Aum Shinrikyo: when a death cult spread their gospel via anime
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It teaches you how people can buy into a total con hook, line and sinker, not only despite its transparent fraudulence but seemingly because of it. It teaches you how otherwise sensible people can go off the deep end to a genuinely disturbing degree. However, these have all been mentioned before by other people. To me, arguably the most relevant way that cult psychology speaks to the modern condition is just how often talking about cults means dealing with the most serious and the most silly acts human beings have ever been responsible for in the same breath.
Talking about cults means having to say that nearly 40 people killed themselves at the same time, so that the aliens that created the world would pick them up in their spaceship and take them to Christian Heaven. Which they also created.
Talking about cults means having to say that a deeply disturbed man murdered six people because he thought The White Album by The Beatles was telling him to start a race war. Talking about cults means having to talk about the anime produced by a group also responsible for multiple terrorist attacks in Japan that killed dozens of people.
That last one might be a little less famous in the West than the previous two, but in Japan, arguably the go-to example of a cult in the public conscious is Aum Shinrikyo, or Aleph as it is known today. Set up as a yoga studio in Tokyo’s Shibuya district in 1984, it soon became something a lot darker as the hands of its psychotic founder, Shoko Asahara, a man convinced not only of his divinity, but that he was something a lot more specific. A reincarnation of Jesus Christ himself.
No matter how much time Aum Shinrikyo and Asahara spent claiming that they were nothing more than a peaceful church spreading a gospel, they actually operated more like a crime gang than anything else. They began by recruiting members from high-society families, especially young people who’d recently graduated. Right from the off, this put people’s backs up. After all, they began marketing themselves as “a religion for the elites”, which is a perversion of the whole idea of religion in the first place.
This put several people of high influence under the control of Aum Shinrikyo and led to a lot of money running through the cult. Asahara was keen to keep the membership of his cult/organised crime ring young and malleable, so he wanted to spread his word through mediums young people were interested in. This lead to the cult creating its own animation studio in 1991 called Manga, Animation and Team (MAT) and green-lighting their first project Chouetsu Sekai (loosely translated to Transcendent World) in the same year.
The anime is a heavily (and I mean heavily) fictionalised account of Asahara’s journey to spiritual enlightenment. It would be fictional just to say that the mass-murdering criminal had a spiritual bone in his body. However, the anime includes him flying, controlling the Japanese government and waging intergalactic wars against alien invaders. This may have been hyperbole, but my research on that is inconclusive.
Yet, this is all part of understanding why the cult would go on to enact several of the most deadly terrorist attacks in Japanese history. It sounds like you’re making light of the situation because of its sheer ludicrousness, but that’s the state of the world right now. The leader of the free world is a proud and open fascist who also makes AI videos of himself dropping faeces on people protesting him. Everything is cults, which is an absolutely terrifying prospect.
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