with the official iconography of Peoples Temple. An elegant pamphlet entitled “a feeling of freedom” (with the subtitle “a collection of photographs & comments about the community of Jonestown”) presents Jonestown as a double, agricultural/medical, project (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 9). Growth and the elimination of Evil are supposed to be the two poles of Jones’s utopia. The photos and the comments are multiforms of these two leading motifs: “Everything grows well in Jonestown— especially the children” (says the caption of two photographs) while the comments, revised and corrected in the text according to the usual filtering operation directed by Jones himself, emphasize the disappearance of Evil: No more drugs, no more racism, no more rapes, no more prisons or jails [ . . . ] The medical compound is something that you have never seen and you probably won’t see unless you go there. It’s almost a miracle. [ . . . ] This is a dream come true. This is a whole new world—clean, fresh, pure [ . . . ] the best in social services any community anywhere can offer! [ . . . ] a lovely Utopia. (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 9)

The last page of the booklet completes the official description of Jonestown as an earthly paradise: there is plenty of food (there is even an “Ice Cream Tree” growing), there is “a beautiful little waterfall” and “a large felled tree” laying “over the water,” people laugh “in the moonlight,” “it is just a perfect experience” (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 9). A more politicized profile but no less utopian, emerges from the open letter addressed by an intellectual of Jonestown to the senior editor of New West magazine and the publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, who were unmasking the Peoples Temple. This document dates back to the February 15, 1978 and, although very different from the clumsy contradictions of “No haloes please,” it follows the same perverse logic. The letter is full of ambiguous statements, such as “I am confident (though I may be foolishly optimistic).” It begins by expressing an outright mistrust in the written word as a means of communication, and goes so far as to deny the possibility of distinguishing between what is true and what is false in a text: Any good reporter can understand how certain details, when presented in a particular light, when told in a certain way, with certain language, can result in a

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portrayal that is so far from the truth of the matter as to perverse everything into its opposite. The slippery and cosmetic nature of language even renders this possible without actual falsification of facts: they need only be arranged, selected, and filtered through certain words in a certain way that exploits the rich potential of connotation and implication in our language. (Tropp, 1978)

These lines of thought become sinister if we reconsider them from the perspective of the editorial work done on the materials received by the Peoples Temple from its members. It was on this premise (the filtering function of the placental leadership) that this former Woodrow Wilson Fellow wrote of his wish to “help rectify what has been a gross miscarriage of justice in the media portrayals” of Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, on the part of New West and the San Francisco Examiner: a “monumental travesty.” Almost one thousand people are here in “Jonestown,” and more come in every week. At the end of January, our oldest resident arrived from San Francisco— a woman who will be 108 years old in October, whose parents grew up as slaves in Virginia. She took the up-river trip in our fishing boat, deep into this beautiful, enchanting place where Sir Walter Raleigh searched for El Dorado. Perhaps more remarkable than the hundreds and hundreds of acres of tropical forest that are now producing food; more remarkable than the development of this lovely community out of virgin jungle, the housing constructions, streets, electric lighting, sanitary facilities, fruit trees planted everywhere, is the population of Jonestown. There are people here from every race, every background. Our farm supervisorial staff, for example, includes a Pomo Indian woman, a young man from Northumberland who grew up on a farm in the shadow of Roman ruins, a former county attorney from Northern California, an ex-wino from the Philadelphia ghetto who, through the inspirational help of Jim Jones, studied agronomy at Cal State, a young woman who grew up in the racism and poverty of rural Mississippi (she watched one of her friends starve), a 55 year old former chemical engineer from a prominent family in Delaware, and an exMormon dairy farmer from Shasta County. 250 senior citizens, mostly black, mostly ghetto-dwellers who suffered from hypertension, fear of getting mugged, and the despair bread by a lonely, alienated environment, are here finding a place of peace and beauty, a new lease on life. The same goes for the over 200 teenagers and young adults who were unable to find the handle for their lives in the big cities—many were sinking into the crime/drug morass. Here they’ve kicked all their habits, from junk to junk food, and have found something to put themselves into, a community to build, a challenging environment in a black nation that doesn’t make people feel like “niggers,” “punks,” or “uneducable louts.” [ . . . ] So we are here, and it’s not a “retreat” or an “escape”: on the contrary, we feel that, for the first time, we have broken loose from the Kafka-like maze of the American waste land, the billboards and “modern” empty society, the insipid charade of getting and spending that weighs even upon the affluent



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like some nameless curse, as subtle but as real as its polluted and poisoned environment. So there’s been no “cop out.” Here in Guyana, we have become free citizens of the world. We’ve got our birthright back that was taken from us when so many of us were kidnapped from our ancestral homelands, and only restored to us a piece at a time, and then only to be taken back when the rent was due. We have our workcut [sic] out for us: but it’s our [underlined, not italicized, in the original text, author’s note] work—liberating, rather than the alienating, self-destructive labor we knew in the States. (Tropp, 1978)

Here is where the text betrays the deeper intentions of its author, in this slip in writing: “workcut out for us,” instead of “work cut out for us.” The return of the repressed in the repressor goes beyond the “cosmetic nature of language” and unearths the truth in spite of the attempt “to pervert everything into its opposite.” The annulment of the empty space between the two words (“work” and “cut”) reveals the wish to restore the dual-unity, to annul any separation or discontinuity. The wish to regain “our ancestral homelands” thus betrays its true nature: it is the wish for prenatal regression (“We’ve got our birthright back”). This would be the only possible therapy for a delivery/separation/individuation experienced as persecution, as having been “kidnapped.” Natural birth, of the natural mother (being born as American citizens), had been an “alienating self-destructive labor” (“labor” can be related to the birth process as well) for the “children” of the Peoples Temple. They felt as if they had been kidnapped from their maternal womb and abandoned (literally “exposed” to die) in the “American waste land,” in an “empty society.” The unconscious wish of the Peoples Temple was thus to reunite the dualunity irreversibly. It was not the umbilical cord that had to be cut, but the physiological process of parturition itself (“workcut” = cut of labor or travail). Jonestown claimed to provide liberation (“a feeling of freedom”) relocating the American Dream backward in space and time, to the origins. As in a black mass, the expatriation of the Pilgrims Fathers was thus imitated and reversed. As expatriates and democratic socialists, we have not really rejected America. So don’t call us traitors: we were just being . . . Americans. We went west. We did that whole thing. We went all the way to the end of the open road. And we came to Geary and Fillmore. A dead end. The whole neighborhood rotted out and razed from the ground, and still waiting to be rebuilt. Everyone knows it has been destroyed, its residents evicted . . . again. We got tired of looking at the vacant lots that lay around us like an unfulfilled promise, an emblem of displacement and perverted priorities. Vacant land, littered with beer cans, whiskey and wine bottles, chicken wrappers and syringes, the symbols of a massive mistake, soft genocide. After 200 years, history has come full circle. America needs to be discovered again. (Tropp, 1978)

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In a way, tragically and ironically, the anal landscape described by Tropp is a prophetic vision of Jonestown as it appeared to its discoverers after the “soft genocide” of collective suicide. In fact, the illusion of restoring the dualunity of prenatal life in a concrete and stable shape implies molding it into a “monumental travesty” (Jonestown as a “lovely utopia”), constructed by regressing to the “malignant anality” of necrophilia (Fromm, 1973) or to the “anal-sadistic” universe of perversion (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1984). Only illusion can play “turtle’s eggs” happily, and go back and start all over again. In our adult world, going back steadily and in a concrete way to the point of departure (going back to the fetal state), means self-destruction and death. It means betraying life so as not to have to suffer from birth trauma. It means surrendering to a necrophilic version of the unconscious fantasy of the dual-unity. In this version, the mother and the unborn child commit collective suicide and sacrifice themselves because they cannot accept the end of their prenatal symbiotic relationship, the dangerous crisis of delivery, the birth trauma, the physiological death of their mutual placenta, once its functions have been exhausted. In our adult world, individual life and death are no longer a game: a limit does exist. And this was clear to Thomas More when he constructed Utopia in such a way that its unreality could be easily verified. The form of the island, with the dimensions indicated in the text, is in fact geometrically unrealizable (Nagel, l973).

Chapter 5

Interdisciplinary Reflections

We need to pause, now. We have to reflect further on the new concepts we have introduced: the interdisciplinary (biopsychosocial) metaphors of the “placental leader” and the “syncytial group.” Specifically, we have to discuss my “uncanny” assumption that men and women, being syncytial group-individuals, were (and are) exposed to the risk of collective suicide any time they experience “syncytial mourning” (Nesci, 2012–2013). This is a catastrophical emotion, which I assume was common in prehistorical human beings and is still present in the unconscious layers of our group-individual mind. It is a feeling of total despair associated with such a painful agony that death appears as the only way to put an end to it. Why and how did it happen? Why and how might it happen again? I must uncover my thoughts on this topic more openly and in details, before we face the really uncanny story of why and how Peoples Temple extinguished itself in its last White Night at Jonestown. I will begin answering my uneasy questions, about syncytial mourning and collective suicide, with the help of one of the pictures I recovered in the basement of Charles Garry, many years ago, in San Francisco. I will not reproduce the original picture by Peoples Temple but its new edition by Filippo A. Nesci, the same artist that created with me multimedia psychotherapy to help people mourning their lost love objects. The picture shows a group of Peoples Temple members inside their church/ pool (in fact the Ukiah temple was built around and over a swimming pool, anticipating the idea of building a church in the “Land of Waters” deep inside the jungles of Guyana). These members are mostly women and children. So, the picture portraits accurately Peoples Temple as a “mother of children” within a prenatal environment since the fetus lives into amniotic fluid (by the 95

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Figure 5.1  The pool/church of Peoples Temple. By Peoples Temple, courtesy of Charles Garry, edited by Filippo A. Nesci.

way all churches claim to be, for their followers, a metaphorical mother of children, but usually within a postnatal scenario). My artist son, working on the original picture I had recovered from a metal suitcase full of slides I had found in the basement of Charles Garry, in San Francisco, edited its digital version introducing fractals. Fractals are similar and repetitive patterns that are common in nature: in matter, landscape, vegetative and animal life—everywhere. Fractals repeat a pattern within the pattern within the pattern infinitively. So, they convey two ideas which are central to our reflections: the group is made up of similar individuals (groupindividuals) who are contained by (and contain) the group (the syncytial group) which is similar to them, at the same time, and this goes on without limits in space-time. From a psychodynamic point of view, these two features give access to our mind, in a subliminal way, to multiple possible elaborations of syncytial mourning, since the fractal pattern is associated with the idea of infinity (Mandelbrot, 2012; Tegmark, 2014) which is evocative of the idea that death is not final. Once again, a poet said it better, about two centuries ago. In just four magic lines, he imagined that we can hold and see the whole universe and eternity in a small sand grain, in a flower, within our own hand, in one minute (Blake, 1803).



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When my artist son applied fractals to this digital picture from Peoples Temples, he changed the images of the people in such a way that they look now like the members of a tribe, with “tattoos” all over their bodies. This is very interesting if we think to what Yuval Noah Harary (2011) wrote in his Sapiens—A Brief History of Humankind: “It takes a tribe to raise a human” (11). Now, let’s look at the picture again, let’s try to analyze our emotional reactions, let’s go backward in time. We are in prehistoric ages. We are evolving into Homo sapiens. A catastrophe is slowly taking place. It is the obstetrical dilemma. The question is: “How will a fetus with such a large head, due to encephalization, be able to come out from a birth canal that has narrowed, due to erect posture?” We are at a turning point. The “Fall” of human beings from the “garden of Eden.” We just lost our natural, aboriginal, symbiosis with nature. We lost it forever. We are unable to deliver our offspring just following our instinct. “Great will be your pain in childbirth; in sorrow will your children come to birth” (Genesis, 3: 16). Now the group of mothers has to collaborate and help each other through labor, literally and concretely. Homo sapiens is the only species that needs help to deliver its own offspring! The “work” of labor (delivery) can be “cut” by the obstetrical dilemma. The risk of extinction is no longer coming from external natural forces only, but also from inside: from the genetic changes of the new species of human beings. “Death in childbirth became a major hazard for human females. Women who gave birth earlier, when the infant’s brain and head were still relatively small and supple, fared better and lived to have more children. Natural selection consequently favoured earlier births [ . . . ] and social abilities” (Harari, 2011: 10–11). What Harari writes about “earlier births,” corresponds to what my research team theorized, in the 90s, when we were investigating prenatal relationships between mother and unborn baby, by ultrasound scanning and a group of observers, in high risk pregnancies at the Agostino Gemelli university hospital, in Rome. From our point of view, human pregnancy lasted 42 weeks, originally, instead of the 40 weeks that today are considered the “normal” duration of pregnancy (Averna et al., 1990). To say it explicitly, the genetic mutations of Homo sapiens put our ancestors at a much higher risk of death, at delivery or immediately after delivery. In this perspective, maternal death, as an increasingly frequent mourning experience, affecting the whole syncytial organization, and the contemporary arousal of consciousness in Homo sapiens, is what Girard was looking for when he was doing research on a “generative event [ . . . ] signifying the passage from nonhuman to human” (1979). I would hypothesize that this generative event, postulated by Girard, consisted in the mysterious “accidental

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genetic mutations” that “changed the inner wiring of the brains of Sapiens, enabling them to think in unprecedent ways and to communicate using an altogether new type of language” (Harari, 23) at the time when the obstetrical dilemma was endangering the very survival of human species. In his historical reconstruction, Harari called it poetically “the Tree of Knowledge mutation” (23). From his perspective, this produced a “Cognitive Revolution” between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago. As all cognitive experiences, it took with itself an emotional correlate which dates back to the Upper Paleolithic age. Emotionally, it was experienced by all members of the community as if it were the death of all group-individuals, the end of the world. If we try to go back in time, with our imagination, and figure out a scenario of scattered human groups, formed by a small number of people, maternal death is a tragedy. If we go on with our imagination, and consider a gradual increase of such events, it is not difficult to envision a collective overwhelming psychological reaction of all the group-individuals. Infant mortality, in fact, was already high. If maternal death was increasing too, it was a threat of annihilation for the whole community. This experience was so powerful that it was psychologically unsustainable for human group-individual mind. Facing a risk of collective hysteria or psychosis, the syncytial group was exposed to acting out collective suicide: better to die than to go on living and experiencing such painful anxieties. I call these feelings “syncytial mourning,” and I envision them at the roots of all human death rituals. I consider maternal death (for the mutations that originated Homo sapiens) as the “numinous” experience (something beyond human mind: too terrible and too wonderful) that has been theorized at the core of religion (Otto, 1926; 2010). While the increase in maternal death was too terrible, the new awareness (associated with it, and implying the capacity of self-questioning and reflecting on our own very nature) was too wonderful! There and then, human beings began to think and reflect on the dangerous increase in maternal death, and tried to find a solution to their own tragic riddle: “Why did it happen?” A reasonable answer was available. The fact that usually maternal deaths were taking place because the afterbirth was not completely expelled, after delivery, was already well known to the mothers. So, women conceived the idea that maternal death was due to the placenta, which was avenging itself for being eaten at the end of delivery. Women made it taboo, the first sacred object. They invented religion, and they created numberless placental rituals, everywhere in the world, shaping infinite different cultures. In their minds, our primordial mothers made the first vow renouncing to eat what animal instinct would tell them to eat, as all mammalian species do in



