Devon cult canes children to 'cleanse their sins': Mother's testimony lifts lid on mysterious commune | Mail Online

The first mists of autumn have descended on the Blackdown Hills, and next weekend one of the alternative communities who have gravitated to this moody, legend-steeped part of the West Country will attempt to lighten the spirits by staging a seasonal festival.

The two-day event, at a rambling farmstead near the small Devon village of Dunkeswell, will feature such local traditions as circle-dancing and apple-pressing to make fresh juice, and it will end with a play — a homespun morality tale enacted by the group’s 20-odd children.

To many villagers, news of this performance has come as a surprise. For although members of the Twelve Tribes, a controversial, US-based cult, began squatting at abandoned Stentwood Farm 14 years ago, and have built it into an impressive smallholding, with a quaint tea-room serving home-baked food, their children are so seldom permitted to leave the commune — hidden down a little-used lane — that few outsiders knew so many live there.

While their baggy-smocked parents greet passing hikers and cyclists with a cautious wave as they do their chores, and the chosen few are permitted to sell their locally-renowned bread and cakes at markets and pop festivals (at the same time trying to recruit converts), for their sons and daughters, contact with non-believers is severely restricted.

Dressed puritanically in bonnets and canvas trousers, they are not permitted to attend local schools, join sports teams or clubs, watch TV or use the internet, much less make friends beyond their closed community. Indeed, they are forbidden from playing any game involving imagination or fantasy.

To most parents, this controlled upbringing alone would be cause for concern. Yet it is not the darkest trial facing the Twelve Tribes children, as they have to conform to the cult’s stultifying doctrine.

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Supposedly to cleanse them of sin and prepare them for salvation when the world ends (the cult insists it will, within the next century or so), they are repeatedly ordered to bend over to be thrashed on their bare bottoms with a willow rod soaked in resin to make it more pliable.

And as these so-called ‘correction’ sessions are central to the cult’s beliefs — a mishmash of Judaism and Christianity devised by its messianic leader Eugene Spriggs, a former carnival showman from Tennessee — the children are often thrashed several times a day.

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Had she known the dark secrets she has since learned about the Twelve Tribes and its dubious leader, Spriggs — or Yoneq, as he prefers (all members have ancient Israelite names) — she might have been less gullible.

Now a wizened 76-year-old with a straggly grey beard and shoulder-length hair, Spriggs was a high-school guidance counsellor as well as a carnival front-man before dropping out and living as a hippy in California, where he formed his own church.

Then, 40 years ago, reputedly declaring himself to be a reincarnation of the prophet Elijah, he decamped with 1,000 followers to Vermont and set up a commune, later sending missionaries to start 12 new ones in Europe, Australia and South America: each representing an original tribe of Israel.

They are run on the profits of a string of bakeries, delis and small factories, and it has been reported that the cult has a sizeable fortune, stashed in offshore accounts. Though it must be said that by comparison with other American religious cult leaders, Spriggs appears to live relatively modestly.

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Quoting Proverbs 13:24 — from which derives the adage ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ — Spriggs stood defiant, hiring a slick lawyer (who later joined the cult) to persuade a judge the state had acted unconstitutionally and order the children’s release.

Since then, the U.S authorities have tolerated the cult’s child-rearing methodology, which is now enshrined in a 147-page manual, littered with Biblical references which supposedly justify ‘spanking’, as the group call it.

Entitled ‘Our Child Training Teachings’, the parental handbook is adorned with happy family photographs, glossing over another uncomfortable truth: that many Twelve Tribes families have been torn apart by their views over whacking their children.

Devon cult canes children to 'cleanse their sins': Mother's testimony lifts lid on mysterious commune | Mail Online