Cult following, p.21
Cult Following, page 21
The internet might make it easier for cults to recruit, but in the best-case scenario, it also removes the element of physical isolation that is so often necessary for these groups to go rotten. It’s much easier to escape a cult when you can leave with the click of a button.
Breatharianism
A Stomach Full of Hot Air
Some cults are taken down by sex scandals, others by failed prophecies, imprisonment, the death of leaders, mass suicides, and murders. The Breatharian Institute of America has the unique honor of being the first cult in history to be taken down by a Twinkie. It was also the first breatharian cult to introduce a mass audience to its main and extremely bizarre tenet: that the human body can live on air and only air.
That’s Incredible! was an early-eighties prime-time network TV show that featured people performing amazing feats—a man who could tow an Amtrak train with his teeth, a three-year-old who could walk a tightrope, a woman who claimed to channel music from famous dead musicians. Wiley Brooks came on the show and lifted a 1,100-pound barbell, despite weighing only 135 pounds himself. The six-foot-tall Black man had the reedy build of an elite marathon runner, but the strength of the thickest bodybuilder. That was certainly incredible, but the secret to his success was even more so. He claimed that he had not eaten solid food in seventeen years: he lived on air.
The statement was so unbelievable that Brooks was quickly booked on talk shows like Late Night with David Letterman and The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder. In the latter interview, he explained to the host that breatharianism occurs when “the human body is in perfect harmony with itself and nature.” Eating, he said, was unnecessary. It was just “an acquired habit like drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes.” He took a stronger stance in other interviews. The Honolulu Advertiser quotes him as saying, “There is one reason why the body dies, and that’s because we constantly introduce into it an alien substance you call food. I call it poison.” So he stuck to consuming air…and the occasional fruit juice, if he was in an area with high levels of unappetizing air pollution.
The forty-six-year-old Brooks claimed to have gotten started as a breatharian when, at twenty-eight, he realized that he was losing his hair, was suffering from arthritis, and found himself tired all the time. Basically, he could feel himself aging. He decided to read some books on longevity and discovered that the secret to fixing all that “getting old” nonsense was to “kick the habit of eating” and just let the body do what it does naturally: take in air.
Now, Brooks wasn’t the first person in history to tout the redundancy of repasts. Various saints and monks and occultists have claimed to have gone decades without eating food. During the Victorian era in the US and the UK, tales of so-called “fasting girls” made headlines. Molly Fletcher, aka the Brookly Enigma, claimed in the late 1870s to have gone fourteen years without eating. Sarah Jacob, the Welsh Fasting Girl, was supposed to have stopped eating after the age of ten. (She would die of starvation in 1869 at age twelve—her parents were convicted of manslaughter as a result.) In Boston in 1889, Josephine Marie Bedard, a.k.a. the Tingwick Girl, was such a notorious noneater that when somebody accused her of taking a bite from a donut, the Boston Globe reported on the incident.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term breatharian was first recorded in 1957 in author Holmes Welch’s Parting of the Way: Lao Tzu and the Taoist Movement, Volume 10. In discussing certain Taoist concepts, Welch brought up Breatharianism for comparison: “I have in mind the cult of Breatharianism, propagated by the Natural Science Society of Maitland, Florida. According to Breatharian doctrine, eating is the cause of death. Meat and wine are poisonous; vegetables are even more poisonous.”
In the early 1980s, all this media attention for his breatharianism gave Brooks an idea: he would start an organization dedicated to its philosophy and practice and would teach other people how to go foodless. In 1982, Brooks founded the Breatharian Institute of America in Larkspur, California. He offered lectures and multi-day seminars in the technique and began to attract followers who wanted the seemingly limitless benefits of breatharianism that Brooks touted. A 1983 United Press International news report tallies his followers at four hundred people who wished their stomachs were vestigial.
