Brave. Rose McGowan

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CHILD OF GOD

      Here’s the thing about cults: I see them everywhere.

      If you’re deep into the Kardashians, you’re in a cult. If you watch your favorite TV show and go online and you’re in chat rooms with everybody else who’s obsessed with that show and you’re breaking it down episode by episode, you’re in a cult. If you’re bingeing, scrolling, absorbing from one news source more than any other, especially if it happens to be fair and balanced, you are in a cult. You’re living your life through other people. If you blindly vote for so-and-so, you’re in a cult. If you’re deep into your country’s propaganda machine, you’re in a cult. Look around you and see where the cults are, because they are everywhere. Anywhere there is group thought and group mentality: you’re in a cult, you’re in a cult, you’re in a cult.

The first step to deprogramming yourself from a cult is realizing you are in a cult. I would know, I escaped from two of the most iconic cults of all time.

      For those who knew me as an actress, I must inform you that I was never that person. I was playing the part of someone who played parts. I was trapped by rigid societal ideals and gender expectations placed on me by people who shouldn’t have been allowed near me (or you). I got such a deeeeeeeeep mind fucking. I rejected brainwashing early on in life, but later, Hollywood’s Cult of Thought actually got me.

      My life altered irrevocably the day I turned into a pixel, beamed up to an orbiting satellite and beamed back down, blasted across living rooms, bedrooms, lives. My job was to take you away from your struggles for a while, to make you feel empathy, to make you feel at all. I took my job seriously. But like in most cults, because I was a woman, I was considered to be an owned object. I was sold for the pleasure of the public. Deeply programmed men (and women) made money selling my breasts, my skin, my hair, my emotions, my health, my being. I was not taken seriously, nor was I respected. Not by most of society, and certainly not by the Hollywood cult with its massively industrialized Madonna/Whore complex.

      Imagine if your value to the company you work for was measured by how much semen you could extract from anonymous masses of men. ’Cause you know, if strange men masturbate to your movies, you must be of some value. Sounds like a sex worker, right? You’re not too far off.

Imagine that every word to come out of your mouth for nearly seventeen years, day after day, month after month, angle after angle, take after take, was something an all too narrow-minded male wrote for you to say. It’s meta and it’s deeply abnormal.

      It took me a long time to figure out that I was in another cult, because I was too busy being other people, not myself. By telling the story of my life, I am reclaiming it.

      But let’s start at the beginning, shall we?

      In a stone barn, in the tiny Italian countryside town of Certaldo, delivered by a blind midwife, as the story goes, I came into the world. There’s an American saying: “Shut that door! Were you born in a barn?!” I guess I never have to shut doors if I don’t want to. I have that prerogative. I suppose sometimes you’re just earmarked for weirdness from birth, and I think I’m one of those.

      The barn was on the property of the duke of Zoagli, known as Duke Emanuele, who, upon joining the Children of God, donated his estate and land to Children of God. His sister Rosa Arianna lived on the property, but loathed all the Children of God members living there. My parents named me after her, Rosa Arianna, I think to make her like them. Didn’t work.

It was incredibly beautiful there in the rolling hills outside Florence, the dark green cypresses and silvery-green olive trees, vineyards, and orchards, those enormous old terra-cotta jars holding red geranium flowers. I suppose if you have to be in a cult, it was as good a place as any.

      Nah, it was better, and even at a young age, I saw the beauty and knew it was wildly extraordinary. I connected to its nature as an escape from what I was born into. As a result, I’ve always been drawn to shapes, colors, and light patterns, and the Italian countryside has haunted me my whole life, in a good way.

      From my earliest memories I recall hearing a lot about a terrifying old man named “Moses” David Berg, our fearless leader in the Children of God. He would send his directives out in cartoon pamphlets called “Mo Letters.” Whatever Moses David wrote, that’s what was done. Each time there was a new letter it would be as if the ruler of the universe had spoken. (Kind of like the head of a studio in Hollywood.) And I guess as the self-appointed prophet he was, Moses David turned out to be the King of Creeps. But the others didn’t know that yet. Some would never know.

      I remember a lot of hairy legs, men’s and women’s, like in the cartoons where you only see the adults’ legs because that’s your perspective as a child. I remember a lot of singing, praying, clapping, and snapping. Yes, snapping. I was told СКАЧАТЬ