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Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Babara Godlee
A
true poet and of the Devil's Party without knowing it," thus
William Blake on John Milton - words borrowed by Colin Wilson for the
title of his latest historical blockbuster, on charlatan Messiahs. For,
as Wilson emphasises, evident lack of insight into their own condition
('without knowing it') distinguishes his large cast of misguided
aspirants to Messianic status, as they preach, plot, quarrel, rage,
rape, break every law, suffer and die - usually violently - across his
colourful pages.
Wilson
made his name with The Outsider (1956) which he followed with
studies on ritual, mystery, the occult, magic and other esoteric themes.
But it is the world of sex and violence, along with bit-players such as
Jack the Ripper, Rasputin and Moll Flanders, and lately, more especially
sex and teenagers, that has clearly engaged him most closely. Where
better, then, to find every variation of his favourite subject - serial
killers and unspeakable villains included - than in this study of manic
Messiahs, prophesying confident deadlines for the end of time and
offering certain salvation to their equally demented disciples in return
for their devotion, their
money and their wife?
Aspiring
Messiahs - the anointed one, or mashiakh of the Jews - come, Wilson
explains, from the tiny percentage of dominant personalities found in
any group, further whittled down to those control-freak 'King Rats' and
'Right Men' who under no circumstances can admit to being wrong. Like
lesser breeds, such as politicians who seduce through an irresistible
charm, they are usually, according to Wilson, intellectual conmen of
awesome plausibility, promiscuously
spreading their 'holy seed' among a devoted following, craving
for power in every sphere of their self-made organisation: superheated,
driven men behaving in an increasingly demented way, that can only
invite catastrophe. Very few - Krishnamurti for example - displayed
gentler characteristics.
But
a hopeful Messiah cannot begin to operate in a vacuum. He, or very
occasionally, she, is, above all, a social phenomenon, reacting to the
temperature of the times, and requiring a strongly supportive structure
of hundreds, preferably thousands of devoted followers. Wilson finds the
psychology of these disciples just as bizarre as that of their leaders -
suffering low-esteem and equally devoid of self-knowledge. In this
disable state, they await the expected millennium, heralding the world's
end, in hope and terror, enduring every indignity at their master's
bidding, before perishing often in terrible ways.
Writing from such a wide perspective - Wilson's interests range, according to his publishers, across diverse fields - the author introduces his subject with the parallel problem of the serial killer and manic Messiah. His digression to illustrate the sheer intensity of the sexual drive may tell us more about his own sexual awakening than we care to know; but he soon settles down to his first chapter, 'Sex as Salvation', in which he traces the now well-trodden fiasco of Waco and the deaths of more than seventy Branch Davidians, along with their mad leader, David Koresh, named after the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse. Chapter Two, 'The Millennium Cometh', leaps back in time to 1666 and its messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, who was expected to overthrow the Sultan of Turkey ("the whole of Europe awaited the greatest event in human history") and to ride into Jerusalem upon a dragon. A short resumé of Jewish expectations, followed by inevitable disappointment, takes the reader further back to "the only messiah of that period who is remembered today was called Jeshua, better known by the Greek form of his name, Jesus". Dealing with the stream of claimants to that title followed - "Many messiahs were undoubtedly mental cases suffering from psychotic delusions," Wilson repeats - he returns to the seventeenth century and Zevi: The most successful messiah since Jesus of Nazareth."
'The
Psychology of Discipleship' (Chapter Three) now exercise Wilson with a
hundred names and cases, the most notorious being those followers of the
infamous Jim Jones, forced to suffer beatings and every variety of
sexual perversion, before over 900 of them committed suicide in
Jonestown, Guyana, encouraged to believe they were going to meet up in a
better place by Jones, who finally shot himself. Certainly Wilson
readers require strong stomachs as he parades Messiahs as killers, power
maniacs, revivalists, even psychoanalysts (Jung, Freud) and poets (Yeats)
through the dramas of his twelve chapters, with their promise of reality
transformed. A host of names, places, events brought together in this
well-produced book has advanced Messianic study - though not so fast
that it could cover the recent mass deaths in Uganda (suicide,
sacrifice, or murder, it is not yet known) of members of the Movement
for the Restoration of the
Ten Commandments of God. Not that this is in any way an academic
offering. Colin Wilson writes entertainingly, but is prone to anecdote
and repetition. Sharper editing could have pruned the repetition - the
Devil is in the detail - but Virgin have served its author well, with
plates of a few of the maddest Messiahs, along with the carnage they
caused; and mirabile dictu -
an index .
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