Sealed World
Lifton called it milieu control: who you may speak to, what you may read, where you may go, and eventually what you may think. It is the most reliable marker across every group in this archive, and it rarely arrives as a rule, it arrives as a favour, a schedule, a move to the country, a communal house where everything you need is already provided and nothing outside is necessary any more.
Part of Cults
52 moments in this segment.
- - North front and lawn of the Oneida Mansion House. A stereo card view of the north front of the Mansion House by the photographers Ranger & Austen, from the Robert N. Dennis collection. The library dates the card to roughly 1865-1875, the community's largest years.
- - Bird's-eye view of the Oneida home buildings. A stereo card from the series Photographic views of the community, Oneida, N.Y., showing the community's buildings from above. It records the settlement as one connected domain rather than a village of separate households.
- - Children and playground at Oneida. A stereo card by Moulton & Dopp showing children and the playground at the Oneida Community in upstate New York. Children there were raised collectively in a children's house rather than by their own parents.
- - Community group under the butternut tree. Members of the Oneida Community posed beneath the butternut tree on the community's grounds. Photographs made on site are much of what survives of how a closed settlement chose to picture itself.
- - Trout pond and grotto at Oneida. Community members at the trout pond and grotto on the Oneida grounds, in a stereo card by Moulton & Dopp. The community kept its own ponds, workshops and gardens.
- - Summer-house on the Oneida grounds, 1873. A stereoscopic view of the summer-house at the Oneida Community, dated 1873 in the Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views.
- - The ranch at Chatsworth. Footage from around 1970 of the disused film ranch north-west of Los Angeles where the Manson group lived. The group was small, itinerant and drug-centred rather than a settled religious community, which is part of why it fits the standard models of coercive organisation poorly.
- - Chapel area of the Unified Family centre. The room used as the chapel in the Dutch Unified Family centre, photographed in April 1975 while a kidnapping complaint against the group was in the news. Interiors of movement premises from this period are scarce.
- - The welcome sign at the Jonestown entrance. The board at the entrance to the Peoples Temple agricultural project in northwest Guyana. The site was reachable only by boat and truck, which is what made the separation work.
- - The herbal kitchen at Jonestown. A kitchen building at the Peoples Temple settlement, photographed by FBI agents during the investigation. The project grew and prepared its own food, an isolation that was logistical as much as ideological.
- - Cottages at the settlement. Rows of small cottages built for residents at Jonestown, photographed by FBI agents after November 1978. Some nine hundred people were living on the site by that year.
- - The playground at Jonestown. Play equipment at the Peoples Temple settlement, photographed during the FBI investigation. Families moved to Guyana expecting a permanent home.
- - Former members describe life inside. Interviews recorded in 1978 in which people who had left the Peoples Temple describe the settlement's routine: rehearsed loyalty drills, restricted mail and radio contact, signed blank documents held by the leadership. The accounts are given by role here; the speakers are private individuals.
- - Press conference, San Francisco. Unedited footage of a contentious 1978 press conference held in San Francisco after the deaths in Guyana. The Peoples Temple had operated from the city since 1970 and its leader had been appointed to the San Francisco Housing Authority in 1975.
- - A tape from the settlement. One of the recordings made routinely inside the Guyana settlement and later released by the FBI. On it the leader reads the day's news to the community and tells them a congressional delegation intends to visit. The tapes are a direct record of how information reaching the commune was filtered.
- - Georgetown interview, November 1978. A long interview recorded in Georgetown on 24 November 1978 with a man who had lived at the settlement and left it that week. The recording is held in the primary-document archive maintained by San Diego State University.
- - The settlement, six months on. A television crew returns to the Peoples Temple settlement in Guyana in May 1979. The commune had been built from 1974 on a lease in the interior, several hours from Georgetown, and was reachable in practice only through the organisation.
