The story of a small Donegal village home to two separate cults
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The story of two cults who set up shop in a small Donegal village at completely different times has resurfaced online and people can’t get over it.
There are countless stories in history of cult leaders taking over an unsuspecting town or village with their droves of followers, and when it happens there isn’t a whole lot locals can do about it.
Why did self-proclaimed prophet David Koresh choose the city of Waco, Texas as a homeplace for his Branch Davidians?
Charles Manson held his followers in thrall at the Spahn Movie Ranch, an old, abandoned film production lot in Los Angeles.
The Manson family seized control of the land in 1968 and used it as a base from which they terrorised the homes of the rich celebrities and socialites in the Hollywood hills.
Less is known however, about the reasons why two entirely different cults chose the Gaeltacht village of Burtonport on the tip of the Donegal coast as their adopted home, less than two years apart from one another.
First up, in the mid-1970’s, were the Atlantis commune. They arrived to Burtonport in 1974 and would remain for six years.
Known to locals as ‘The Screamers’, the members of this cult took control of a big Georgian house on the edge of the quaint village and painted it in rainbow colours and daubed its exterior with zodiac symbols.
The group, led by charismatic Englishwoman Jenny James, believed in “primal scream therapy” – yelling, shouting and shrieking to release deep-rooted fears buried from childhood.
The idea was originally put forward by American psychologist Arthur Janov, who published his controversial ideas in his best-selling book, The Primal Scream – published in 1970.
Janov believed that people repress childhood traumas at huge psychological cost. Bring them back to the moment of trauma, unleash their feelings and they will be set free.
The theory was adopted and promoted by a number of famous faces like Mick Jagger, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and he became something of a messianic and enduringly contentious figure.
Jenny James wanted to establish a new family of people who were not related – her own tribe – and to live off the land.
At any time, 30 people were living in the Burtonport House.
James wrote many books expressing her unusual beliefs – one of which was a “stud theory” which described men as only being good for sex and cutting wood.
Unconditional emotional honesty was obligatory amongst community members, on the basis that concealed emotions bred problems.
Locals in the town described their fear and wariness of the property and its inhabitants in a documentary called The Silence and the Scream, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2018.
Producer of the documentary, Conor Garrett, shared his own childhood memories of the house.
“My mum took me past it as a kid,” he said. “It was folklore and it scared us.”
In 1980, the Atlantis members quit Burtonport for the more extreme setting of Inishfree – a rugged island off the coast of Donegal.
The people of Burtonport had their village restored to normality for two years, before another cult arrived in September 1982 with completely different intentions.
The Silver Sisterhood were a religious movement whose central belief was that God is a woman and its ambition as a group was to bring about a matriarchal society.
The Order originated in Oxford in the mid-1970s but moved to the Calder Valley in West Yorkshire at the beginning of the 1980’s
They stayed in the Calder Valley for around 18 months between 1981 and 1982 before moving to Burtonport in September 1982.
The group moved into the same property that the ‘Screamers’ had live in two years prior, and renamed it An Droichead Beo – which means ‘The Bridge of Life’ in Gaelic.
They lived without electricity, dressed in medieval peasant clothes, including whimples and made instruments, textiles, jewellery and ornaments.
Content retrieved from: https://her.ie/trending/the-story-of-a-small-donegal-village-home-to-two-separate-cults-2-625270.
