Like fun and charm, charisma is difficult, if not impossible, to describe. In Netflix’s fascinating six-part documentary (available now) on the attempt to build a new American city in his name, former followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh tried to evoke the spell cast by their guru. “I saw him and that was the end of me,” remembered one.

There is very little footage of Rajneesh, a one-time philosophy professor from northern India: just a long beard and voluminous white robes glimpsed through the window of one of his 93 Rolls-Royces, or through a crowd of ecstatic worshippers.