Philippe Meniére and his life partner, Agnes Jardel, the French Couple who shot dead one police officer and critically wounded another, are still at large somewhere in the surrounding area of Sutherland. As police continue their search, some seriously bizarre details have begun to emerge about their cult and the 12 years they spent cultivating weirdness on the Karoo farm.

Look, any South African knows that if you spend more than a week in the Karoo, you start talking to yourself. Being French, they started off left of centre, but after 12 years in semi-desert isolation, they killed the first public servant person who came to visit, who just happened to be a cop. Now they are hiding in the koppies of the farm that they “know every bossie” of. This from IOL:

Between them they have a .22 hunting rifle, a 9mm pistol, a semi-automatic rifle, two revolvers (a 765 Magnum and a .38 Special) and a pump action shotgun.

Police have deployed more than 50 highly trained trackers to hunt down the couple, who are reportedly hiding and watching their every move. Not a job I’d be volunteering for, especially when one considers that they are bona fide, card-carrying members of a global cult.

The little club these two belong to is called Ramtha. It originated in the United States in 1977, having been founded by one Judy Zebra Knight (no kidding). And now, for a little bit of education. Cue extensive quoting from WikiPedia.

Ramtha (the name is claimed to be derived from Ram and to mean “the God” in Ramtha’s language) is an entity whom Knight claims to channel. According to Ramtha, he was a Lemurian warrior who fought the Atlanteans over 35,000 years ago.^[14]

The four cornerstones of Ramtha’s philosophy are:^[16]

1. The statement ‘You are god’
2. The directive to make known the unknown
3. The concept that consciousness and energy create the nature of reality
4. The challenge to conquer yourself

JZ Knight says that in 1977 Ramtha appeared before her and told her that he had come to help her over the ditch. JZ Knight became his first student of what he calls the great work.^[14]

Skeptics point to Ramtha’s story as proof that he does not exist. Ramtha claims to come from the continent of Lemuria and to have conquered Atlantis. The existence of the two locations are considered of legendary nature, and neither have been found. Furthermore, the claim that Ramtha led an army of 2.5 million contradicts estimates of the world population at 33,000 BC.

When Knight says she is channeling Ramtha, she/he speaks mostly in English, in what sounds like an accent from the Indian Raj,^[19][20] and sometimes in a simplistic way. Ramtha has expressed confusion about modern items (or even the ability to read English),^[21] although he seems to have clear understanding of complex issues of modern physics, such as the quantum field or neurology, which appear frequently in his speeches.^[22]

Ramtha’s teachings appear to be a mixture of Jungian philosophy, Western occult traditions and contemporary positive-thinking attitudes (such as New Age beliefs),^[18] but have yet to stand against elementary skepticism or scrutiny,^[19] and predictions made by the disembodied entity have either failed to come true (for example, predicting that a holocaust would take place in 1985, or that the USA would be involved in a major war in 1985) or the predicted scenarios are too wide to evaluate and/or have too large an error margin to be considered, which is usually the case with channelers.^[18]

…

JZ Knight has been involved in several court disputes, some personal and others business-related. Knight brought suit against a woman from Berlin named Judith Ravell for disturbing Knight’s psychic state and leaving her “hanging in spiritual limbo” during the five years Ravell claimed she was also channeling Ramtha,. The case was brought to the supreme court in Vienna and lasted over five years, at the end of which Austria’s supreme court awarded copyright to J.Z. Knight as the sole channelor of Ramtha, and Ravell was made to pay $800 in psychic damages to J.Z. Knight.^[11]

The cult believes that the world will end in 2012, and is in no way a means of garnering vast swathes of cash for its sole legal challenger, JZ Knight, who lives in a 12,800-square-foot French chateau-style home, and wears a face festooned with the folly of cosmetic surgeons.

According to the the owners of the farm on which the french couples presided, the du Plessis family, the couple got progressively weirder as the Karoo months turned into years. It must be said that the du Plessis’s are certainly not missing their fifteen minutes of fame, providing enough detail to sketch the outlines for a novel. No less than three family members provide beautiful quotes, such as “”They withdrew from society, but still fed off it”, “They both have dark eyes, which have become very intense over the past two years,” and my personal favourite, “It was as if he was constantly trying to read my thoughts.”

So there you have it kids. Don’t mix doses of Karoo and metaphysical cult.

[source: IOL, News24, Wiki]