Despair

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Who Wrote the Bible? Searching for Its Origins and Authors (2025)

  22. Revelation: The Apocalypse of John readers would have known how these texts worked and what their symbols pointed to. As a genre, apocalyptic tends to become prominent at times of significant oppression. All of the hopes for the present world seem futile, so attention is turned to the eschatological future, when the world will be turned upside down. For the Jews of the 2nd century BCE, that moment of oppression was the rule of Antiochus IV. For the Christians of the 1st century CE, it was the rule of the emperor Nero. The “great whore of Babylon” is revealed as “the great city that rules over the kings of the earth” (Rev. 17:18). Rome was the greatest city of the early Christian world, and the equation of Rome with Babylon would have been instantly recognizable to early Jews and Christians. This line participates in a common Jewish interpretation of the first centuries CE, in which the Babylon described in the prophetic books stands in for the Rome of their present day. The “whore of Babylon” sits on a scarlet beast with seven heads. These heads “are seven mountains on which the woman is seated” (Rev. 17:9). Even now, Rome is known to sit on seven hills. She is “drunk with the blood … of the witnesses to Jesus” (Rev. 17:6). Who else but Rome would be held responsible for the deaths of early Christians? Among the Roman emperors, one was known to be particularly nasty to Christians—the infamous Nero. The famous “mark of the beast” comes in here. Perhaps nothing in the entire Bible has been as wildly interpreted as this verse and the number 666. As always, the problem is due to modern interpreters not knowing how to read this sort of text in its historical setting. The verse in question says, “Let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred sixty-six” (Rev. 13:18). For almost any educated Jewish or Christian reader in the 1st century CE, these lines wouldn’t have been even the slightest bit mysterious. The “number of a person” would be the numerical equivalent of their name using the ancient Jewish counting system known as gematria. Every Hebrew letter has a numerical equivalent, so every word, phrase, and sentence has a number that can be calculated. If the name Caesar Nero is transliterated into Hebrew, the numerical equivalent is 666. Based on this evidence, Revelation was certainly written after the persecutions of Nero, in the 60s CE. The use of Babylon as code for Rome rose to prominence in Judaism after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, which suggests that the book was probably written some time after that. Generally, 135

• From Another Country (1962)

  Now, bowed down with the memory of all that had happened since that day, he wandered helplessly back to Forty-second Street and stopped before the large bar and grill on the corner. Near him, just beyond the plate glass, stood the sandwich man behind his counter, the meat arrayed on the steam table beneath him. Bread and rolls, mustard, relish, salt and pepper, stood at the level of his chest. He was a big man, wearing white, with a blank, red, brutal face. From time to time he expertly knifed off a sandwich for one of the derelicts within. The old seemed reconciled to being there, to having no teeth, no hair, having no life. Some laughed together, the young, with dead eyes set in yellow faces, the slackness of their bodies making vivid the history of their degradation. They were the prey that was no longer hunted, though they were scarcely aware of this new condition and could not bear to leave the place where they had first been spoiled. And the hunters were there, far more assured and patient than the prey. In any of the world’s cities, on a winter night, a boy can be bought for the price of a beer and the promise of warm blankets. Rufus shivered, his hands in his pockets, looking through the window and wondering what to do. He thought of walking to Harlem but he was afraid of the police he would encounter in his passage through the city; and he did not see how he could face his parents or his sister. When he had last seen Ida, he had told her that he and Leona were about to make it to Mexico, where, he said, people would leave them alone. But no one had heard from him since then. Now a big, rough-looking man, well dressed, white, with black-and-gray hair, came out of the bar. He paused next to Rufus, looking up and down the street. Rufus did not move, though he wanted to; his mind began to race, painfully, and his empty stomach turned over. Once again, sweat broke out on his forehead. Something in him knew what was about to happen; something in him died in the freezing second before the man walked over to him and said: “It’s cold out here. Wouldn’t you like to come in and have a drink with me?” “I’d rather have a sandwich,” Rufus muttered, and thought You’ve really hit the bottom now. “Well, you can have a sandwich, too. There’s no law that says you can’t.” Rufus looked up and down the street, then looked into the man’s ice-cold, ice-white face. He reminded himself that he knew the score, he’d been around; neither was this the first time during his wanderings that he had consented to the bleakly physical exchange; and yet he felt that he would never be able to endure the touch of this man. They entered the bar and grill.

• From Real Life (2020)

