A Martian Mode In the psychotic mind, fact and fantasy mingle freely. The line between the real and the imagined easily blurs or disappears. Most madmen invent their own worlds. If the charges against Charles Manson, accused along with five members of his self-styled "family" of killing Sharon Tate and six other people, are true, Manson showed no powers of invention at all. In the weeks since his indictment, those connected with the case have discovered that he may have murdered by the book. The book is Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, an imaginative science-fiction novel long popular among hippies.
The hero of Stranger is Valentine Michael Smith, a human who, somewhat like Kipling's Mowgli, was reared from infancy by nonhumans, in his case Martians, and in the process acquired hypnotic and magical powers. He comes to earth, is tutored by a man called Jubal, then sets out as a self-styled god to save man from himself by propagating his own superior kind and gleefully dispatching those who stand in his way. Manson named an illegitimate child Valentine Michael Smith and nicknamed his parole officer Jubal. That, however, was only the beginning.
Like Referees. In the book, the Martian established a sort of religious colony called a "family" or "nest"—not unlike the commune that Manson led at a deserted movie-location ranch. Inhabitants of the novel's nest practiced free sexual sharing and group nudity, very much the way life was lived at Manson's ranch. In book and in life, the complete abandonment of personal ego to the all-powerful leader, usually through sexual submissiveness, was essential. The fictional Smith and the real Manson apparently shared a belief in their oneness with God. "Among Martians," Heinlein's hero says, "there is only one religion—and it is not a faith, it's a certainty: 'Thou art God!' " Manson's followers often called him God, Jesus or Satan.
The most disquieting similarity between Manson's life and the novel concerns death. Heinlein's Martian teaches a bizarre philosophy of reincarnation. Beings do not die; they are simply "discorporated" and "sent back to the end of the line to try again." He enlists one of his female followers to help him discorporate some enemies of the cult. The Martian makes a list of those to be dispatched, and in one evening 450 are killed. Police believe that Manson, like the Martian, used his women to perform the grisly revenge that he sought on the group gathered with Sharon Tate last summer. According to one of the attorneys in the case. Manson was compiling a Martian-style list of enemies to be murdered.