The Price of Enlightenment

The United States has seen the rise and fall of many evangelists, but few who rose as spectacularly or fell as dramatically as Joseph Priest. In the sixties Priest’s “Crusade for Sufferers” earned him nation-wide acclaim. Early converts to his Temple of Sufferers even included junkies, prostitutes and thugs; people that one would have expected to laugh at such a cause joined willingly, responding eagerly to Joseph Priest’s charisma and to God. But these were not the only converts, nor the majority. In those early days, Priest sincerely believed in his Crusade, exercising total command over his followers, who worshipped him with blind devotion. But power bred a need for ever greater power. With all the world as his stage and Joseph Priest the only actor, inevitably megalomania was to drive him to accept nothing less than the role of God. Before long, his desire to demonstrate his healing powers led him to fake ‘miracle cures’. From that moment on, every ‘miracle’ had to succeed, no matter what trickery was involved. Whatever brought more converts to the Temple, to the Lord, was justifiable. Moreover, it became as important for him never to lose a member of the Temple of Sufferers as it was for him to convert more. The burning drive with which Priest led his campaign across America took its toll on his strength. The man who believed he was the reincarnation, who had cured addicts and redeemed prostitutes, began to rely on hard drugs and sexual excess to maintain the force and direction of his ‘religious’ crusade. With a terrible irony, he adopted as his ‘doctor’ a former junkie whom he had cured. He indulged in intense sexual adventures with one after another of his followers, male and female alike. Renouncing his wife but refusing her a divorce, he fathered a child by the wife of his business manager. In public he pronounced God’s word; in private he re-wrote the Word to suit himself. During the early years, Priest had surrounded himself with a clique of followers who, for reasons of their own, determinedly supported him through good times and lean times, through right and wrong. As the thin and lean times were forgotten, however, buried beneath the acclaim and the growing wealth, right became ever less well-defined from wrong. Where once Priest had fought against injustice, he now created it. Disenchanted members of the Temple started to file unbelievable complaints with Congress. In 1978, an enquiry was finally opened, only to end in disaster. Like dictators before him, Priest sought to silence his ‘Judas brethren’ by intimidation. He created a Gestapo-like force, ever watchful for resentment, revolt and deserters. The man who called himself The Father was fast approaching total megalomania, and the paranoid conviction that all who were not of the Temple were, by definition, hell bent on destroying it. In the same year came news of the mysterious deaths in the Braziliana jungle of a thousand of Priest’s followers. If, indeed, God moves in a mysterious way, then none more so than in the collapse of the Temple of Sufferers. In 1974, however, the Temple of Sufferers was at its zenith. Joseph Priest’s mobile Crusade had been on the road for seven weeks. From city to city a circus-style management ran ahead of the coach-convoy, hiring halls, where necessary buying derelict churches. His next step was audaciously simple. He set out to find a young media-man who would promote his cause with the same blind dedication avowed by his immediate clique of followers. What he needed was a film man, one who if possible was down but not out, capable but under-rated, angry and perhaps embittered at rejection of his work. In the last resort, even one who could be bought. In California, film people were ten a penny. One of them was Charles Xavier Baines. In 1896 a pauper named Henry Jackson built himself a ramshackle beach-house in the shelter of the sand dunes to the north of San Francisco. The world moved on to discover urban sprawl, the automobile, air conditioning and the Bay Area Rapid Transit System, but Jackson’s villa remained the only house within miles. It was the only house in sight for one excellent reason; no other builder before or since had dared defy simultaneously the wind, the sand and the sea and earthquakes. ‘Jackson’s Cove’, as it was known locally, lay slap-bang astride the spot where the San Andreas fault runs out under Pacific Ocean after passing inland behind San Francisco. Modern technology can work wonders, but it cannot sell real estate on the most mobile piece of the earth’s crust. A mere five miles to the north, or as far south again, the millionaires’ mansions vied for shore space, but not in Jackson’s Cove, where earth tremors were practically a weekly event. Jackson’s Cove was a realtor’s nightmare come true. Its situation was sublime, but the house might fall down at any time. Even without the tremors, property built in Jackson’s Cove would have been almost impossible to sell. The interior of the house was perpetually carpeted with sand, the cracks in the walls let in draughts and the windows were whitened for six months of the year with encrusted salt from the rollers ploughing in from the ocean. Winter storms frequently brought down the power lines, telephone communication was intermittent and even the tap water tasted of salt. The house lay in such a wilderness of shrub, coarse grass and ever-changing horizons that it was hidden from traffic on the coast road not twenty yards from its backdoor. If you enjoyed peace, quiet and a spartan life style in an earthquake zone, it was paradise. If you sought stability, a social life and immersion in the real world, it was sheer hell. It was fortunate, then, that stability and immersion in the real world would have driven the present occupants round the bend. And it suited Charles Xavier Baines and Ciana Romana perfectly.