  Il repense bien vite à cette période affreuse, l’an dernier, où il a dû se présenter aux examens préliminaires, et a passé trois mois sans pouvoir sortir de son lit, manger ou se laver régulièrement. Ces trois mois ont représenté une longue dérive obscure vers une zone informe et glaciale. Il a passé tout ce temps à s’enfiler des vieilles séries médicales sur internet et à regarder la lumière changer sur les murs, prostré dans son lit. Quand il réussissait à s’extraire de sa couche, il trempait dans sa baignoire pendant des heures, se sentant apeuré, et tout petit. Il passait des heures à se demander ce qu’il allait faire s’il échouait. Ce n’était pas tant l’humiliation qui l’effrayait que la chute brutale dans l’inconnu. Il allait devoir quitter le programme. Il allait devoir trouver autre chose à faire de sa vie. C’était ça qui l’avait paralysé pendant tous ces mois. Il lui était impossible de faire quoi que ce soit. Puis, un jour de la fin septembre, Henrik était passé chez Wallace et avait enfoncé la sonnette jusqu’à ce qu’il cède et le laisse entrer. Une fois en haut, il avait déposé par terre une pile d’articles de recherche, de carnets et de marqueurs et avait dit à Wallace de s’y mettre. Plusieurs heures par jour, Henrik avait appris à Wallace tout ce qu’il n’avait pas intégré jusque-là. Ils avaient couvert la signalisation cellulaire, les gradients, la morphologie, la structure des protéines, la composition des parois cellulaires, l’intégralité de la lignée des tissus gonadiques des mouches et des nématodes, les tests de quantification des levures. Une technique après l’autre, Henrik dessinait des diagrammes, patiemment ou pas, et quand ça ne marchait pas, il cognait du plat de la main, qu’il avait épaisse, sur la table et criait : Il faut que tu retiennes ça, Wallace. Concentre-toi . Wallace l’écoutait sans rien dire. Il prenait des notes. Il lisait les articles, chaque nuit, jusqu’à ce que le texte nage devant ses yeux. Il perdit trois kilos, puis cinq, puis sept et demi. Henrik commença à l’emmener à la salle de sport. Le força à faire du jogging et à lire, à se rappeler à tout moment un quelconque détail obscur du développement embryologique des nématodes. À se rappeler le mécanisme de la dégradation de certaines protéines de certains tissus dans certaines conditions spécifiques, puis d’autres conditions, d’autres tissus, des scénarios qui s’ouvraient et se refermaient comme une porte fixée sur des gonds mal vissés. Wallace finit par savoir comment la lumière se déplaçait dans la barbe d’Henrik. Et dans ses cheveux épais. La longue pente de sa bouche. Il apprit à déchiffrer les humeurs d’Henrik comme les mammifères, sur des îles volcaniques, apprennent à reconnaître les lents signaux annonciateurs d’une éruption. Le morne après-midi de décembre où Wallace passa ses examens préliminaires, un peloton d’exécution plutôt qu’un test, la première personne qu’il chercha au déjeuner en l’honneur des lauréats fut Henrik. Mais Henrik regardait déjà ailleurs, par la fenêtre.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He stood at the center of the bridge and it was freezing cold. He raised his eyes to heaven. He thought, You bastard, you motherfucking bastard. Ain’t I your baby, too? He began to cry. Something in Rufus which could not break shook him like a rag doll and splashed salt water all over his face and filled his throat and his nostrils with anguish. He knew the pain would never stop. He could never go down into the city again. He dropped his head as though someone had struck him and looked down at the water. It was cold and the water would be cold. He was black and the water was black. He lifted himself by his hands on the rail, lifted himself as high as he could, and leaned far out. The wind tore at him, at his head and shoulders, while something in him screamed, Why? Why? He thought of Eric. His straining arms threatened to break. I can’t make it this way. He thought of Ida. He whispered, I’m sorry, Leona, and then the wind took him, he felt himself going over, head down, the wind, the stars, the lights, the water, all rolled together, all right. He felt a shoe fly off behind him, there was nothing around him, only the wind, all right, you motherfucking Godalmighty bastard, I’m coming to you. 2It was raining. Cass sat on her living-room floor with the Sunday papers and a cup of coffee. She was trying to decide which photograph of Richard would look best on the front page of the book-review section. The telephone rang. “Hello?” She heard an intake of breath and a low, vaguely familiar voice: “Is this Cass Silenski?” “Yes.” She looked at the clock, wondering who this could be. It was ten-thirty and she was the only person awake in her house. “Well”—swiftly—“I don’t know if you remember me, but we met once, downtown, in a night club where Rufus was working. I’m his sister—Ida? Ida Scott——” She remembered a very young, striking, dark girl who wore a ruby-eyed snake ring. “Why, yes, I remember you very well. How are you?” “I’m fine. Well”—with a small, dry laugh—“maybe I’m not so fine. I’m trying to locate my brother. I been calling Vivaldo’s house all morning, but he’s not home”—the voice was making an effort not to tremble, not to break—“and so I called you because I thought maybe you’d seen him, Vivaldo, I mean, or maybe you could tell me how to reach him.” And now the girl was crying. “You haven’t seen him, have you? Or my brother?” She heard sounds coming from the children’s bedroom. “Please,” she said, “try not to be so upset. I don’t know where Vivaldo is this morning but I saw your brother last night. And he was fine.” “You saw him last night?” “Yes.” “Where’d you see him? Where was he?”

• From Another Country (1962)

  The first time he said this, she winced and said nothing. The second time she slapped him. And he slapped her. They fought all the time. They fought each other with their hands and their voices and then with their bodies: and the one storm was like the other. Many times—and now Rufus sat very still, pressing darkness against his eyes, listening to the music—he had, suddenly, without knowing that he was going to, thrown the whimpering, terrified Leona onto the bed, the floor, pinned her against a table or a wall; she beat at him, weakly, moaning, unutterably abject; he twisted his fingers in her long pale hair and used her in whatever way he felt would humiliate her most. It was not love he felt during these acts of love: drained and shaking, utterly unsatisfied, he fled from the raped white woman into the bars. In these bars no one applauded his triumph or condemned his guilt. He began to pick fights with white men. He was thrown out of bars. The eyes of his friends told him that he was falling. His own heart told him so. But the air through which he rushed was his prison and he could not even summon the breath to call for help. Perhaps now, though, he had hit bottom. One thing about the bottom, he told himself, you can’t fall any farther. He tried to take comfort from this thought. Yet there knocked in his heart the suspicion that the bottom did not really exist. “I don’t want to die,” he heard himself say, and he began to cry. The music went on, far from him, terribly loud. The lights were very bright and hot. He was sweating and he itched, he stank. Vivaldo was close to him, stroking his head; the stuff of Vivaldo’s sweater stifled him. He wanted to stop crying, stand up, breathe, but he could only sit there with his face in his hands. Vivaldo murmured, “Go ahead, baby, let it out, let it all out.” He wanted to stand up, breathe, and at the same time he wanted to lie flat on the floor and to be swallowed into whatever would stop this pain. Yet, he was aware, perhaps for the first time in his life, that nothing would stop it, nothing: this was himself. Rufus was aware of every inch of Rufus. He was flesh: flesh, bone, muscle, fluid, orifices, hair, and skin. His body was controlled by laws he did not understand. Nor did he understand what force within this body had driven him into such a desolate place. The most impenetrable of mysteries moved in this darkness for less than a second, hinting of reconciliation. And still the music continued, Bessie was saying that she wouldn’t mind being in jail but she had to stay there so long. “I’m sorry,” he said, and raised his head. Vivaldo gave him a handkerchief and he dried his eyes and blew his nose.

