Harrison Hill in TLS: ‘In the summer of 1891, a blue-eyed social reformer named Alzire Chevaillier arrived, with her mother, at a spiritualist colony just north of Santa Rosa, California. Raised in Boston, Massachusetts, Chevaillier had worked variously as a speaker, teacher, magazine editor and metaphysical healer. She was a seeker type, unsatisfied by (…) mainstream Christianity. She wanted more. She found it in the figure of the self- proclaimed prophet Thomas Lake Harris.’

And: ‘Harris said the grapes grown by the group there were so divinely blessed that it was impossible to get drunk on the wine they produced.’

As well: ‘All religions have objectively strange beliefs and practices (see: the virgin birth). Conversely, all cults are engaged in the kind of transcendent, redemptive processes that we associate with mainstream religion.’

Hill calls cults the wrong answer to the right question. But what is the right answer?

(a sf 2162)