AustLit

'Carmel Bird’s (b. 1940) Mandala Trilogy comprises three studies of what the English sociologist Colin Campbell termed the “cultic milieu”.2 For Bird, this is a subculture of alternative (or “deviant”) religiosity, in which the vulnerable are caught up in the snares and delusions of charismatic leaders. The White Garden (1995) introduces the amoral psychiatrist, Dr Ambrose Goddard, who medically and sexually abuses patients at Mandala Psychiatric Clinic, a virtual prison over which he (as his name suggests) is “God”.3 In Red Shoes (1998) Petra Penfold-Knight is the leader of the Hill House Brethren, a “cult” that kidnaps patients from Mandala and steals the babies of unmarried mothers, and in which members are dressed identically and wear red shoes. Cape Grimm (2004) is the tale of Caleb Mean who, raised from infancy to understand himself as the second coming of Christ, incinerates his community of one hundred and forty-seven religious followers (most of whom are his relatives) in remote north-west Tasmania on his thirty-third birthday. The novels tease out connections between psychiatry and what are popularly termed “cults”, and psychiatrists and the charismatic leaders of deviant religious groups. This chapter examines the Mandala Trilogy using social scientific models from the study of new religious movements (NRMs), including American sociologists of religion Rodney Stark and William Simms Bainbridge’s three classic models of “cult formation” (psychopathology, entrepreneurship, and subcultural evolution) to illuminate the portrayal of charismatic leaders, Stanley Cohen’s notion of “moral panic” to interpret Bird’s identification of fringe religion with criminal behaviour, drug-taking, sexual deviance, and irrational beliefs, and Campbell’s “cultic milieu”, mentioned above, to clarify the teachings of the charismatic leaders, and the existence of a group in society that is primed to follow such leaders, and to join such movements.' (Introduction)