The Bizarre Story Of The California Cult That Inspired Charles Manson

The stories behind shadowy cults typically follow a similar pattern which emerges time and time again. They typically revolve around a charismatic leader — almost always a man with Messianic tendencies — who attracts a circle of followers made up of vulnerable people and lost souls looking to turn their lives around. As such, the leader's followers are open to radical ideas, and the cult works to reorganize their understanding of the outside world using quasi-religious and occult imagery which alienates them further from mainstream society. At their core, they often contain what The New Yorker's Zöe Heller describes as a "pyramid scheme of sexual slavery," with shame, guilt, and physical forms of coercion including food and sleep deprivation used to bend members to the leader's will. In many cases, such groups reach their nadir with an explosive act of violence.

One may assume that the similar traits found in multiple cults across the Western world are the result of the people behind them simply developing the same coercive tactics and reaching for the same touchstones to attract followers from broadly the same culture — according to religious expert Ben Zeller, many of those who joined American cults in the 1960s and 1970s were from relatively affluent white families (per KCRW). But the truth is that some cults actually learn from one another. In the case of the Manson Family, the murderous California cult that revolved around would-be rockstar Charles Manson, much of the inspiration may have come from a group called WKFL Fountain of the World, which formed in 1948 under a man called Master Krishna Venta and which came to a violent end 10 years later.

The cult leader known as Master Krishna Venta was born Francis Pencovic, and had worked as a boilermaker prior to his forming WKFL Fountain of the World (the initialism stood for "Wisdom, Knowledge, Faith, and Love)". Like many cult leaders, Venta reportedly kept his followers in the dark over his past, making outlandish claims such as that he had been present in Rome in 600 A.D.

What they apparently didn't know was that their leader had a lengthy criminal record, which included arrests for writing threatening letters to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the early 1940s and for writing false checks, for which he was sentenced to nine months in prison. According to a 1958 article from The Los Angeles Times, he had been known by various aliases including Francis Hiendswatzer, Frank Jensen, and Frank Christopher. After Venta was taken to court by the mother of his two children over child support payments, it was suggested that he had been compelled to form the Fountain of the World cult as a way of making his assets communal and hiding them from his former family.

When he first established his cult in 1948, Master Krishna Venta had his followers adhere to the Biblical Ten Commandments. Many of the cultists in WKFL Fountain of the World reportedly came to believe that Venta himself was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, and among believers he was rumored to have no navel which his followers took as proof he did not have a human birth.

But while Venta's cult drew primarily from Christianity to paint its leader as the new Messiah, the belief system he espoused contained many more fanciful details that he had seemingly dreamed up on his own. Chief among the mythos of WKFL Fountain of the World was Venta's claim that he had originally come to Earth 240,000 years ago, as part of a spaceship convoy containing 35,000 people from the planet Neophrates, per Archaeologist and author Rebecca Bradley. According to Venta, Neophrates' orbit has drawn it too close to its sun and rendered it uninhabitable, and the convoy had set out to our planet and established humanity as we know it.

But Master Krishna Venta's mysticism wasn't just concerned with an unprovable alien past; it also looked to the future, and did so with decidedly apocalyptic overtones. Venta's teachings claimed that the United States, which at the time of the formation of WKFL Fountain of the World was just emerging from the horrors of World War II, was to be plunged into a race war in which the white population would be defeated by the Black population. He said that the country would then be invaded by Russia, after which Venta himself would emerge as the true leader ready to rebuild the world with 144,000 followers.

By 1968, Venta had among his followers Charles Manson, who, along with several members of the future Manson Family, stayed with the Fountain group for several months. Though the details of Manson's interactions with Venta and his followers are scant, it is believed that Manson was evicted from the Fountain after attempting a coup against the group's "Master." Indeed, it appears that Manson took inspiration from the veteran cult leader, perhaps repurposing Venta's apocalyptic vision of a race war for his own mythos, retitling it "Helter Skelter" after the Beatles song.

Like Master Krishna Venta, Charles Manson told followers that he was convinced that race war was just around the corner in the United States. After becoming estranged from WKFL Fountain of the World, Manson made "Helter Skelter" – a sort of disordered confusion — the central myth of the Manson Family, compelling his followers to buy into his disturbing apocalyptic vision. 

In July and August 1969, under the leader's direction, the Manson Family carried out nine murders, including that of actress Sharon Tate. Though the murders were said to fit somehow into Manson's vision, there are still several mysteries surrounding the Manson murders. What is seldom remembered about the Manson Murders is that the Manson Family attempted to pin these murders The Black Panthers, a step which they thought would bring about the race war from which Manson believed he would emerge all-powerful (Manson had previously shot a man he believed to be a Panther, and had grown paranoid that the organization might attempt to pursue him). Thankfully, the involvement of Manson and his followers was proven in court, and several including Manson, spent the rest of their lives behind bars for their bloody crimes. Manson died in prison in 2017.

Unlike the Manson Family it would arguably influence, there is no evidence that the WKFL Fountain of the World sought to perform acts of violence against society to achieve its aims or to bring about the apocalyptic vision that Master Krishna Venta foretold. Instead, Venta's followers made public displays of helping the local community, offering to provide help after natural disasters such as the fire-inducing Bakersfield earthquake of 1952, and were on the scene attempting to assist survivors of a plane crash near Chatsworth Reservoir in 1949.

However, within the cult, the contours of Venta's leadership matched those of other leaders of the same ilk in that he came to exert control over the women of the group for his own sexual ends — even the wives of other Fountain members. In 1958, two male members of the group enraged by their wives' sexual relationships with their leader entered the Fountain of the World's monastery in Box Canyon armed with several sticks of dynamite and carried out a suicide bombing, killing 10 people including Venta. Though the cult attempted to continue in the years after the shocking attack, a new leader failed to materialize, the WKFl Fountain of the World faded into obscurity.

Some of those who had been disciples of Venta went on to follow another notorious cult leader: Jim Jones who led the Peoples Temple. For a better understanding of how cult leaders get followers, here is the psychology behind why people join cults.