“[the cult leader, Steve] looked so confident. He exuded power in a way I had never known anyone to exude it. Magical power … I knew I was in the presence of a magician … Then, he spoke. ‘Hey, I’m here in London to initiate some Ritual Masters as Celtic Shamans.’”
Most of the teachers in the organisation were women and mostly they wore skirts, a fact Murray didn’t fully clock until female devotees were instructed to wear skirts, too. Murray looked askance at this. She was more of a sweatpants girl. But she noticed other things. When the gathered were addressed by Steve, he opened with a sex joke. “How we were supposed to do 45 minutes of cardio a day and how he’d rather have sex for his cardio than do anything else.”
I think there often is in these hierarchical spiritual organisations. I found it interesting that it was a primarily quite female space – the teachers, the healer – and then this man walks in and he’s incredibly confident and magnetic. The first thing he says is a joke about sex. From this quite floaty, quite gentle, wishy-washy energy, it was suddenly, like, ‘Hey, I’m here,’ and, ‘Let’s fuck.’ I think he was doing that deliberately.”
And later:
She believed [Steve] loved her, would marry her, that he controlled the weather, that she had special powers. By the middle of the next day, she was hallucinating diagrams on people’s necks that showed her how to “heal” them. She had the thought: “Steve is my father and I do want to fuck Steve.” (Perhaps an echo of the fact that her character in Game of Thrones was impregnated by her father).
I always find it interesting how far unbridled confidence can get you. His confidence convinced those women that they loved him and he loved them.
She sounds awesome. I remember her from Game of Thrones, but I had to look her up. She was that redhead who had her father’s baby and ran with Jon Snow for a while. Gilly. Not the one who says “You know nothing, Jon Snow” — that was Ygritte. Easy to get them confused. The former was more like a friend to Snow (he looked after her for a time); the latter was his lover.
Wildling cult
