Five of History’s Stupidest Cults
“Cult” is such a scary word, bring to mind as it does images of all kinds of abuse inflicted on brainwashed victims by some unkempt maniac at the center of it all. Fortunately, some cults are mostly harmless. In fact, they’re really, really dumb.
The Coconut Cult
In 1903, author and proto-hippie August Engelhardt began publishing open invitations to join him on an island in the South Pacific to live in a nudist colony eating only coconuts. They’re the food that grows closest to the sun, he reasoned, so they must be the ideal diet. He managed to net a few dozen followers, but they all peeled away as “clawing out coconut desperately and nakedly” turned out to be an untenable lifestyle. Engelhardt himself succumbed to malnutrition by 1919, proving you can survive more than a decade on nothing but coconut.
The Pana-Wave Laboratory
Yuko Chino founded the Pana-Wave Laboratory in 1977, predicting the end of the world on May 15, 2003. Its members became convinced that wearing white clothing and wrapping all of their cars and homes in white would protect them from harmful electromagnetic waves and that kidnapping a famous seal would prevent the apocalypse. Yes, the “arf, arf” kind. Fortunately, they failed, and that appeared to be the extent of their deviant behavior. They were raided the day before their supposed doomsday, and nobody found any evidence of a planned attack. Just a bunch of weirdos wearing white. When doomsday and came and went, they simply said, “Oops, our bad,” and quietly backed away from the spotlight.
Sky Kingdom
Sky Kingdom was founded in Malaysia in the ‘80s by a man calling himself Ayah Pin who declared himself God, but mostly just because he wanted a bunch of wives and a giant teapot. We’re talking a two-story pink teapot, with an accompanying vase it continuously poured holy water into, presumably via some system of pumps and pulleys. They mostly kept to themselves, making money by allowing tourists to come see their teapot, but local religious authorities arrested several members for denouncing Islam over the years. They even demolished their teapot in 2005.
Glycon
In Ancient Rome, a Greek con man named Alexander of Abonoteichus amassed a following by claiming to speak for the god Glycon, a snake with a human head. This wasn’t a faith-based relationship: Alexander literally spoke for “Glycon,” an ordinary snake who appeared to have a human head via the magic of hand puppetry. Even after Alexander was unmasked as a fraud, Glycon retained many of his believers, including comic writer Alan Moore, but if we just talk about fake things Alan Moore believes in, we’ll be here all day.
The Cult of Greek Belly Prophets
Bet you only expected one puppet-based cult, but the cult of Greek belly prophets simply did away with the middleman. Playing on the belief that noises from the stomach were messages from the gods (mostly “eat something,” probably), the “belly prophets” claimed to be able to interpret these noises and appeared to have full-blown conversations with the gods by throwing their voices.
Yes, they were essentially the first ventriloquists. Really puts Jeff Dunham in a whole new light.
