Beam them up, Heidi - Remembering the Las Cañadas suicide sect scare
ex-l wrote:The woman was whacko ...
OK. I will eat humble pie too.
I was too fast and too hard with that remark. It was unfair on her and you.
When I saw Heidi Fittgau-Garthe she would be both going through the Honeymoon Phase AND being "lovebombed" - although the term and CONSCIOUS practise does not exist within the BKWSU - by the Seniors. During that period ... we all go a little mad, lose our grounding becoming "intoxicated". Older English people have prejudicial sanskars against perceived cranky Germans, so pass it via that filter too.
What I did feel was that right from the beginning, she did not really get Gyan or had her own spin on it - which was new at that time and we were all taking and teaching "The Hindi Course". Western BK service was in it "Golden Age" when we were, "all speaking a pure form of Hindi" and it was all very original. She seemed to be allowed extra privileges without following full principles because she had wordly status, like being able to incorporate Gyan into her expensive paid for psychological seminars. If I remember right, she was doing expensive psychological seminars for professional business people and so she might have been seminal in later BK developments.
Of the UFO cults stuff and the ISIS Center, I do not know the real story. Most of what we have is taken from anti-cult websites and tabloid reporting of that time. She was good news for a few days in the standard "whacky cult" mode following Heaven's Gate. A more recent review is below. It is said to be a stitch up by the daughter of a "follower" but has all the classic hallmarks of New Age cult dynamics. Read Stanley Cohen "Moral Panics"
Heide is still alive. It would be great if she could be found and invited to come on this forum to discuss her BKWSU experiences, why she left and what she learnt. It would probably take only a couple of phone calls via the local newspaper.
Tenerife News, Jan. 4, 2007 wrote:It is nine years to the week since Tenerife suddenly leapt to international prominence, swept the prime slots on all the 24 hour news services and hogged the front pages of a host of newspapers around the world. Bad news is good news in the media and Tenerife was hot news for all the wrong reasons as far as the tourism authorities were concerned that week in which the island became the focus for an unprecedented feeding frenzy.
The BBC report filed on January 8 1998 put it like this:
"Spanish police say they have prevented a possible suicide attempt by members of a cult based in Tenerife in the Spanish Canary Islands. The authorities in Tenerife say the 31 members of the cult, who are mainly British and German, were planning to commit suicide later today. Police have detained a German psychologist said to be the leader of the sect ..."
The garbled accounts of that strange night relied heavily on police reports with a good deal of imaginative hearsay and unconfirmed rumours thrown in for good measure.
The police issued a statement which said the general belief among the cult members was the world would end at 7 pm on January 8. They intended to gather in a pre-arranged spot in Las Cañadas, confident that a space ship would put down to collect them – once they had all committed suicide.
In the nick of time – or so the general public were led to believe – the police were tipped off and, in the early hours, a veritable army of state police in riot gear descended on the streets around an ordinary terraced building in the La Salud district of Santa Cruz. Dozens of people were taken into custody.
Among those detained was a German psychologist, Heidi Fittkau-Garthe, a ‘new-age’ figure believed to be the ringleader of the so-called sect. She was arrested and charged with organizing an alleged attempt of mass suicide.[...]
In the end Dr Fittkau-Garthe was detained in custody for twelve days before being released without charges. Since then she has kept a remarkably low profile, living in rustic simplicity on a finca in Arico, involving herself in esoteric studies, working for the Foundation for World Peace and growing lettuces.
Interviewed by a local daily some time ago, she told her interlocutor:
"The group was no sect and I have never worked in one. I was accused of planning the suicide of a group of friends who had merely come over to spend Christmas in Tenerife ...
“What actually happened in 1998 was the result of an act of a daughter’s vengeance on her mother who was one of the group. Six months before they had had an enormous family row and it was the daughter who contacted Interpol and told them her mother and another hundred people were in the mountains of Tenerife intending to commit mass suicide."
The daughter, she said, had informed the authorities that the group was a destructive sect.
"What happened was terrible. And the worst of it all were the lies that were told concerning children.[...]
In the meantime there is a slim possibility the name of Heidi Fittkau-Garthe may surface in the media once again in the coming year: she is said to be trying to organize a peace rally to coincide with the Beijing Olympics.
It will be held in the mountains of Mongolia. High places still seem to hold a fatal fascination for the peace guru of Arico.
Source: Beam them up, Heidi - Remembering the Las Cañadas suicide sect scare, Tenerife News, Jan. 4, 2007.