• From Push (1996)

  But what I think is he pull his shit on the wrong one. You can't get away with everything all the time with everybody. The first couple of years on the street was the worst. From working under Ma, even though I do everything, I really did not know how to get a job, talk to social service—what's that! So I was just out there! I would go with men to bars, drink, go home with them, hope I get to stay the night— that they don't tell me go after they come. After I do this with, oh, is it five or fifty or a hundred guys, I start dissolve. I don't know how else to explain it. I'm strong woman, if you was looking at me you could see this. Redbone, what Americans say, some color to her, Jamaicans would say. Five foot eight inches, heavy set, or fat some people would say. Kimberton (who is dark) say I look like a mutant, what ever that is. But after the I don't know how many mens I start to break into little pieces and the men look funny, like worms is growing out of their skins, worms that turn to little penises, till I am sick with the walking dicks of Harlem. Everywhere is a hand rubbing, a dick going psst psst come here come here. I can't stay in shelters. I just can't, they is crazy people houses. So I just wander the street, get little money here and there. I meet this one guy, give me enough to get a room at the Y for one week, tell me to go down to welfare. I check that out. They are so nasty to me, send me so many different places to get so many different papers, things I don't have no way of getting! I don't have no birth certificate unless my mother got it but I know where I was born— Kingston, Jamaica. September 22, 1963. I say fuck the whole welfare thing. It's crazy. I walk out office but not before I break one white woman's nose. She send me to get a social security card. I tell her the number but she say got to have the card, go get a duplicate at downtown office. By the time I get back from downtown, where they tell me was an office I could go to on 125th Street, she got coat on talking 'bout she through for the day, going home. You know just as breezy as she can be! Come back tomorrow and she help me right off. What she saying, and she know it, spend another night in. nowhere sleeping next to death. Git on that park bench, subway, rooftop—freeze, get stabbed, raped; I'm going home.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Yet there knocked in his heart the suspicion that the bottom did not really exist. “I don’t want to die,” he heard himself say, and he began to cry. The music went on, far from him, terribly loud. The lights were very bright and hot. He was sweating and he itched, he stank. Vivaldo was close to him, stroking his head; the stuff of Vivaldo’s sweater stifled him. He wanted to stop crying, stand up, breathe, but he could only sit there with his face in his hands. Vivaldo murmured, “Go ahead, baby, let it out, let it all out.” He wanted to stand up, breathe, and at the same time he wanted to lie flat on the floor and to be swallowed into whatever would stop this pain. Yet, he was aware, perhaps for the first time in his life, that nothing would stop it, nothing: this was himself. Rufus was aware of every inch of Rufus. He was flesh: flesh, bone, muscle, fluid, orifices, hair, and skin. His body was controlled by laws he did not understand. Nor did he understand what force within this body had driven him into such a desolate place. The most impenetrable of mysteries moved in this darkness for less than a second, hinting of reconciliation. And still the music continued, Bessie was saying that she wouldn’t mind being in jail but she had to stay there so long. “I’m sorry,” he said, and raised his head. Vivaldo gave him a handkerchief and he dried his eyes and blew his nose. “Don’t be sorry,” said Vivaldo. “Be glad.” He stood over Rufus for yet another moment, then he said, “I’m going to take you out and buy you a pizza. You hungry, child, that’s why you carrying on like that.” He went into the kitchen and began to wash his face. Rufus smiled, watching him, bent over the sink, under the hideous light. It was like the kitchen in St. James Slip. He and Leona had ended their life together there, on the very edge of the island. When Rufus had ceased working and when all his money was gone, and there was nothing left to pawn, they were wholly dependent on the money Leona brought home from the restaurant. Then she lost this job. Their domestic life, which involved a hideous amount of drinking, made it difficult for her to get there on time and also caused her to look more and more disreputable. One evening, half-drunk, Rufus had gone to the restaurant to pick her up. The next day she was fired. She never held a steady job again. One evening Vivaldo came to visit them in their last apartment. They heard the whistles of tugboats all day and all night long. Vivaldo found Leona sitting on the bathroom floor, her hair in her eyes, her face swollen and dirty with weeping.

