The recently published memoir “The Make-Believe” by former “Game of Thrones” star Hannah Murray provides a terrifying insight into how easily an impressionable and spiritually unmoored young person can become ensnared in a “wellness” cult. The book recounts the successive — and increasingly expensive — courses on magic Murray undertook, which culminated in a full-blown psychotic breakdown and involuntary commitment to a mental hospital.
At the time of her committal, Murray was so mentally unwell that she was drinking her own urine under the belief that as a “Ritual Master,” she would be provided with all the nutrients she needed. What is surprising is that while this was happening, Murray seemed to the outside world to be a successful Hollywood star, appearing at red carpet events and conducting interviews.
Murray identifies her descent into psychotic madness thus: “It started with a self-help book.” The book in question, “The Inner Fix,” suggested that “twenty-somethings trying to fill an emptiness inside themselves with sex, drugs and booze should look instead to spirituality for fulfillment.” So far so good, one might think. But since Murray had been raised by atheists, “I didn’t believe in God as a child, but I did believe in magic.” Which is perhaps why her search for fulfillment led not to church, but — by way of a personal trainer while she was in Boston filming the movie “Detroit” — to an “energy healer,” who then introduced Murray to a shadowy wellness cult which offered courses in her hometown of London. Reading Murray’s account, one cannot help but be reminded of that famous quote attributed to G. K. Chesterton: “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing, he believes in anything.”
Murray is careful not to name the cult in her book but divulges that she flew to Minneapolis to attend additional courses. One of these, the “Ritual Master” course, was a part of a broader “Path of the Warrior” course. The accompanying literature for this course (even magical cults have promotional brochures, it turns out), offered “a spiritual path, which seemed to involve fighting evil and championing good both within oneself and in the world at large … becoming a ‘Warrior of Light’ and changing the world for the better.”
And as if that prose were not sufficiently outlandish, the online application form reads like the Temu version of a Navy SEALS recruitment poster: “This is the toughest program you will ever enter and there are many who fail this program. You will be pushed to your limits, tried and re-tried, as you become a Ritual Master. We will push your buttons, and you will not like that. That is our job.”
The names of some courses offered by the cult are simply absurd: “Dragon Magic, Mermaid Magic, Vampire Magic, Unicorn Magic,” to name but a few. Others feel bizarre and sinister: “Astral Travel, Sacred Geometry, Journeys of the Spirit, Twelve Races of Earth, King Solomon’s Healings, Egyptian Magic, Wiccan Training.”
Murray met the leader of the cult, whom she names “Steve,” while he was in London to “initiate some Ritual Masters as Celtic Shamans.” Steve was introduced as “Ipsissimus Steven, leader of the worldwide Order of the Warriors of Light, High Priest of Egyptian Magic, Wiccan High Priest … He seemed to have a thousand titles.” This quasi-religious gobbledegook matches the various initiation ceremonies Murray went through, involving “magical accoutrements” and even a sword. As part of her “Course on Healing,” she received a magic wand, and a humorous part of this otherwise tragic book recounts how underwhelmed she was upon receiving it: “It doesn’t look like I had imagined it would. It looks sort of clunky and homemade. I don’t like the colours.”
Much of the overblown and lurid language used by the cult might be better suited to a pulpy horror novel, yet for all its ridiculous theatrics, the cult promised inner healing, which Murray candidly confesses was something she craved. She knew there was something broken inside her, yet the magical spells and incantations she memorized to start hearing guidance from the “Hierarchy of Light” instead broke her mind.
Much of the cult’s schlocky psychobabble finds an echo in the final film Murray made before retiring from acting, “Charlie Says,” about the infamous Manson family cult. It is astonishing, after reading the book, to think that Murray would wish to play one of Charles Manson’s brainwashed accomplices, Leslie “Lulu” Van Houten. Yet she claims that working on the film “was the real beginning of my recovery … In crafting my performance of Leslie, I was beginning to alchemise my experiences into something else, something I felt had value.”
