Krishna Venta

Once upon a time there was a cult that carried out suicide bombings long before it was cool. At the same time, they were steeped in Eastern mysticism long before the Hippie era, again quite ahead of the global trends. What was this sect that, if it existed today, would surely have explosive hipsters as members?

They called themselves the Fountain of the World and were led by a certain Francis Penzovich, the son of Jewish immigrants in California. As is customary, Francis changed his name to Krishna Venta, rejected Judaism, and after a rich career filled with petty fraud, crime, and frequent prison stints - decided to become enlightened, become a Guru, and gather followers who would lead them to a bright future and salvation. The beginning of the sect was in the early forties, during the period when Venta sent threatening letters to the then President Franklin Roosevelt (!?) for some reasons known only to him, which is why he was imprisoned in an insane asylum.

And is there a better place for enlightenment than an insane asylum?

After being released, Venta declared himself a Guru after claiming that the spirit of Jesus had downloaded into his body and he had become just a tool for channeling a higher consciousness, preaching a difficult-to-digest mixture of Christian/Mormon, Jewish and Hindu mysticism. The spirit of Jesus has supposedly been present on earth for a long time because it arrived on this planet 100,000 years ago in an alien ship and was distributed into various individuals who thus conveyed the message of heaven. Among them were the first man Adam, Krishna, Jesus, Joseph Smith (founder of the mega-sect Mormons) and Abraham Lincoln (!?) and the last one was, of course, Venta...

An apocalyptic cultists would not be apocalyptic if he did not predict the end of the world, and Venta said that there would be a nuclear war between the USA and the USSR and that he had to gather 144,000 followers in the shortest possible time who would continue humanity to a new, higher level of consciousness. Something was not going well for him because he gathered at most a few hundred members, bought a property about 45 km from Los Angeles, a place where the sectists could peacefully sect. To be honest, the sect was engaged in charity work, they saved some people during a major fire in California and several survivors of a plane crash, and they also took in homeless people and various sufferers on their property.

Venta later went to Europe to meet the Pope in Rome, to open his eyes and tell him how things were, but the Pope was not in the mood to give him an Audience. Occasionally, quasi-crucifixions were performed in order for Venta to experience the `feeling` of Jesus on Golgotha. Other spiritual activities included gambling in Las Vegas, swindling the sect's funds, and active messianism. In order to obtain funds to strengthen the sect, Venta often went to Las Vegas after once winning a good sum of money gambling...but luck increasingly deserted him and he had to take money from the sect's fund and gamble with it, which brought the sect to the brink of financial collapse.

And then (1958) two fanatical sectarians had enough, the end of the world and the atomic mushrooms were nowhere to be found, and the common money magically disappeared. The two decided to change the mind of the gambler-messiah-immortal-ascended-master through personal self-sacrifice, a martyr's path to a better world. They were probably afraid to openly confront the leader and therefore decided to sacrifice themselves without much talk because the deeds speak for themselves. They purchased dynamite which they tied around their belts and with an electric lighter in their hands they went to the sect's ``base'' in California and found Krishna Venta preaching to a large group of people.

At that moment they activated the explosives, which blew up the suicide bombers along with the leader Venta and eight other sect members, killing a total of 11 people and seriously injuring over 70 others. And so the messiah departed to a higher plane of existence, literally disintegrated, and the sect never recovered from the shock and loss of its leader, existing for some time with fewer and fewer members, only to die out completely in the mid-nineties.

The Cult was just too early...

(Roger Mortis, 081)