• From Another Country (1962)

  4And the summer came, the New York summer, which is like no summer anywhere. The heat and the noise began their destruction of nerves and sanity and private lives and love affairs. The air was full of baseball scores and bad news and treacly songs; and the streets and the bars were full of hostile people, made more hostile by the heat. It was not possible in this city, as it had been for Eric in Paris, to take a long and peaceful walk at any hour of the day or night, dropping in for a drink at a bistro or flopping oneself down at a sidewalk café—the half-dozen grim parodies of sidewalk cafés to be found in New York were not made for flopping. It was a city without oases, run entirely, insofar, at least, as human perception could tell, for money; and its citizens seemed to have lost entirely any sense of their right to renew themselves. Whoever, in New York, attempted to cling to this right, lived in New York in exile—in exile from the life around him; and this, paradoxically, had the effect of placing him in perpetual danger of being forever banished from any real sense of himself. In the evenings, and on week ends, Vivaldo sat in his undershorts at the typewriter, his buttocks sticking to the chair, sweat rolling down his armpits and behind his ears and dripping into his eyes and the sheets of paper sticking to each other and to his fingers. The typewriter keys moved sluggishly, striking with a dull, wet sound—moved, in fact, rather the way his novel moved, lifelessly, pushed forward, inch by inch by recalcitrant inch, almost entirely by the will. He scarcely knew what his novel was about any longer, or why he had ever wished to write it, but he could not let it go. He could not let it go, nor could he close with it, for the price of that embrace was the loss of Ida’s, or so he feared. And this fear kept him suspended in a pestilential, dripping limbo.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  But the atrocious act was too public to leave room for such a mistake. Both Tacitus and Suetonius distinguish the two sects, although they knew very little of either; and the former expressly derives the name Christians from Christ, as the founder of the new religion. Moreover Nero, as previously remarked, was not averse to the Jews, and his second wife, Poppaea Sabina, a year before the conflagration, had shown special favor to Josephus, and loaded him with presents. Josephus speaks of the crimes of Nero, but says not a word of any persecution of his fellow-religionists.526 This alone seems to be conclusive. It is not unlikely that in this (as in all previous persecutions, and often afterwards) the fanatical Jews, enraged by the rapid progress of Christianity, and anxious to avert suspicion from themselves, stirred up the people against the hated Galilaeans, and that the heathen Romans fell with double fury on these supposed half Jews, disowned by their own strange brethren.527 The Probable Extent of the Persecution. The heathen historians, if we are to judge from their silence, seem to confine the persecution to the city of Rome, but later Christian writers extend it to the provinces.528 The example set by the emperor in the capital could hardly be without influence in the provinces, and would justify the outbreak of popular hatred. If the Apocalypse was written under Nero, or shortly after his death, John’s exile to Patmos must be connected with this persecution. It mentions imprisonments in Smyrna, the martyrdom of Antipas in Pergamus, and speaks of the murder of prophets and saints and all that have been slain on the earth.529 The Epistle to the Hebrews 10:32–34, which was written in Italy, probably in the year 64, likewise alludes to bloody persecutions, and to the release of Timothy from prison, 13:23. And Peter, in his first Epistle, which may be assigned to the same year, immediately after the outbreak of the persecution, and shortly before his death, warns the Christians in Asia Minor of a fiery trial which is to try them, and of sufferings already endured or to be endured, not for any crime, but for the name of "Christians."530 The name "Babylon"531 for Rome is most easily explained by the time and circumstances of composition. Christianity, which had just reached the age of its founder, seemed annihilated in Rome. With Peter and Paul the first generation of Christians was buried. Darkness must have overshadowed the trembling disciples, and a despondency seized them almost as deep as on the evening of the crucifixion, thirty-four years before. But the morning of the resurrection was not far distant, and the very spot of the martyrdom of St. Peter was to become the site of the greatest church in Christendom and the palatial residence of his reputed successors.532 The Apocalypse on the Neronian Persecution.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  She smiled wanly as she sat back and remembered. “I never played much with other kids on my block because I was so lost in my fantasies. I’d watch them but not join in. Instead, my sister and I had our own private games. Our favorite was that we lived on top of a high steep mountain and saw our parents once a month, maybe less. All we had was magic, a fantasy, a dream. From the time I was very small I knew that they would never divorce. I knew I could not make them disappear. And I knew that I was trapped with them forever. I spent a lot of my childhood thinking, When will I be old enough, when will I be big enough, when will I be strong enough to leave? Those were my wishes.” As we sat in silence, I thought to myself, “go figure” indeed. According to our demographic questionnaire, Carol’s father had made it big in the corporate world, rising to vice president in one of the largest West Coast engineering firms. Carol’s mother was a successful fund-raiser and had been on the board of numerous nonprofit organizations. They had a nice house, good clothes, expensive cars. The children had been sent to the best private schools. Yet life at home had been one long nightmare for Carol and her siblings. When did she begin to question the normalcy of her family life? “All through my growing up, I knew in my bones that I was supposed to keep what happened a secret,” she said. “Had you interviewed me then, I would never have told you about our rituals, about what was going on. I had no one to talk to. Only my brother and sister and I knew and we didn’t dare let it seep out. Maybe the hardest thing of all, which I still haven’t told you, is that we kept our secret so hidden, making sure no one found out. It was like I had two identities. It was a heavy thing for me to carry. I know that after awhile I began to feel sort of dead inside. I went into treatment years later because I was afraid that I was dead or empty.” The Castle SecretsFAMILIES LIKE CAROL’S rarely come into public view because they are so normal-looking from the outside. Had I met this couple at a party, I would have found them to be cultured, respectable members of the community. The children were never hit so hard that they had visible bruises or needed to be taken to an emergency room. Nothing about the family’s behavior in the public domain—in business, social, or school life—would have given any clues as to what happened from five o’clock on. A man’s home is his castle. It is surrounded by a moat and outsiders are not invited in.