“Charlie Says,” released in 2018 to a lukewarm reception, arrived at the same time as Quentin Tarantino’s far starrier “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” which recounted the Manson murders from the perspective of Sharon Tate rather than from inside the twisted minds of Manson’s protégées. The movie is tough-going, and once you have seen actor Matt Smith’s personification of psychopath Charles Manson, I guarantee you won’t be able to picture him as the young and dashing Prince Phillip in Netflix’s “The Crown” in quite the same way. Yet the mystical promises Manson used to ensnare his vulnerable young acolytes, proclaiming himself to be a “beacon of light,” are strikingly similar to the grandiose claims made in Murray’s cult.
But perhaps one of the most disquieting things about the memoir is that while she was in psychiatric hospital, Murray was permitted unrestricted contact with the very cult leaders whose practices had put her there. It seems that the medical personnel working to get her better were quick to prescribe strong antipsychotic drugs, yet did not pause to identify, or even investigate, the source of her affliction.
This perplexing fact points to a larger paradox within Murray’s book. Aside from the observation that it cost her thousands of pounds and drove her crazy, the book never actually states how the cult was bad. It never probes specifically why it drove her crazy. Perhaps this is partly because the type of wellness-speak adopted by the cult — taking a smorgasbord approach to world religions and “traditional” (in the sense of non-scientific and specifically non-Western) healing — is bizarrely mainstream within our culture. King Charles, for example, receives zero pushback in the United Kingdom for his evident fondness for New Age philosophies and alternative religions. Just take a look at the “Harmony Summit” he hosted last year, or note the lack of skepticism in the reporting on his favorite holistic retreat center. (And remember this is the same King Charles who is the head of the Church of England!) The culture more broadly seems unable to articulate the mechanism that can distinguish a so-called “good” wellness culture from a bad one.
An essential question that this book — and Western culture more broadly — cannot seem to identify, is when does a culture become a cult? The two words share the same Latin root: “cultus,” meaning care, tending, worship, cultivation. The term “culture” feels either morally neutral or simply explanatory, whereas “cult,” has become a negative term, meaning an unhealthy, coercive belief system and group structure. Yet the linguistic boundary between these two words is slim; both essentially describe a group organized around shared symbols and rituals.
There is no such problem distinguishing between good and bad in a book I couldn’t help but think about while reading “The Make-Believe,” Frank Peretti’s horror-fantasy novel “This Present Darkness,” published back in 1986. Murray’s real-life experience is eerily similar to that undergone by the fictional Sandy Hogan, a college freshman who comes under the malign influence of psychology professor and actual witch Juleen Langstrat. Some of Langstrat’s courses — “Pathways to Your Inner Light,” “Introduction to God and Goddess Consciousness” — would fit right into the curricula of Murray’s cult. Langstrat’s students are promised “inner teachers, spirit guides, and ascended masters,” and Sandy gets into grave spiritual and physical danger as she naively travels along astral planes under Langstrat’s tutelage.
All turns out well in “This Present Darkness” as Sandy is rescued from her dangerous cult by those who can discern between good and evil. The ending of Murray’s memoir, however, is rather more enigmatic. She concludes that she does not “engage in the spiritual anymore, in meditation or the ritualised. I cannot.” By resolving to abstain from the spiritual altogether, Murray reflects a culture so traumatized by dangerous counterfeits that it chooses spiritual starvation over the risk of being deceived.
Yet the deep-seated hunger for healing remains. Until our culture recovers the ability to distinguish between a destructive cult and a healthy faith and is able to acknowledge the sinister origins of seemingly benign “wellness” cures, vulnerable souls will continue searching for light in all the wrong places.
***
Bridget Riley studied modern history at Oxford and completed a Ph.D. in medieval history at the University of Reading. She writes on history, culture, and the philosophy of religion.
This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
.png)
.png)
