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Unholy Sensations: A Story of Sex, Scandal, and California's First Cult Scare

Online ISBN:
9780197775356
Print ISBN:
9780197775325
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
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Unholy Sensations: A Story of Sex, Scandal, and California's First Cult Scare

Joshua Paddison
Joshua Paddison
Senior Lecturer, Department of History, Texas State University
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Published online:
20 March 2025
Published in print:
17 July 2025
Online ISBN:
9780197775356
Print ISBN:
9780197775325
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Unholy Sensations tells the forgotten but fascinating story of a sex scandal that erupted in the 1890s around a multiracial spiritualist colony called Fountaingrove in northern California. Out of the scandal came a new kind of public menace—what newspapers called the “cult.” The Fountaingrove sex scandal helped establish for the first time popular ideas of “cults”: groups or movements that violated religious, familial, and sexual norms to such an extent that they seemed dangerous to the dominant moral order. Thomas Lake Harris, the leader of Fountaingrove, became the archetype of the villainous “cult leader,” supposedly brainwashing and manipulating his followers through his powerful charisma. The Fountaingrove scandal also established California as a breeding ground for cults, a reputation that remains strong today. Throughout the 1890s, the scandal’s twists and turns captivated the public with a volatile mix of sex, religion, and racial exoticism due to the presence of Japanese immigrant men at Fountaingrove. From the Fountaingrove scandal onward, calling a group a cult was to mark it as outside religious, racial, sexual, and gender norms, all at the same time. Unholy Sensations tracks the emergence of the “cult” as a cultural concept while exploring the lived day-to-day realities of the Fountaingrove colonists, their beliefs, and their sexual practices, as well as considering the motives of those who attacked Harris and the colony.

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