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  However, the young woman’s older brother, a twenty-nine-year-old law student, entered guilty pleas to kidnapping and forcible confinement. He was sentenced to a fifteen-month term of house arrest and community supervision.674 I no longer do involuntary cult-intervention work with adults, though such an involuntary intervention for minor children remains completely legal in the United States when it is under the direct supervision of their legal guardian or custodial parents. But despite my decision to abandon involuntary intervention work with adults, I deeply sympathize with families and others concerned who may find themselves facing an extreme situation, in which voluntary interventions seem to be improbable, if not impossible, due to a lack of meaningful access as a direct result of cultic influence and manipulation. After his acquittal in 1993, deprogrammer Kenneth J. Paolini said, “What pulls on you is when a parent calls and says, ‘I’m desperate.’”675 But today, regardless of how desperate the situation may be, due to legal concerns, cult-intervention professionals in the United States have abandoned involuntary intervention, with the possible exception of minor children under the direct supervision of a custodial parent or legal guardian. Evolution of Deprogramming What was once called “deprogramming” remains largely the same process used today for cult-intervention work, but it is done only with adults on a voluntary basis. Conway and Siegelman succinctly described the deprogramming process in their book Snapping: America’s Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change . The authors wrote, “It appears to be a genuinely broadening, expanding personal change, it would seem to bear closer resemblance to a true moment of enlightenment, to the natural process of personal growth and newfound awareness and understanding, than to the narrowing changes brought about by cult rituals and artificially induced group ordeals.”676 Steve Hassan, himself a former member of the Reverend Moon‘s Unification Church, related about his own deprogramming, “I had the indescribable experience of my mind suddenly opening up, as if a light switch had been thrown.” He concluded that this was like “rediscovering myself.”677 In the second edition of Conway and Siegelman’s Snapping: America’s Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change , they explain that the “methods of voluntary deprogramming and exit-counseling, while far less controversial and much safer from a legal standpoint, prompted fewer cult members to experience a sudden ‘snapping out’ of their controlled states of mind.”678 Instead, as I discussed with the authors, what now most often occurs is a slower, less pronounced moment of emergence or “gradual ‘unfolding’ from the cults’ ingrained altered states.”679 From the time of Ted Patrick to today, cult-intervention work has evolved and changed. But the essential elements for a successful intervention remain largely intact and based on an educational model and process. The essential building blocks are the following: learning about the inherent dynamics and authoritarian structure of destructive cults; reviewing the systematic persuasion, influence, and control techniques evident in such groups; sharing historical information about the particular group or leader; and understanding the family concerns that led to the intervention.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AMBROSE. In the blind man we have a type of the Gentile people, who have received by the Sacrament of our Lord the brightness of the light which they had lost. And it matters not whether the cure is conveyed in the case of one or two blind men, inasmuch as deriving their origin from Ham and Japhet, the sons of Noah, in the two blind men they put forward two authors of their race. GREGORY. (Hom. 2. in Ev.) Or, blindness is a symbol of the human race, which in our first parent knowing not the brightness of heavenly light, now suffers the darkness of his condemnation. Jericho is interpreted ‘the moon,’ whose monthly wanings represent the feebleness of our mortality. While then our Creator is drawing nigh to Jericho, the blind is restored to sight, because when God took upon Him the weakness of our flesh, the human race received back the light which it had lost. He then who is ignorant of this brightness of the everlasting light, is blind. But if he does no more than believe in the Redeemer who said, I am the way, the truth, and the life; (John 13:6.) he sits by the way side. If he both believes and prays that he may receive the everlasting light, he sits by the way side and begs. Those that went before Jesus, as He was coming, represent the multitude of carnal desires, and the busy crowd of vices which before that Jesus comes to our heart, scatter our thoughts, and disturb us even in our prayers. But the blind man cried out the more; for the more violently we are assailed by our restless thoughts, the more fervently ought we to give ourselves to prayer. As long as we still suffer our manifold fancies to trouble us in our prayers, we feel in some measure Jesus passing by. But when we are very stedfast in prayer, God is fixed in our heart, and the lost light is restored. Or to pass by is of man, to stand is of God. The Lord then passing by heard the blind man crying, standing still restored him to sight, for by His humanity in compassion to our blindness He has pity upon our cries, by the power of His divinity He pours upon us the light of His grace. Now for this reason He asks what the blind man wished, that He might stir up his heart to prayer, for He wishes that to be sought in prayer, which He knows beforehand both that we seek and He grants. AMBROSE. Or, He asked the blind man to the end that we might believe, that without confession no man can be saved.

