![]() ![]() ![]() One night, one of the questions was “What does Guinevere need to learn?” The answer came back that I was a lazy little girl. Only the older kids were allowed to ask questions, and our eyes would be glued to the pointer as it slid over the smooth surface, gaining momentum, the low swish of felt on wood the only sound as we held our breath for answers. The Ouija board was hand carved, the woodgrain beautifully polished, the pointer covered in purple velvet. We kids were allowed to talk to only one spirit, Faedra, and sometimes after dinner we’d gather around the board to summon her. Shelves were lined with notebooks containing transcriptions of the conversations adults had had with various spirits. The Ouija board, for instance, was a regular part of our lives. Older kids read younger kids stories before bed-“ The Chronicles of Narnia,” “ A Wrinkle in Time”-and we fell asleep in piles, three or four to a bed.Įven the mystical stuff had a mundane quality for those of us who didn’t know anything else. We had dogs, goats, cows, chickens, a Shetland pony named Stardust, and a cockatiel named Charles. Fishing was big, and every time an adult caught a bluefish or a bass I pasted one of the scales in my diary. The young Family members sang together almost every day as we harvested strawberries or corn-Woody Guthrie songs, or folk songs like “Down in the Valley.” We foraged in the woods for morel mushrooms. To my knowledge, there were no orgies.) What I don’t always say is that I also had a happy childhood, or, anyway, parts of one. As I like to say when I tell people about my background, “It wasn’t all acid and orgies.” (Acid was used by adults, as a tool for spiritual growth. The travel plans for Venus took place against a backdrop of these everyday chores. If you live in a large group of people, there are always dishes to wash and heaps of laundry to hang up to dry. Cults are fascinating-but one thing the Manson Family and the Lyman Family have in common is the banality of daily life inside these worlds. ![]() To people who grew up in more ordinary circumstances, my childhood sounds exotic, scandalous, and fascinating. Also, Mel Lyman wrote a book called “Autobiography of a World Savior.” In 1973, three members of the Lyman Family attempted to rob a bank one of them was killed, and the other two went to prison. But, if Lyman had asked, I’m pretty sure that they would have complied. True, Lyman never ordered his followers to kill anyone, the way Charles Manson did. I grew up under the reign of a charismatic, complicated leader named Mel Lyman, who was constantly issuing new rules for living. You don’t know how it was.īut in time I’ve had to consider some irrefutable truths. It makes me feel protective of my upbringing. So it feels judgmental, presumptuous, and narrow in scope. It’s a term created by people not in cults to label and classify groups they view to be extreme or dangerous. What’s the difference between a commune and a cult? Here’s one: a cult never calls itself a cult. In my early twenties, years after I left the Family, I was describing my childhood to someone and she said, “That doesn’t sound like a commune-it sounds like a cult.” I still balk at this word and all the preconceived notions that come with it. I was also raised to believe that we were eventually going to live on Venus. (Only the direst circumstances called for medical professionals: fingers cut off while we kids were chopping wood, or a young body scalded by boiling water during the sorghum harvest.) I was homeschooled and never saw a doctor. I had no contact with anybody outside the Family my whole world was inhabited by people I had always known. The Lyman Family, as it was called, referred to itself in the plural as “the communities.” It was an insular existence. I was born into a family of a hundred adults and sixty children in 1968, and spent the first eleven years of my life among them. So I usually just say, “Upstate New York.” My reality included LSD, government cheese, and a repurposed school bus with the words ‘Venus or Bust’ painted on both sides.” And that, while completely factual, is hard to believe, and sounds like a cry for attention. For me, it’s an exceptionally loaded one, and demands either a lie or my glossing over facts, because the real answer goes something like this: “I grew up on compounds in Kansas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Martha’s Vineyard, often travelling in five-vehicle caravans across the country from one location to the next. “Where are you from?” For most people, this is a casual social question. ![]()
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