Abstract

On 18th November 1978 more than 900 US citizens self-annihilated their religious and political community in the Guyana jungle through a cyanide-laced drink. This eschatological feast was the final step of a 1961 self-fulfilling prophecy by their Pastor and charismatic leader, Rev. Jim Jones: a nuclear holocaust had become the partly explicit narrative texture of the cult and its unconscious emotional organizer. The crimes and the suicidal atonement of the November 18 events followed a sacrificial model. The self-sacrifice of the group as such turned it into a sacred crystal group, a perfect microcosm encompassing the totality of the macrocosm. The death of Jonestown was embedded in an end-of-the-world phantasy of apocalyptic destruction, a void in the flux of time allowing a revolutionary New Beginning, a restoration of the originary Dual Unity mother/ child before the birth. Depressive breakdowns and manic strategies converged in a denial of the very death the followers were witnessing and managing: only a dream, a divine flight to another Promised Land. This overall process was facilitated by the ritual collective suffocation of the group. Voices turned into agonizing wheezes. Bodies and the community itself morphed into an aerial invisible limitless entity pervading the ether and all of reality. Emphasis on flatus vocis and frantic recording built up a pneumatic group Self as a fleshless sound skin (Anzieu).