An Ethnologist at the Mandarom: Maurice Duval on the Pressures of Studying a Group France Had Already Judged

Mandarom

Condensed reading of: Un ethnologue au Mandarom, Presses universitaires de France

Enquiry Inside a “Cult”: Maurice Duval

Maurice Duval’s book presents two points of interest. The first is to bring to light the difficulty of speaking about or studying serenely in France everything that touches on what is called, in a tendentious and stigmatising way, a “cult”. The second point of interest concerns the ethnological study of the Mandarom proper.

Given the purpose of the CICNS’s site, the extracts that follow attach themselves more particularly to giving an overview of the pressures and difficulties that Maurice Duval encountered during his study. The reader is nevertheless encouraged to read the book for both aspects that make its interest.

The hyperlinks in the condensation are added by the CICNS.

See our interview with Maurice Duval (video clip)

Story of a piece of research

(…) This book gives an account of a singular ethnological piece of research, …inside the cult of the Mandarom, situated at about 1,200 m of altitude in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence… The director of the laboratory to which I was then attached suggested undertaking the study of this group… Frightened at the idea of studying a cult, I answered at first in the negative… On learning that a Catholic nun was a specialist on the “cults” in Montpellier, I made an appointment with her. The nun …explained to me that she went into these groups with the aim of “bringing their members back onto the right path”, that is to say onto hers… The fact that she could go there without consequence for herself led me to suppose that I too ought to be able to go.

(…) On 21 October 1996, I addressed a letter to the head of the Mandarom, Mr Gilbert Bourdin, whom his disciples (editor’s note: the “aumists”) call “His Holiness the Lord Hamsah Manarah” (editor’s note: SHM), indicating to him my intellectual curiosity about his group and requesting authorisation to study it. I specified in this letter: “I am a stranger to your system of beliefs and to your practices, of which I know nothing, and I shall have to remain external to them.” This precaution answered the recurrent reaction of a good number of friends and colleagues who feared that I “would not remain an unbeliever for long”… The negotiations with the Mandarom were long, the agreements never seemed definitively acquired, I was asked for patience… But it was an unconditional requirement: either the Mandarom accepted the ethnological enquiry, its method and its duration, or the enquiry would not take place… On 1 October 1997, I spent my first day on the spot… The favourable answer received from the CNRS on 1 December 1997 announced to me that my project on the Mandarom had been ranked second (equal) at national level.

(…) A monk had stopped following me after a few weeks of work on the spot… One of the obstacles I encountered was obviously linked to the media campaign that had taken the Mandarom as its target… It still sometimes happened that I was suspected of being an agent of the Renseignements Généraux, but that was becoming rarer and rarer… Another obstacle, a more objective one this time, came from the initiatory character of the group, because secrets are inherent to every initiation… Access to information was a combat from the beginning to the end of this work.

(…) The ethnological method consists in living as much as possible with the people one wishes to know… When the ethnologist puts on work overalls, as I really did here, he has nothing of an academic, and one will easily imagine that people spoke to me differently because I was perceived differently…

(…) Numerous texts are written on the “cults”, but many of them have the unfortunate tendency to repeat one another, apart from the articles and books that emanate from sociologists of religions. It appeared to me that a deep knowledge of these movements remained to be produced, because in the end, very few journalists have spent more than a few hours in the “cults” they speak of. The debate is so impassioned that one can write a book and publish it, because it sells well, without ever having set foot in the group about which one claims to have knowledge. Scientifically that is obviously unacceptable, and it seemed to me that this work had to fill a gap… I therefore began this study as an ingenuous person, that is to say by disregarding what the media or the “authors” for the general public say, whose purpose can sometimes be suspected of stating what makes a scandal rather than the truth… But to disregard common sense, that is to say everything one thinks one knows, is not easy when it is a matter of a subject so present in the news. My friends and certain colleagues offered their commentaries, advising my wife to keep an eye on me, testing me permanently to see whether I was keeping well away from belief, asking me whether I was not a witness at the Mandarom to rapes, drugs, embezzlement of money, watching to see whether I was becoming an ascetic, etc. As soon as I began this research, I was permanently on the defensive, ostensibly showing the medicines I used to demonstrate that I treated myself with allopathic remedies, not missing an opportunity to exhibit my unbelieving character, etc.