- - Rajneesh followers living in a former Amsterdam prison. Around eighty followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh living in a disused house of detention on the Amstelveenseweg in Amsterdam, photographed in January 1982. The movement housed its European members in large shared buildings of this kind.
- - A documentary made on the ranch. A 1984 Oregon television documentary on the commune built by followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, filmed while it was still operating and before the county election of that autumn.
- - Two news tapes, November 1984. Two station news items broadcast on 17 and 24 November 1984, transferred from the original tapes by an Oregon historical society. Federal investigators moved on the commune the following year; its leader was arrested in October 1985 and deported on immigration charges.
- - Information kiosk at Zen Crossing, Rajneeshpuram. A visitor collecting information from a kiosk attendant near the shopping mall at Rajneeshpuram in 1985. The commune's incorporated city had its own streets, named crossings and staffed information points.
- - A-frame guest housing at the Oregon ranch. Prefabricated A-frames, made in the commune's own factory, used to house visitors at Rajneeshpuram. The settlement manufactured a large part of its own building stock on site.
- - City limits sign on the road into Rajneeshpuram. The city limits sign on the approach road to Rajneeshpuram. In 1982 the commune had its ranch in Wasco County incorporated as a city, giving a religious settlement municipal powers - a status Oregon contested in the courts.
- - Day two outside Mount Carmel. A local evening newscast from 1 March 1993, the day after the ATF raid on the Branch Davidian property outside Waco. Four ATF agents and six Branch Davidians were killed in the raid; the standoff that followed lasted 51 days.
- - Nineteenth of April, as broadcast. National and Texas station coverage of the final day of the siege, 19 April 1993, when 76 Branch Davidians died, among them a number of children given as 20 to 28 in different official sources. How the fire began is disputed: the 2000 Danforth report concluded the Branch Davidians started it; critics point to law-enforcement gunfire and the use of flammable CS rounds.
- - Mount Carmel burning, 19 April 1993. An aerial photograph of the Branch Davidian buildings alight on the fifty-first day of the siege. The fire ended both the standoff and the settlement.
- - Armour beside the burning buildings. A government photograph, released to the press, showing a tank next to the Branch Davidian buildings as they burn on 19 April 1993. Armoured vehicles had been used that morning to punch holes in the walls and inject gas.
- - Engineering vehicle breaches the dormitory. An FBI Hostage Rescue Team vehicle drives into the men's dormitory at Mount Carmel on the morning of 19 April 1993. The gymnasium behind it had already been demolished by a second vehicle.
- - A network special, the day after. An ABC News special broadcast on 20 April 1993, before any inquiry had reported. It shows the account the public was given at the time, which government acknowledgements about pyrotechnic tear-gas rounds later forced open.
- - Bullet holes in the front of Mount Carmel. The front entrance of the Branch Davidian residence outside Waco, Texas, after the gun battle with ATF agents on 28 February 1993. Damage is visible around the windows and the double doors.
- - Federal machine gun position outside Waco. An FBI M60 position set up inside a house near the Branch Davidian property during the fifty-one day standoff. Photographs like this one show how completely the settlement was ringed before the final assault.
- - Burned refrigerator in the concrete vault. A stainless steel refrigerator recovered from the reinforced room the Branch Davidians used for food storage and shelter, photographed by investigators after the April 1993 fire.
- - The Mount Carmel Center from the air. An FBI aerial photograph of the Branch Davidian buildings outside Waco, Texas, in 1993. The community lived in one sprawling structure they had built themselves on open land.
- - A British report on the siege. A BBC Newsnight report from 1993 on the standoff outside Waco. The Branch Davidians descended from the Davidian Seventh-day Adventists, themselves a schism from Adventism, which grew out of the Millerite movement of the 1840s.
- - Aum buildings at the foot of Mount Fuji. Prefabricated buildings used as religious facilities by Aum Shinrikyo, photographed in September 1996. The group's complex functioned as workshop, dormitory and laboratory at once.