Although Brooks preached longevity (and sometimes even immortality), the Breatharian Institute was short-lived. In 1983, Brooks was caught one night walking out of a 7-Eleven with a Slurpee, a hot dog, and a pack of Twinkies, and the discovery hit the newspapers just like the Tingwick Girl’s donut. Once the hamburger was out of the bag, more stories of his clandestine eating appeared, detailing his tendency to binge on chicken pot pies, chili, and biscuits via room service when he stayed at hotels. His partner, Lavelle Lefler, who had helped him start the organization, finally explained to the UPI, “The truth is he sneaks into 7-Elevens and fast food places and eats just like the rest of us—except worse because he has to rely on places that are open late into the night.”
Brooks claimed that the accusations were revenge by a scorned lover, and said that nobody could prove he ate anything, but the damage was done. Thirteen officers left the organization, and the Institute shrunk to basically just Brooks. Not that his adherents lost faith in breatharianism itself—just in Wiley Brooks. Lefler told the UPI, “I have taught yoga for fifteen years and I have been to India, where people survive without eating, so I know the breatharian concept is true.”
Sans his following and his media prominence, Brooks continued to preach his take on breatharianism via his website throughout the nineties and into the new millennium. At one point he was caught eating at a McDonald’s. Unfazed, he explained that one of the most perfect meals on the planet was a McDonald’s Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese and a Diet Coke, because “the sum total frequencies of all its parts equal the base frequency of that item.” Basically, he claimed it was five-dimensional food—which was a whole new can of tuna for Brooks. His beliefs had become even more incredible, somehow, than the idea of living without food. He began preaching that the three-dimensional state of human beings was merely our fallen state, and that we are really five-dimensional beings who have to go through what he called an “ascension” to get back to our true potential. Somebody who ascends would become a “Living God on Earth.” Also, aliens are involved. The ideas were reminiscent of those propagated by both I AM and the Planetary Activation Organization.
However, while Wiley was shifting from diet tips to multidimensional trips, others took up the breatharian mantle. The idea was an easily adoptable one, simple in expression and less dependent on the charisma and complex theologies of an individual than most cults. In the late 1990s, an Australian woman named Jasmuheen (born Ellen Greve) started appearing on TV and writing books explaining her ability to live completely off air and light and teaching other people to follow her lead. She also claimed to be able to channel Saint Germain and that her DNA had expanded from two to twelve strands, another strange intersection of cult teachings from both I AM and the Planetary Activation Organization. However, her breatharian teachings soon became connected with a series of deaths all over the world. Verity Linn, a forty-nine-year-old Scottish woman, was found dead of dehydration in a tent in the highlands, a copy of Jasmuheen’s book in her possession and a diary of her final days confirming the connection. Thirty-three-year-old Australian Lani Morris died in a hospital after following Jasmuheen’s program, as did thirty-one-year-old kindergarten teacher Timo Degen in Munich.
The final blow to her gurudom came when, in 1999, Jasmuheen went on Australia’s 60 Minutes television program. The concept for the show was that they were going to monitor her for seven days to see if she was telling the truth about her no-diet diet. But they had to cut the attempt short after only a few days because she was losing weight and showed obvious signs of dehydration and impaired cognitive abilities. But that still didn’t kill breatharianism.
In 2017, the Sun ran a story about a married couple, Akahi Ricardo and Camila Castello, who were both breatharians. The two claimed that, other than the occasional fruit or vegetable broth, they hadn’t eaten anything for nine years, a time span that included the births of both of their children. Castello told the paper, “Humans can easily be without food—as long as they are connected to the energy that exists in all things and through breathing. For three years, Akahi and I didn’t eat anything at all and now we only eat occasionally like if we’re in a social situation or if I simply want to taste a fruit.” Akahi would tell GQ that same year, “When I started this, I felt cleaner, I felt sharper. I felt…fearless.” Like every other breatharian leader, the couple were also selling seminars on how to run on air. In the GQ article, a journalist, Breena Kerr, attended one of those seminars. She described the experience as:
A bit light on activities…. Aside from the morning and evening meditations, Ricardo isn’t around. Everyone just hangs out in the dark, stuffy house from 10:30 A.M. to 5 P.M. enduring the fast, maybe with the occasional trip to the river or to gather apples and blackberries that they cannot, at present, eat. The kitchen table is littered with drawings and watercolors of numinous images. The strange figures, geometric patterns, and nature scenes look like something from a drug trip.
