Also here you will read about the cults of the end of the world, which planned to conquer the planet after the apocalypse. The latter managed to gain frighteningly a lot of power.

Some of these religious sects have caused massive loss of life.

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The Gate of Heaven was one of these dangerous religious sects. Its members committed mass suicide in 1997, when Comet Hale-Bopp passed the Sun.

 

Sectarians believed their souls would reach an alien spacecraft pursuing the comet. Then the alien ship was to take their souls to "a higher level of existence than humans."

The group was founded in 1974 by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, who met in a psychiatric hospital. To commit suicide, 39 members took phenobarbital mixed with apple juice.

They drank the vodka mixture and then put plastic bags on their heads to suffocate. They were all dressed in black shirts with armbands on their arms, which read "Heaven's Gate Travel Team."

They wore matching sweatpants and Nike sports shoes. The sect 's site is still operational.

Foto: Mike Jay / Wikimedia

John Frum is one of the best-known examples of "aircraft goods cultures." Such religious sects are usually groups of worshipers formed during or immediately after World War II .

 

They were formed among the inhabitants of the islands who benefited from the presence of soldiers, who shared goods with them.

Their members believe that by practicing rituals that mimic the behavior of the soldiers they saw on the island, they will receive even more goods.

The John Frum sect is made up of the inhabitants of the Tanna Islands in the South Pacific. Before soldiers arrived on the island, the natives were unfamiliar with modern goods, such as manufactured clothing, medicines, and canned food.

The inhabitants of the islands saw the soldiers receiving the goods from the planes, which parachuted them on the ground. So, after the soldiers left the island, the members of the sects began to practice rituals in which they imitated the soldiers.

They thought that this way they would receive new goods. Some of the practices include marches, mimicking landing signals and creating fake airstrips, radios and control towers.

 

The cult of John Frum worships a character named John Frum, often described as an American soldier in World War II .

The name John Frum could be the crushed form of the words "John from" in the sentence "John from America."

This cult of parachuted goods from the plane is still active and has meanwhile become a tourist attraction.

Foto: Wikimedia / The Awl

Family International is a sect founded in 1968 by a former pastor who believed himself to be a prophet of God. He formed a group with totally unusual views on sexuality.

 

For example, worship supports parent-child incest. Members are also told to imagine having sex with Jesus. The sect has a teaching called "Jesus the Lover."

Members believe that their group is like the bride of Christ, whom they should love as the wife loves her husband. They are encouraged to imagine that Jesus joins them when they have sex or masturbate.

Male members are told to imagine that they are female. This is to avoid a homosexual relationship with Jesus. The sect was originally called "Adolescents for Christ."

 

It was later called "Children of God" and is now called "The Family International". The sect had several notable members: Joaquin Phoenix and Rose McGowan, for example, were born into this organization.

According to the sect's official website, members of the cult come from more than 80 countries.

Photo: Wikimedia

Narcotics is the name given by the media to a religious sect of drug traffickers in Mexico who practiced human sacrifice .

 

They believed that this way they were protected by the police and even that the bullets could not pierce them. This cult was led by a Cuban-American man named Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo.

When Constanzo was a teenager and living in Puerto Rico, he began to practice a religion called Palo Mayombe.

This religion involves animal sacrifices. At maturity, Constanzo moved to Mexico City. There, he gathered a few people to follow him and set up a successful business.

In it, they sacrificed animals "to bring good luck" to customers. Many of his clients were drug dealers and paid killers.

In 1988, drug dealers moved to an isolated farm in the desert, from where they carried out trafficking in cocaine and marijuana.

The sectarians then began to make human sacrifices: they cast spells that they thought protected them from the police. Among their victims were foreigners and rival drug traffickers.

 

Their murders came to light after they kidnapped and killed an American student. He is in Mexico for spring break. When police raided the narcotics farm, 15 mutilated human bodies were found.

Next to it, a boiler was discovered containing a dead cat and a human brain.

Photo: Wikimedia

The Hernandez Brothers' sect was formed in 1963. Several petty criminals claimed to be prophets of the Inca gods and convinced several villagers in the small town of Yerba Buena, Mexico.

 

The criminals were brothers Santos and Cayetano Hernandez. After convincing the villagers that they were prophets, they promised to take them to a hidden treasure in the nearby caves.

The brothers hired a prostitute, Magdalena Solis , who was to take part in the scam. They introduced Solis to the villagers as the reincarnation of an Inca goddess.

Solis soon became mentally unstable and took over the sect. When two villagers tried to leave the group, Solis ordered them killed.