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order to recover from delivery and be helped to breast feed, thanks to the pharmaceutical substances contained into the afterbirth (Kristal, DiPirro, Thompson, 2012). Women (not men) made the first human thoughts. Women, not men, created the first sacred object: the placenta. “I renounce eating you, since I believe you will spare me from maternal death.” Placenta-eating instinct (Ober, 1979) was culturally overcome, repressed, and sublimated with the creation of a taboo on placenta-eating and the invention of multiform myths and rituals. At the same time, something else was also taking place. Standing up, human beings looked at the sky more often than before. And they were fascinated by the moon. We must listen to the lesson of a great historian of religion to get a feeling of what this implies. We must become familiar with Eliade’s concept of the “metaphysics of the moon,” meaning a consistent system of beliefs centered on the view that death is not final. For three nights, the starry sky is without a moon. But this “death” is followed by a rebirth: the “new moon.” [ . . . ] This perpetual return to its beginnings, and this ever-recurring cycle make the moon the heavenly body above all others concerned with the rhythms of life [all the more so if we remember that women menstruate every 28 days, which is the duration of every lunar month, author’s note]. It is not surprising, then, that it governs all those spheres of nature that fall under the law of recurring cycles: waters, rain, plant life, fertility. [ . . . ] We find the symbolism of spirals, snakes and lightning—all of them growing out of the notion of the moon as the measure of rhythmic change and fertility—in the Siberian cultures of the Ice Age. [ . . . ] All these symbols, hierophanies, myths, rituals, amulets and the rest, which I call lunar to give them one convenient name, [ . . . ] are bound together by harmonies, analogies, and elements held in common, like one great cosmic “net,” a vast web in which every piece fits and nothing is isolated from the rest. [ . . . ] In the primitive mind, the intuition of the cosmic destiny of the moon was equivalent to the first step, the foundation of an anthropology. Man saw himself reflected in the “life” of the moon; not simply because his own life came to an end, like that of all organisms, but because his own thirst for regeneration, his hopes of a “rebirth,” gained confirmation from the fact of there being always a new moon. (Eliade, 1976: 154–158)

From this perspective, it does make sense that religions of the Great Mother (Neumann, 1955; 2015) come first, historically (Stone, 1976). And it does make sense that the first icon and insignia of the Egyptian sacred king was the pharaoh’s placenta with its umbilical cord. Religion was not born out of a mythical primal murder (parricide by his sons/brothers) as Freud theorized in “Totem and Taboo” (1912–1913). It originated out of the need to prevent destructive behaviors triggered by the overwhelming, uncontrollable, violent emotions of prehistoric maternal death: syncytial mourning.

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The birth of religion corresponds to the loss of the “paradise” of instinctual symbiosis between our ancestors and their ecosystem (mother earth, lunar phases, and human biorhythms as well as placenta-eating animal instinct). Religion began as the first “therapy” for the tragic transformation of human delivery into an ordeal. It was born together with a new awareness, by groupindividual mothers, of the need to be helped to deliver (since there was an inner conflict inside their own body with their own prenatal child) and to be helped to live in the external world (after the loss of the original symbiosis and the splitting between nature and culture). Legends, myths, gods and religion appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution. Many animals and human species could previously say, “Careful! A lion!” Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, “The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.” This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language. (Harari, 2011: 27)

Pressured by the dramatic increase in maternal deaths, in Africa (probably for ecological factors), the new mutated Homo sapiens were able to create imagined realities, to share them with words, and to enhance cooperation among group-individuals based on common myths, customs, and beliefs. They invented culture: a most powerful tool. Women, not men, made the first human covenant, since they had separated from nature, after the “betrayal” of the obstetrical dilemma. Women, not men, felt the need to come to terms with these mysterious “omnipotent” forces. I call it the “lunar/placental covenant” of Homo sapiens: “I renounce eating the placenta, since I believe that this will spare me from maternal death and make me similar to the moon, who can regenerate itself.” Now we are ready to go back to Jonestown and recover the hidden “lunar” motives unconsciously reacted out in the last White Night of Peoples Temple.

Chapter 6

The Death Ritual of Jonestown

We will begin reviewing the early trials of the White Night, which can be reconstructed comparing different accounts from different sources (Mills, 1979; Yee, Layton, 1981; Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982). These prototypes were staged by Jones to test the loyalty of his followers and prefigured the structural characteristics of the final rite of Peoples Temple. All the accounts agree on one point. The first trials were staged during the meetings of the Planning Commission. This was what Canetti (1962) would have called the “crowd crystal” of the organization, that is, a stable and restricted group of people around which the unstable but larger mass of followers and sympathizers would cluster on every occasion. Officially, the Planning Commission was considered to be the main governing body of Peoples Temple. Actually, their meetings were cathartic sessions where Jones used to experiment new ideas before implementing them throughout the whole organization. The important decisions were actually taken within a restricted group consisting of the leader and his “inner circle,” made up mostly of white women: the “nurses” of Jones. During the meetings of the Planning Commission, some of the members were put “on the floor,” one after the other, by their own relatives and friends. They were exposed like pharmakoi to all the malevolent projections of the group, with false accusations of egotism, homosexuality, and betrayal. The individual member was assigned a tragic alternative: he or she could play the role of guilty and “confess,” so that the fantasies of the group could be validated, or be victimized. It was a sadistic game of flagellation/purification through which a perverse reality was constructed. From this perspective, the cathartic sessions of Peoples Temple look like a modern version of the rituals of the Flagellants in the Middle Ages. At that time, people would join together and wander from one village to the next, 101

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under the guidance of a charismatic leader who claimed to have received a message from heaven. The core of this message was always the same: the end of the world was at hand, the people should confess their sins in public, and lash each other mercilessly. They were all supposed to share their belongings, leave their relatives and friends, and go to Jerusalem to liberate the Holy Temple from the hands of the Infidels. Such “crusades of the poor” often ended in massacres. Here and there Jews would be killed to avenge the death of Christ. Some Flagellants would die of self-inflicted wounds. And often the armies of the local authorities would exterminate or disband them, to put an end to their dangerous “pilgrimages” (Cohn, 1970). The cathartic sessions of Peoples Temple had the same purpose as the perverse rituals of the Flagellants. In the jargon of Peoples Temple, they were designed to inculcate “socio-centrism” or “being concerned about the people.” The individual identity and the natural affective ties of each single member were destroyed in the process. Moreover, the cathartic sessions of Peoples Temple turned all members into accusers or passive spectators of the moral lynching of their relatives and friends. The final result was a feeling of profound disgust toward the “reality” of life. A “reality” which, thanks to Jones and the Peoples Temple, the individual members were supposed to have uncovered in themselves: that they were self-centered, racist, and homosexual, living in a world full of injustice, hate, and racism. In this way, the “true believer” of Peoples Temple was engulfed by and engrossed in the apocalyptic worldview of the group. But let us get down to the “facts,” and report three different prototypes of the White Night. An early episode in 1973 was documented by a woman who had left the Church and was subsequently joined by other ex-members of Peoples Temple to promote the birth of the “Concerned Relatives” group. When the episode occurred, she and her husband were still members of the Planning Commission of Peoples Temple. One afternoon the P.C. [Planning Commission] counsellors received an emergency message. “Come to the church immediately for a special meeting.” We dropped what we were doing and left as instructed. When we arrived, it was obvious that Jim was very upset. He began, “Eight people left the church last night. They cut the telephone wires so [ . . . ] couldn’t call to warn us.” He was speaking in a low voice as though he were afraid the walls might hear what he was saying. “No one knows why they left, but [ . . . ] and four others all disappeared. Don’t worry, though, I’ll find them.” Jim tried to sound confident, but then he shook his head in despair. “These eight people might cause our church to go down. They could say things that would discredit our group. This might be the time for all of us to make our translation together.” He had mentioned the



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idea of a “translation” a few times before, but no one had ever taken it seriously. His idea was that all the counsellors would take poison or kill themselves at the same time, and then he promised we would all be translated to a distant planet to live with him for eternity. The few who believed this fairytale said they’d be happy to do it anytime. Now, however, faced with death, it became obvious that there were many who didn’t want to. [ . . . ] “I want to take a vote today to find out how dedicated you all are,” Jim said. “Life is a bore. Surely no one here is enamored with his existence. You’ve seen too much reality in all the hours of counselling at the P.C. meetings. How many of you here today would be willing to take your own lives now to keep the church from being discredited? Perhaps this way we will go down in history as revolutionaries. We could leave a note saying that we were doing this as a sign that we want peace on earth, or that we couldn’t exist as an apostolic socialist group, or something like that.” [ . . . ] [One of the four pastors of the Peoples Temple, and a key figure in the organization, author’s note] was the first to speak. “I don’t want to die. I don’t know about the rest of you people, and, Father, I’m sorry to have to tell this, but I don’t want to kill myself.” As he finished speaking, [he] walked away. Jim couldn’t believe his ears. He was shocked that [his follower] would take this so seriously, and now [ . . . ] had set a dangerous precedent for the rest of the counsellors. A few others bravely said they weren’t ready to kill themselves either, but many of the people stood up and offered to die for the Cause. Jim wrote down the names of those who had said they weren’t ready to die yet. He read this list slowly and with emphasis, and then he said, “The names I have just read are people who can’t be trusted yet. A person is not trustworthy until he is fully ready to lay down his life for this Cause.” (Mills, 1979: 230–232)

The association between cathartic sessions and the future White Night is also found in another account, which was documented by the brother of one of Jones’s “nurses.” That young woman eventually managed to escape on May 13, 1978 (Jones’s birthday), at which time she reported that collective suicide was imminent. Her affidavit was as much quoted, in most books on Peoples Temple, as it was overlooked when something still could have been done to prevent the tragic end of Jonestown. When the episode took place, in 1973, the “nurse” was still a member of the “inner circle” of Jones. It began with his calling [ . . . ] and four other counselors together for a secret meeting. He [Jones] reminded them that several key members had defected, and told them that he was afraid they would reveal damaging information. He thought the Temple might be raided, and said he wanted to discuss ways to have the entire membership of the Planning Commission killed rather than captured. It was decided at this meeting that the most efficient method would be for all the members to board a chartered plane flown by a commercial pilot. When the plane reached a specified altitude, the pilot would be shot in the head. Nothing was resolved at this secret meeting, so the six adjourned until the entire P.C.

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met later in the evening. At that meeting Jones announced that the Temple was at its end. The church was cornered. They could not go any further. “Tonight,” he said, “we will sit here and die together.” Even [ . . . ] was not certain whether Jones was simply testing the group or whether they were really to die then and there. Several people became frantic. Jim asked everyone to stand and make his or her last request. A woman asked for a final cigarette. Two young men said they wanted to fuck someone before they died. Others stood and expressed relief that they were about to die; they said they were sick of life. [ . . . ] knew how they felt. “I wasn’t afraid myself,” she recalls. “I was too tired of living.” Suddenly two members entered the room carrying trays with little bottles of liquid and stacks of small paper cups. Bottles and cups were handed out, and the first to receive and drink the liquid promptly collapsed. With that an older woman stood up, announced that she wasn’t going to die, and ran for the door. A guard drew a pistol and shot her at a close range. The gun was loaded with blanks, but the power of the blast cut her side and she fell in a heap. After a moment of silence, when all eyes had turned back to Jones, he announced that this had been a “tryout” in order to see what would happen. (Yee, Layton, 1981: 184–185)

The setting of this event (a meeting of the Planning Commission), links again the cathartic sessions of Peoples Temple with the yet-to-come White Nights. Both rituals were meant to purify the group by singling out the internal enemies, the “traitors,” the ones who were not “trustworthy.” But the tragic paradox of the White Night lay in the fact that this ritual was to make use of death for the catharsis/purification of the community. In order to be “trustworthy” one had to be ready for suicide! A different account of the “first experiment” is reported by Reiterman with Jacobs. According to their version it also took place during a meeting of the Planning Commission. On this particular night Jones suspended a Temple prohibition. He announced that some very good wine had been made from grapes grown on the church’s Redwood Valley properties. And he ordered wine poured and passed around for a rare celebration. Some p.c. members hesitated—it was against all practice, after all—but finally they tried the wine. Sipping and socializing, the group began to feel loose, even relaxed. [ . . . ] Jones went around making sure everyone had tasted at least some wine. Then, suddenly, he called for everyone’s attention in a foreboding voice. The party mood snapped. The wine contained a potent poison, he informed them. They would all die within forty-five minutes. [ . . . ] Soon various people around the room slithered out of their chairs like dead fish. Jones warned: Anyone who tries to escape will be shot by [ . . . ] armed security watching the exits. [ . . . ] As some members keeled over, apparently dead or dying, other p.c. members held their seats. Some [ . . . ] believed they were dying but did not react; death sounded like a long vacation from an exhausting and unsatisfying life, and they were consoled by thoughts of reincarnation.