Kerr also uncovered a few disturbing attitudes when it came to paying for the seminar. A guest named Mary told her, “I had to delay my house payment to afford this. But who cares? This is more important.” Another attendee, this one named Beth, said, “The price of this retreat is nothing for what he gives you. I mean, he’s giving you the universe. Who else can give you that?”
A few years later, yet another breatharian took up the baton for the cause. Nicolas Pilartz was born in France and, after watching a documentary about breatharianism, decided to try it for himself to solve some of his chronic pain issues. Ten years later, he was running the Eden Pranic Center in Coccore, Italy (prana is a Hindu concept that means something like “life force”). According to Vice, it is “one of the largest breatharian organizations in the world.” Pilartz seems to preach a less extreme form of breatharianism. He supposedly eats one meal a week and just consumes liquids otherwise. He also told the publication that he has no problem eating socially, during events and get-togethers, but he has to be careful: “When I eat now I feel, straight away, my vibration going down. There’s the moment of going up, like when you drink a bit of alcohol, and then I have a downwards effect. I experience a feeling of seeing double, like if I get a bit drunk. I feel my vibration changing.”
In many ways, modern breatharianism is more like an extreme fad diet than a niche religion, akin to the many fad diets and systems that have come and gone since the eighties. But there is one thing that Wiley Brooks and the other breatharians have right: We have a complex relationship with food. We eat to socialize and to soothe, and we have guilt over what we eat or don’t eat. For people who struggle with this relationship, there’s something appealing about leaving our daily bread in the dust. But at the end of the day, you can’t swap jelly donuts for jet streams and survive the attempt.
Heaven’s Gate
Just “Do” It
The photographs were eerie. They depicted supine bodies on white mattresses that were set up on bunk beds and folding tables and on the floor. A purple shroud covered each face and torso; their legs and feet were clad in identical black track pants and Nikes, the white swoosh so prominent against the black shoes that the photos almost seemed like an advertisement. But these were crime scene photos of suicide victims—thirty-nine of them. All were members of a cult called Heaven’s Gate who had ended their lives in March 1997. And since it was the late nineties, for the first time people who saw those photos on the news could just google the cult online to learn the whole story straight from the source, heavensgate.com (although it would be another year before Google was launched, so they probably Yahoo’d it or asked Jeeves).
Marcus Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles met at a psychiatric hospital in Texas in 1972. Applewhite was a forty-one-year-old singer, music professor, and the son of a Presbyterian minister. He was divorced, had two children, and had been let go from his position at the University of St. Thomas in Houston two years earlier for having an affair with a male student (although the official reason, as relayed by school president Reverend William Young to the San Diego Union-Tribune, was “health problems of an emotional nature”). Applewhite had checked into the hospital with debilitating internal conflicts about his sexuality. Nettles was a forty-five-year-old divorced nurse with four children and an intense interest in spiritualism and UFOs. Applewhite told her that he had been hearing voices and having violent visions of the world ending. Nettles believed that Applewhite was actually receiving visions from beyond the stars. Suddenly, it was like that classic Reese’s commercial in which two people bumped into each other, mixing up the peanut butter one was holding with the chocolate the other was. Something just clicked between them. So they checked out of the hospital and took a six-month road trip across the country.
