Enter The Apocalypse: Aum Shinrikyo Becomes A Doomsday Cult By the early 1990s, the group had amassed some 10,000 members in Japan and several thousand around the world, notably in Russia. Others were dead, killed when they announced their intention to withdraw from the cult.īut Aum Shinrikyo continued to grow. Some whispered that people who wanted to leave the group were being held against their will and forced to sign over substantial sums of money. The anti-cult lawyer who was causing Aum Shinrikyo trouble mysteriously disappeared with his family and was never seen alive again. Some continue to protest the group’s remaining offshoots to this day. Wikimedia Commons Horrified parents began to campaign against Aum Shinrikyo, claiming that the cult was brainwashing their children. These aspects of cult life were shrouded in secrecy, but some who escaped the cult report undergoing shock-therapy and taking hallucinogenic drugs. Members attended “madness camp,” a ten-day summit designed to test the limits of their strength. They stuck with it, determined to belong even as the group’s emphasis on physical endurance and punishment began to take a toll. His teachings also found a surprising foothold in the country among young academics and college students, who felt the cult’s ideas were progressive and a relief after years of high-pressure academic competition. Members developed strong bonds with each other by tapping into the anti-parent rhetoric and lost contact with their families. It was an effective way to cut youthful followers off from more reasonable counsel, and it worked. Young people, he said, should shun parents because parents were part of the present life and not the future.
He offered salvation and promised to take on the world’s sins while sharing his spiritual power and wisdom with followers.īut his lofty vision was mixed with more sinister messages. He began to refer to himself as the “ultimate savior” and the lamb of Christ. Asahara Makes Aum Shinrikyo Followers New Promises - And ThreatsĪFP/Getty Images A child of a member of the secretive sect Aum Shinrikyo is taken from a facility by police.Īs time went on, Asahara’s claims grew bolder. In books and frequent appearances on talk shows, Asahara promised members health and a better life through spirituality, focus, and positive thinking - a message that garnered him an increasingly enthusiastic following. What started in 1984 as a class became in 1987 the group Aum Shinrikyo, which gained official recognition as a religious organization in Japan just two years later. He mixed Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian teachings with the prophecies of Nostradamus and began to promulgate his beliefs in the yoga and meditation sessions he taught. That’s when things took a turn toward the mystical.Īsahara became deeply interested in meditation and ancient religious philosophy. He eventually strayed into more questionable business practices and, in 1981, was found guilty of practicing pharmacology without a license. Peers remember him as a bully who wanted money and had few scruples about how he obtained it.Īfter leaving school, he began selling herbal remedies, a career that proved inadequate to support his wife and growing family. On his graduation in 1977, he left his classmates with few nice things to say about him. He lost much of his sight to infantile glaucoma as a child and was sent to a school for the blind. Shoko Asahara, born Chizuo Matsumoto, grew up in a poor family of tatami mat makers. The man who turned a yoga class into murderers came from humble beginnings. Shoko Asahara And The Start Of Aum Shinrikyo Just 11 years later, it carried out a devastating sarin gas attack on a Tokyo subway and made a name for itself as one of the world’s most frightening doomsday cults. In 1984, the Japanese group Aum Shinrikyo was founded as a simple yoga class. Wojtek Laski/Getty Images Shoko Asahara, leader of the cult group Aum Shinrikyo, during a visit to Moscow, Russia, on February 17, 1994.
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