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Some shared Jones’s vision of a glorious final statement. Some, no doubt, were in a state of shock, afraid of oncoming death from poison or afraid of the bullets [ . . . ], afraid of being seen as cowardly or disloyal. [ . . . ] Many were skeptical, thinking the ritual surely could not be real. Most could not be sure, and others [ . . . ] did not care one way or the other. Only a few, the actors, knew for sure. Even [ . . . ] Jones’s longtime stagehand, may have been left out of this secret—at least Jones wanted the others to think that. At one point she made a wild, screaming dash for the door: she was going to “kill enemies,” she shouted. [ . . . ] knocked her to the floor. It was only a blank, but the percussion had torn her clothing and she had seemed to pass out. Momentarily, she recovered, dazed and sputtering angrily. One of Jones’s lieutenants had failed the loyalty test and the others were amused. Soon the slapstick was over. There was no poison after all, Jones announced. But there had been a test, and Jones wanted to evaluate the success of his experiment. He ordered two Temple women [ . . . ] to ask p.c. members on tape whether the charade had fooled them. The interview result: about half believed, and half were skeptical. [ . . . ] Most of all the little exercise had been unifying. The thought of dying had raised expressions of loyalty, and sacrifice, even of the lives of the children. [ . . . ] The mechanism was tested and in place. (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982: 295–296)

This account documents the theatrical confusion and indiscriminate hopping between fiction and reality which was so characteristic of the meetings of the Planning Commission. It also provides clues to the connection between the catharses and the “miracles.” In the cathartic sessions, the individual was systematically torn to pieces by the group—psychologically and at times even physically (in the “boxing matches,” for example, the person “on the floor” was forced to defend himself against a series of challengers until he finally surrendered to the power of the group). The catharses in fact purified the group by revitalizing its syncytial nature, the essential prerequisite for an atmosphere that would be favorable to the “miracles.” Together the catharses and the “miracles” removed the group’s inner evil—the inevitable resurgence of that part of the individual (the Ego) which was capable of self-questioning, of separating from the group, and of distinguishing between fiction and reality. The very existence of an individual Ego and an individual Self had to be denied, at all costs, in the regression toward the group-individual. The final death rite of Peoples Temple arose out of a condensation of all the original rituals. In the White Night, collective death was supposed to bring about the “translation” (or last exodus) which would definitively purify the group (catharsis). It would bring about the magical transformation of Evil into Good. “We win when we go down!” (Pozzi, Nesci, Bersani, 1988: 160)—Jones was later to shout during the last White Night. And this was the ultimate “miracle.”

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This hypothesis of the White Night as the result of a condensation is confirmed by the fact that, in Jonestown, the White Night replaced the two basic rites designed for the elimination of the group’s inner evil: the “miracles” and exoduses, which had by then fallen into disuse. In Guyana, Jones was no longer able to do “miracles” as effectively as before. For example, his performance of faith healings in the Catholic church of Georgetown (which he had only gained use of by deception) had not brought forth the usual favorable reactions. The final blow to the thaumaturgical power of the Peoples Temple leader had come with the death of his mother. Lynetta Jones died in Guyana, and her “godlike” son had not been able to save her. The chances for pulling off another exodus were no better. It was true that the Russian embassy maintained regular and friendly contacts with the utopian community, but it was also true that the Soviets were diffident of Jones and his group. They hesitated to encourage them to move to Russia. By deepening the regressive flight of Peoples Temple, the White Night would therefore condense all the previous rites (which were no longer practicable) into a new and single one. For the true believer, this ritual would not only bring forth catharsis, but would also retrieve the gratifications of the other two lost rites. If those who drank the “poison” could come back to life, was that not a miracle? And if they were about to make the “translation,” would that not also be a new exodus? From this perspective, the White Night seems to be the regressive result of condensation and replacement, the two “distinguishing marks of the [ . . . ] primary psychical process” (Freud, 19l5a: 186). Further evidence that the unconscious mind of the group-individual was the impersonal molder of the death ritual of Jonestown. BLACK NIGHTS, WHITE NIGHTS These trials became more and more frequent when Peoples Temple settled in the jungles of Guyana after the exodus of l977. At first, they were called “Omega,” then “Alpha,” because the end was supposed to represent a new beginning. Later still they were called “Black Nights,” and finally “White Nights” (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982). The changes in the name of the rite (whose structure nevertheless remained constant) give the answer to the enigma of the final oxymoron. The White Night had its roots deeply ensconced in the “metaphysics of the moon” (Eliade, 1957), in the original soil of the unconscious mind. Only there could the representation of individual death be easily displaced by the idea of cyclical metamorphosis.



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We need to read more of Briffault (1927) to realize how capable man was (and still is) of disavowing the reality of natural and individual birth and death in order to preserve this lunar illusion. In a more general way the moon is conceived as dying every month and as being born again after three days, and the power of men to survive every month, or the hope that they will survive after death, is regarded as being derived from the moon, and as dependent upon the moon’s faculty of being born again after dying each month. [ . . . ] Among the natives of the Caroline Islands, for instance, it is thought that men formerly went to sleep as the moon waned, and slept during the three days of the interlunary period, and that they rose again with the new moon after the third day. Accordingly, the people rejoice at the appearance of the new moon, and say that they are born again. [ . . . ] The Takelma Indians likewise believe that their power of living [month] after month is dependent upon the monthly resurrection of the moon. When it first appears, they pray to it: “May I prosper, may I remain alive yet awhile. Even if people say to me, ‘Would that he die,’ may I do just as thou doest, may I rise again like the moon. Even thus when many evil beings devour thee, when frogs eat thee up, and many evil beings such as lizards, when those eat thee up, still dost thou rise again. In time to come may I do just like thee.” (Briffault, 1927: 652–653)

Now finally the blueprint of the White Night can be introduced. In fact, the classical motif of lunar metamorphosis is essential in its ritual pattern. They [the white nights] would usually start [ . . . ] with the traitors [ . . . ]. That’s the way he got your attention. He’d get real sad and talk about how he just couldn’t understand how people who’d been our brothers and sisters could turn around and do these things to us. He’d talk about what kind of people could sell out their comrades for a fancy car and a pocket full of credit cards. Then he’d shake his head and he’d say they’d broken his heart—made him feel like life just wasn’t worth living. When he started talking like that, then people would start jumping up and down and shouting about how much they loved him—and finally, he’d say he knew they did and that was the only thing that made him want to go on—that made him want to go on living. (Feinsod, 1981: 134–135)

This was how the White Nights usually began, according to one of the very few survivors of Jonestown. Disavowal of ambivalence (Jones’s inability to understand the aboutface of the “traitors”) and the fear of metamorphosis played an essential role: the “selfless” group-individual, who was ready to escape from the accursed cycle of reincarnations (the “true believer”), could be abruptly transformed into a “self-centered” individual (as they used to say inside Peoples Temple), eager for life and unworthy of eternity (a “traitor”).

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The same dynamics of catastrophic change return in the second part of the rite. But this time the transformation had to do with the external rather than with the internal world. It would always come around to what we were going to do when they attacked us. Sometimes we’d talk fighting; and then he’d remind us that we couldn’t fight the Guyanese [Jones used to tell his followers they were “black and socialists,” like the Guyanese, so they could not fight against them, author’s note], and then other people would bring up various alternatives, but he’d just keep shaking his head and ruling them all out for some reason or other, whatever they were. What it usually came down to in the end was that no matter what happened, they’d send us back home. Then he’d talk about all the reasons we left America, and he’d ask if anybody wanted to go back to that. And then it’d get real quiet, and finally he’d just throw up his hands and say there wasn’t any way out for us. (Feinsod, 1981: 135)

The mythical adoptive mother of Peoples Temple might at any time reveal herself ambivalent and historically ready, for reasons of state, to put an end to the Golden Age of the “lovely utopia” of Jonestown. She could betray her symbiotic accord with Peoples Temple, in order to provide her own child (the Guyanese people) with a new life cycle. The placenta which had grown old (Jonestown) could be expelled and abandoned to its fate in a world of persecution, instead of being protected indefinitely within the womb of the Guyana jungle. The catastrophic anxiety associated with this double (external and internal) metamorphosis needed elaboration. In one way or another the magic filter, the “poison” would enter the scene at this point in the ritual. The following account, still part of the same episode, refers to a White Night that took place in April, 1978. He [Jones] sent one of the nurses to the medical tent and told us she was going to get the poison, and we were going to do it right then and there. Then he started calling on people, calling them out by name, and asking them if they were afraid to die. I wasn’t sure if it was for real or not, but the people he was calling on, they were all people who’d stood up before when we talked about dying and admitted they were afraid, so I kind of figured, if he really meant to do it, he wouldn’t be calling on those people, he’d be calling on people he’d know were ready to do anything he said. Then, when the nurse came back, he said she was going to demonstrate how easy it was, and she took one sip out of this bottle and just kind of keeled over and crumpled up. Well, right then I stopped being worried. I mean I’m no medical expert, but I never heard of any poison that takes a person as quick as that. There were some people who looked real worried, and some people who didn’t. It was kind of hard to say how many of each there were, but a lot of the old people and a lot of the children were sitting there with their eyes



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all bugged out, so I guess they believed it. A lot of them were crying and you could see how hard it was on them but eventually they’d all say they’d do it if that’s what he decided we had to do. But, then he got to this one teenage girl, and she said she’d do it just like the rest of them, but she wanted to say goodbye to all her friends first. Well, she started going on naming damn near everybody in Jonestown. It might not sound real funny now, but it was like she was reading the goddamn telephone book, a mile a minute, without even breathing, and after a while you just couldn’t keep a straight face. I don’t remember who laughed first, but after a while even Jones was laughing, and that was about the end of it. Even the dead nurse got up and started laughing. (Feinsod, 1981: 139–140)

In the White Night, the syncytial group and its leader staged the lunar metamorphosis: from the waning atmosphere of “death” to the manic triumph of “resurrection,” with the “dead nurse” laughing. All of the dreaded metamorphoses were exorcized by the cathartic demonstration that even the most dreaded one (death) could be overcome. It now becomes clear why the White Night came to be repeated more and more frequently at Jonestown, along with the growing fear of an impending catastrophic change—the death of Jones, the downfall of the Peoples Temple, the unbearable experience of syncytial mourning. The White Night dramatized the promise of the ultimate group illusion: “If we hold together, we will become like the moon, which changes skin and is reborn . . . we will only die apparently . . . we will be truly regenerated.” Peoples Temple carried lunar metaphysics to the extreme. Their group illusion was perverted and crystallized in a “monumental travesty”: Jonestown as a realized utopia. “It is a beautiful tropical night. There is a cool breeze blowing. I can look out the window at the full moon, hearing people laughing, and I can see Jonestown lit up in the moonlight. All else is quiet—it is just a perfect experience” (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 9). Through total isolation from the rest of the world, Jonestown “lit up” in the inebriant moonshine of the eternal lunar deception: the impossible refetalization of mankind into a Paradise on earth, the false rediscovery of a mythical Golden Age.

THE STORY OF AWAKAIPU It is here that the collective murder-suicide of Bekeranta fits in. This was the utopian community reported by an anthropologist as the historical precedent of Jonestown (Drummond, 1983). As we will now see, Drummond’s association between the two perverse utopias is as inaccurate in relation to the death rite, as it is absolutely correct, in the light of lunar metaphysics.

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Awakaipu [ . . . ] was an Arekuna Indian who had lived for some time in Georgetown [Guyana] and learnt English. [ . . . ] He sent messengers throughout the Indian country saying that all who wished to see wonderful happenings, and to know the way to become rich and powerful as the white men, should meet at the beginning of the dry season in the valley of the Kukenaam at the foot of Mount Roraima. [ . . . ] A thousand Indians from every tribe gathered at the foot of the mountain and gave Awakaipu knives, powder, shot and fish-hooks. In return, he gave them pages from The Times, which he said would act as charms [ . . . ] . Awakaipu named his settlement Bekeranta, which is an Indian form of a Dutch-Creole word meaning Land of the Whites. He built a two-storeyed hut, living on the upper floor himself and installing a harem of chosen girls in the floor below. [ . . . ] He encouraged cassiri drinking and dancing, hoping that this would induce a state of mind in which all would accept his leadership. Later he decided that he would have to kill all untrustworthy elements so that the others would follow him. On the night of a general orgy he appeared and announced through the folds of his gown that he had just being received in audience by the great spirit Makunaima, who had told him that the Indians must never be driven out of their own land by the white people. They must become greater and more powerful than the whites; they must have white women as wives, and themselves have white skins. Makunaima, he went on, had told him that all gathered at Bekeranta could have white skins. They would have to kill each other and their souls would rise to the summit of Roraima, where they would be reborn and return to the valley of Kukenaam in two days; [ . . . ] Awakaipu seized a war-club, attacked a man and smashed his head open so that the blood spurted into a gourd of cassiri, which he then drank. The drunken Indians now began to fight each other and submerged hatreds erupted once again. It is said that four hundred men, women and children were killed during that night of massacre, and the survivors waited day after day to see the resurrected come down from Roraima. [ . . . ] Eventually it was realized that there would be no resurrection and a party of Indians went to the two-storeyed hut of Awakaipu and beat him to death with their clubs. (M. Swan, 1958: 243–245)

Unconsciously, Awakaipu promised his followers a dramatic change in their identities: “their skins would be white and they would have all the knowledge of the white people.” A change that was meaningfully represented as a lunar metamorphosis, in syntony with the mythology of the Indians of Guyana. The idea of dying in order to change skin and be resuscitated (after an interlunar period, like the moon) was a familiar motif in the culture of the Arekuna, as well as in other myths and beliefs all over the world. But Awakaipu was no longer able to believe it. He felt differently from his people. He felt homeless in his own home/country/culture. He had been estranged from his own roots by the Schomburgks, the Europeans who left the colony after having made use of him for their expeditions in the territory. In an attempt to work through the vertigo of his disorienting experience, he



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managed to give a familiar meaning to what they had left him (The Times). Those newspapers were “waste-paper” (M. Swan, 1958) for the Schomburgks. They were just refuse. Using a technique which is typical of every placental leader, Awakaipu had succeeded in obtaining wealth and power. He had recycled the discarded wastes of a catastrophe (colonization, in this case) and filtered them back into his own familiar culture. He had imbued the pages of the Times with an indigenous meaning. But he himself felt discarded, already become a stranger in both his own culture and the culture of the colonizers. Filled with a sense of disorientation and despair, he set out on a suicidal enterprise. Awakaipu’s ordeal was a model of ambiguity and reversal. It was not aimed at detecting the people’s faithfulness toward their own cultural matrix, but to test the truthfulness of the syncytial cultural matrix toward its own people: “if our gods do exist, they have to resurrect us! If they do not exist, we’d better die.” The same logic had inspired countless other self-genocides of history. The Xhosa of South Africa (Canetti, 1962) are another example. In 1857, they sacrificed all their food resources in the desperate illusion that, by the rising of a double bloody sun, the spirits of their dead ancestors would come to destroy the colonizers and ransom their people. Finally, the prophesized sunrise came, but the sun was not double and the army of the dead did not appear. Within a short period of time the population of the colonized part of the Xhosa territory dropped from 105,000 to 37,000 inhabitants. In those “times,” groups of skeletons would often be found, embraced together under trees—the lunar/placental “topoi” (or mental places) of “the man of prehistoric times” surviving “unchanged in our unconscious” (Freud, 1915b: 296). THE SEPARATION SIN Deep inside the Guyana jungle, in the heart of darkness, abandonment of the Peoples Temple, betrayal and death of the group, became one and the same thing. This symbolic equation had been prefigured in the prototypes of the White Night, and then configured as a ritual motif. The separation sin of syncytial cultures had been reestablished. Actually, in Jonestown, any and every expression of individual life separate from the group assumed the connotation of betrayal. In this sense, it is significant that the White Night reported above (Feinsod, 1981) was concluded thanks to the fact that one young member had been able to revive the syncytialization of the group by rapidly and indiscriminately repeating the names of all the inhabitants of Jonestown (“her friends”). This evidence of