(…) One may be surprised at the lack of intellectual enthusiasm for these groups which nevertheless seem to disturb society… I regret being currently the only ethnologist in France to make a study of what is called a “cult” using the method of that discipline, that is to say immersion in the group studied… What we think we know about the “cults”, in any case about the Mandarom, rests on discourses that emanate from former followers who have broken with the group, sometimes strongly stimulated by associations that have an interest in it. All that rests on debates too impassioned for one to be able to credit them. Even if the words of former followers are very interesting and must be received, it is also fitting to analyse them and not to take them as absolute and systematic truths as soon as they are uttered.

(…) Given the number of cults and the intensity of the debate on this question, it is really very surprising that the State — which nevertheless says it is preoccupied by the question with ostentation and recurrence — suggests no research on these groups… I was sometimes asked whether the Mandarom really deserved a study to be made of it, adding: “The guru is a nutcase and so are the followers.” … But once “They are all mad!” has been asserted, has one advanced? What is more interesting is to know why the followers of the Mandarom are qualified as “mad”… To advance the idea of madness before any minute examination of the question is to evacuate in advance any possibility of reflection.

(…) Working on an object as sensitive as this one, the question of how to name is of the first importance… Words are often polysemous, and where one thinks one is expressing one meaning, the reader may hear another. So it is with the words “cult” and “guru”… The great difficulty in naming concerns above all the group as a whole: is it a cult, and what does that word signify exactly?… to say of a group today that it is a cult is to stigmatise it, indeed to criminalise it… Objectively, the group of the Mandarom has put in place a clergy, rites, a corpus of beliefs, a dogma; it has a relation to the divine — so many elements that make it necessary to speak of a religious group, and more precisely of a marginal religious group.

The formation of a totalitarian pocket

(…) The story of this research could not pass over in silence the pressures I underwent throughout this work (see also on this subject the interview with Régis Dericquebourg)

(…) In 1998, I received a letter from the president of section 38 (CNRS), which deals with ethnology. It said among other things: “Your projects appeared insufficiently (…) detached; hence the fear… that your deliberately relativist approach may be used for the banalisation of movements of the type of the one you are studying.”… It (editor’s note: the commission) condemned before knowing, which, for a commission of researchers, is worrying to say the least… This story brings into relief a serious phenomenon: there exist taboo objects for the majority of the ethnologists who sat at that time on the CNRS commission.

(…) The president of the University of Provence refused to let me organise a colloquium on the theme of the “cults” at that university, although he had accepted at first, while specifying that we would be closely watched. I had proposed to my laboratory to set up a Centre for research and documentation on the New religious movements. My laboratory, favourable at first, then changed its mind. Yet the public authorities say they are interested in the observation of the cults, so how is one to understand these contradictory practices, if not by a deliberate will not to know?

(…) The paroxysm of suspicion towards me was reached when the management of the Mandarom had the unfortunate idea of sending 13,953 letters (!) to defend itself. Believing that researchers and teacher-researchers would understand better than others… I could no longer spend an evening in the company of friends or colleagues without being flooded with questions, not about what the aumists are, but about the crimes attributed to them… Troubled by what I observed, I wrote to the president of the Ligue des droits de l’homme, explaining to him what I knew of the Mandarom and the contradictions I had been able to note on certain aspects with what was said of it in the media… I never received a reply… The position of the Ligue des droits de l’homme on this question is to oppose an extension of the penal provisions while affirming that the doings of the cults must be fought (LDH info, no. 90, June 2000, p11). Obviously, the Mandarom is included in the catch-all “cults”.

(…) I wrote three articles intended for specialised journals. The first was sent to one of the great ethnology journals… He (editor’s note: the editor-in-chief) telephoned me and informed me that the journal’s reading committee had great reservations about my text. Here are some of the corrections that were asked of me:

not to say that the rumour about the Mandarom is unfounded; (Read also on the theme of rumour: http://www.cicns.net/Rumeurs_3.htm, /library/cicns/rumeurs2/, /library/cicns/rumeurs/)
to say that my study risks serving the group studied;
to analyse the group’s finances (it is in all likelihood the first time in the history of the discipline that an ethnologist has been asked to transform himself into a tax agent), etc.

