An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Manson, Charles

When dawn broke over Los Angeles, California, on 9th August 1969, it revealed a scene of macabre horror. In a luxurious Hollywood mansion five people, the film star Sharon Tate and four house guests, had died in what seemed to be a ritual murder, carried out in the dark of the moon. It was apparently quite motiveless, and the victims had been shot and stabbed repeatedly, with a degree of ferocity that caused even veteran police officers to blench.

The strangest feature of the case was the way in which the bodies of Sharon Tate and her friend Jay Sebring, an internationally famous hair stylist, had been posed in death. Looped around Miss Tate’s neck was a nylon rope. The rope had been slung over a ceiling beam, and the other end of it tied around Sebring’s neck, while his head had been muffled in a hood. Yet neither of them had died from hanging.

Two days later, another very similar discovery again shook an already terrified city. Two more wealthy people, Mr and Mrs La Bianca, were found dead in their Los Angeles home. They had been tied up and stabbed repeatedly, and Mr La Bianca’s head was hooded in a white pillowcase.

On account of their bizarre nature, and the social eminence of the people involved in them, the killings received world-wide publicity. The term ’ritual murder’ was used from the start to describe them, and possible connections with the occult were probed. It was recalled that Miss Tate’s husband, Roman Polanski, had been the producer of the sensational film about Satanism, Rosemary’s Baby. It was rumoured that this film had angered some secret groups because of the matters it dealt with, and that Mr Polanski had received threats. He himself had escaped the massacre by sheer luck; he had been filming in London when it occurred.

It seemed that some element of impersonal hatred was involved; at the scene of each crime, references to ’pigs’ had been daubed in letters of blood. By another strange twist of fate, Sharon Tate was eight months pregnant when she died, and the name of the woman victim in the second killings was Rosemary.

Sharon and her husband were admittedly interested in the occult; and she had made her film debut in a picture called 13, a story about a girl with the powers of a witch. She also made a picture called Evil Eye.

California is well known as a centre for occult groups and orders of all kinds, some of them internationally respected, others strange and fantastic in the extreme. As police pursued their enquiries, many cultists were interviewed, but without significant results.

Eventually, however, a girl hippie, while detained in prison on another charge, boasted to her cell-mates that she had been one of the killers at the Sharon Tate mansion. The authorities were told; and as a result a communal group of hippies, who had been living on deserted ranches in the vicinity of Los Angeles, was closely investigated, and six of them, four girls and two men, were charged with the murders. Police stated that they believed this hippie clan to be responsible for a number of other unexplained killings as well, and to have planned more.

So the world came to hear the name of Charles Manson, leader of the hippie ’family’ which called itself Satan’s Slaves. His lean, bearded face, with hypnotic eyes, stared disturbingly from every newspaper. The disquieting facts that black magic and ritual murder were poisonously alive in the modern world could no longer be ignored.

Two of his girl followers, Susan Atkins and Linda Kasabian, gave chilling descriptions of how the murders took place. Both said that the killings were done under Manson’s hypnotic influence; he gave the orders to kill, and his followers carried them out. Susan Atkins later tried to retract her testimony, and say that Manson knew nothing about the murders; but it was too late and the court had heard too much for this to be accepted. Linda Kasabian, who took no part in the actual killings, was granted immunity from prosecution in return for her evidence. Manson’s lieutenant, Charles ’Tex’ Watson, suffered a mental breakdown while in custody, and was detained in a hospital. The other two girls accused were Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten.

The motive for the murders was twofold. Firstly, to express hatred for what Manson called ’the piggy world’, that is, the world of established wealth and convention, the world of non-hippies; secondly, to strike terror into that world, and so precipitate what Manson believed was the coming revolution, when the white Establishment and the black militants would fight each other to extinction, and only hippies would be left. He thought that the killings would be blamed upon negro militants.

It seems incredible that a man should have been able to make others follow him blindly in such a scheme. But Manson and his devotees lived in a world of their own, out in the California desert; a world distorted by drugs, especially LSD. His followers regarded him as a man with divine powers. They recounted in court how they had seen him work miracles, such as charming snakes, healing sick animals and birds, and making old people become young again. Even after he was arrested, groups of his followers sat outside the court house day after day, confident that he would be triumphantly released. When Los Angeles was shaken by an earthquake while the trial was proceeding, some of them took it for a sign. Where they thought the ’sign’ came from, however, is not clear; because Manson regarded himself as being a combination of both Christ and Satan. Where he derived this belief from is not known, but the idea that God was manifest in three aspects, those of Lucifer, Jehovah and Satan (all three of whom should be worshipped) had already been put forward, and Manson may have come across it.

