Forty Years On – Life After The Divine Light Mission Cult.

I broke free from Maharaji’s cult in 1985.  It is now 2026, (Ok 41 years but near enough to 40).  The time has gone frightfully quickly.  

My graduation photo, taken by my step-father

 In many ways directly taking on cults has found itself playing second fiddle to much more in my life The anti-cult movement itself has gone much more low profile. Ian Howarth’s Cult Information Centre and Family Action Information & Rescue (FAIR) have largely become quite inactive. The internet has driven many people to check out cults more online than through direct social interaction, so many focus on the cult they were in, are in or have family and friends in, without looking so much at the bigger picture. 

There are less visual activities on the streets by cultists. The ISKCON Hare Kryshna parades seen in many city centres have largely ceased.   More cults operate underground than ever before.   

The most disturbing trend is the rise of the charismatic Internet Influencers. Some do little more than discuss fashion, recipes and their favourite music which is fine, but others promote extreme conspiracy theories, racist and sexist ideology.  The Q-Anon and general MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement of die-hard Trump fanatics have a very cult-like mentality. We are seeing a new lingo too, the age of ‘Fake News’. Cults can dismiss their critics as giving false information even for stating nothing but facts.  

Some influencers have actively encouraged sexism, and chauvinism, often in a backlash to the growing feminist and Me Too movements. There are also champions of self-harming, anorexia, and assisted suicide who have encouraged their subscribers to attempt to hurt themselves or take their own lives, often successfully.  

Me in my Skippon's Regiment Sealed Knot Uniform - taken by regimente members.

Some cult scandals still surface.  Children have died of diabetes because their religious parents have tried prayer and faith healing instead of insulin and doctors.  Others have died in dangerous violent exorcism rituals.  

The cult is no longer always a ‘religious’ practice.  

In 2006, actress, Alison Mack, a popular star of the successful Superman TV series Smallville, became an active member of a cult called  NXIVM [Nexium], led by Keith Raniere, and based in New York.  NXIVM was presented as a Marketing specialist training and personal development company.  

Given her celebrity status, Mack was fast tracked through to becoming Raniere’s chief assistant and tried to draw in many of her showbiz allies as the company was greedy for celebrity endorsement. Mack personally created many of NXIVM’s activities and promotional activities.  The company seemed to particularly champion female empowerment. 

Unfortunately the group was eventually seen as having a pyramid selling command structure, and members, especially women, were expected to share, ideally with documented evidence, details of their deepest secrets, affairs, drug takings, etc, which could serve for blackmail purposes and discouragement to dissent or deciding to leave NXIVM.  Worse, many women were allegedly groomed as Raniere’s sexual concubines, and some were branded with a heated  branding pen, to bear the symbols of NXIVM.  

Scandals erupted into investigations leading to the arrests and successful charges being made against Raniere and Mack too. She pleaded guilty to racketeering and went to jail for three years, getting released in 2023.  

While seeing such stories, and relatively little on Prem Rawat who is plodding on with his supposed wise man of peace spreading encouragement to self—improvement tour, mostly in Africa and India (where his change of identity from Maharaji has helped many forget his extravagant, decadent, and scandal saturated past).  

Some of Prem Rawat’s words of wisdom, often tired, random extracts from years of Satsang, are being released in book and pamphlet form, and I have acquired some (with stories repeated from one to another and a few released with fresh titles for different editions to give the impression that they are new books).  The work is unlikely to be seen by many not already following him.  

My own life has split into cult-watching and non-cult-watching.  My creative writing was getting more and more attention from the Millennium onwards, and I left organized atheistic Humanism (stepping down as Secretary and unofficial chair of the Manchester Humanists), to focus on job searching and my poetry and literary activity.   

I also joined The Sealed Knot English Civil War Re-enactment Society, serving as a pikeman from 2003 to 2013.  I pulled out for financial reason, always hoping to go back but my health was due to nosedive, rendering that option a non-starter.  

Career wise, I got trapped in call centre cold selling work, which I hated and it left me feeling as manipulative as a cult recruiter. Fortunately, my sales successes were few and I regarded my eventual dismissal as a mercy killing.  

I got various temporary jobs, my favourite being in post office sorting.  

I got involved in poetry groups, open mics and poetry slams, mostly in Manchester, and later in Preston.  I also started attending science fiction conventions.  

