Opinions on the Sedona Sweat Lodge are like belly buttons - everybody's got one

Well folks, the Yavapai County sherrif’s office isn’t commenting about the Sweat Lodge that killed 3 people out at Angle Valley, but the blogosphere sure is! Gawker’s blog seems to be the most controversial and the harderst to access online today. Some say Oprah’s Dangerous, some say she’s just a reflection of her audience. This blog isn’t available to all the folks in Arizona, so I’m putting it up for them. I don’t know if it’s because Oprah doesn’t fancy being associated with James Ray anymore or if the prosecutor wants to have a jury that doesn’t know anything about the sweat lodge that killed 3 people just outside of Sedona. There’s also an association with Scientology here, and you know how them folks are about criticism. Read it for yourself and decide who sounds credible and who doesn’t.




KPHO in Phoenix released a lot of pictures and copies of some of the documents taken in evidence.

http://www.kpho.com/news/22075834/detail.html



Here’s the newstory that was on CBS the other day

http://www.kpho.com/video/22076046/index.html

Here’s what Casandra Yorgey has to say about the new evidence

http://www.examiner.com/x-11245-Philadelphia-Speculative-Fiction-Examiner~y2009m12d29-Breaking-news-new-police-info-released-on-James-Ray-death-lodge



Terry Hall has a comment about James Ray’s law of gender

http://bizsayer.com/2009/12/03/james-arthur-ray-gender-crazy/





The search warrants and related info is on the Salty Droid blog:

http://saltydroid.info/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Search-Me.pdf





The 3 day schedule for the Spiritual Warrior Retreat is enlarged here:

http://img685.imageshack.us/img685/9829/scheduley.jpg

Here’s the Spiritual Warrior manual. The wavier enclosed has some of the strictest terms I’ve ever heard of:

http://img685.imageshack.us/img685/9829/scheduley.jpg





Here’s Gawker’s blog post today:

Oprah Guru to Dying Sweat Lodge Victims: 'It's a Good Day to Die'

Before three people died in his sweat lodge of horror, James Arthur Ray told them to "surrender to death to survive it." The police report is out, and it's thirty-three pages of insanity, chronicling Ray's sordid career and stanky retreat.

We begin with the scene of the crime: The tarp-covered sweat lodge where participants were to experience "rebirth." As participants began to drop, Ray kept asking for more "grandfathers" (heated rocks) and cut a cool, careless figure amid pandemonium:

This participant believed he was having a heart attack and believed he was going to die. He kept saying “I don’t’ want to die, I don’t’ want to die.” Instead of summoning medical aid, James Ray stated, “It’s a good day to die.”

“During the sweat lodge, Beverly remembers hearing someone say, “I can’t get her to move, I can’t get her to wake up.” James Ray replied, “Leave her alone, she’ll be death with in the next round.” This confirms the statements made by the Mercers.

A doctor who was participating in the ceremony, advised James Arthur Ray that one participant who had almost consciousness stumbled into the heated rocks and a severe burn on his arm. James Arthur Ray’s response was, “He is fine.”





The "let yourself die" theme grazes the aesthetics of cult suicide, which could add a whole new dimension to this already tawdry case, though I suspect Ray wasn't murderous in a premeditated way. He just had his head so far up his own butt he either didn't notice or care that people were perishing left and right. As stunning as this apparent callousness is, however, Ray's followers' continued to adore him. Stockholm syndrome?

Caci said that he observed what he called a large woman unconscious and advised Ray and nothing was done. Caci stated that he and another person at the end of the last round pulled this woman from the Lodge. Caci advised Surak that he felt James Ray could have conducted the sweat lodge better than he did and that there should have been doctors and nurses on the scene to assist in case of emergencies. Lou Caci also attended James Ray’s “Modern Magick” program in March of 2008. Caci was instructed to break a brick with his hand. Caci broke the brick but also broke his hand. Caci described breaking the brick and his hand as an “amazing experience.”

Another participant says she and her husband both broke bones there, along with sixteen Modern Magick participants who ended up in a Hawaiian emergency room. The police report establishes a pattern of physically distressed "vision quest" participants dating back to 2005:

Mickey told Detective Poling he was sitting outside the sweat house while the final session was being held and heard participants inside the lodge “screaming” to get out. Mickey heard James Ray tell the participants, “No!

The 33-page police report is equal parts thriller novel and parody. The detectives exchange emails with message board commenters, one of whom punctuates his murder accusations with a frowny face. We learn about Ray's "wealth society" (Ponzi-ish or Scientology-ish?) and the mysterious suicide of Colleen Conaway, a Ray follower who leapt to her death during a retreat in San Diego. He is motivated, it seems, by some sort of megalomaniacal power fetish:

In one of the events James Ray played the role of “God” and when anyone did anything he didn’t like James would point to them and say “You’re dead.” The participant would then have to play dead until James Ray decided they could live again.

Ray's inestimably irksome righteousness in the sweat lodge of horror aftermath—promoting the notion that the dead people weren't manslaughter victims, just freed of their corporeal beings and in a more spiritually enlightened place—seems to confirm the "megalomaniacal jackass" gloss. [NYT] [Gawker]



To comment on the above post, you can send an email to Azaria Jagger, the author of this post, at azaria@gawker.com or

moc.rekwag@airaza.



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