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how deeply the girl was in symbiotic communion with her group, made the whole community pass their loyalty test. This episode evokes (and sheds light on) some details of the Bakongo ritual of the poison ordeal. While the poor wretch is still dazed by the poison which he has swallowed, the bystanders will take twigs of six different sorts of trees and throw them at him in quick succession, requiring him to name the tree from which each twig was plucked. If he names them rightly, they will ask him to name the various kinds of ants that are running about on the ground; and if he again answers correctly, he is called upon to name the butterflies and birds that flit by through the air. Should he fail in any one of these tests, he is pronounced a witch and pays the penalty with his life. (Frazer, 1919: 359)

Just as the accused Bakongo had to prove that he was able to recognize (and knew by heart) the names of the trees and animals of his ecosystem— therefore that he was in symbiosis with his cultural matrix—so the “children” of Jonestown had to demonstrate that they had fully mentalized their membership in the syncytial group. White Night after White Night, the regression to the group-individual deepened, in the isolation of Jonestown, to the extreme limits. Ultimately, leaving the group meant breaking the heart of Jones and dismembering the Peoples Temple. It meant acting out a new version of the separation sin. A dramatic confirmation of this hypothesis can be read in the confession of a young woman addressed to Jones in July l978. It followed a practice of selfdisclosure which had, long since been consolidated inside Peoples Temple. What is treasonous in me? My intellectualism that causes me to trust my own judgement sometimes better than yours. Also, I have this fear that unless we take much caution to eliminate racism now, after u are gone, racism & factionalism could break this community apart (unlikely, but a possibility). If I thought this community was falling apart because of that, I would make the strongest efforts to keep it together & resolve the differences. If that failed, I would leave & devote myself to some other revolutionary work. I think that is treasonous in me. The right thing to do would be to stay, to stay no matter what, even if it fell apart. To go down w/Jt (with Jonestown, author’s note) if we couldn’t make it together. (Reston, l981: 86)

The same motif returned right on call during every White Night. Once, for example, while the possibility of fleeing to Cuba was being discussed, one of the members of Peoples Temple expressed the fear that this might cause the group to lose its unity as an indivisible whole. Jones replied that their oneness as a group would be a preliminary condition for any new exodus



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whatsoever —“But if problems arose [ . . . ] we can white-night [die together, author’s note] in one place, just as well as another” (Reston, 1981: 185). Also in the last White Night, this motif was to return, punctually and automatically, in the form of a confrontation between a woman (Christine) and Jim Jones about the inevitability of suicide. Following the typical pattern of the cathartic sessions, the group turned against Christine and reduced her to silence. Woman’s voice: [ . . . ] well, I think I still have a right to my own opinions. Jones: I’m not taking it from you. I’m not taking it from you. Man’s voice: Christine, you’re only standing here because he was here in the first place. So, I don’t know what you’re talking about, having an individual life. Your life has been extended to the day that you’re standing there because of him. [Applause] (Pozzi, Nesci, Bersani, 1988: 161)

As the Planning Commission had become the “crowd crystal” (Canetti, 1962) of Peoples Temple through the cathartic sessions, so the commune of Jonestown had become the “crowd crystal” of itself, through the White Nights. DEATH NARCISSISM By acting out the narcissistic paradox contained in its name, the Peoples Temple had come to worship its own immutable and double unity: placental leader and syncytial group. From this perspective, we can start understanding how the people of Jonestown had been able to rediscover the archaic ritual of the “oral trial,” as Theodor Reik redefined the “poison ordeal” (1945), and to work it through within the perverse scenario of “death narcissism” (Green, 2007). They destroyed themselves to save their group illusion. They preferred death to the painful avowal that the holocaust and the persecution they claimed to foresee outside Jonestown were just a reflection of the genocide that was going to happen inside. They were no longer capable of detaching themselves from what they were contemplating: their own unconscious image, disavowed, projected, and reflected in the mirror of the narcissistic swampland. They were ready to be drowned like the mythical Narcissus, who was unable to detach himself from the fascination of stagnant, motionless, mirroring waters. A less known version of this myth needs to be recalled here. According to Pausanias (9.31.8), Narcissus was in love with his own twin sister. When she died he was overwhelmed with grief and sorrow until he looked at his own image in the mirror of a swampland. The illusion of seeing his own beloved

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sister twin again was so consolatory that he was no longer able to detach himself from that vision. This version of the myth helps us to understand the prenatal scenario where the motifs of narcissism and of the double cluster together: the perverse love relationship between the unborn child and the placenta (Narcissus and his sister twin), the impossibility to accept the death of the afterbirth (the twin sister of Narcissus) after delivery, and the dangers of malignant symbiotic attachment that “cuts” the work of delivery and drowns mother and unborn child in their swampland, with the fascination of motionless, mirroring, “dead” waters. It also sheds new light and insight into the unconscious meanings of the cassette of the suicide. This was a fetish-object, a concrete materialization of the sonorous soul of the placental leader and his syncytial group: the crystallization of an illusion. It was to be the unalterable custodian of the death ritual, the Echo of a new variant of the Narcissus myth—An echo that could always be re-played. An uncanny story within the story must be recalled here. On March 13, 1979, Michael Prokes, the former PR officer of Peoples Temple called a press conference. Why did Jonestown end the way it did? [ . . . ] I believe at least a good part of that answer can be found on the tape recording of the last hour of life in Jonestown. [ . . . ] Why is it being kept locked out? The press should demand that the tape be made public. I’m not talking about a transcript either . . . [ . . . ] . In order to be properly evaluated and understood, the entire 50 minutes of the original tape should be played to the press, unedited and uncensored. [ . . . ] I refuse to let my black brothers and sisters and others in Jonestown, die in vain. (Prokes, 1979)

He then walked out of the room and shot himself. The uncanny cassette had become the fetish object which could make resound, over and over again, the voices of the dead community. An unsettling object. The technological perverse opposite of the tjurunga/bullroarer that Aboriginal Australians used to build, with wood or stone, carve and paint, tie with a string, and use to produce magic sounds after the birth of every new baby. Now, we are better prepared to approach the transcription of the recording of this uncanny cassette and discover, in a condensed form, all the motifs of the placental leader and his syncytial group. It is all there: the desperate disavowal of every human limit, of every discontinuity, of every separation. It is all condensed in the loudest cry of Jones, in his “ololoughe” (from “olos” = “all” or “whole,” and “luzo” = “to cry”). In Ancient Greece, this was the name given to the cry of the sacrificer at the moment of sacrificing his ritual



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victim. In Jonestown, while the children were beginning to die, when the child/people was facing the ultimate catharsis, Jones cried out from the bottom of his unconscious: “Mother, mother, mother, mother, mother please! Mother please! Please! Please! Don’t . . . Don’t do this! Don’t do this! Lay down your life with your child but don’t do this!” (Pozzi, Nesci, Bersani, 1988: 171). This ololoughe was a ritual cry to a maternal imago, regarding something unutterable (“Don’t do this!”). The cry of Jones re-evokes numberless mysterious myths and rituals of the Great Mother, where a secret sacrifice (or ritual action) was performed. And it gives some meaning even to the awkward poisoning of pigs which preceded the holocaust of Jonestown (Wooden, 1980). After a delegation of children entreated Jones not to cut off their heads, as he had graphically suggested during one White Night, Jones instructed [ . . . ] [the doctor of Jonestown] to research the subject of mass suicide by poisoning. On a hot night in May 1978, Jones assembled his followers to see the progress of [ . . . ] [the doctor’s] research. Three pigs were brought up from the piggery and injected with syringes filled with different quantities of cyanide. The children, the adults, and Jones watched the ominous results. (180)

The ritual murder of little pigs as doubles of the initiands was the preliminary sacrifice in the Eleusinian Mysteries (Burkert, 1983). The pig, in fact, was the sacred animal of Demeter—a Greek version of the Great Mother. In some rituals, the pig had to be immersed and cleaned in the waters together with the initiand. In other cases, pigs were thrown into deep caves. It is my hypothesis that the rituals of the Great Mother revived a prenatal setting in which the pig represented the sacrificial double: the placenta. And this would explain why so many motifs of the White Night (and of other rituals of collective suicide) re-evoke those myths as well. According to one myth, for example, Demeter was trying to make the son of the king of Eleusis immortal by exposing him to the flames (catharsis by fire is a leitmotif, in the unconscious fantasies of collective suicide). Demophon was the name of the child (from “demos” = “people,” and “faino” = “to bring to light”). The natural mother did not accept this dangerous catharsis: her common sense told her that Demeter was actually killing her son while pretending to make him immortal. The woman tried to interfere with the sacred action, but the Goddess reproached her with a loud cry. With the infants dying, Marceline pleaded with Jones to stop killing them. “Mother, Mother, Mother” was recorded before he turned off the tape and confronted his wife. According to eyewitnesses and police reports, an enraged Jones either ordered or pushed Marceline from the table. “You can’t do that to

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Mother!” protested her personal bodyguard, [ . . . ]. Jones ordered [him] to fill a paper cup from the vat and drink it immediately. [The bodyguard] acquiesced. Marceline seemed to give up then, and drank the poison herself. (Wooden, 1980: 187–188)

Jonestown as an uncouth Eleusis. Jonestown as one of the many places where the mysterious ancient rituals are still played back in the perverse form of a regressive unconscious acting out. THE END OF JONESTOWN Ryan and his group had succeeded in visiting Jonestown, despite Jones’s obstructionism and the objective difficulties of reaching the commune immersed in the jungle. Even though all the inhabitants had done everything imaginable to demonstrate that they were happy and did not want to return to the United States, a small group of people had either fled or, in broad daylight, expressed their resolute desire to leave with the Congressman. Even though the lawyers of Peoples Temple (Charles Garry and Mark Lane) maintained that the incident was of little account compared with the positive fact that most of the people had shown themselves happy and united around their leader, Jones appeared to be wounded to the quick. His mood, moreover, was shared by the members of the commune—a fact clearly demonstrated in the following episode. The moment the journalists and the “traitors” (as those who abandoned Jonestown were called) had boarded the truck that was to take them to the airstrip of Port Kaituma, a man tried to join this little group with his children. The omnipresent loudspeakers of Jonestown called his wife who immediately came. The woman accused the natural father of kidnapping her children, and she even threatened to kill him. All of Jonestown was on her side. The ensuing argument was temporarily settled by the lawyers of the Peoples Temple who convinced the man that he did not have the right to take his own children with him. The man, having failed to escape with his children, refused to desert them and leave alone. Ryan then offered to stay in Jonestown to guard his safety and allow others to come forward and express their desire to go back to the States. Soon afterwards, a member of the Peoples Temple attempted to stab the Congressman with a knife. We can try to understand this episode by recreating the emotional atmosphere which surrounded it. Once again, the personal experience of Tim Reiterman during that dramatic moment is my main point of reference. What sounded like a cheer rumbled from the pavilion. Scores of people stampeded toward the far end of the structure. The noise stopped both Greg, who



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had been shooting from the truck roof, and Bob Brown, who was spreadlegged on the hood taking footage of the fields. “I’ll wave if it amounts to anything,” barked Don Harris, hitting the mud with a squish of boots, then jagging a course through the crops [Greg Robinson, photographer of the San Francisco Examiner, NBC newsmen Don Harris, and Bob Brown were later to be assassinated on the airstrip of Port Kaituma by the “Red Brigade” of Peoples Temple, author’s note]. A moment later, he whistled and flailed both arms like a madman. We other reporters hit the muck and ran through tall beans to the pavilion. There, Harris held fast rushes, but he deliberately controlled his normally unexcitable voice. He said, slowly, so there would be no misunderstanding, “Some guy tried to kill Leo [Congressman Leo Ryan]. Leo’s all right. The guy grubbed Leo around the neck. Put a knife to his throat. Said, ‘I’m gonna cut your throat, you motherfucker.’ Leo and the rest took it away. The guy was cut in the scuffle.” My neck muscles swelled with adrenalin. I felt an overwhelming need to see for myself, to be there to support Ryan. At that moment, we were as one—the outsiders, the enemy. Distinctions among reporters, the congressman, the relatives fell away. Our only hope in a crisis was sticking together. But [ . . . ], backed by a group of husky young men, instructed us to turn back. [ . . . ] The situation was volatile, he said, and our presence might touch off more trouble. “People are uptight.” (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982: 518–519)

The regressive reactions of the inhabitants of Jonestown caused Ryan’s group to precipitate into an unintentionally imitative behavior. Ryan’s group became a mirror image of the Peoples Temple, with all differences abolished (“At that moment, we were as one [ . . . ]. Distinctions [ . . . ] fell away.”). In the “perverse scenario” of Jonestown, the attempted knifing of a paternal figure (the Congressman) was the “action-symptom” that revealed the construction of a “neosexual erotic theater” (McDougall, 1986) by the Peoples Temple. In it the function of the third party (whose function is to mediate the relationship between mother and child) was reversed. Instead of taking on his own shoulders what Fornari defined as “the primary paranoia” (i.e., the maternal anxiety of murdering and/or being murdered by the fetoplacental unit), the father became the violator of the mother’s body. Instead of being fantasized as the redeemer (the one who could safely contain the “primary paranoia” and work it through), the paternal imago was experienced as the enemy. Putting his knife to Ryan’s throat, the member of Peoples Temple was accusing the Congressman (unconsciously) of attempting to cut an umbilical cord which was still the only source of life for the people/fetoplacental unit. In the bodily language of the unconscious, he was accusing Ryan of endangering the prenatal symbiotic triad (mother, placenta, and unborn child). At the same time, he was trying to punish him under the law of retaliation, which is the archaic law of the unconscious.