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  A month earlier Chile’s supreme court found Gerard Mucke Koschitzke, Kurt Schnellenkamp Nelaismisckies, Gunter Schaffrik Bruckmann, and Dennys Alvear Henríquez, members of Schaefer’s “iron circle,” guilty of “various crimes of sexual abuse, rape of minors and abduction of minors.” The men will serve eleven-year prison sentences. Judge Hernán González of the Talca Court of Appeals announced that a total of nineteen individuals convicted of cult-related crimes in January must surrender and serve their sentences.233 Allegedly Hartmutt Hopp, reportedly Schaeffer’s “right hand man,” escaped Chile and fled to Germany with millions of dollars taken from the Dignidad community. Chilean authorities have applied for his extradition. More than one hundred members of the Dignidad group eventually drifted back to Germany. Others remained behind in the Chilean compound, which is now called “Villa Baviera.” They hope to eventually turn it into a financially viable community again. Just like many of the former members of the Children of God, second-generation survivors of Dignidad are reportedly deeply traumatized because of the horrible childhood Schaefer imposed on them.234 By the conclusion of the twentieth century and now in the twenty-first century, the damage done by destructive cults has become increasingly evident. Collective awareness about them has largely increased through media reports, criminal arrests, and court trials. Groups called “cults” often fit a particular pattern, which may include a seemingly encapsulated or cocooned state of being. In this sense the people in cults appear to function within their own alternate reality. But when that alternate reality comes into conflict with mainstream society, some groups have imploded or exploded. The occurrence of such tragic events brings into sharp focus what Dr. Bruce Perry calls “the fracture lines in our culture.”235 CHAPTER 2 SMALL BUT DEADLY Most of the destructive cults reported about around the world are actually quite small, often with less than one hundred members. Nevertheless, these small groups have greatly contributed to the history of cult tragedies. Unlike the larger organizations or movements, these smaller groups are typically very tightly wound around an ever-present charismatic leader. The tight-knit nature of small cults often means leaders more readily influence and control members. Because small cults are so tightly wound, their members seem to be more subject to the mood swings and delusions of their leaders. Historically, mental health professionals have described some leaders of destructive cults as psychopaths, deeply disturbed individuals, or both. Within the environment of a tightly controlled small cult, there is what can be characterized as an almost symbiotic relationship between the leader and his or her followers. This close relationship in some cultic situations has become the basis for tragedy. Members of small cult groups typically become largely dependent on the leader to determine the parameters of reality.

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  The center helps cult victims and generally educates the public.292 1997—Marshall Applewhite and the Heaven’s Gate Suicides In March 1997 thirty-nine people, twenty-one women and eighteen men, were found dead at a mansion in the exclusive neighborhood of Rancho Santa Fe near San Diego in the United States. They ranged in age from twenty-six to seventy-two and came from nine different US states. The thirty-nine bodies were identified as members of a cult group known as Heaven’s Gate.293 Again, like the Solar Temple, the small group had not been subjected to intense scrutiny or what some might label “persecution”; rather it had remained relatively obscure and unnoticed. The bodies of the cult members were found dispersed in the mansion on cots and mattresses. All but two had shrouds of purple covering their heads and shoulders. Most had died of suffocation, induced by plastic bags placed over their heads after they took a concoction of phenobarbital and alcohol. Found among the dead was Marshall Herff Applewhite, the sixty-five-year-old leader of the group. Applewhite had a troubled history. In 1970 he checked himself into a psychiatric hospital after hearing voices. He also hoped to find a cure for his “homosexual urges.”294 Marshall Applewhite never resolved his mental illness. After discontinuing his psychiatric treatment, Applewhite had himself castrated, it appears in an effort to resolve his sexual conflicts. Videotapes of Applewhite’s final statements were shown to Louis Jolyon West, professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles. Dr. West concluded that the tapes demonstrated Applewhite was “delusional, sexually repressed and suffering from clinical paranoia.”295 Applewhite taught his followers that he was a messenger from an “Evolutionary Kingdom Level Above Human.” He claimed that periodically this higher kingdom sent messengers to earth and that one such previous visitor was Jesus. Applewhite believed he had once been Jesus in an “away team” and had been “incarnated again in…[a] mature (adult) [body] that had been picked and prepped for [his] current mission.” He advised his followers that if they studied with him, he would become their pivotal link to this higher level. He said that only through him would it be possible for them to eventually evolve and shed their human “containers,” which were only temporary “vehicles” for this supposed journey. Applewhite’s group evolved over the years, beginning in the 1970s. The group was known by successive names including The Two (Applewhite and his platonic companion, Bonnie Nettles), Human Individual Metamorphosis (HIM), Te and Do (Nettles was Te, and Applewhite was Do), and then Total Overcomers Anonymous.296 Finally, Applewhite chose the name Heaven’s Gate. Applewhite required his “class” to give up virtually everything. This included their families, friends, and sex. Five of his male followers also had themselves surgically castrated, following their leader’s example. Members of Applewhite’s “crew” surrendered and renounced all their worldly possessions. They were told that they must overcome and do battle spiritually with dark forces known as the “Luciferians” and those they influenced.

