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<\/a><\/p>\nThe adorable baby in #1 is Adolf Hitler, who became, with his bizarre little moustache and floppy forelock, one of the most recognizable faces of the 20th<\/sup> century, right up there with Elvis and Marilyn.\u00a0 There are commentators on Hitler who angrily denounce any publication of his baby picture as a literal \u201cobscenity\u201d, on the grounds that it humanizes him \u2013 whereas they wish him to be seen as a creature effectively outside<\/em> humanity, whose acts can only be seen as historically unique and uniquely evil.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/a>There are those who would also see Hitler\u2019s followers, the German volk<\/em> in general, as fundamentally flawed, intrinsically different from the rest of humanity, and thus uniquely liable to commit the kind of evil that Hitler spearheaded.\u00a0 This is both demonstrably wrong and not terribly helpful in understanding what happened.\u00a0 Hitler was all too human, of a certain type; his rise and fall followed a common messianic pattern; the atrocities of the Nazi period, though horrific, were by no means unique; and Hitler\u2019s worshippers were, in the main, perfectly normal humans reacting to a messiah in a perfectly normal way.\u00a0 His movement began on the dark side of politics in an era of despair, offering an illusion of light at the end of the post-Versailles tunnel.\u00a0 All of this is actually much scarier than seeing the Nazi phenomenon as unhuman or abnormal.<\/p>\n<\/a>Messiah #2 is Ayn Rand, Russian-born American novelist and pop philosopher, author of the cult novels The Fountainhead<\/em> and Atlas Shrugged<\/em>, herself the fountainhead of the Objectivist movement and a major influence on the Libertarians and some frighteningly influential economists.\u00a0 How does she fit in here?\u00a0 Because the Objectivist movement, built around a philosophy of rationality and individualism, oddly enough displays all the characteristics of a messianic cult, including an interest in apocalypse and salvation. \u00a0Rand\u00a0displayed all the characteristics of a megalomaniac messiah, her novels standing in as Holy Writ.\u00a0 Her following started as a fan club of young intellectuals, with strong elitist overtones.<\/p>\n<\/a>Number 3 is a heartbreaker, considering what this appealing little boy turned into: Jim Jones, the founder and pastor of The People\u2019s Temple in California and of Jonestown in Guyana \u2013 notorious for leading over nine hundred of his followers to die with him on one apocalyptic day in 1978.\u00a0 Since that mass drinking of the Kool-Aid, Jones has become an archetype of the \u201cnutty cult leader\u201d \u2013 which makes him a reasonable benchmark for examining some of the other messiahs, and not just those whose stories ended in suicide.\u00a0 His technique was classic bait-and-switch; he used religion to get the punters in the door, then switched to his own formulation of Jonescentric Marxism.<\/p>\n<\/a>Number 4 is another heartbreaker.\u00a0 The good-looking teenager with the shy smile and ill-fitting suit is Charles Manson in 1949, aged fourteen.\u00a0 Like the aforementioned Roche Theriault, Manson was a messiah on a pathetically petty scale, controlling a harem of young women and a handful of young men.\u00a0 Unlike Theriault, Manson became notorious enough to be considered another twentieth-century archetype: the murderous mind-controlling Svengali-ish cult-leader.\u00a0 Most people know the outline of the story: how, in the summer of 1969, Manson sent his minions out to commit bloody massacre and thereby spark off the apocalypse, their victims including the beautiful and very pregnant actress Sharon Tate.\u00a0 And most of us also remember the continuing worship and bizarre behavior of his followers during his trial.\u00a0 Like Jim Jones, he provides a benchmark for looking at other messianic cults\u2014and not just those that end in homicide.\u00a0 He approached his messiahship through rock music and the dark side of the \u201860s counterculture.<\/p>\n<\/a>Next comes Madame Helena Blavatsky: conwoman, adventuress, spinner of an occult web that would mesh Eastern mysticism with Blavatsky\u2019s own agenda to produce the theosophical movement and its spinoffs.\u00a0 Highly intelligent and utterly unscrupulous, she was part of\u2014and a great beneficiary of\u2014the nineteenth-century craze for spiritualistic and otherworldly things, and is one of those ultimately responsible for the enduring interest in Atlantis and mythical lost civilizations in current popular culture and pseudoarchaeology.\u00a0 That is to say, this bitch has a lot to answer for. \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/a>Number six is Josef Stalin, the man of steel, who finessed himself into a position as Lenin\u2019s successor in controlling the Soviet empire.\u00a0 His modern reputation in the West is that of a rough and thuggish Georgian peasant.\u00a0 On the contrary, he was extremely intelligent and seminary-educated, and even a talented poet in his early years.\u00a0 His was a different role from that of, say, Hitler, but one that is no less important in the game of prophets and messiahs: he played the sidekick who inherits the reins of cultic power when the messiah falls or dies.\u00a0 The psychology that Stalin fostered in his brutal regime, however, was completely characteristic of a cultish mindset, and particularly of the so-called \u201ccult of personality\u201d \u2013 and though he is correctly recognized as a monster, responsible for many more miserable deaths than even Hitler, there are many in the modern Soviet Union who look back on him with admiration and nostalgia.<\/p>\n