Photo of me performing poetry at Vinyl Tap, Peston

From 2010 onwards there was pressure from my increasingly estranged sister to move out of the family home in Manchester. She never forgave me for exposing her son over his petty thefts of my property and she openly accused me of avoiding job searches and moving from my Mum’s house to be able to exploit my Mum for financial assistance.  

With my mum’s health deteriorating and my sister, a trained nurse, moving in more as her official carer, I reluctantly moved out. It was not easy.  Manchester housing was nigh on impossible to get for me and I was even advised by the council to live on the streets, homeless.   Fortunately, friends intervened and helped me get my current flat in Preston, forty miles from my old family home, and the city I lived in through most of my cult experiences. 

My first two Pub Sign books, taken by myself

I got to give talks too, not just on my cult experiences but on everything from heraldry to my new obsession, Pub Signs.  In  2012 (approximately), I started photographing inn signs and this grew more fascinating to me.  In  2017 at a talk on them, a publisher commissioned me to write a book about them based on the talk and the book, Watch The Signs! Watch The Signs! Came out in 2019.  A second book on signage, called simply Pub Signs, came out in 2024.  

In between the books, Covid hit, and the UK, like much of the World  went into lockdown.  In some cults, faith and conspiracy theory contributed to denial of the virus and contempt for medical vaccines, a scepticism that helped spread the virus and kill many more people.  

Smiley Stoma bag, taken by me

I followed Lockdown restrictions, but I had another pressing reason for not going out or doing anything. I was getting exhausted easily, often struggling to breathe in at all, and my bowels were in chaos.  Though I first detected symptoms as early as March 2020, it was the August when it got so bad that I sought medical attention from a medical profession already stretched by Covid patient needs. My doctor had a dire prognosis for me – bowel cancer.  Tests proved this prognosis accurate but there was hope. They were confident the cancer could be irradicated though not without risks or consequences.   

In December 2020, with Covid still raging, I had two operations four days apart, and the bulk of the cancer was gone along with much of my intestine and anus. I had a stoma bag for life now. 

Recovery was gradual, running parallel to the easing of lockdown restrictions.  As well as my stoma I was left with depression and anxiety.  At first, in counselling, I took this as just rooted in the fight against cancer but soon realized it was rooted right back to events that groomed me for the cult years. The cult had left me with doubts of my sanity. It was an Anti-mind movement and one that always said ex-members were cursed to pain, misery and sickness.  They had nothing to do with my cancer though and I see my surviving cancer as an extension of my ability to survive them.  

My writings, like the pub signs books, are my drive to prove I’m not just the cult guy or the cancer guy.  A life free from having been near or in a cult is as important to me as that of being embroiled.   I am me. I am free. I am alive.  Forty years on, I feel more independent of religion than ever.  My writing  in many ways owes itself to the cult years. We were forbidden to write anything down, as a paper trail could leave evidence of our activity for any investigators or reporters on our tail. It also involves thinking and critical analysis.  

However, the cult helped me become much more articulate. We had to share our experiences at communal meetings, unscripted and improvised, and when I spoke I learned to use words more effectively I’d been quite monosyllabic before recruitment.  

Once free, I started to write, and rarely stopped, but my writing was rarely about my experiences. I wasn’t ready for that level of soul searching yet. My work defied the golden rule for writers, ‘Write about what you know’. I wrote about experiences alien to myself, pushing for escapism.   

At Bolton, when I returned to full time education in 1987-90, gaining a Humanities degree in literature and philosophy (I chose them because they involved thinking), I discovered a cult, The School Of Economic Science (not to be confused with the London School Of Economics) was actively fly-posting the campus inviting students to take their own courses. I decided to write an article on them for the campus newspaper and drew references toi my experiences – my first public statement of them). The article was picked up on by The Bolton Evening News and I was invited to appear on the Richard & Judy Show too (Sadly I never met R & J as my segment was filmed at my Mum’s by an outside broadcasting team).  The public presentations helped me draw more on my life experiences in my writing, which often swings between self-analysis and experience and escapist flights of fancy now.   

If you like my writings and you would like to see more, you can help fund my activity with a modest donation or two to my new Buymeacoffee Donations Page https://buymeacoffee.com/arthurchappell?new=1

Arthur Chappell