I nevertheless agreed to revise the article within certain limits and returned it corrected. I received a letter from the journal’s director: (…) “We have however collectively considered that an approach by participant observation was certainly useful and even necessary, but that it was frankly insufficient and that one could not approach such a subject without diversifying the approaches… it is preferable that you now take back your freedom for this text and I am asking the editorial office to return it to you.” I wondered, reading this letter, whether it was the first time that an ethnology journal had exercised a censorship in order to conform to common sense… That is a paradox, and not the least of them, since the aim of research work is above all to deconstruct common sense, to go against opinion…

A few months later, the University of Aix-en-Provence published a collective work on prayer… I proposed to the person in charge of the work a text on prayer at the Mandarom… The University’s editorial council opposed the publication of my article. I received a letter from the director of publications who wrote this: “I have never called your scientific rigour into question…”. It is quite evident that since it is not “scientific rigour” that is at issue, the reasons are indeed ideological ones, inherent to a secular fundamentalism just as dangerous and antidemocratic as the religious fundamentalisms.

(…) There seems to be no taboo about an ethnologist going to study a prophet and his movement in Africa, contrary to what happens with the Mandarom… The Other enters one of two classes, valued or devaluing, according to his spatial proximity.

(…) The aumists decided to submit a dossier to the President of the Republic… They were asking (therefore) for equality of treatment… The delegation comprised the president of the Association du Vajra triomphant, four bishops, all in sacerdotal dress, a woman lawyer and follower in civilian dress, and a bailiff who did not belong to the movement… Police officers asked the delegation not to pursue its course of action… The president asked: “What offence have we committed?” They (editor’s note: the police officers) retorted that the aumists had made no declaration of a demonstration to the police prefecture… She (editor’s note: the president) declared that she in no way wished to be in breach of the law and headed at once for the prefecture… The president proposed (then) to reduce the delegation to three people. “That would still be a demonstration”, she was told. She suggested that only two people go there. “That would still be a demonstration”, insisted the Secretary (editor’s note: of the deputy director for Public Order)… the aumists decided to renounce their course of action and entrusted their dossier to the bailiff… The Élysée refused to take it.

Democratic inquisition

(…) The accusations that have been formulated against the Mandarom are: rape of followers by the guru, embezzlement of money, money laundering (see on this subject), construction of statues that disfigure the landscape, use of drugs, mental manipulations, confinement of children, confinement of the followers, madness of the guru, madness of the followers, etc. Where the aumists are concerned, the habitual presumption of innocence has been replaced by the presumption of guilt… It must be specified that the Mandarom has never been convicted to this day (except for the statue, which was destroyed by the public authorities in 2001), nor its guru on the question of rape notably, and this despite the intense work of the justice system.

(…) Contrary to widespread opinion, the Tribunal de grande instance of Nanterre ordered the authors of a work accusing the guru of rape — written by a former follower designating herself as the victim and above all by her friend, a TF1 journalist — to pay 10,000 F in damages to SHM for non-respect of the presumption of innocence.

(…) On the question of the children imprisoned at the Mandarom, as I said above, I never saw a single child shut up in that place during the years my research lasted. Now, opinion is convinced of the contrary, which shows clearly that there is a powerful ideological factor at work.

(…) As for the question of drugs, it would make anyone laugh who honestly knows the aumists, because they manifestly have no need of that to “travel” in the cosmos!… (One may ask oneself whether or not this way of life should be forbidden, that is to say the monastic way of life, but then one must ask the question for all monasteries… in order to respect equality of rights.)

(…) “Mental manipulation”, also called “brainwashing”, was long ago refuted by researchers… Need it be recalled that until the 1970s, the Cistercian monks had no private cell to sleep in, that they had to sleep fully dressed in order to be in a state of permanent wakefulness, and that even today these monks renounce their family, a career, a social life, etc.