Then she began to ask for human sacrifices and claimed that she had to drink blood to stay young. The group killed four people in the next six weeks.

At one point, a 14-year-old local witnessed one of the rites of the religious sect. He walked 24 kilometers to the nearest police station, where he said he saw "vampires".

 

A policeman accompanied the boy back the very next day. Both were killed by members of the sect. Due to their disappearance, several police officers went to the village.

In a raid, many members of the cult were shot, and Solis was arrested.

Photo: Wikimedia

The People 's Temple was a religious sect that formed in Indiana, USA, in 1955. Jim Jones preached a message that borrowed from Christianity, Communism, and Socialism.

 

In 1974, Jones moved to Guyana with nearly a thousand followers and founded Jonestown. The community began to provoke negative comments in the press.

This happened after some former members described the brutal practices they had endured there. For example, they said members were regularly asked to participate in a "catharsis" process.

In this process, a person was chosen to be criticized and beaten. Based on these negative things that reached the press, an American congressman from San Francisco visited Jonestown.

He wanted to investigate allegations of abuse. Several members asked the American dignitary to leave and accompanied him to a nearby runway.

 

But Jonestown security guards intervened immediately: they killed the politician, three journalists and a former member of the sect. That same evening, Jones ordered his followers to commit suicide by consuming grape juice mixed with cyanide.

Photo: Wikimedia

This was an apocalyptic cult that formed in the late 1980s in Uganda. Worship leaders preached that the world would end on December 31, 1999.

However, when they noticed that the new millennium had come without incident, the sect's leaders advanced a new deadline for the end of the world: March 17, 2000.

 

Once this day came, they organized a huge party and gathered in their church to pray and sing. There was an explosion and a fire at the church.

All 530 people present died. The police investigation concluded that it was a mass murder. It had been organized by the sect's leadership.

Hundreds of other members were also found dead by poisoning, lined up on the properties of the Ugandan sect. Forensic experts concluded that these members had been killed a few weeks earlier.

Photo: Wikimedia

 

The family was a sect created by an Australian yoga teacher who claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus. She put her followers to help her gather 14 children together in order to turn them into a "perfect race".

 

From 1968 to 1975, yoga teacher Anne Hamilton-Bryne and her followers gathered 14 children. Some of them were the biological descendants of members of the religious sect, some were adopted and others were abducted.

The children were told that Hamilton-Bryne was their mother and lived separately from the adult members of the sect in an isolated complex. They were cared for by a group of extremely cruel women, called "aunts."

The children's hair was bleached: they all had to look the same. They were beaten and starved regularly. If a child wet the bed, he was forced to take a cold shower.

A child suffering from asthma had a wheezing breath, so he was left outside in the cold at night. Children were often drugged with psychiatric drugs.

 

When they reached adolescence, they were forced to go through an initiation that involved ingesting LSD and abandonment in a room in the dark.

The children were finally taken by the authorities in 1987. This happened after one of them was expelled from the Family for rebellious behavior. He was the one who alerted the police.

Photo: Wikimedia

The sect's founder, Shoko Asahara, prophesied that the world would end in 1997 and that the United States would begin "World War III," which would end in a nuclear Armageddon.

He claimed that he gave his followers "superhuman powers" in exchange for their material goods. He claims that the world is ruled by conspiracies developed by Freemasons, Jews, the British royal family and rival Japanese religions.

 

Shoko Asahara said that the Aum Shinrikyo sect will reveal the truth about these conspiracies to the world. For PR and advertising purposes, the sect produced its own comics and cartoons.

They portrayed the sect as an elite group, using powerful weapons to fight world conspiracies. In 1994, the group used a modified refrigerated truck to release a cloud of sarin gas.

They carried out the attack near some judges who were supervising a real estate lawsuit filed against the group. At the time, police did not know who was behind the attack.

They focused their investigation on an innocent local. When police drew up plans to raid the sect's buildings, Asahara was notified in advance.

As a result, he staged another sarin gas attack to divert police attention. The group carried out a coordinated attack on five subway trains. They killed 13 people and more than 5,000 people arrived at the hospital.

 

The plan failed, and police raided cult buildings across the country. They discovered explosives, chemical weapons, a Russian military helicopter and laboratories in which members of the sect made drugs.

Aum's "chemicals" included "serum of truth," LSD, and methamphetamine. The members of the sect sold them to underworld organizations.

Aum Shinrikyo still exists today. In 2011, the cult had 1,000 members. It is currently under the supervision of the Japan Public Security Intelligence Agency.