A new memoir from former “Game of Thrones” actress Hannah Murray offers a firsthand account of how a young person’s search for spiritual meaning can spiral into a wellness cult, a psychotic breakdown, and involuntary commitment to a mental hospital. The book, “The Make-Believe,” was reviewed by The Daily Wire, which described Murray’s story as reading like horror fiction even though the events actually happened.
Murray traces her descent to what she calls a simple beginning: a self-help book. “It started with a self-help book,” she writes. That book, “The Inner Fix,” suggested that twenty-somethings trying to fill an emptiness inside themselves with sex, drugs and alcohol should turn instead to spirituality for fulfillment. Raised by atheists, Murray writes that she “didn’t believe in God as a child, but I did believe in magic.”
Her search led her not to a church but to an “energy healer,” whom she met through a personal trainer while filming the movie “Detroit” in Boston. That healer introduced her to a wellness cult offering courses in her hometown of London. The Daily Wire’s review invokes a famous line attributed to G. K. Chesterton: “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing, he believes in anything.”
Murray does not name the cult in her book but writes that she traveled to Minneapolis for additional courses, including a “Ritual Master” program that was part of a broader “Path of the Warrior” course. Promotional material for the course promised a spiritual path involving fighting evil and championing good, both within oneself and in the world at large, and becoming a “Warrior of Light.”
The online application, as described in the memoir, struck a harsher tone, warning applicants that the program was the toughest they would ever enter, that many would fail, and that their “buttons” would be pushed deliberately.
Course offerings carried names that ranged from the absurd to the sinister. Among them, according to the book: “Dragon Magic, Mermaid Magic, Vampire Magic, Unicorn Magic,” alongside “Astral Travel, Sacred Geometry, Journeys of the Spirit, Twelve Races of Earth, King Solomon’s Healings, Egyptian Magic, Wiccan Training.”
Murray writes that she met the leader of the cult, whom she refers to as “Steve,” while he was in London to initiate some Ritual Masters as Celtic Shamans. He was introduced with a cascade of titles: “Ipsissimus Steven, leader of the worldwide Order of the Warriors of Light, High Priest of Egyptian Magic, Wiccan High Priest.” Murray observed that he “seemed to have a thousand titles.”
Her initiation ceremonies involved what she describes as magical accoutrements and even a sword. As part of a “Course on Healing,” she received a magic wand, and the memoir includes a darkly comic passage in which she is underwhelmed by the object itself, finding it clunky and homemade and disliking the colors.
For all its theatrical trappings, Murray writes that the cult promised inner healing, something she candidly admits she craved. She knew there was something broken inside her. But the spells and incantations she memorized in order to start hearing guidance from the “Hierarchy of Light,” she writes, instead broke her mind. At the time of her committal to a psychiatric hospital, she was so 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 may be most striking is the contrast between her private collapse and her public profile. Even as this was happening, according to the memoir, Murray appeared to the outside world as a successful Hollywood star, attending red carpet events and giving interviews.
The cult’s teachings also found an unexpected echo in her acting work. The last film she made before retiring from acting was “Charlie Says,” a 2018 drama about the Manson family in which she played Leslie “Lulu” Van Houten, one of Charles Manson’s brainwashed accomplices. Murray claims that working on the film “was the real beginning of my recovery,” describing how crafting her performance helped her transform her experiences into something she felt had value.
The Daily Wire review notes that “Charlie Says” was released to a lukewarm reception, arriving around the same time as Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” It also draws a parallel between the mystical promises Manson used to ensnare vulnerable young followers, proclaiming himself a “beacon of light,” and the grandiose claims made by the cult in Murray’s account.
One of the more disquieting details in the book concerns Murray’s time in psychiatric care. According to the memoir, she was permitted unrestricted contact with the very cult leaders whose practices had put her there. The review observes that medical personnel were quick to prescribe strong antipsychotic drugs but did not pause to identify or investigate the source of her affliction.
That gap points to a larger paradox the reviewer identifies in the book: aside from the fact that it cost Murray thousands of pounds and drove her crazy, the memoir never explicitly states how the cult was bad, nor does it probe specifically why it drove her crazy. Part of the difficulty, the review suggests, is that the kind of wellness-speak the cult adopted — sampling from world religions and “traditional” healing — is bizarrely mainstream in contemporary culture.
The review points to King Charles as an example, noting that his evident fondness for New Age philosophies and alternative religions receives zero pushback in the United Kingdom, citing the “Harmony Summit” he hosted last year and the lack of skepticism in reporting on his favorite holistic retreat center, despite his role as head of the Church of England. The broader culture, the review argues, seems unable to articulate what distinguishes a so-called “good” wellness culture from a bad one.
At the heart of the book, according to the review, is a question neither the memoir nor Western culture can seem to answer: when does a culture become a cult? The two words share the same Latin root, “cultus,” meaning care, tending, worship, or cultivation. “Culture” tends to read as morally neutral or merely explanatory, while “cult” has become a negative term for an unhealthy, coercive belief system and group structure. Yet the linguistic boundary between them is slim, since both describe a group organized around shared symbols and rituals.
The review contrasts Murray’s account with Frank Peretti’s 1986 horror-fantasy novel “This Present Darkness,” in which a college freshman named Sandy Hogan falls under the influence of a psychology professor who is an actual witch. Some of the professor’s courses — “Pathways to Your Inner Light” and “Introduction to God and Goddess Consciousness” — the review notes, would fit comfortably into the curricula of Murray’s cult. In the novel, Sandy is rescued from danger by those who can discern between good and evil.
Murray’s memoir ends on a more enigmatic note. She concludes that she does not “engage in the spiritual anymore, in meditation or the ritualised. I cannot.”
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-seductive-appeal-of-wellness-cults