- - The FLDS temple at Eldorado. The white limestone temple at the YFZ Ranch outside Eldorado, Texas, built after the church bought the property in 2003. The ranch was a new closed settlement several hundred miles from the older base at Short Creek.
- - Covered windows on the Edmonton building. A Scientology building on 97 Street in Edmonton, Alberta, in May 2006. The photographer noted that the eight upper-floor windows had been boarded over; blank frontages are one small piece of the apparatus that keeps an interior private.
- - Warren Jeffs's house in Colorado City. The home of FLDS president Warren Jeffs in Colorado City, Arizona, photographed in December 2006, months after his arrest. He was convicted in Texas in 2011.
- - A verdict in Utah, later overturned. Courtroom video of the 25 September 2007 verdict convicting Warren Jeffs, president of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, on two counts as an accomplice to rape. The Utah Supreme Court overturned it on 27 July 2010 over deficient jury instructions.
- - The schoolhouse at Colorado City. The schoolhouse in Colorado City, Arizona, formerly the Short Creek community, photographed in 2008. The schools, the utilities and the town marshals in the twin settlements were largely in the hands of church members, which is much of what kept the place closed.
- - Life sentence in Texas. Warren Jeffs was convicted in Texas on 9 August 2011 on two counts of sexual assault of a child and sentenced to life, with parole eligibility in 2038. The 2008 raid on the group's Texas ranch that produced the evidence also placed 416 children in state custody, most of whom Texas courts later ordered returned.
- - Oneida Community Mansion House from the street. The brick Mansion House at Oneida, New York, photographed in 2012. Built from 1862 onwards, it held the whole community under one roof, with shared sleeping quarters, a communal hall and a common nursery.
- - The Big Hall inside the Mansion House. The central assembly room of the Oneida Community Mansion House, where members gathered in the evenings for meetings and mutual criticism. The community occupied the building from 1848 until it dissolved in 1881; the photograph was made in 2016.
- - Security agency inspection of an Aum facility. Officers of Japan's Public Security Intelligence Agency entering a facility used by Aum Shinrikyo in April 2018. Successor organisations remain subject to an observation law passed after the subway attack.
- - Inspectors at an Aleph site. A Public Security Intelligence Agency inspection of premises believed to be in use by Aleph, one of the successor bodies to Aum Shinrikyo, in February 2021.
- - A timetable for every hour. A network documentary segment on how Heaven's Gate organised its members' days under Marshall Applewhite: hours of lectures, assigned partners for every task, and set times for meals and washing. The group was founded in 1974 by Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, who died in 1985.
- - Remains of a basement room. What is left of a below-ground room at the Mount Carmel Center, photographed in 2022 on the cleared site.
- - Basement remains at the Mount Carmel Center. Concrete remains of a below-ground room at the Mount Carmel Center outside Waco, Texas, photographed in 2022. The Branch Davidian settlement stood here until the 51-day siege and the fire of 19 April 1993; the sunken structures are among the few physical traces left on the site.
- - The church rebuilt on the site. A small Branch Davidian church put up on the ground where the Mount Carmel Center stood, photographed in 2022. A remnant congregation has continued to meet at the site.
- - An Oregon station reports, 1983-84. Reports broadcast by a Portland station across 1983 and 1984 on the commune founded in 1981 at the Big Muddy Ranch in Wasco County, its buses, its land-use disputes and its takeover of the nearby town council.
- - Twenty years of one broadcaster's reporting. An Australian current-affairs anthology collecting segments filmed between 2005 and 2023 on the Church of Scientology. The organisation holds US tax-exempt religious status and was recognised as a religion by the UK Supreme Court in 2013; it also carries federal criminal convictions of eleven officials from 1979-80 and a French organised-fraud conviction upheld on appeal.
- - Raised inside the organisation. An interview with a woman who was raised in the church's staff order from childhood and later wrote about it. She describes signing a billion-year staff contract as a child and the auditing sessions that followed. Her account is her own and is not a court finding.