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But the “reality” of Jonestown had already been unmasked as untrue by the last event of Ryan’s visit. A husband fighting with his wife because he wanted to leave and take their children with him, was a fact that ineluctably reaffirmed the reality of genital relationships and biological fatherhood—a fact that inflicted an incurable wound onto the narcissism of the group. It was not true that the “children” of Jonestown were continuously regenerated by their lunar “Father”/placental leader and their placental mother/syncytial group (the Peoples Temple). It was not true that the group-individuals/unborn children lived in harmony within their maternal womb (Jonestown) and never wished to get out of it. In other words, it was not true that Jonestown was Paradise on earth! We can now better understand the reaction of anger and despair that the abandonment by the “traitors” set loose in the members of Peoples Temple who had remained. While Jonestown was celebrating its last White Night, Ryan was sentenced to death and executed because he had “fucked” their collective mother/group. The recording of the last White Night opens with the voice of Jones accusing the people who had left of having committed “the betrayal of the century,” and of having precipitated a “catastrophe” (Pozzi, Nesci, Bersani, 1988: 153). For those who understand the language of the unconscious, that catastrophe was the collapse of the group illusion (the climate of elation, of manic triumph that characterized the “happiness” of Jonestown). A collapse that had been caused by the power failure of placental leadership. The sacred king had become old. The placenta had aged. If this reality could not be wiped out, it would be necessary to face the dangerous metamorphosis of delivery and birth, to recognize the end of their symbiotic organization, and the beginning of a new life of inevitable separation of mother/group and individual members. It would be necessary to avow the role of the father as paternal leader, heir to the spoils of the placental leader. It would be necessary to leave the utopian Paradise of the Golden Age and enter the transient time-space of history. In other words, it would be necessary to go through a mourning process. Dozens stood stiff as cane stalks around the playground perimeter, their attention fixed on Jones and some aides [ . . . ]. The rank-and-file members by the truck [that was to carry Ryan’s group from Jonestown to Port Kaituma, author’s note] had turned their backs to us to watch and wait [for a sign by Jones indicating what to do, author’s note]. They all looked as though there had been a death in the family. (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982: 517)

It was to avoid the painful working through of this mourning (the inevitable catastrophe of every symbiotic organization) that Jonestown was to celebrate its own version of the poison ordeal.



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POISON ORDEAL AT JONESTOWN: DRINKING KOOL-AID The complete transcript of the White Night of November 18, 1978, has already been published (Zaniello, 1987; Pozzi, Nesci, Bersani, 1988). I will therefore limit myself to recalling a few moments and a few expressions which confirm two hypotheses of mine: the death ritual of Peoples Temple was rooted in the syncytial culture, in the metaphysics of the moon; the White Night was a condensation of the previous rites of Peoples Temple (miracles, exoduses, and catharses). The suicide cassette opens with Jones speaking to his people. His words resound with lunar motifs. His speech moves along the same patterns of thought as those mythological narratives which “explain” the introduction of death upon the earth. In the myths, there was a god (none other than the moon, according to Briffault) who was supposed to have sent a message to mankind to partake of his gift of periodical regeneration, while all of the other creatures would have to face death. The lunar messenger, for some reason (usually because he was tired and/or because he had been deceived by a snake) would pervert the message. The lie would be believed. And then there would be nothing that could be done to undo this mortal betrayal of the original “truth” (mankind’s immortality). Also in the Peoples Temple, lies and deception were omnipotent and irremediable. Collective disavowal of the painful aspects of reality inevitably regressed the individual members to group-individuals, and crystallized the play of illusion into the fraud of perversion. It is only here, within the universe of perversion, that the omnipotence of thought becomes an ideology. It is only here that we are faced with the idealization of a pattern of thought which systematically betrays our mortal human nature and the limits of reality. This regressive thought, which is typical of the syncytial group, invalidates the functions of the individual Ego— especially that of reality testing—any time the acknowledgment of reality endangers the primordial cultural matrix. The theatrical/cathartic atmosphere of the meetings of the Planning Commission were just one example of this regressive process. Actually, the participants were being trained to surrender to the power of their placental leader and syncytial group, and to stop trying to determine whether whatever was happening at any given moment was real or staged. In the last White Night, we are confronted with the final outcome of the process. We see how Jones was able to maintain that the Peoples Temple was not dying, just “stepping over to another plane,” that they were not destroying themselves, just making “that step to the other side” and leaving “this goddamm world.” They were committing “an act of revolutionary suicide, protesting the conditions of an inhuman world!” (Pozzi, Nesci, Bersani, 1988: 150–175) We can now listen to the “living word” of the placental leader.

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Jones: I’m tired. Since quite a day, I’m getting tired. My bones ache. I’ve tried my best to give you a good life. [The lunar messenger bringing the gift of eternal life to mankind is getting tired, author’s note] In spite of all that I’ve tried, a handful of our people, with their lies have made our lives impossible [sneaky liars pervert the message and deprive mankind of the gift of immortality, author’s note] There is no way to detach ourselves from what’s happened today. Not only are we in a compound situation. Not only are there those who have left and committed the betrayal of the century. Some, have stolen children [children = members of Peoples Temple, author’s note] from their mothers, and they [the Red Brigade of Peoples Temple, author’s note] are in pursuit right now to kill them, because they stole their children; and we are sitting here, waiting on a powder keg. [Here Jones is evoking the emotional atmosphere of the last scene of Ryan’s visit. Perverting the truth, he is accusing the Congressman and the Concerned Relatives of having stolen children (members) from the Peoples Temple. He is denying that those “children” who “have left and committed the betrayal of the century” are leaving Jonestown willingly. He pretends they have been kidnapped, author’s Note.] [ . . . ] It’s going to be a catastrophe. It almost happened here, almost happened. . . . The Congressman was nearly killed here. You can’t steal people’s children, you can’t take off with people’s children without expecting a violent reaction. [ . . . ] If we can’t live in peace, then let’s die in peace. (Applause) We have been so betrayed. We have been so terribly betrayed. (Music) [ . . . ] What is going to happen here in a matter of a few minutes is that one of those people on that plane is going to shoot the pilot. I know that. I didn’t plan it, but I know it’s going to happen. They’re gonna shoot that pilot and down comes that plane into the jungle. [Actually, the Red Brigade didn’t follow the plan by Jones. Instead of waiting and letting the planes take off, they began shooting immediately on the airstrip to prevent the planes from taking off; so, the false defector, who was supposed to kill the pilot after takeoff, could not execute his mission. The plan organized by Jones failed, and his prophecy too, author’s note] And we had better not have any of our children left when it’s over. Because they’ll parachute in here on us. I’m going to be just as plain as I know how to tell you. I’ve never lied to you. I never have lied to you. I know that’s what’s gonna happen. [ . . . ] And it’ll happen, if the plane gets in the air even. So, my opinion is that we be kind to children, and be kind to seniors, and take the potion, like they used to take in ancient Greece, and step over quietly. Because we are not committing suicide. It’s a revolutionary act. We can’t go back. They won’t leave us alone. They’re now going back to tell more lies, which means more Congressmen. And there’s no way, no way we can survive. (Music) Anybody . . . Anyone that has any dissenting opinion, please, speak! (Music) (A voice from the Assembly) Yes. You can have an opportunity, but if the children are left, we are going to have them butchered. (Pozzi, Nesci, Bersani, 1988: 153–154)

In the words of the placental leader, separation sounds like betrayal and catastrophe (“a handful of our people, with their lies have made our lives



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impossible”). In the unconscious fantasy of the syncytial group, the Peoples Temple is a “mother of children” who experiences delivery and the birth of her babies in the terms of Fornari’s “primary paranoia” (1981). If the children are born and come out of the jungle/womb, if the airplane takes off and detaches itself from the mother/earth, the lot of the mother/group is sealed (“They’re now going back to tell more lies, which means more Congressmen. And there’s no way, no way we can survive”). The mother dies because she experiences delivery as dismemberment: her children are literally a part of herself. If they are separated from her, she dies. And the unborn babies die too. Separated from their mother, they are exposed and helpless in a persecutory environment (“if the children are left, we are going to have them butchered”). Thus, the unconscious dynamics of maternal ambivalence and the motifs of syncytial culture return—deeply associated—at the roots of the White Night. In the crucial moment, after so many rehearsals and stagings, when it became clear that they were really going to die, when the children were already drinking the Kool-Aid laced with poison (a red water with a fruit flavor, containing benzodiazepine and cyanide) and the whole group was undergoing the final catharsis, the motif of the miracle had to be explicitly reintroduced in order to spur the people toward their last exodus. Man’s voice: Sit down and be quiet, please. One of the things I used to do, I used to be a therapist. And the kind of therapy that I did had to do with reincarnation in past life situations. And every time anybody had an experience of going into a past life, I was fortunate enough, through Father, to be able to let them experience it, but all the way through their death, so to speak; and everybody was so happy, when they made that step to the other side. Jones: When you step to God, there’s nothing you can do, but step that way. It’s the only way to step. (Cries of children.) The choice is not ours, now. It’s out of our hands (A child is crying near the microphone). Man’s voice: If you have a body that’s been crippled, and suddenly you have that kind of body that you wanted to have (Jones’ incomprehensible voice, while children keep on crying). Jones: Death is nothing but a little rest . . . a little rest. Man’s voice: It feels good, it never felt so good. I’ll tell you, we’ve never felt so good as how that feels! (Cries/Interruption). A voice from the crowd: It’s hard! Jones: It’s hard, it’s hard only at first. Only at first, it’s hard. Hard only at first. [ . . . ] Living is much more difficult. [ . . . ] It’s far, far harder to have to watch you every day die slowly . . . and from the time you’re [a] child to the time you’re gray, you’re dying. ” (Pozzi, Nesci, Bersani, 1988: l67–168)

If the social body of the Peoples Temple had been “crippled” by the intrusion of enemies, captained by Ryan, and by the defection of twenty or so new

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“traitors” (who had chosen to take advantage of the opportunity to flee), now only violent death could mask the traces of this crippling/aging. Only death could disguise the unequivocal signs of the falsehood of the Jonestown utopia. At the same time, the White Night ritual would bring about the ultimate miracle: the mysterious, unutterable, omnipotent therapy of the metaphysics of the moon. The social body of the Peoples Temple would be “suddenly” metamorphosed. The group with a “crippled body” would be magically turned into a group with the “kind of body that you wanted to have.” By casting off its old skin, the Peoples Temple would become purified once and for all: no more individuals, no more ambivalence, no more limits, “no more pain.” After a “little rest,” everybody would “lay down” his “burden” (Pozzi, Nesci, Bersani, l988: 167–172). Reviving echoes from an old negro spiritual, and capturing a suggestion from the confused “voices” of his syncytial group, Jones regressively found a new and perverse version of the ancient lunar motifs. “Jones: That song—[voices]. Lay down your burdens. I’m gonna lay down my burden, down by the riverside. Shall we lay them down here by the side of Guyana? What is the difference?” (Zaniello, 1987: 419) What is the difference? In the unconscious there was no difference, there was no way to distinguish between the psychic reality of the song (played in that moment) and the external reality of Jonestown, where the members of the Peoples Temple were murdering their own children, poisoning themselves, and dying together. And so, they were going to lay down their “burden.” As far as they were concerned, they were merely going to step over and meet their “old mother,” their “father, sister and brother.” Just like in the old song, they too were going “down by the riverside.” They too would “study war no more.”

Chapter 7

Fractals

According to an Italian philosopher, “the highest achievement in the works of Benjamin and Freud was their attempt, faced with the rubble and fragments of the present, to try to construct on this ground and with these very ruins other patterns, other images through which the newly emerging historical scene, still groping for words to express its richness, may come into its own” (Rella, 1981). Following their paths, we will try now to construct “other patterns” out of the rubble of the catastrophe of Jonestown. With this aim in mind, I will recall some collective suicides throughout history, and try to bring out the psychosocial dynamics of this death rite. And its pattern. The historical examples which I have chosen will also illustrate that collective suicide is an ancient and universal rite. It is independent of the Christian cultural matrix. And it is also independent of the geo-political matrix of Guyana, where some researchers have tried to confine it (Naipaul, 1980–81; Crist, 1981; Drummond, 1983). Furthermore, by reviewing these historical precedents, we will discover that collective suicides remind fractals: “infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales” as the Fractal Foundation defines them. Fractals are universally present in nature, from sea shells to plants and trees. This is why, may be consciously and unconsciously, my artist son Filippo A. Nesci, as we have seen, used fractals to edit the Peoples Temple pictures I had recovered from the metal suitcase in the basement of the office of Charles Garry. I think that in this way art is helping us all to mourn the traumatic loss of the victims of Jonestown. In fact, if we reach a deeper understanding of what attracted so many people to die together, so many times, in so many different historical situations, we might not feel them completely alien as we did in 123

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order to defend ourselves from their syncytial mourning, in the aftermath of the tragedy of Peoples Temple. SUMERIAN RITUAL SUICIDES In his excavations, at Ur, Sir Woolley (1955, 2012) discovered that the royal tombs of about 3000 B.C. end in a mysterious death pit. Gradually he succeeded in solving the riddle. Down into the open pit, with its mat-covered floor and mat-lined walls, empty and unfurnished, there comes a procession of people, the members of the ruler’s court, soldiers, men servants and women, the latter in all their finery of brightly coloured garments and head-dresses of carnelian and lapis lazuli, silver and gold, officers with the insignia of their rank, musicians bearing harps and lyres, and then, driven or backed down the slope, the chariots drawn by oxen or by asses, the drivers in the cars, the grooms holding the heads of the draught animals, and all take up their allotted places at the bottom of the shaft and finally a guard of soldiers forms up at the entrance. Each man and woman brought a little cup of clay or stone or metal, the only equipment needed for the rite that was to follow. There would seem to have been some kind of service down there, at least it is certain that the musicians played up to the last; then each of them drank from their cups a potion which they had brought with them or found prepared for them on the spot—in one case we found in the middle of the pit a great copper pot into which they could have dipped—and they lay down and composed themselves for death. Somebody came down and killed the animals (we found their bones on the top of those of the grooms, so they must have died later) and perhaps saw to it that all was decently in order—thus in the king’s grave the lyres had been placed on the top of the bodies of the women players, leant against the tomb wall—and when that was done earth was flung in from above, over the unconscious victims, and the filling-in of the grave shaft was begun. (69–70)

Sir Woolley had no doubts about the meaning of the ritual. God does not die, and the “death” of a god-king is merely his translation to another sphere; he is to continue his life and preserve his state, and therefore he takes with him his court, his chariot and his guards. Probably the word “sacrifice” is in this connection misleading. I have pointed out that there seems to have been no violence done to the men and women attendants in the tomb chambers and death-pits, but that they drank of the drug provided and went quietly to sleep; and also, that they were not provided with even that minimum of tomb furniture—vessels of food and drink—which judging from the private graves was essential to the dead. They were not the victims of a brutal and savage

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massacre; it would seem that they were not even regarded as dying; they were going to continue their service to the royal master under new conditions, quite likely assuring themselves thereby of a less nebulous and miserable existence in the next world than Sumerian belief allotted to men dying in the ordinary way. The degree of faith which would make death the gateway of life has not been unknown in primitive ages. (81)

