End of Days by Sylvia Browne

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 9th, 2022 in Stories

Folgers Coffee heiress; Voytek Frykowski, thirty-two, boyfriend of Abigail Folger; and Jay Sebring, thirty-five, renowned hairstylist. Less than twenty-four hours later, several miles away in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles, two more murders took place on Manson’s orders—Leno LaBianca, forty-four, owner of a successful chain of supermarkets, and his wife, Rosemary, thirty-eight, owner of a dress shop, were viciously killed in their own home. All the dead were Caucasian.

The word pig had been written in blood at both locations, and at the LaBianca house the word healter-skelter [sic] was scrawled in blood on the refrigerator door. And contrary to the initial impressions of the Los Angeles police, the murders were far from motiveless, and the words pig and (properly spelled) helter-skelter were partial keys to unraveling the twisted tragic mystery of yet another doomsday cult.

At its simplest, Manson’s prophecy of and role in the Apocalypse went like this (and it was undoubtedly even more convincing when told with mind-numbing repetition to a bunch of lost, vulnerable young people with an endless supply of recreational drugs in their systems):

While Charles Manson apparently never made any specific claim of being the reincarnated Christ, he spoke often of having once lived two thousand years ago, a lifetime that ended with his death on the cross. He also regaled the Family on countless occasions with his “vision” during a psychedelic mushroom trip: the bed he was lying on became a cross; he could feel the nails in his feet and see Mary Magdalene weeping below him; and when he surrendered to death he could see through the eyes of all humanity at the same time. Many Family members later admitted that they truly believed Charles Manson was Jesus, returned to earth as a sign promised in the Bible that the end of the world was coming.

The biblical book of Revelation, 9:15, reads, “So the four angels were released, who had been ready for the hour, the day, the month and the year, to kill a third of mankind.” The four angels, Manson was sure, were the Beatles. This belief was reinforced by an earlier reference (Revelation 9:3) to “locusts, ” obviously synonymous with “Beatles” in Manson’s interpretation, especially as they’re described in verses 7 and 8: “their faces were like human faces, their hair like women’s hair … they had scales like iron breastplates [the Beatles’ guitars] … they have tails like scorpions [the guitars’ electrical cords].” The first verse of Revelation 9 refers to a “fifth angel … and he was given the key of the shaft of the bottomless pit,” who’s later referred to in verse 11: “They [the locusts] have as king over them the angel of the bottomless pit.” Needless to say, that fifth angel of the bottomless pit, that “fifth Beatle,” was Charles Manson.

As a result, Manson convinced himself and the Family that the Beatles were sending him messages through their songs. To name just a couple: George Harrison’s “Piggies,” recorded on the Beatles’ White Album, was a commentary on materialism, society’s upper class, and greed. Obviously, to Manson, it was an edict to select materialistic, upper-class victims to murder, and to leave the word pig in the victims’ blood as a kind of souvenir/explanation. And then there was the song “Helter Skelter,” also on the White Album, which contains the lyrics, “When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide/Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride/ ’Til I get to the bottom and I see you again.” To the Beatles it was undoubtedly a harmless reference to the amusement park slide that in England is called “helter skelter.” To Manson it was a description of the Family emerging from the bottomless pit to reclaim the world after the great war of Armageddon.
Another Beatles song from the White Album begins, “Blackbird singing in the dead of night/Take these broken wings and learn to fly/All your life you were