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  Her body was never found, but she was officially declared dead. Left behind was a suicide note. The environmental consultant with a master’s degree in plant ecology had written, “I attended a course called Executive Success Programs [ESP] based out of Anchorage, Alaska and Albany, New York. I was brainwashed and my emotional center of the brain was killed/turned off. I still have feeling in my external skin, but my internal organs are rotting. Please contact my parents…if you find me or this note. I am sorry life; I didn’t know I was already dead. May we persist into the future.”973 At the time Snyder had been attending a sixteen-day “intensive” offered by a for-profit privately owned company run by a former multilevel marketing guru named Keith Raniere. On the second day of that program, Snyder reportedly seemed “delusional.”974 Her domestic partner, Heidi Clifford, said she had stopped sleeping and was threatening suicide. Kristin Snyder had been involved with ESP, now known as NXIVM (pronounced nexium).975 Her parents said they had become concerned when their daughter came home for a visit after her first sixteen-day ESP intensive. In conversation they questioned the cost of ESP, specifically the $7,000 she paid for an intensive. She then cut them off and called her “coach.”976 Snyder reportedly spent more than $16,000 in four months before she was done with ESP.977 “I do, indeed, feel that her involvement in ESP was a first-cause factor in her death,” Kristin Snyder’s father told the press. “As it was, her personality disintegrated right before their eyes, and no one knew how to pick up the pieces. I do not believe that Kris wanted to kill herself. She cried out for help for almost a week, but was totally ignored,” her father said.978 Carlos Rueda, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Our Lady of Mercy Hospital in New York City, stated that he treated three ESP/NXIVM students for psychological disorders he believed were related to its training. One case included a “psychotic episode” and required hospital care in January 2003. Rueda told the press, “I think that the stress and the way the courses are structured may make people who have a tendency to have a psychotic disorder have an acute episode.”979 The press contacted the woman who had experienced the breakdown, and she claimed that ESP/NXIVM told her, “We have to break you to reconstruct you.” She then concluded, “But they rebuild you how they want to rebuild you.” A spokesperson for ESP stated that “no civil action has ever been alleged against ESP in that regard.”980 Other controversial LGAT programs include EST (Erhard Seminar Training), now known as Landmark Education, Lifespring, and the Mankind Project. These LGATs have also garnered press attention, complaints, and in some instances personal injury lawsuits.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Dr. Baur, of Tübingen (d. 1860), the master-critic among sceptical church historians, and the corypheus of the Tübingen school, came at last to the conclusion (as stated in the revised edition of his Church History of the First Three Centuries, published shortly before his death, 1860) that "nothing but the miracle of the resurrection could disperse the doubts which threatened to drive faith itself into the eternal night of death (Nur das Wunder der Auferstehung konnte die Zweifel zerstreuen, welche den Glauben selbst in die ewige Nacht des Todes verstossen zu müssen schienen)." Geschichte der christlichen Kirche, I. 39. It is true he adds that the nature of the resurrection itself lies outside of historical investigation ("Was die Auferstehung an sich ist, liegt ausserhalb des Kreises der geschichtlichen Untersuchung"), but also, that "for the faith of the disciples the resurrection of Jesus became the most solid and most irrefutable certainty. In this faith only Christianity gained a firm foothold of its historical development. (In diesem Glauben hat erst das Christenthum den festen Grund seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung gewonnen.) What history requires as the necessary prerequisite of all that follows is not so much the fact of the resurrection itself [?] as the faith in that fact. In whatever light we may consider the resurrection of Jesus, whether as an actual objective miracle or as a subjective psychological one (als ein objectiv geschehenes Wunder, oder als ein subjectiv psychologisches), even granting the possibility of such a miracle, no psychological analysis can penetrate the inner spiritual process by which in the consciousness of the disciples their unbelief at the death of Jesus was transformed into a belief of his resurrection .... We must rest satisfied with this, that for them the resurrection of Christ was a fact of their consciousness, and had for them all the reality of an historical event." (Ibid., pp. 39, 40.) Baur’s remarkable conclusion concerning the conversion of St. Paul (ibid., pp. 44, 45) we shall consider in its proper place.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  My heart wasn’t good, I was short of breath, and I didn’t have time to go to the doctor. She continued to cry and then to holler, but I was too tired and beat to listen. Anyway, to make it short I came home one day and the house was empty. She had moved out, taking the couch, the TV, the washer and dryer, her clothes, the whole frigging house. Fortunately she left my dog. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. It was night. I walked in and out of the house four or five times. I couldn’t believe it. I was sobbing like a baby. How could she? I nearly went mad. I mean it, Judy, mad, insane, bonkers. I couldn’t eat. I went to work but I did nothing. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t go into the empty house. I stayed out on the porch for eight months, rain or shine. Depression set in like an anvil-shaped cloud. I was so overwhelmed with sadness, I said to myself, ‘This is it. No one’s ever wanted you—your wife, your dad, your mom.’ I tried to kill myself with carbon monoxide four or five times. Actually the only way I slept at all was by wrapping my arms around my dog and dozing off at dawn.” I’ve seen many marriages come apart with the kind of severe reactions Billy described. (Often this kind of terrible trauma is what sparks a custody fight that never ends.) Still hurting from the unexpected and long-remembered loss of their intact family during childhood, they go on to lose the central relationship of their own adulthood without any warning. This confirms their view that they’re doomed, that everything they need dies. The suffering is exactly as Billy described. They can’t stand it. To come home to an empty house and be greeted by a note tacked to the door is a dreadful humiliation. The reaction—depression or explosive rage—can last for years. People blame the partner, the real or imaginary lover, the partner’s family, the world. The trauma of the breakup can dominate their lives and lead to savage fighting over children or property. But why didn’t Billy have a clue about what was coming? For a woman to empty the household takes not only careful planning but a towering rage that builds over time until it explodes in an extraordinary act of hatred and revenge. Yet Billy was taken by surprise. He was looking miserable. I touched his arm and said, “Billy, I can’t think of anything worse that could happen. What she did was awful. Thank God you didn’t kill yourself. What led to her anger?