In our context, it is irrelevant whether this death rite was connected with the burial of the real sacred kings of Ur, or with the burial of temporary kings sacrificed together with their ephemeral courts. Analogously, it is irrelevant whether it was a funerary or a fertility rite. What is relevant for us, is that the motifs of the ritual as reconstructed by Sir Woolley present striking analogies with the last White Night of the Peoples Temple: 1. The formal aspects of the collective suicide (performing some ritual service with music in the background, drinking poison together from a great pot, killing the animals, and so on). 2. The peculiar godlike nature of the sacred king (placental leadership) and his indissoluble relationship with the court (his own syncytial group). 3. The belief that dying together would allow the whole group to go to a better world. This latter belief can be understood at a deeper level if we recall the psychoanalytical studies of Ernest Jones on “dying together,” and those of Fornari on suicide. According to Ernest Jones (1911; 1912) the idea that death consists of a return to the heaven whence we were born, that is, to the mother’s womb, is familiar to us in religious and other spheres of thought. In fact, the idea of personal death does not exist for the unconscious, being always replaced by that of sexual communion or of birth. According to Fornari (1967), “the person who commits suicide [ . . . ] is not able to separate and clings to a maternal imago. [ . . . ] His fixation point is located in the symbiotic stage of human development.” This theory would be confirmed also in Dante’s “Inferno” where the poet “represented those who killed themselves as plants—which cannot live unless rooted into the ground, i.e. into the Mother Earth” (246). In view of these studies, the collective suicide of Peoples Temple may be seen as the acting out of an unconscious fantasy of re-fetalization. The jungle itself is a maternal imago of extreme ambivalence because it is fertile and insidious, life-giving and death-giving at the same time. Dying together in the jungle would be like being reimplanted into the womb of mother Earth, in order to be born again, like grain, in another season. An interpretation which

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still resounds from the last tape of the Peoples Temple, where Jim Jones says, “I’ve been born out of due season, just like all we are” (Pozzi, Nesci, Bersani, 1988: 161). According to Zee also, the death ritual of the Peoples Temple is deeply associated with the idea of rebirth: “Jones, whose last words were ‘Mother, Mother,’ did not see death as the ultimate separator, but as a bridge to the good object—‘we are going to meet in another place.’ The White Night became the ‘White Knight’ (psychotic clang association) the deliverer” (Zee, 1980: 355). The White Night was not conceived as suicide or self-destruction. Inside Peoples Temple it was considered the means to make what they called the “translation.” It was their way to abandon this world and enter a better one (Mills, 1979) where they could restore the dual-unity forever. The ancient and universal motif of dying together as a journey to another world links the death pits at Ur and the death rite of the Peoples Temple. From this perspective, the last exodus in the jungle of Guyana and the construction of the “White Night” ritual take on the same unconscious meaning of burial in the pit/womb of mother Earth. They are different versions of the same unconscious fantasy of going back to prenatal life. As Jonestown (and Waco) tragically prove, collective suicide is not always motivated by an intolerable situation affording no means of escape, or by a real risk of death. There are often situations where an external threat interacts with a persecutory vision of the world and a “calling to martyrdom.” In such situations, a group which already finds itself in a marginal position is likely to experience deep narcissistic wounds. The whole membership may then withdraw completely from the “evil” external world, and further regress in the direction of primary narcissism. At this level, the external reality is replaced by psychic reality, so that the very function of reality testing can be severely impaired (Zee, 1983). Thus, the group may provoke an escalation of threats and, eventually, act out its own final dissolution. THE OLD BELIEVERS IN RUSSIA A typical example is the case of the Old Believers in the Russia of the Czars, particularly toward the end of the seventeenth century. I will summarize this historical period quoting from Crummey’s “The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist” (l970). In the turbulent middle decades of the seventeenth century, the government of Tsar Alexis presided over two programs of reform of momentous significance for the subsequent history of Russia. The first was the promulgation of the law code of 1649 [which] [ . . . ] completed the enserfment of the Russian peasantry

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and bound urban taxpayers to the town in which they were legally registered. [ . . . ] The second reform, a campaign to purify the liturgical practices and moral tone of the Russian Orthodox church, set off the great schism, or raskol. To outline the course of the ecclesiastical reform briefly, in chronicle style, is easy enough. [ . . . ] Early in 1653, within months of his elevation to the patriarchal throne, Nikon issued a new psalter and a set of supplementary instructions which enjoined his flock to make the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of the traditional two [ . . . ]. To explain how and why a dispute over seemingly trivial questions split the Russian church and divided society is a good deal more difficult. [ . . . ] First of all [ . . . ] the cultural atmosphere of Russia was charged with tension born of apocalyptic expectations. [ . . . ] And the mood of frustration and fear was undoubtedly intensified by the epidemic of plague that swept Moscow in 1654. [ . . . ] Many Russians of all classes reflected on the meaning of the symbolic drama of the Apocalypse and found its predictions for the end of the world relevant to their own day. The educated found food for speculation in the Kniga o vere, a collection of apocalyptic writings of Ukrainian origin which enjoyed unprecedented popularity. Among the peasantry, apocalyptic thought found its clearest expression in the life and teachings of the hermit Kapiton. [ . . . ] Apparently the core of Kapiton’s teaching was the conviction that the end of the world was at hand and that Antichrist already ruled the world. He therefore admonished his followers to discipline themselves by fasting and other ascetic practices in preparation for the final consummation. [ . . . ] The liturgical reforms, one of the products of the nascent internationalism of the court circle, ran counter to the widely held attitudes usually summarized in the loosely tied bundle of historical conceptions known as the Third Rome doctrine. In their attacks on the liturgical reforms, Avvakum and the other Old Believer spokesmen [ . . . ] repeatedly stressed that, after the apostasy of the first Rome and of Byzantium, [the second Rome] only Moscow preserved Christian orthodoxy. [ . . . ] If Nikon had dragged the Russian church into apostasy, then the Third Rome had fallen. By definition, a fourth there could not be. [ . . . ] Antichrist’s reign had begun. [ . . . ] The most cautious, like Avvakum, stopped with the explanation that the spirit of Antichrist dominated the world but that Antichrist had not yet appeared incarnate. Others jumped to the conclusion that the hated Nikon was the precursor of Antichrist or Antichrist himself. [ . . . ] There was [ . . . ] an even more obvious candidate for the throne of Antichrist—Tsar Alexis himself. [ . . . ] There were [ . . . ] practical difficulties in supporting this interpretation, notably the fact that Alexis was not Jewish and ruled in the new, not the old Jerusalem. Nevertheless, the fact remained that the tsar had given his support to the apostate, Nikon, and was the moving spirit behind the council of l667 which sanctioned the reforms and anathematized their critics [ . . . ] The council’s declarations characterized the Old Believers as “heretics recalcitrants” and then went on to affirm the principle that heretics are liable to civil as well as ecclesiastical punishment. Once opposition to the liturgical reform and all of its implications carried the Old Believers into opposition to the Russian state, their movement became a rallying point for the discontented and dispossessed of Muscovite society. (3–15)

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Within this historical scenario two episodes of collective suicide can be recalled now. In the 1670’s the peasants of the Tolvuiskii and Shun’gskii Pogosty on the Zaonezhskii Peninsula had been placed in servitude to the Viazhitskii and Tikhvinskii Monasteries. Their discontent with their lot led to a brief revolt in 1679. Although troops rapidly restored order, the incident left a strong aftertaste of bitterness. [ . . . ] Suddenly in the early days of 1687 a large number of peasants appeared before the Paleostrovskii Monastery, and quickly wrested control from its monks. It soon became clear that the leaders of the peasants were the former Solovetskii monk Ignatii and the peasant Emel’ian Ivanov from Povenets. [ . . . ] In seizing the monastery, the old Believers were deliberately looking for trouble. Their action had psychological rather than social roots, for the local population had few concrete economic or social grievances against the monastery. In fact, the Paleostrovskii Monastery had virtually no economic relations with the surrounding population. [ . . . ] What motivated the peasants who attacked the Monastery was something quite different. For years, the Old Believers of Olonets had heard of the persecutions suffered by their fellow believers elsewhere. They could not help feeling that the crisis was soon to come for them. [ . . . ] Nothing dramatic happened. Yet the Old Believers were convinced that the days of tribulation, prelude to the end of the world, were immediately ahead. [ . . . ] Better to provoke the confrontation with the agents of Antichrist when faith was still strong. [ . . . ] The monks of the Paleostrovskii Monastery had come out in strong support of the Nikonian reforms and were suspected by the Old Believers of spying on them in behalf of the authorities. By seizing the monastery, the Old Believers succeeded in forcing the local authorities into decisive counter-measures. Within a remarkably short time, about 500 soldiers arrived under the walls of the monastery. In the meantime, the Old Believers had taken some measures for their defense and had also placed straw and hay at appropriate points in the structure of the largest chapel in the monastery in case they should want to set it alight. Once the siege began, their leaders began to prepare them for death by prayer and mutual confession. At the same time, some of the Old Believers succeeded in defending the monastery walls for a period of several days. The besieging troops were very cautious at first. Eventually they succeeded in breaching the outer palisade. The Old Believers retreated into the chapel by way of ladders to the second floor, since they had already barricaded the lower entries. When they were all inside, they pulled the ladders up after themselves into the building and set it alight. In accordance with their instructions, the soldiers tried to break into the building and take the Old Believers prisoner, some chopping at the walls with axes while others fired cannon shots at the building. Soon the chapel, so elaborately prepared in advance for precisely this situation, was completely in flames. On March 4, 1687, according to Old Believer tradition, the Monk Ignatii died with 2,700 followers. (Crummey, 1970: 45–47)

One year later, the peasant Emel’ian Ivanov (who had slipped through the besieging forces before the holocaust) managed to gather a large crowd of

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followers together and once again take over and occupy the Paleostrovskii Monastery. The government, angry and embarassed, was forced to gather a major military force. [ . . . ] Lev Ivanov, the archpriest of Olonets, was sent in October of 1688 to debate with the insurgents in the forlorn hope of convincing them of the error of their beliefs. His mission was unsuccessful, but he was able to report to the authorities on the situation of the rebels. In mid-October, the governor of Olonets sent out an expedition to fulfill a very delicate mission [ . . . ] One last attempt was to be made to convince the Old Believers to give up their opposition. If that failed, the soldiers were to use all of the usual methods to break into the monastery but not to cause any bloodshed, since the objective was to capture the Old Believers, not to kill them. [ . . . ] On November 23, 1688, the troops closed in step by step. This time they advanced behind the shelter of wagons of hay until they were right beside the walls. The attackers quickly breached the wall and the defenders fell back into the chapel, setting fire to the other buildings as they went. When all of the Old Believers were inside, the ladders were drawn up into the church and the building was set on fire. Once again, the troops tried unsuccessfully to chop their way in to capture the rebels alive. A high wind, however, quickly fanned the flames into a huge blaze and the soldiers could only look on or search for anything that might be salvaged from the flames. This time, according to tradition, 1,500 Old Believers died. (Crummey, 1970: 48–51)

The Old Believers’ inability (or unwillingness) to abandon the two in favor of the three in the fundamental sign of the cross is rich in symbolism and deserves comment. In the language of the body, it expresses one of the leitmotifs of collective suicide: the impossibility of working through a dyad into a triad. In other words, the dual-unity could not be allowed to follow its natural course and break up into the triad of mother, newborn child, and placenta. The association between dualism and collective suicide comes up again in the “endura” (a ritual suicide) of the Cathars (literally, the “Purified Ones”). In the Middle Ages, the Cathars were ascetic and dualistic Christian sects which practiced the ritual of consolamentum, a sort of baptism or initiation by laying on of hands (Manselli, 1980). The man or woman thus made perfect, thereafter undertook a life of severest austerity, in which any indulgence of the flesh was forbidden and even sinful thoughts were to be eschewed. [ . . . ] Perfected cathars thus constituted a picked group who pursued a life unendurable by ordinary men and women; hence baptism was usually postponed by believers until the approach of death, when the consolamentum could be conferred in an abbreviated ritual. [ . . . ] In their earlier days, the perfected cathars donned a black robe at baptism; when persecution made distinctive garb dangerous, this was replaced by a thread or a cord worn next to the skin by the heretic. The practice of endura, suicide by

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starvation after receiving the consolamentum, in order to prevent recontamination of the soul, has often been commented on. (44)

According to Manselli, in some catharian groups, people approaching death could choose between being strangled by a perfected one (which they called martyrdom) or submitting to the “endura” (starving or bleeding to death). The Cathars had much in common with the Peoples Temple: a radical disdain for the body, sexuality, and reproduction; the feeling of being at the center of a cosmic struggle between Good and Evil; the belief in the transmigration of souls; the condemnation of war; the conception of existence as a trial. If the trial was successfully undergone, that is, if one succeeded in renouncing one’s own life, the outcome would be final escape from the cycle of reincarnations (Manselli, 1980). Dualism, it would seem, is psychologically predisposed to certain results. As if the disavowal of the third party (the placenta, with its mediating functions in prenatal life, the father, in postnatal life, that is, the entities that triangulate the dual-unity of mother and child) crystallizes the lively flow of human ambivalence and of dialectic thought into an insoluble and deadly antinomic conflict. COLLECTIVE POISONING IN AFRICA In my opinion, the poison ordeal is the closest analogy to the White Night of Jonestown, not only in its ritual structure but also in its genocidal dimensions. For example, an estimated three thousand or more deaths took place each year, in Madagascar alone (Ellis, 1838; Sebree, l888; Perrot, Vogt, 1913). This death ritual had an appalling diffusion which extended from one coast of tropical Africa to the other, during the European colonization and the slave trade. Choosing among many different versions, I will begin by reporting the one practiced by the Balantes of Senegal. Like many savages in many parts of the world, these people imagine that there is no such thing as death from natural causes. All deaths and indeed all misfortunes, such as epidemics, the failure of crops, the ravages of locusts, and the outbreak of fires, are set down by them to the nefarious arts of sorcerers, those wicked and dangerous beings who have assumed the human form in order to prey on human flesh. The poison ordeal, which rid society of these pests, was therefore regarded as a public benefit, and its administration was hailed with an outburst of general joy and rejoicing. [ . . . ] So the people came in crowds. Youths and maidens, mothers with babies at the breast, men in the prime of life, old men in their decline, all hastened to the scene of action, carrying presents

