Our fascination with cults goes deep. It’s hard to watch crime shows, read thrillers, or horror without a cult or two popping up somewhere along the way. It’s become cliché, a trope, a predictable element of how we scare ourselves. We joke about tight-knit clubs, gyms, friend circles as being cultish, and we laugh. The psychology isn’t too hard to figure out: what is horror except a way to play out all the possible terrors that might occur before they actually do? It’s why we watch scary movies, why we devour true crime. In the back of our heads, there is a little voice that whispers over and over it can’t get you when you’ve seen its face.
But cults are not the exclusive territory of the disturbed and deviant. They consist of people much like any of us, people who walk every avenue of life, and consist of every possible combination of human attributes. That is where the scary lives: if a seemingly normal person can be lured into a cult, then how do I know who to trust?
The Son of Abraham explores cult psychology and the lengths that seemingly ordinary people will go to when asked by their leader. Book three of the Diabhal trilogy, it follows Alan Robertson, a little boy who grew up in a cult called The Society, a matriarchal group that followed the old ways brought over from Ireland. Despite the efforts of his sister, and ascended leader to the Society, to free him from the cult, Alan’s path has led him to collect worshippers who believe him to be The Son of Abraham, an all-powerful being who can lead them from this Earth, from their pain, to the next world free from suffering.
It’s an old story: Jim Jones promised his followers Utopia in Guyana; Marshall Applewhite convinced his masses that their future was on the tail of the Hale-Bop Comet. Alan Robertson promises his followers a cure for their pain, a balm for the grief, rejection, displacement that haunts them. So what attracts people to these groups? With the wealth of knowledge that exists about cults and their leaders available, why would anyone choose this path?
While far from universal, there are commonalities that exist across the cult board:
-1. Doomsday Ideations: Charles Manson believed that in order to ignite what he believed to be end-times level race wars, he needed to spark a wave of violence, so random and horrible that it would escalate to fuel the apocalypse. The problem, of course, was that his wave of violence was far from random. His ‘Family’ targeted people and locations that Manson had perceived as having persecuted him in the past.
Valentina De Andrade led the Superior Universal Alignment cult on the belief that all boys born after 1981 were evil and needed to be sacrificed in order to change the prophecy of the end of the world given to her by space aliens. Her followers murdered nineteen children by the time the Brazilian government stopped the cult’s murder spree in 1993.
-2. Recruiting the Disenfranchised: Annie Hamilton-Byrne used a combination of new-age teachings and yoga to recruit primarily middle-aged women to her ‘Family’. Members ‘gifted’ their children to her, and allowed her to control them with mind-altering drugs. Hamilton-Byrnes targeted women who, like her, had lost loved ones, were grieving and lonely. She promised them connection, and family.
Charles Sobhraj murdered at least ten young people who had the misfortune of crossing his path in South Asia in the 1970’s. Sobhraj idolized Charles Mansion and attempted recreate his Family. His victims were first his guests, he is said to have had a magnetic presence that not only attracted others, but inspired a sort of blind trust. His victims were young travelers, who saw Sobhraj initially as a mentor and guide.
In the fictional universe of The Son of Abraham, Alan Robertson preys on those who have suffered catastrophic losses and have found themselves on the edges of society. He listens to them, and that experience of being truly heard binds these lost souls to The Son of Abraham. But it’s fiction, right? No one would actually do that? Right?
Except they would. It’s been documented through the studies of cult personalities and behavior that a certain level of cognitive dissonance occurs wherein followers of a cult leader will ignore what we might perceive as ridiculous or unbelievable. The further into the cult they go the more likely that a once-reasonable individual will blindly accept whatever they are being told.
The Raëlian Church believed that space aliens were communicating to the group and were capable of cloning humans, even claiming a successful clone-human birth in 2003.
The Church of Euthanasia preaches that in order to bring about balance on Earth, we must not only stop procreating, but also consider suicide and even murder in order to eradicate the human population from the globe.
When we feel heard, when we feel special, when we feel seen for what might be the first time in our lives, who knows what we will grow to believe?
Alan Robertson uses this vulnerability to further his prophecy that he will become the ascended ruler of the Night Forest, the dimension just past our own where the dead rise anew and free from the pain of our waking world. Would you follow him? What would you sacrifice if you were promised a world without pain and suffering? What would you compromise if you felt a human connection that you’d been longing for all your life?
It’s a thin line that seemingly ‘normal’ people cross constantly. All of us have followed a friend against our better judgement, listened to a person you knew was trouble, took that step off the edge just so you could feel what it was like to fall.
Whether fiction or fact, cults are ingrained in our psyches, we are either fascinated or horrified, but in Nietzsche’s words “…if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
***thanks to my sources:
https://www.livescience.com/11370-top-10-crazy-cults.html
https://historyofyesterday.com/infamous-female-cult-leaders-6e68621f7c0b
http://dostoevsky-bts.com/blog/6-evilest-cults-time/
https://murderpedia.org/male.S/s/sobhraj-charles.htm
Kathleen Kaufman’s prose has been praised by Kirkus Reviews as “crisp, elegant” and “genuinely chilling” by Booklist. She is the author of the Diabhal trilogy, featuring Diabhal and Sinder, with The Son of Abraham being the third and final installment. Her novel The Lairdbalor will soon be a feature film with Screen Australia and director Nicholas Verso. She is also the author of acclaimed historical horror Hag and sci-fi thriller The Tree Museum. When not writing, she can be found teaching literature and composition at Santa Monica College or hanging out with a good book. Kathleen Kaufman is a native Coloradan and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, hound, and a pack of cats. You can find her on Twitter @kathleenkaufman.
