ABSTRACT
This chapter represents an exhaustive analysis of either the Jonestown tragedy or any other historical episode, nor is any decisive predictive formula attempted. Persecution, or rather opposition and a perceived threat of intervention from state authorities, were significant precipitating factors for the actual suicidal events with respect to both the Jonestown and the Old Believer holocausts. In contrast, Jim Jones has phantasies of CIA mercenaries or other sinister forces stalking Jonestown in the Guyana jungles. The most important similarity between Jonestown and the Old Believer suicides entails a pattern of interweaving political and religious elements in each movement. An important analysis of the Peoples Temple movement and the Jonestown Massacre was published by sociologist John Hall in 1981. An exploratory comparison has been ventured between the sixteenth-century Old Believer mass suicides and the more recent Jonestown deaths of over 900 devotees of the Peoples Temple.