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for the poisoner and eager to demonstrate their innocence by drinking the poison. Children of ten years came dancing with their parents to brave death. For all were admitted to drain the fatal cup, though all had to pay a fee [ . . . ] for the privilege. Poor people saved up to buy the chance, about one in four, of dying in agony. [ . . . ] The people arrived singing, from various quarters, and grouping themselves in a circle round the poisoner, who shone resplendent in his richest robes, loaded with amulets and copper bracelets, they spread out their offerings before him. As each drank the poison from the calabash, he ran into the woods and sat down under a tree. Some, seized by a fit of sickness, vomited up the poison and were saved; others expired [ . . . ] in a few hours. The victims became at once the object of public hatred and execration as the authors of all the ills that had lately befallen to the village. A fourth of the population was computed to perish in these orgies of poison. (Perrot et Vogt, 1913, quoted by Frazer, 1919: 313–314)

It is worth noting that the poison ordeal turned into a real and proper selfadministered genocide in the areas which were most oppressed by the slave trade. This fact was not due to mere economic reasons (in that family members of the victims were often sold as slaves), but also to a particular modification in the leadership directly brought about by the European colonization. According to Frazer, the figures of the “fetish” king and the “administrative” king in those areas were fused into one person. Before the white colonization they had evolved into two distinct and separate entities. Now one person alone had become the repository of both powers, political and religious. In this way, a regressive and dangerous situation was created. An illness or the death of such a king (who incorporated both powers) had become global catastrophes. The poison ordeal was the ritual through which these dramatic events were resolved. At least one of the many pieces of evidence regarding the connection between the leadership crisis and the poison ordeal should be mentioned in order to give an idea of the dimensions and the cruelty of this phenomenon. Uwet, a small tribe from the hill-country, had settled on the left branch of the river [the Great Qua river, in the area of Calabar, an African region where the slave trade had been going on for three centuries author’s note] where it narrows into a rivulet. When we [the Christian missionaries, author’s note] first visited the place, a considerable population, divided into three villages, occupied the settlement. Since that time, it has almost swept itself off the face of the earth, by the constant use of esere [the local name of the poison used in the ordeal, author’s note]. At one time two headmen contended for the kingship. He who succeeded in gaining it fell sick, and of course accused his opponent of seeking to destroy him, and insisted that his competitor and adherents should test their innocence by the ordeal. A number died, and the sickness of the successful candidate also issued in death. The one disappointed now attained the coveted

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honour, and in retaliation subjected those of the opposite party to the test, and a number more perished. On one occasion the whole population took the esere, to prove themselves pure, as they said; about half were thus selfdestroyed, and the remnant, still continuing their superstitious practice, must soon become extinct. (H. Goldie, 1901: 37–38)

A videocassette still exists, which permits us to participate “live” in one of the religious services held by Jim Jones. I made my own copy from the archives of Charles Garry, in the basement of his office, and showed it (in a briefer edition) to colleagues and students at the Southern California and the Los Angeles Institutes of Psychoanalysis, in the 80s (long before their merge in the New Psychoanalytic Centre). I also presented some parts of it to the Dpt. of Psychiatry at Harbor-UCLA (with Professors Milton Miller, Warren Procci, and Ira Lesser), and at UCLA (with Professors Warren Procci and Louis J. West). In watching it we realize, in a very immediate and vivid way, how the primordial figure of the sacred king reappears in the leader of the Peoples Temple. The main sequence of the rite begins with the entrance of Jones on the scene, accompanied by the music of the “Internationale” (the Marxist anthem). The culmination is reached when Jones exclaims “I come as god socialist!” And shortly thereafter, “I am God!” Political power and religious power were so intimately interconnected in the leader of the Peoples Temple that his performance mixed political harangues and “miracles” as if they were interchangeable aspects of the same charisma (Peoples Temple, n.d. document n. 3). Whoever has seen the videocassette has been left with no doubts as to the effect of these “religious services”: to establish and confirm the absolute power of Jones over all the members of the group. Through his regressive escape into the jungle, Jones revived the figure of the sacred king. In the village of Jonestown, Jones had turned himself into a modern version of king Calabar at Calabar , “an individual [ . . . ] who bore the name of [ . . . ] [the Country], and likely, in bypast times, possessed the power indicated by the title, being both king and priest” (H. Goldie, 1901: 43). Soon after the tragedy, Dave Martin and his band, “The Tradewinds,” captured this aspect beautifully in “Brother Jonesie”—a reggae that can be listened to on Internet (Dave Martin, 1979). The reggae is a popular music of Jamaican origin that combines indigenous styles with elements of rock ‘n’ roll and soul music. It is performed at moderate tempos, with the accent on the offbeat. Here I will only summarize its main themes, since the lyrics are not accessible on the web for copyright issues. Brudder Jonesie was ruling his followers like a king in olden days, in his temple into the jungle, but then everything turned bad, and Brudder Jonesie made them all fall with him. When he told them to drink, they all began drinking.

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If we think of Jones as “a king in olden days” we can better understand the poison ordeal of the Peoples Temple. After the exodus to Guyana the physical and mental health of the leader of the Peoples Temple deteriorated rapidly. This created a situation that was extremely dangerous for the survival of the community. A peaceful succession was unthinkable from the point of view of our unconscious mind: a sacred king can certainly not retire in the universe of regression! Two alternatives were left: the dissolution of the Peoples Temple or its consecration to death. By dying together, the group would find a new beginning, where death would become a rebirth into another dimension, another world where they could be reunited forever. A third alternative was also possible, and apparently had even been considered, according to the most accurate reconstruction of the tragedy (Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982). This would have been to follow the classic norm of succession of the sacred kings, namely succession by murder (Frazer, 1913). By killing Jones, the murderer would have then incorporated the precious spirit of the people (the “Body Politic,” in the terms of the Tudor age) in himself, thus permitting the whole community to continue to live and prosper. But the syncytial culture of Peoples Temple did not allow such a solution of the crisis. Furthermore, after the “betrayal of the century” committed by those who had abandoned Jonestown, during the visit/investigation of Congressman Ryan, it was too late. All the members had to prove their own innocence by submitting to the “ordeal” and drinking the poison. As a last motif, further linking Jones to the sacred kings, let us recall that he did not commit suicide. It is almost certain that he was killed in a ritual way. A cup containing a hypnotic drug was given to him to drink, whereupon he lost consciousness. Only then was he given the ultimate push toward death, a pistol bullet in the temple. Coming to conclusions, the collective poison ordeals which contributed to the depopulation of tropical Africa during the slave trade are similar to other self-imposed genocides practiced by many colonized peoples. In different forms (for example through alcohol abuse as in the case of the American Indians) a people who have passively suffered from the dismemberment of their cultural matrix end up in active self-destruction. As all the actors of collective suicide, they are condemned to repeat the illusory attempt to restore the broken dual-unity through dying together. One last reflection. The poison ordeal is the sign of a cultural crisis and a symptom of regression. From this perspective, we can interpret the dramatic phenomenon of drug abuse in Western societies as a new edition of the ancient death ritual of collective suicide, although in a “narcissistic” (individual) contemporary form. Unable to find their own way in our competitive and unhuman communities, young people risk to become unaware victims of new drugs turned into poisons.

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THE PATTERN OF COLLECTIVE SUICIDE Out of the rubble of the catastrophe of Jonestown, we are now able to extract a psychosocial pattern which can be summarized in a few steps: A syncytial mourning experience (a natural or cultural catastrophe which is experienced by all group members as a risk of annihilation) inflicts an intolerable wound to group narcissism. The group flees from this intolerably painful reality through defense mechanisms: collective disavowal and regression to the primordial (syncytial) cultural matrix. During this process, internal schisms occur, so that the group splits into subgroups: the most marginal ones are likely to recreate regressive versions of the primordial human groups, with a placental leadership and a syncytial membership. At this point, collective suicide is ready to be acted out ritually, following the cultural pattern of each different community. Let us go back to our historical examples and review them in this light, briefly. The death pits at Ur date back, according to Sir Woolley, to a period following a flood which totally submerged the region. In his view, this was the great universal flood of the Bible. While leaving this hypothesis out of consideration, I find it worth noting that the ancient lists of the Sumerian kings linked kingship with a flood. “After the Flood came, kingship was sent down from on high” (Woolley, 1955: 34). Thus, it could be hypothesized that the universal belief in the sacred nature of the king had been restored, at Ur, in the face of an event (a catastrophical flood) which had reactivated the need for omnipotent control over the environment. As we have already described, the sacred kings were attributed with a magical power over the agents of weather and all natural events, so that the fear of catastrophe was culturally elaborated and limited by them. In the imaginary of the people, the king and his court actively controlled catastrophical anxieties (the fear of the end of the world or the terror of annihilation) through the death ritual. They themselves impersonated this world which was ending. By sacrificing themselves, they allowed the rest of the ecosystem (vegetation, animals, and human beings) to live and prosper. A new king and a new court, younger and full of life, were installed, so that the soul of the people could go on living in this regenerated “double body.” The king and his court (his own syncytial group) thus constituted a subgroup (a placenta) that functioned as a filter between the environment/body-of-the-mother and the people/fetoplacental unit. This was a filter which had to be regenerated periodically in order to allow the people to be reimplanted in the motherland/womb for a new cycle of prenatal vital growth. Another type of catastrophe (cultural rather than natural) was responsible for the suicides of the Old Believers and reveals how the power of culture is so strong as to be able to hand down the death ritual from one generation to

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the next, even in modern history. The collective suicides of the Old Believers continued to repeat themselves as late as 1860 (Crummey, 1970). Thus, there is no reason to deny that suicidal societies have existed and even survived over long periods of time. This very conclusion is confirmed through the study of the African collective suicides, where the placental nature of the leader and the syncytial structure of the group are more easily recognizable. My hypothesis, then, is that groups of human beings tend to react regressively when exposed to any traumatic change or metamorphosis that is able to trigger the experience of collective syncytial mourning. This catastrophical experience may be induced by a natural event (droughts, floods, epidemics, etc.) or a cultural event (colonization, loss of religious political and moral values, and so on). In every case, the group tends to construct a metaphorical placenta, a subgroup within the group, which is designed to annul the catastrophical experience. Whatever was passively suffered, can in the end be transformed into an active operation: collective suicide. From my perspective, this was the primal defense mechanism against syncytial mourning, the Paleolithic emotion that human beings suffered for their original catastrophical experience: the obstetrical dilemma, with all its consequences, as we have discussed in our “Interdisciplinary Reflections.” There and then, the death ritual (or its evolutionary editions: genocide and war) are unconsciously rediscovered and ritually reenacted.

Conclusion

The tragedy of religious cults consists in the fact that, unconsciously, they are born out of a regressive wish to re-establish concretely the symbiotic instinctual natural lifestyle of our prehistory, before the onset of the obstetrical dilemma and the awakening of human awareness, before the painful experience of syncytial mourning and the institution of the taboo on placentophagy. It is an impossible mission. We can’t go back in time. That is why cults, drawn into the swirling waters of regression, are inevitably subject to disavowing reality, to lying, and to acting out the dynamics of the “perverse universe.” Cults regress to the dawn of religion, the numinous waters where collective suicide rituals appeared on earth in the desperate attempt to solve, at any cost, the agonies of syncytial mourning due to the fact that maternal death was increasing dramatically since the onset of the obstetrical dilemma and the “Tree of Knowledge” mutation of Homo sapiens (Harari, 2011). Following their regressive path, religious cults risk to provoke the very experience they were trying to overcome: syncytial mourning. If this happens, their members are unable to elaborate such emotions and work them through. They prefer to die in death rituals (collective suicide, genocide, and war) rather than suffer. A cult pretends to be concretely a “syncytial group” and to be led by a real “placental leader” in flesh and bones. It secretly wishes to go back to a prehistorical psychosomatic state when human beings were still in synchronic symbiosis with their own animal body and their environment. The psychopathology of the cult leader is crucial to promote this regressive process by emotional manipulation and ideological fabrication of a neo-reality that exempts its members from reality testing within the cultural matrix of the syncytial group. 137

138 Conclusion

A cult is Utopia (the paradoxical name given to the prototype of every imaginary paradise on earth) turned into Mentira (the name given at first by Thomas More to his imaginary and ironic nowhere land). At the end of his writing More (1516) abandoned Mentira and “glitched” it into Utopia, since he was pursuing ambiguity and irony. Utopia (from ancient Greek, ou = no and topos = place) is only an apparent error. It is not nonsense. It is an artful “glitch” (F. A. Nesci, 2016). It is an extremely creative rhetorical figure which unifies two contradictory terms to signify a profound concept in the guise of nonsense. As we have seen, it is an oxymoron. Mentira, instead, explicitly betrays its falsehood, from the Latin mentiri = to lie. That is why More decided to discard and replace it, at the end of his work. Cults are unable to cope with irony, ambivalence, or ambiguity. They need a primordial world made of certainties only, and they need it concretely. So, they need to regress and to lie. Jones, as we have seen, pretended he was “saving the lives” of his followers performing “miracles” almost every day, while he was actually poisoning his own animals, since he was a child, and ended his life poisoning his “people.” If we, the “normal” individuals, will not accept to constantly cure our “Paleolithic emotions,” learn how to use our “god-like technology,” and change our “medieval institutions” (Wilson, 2009), we will not make it. If we will go on destroying planet Earth and producing marginalized groups of victims, ready to become the desperate group-individuals of psychopath placental leaders, collective suicide rituals will go on taking place around us. And, it will take place in new forms that we will not even be able to identify, such as widespread alcohol and drug abuse in Western societies, suicidal emigrations from Africa to Europe in the Mediterranean Sea, and suicidal terrorism where the murderer dies together with his/her victims. In fact, religious cults are also able to kill, while committing their own “revolutionary suicide” (as Jones called what they were doing in their last White Night). It happened at Jonestown, where Congressman Ryan and others were assassinated by the “Red Brigade” of Peoples Temple (named in this way by the Peoples Temple’s leader since he admired the leftist terrorist organization of the Brigate Rosse, which was very active in Italy, in the 70s, and killed a political leader a few months before the poison ordeal in the jungles of Guyana). And it is happening everywhere in the world, today, by the hands of other religious cults that our mass media prefer to classify as terrorists. Just as we prefer to ignore that genocides and wars are death rituals derived from collective suicide, which is the reason why it is so difficult to effectively prevent them.

Conclusion

139

Figure C.1  The child into the sand. By Peoples Temple, courtesy of Charles Garry, edited by Filippo A. Nesci.

