Famous Cult Leaders: With impressive power for manipulating the mind and deceitful empathy, the cult leaders are adept at controlling their followers by the power of their beliefs. The limited view of the world that cults propagate can make it difficult for their members to perceive that their behavior is anything less than normal, even when they involve mass abductions, suicides, or horrifying violence.
Famous Cult Leaders
- Rabbi Jason Kimelman-Block
- Danté Stewart
- Shoko Asahara
- Jim Jones
- Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret
- Marshall Applewhite
If that’s not disturbing enough, we’re taking deep dive into the mind of five cult leaders incarnates in the 20th century. each of them was able to strip someone of their rights, leading to massive loss and bloodshed.
Shoko Asahara–Aum Shinrikyo or “The Supreme Truth”
The year 1987 was the time that Shoko Asahara (born Chizuo Matsumoto) was the founder of the religious group Aum Shinrikyo, which began as a yoga studio that incorporated Tibetan Buddhism and Hinduism. The group initially sought and encouraged meditation as well as acquainting thousands of acolytes throughout Japan.
In the end, the group began to preach Doomsday prophecies, as well as occultists,m, and then Asahara declared that he was in fact the incarnation of Buddha. Asahara’s charisma, charismatic personality, and manipulative empathy allowed the doors to thousands of followers as he proclaimed that they could attain their “power of God with the right training.”
In the early decade of the 1990s, Asahara was able to recruit 10,000 people who believed Asahara was a god of salvation and the next Emperor. The group was based out of an area at the foot of Mt. Fuji in which members created chemical weapons.
The cult was gaining momentum and has been running for a parliamentary seat in 1990,
but did not receive enough votes, causing frustration in Asahara. As a result, in June 1994 Asahara caused a gas attack with sarin within Matsumoto City, which injured hundreds of individuals and claimed the lives of eight. The participants wear surgical masks and carried chemicals in a packet concealed in newspapers inside plastic bags. After puncturing the packets with sharp umbrellas, the five men, along with their escape drivers left the scene.
After the incident police discovered a secret basement in the Mt. Fuji compound, where cult members were hiding and hiding, including Masami Tsuchiya, a chemist, who confessed to having made the Sarin gas. However, Asahara remains at large, as did Aum Shinrikyo made four more gas attacks on subways.
Then, on the 16th of May, 1995 Asahara was found in another room that was hidden from the Mt. Fuji compound and detained and tried for a long time, leading to his death in 2006.
Shoko Asahara was executed for the crimes he committed in July 2018.
David Koresh
David Koresh, born Vernon Howell became the charismatic head of The Branch Davidians, taking over control in 1987 following the demise of the group’s founder. Koresh was a seasoned scholar of the Bible and believed that he could speak to God and prophesied his predictions about the Second Coming of Christ as well as the upcoming End of the World.
After he persuaded over 100 people to reside in his private compound, which he named Mount Carmel, which is located near Waco, Texas, Koresh used his position within the group to engage in sexual relations with several wives, including girls that were just 10 years old.
At the same time, Koresh was preaching to his followers that the End Times were near and the formation of the “Army of God” was essential. In February 1993 The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) tried to detain and charge Koresh with an arrest warrant for possession of firearms that were illegal.
A four-hour gun battle ensued,
which resulted in the death at the hands of five ATF agents as well as six of Koresh’s associates. The standoff lasted fifty-one weeks and was widely reported by the press.
A few Branch Davidian members managed to escape from the area during the standoff but more than 80 were trapped in the compound. ATF as well as FBI negotiators tried to find a solution but the standoff grew beyond control.
Jim Jones-
Jim Jones was born in rural Indiana on May 31st, 1931. He established The Peoples Temple in the 1950s before its rapid growth brought the cult into a new location in Mendocino County in the 1960s and then in San Francisco in the 1970s.
It didn’t take long before Jones his sermons turned paranoid. His sermons began to refer to an imminent Doomsday as caused by an apocalypse caused by nuclear weapons brought on due to government incompetence.
Concentrating on social outcasts that were marginalized by
In 1977, when the cult made its relocation into Guyana, South America, the Peoples Temple had amassed around 20.000 members.
The community located in Guyana was described as a utopian society that was free from the rigidity of U.S. politics. Jones asserted that the absence of corruption would permit members of the Temple to live their lives in peace and align their own relationship in their relationship with God and the natural world.
However, Jones also confiscated
the passports of everyone when they arrived and set up tasks and routines for all to adhere to daily. Jones’ Marxist fantasies provided a grim reality to his followers. It was grueling working hours and nights watching documentaries of Soviet-style about extremes and dangers as well as vices in the external world. The speeches he delivered, which played over compound speakers for the majority of the day–were sloppy and dark in tone.
Children were the first ones to go. Parents would inject them with cyanide before drinking the cyanide-laced juices themselves. Jones was discovered deceased in the chair, with an injury to the head. The death toll in Jonestown 909 was.
David Berg
Berg declared that happiness and revolution were his primary goals. At the close of the 1960s, incidents such as those of the Manson Family murders along with drug-related burnouts and rising crime rates led to the decline during that Summer of Love. Famous Cult Leaders
It also allowed new companies to enter the scene and attract people with appealing ads.
Berg the pastor before when he founded Children of God in Huntington Beach, California, preached an “old world” idea of Christianity. Berg was also a proponent of sexual relations with children who were not yet minors to help youngsters “embrace sexuality.”
And not only that, Berg believed that incest was acceptable because it is best to learn from your parents.
The nickname of one of Berg’s friends was Grandpa
as well as King David as well as Mo (for Moses). In 1973, Children of God was global, boasting a staggering 130 congregations across the globe. Famous Cult Leaders
A lot of members resided in communes with other members. And shared a strict communist belief system which included street performers and beggars for their income.
The cult remained through various incarnations before it settled upon The Family in the early 1980s. When Berg died in 1994 his widowed spouse Karen Zerby took over.