"If you ever decide to leave, I'll take you and hang you upside down, and slit your throat, and use you as an example for everybody else."
- Charles Manson to Susan Atkins
Author Jean Stafford won the O. Henry Award for a short story in 1955, and a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1970 for her collection of short stories. That same year she penned a non-fiction piece for McCALL'S for their special "Occult Explosion" issue (see last Friday's WOM post). Her eruditely-written article was not on Astrology, the Tarot, ESP or any of the other mystical topics of the day -- it was on Charles Manson and the Tate/LaBianca Murders and its "demonic" influence on society.
The perpetrators had been arrested and imprisoned and there were enough facts about Manson and his followers to allow a fair assessment of the cult's infrastructure and the personality types that were seduced into the inner circle.
One of the more interesting threads that Stafford discusses is the analogy between Manson and "The Old Man of the Mountain", the Shiek-al-Jabal that ruled the infamous assassins. The comparison is uncanny.
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