140 Conclusion

This book does not end here. It will end with a picture, since words are unable to speak to the group-individual inside us, and it is the group-individual that needs to be supported to work through our collective mourning for the victims of Jonestown. Once again, it comes from the metal suitcase I found in the basement of Charles Garry’s office, in San Francisco. I do not know who is (or was) the lively child whose identity is hidden by the editing of my artist son. Probably he was playing, buried in the sand. His eyes are closed eyes. A mysterious expression surfaces in his face. After so many years of reflecting on Jonestown, I think I might know why this picture was in their metal suitcase. From my perspective, it was there for an unconscious reason. It was there because it was the symbol of the state of mind that Peoples Temple was trying to offer to its followers: fading into the infinite mass of grains of sand (as if they were a maternal womb) in order to dream for ever a world without evil, a life without death, an eternal symbiotic pregnancy without any risk of delivery. And it was an identification object for the group-individuals of Peoples Temple. They all unconsciously imagined and felt themselves as buried in the sand, dreaming/playing, protected by mother Earth—forever. I hope this insight in the collective illusion of the victims of Jonestown will help us all to mourn for their loss, to stop feeling them completely alien to us, to be empathic with their fragility. In our unconscious group-individual mind, we also share some of their illusions, wishful thinking, and impossible dreams. At the same time, I hope that remembering and working through the hidden motives and meanings of their poison ordeal, we can become more aware of the constant need to question ourselves and our beliefs, to constantly check on our leaders, and to look for a “good enough” balance between “playing and reality” in life (Winnicott, 1971) instead of going on pretending to be able to find or make Paradise on earth, if we just get rid of some “scapegoat” on whom we can paranoically project our own inner evil.

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Sebree, J., The Great African Island, London: 1888, quoted by J.C. Frazer, in FolkLore in the Old Testament, London: MacMillan, 1919. Segal, Hanna, “A Necrophilic Fantasy,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 34 (1953): 98–100. Seligman, Charles Gabriel, Murray, Margaret, “Note upon a Early Egyptian Standard,” Man, 11 (1911): 165–171. Shaw, Daniel, “Traumatic Abuse in Cults: A Psychoanalytic Perspective,” Cultic Studies Review, 2 (2003): 101–129. Shaw, Daniel, Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation, London: Routledge, 2014. Singer, Margareth T., Cults in Our Midst, San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2003. Smith, Edwin W., Dale, Andrew M., The Ila-Speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia, London: MacMillan, 1920. Spencer, Baldwin, Gillen, F.J., The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, London: MacMillan, 1904. Stoen, Timothy O., Marked for Death: My War with Jim Jones the Devil of Jonestown, North Charleston: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015. Stone, Merlin, When God was a Woman, New York: Harcourt, 1976. Strehlow, Carl, Die Aranda und Loritja-Stamme in Zentral-Australian, Frankfurt: J. Baer & co., 1908. Swan, Michael, The Marches of Eldorado, Boston: Beacon Press, 1958. Swann, William B. Jr., Gómez, A., Seyle, D. Conor, Morales, J. Francisco, and Huici, Carmen, “Identity fusion: The interplay of personal and social identities in extreme group behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96 (2009): 995– 1011. doi:10.1037/a0013668 Tegmark, Max, Our Mathematical Universe. My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. Tropp, Richard D., Open letter to the editors of New West and the San Francisco Examiner, dated February 15, 1978, San Francisco: Archives of Charles Garry. Twitchett Denis, and Loewe Michael, The Cambridge History of China, London: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Tylor, Edward Burnett, Primitive Culture, London: MacMillan, 1903. Van Gennep, Arnold, Les rites de passages, Paris: Nourry, 1909. Vernant, Jean Paul, “Ambiguity and Reversal. On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex,” in ed. J.P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, translated by Janet Lloyd, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, 113–140, New York: Zone Books, 1988. Westerman, Diedrich, Geschichte Afrikas. Koln: 1952, quoted by E. Canetti, in Crowds and Power, New York: The Viking Press, 1962. Widengren, Geo, The King and the Tree of Life in Ancient Near Eastern Religion. Uppsala: Lundequist, 1951. Wilson, Edward O., quote from a public discussion between Edward O. Wilson and James Watson, moderated by NPR correspondent Robert Krulwich, Harvard Magazine, September 9, 2009. Winnicott, Donald W., “Transitional Object and Transitional Phenomena,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 34 (1953): 89–97.

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Winnicott, Donald W., Playing and Reality, London: Tavistock Publications, 1971. Wooden, Kenneth, Children of Jonestown, New York: McGraw Hill, 1980. Woolley, Leonard, Excavations at Ur. London: Ernest Benn, 1955. Reprinted as Ur of the Chaldees, Sherbrooke (Canada): InExile Publications, 2012. Yee, Min S., Layton, Thomas N., In my Father’s House – The Story of the Layton Family and the Reverend Jim Jones, New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981. Zaniello, Tom, Explorations in Reading and Writing, New York: Random House, 1987. Zee, Hugo J., “The Guyana Incident. Some Psychoanalytic Considerations,” Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 44 (1980): 345–363. Zee, Hugo J., “The Guyana Incident. Some group dynamic considerations,” in ed. Max Rosenbaum, Compliant Behaviour: Beyond Obedience to Authority, 229–242, New York: Human Science Press, 1983.

Index

Note: Page references for figures are italicized adoptions: in human pre-history, 59; in Peoples Temple, 59 anointed pictures, 34, 35, 68. See also miracles; Peoples Temple anointed prayer cloth, 37, 69, 76. See also miracles; Peoples Temple Bekeranta (South America), 109–11 Blake, William, 96 Briffault, Robert, xviii, 50. See also adoptions; group individual collective clan-relationships. See adoptions collective suicide: historical precedents of, interpreted as fractals, 123; as mourning ritual, 51–55, 84–89; psychosocial pattern of, xviii, 134–35; relationship with genocide and war, viii, xviii, 24, 53–54, 135, 137; relationship with placental leadership and syncytial membership, 58, 118, 125, 134; and syncytial membership, xvi, xviii, 24.

See also Bekeranta (South America); Heaven’s Gate; O-Dae-Yang (South Korea); Old Believers (Russia); poison ordeal (Africa); Ur (Sumer); Waco; Xhosa (South Africa) collective unconscious, xix culture, 61, 99–100. See also group individual; obstetrical dilemma end of the world, 98, 102, 127–28, 134. See also Jones, James Warren (Jim) Fraenkel, Cornelius, xiii, 29, 50 Freud, Sigmund: and phylogenetic memory, xix, 111; and poets, 1; and primary process, 106; and reality testing, 23, 75; and religion, 99; and the Schreber case, 20 Garry, Charles: at Jonestown, 116; and the pictures of Peoples Temple members, cover page, xii, xix, 21, 95, 96, 123, 139–40 151

152 Index

Girard, René, xii, 26, 97 group-individual, xvii–xix, 50, 76, 80, 90, 105–7, 112, 138; and autochthony, 75; and choral singing, 66; and primary oral cultures, 61; and syncytial cultures, 51–53, 59, 75. See also collective suicide; culture; mortal sin; syncytial membership Heaven’s Gate, xviii identity fusion, 47–48; and the syncytial group, 49 Jones, James Thurman: absent and invalid father of Jones, James Warren (Jim), 10–11; wedding with Jones, Lynetta, 5. See also Jones, Lynetta; Jones, James Warren (Jim) Jones, James Warren (Jim): as an “automaton of the group” according to the theory of leadership by Bion, Wilfred, 63; childhood anecdotes, 11–12, 12–15, 21, 77–78; death of, 45, 133; end of the world prophecy and vision, 77–78; as a placental leader, 43–45; psychopathology of, 2–3, 21, 21; speaking about himself, 11; speaking about his own childhood, 10–11; and tree symbolism, xvii, 29; youth anecdotes, 15–16, 17–18. See also Jones, James Thurman; Jones, Lynetta; Jones, Marceline; perversion; traumatic Narcissism; placental leader Jones, Lynetta: as an ambivalent mother, 23–24; biography of, 5–6;

and the conception of Jones, James Warren (Jim), 5; and the Depression, 6–7; dreams regarding Jones, James Warren (Jim), 5–6; perverse aspects in her relationship with Jones, James Warren (Jim), 9–10, 12–15; and the supernatural, 6; upbringing of Jones, James Warren (Jim), 3–15, 64. See also James, Warren Jones (Jim); Jones, James Thurman; perversion; placental leader Jones, Marceline: healed of cancer by Jones, James Warren (Jim), 43; necrophilic aspects in her relationship with James Warren Jones (Jim), 18–22. See also Jones, James Warren (Jim); perversion; placental leader Jonestown, xvii; as an agricultural/medical project, 86, 91; collective suicide of, vii–viii; goals of the mission in Guyana, 44; as the place to facilitate regression and the dynamics of the perverse universe, 119; as the unconscious space for prenatal regression and the fulfillment of a death wish, 90–91; as utopia, 80, 86, 89–94, 109, 118, 122, 138 Jung, Carl Gustav. See collective unconscious Martin, Dave and “The Tradewinds,” 132–33 meditation folder. See miracles miracles, 30–34, 36, 66–67; the last white night as a, 105; and the meditation folder, 70, 71–74, 72, 73, 74;

Index

origin of, by the leader and/or by the group, 73–74; and testimonial letters, 30–33, 33, 43, 67–68, 75–76. See also Jones, James Warren (Jim); Peoples Temple; placental leader; syncytial membership mortal sin: as described in anthropology, 83; as theorized by Mauss, Marcel, 83–84; in the Warramunga mourning ritual, 84–85 multimedia psychotherapy, xiii, xix, 95. See also Nesci, Filippo Arturo Neanderthal man, xix necrophilia. See perversion Nesci, Filippo Arturo, cover page, viii, xix, 21, 96, 123, 139 obstetrical dilemma, 97–98, 100, 135, 137 O-Dae-Yang, xviii, 59 Old Believers (Russia), 126–29, 134–35 Ong, Walter. See orality orality: and the book song of Peoples Temple, 61, 65; and primary oral cultures as theorized by Ong, Walter, 61, 83, 88, 90, 140. See also poison ordeal Peoples Temple: and anointed pictures as fetish objects, 34, 67–69, 71, 75; and anointed prayer cloth, 37, 69, 76; and the choir as organ of its social body, xix, 66; and “Community Unity,” 60–61; and its exoduses, 78, 84–87; and “group illusion” as theorized by Anzieu, Didier, 65;

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and the meditation folder, 70, 71, 74; as a mother of children in a prenatal environment, 95–96; and the motif of oneness in the songs of, 15, 61–62; and “The Oneness” church, 10–11, 60; and paranoia for mass media negative news on, 79; and paranoia for negative thoughts within, 79–80; as a regressive fictional place where “miracles” “visions” and “prophecies” were at home, 80. See also orality; placental leadership; syncytial membership perversion: necrophilia in the Schreber case, 19–20; necrophilia as theorized by Fromm, Erik, 20–21, 94; necrophilia as theorized by Segal, Hanna, 18–19, 22–23; parental necrophilia, filial paranoia, and transgenerational trauma, 20; as theorized by Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine, 8, 9, 12, 24, 94. See also primary paranoia placenta-eating instinct, 98–100; and the taboo on placentophagy, 99. See also obstetrical dilemma; religion placental leader: as a “double” of the people/child, 55–56, 56; as grower and pharmakos of the people/child, xvi–xvii, 27, 38, 42–43; and Jones, James Warren (Jim), depicted as a tree of life, 31–32, 32; and Lloyd deMause, 25; and paranoia, or the need to project evil out of the group, 36–37, 37, 38;

154 Index

and the ritual of the pharmakoi in Ancient Greece, 42–43; and the theory of the king’s two bodies in Leviathan, 56–57; and trees as symbols of, 28–29, 29. See also sacred kings poison ordeal (Africa), xviii, 52–54, 112–13, 119–22, 130–33, 140 primary paranoia: and the psychology of cult leaders, 24; as theorized by Fornari, Franco, 22–24, 117, 121 Quasimodo, Salvatore, 82 reincarnation, 8, 62, 104, 107, 121, 130 Reiterman, Tim, xi, xv, 9, 104, 116 religion, 98–100, 137. See also obstetrical dilemma religious cults, xii, xv–xvi, xviii–xix, 2, 24, 137–38. See also placental leader; syncytial membership Róheim, Géza: and the dual-unity, 64, 81–83, 86–90, 93–94, 126, 129–30; and the “separation sin,” 81–82, 86 Ryan, Leo, 59, 116–21, 133, 138 sacred kings: definition of, xvi–xvii, 25; enthronement rituals, 27; the placenta as symbol of, 28; ritual murder of, 125, 133. See also placental leader; syncytial membership Salustri, Carlo Alberto, aka Trilussa, 1–2, 4, 24 Shaw, Daniel, 1–3 syncytial membership, 58–59, 75–76; and “group-individual” (Briffault, Robert), xviii–xix; 50–53; and “identity fusion” (Swann et al.), 47–48;

and primordial human groups: advantages and risks of, 58–59, 95; and separation sin, 111–12; and suspension of reality testing in regression to, 41, 105, 137. See also placental leader syncytial mourning, 53, 87, 95, 96, 98, 99, 109, 124, 134, 135, 137 terrorism: and the “fusion construct,” 47–48; and the Red Brigades, 117, 120, 138; and suicidal terrorism, 138; and the Twin Towers, 47 testimonial letters. See miracles Traumatic Narcissism: and cult leaders as traumatic narcissists and victims of traumatic narcissist, 1–3; and identification with the aggressor, 2; and prenatal life, 3; and transgenerational trauma, 3–5, 24. See also Shaw, Daniel Ur (Sumer), xvii, 124–25, 134 utopia: authored by More, Thomas, 89; conceived as an ironic play, 89–91; described as geometrically unrealizable, 94; and “Mentira,” 89–91; a psychoanalytic study of (by Rudat, Wolfgang), 89–90. See also Jonestown uxoricide, 16–17, 22. See also Jones, James Warren (Jim) Waco, 126 white night: as condensation of miracles, catharses, and exoduses, 105–6;

Index

excerpts of the transcripts of the last white night, 114–22; and the “metaphysics of the moon” (Mircea Eliade), 99; as an oxymoron, 77, 89; and the Planning Commission of Peoples Temple, 101–5;

155

as a ritual, xi, xviii, 66 Winnicott, Donald: as author of Playing and Reality, 140 as theorizer of “transitional” objects and phenomena, 69–71, 74, 76 Xhosa (South Africa), 111

About the Author

Domenico A. Nesci, MD, is a psychiatrist, criminologist, and psychoanalyst. He works at the Ambulatorio di Psichiatria of the Fondazione Policlinico Agostino Gemelli, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, in Rome, Italy, where he is professor of community psychology. He is also president of the International Institute for Psychoanalytic Research and Training of Health Professionals (IIPRTHP), vice president of DREAMS onlus, and co-director of the Scuola Internazionale di Psicoterapia nel Setting Istituzionale (SIPSI). He is the author of Multimedia Psychotherapy: A Psychodynamic Approach for Mourning in the Digital Age.

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