Why you should listen to the Jonestown Death Tape
Content warning: Mass suicide, cultic dynamics, & death of children.
On November 18, 1978, over 900 people died of cyanide poisoning at Jonestown, a compound in the jungles of Guyana. They were members of an organization called the Peoples Temple, led by the preacher Jim Jones, that had once been a highly impactful force of social reform in San Francisco but had now descended into a bizarre, heavily controlled forced labor dystopia presided over by the amphetamine-driven Jones as mad king. You’ve of course heard the term “drinking the Kool-Aid” (it was actually Flavor Aid, a cheaper knockoff).
You may or may not know that there’s an audio recording of the massacre. The FBI labeled it “Q042” but it’s usually referred to as the “Jonestown death tape”; a macabre appellation, well-earned but also overly trivializing in comparison to the tape’s actual contents.
The tape is about 44 minutes long, but it spans several hours; recording was stopped and started at seemingly arbitrary moments. It’s a truly incredible document because it feels almost as if it was prepared. It’s almost structured like a three-act play. I used to listen to it at least once a year as a kind of memento mori and also because hearing these people talking in their own words really humanizes them. It’s so easy to caricaturize what happened that day, boil it down to “they were a cult and they all killed themselves because [insert inane oversimplified reason here, e.g. “social proof”].” But when you hear the specifics it becomes more difficult to be overly confident about any particular interpretation of this, there are so many nuances and complications.
For that reason, I’m not really going to interpret the contents of the tape; I don’t think that’s my place. But I’m going to share a few things about it that are worth knowing.
One of the weirdest things about the tape is that when you listen to it you can hear something like a funeral dirge running under the entire thing. People often think that what they’re hearing is an organ, but it’s not. The audio of the massacre was recorded over a blues album that was previously on the tape, but now playing at half speed. It just happens to create an eerie background elegy. Completely unintentionally.
I don’t know what to make of this but it fills me with a sort of awe. Have you ever had experiences when you were in an episode of your life that was dense with meaning—whether for good or ill—and disparate things started to sort of rhyme with each other in an uncanny way? It’s weird how this happens sometimes—a nexus of meaning weirdly attracts a chorus of relevant symbols around it. I think about that whenever I hear the unearthly, funereal chords that open Tape Q042.
Next we hear Jim Jones pontificating on why they’re going to do this. It would take quite a lot of context to explain the details here but I’ll try to sum it up briefly: a California congressman, Leo Ryan, had just visited Jonestown in response to numerous complaints and reports that people in Jonestown were living under cruel and unusual conditions. These reports were pretty much entirely true. When Ryan visited, they put a lot of effort into cleaning up the place, hosting a night of dinner and heartfelt singing, and making it all look reasonably cheerful. However, some members elected to leave with the congressman on a plane back to the US the next day. In response, a cadre of Jones’s supporters followed the departing group to the airfield and murdered the congressman, along with several of the defectors. (Jones claimed he was unable to prevent the attack but this was an obvious lie.) Jones believed that the next thing that would happen would be the U.S. government storming the compound and either stealing or murdering their children; therefore, he argues, the most revolutionary thing they can do is take their own lives so as to die in peace rather than violence. “It was said by the greatest of prophets, from time immemorial,” Jones says, “‘No man may take my life from me—I lay my life down.” And the crowd applauds.
Only one person speaks out against the mass suicide, a woman named Christine Miller. The first third or so of the tape centers largely on the debate between Miller and Jones. Miller argues that there’s little reason for everyone to die due to the actions of a few; she suggests taking an airlift to Russia, a possibility Jones had evidently mentioned in the past; she says “I feel like as long as there’s life, there’s hope. That’s my faith.” Jones answers her on each point: “I haven’t seen anybody yet that didn’t die. I’d like to choose my death for a change.”
As their conversation goes on, other members of the group start to argue against Miller, shouting her down. Not a single person speaks in her favor.
After Christine eventually stands down, the rest of the tape consists largely of Jones continuing to ramble nihilistically, interspersed with other group members thanking him (they call him “Dad”) for all he’s done for them. Some members give soothing speeches to help calm the others down. One man gives a particularly beautiful speech that still haunts me:
One of the things that I used to do, I used to be a therapist. And the kind of therapy that I did had to do with reincarnation and past life situations. And every time anybody had the experience of going into a past life, I was fortunate enough to be able to let them experience it all the way through their death, so to speak. And everybody was so happy when they made that step to the other side… When you have a body that’s been crippled, suddenly you have the kind of body that you want to have… It feels good, it never felt so good, family, I tell ya… you’ve never felt so good as how that feels.
Don’t let me aestheticize the contents too much, though. There are some very dark moments on this tape. Notoriously, you do hear children crying for much of the second half, and there’s one point where a woman says to the crowd “They’re not crying from pain. It’s just a little bitter tasting but, they’re not crying out of any pain,” which if you know anything about cyanide poisoning is sadly completely untrue. (Jones didn’t drink the cyanide himself; he had one of his assistants shoot him in the head. A lying hypocrite to the end.) But I think if you are the kind of person who can tolerate that sort of thing, there’s a lot in this document worth hearing.
P.S. I had to post something today and this is one of the few topics I can write about mostly from memory, please don’t get mad at me for this.