Martina Zangger’s eight-year life inside the Rajneeshee cult
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Watching the Netflix docuseries Wild Wild Country, about the Rajneeshpuram community, was not a comfortable experience for Martina Zangger. Curled up in the lounge with her husband and daughter in Newcastle, Australia, she shook her head in renewed shock that she could have been caught up with the movement for eight years, even relocating to the US and living among some of the worst of it.
“My family was telling me how crazy it was,” Martina, 63, tells Woman’s Day.
“I knew the extent of it – I’ve read a lot of books and had therapy about the experience – but the documentary was still shocking.”
The Rajneesh cult gained traction in the 1970s and ’80s, with up to 250,000 followers worldwide. The draw was its Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, known as Osho, who preached a counterculture doctrine that enticed thousands of devotees, including Martina, to a commune in Oregon.
“I was 19 when I first heard about Rajneesh,” Martina says.
“I’d dropped out of university after my first semester. I couldn’t cope with being in the world as a young adult and when I was given Rajneesh’s book, I read it voraciously and became smitten with him. He promised to bring healing, which I was searching for because of my history.”
Blinded by belief
Growing up, Martina was sexually abused by her grandfather and uncle, and the promise of healing and the escapism of an ashram on the other side of the world were very appealing. The problem was that nothing was as it seemed and blinded by a senseless devotion, Martina failed to see any of the red flags.
“Within days of finishing his book, it was like I’d fallen deeply in love,” she recalls.
“I moved into a Rajneeshee share house and started saving to move to the ashram.”
The cost of commitment
It cost more than $15,000 for 18 months in the US, not including flights, and Martina’s Rajneeshee flatmates had an unorthodox way to make this money.
“They told me about a brothel I could work in to save up to go,” she recalls.
“Many of them were sex-working and it was seen as acceptable as we were so counterculture.”
Crossing a line
Martina also ended up as a sex worker and by 1982 had saved enough to fly to the States. Her parents were horrified, but she didn’t care. Once at the ashram, she was even able to explain away the life of slavery that awaited.
“I had to work seven days a week for 12 hours a day, digging ditches for irrigation,” she says.
“I had a mattress on the floor of a tiny room I shared with three others. It’s not what I expected, but I wasn’t ready to say, ‘This is shit.’ I was only 20 and I put up with it. It was my great adventure.”
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