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  “Homosexuality was frowned on” by Moses and his followers, said Tracey Cline, district attorney.465 Moses took Jadon Higganbothan into a garage and shot him in the head. What happened next was reminiscent of 1 Mind Ministries; the boy’s lifeless body was stuffed into a suitcase and stored in the house until the odor caused Moses to have the remains buried.466 Willie Harris, the father of Lavonda Harris, one of the Black Hebrews charged with murder, told the media that Moses made communication difficult between his daughter and her family. After her arrest Harris spoke with his daughter and said she seemed “programmed.” “She was very withdrawn and very sad…She’s in denial about whether Moses had anything to do with the murders,” he said.467 In June 2012 Peter Lucas Moses Jr. entered a guilty plea to avoid the death penalty. He also agreed to testify against his followers.468 Moses was finally sentenced during June of 2013 and received two life terms in prison.469 Charges against two Black Hebrews, Sheila Moses and Sheilda Harris, were dropped, and the women were released from jail. Lavada Harris and Vania Sisk both entered guilty pleas, Sisk for second degree murder and Harris as an accessory after the fact of murder. Sisk was sentenced to two consecutive prison terms of fifteen to nineteen years each. Harris was sentenced to two consecutive terms of between six to eight years.470 In February 2013 LaRhonda Renee Smith pled guilty to second-degree murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy charges related to the deaths of Antoinetta McKoy and Jadon Higganbothan. Smith agreed to cooperate as a witness for the state but was sentenced to eleven to fifteen years in prison.471 The harm inflicted and the suffering endured in family cults have been horrendous and often seem unimaginable to the general public. For this reason they are often realized only through sensational media reports. But the fact that that this type of abuse exists is historically undeniable. Within the larger context of destructive cults, the relatively small fraction that constitutes family cults is perhaps the most unsettling. This is because the leaders doing harm are parents. The idea of fathers—and in some cases, mothers—becoming cult leaders and using their parental power to physically, psychologically, and emotionally damage their children is a deeply disturbing reality. But what we can see through the case histories recorded in this chapter are the death and destruction family cults have wrought. Parental rights have been repeatedly challenged in courts across the United States and around the world when the welfare of children is threatened and abuse allegations are investigated. The leaders of family cults have been criminally prosecuted and held legally accountable. These prosecutions have shocked communities when a family household within a residential neighborhood is exposed as a destructive cult. CHAPTER 4 DEFINING A DESTRUCTIVE CULT The definition of a cult has been debated, and it is frequently understood in a myriad of different ways from various perspectives.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  It has huge flaws, in both the institution and the people who lead it. They are only human. And I have no trouble accepting that. It’s all part of my faith. “On the very first page of The Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith wrote that if it contained mistakes or faults, ‘it be the mistakes of men.’ And this same thing is stated in various ways throughout the text that follows—that errors in this sacred book are possible, even likely. I have always believed that Mormonism was the one true church, but I don’t think it has ever been infallible. And I certainly don’t believe it has a monopoly on the truth.” One of the events that led to Dr. Quinn’s excommunication was the publication, in 1987, of Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, a fascinating, exhaustively researched examination of Joseph Smith’s involvement in mysticism and the occult. In the preface to a revised 1998 edition of the book, Quinn astutely observed that “many academics feel embarrassed for a scholar who even briefly acknowledges belief in the metaphysical.” He argued, nevertheless, that authors had an intellectual and ethical responsibility “to state one’s own frame of reference when writing about the metaphysical”—which he proceeded to do, succinctly describing his Mormon faith. And regarding that faith, he wrote, “I make no apologies to secular humanists or religious polemicists.” I happen to find Quinn’s argument compelling. He’s convinced me that those who write about religion owe it to their readers to come clean about their own theological frame of reference. So here’s mine: I don’t know what God is, or what God had in mind when the universe was set in motion. In fact, I don’t know if God even exists, although I confess that I sometimes find myself praying in times of great fear, or despair, or astonishment at a display of unexpected beauty. There are some ten thousand extant religious sects—each with its own cosmology, each with its own answer for the meaning of life and death. Most assert that the other 9,999 not only have it completely wrong but are instruments of evil, besides. None of the ten thousand has yet persuaded me to make the requisite leap of faith. In the absence of conviction, I’ve come to terms with the fact that uncertainty is an inescapable corollary of life. An abundance of mystery is simply part of the bargain—which doesn’t strike me as something to lament. Accepting the essential inscrutability of existence, in any case, is surely preferable to its opposite: capitulating to the tyranny of intransigent belief. And if I remain in the dark about our purpose here, and the meaning of eternity, I have nevertheless arrived at an understanding of a few more modest truths: Most of us fear death. Most of us yearn to comprehend how we got here, and why—which is to say, most of us ache to know the love of our creator.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Those two books cost Augustine more pain and struggle than all the other books he wrote combined. The two projects went on for perhaps as many as twenty years apiece and were brought to completion only with the greatest difficulty, and not without pieces of at least one of them getting abroad without his consent. Whether those books succeed or not on their own merits is an open question, but considering their importance in Augustine’s life and work, they are far too little known. The struggle they embody and their relative opacity to our eyes is the evidence of the failure of the effort of will that the Confessions represent. The idealized Platonic Christianity of Milan and after expresses itself in the great book and is broken in the effort, and the pieces begin to fall away. What had still seemed vibrantly possible in 391, when Augustine wrote an optimistic book called True Religion, now fades from view. That he seems to have discovered, or at least noticed, not long afterwards that Porphyry, the greatest disciple of the philosopher Plotinus, was a virulent anti-Christian at least gave pretext for the disavowal of neo-Platonism that fills the eighth, ninth, and tenth books of City of God in the 410s. The man who lived in Africa and who had written the Confessions, in other words, was no longer the man of the Confessions, and that was Augustine’s tragedy. To understand the man whose story is told in that book, we must understand the man who told it. The crabbed turmoil of Augustine’s later years is only the externalization of the conflicts that he had chosen for himself. Conversion, which Peter Brown once memorably spoke of as a process of “hardening the will,”144 was just that for Augustine. He had made his change, once and for all, and though he changed and changed again throughout his life, he could not admit or recognize those further changes. He had to insist that he had become in 387 the man he was in all the later years of his life, an evident untruth, but one he was perfectly sincere in uttering. WHAT IF…