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this truth by Satan. Satan was seen as the spirit
of separation that keeps us from loving each
other, building positive relationships, and living
together harmoniously. By rejecting Satan and
the World, and living in perfect agreement, the
Love Family could create Heaven on Earth
where members would live forever in their
physical bodies.
These ideas grew out of an LSD vision
experienced by Paul Erdmann, then 27, in 1967
during the Summer of Love in San Francisco’s
Haight-Ashbury district. The following year,
Erdmann returned to his hometown of Seattle
and began attracting young hippie seekers who
were inspired by his vision, absolute conviction,
and willingness to take bold action. Other
visions followed, including one that revealed
Erdmann’s true name, Love. Before long, Love
transformed his amorphous ideas into a simple
but coherent belief system based on the Old and
New Testaments of the Bible. Together, Love
and his followers were the resurrected body of
Jesus Christ. They were the true Israelites, called
by God to build New Jerusalem. In recognition
of their Israelite identities, they all took the
surname Israel. The key to their success was to
be Jesus Christ by living as One.
However, Oneness did not mean social equality.
The Love Family was a patriarchal kingdom
believed to reflect a divine hierarchy symbolized
by a golden pyramid. At its apex was Love, who
had absolute authority as the King of Israel. He
had complete control over who joined, who was
baptized, who got a virtue name, how money
was allocated, where members lived, whom they
had sex with, and who got kicked out. The
Family’s small size and communal structure
gave Love enormous freedom to micromanage
daily life, which he did virtually every day. Ms.
Israel portrays Love as the object of slavish
devotion, an attitude that he promoted by
constantly being attuned to and managing the
collective mood.
Assisting Love were the elders. These were men
with virtue names handpicked for their
commitment to community ideals, leadership
ability, and, most of all, their devotion to Love.
Each elder and his “elder lady” supervised a
household that consisted of up to 20 people
sharing a house or yurt. The next tier included
all other baptized members with virtue names.
Together the “virtues” made up the core of the
Family. At the bottom of the pyramid was a
servant class that consisted of newer members
such as Ms. Israel and her mother. They were
identified by Hebrew names chosen from the
Bible.
Within each stratum of the hierarchy, women
occupied a secondary position and were
expected to bow to men and do their bidding. On
one of my early visits, I was chatting with an
elder in his house when another elder man
walked in and joined the conversation. Although
the elder lady was busy cooking, folding
laundry, and feeding a baby, the man said to her,
without so much as a glance, “Charity, will you
give me a braid?” The elder lady immediately
dropped what she was doing and, without a
word, proceeded to braid his hair while we, the
men, continued to talk as if she weren’t there.
As a young newcomer, Ms. Israel quickly
realized that to fit in she had no choice but to go
with the flow so she watched what the members
did and modeled her actions after theirs.
Initially, she had been shocked at her mother’s
transformation, but soon she realized that she,
too, had become meek and submissive.
So why did people such as Rachel’s mother join
the Family? Ms. Israel addresses this question in
an excellent chapter, “Why Love? ...” (Chapter
5), She finds that members came from very
diverse backgrounds—rich and poor, good
families and bad but for the most part they were
young hippies looking for communal
alternatives to mainstream society but
disillusioned by everything they had tried. That
is, until they met the Love Family, which they
often likened to “coming home” (p. 159). By the
time Ms. Israel’s mother joined, the Family no
longer needed to proselytize because “droves of
people” (p. 156) from the counterculture were
eager to join, even knowing that total
submission was part of the deal.
Ms. Israel has no use for those who claim they
were brainwashed, and she gives little attention
to the issue. “They had all made the choice to be
there in the first place and had willingly
relinquished their autonomy,” she writes (p.

International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 10, 2019 87
611). This is an important observation. The Love
Family’s membership was self-selected, in that
people chose to join because the Family offered
something they wanted. They knew they would
have to change and were willing to do so, or at
least give it a try. Self-selection continued after
members joined because turnover was high
among the Hebrew names. At the same time,
selection by the Family also occurred because
not everyone who wanted to join was allowed to.
The community effectively screened out free
riders and people unlikely to adapt to the
Family’s culture.
The result of these selection processes was a
membership ready and willing to go with the
program, and Ms. Israel’s book is peppered with
examples of how Family beliefs and practices
then facilitated the process. The core belief was
“We are One,” and there was enormous pressure
to be One, to not have personal opinions or
independent ideas. Individual thoughts were
from Satan. Any negative comment would result
in gentle admonishments to stay “positive” (p.
88), “take it up” (p. 89), or “brighten up” (p. 91)
and members would be reminded that “thoughts
create” (p. 88). If you continued to hold to an
independent viewpoint, you would be labeled
“dark” (p. 91) and subjected to gossip and
ostracism. Given the rewards of membership—
meaning, purpose, security, and a community of
friends—the cost of leaving was simply too
high. The result was constant self-monitoring
and the suppression of contrary thoughts and
feelings, which, in turn created an illusion of
Oneness in the community. For those like Ms.
Israel, who still harbored “separate thoughts” (p.
91), the appearance of unanimity fostered guilt:
Why am I the only one who doesn’t get it?
Marijuana and, in particular, psychedelic drugs
were used to reinforce the Family’s belief
system. They were regarded as “sacraments”—
marijuana because it brought people together,
and psychedelics because they produced visions.
Visions were common and always discussed in
meetings, where they were recounted in ways
that confirmed Family beliefs, Love Israel’s
authority, or both. Of course, some people made
up visions because there was such great pressure
to have them, and those who didn’t wondered
why they didn’t get it.
Ms. Israel and several of her peers were
introduced to LSD when they were just 12 or 13
years of age. The occasion was an informal rite
of passage, approved by Love and conducted by
an elder acting as guide. The purpose of the LSD
was to help the kids experience Love Israel’s
vision of the Oneness of all things. And Ms.
Israel did have such a vision. Afterward, the idea
of being One “no longer was just something I
was being told it was something I had
experienced, something I had felt, that was very
real, a way of thinking that was now part of my
awareness” (p. 213).
Nonetheless, Ms. Israel struggled with
questions. She wondered how everything could
exist in the present and was confused about
being eternal, especially after she learned about
babies who had died in the community. (These
deaths were never reported to authorities outside
the Family.) But she quickly accepted Family
beliefs, and she describes the blissful feeling of
merging with the collective mind during Family
gatherings. She felt safe and protected by a
loving community. Yet at other times she found
Family life to be “oppressive” (p. 146). For an
escape, she liked to befriend new members who
didn’t know the rules yet because they would
talk about the past and life in the outside world.
“I craved my own mind,” she says, adding that
she would sneak off by herself “just to be alone”
(p. 147). Her diary was perhaps her most
significant way of maintaining her individuality.
So secret was it that she wrote in a code that she
had invented in case someone found it.
If I have given the impression that Ms. Israel’s
book dwells on the matter of commitment, it is
only because the subject is of great interest to
me. In fact, she addresses a wide range of issues
pertaining to communal survival. These include
health and medicine, sexual relationships,
parenting, education, the acquisition and
allocation of resources, relationships with
government agencies and other communities,
and the roots of the discontent that ignited the
breakup in 1983. Here I will touch on a few of
these.
The chapter on medicine (Chapter 8) reveals the
perils of trying to live without it. Since members
were considered eternal, illness was an illusion,