This shittiest part about growing up in a cult was growing in the wrong cult. Sure, being told that I was a sexual deviant at age nine because I had the poor sense to be born with cancer sucked. Being branded apostate and poison to mankind when I left as a teenager was also unpleasant. But really, the frustrating part is how mundane it all managed to be.
I first saw In the Mouth of Madness (starring the phenomenal Sam Neill) at age seven. That’s a fantastic age to be introduced to the occult and I am being sincere here. There’s enough imagination and magic left in youth to get a transcendent impact, but still enough time for rationality to set and allow for the gears of modern thought to grind to dust the archaic sentiments. I say that up through the teens, it is the season of Lovecraft and Crowley. Perhaps, my perspective is skewed. I am an ex-cultist convict after all.
Just as I had the very precise fortune of being born with cancer, I also had the exacting privilege of being born into a cult that is second only to Mormons in how mundane it is. Recruitment is modeled after McCarthy fear mongering and everyone wore suits. The creepy archives? They were literal archives. Metal file cabinets, floor to ceiling, in the basement of a converted church. The florescents flickered just like you’d imagine. These cabinets were full, sagging with aimless knowledge. In each folder, a name and a record of their therapy. Secrets, shameful and malicious, slept in those individual files. You’d think insane to keep such a thing in modern times, but its still there, right off of what should be a stretch of MLK Jr., Way.
In a broad intellectual sense, it’s impressive. In a precise sense, though, it sucks. No mystic skulls, ancient scripts, sex-spells, sacrifices, or eldritch amulets. I left because I saw how ridiculous it was. Outside, I discovered how, being forged by their community, ridiculous I am. Fifteen years in a cult, and all I got was branded as a pariah.
This is Not a Pipe 