The Family
CHRIS JOHNSTON AND ROSIE JONES

There is something fascinating and repellent in equal measure about those who claim to be the reincarnation of Jesus. As a case study in both the power of charisma and the damage done by collective religious delusion, Anne Hamilton-Byrne takes some beating. A yoga teacher from Melbourne, with piercing blue eyes and a forceful character, emotionally adept at controlling those drawn to her by playing on their weaknesses, she convinced her many followers from the 1960s to the 1980s that she was the Son of God. Among those taken in were the Catholic priests in the Dandenong Ranges, forested hills on the fringes of the Australian city, who conducted her second marriage to her aide-de-camp, Bill, and then baptised the procession of babies she claimed as her own.

Hamilton-Byrne lived in un-Christ-like luxury, with homes in Australia, Kent, New York and Hawaii. The Great White Brotherhood, as her cult was known, was funded by wealthy initiates – professors, lawyers, senior civil servants – taken in by a mishmash of Buddhist, Christian and New Age ideas and by her carefully maintained blonde, angelic image, the result of repeated facelifts that finally left her with a hairline on the crown of her head.