Manson was born on 11th November 1934, an illegitimate child in poor circumstances. At the time of the murders he was in his thirty-fifth year; and twenty-two of those years had been spent in various prisons, on a variety of charges none of which involved violence.

Manson’s birth-sign is Scorpio, one of the most complex signs in the whole Zodiac. It is the fixed sign of water; the still water which runs deep. Ruled by Mars, it is a sign associated with sex, death, and the unseen worlds. Its natives have a magnetic personality, and a strange ability to bend others to their will. They often have remarkable psychic gifts, and are naturally drawn towards occultism and mysticism. They have a powerful sexual drive, and strong emotions.

The complexity of Scorpio is shown by the fact that it has three different symbols: the Scorpion, the Serpent and the Eagle. Its natives can soar to the heights and also plumb the depths. The serpent is an emblem of occult wisdom; the eagle soars above all other birds, and signifies sublimation; the scorpion personifies lust and cruelty, and is a creature of the sun-scorched desert, as Manson was.

Manson boasted that he lived like a king among his hippie followers and at one time had fifteen girls to wait on him and minister to his every wish. On moonlight nights, he presided over rites of orgiastic sex. The eye-witness descriptions given of these show that he did indeed have some knowledge of magical sex rituals. He was described as standing in the centre of a circle of men and girls. When he signalled the rite to commence, the girls would surround him, kissing his feet and treating him as an incarnate god. Meanwhile, the men sat back in meditation, while the drugs they were using took effect. When Manson judged the time was right, all joined in communal sexual acts, passing round the circle from one partner to another until they were too exhausted to continue. These practices were supposed to raise magical power, and produce dreams and visions.

Manson seems to have pictured himself as being something like the Devil of a medieval witches’ coven—regarded as an incarnate god, having power of life and death over his devotees, rewarding his female followers with his sexual favours or punishing them with beatings, and having a male officer who carried out his orders.

According to Linda Kasabian’s testimony, the men of Manson’s clan called themselves witches, and “Charlie called all the girls witches”. He told them to make “witchy things” to hang in the trees, marking the way to their camp site—signs made of weeds, stones and branches, held together with wire. According to the same witness, before the party of killers set off for Sharon Tate’s house, all of them dressed eerily in black, Manson told them to “leave a sign—something witchy”. He himself did not accompany them, but awaited their return, confident that his orders would be obeyed.

However, there is no evidence that Manson was a witch in anything except his own fantasy. He seems to have gathered his followers together originally in the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco, birthplace of the hippie dream, and travelled with them through California on a dilapidated school bus. He may have derived some mystic ideas from his name: Manson, the Son of Man.

The trial of Manson and the others accused lasted nine months, and cost an estimated one million dollars. The only one of them to express any regret for the killings was Linda Kasabian. The rest made it plain that they regarded the trial as a mockery, and treated it accordingly. This led to bizarre court-room scenes, reminiscent of the behaviour of the supposedly bewitched girls at Salem in the seventeenth century.

The three girls, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten, acted throughout as if Manson had them under a spell. Whatever he did, they copied. When he laughed, they laughed; when he got angry, they got angry; when he appeared in the courtroom with a shaven head, they shaved their heads also. Manson made his appearance like this, sacrificing his long hair and beard, after he had been found guilty. Through his lawyer, he said, “I did it because I’m the Devil, and the Devil always has a bald head.” Together with Manson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten were found guilty, and all four were sentenced to death in the gas chamber.

Manson claimed that he took the people whom society had cast aside as human garbage, and gave them love, forming them into his ’family’. But his mind had been twisted by twenty-two years in American jails. The ’love’ had an opposite side—hatred for the ’straight’ people, the ’piggies’; and he infected his followers with his own ruthless hate.

Maybe if society had more compassion for its human garbage, if it could have found something better to do with the young Charles Manson than to lock him up in one jail after another, then the hideous events of August 1969 in Los Angeles might never have happened.