Word: sect
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Although the sect leader was accused of immigration-law violations, INS Agent Joseph Green testified in Charlotte that the guru's followers were plotting to kill the U.S. Attorney in Portland and the Oregon attorney general if the Bhagwan was imprisoned. A week earlier, an Oregon grand jury filed attempted murder charges against Ma Anand Sheela, 35, the Bhagwan's former secretary. She had fled the commune in September, prompting accusations from Rajneesh that she had conspired to murder his physician. Sheela was arrested last week in West Germany. In addition to the attempted murder indictment, she too has been...
Sheela, a raven-haired 35-year-old who joined the sect in 1973, was the leader of the first band of Rajneeshees that settled in 1981 in what was then Antelope, Ore., a hamlet of 40. As their numbers increased, the sannyasins (followers) bought out older residents, registered to vote and took over the city council, changing the name Antelope to Rajneesh in 1984. Sheela was responsible for the scheme to recruit about 3,500 homeless people for the commune last fall, in what observers believe was an attempt to load the voting rolls against longer-term residents of Wasco...
Given the sect's penchant for put-ons, as well as its reportedly declining membership and lawsuits concerning the takeover of Antelope, outsiders did not know what to make of the bhagwan's statements. Neither, evidently, did the six different groups of lawmen that jointly began examining the guru's charges last week: the Oregon state police, the FBI, the Wasco County sheriff, the Dalles police, the state attorney general's office and the U.S. Attorney's office. Wasco County District Attorney Bernard L. Smith said at week's end that his office will coordinate an investigation of the situation...
...obsolete sense of whim or quirk, but that won't help matters much. And what will readers make of such Fowlesian whims as building his plot around questions to which he never provides the answers? Or resting his conclusion on an assumed familiarity with the Shakers, that little-known sect of puritanical Protestants who arose in England two centuries ago and later prospered briefly...
...official Church News of Salt Lake City published the letter last month. It was written by Martin Harris, a farmer who lived near Palmyra, N.Y. Harris was Smith's first convert outside the prophet's family. Addressed to a Canandaigua, N.Y., newspaper editor who later joined the sect, the document describes a version of the foundations of Mormonism that differs markedly from the official account written by Smith in 1838. The letter, discovered in 1983 | and donated to the church last month by a Utah businessman, depicts Smith as a man influenced by folk magic and occultism. This appears...