During this time, Applewhite and Nettles hammered out their ideas about existence. They fancied themselves as the two witnesses mentioned in Revelation 11 who are given power by God to prophesy and shoot fire out of their mouths and inflict plagues and control the weather. They called themselves the “UFO Two,” “the Two,” and Bo and Peep and Guinea and Pig, respectively. The nicknames that stuck, though, were the musical notes Ti and Do, with Applewhite being Do and Nettles being Ti. From what can be determined from their letters and people who knew them, they weren’t lovers, but they were wrapped up in a shared fantasy and delusion.
The ideas that they arrived at concerning the nature of humanity and the universe were basic UFO cult stuff. They decided that we are all mere physical containers meant to be indwelt by immortal alien presences struggling to transcend those crass containers and attain the “Next Level,” a concept they likened to the Christian idea of the Kingdom of God. They held that Jesus was the first fully indwelt and ascendant alien, and that Applewhite was the latest. The cult’s followers were encouraged to give visual form to what their true extraterrestrial selves looked like, or, alternately, to the aliens guiding them in their evolution. They drew images of bulbous-headed but benign-looking beings. When one of the images was found in the mansion where they eventually died, it was described by the medical examiner to the Associated Press as “the head of an alien, like you see in The X-Files.” Nettle and Applewhite believed that anybody could welcome an alien indwelling and ascend bodily, evolving into a newer, better, more harmonized being. People just had to join this new ascetic initiative that they would eventually call Heaven’s Gate, the keys to which were held by Ti and Do.
By the mid-1970s, Ti and Do had gathered a following that they called “the crew,” one of many references in their cult to the television show Star Trek, which had debuted less than a decade earlier, in 1966. They would gather adherents by holding talks about UFOs and how to ascend to one’s own fully realized extraterrestrial self. For instance, in 1975, Ti and Do gave a talk to 150 people in a motel hall in the seaside town of Waldport, Oregon, population six hundred at the time. One attendee, Aaron Greenburg, described the gathering to the New York Times more than twenty years later: “There was this compulsion. It was like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters when he was making that tower of mashed potatoes.” Like most cult leaders, Ti and Do were possessed of extraordinary charisma.
And then, like those drawn to the colorful alien ships in the Steven Spielberg movie, twenty of the attendees, including Greenburg, followed Ti and Do out of town like children behind the Pied Piper, after which point they all disappeared from the public record. It was a big enough exodus that the national media reported on it. Walter Cronkite himself announced on CBS Evening News, “A score of persons from a small Oregon town have disappeared. It’s a mystery whether they’ve been taken on a so-called trip to eternity—or simply been taken.” The truth is that they probably eventually peeled off from the group, since hundreds of people joined and left Heaven’s Gate over the decades. It’s at least known that none of the residents of Waldport were among the thirty-nine suicides decades later.
For the next twenty years, the members of Heaven’s Gate lived in various places in Southern California. The next big moment in their timeline, though, was in 1985, when Nettles died of cancer. Her death was a blow to their teachings, as ascension was supposed to be a bodily thing. However, Applewhite adjusted their theology accordingly to say that sometimes the body had to be discarded first, a relatively innocuous-seeming change that would eventually lead to their infamous act of mass self-destruction twenty-two years later.
Meanwhile, the members became identically androgynous in their dress and bearing. They all wore their hair cut short and dressed in matching baggy shirts that hid their bodies, topped by either a mandarin or a butterfly collar buttoned all the way up. Sex was forbidden, as were individual friendships between members. Later, it would be discovered that some half a dozen of the men, including Applewhite, had been castrated as a way to make sure their bodily containers didn’t exert any undue influence on their higher selves. It seemed Applewhite had found a way to externalize and communalize his internal sexual conflicts.
The group mostly stayed under the radar during the 1980s and early 1990s, isolating themselves from friends and family. When the internet gained traction in the late nineties, they embraced it. Heaven’s Gate began earning income by building websites under the business name the Higher Source. They also built their own website, staking a claim as one of the first cults to use the internet as a recruitment tool.