(…) The same belief at the Mandarom and in the Hindu religion does not have the same status and does not provoke the same reactions. Our society seeks to elaborate a single norm, a norm that aims to codify our behaviours and our thoughts to the extreme and in which there is no longer any place for the margins, even peaceful ones. Everyone must fall into line, despite a discourse on liberty that would give the illusion of the contrary.

(…) The rumour concerning it (editor’s note: the Mandarom) expresses itself in diverse and multiple manners. Thus a television programme expresses itself with images of the OTS (Order of the Solar Temple), a “cult” whose members apparently committed suicide, associated with photographs of the Mandarom, when there is no link at all between these two groups… On the same page of a magazine for young people, devoted to children in the cults, one sees the photograph of a little girl who is supposed to live with the Devotees of Krishna (that is in any case what the magazine suggests). Beside her figures the photograph of Gilbert Bourdin — yet there is no question at all of the Mandarom in the article.

(…) The formation of opinions in our society is principally the doing of the media. Indeed, anthropology posits that what women and men think does not necessarily result from their own will, but that a part of these thoughts is forged by the society that secretes and diffuses them. But of course, alas, these ideas can be more or less close to the truth. Journalists are subject to professional constraints capable of preventing them from taking time to elaborate their dossiers. That sometimes entails errors liable to have heavy consequences, even for those who do their work with the greatest seriousness and with a certain ethics.

(…) In this instance, the media have, as their principal source of information, the associations for the fight against the “cults”. These are the ADFI (Association for the defence of the individual and the family)… and the Centre Roger-Ikor (CCMM)… They (editor’s note: the associations) are surrounded by a few authors who find here the material for their writings… I undertook to telephone the president of a section of the ADFI in Paris… he begged me to accept being followed by the good offices of his association “to protect you”, he told me… In vain did I tell him my age, my professional experience, my absolutely unbelieving character; nothing worked… Deafness is a necessity in order to condemn a priori.

(…) One of the spearheads of the combat against the Mandarom and against these groups, A. Vivien, says clearly that one must not understand, because knowledge would prevent one from fighting! ”(…) by dint of understanding one ends up justifying (…) The sanctimonious sociologists, at the CNRS and elsewhere (…) meekly fall into line with the discourses of the cults which must be understood and thus authorise themselves not to fight their excesses”. This virulent anti-intellectualism leads Mr Vivien to draw his revolver on hearing intellectual knowledge spoken of… yet, in elementary logic, to know makes it possible either to observe that one was mistaken and that there is nothing to fight because nothing is delictual or, on the contrary, to use the knowledge acquired better to counter what must be countered. There certainly exist “cults” that represent a danger, even if, in the words of a sociologist of religions, “these groupings are not necessarily dangerous and I would add that they very rarely become so” (R. J. Campiche, Quand les sectes affolent, Labor & Fides, 1995, p.103).

(…) The politicians, of all tendencies combined, say the same thing about the Mandarom:

With the cults, you are in danger, a danger sometimes invisible and all the more pernicious. That is what the Interministerial Observatory on the cults says very explicitly in its annual report of 1997. It condemns the cults while saying that it does not know what they are.
(…) We are well informed… and we are doing what is necessary to protect you.
(…) So trust us… we are protecting you from Evil.

The political benefit of the anti-cult campaign is enormous, because it institutes a consensus in French society. Indeed, who does not adhere to this opinion according to which the cults represent a danger?… Currently, along with terrorism, there is no better instrument on the political plane for making a diversion from the essential social problems than that of the cults.

Daily life

(…) The Mandarom is initially a monastery sheltering monks and nuns. Those who wish to consecrate a part of their life to spirituality within this framework take vows of chastity and poverty, but do not pronounce perpetual vows — “that is no longer adapted to modern society”, SHM said.

(…) Aumist vegetarianism is explained by the concern to take the minimum from Nature, because every levy disturbs a process of reincarnation… The higher the being consumed is in the hierarchical scale of the vegetable or animal kingdom, that is to say the closer it is to humanity, the more one must pray.

(…) One has the impression that, for the aumists, nothing any longer belongs to the profane. Cooking, eating, washing up, etc., profane activities if ever there were, for most people, become here acts associated with spirituality.

(…) Renunciation comprises (therefore) two categories: exterior renunciation, which has as its object concrete things (silence, the pleasures of the table, comfort, the pleasures of sexuality, those of the affects, etc.) and interior renunciation, the most difficult, that is to say the one that takes the ego as its object… The knights, that is to say the faithful who live in civil life, cannot be renunciants in the same way as the monks and nuns, since renunciation does not accommodate itself to social life.

(…) Sexual liberation is condemned, and the guru calls for a resacralisation of sexual relations… Contraception is accepted because it is preferable that the child be wanted… If abortion is tolerated, everything must nevertheless be done to avoid it…

(…) Violence is condemned, whether physical or verbal, and non-violence is a virtue…

Portraits

(…) The aumists think that Gilbert Bourdin is a reincarnation of God on earth, but that it is always the same God who has manifested himself since the dawn of time; the idea of excluding one is therefore unthinkable, since it is the same one. Moreover, the social context and the ideology of the time were opposed to the exclusion of the different. There resulted from this a syncretism that seeks to associate all the religions of the world, monotheistic and polytheistic, which the guru has synthesised.

(…) finding the former followers is difficult when it is a matter of those who have turned against their former movement… Curiously, it is those who had no contact with the ADFI… whom I was able to meet. Should one establish a relation of cause and effect here?

Who are they?

(…) Aumism is (therefore) a minority religion which is inscribed both in the rupture with the Christian Churches and in continuity with them, since it can be compatible with them.

The beliefs

(…) Aumist time is a cyclical time composed of four cycles: the Age of Silver, the Age of Copper, the Age of Iron and the Age of Gold. To these four times is added another, outside of time, the Age of Diamond… The “Lord” Hamsah Manarah is (therefore) for the aumists the Cosmo-planetary Messiah. He has returned to earth with the aim of helping humanity to accede to the Age of Gold, because now the “Christ on the cross is finished”, he is a God of the Age of Iron, and he has returned as “glorious Christ” with the sword and the shield… Gods (also) declared war on him with the design of hindering his project, and he had to clean the earth by annihilating numerous demons… Between 1983 and 1988, a war could have broken out, but the “Lord” intervened and prevented it. Certain gods also tried to attack SHM, following which tens of millions of gods were obliged to take refuge on other planets.

(…) One addresses oneself directly to God — even if that is not always systematically the case — but here, as in Hinduism, God is present in each person. Indeed, “a divine particle is in each one”; it is the “supreme self” that it is fitting to develop through spiritual work.

(…) In the final analysis, one may say that the gods of aumism are like the Greek gods: they are not infinitely good and can even be perverse… These multiple gods are mortal… Above the religions and the gods, the God of Unity is immortal. He returns regularly to earth as to all the planets. The “Lord” Hamsah Manarah was an incarnation, but in that he is like every living being, since each holds a divine particle within himself that allows access to deity, as in Buddhism and Hinduism.

Not to conclude

(…) One could not conclude the series of grave questions that have been addressed here. The questions are posed, and that is already a great deal. Their aim is to question further, indeed to disturb, by showing how opinion can construct a rumour, with foundations as fragile as they are dangerous, but nevertheless largely consensual. Now, it falls to the researcher to deconstruct these opinions and to replace them with a view as objective as possible, and to substitute, in this debate, reason for passion.

(…) One is mistaken when one thinks of eradicating a system of beliefs by violence, as our society is doing at the moment, because in this domain, only the apprenticeship of the critique of judgement and of critical judgement can serve… One thing is certain: the truth of these movements must be discovered, and for that research in the social sciences must be encouraged… To ensure that religious groups, marginal as well as traditional, conform to the law and to the broad lines of collective morality, and to leave them the possibility of living their beliefs, is the rule to be adopted, even if a critical debate is then engaged with regard to them.

A senior lecturer in the ethnology department of the University Paul-Valéry in Montpellier, director of the CERCE (Centre d’études et de recherches comparatives en ethnologie), Maurice Duval is notably the author of Ni morts, ni vivants : marins, Pour une ethnologie du huis-clos, “Ethnologies-Controverses”, PUF, 1998

Not to be missed: Our interview with Maurice Duval

and sociologues-nouvelles-spiritualites-23.htm