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    An apocalyptic cult, 900 dead: remembering the Jonestown massacre, 40 years on

    More than 900 people, many of them children, died in a mass murder-suicide in 1978 by drinking cyanide-laced punch at the order of cult leader Jim Jones
    by J Oliver Conroy Nov 17, 2018 5 minutes
    An aerial view of the mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, which took place 40 years ago, on 18 November 1978. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

    Four decades ago this Sunday, the Rev Jim Jones, the charismatic leader of an American cult in the Guyanese jungle, ordered his followers to murder a US congressman and several journalists, then commit mass suicide by drinking cyanide-laced fruit punch.

    The Jonestown massacre was, before 9/11, the largest single incident of intentional civilian death in American history. More than 900 people died, many children. It was also a devastating cultural trauma: the end of the last strains of a certain kind of 1960s idealism and 1970s radicalism. Jonestown’s legacy lives on in the ironic phrase “drink the Kool-Aid”. (In actuality it was Fla-Vor-Aid.)

    Although he would later become a symbol of the darker side of the west coast counterculture, Jim Jones was born to a poor family in Indiana. Described as an intelligent and strange child, Jones was instinctively attracted to religion, especially charismatic Christian traditions like Pentecostalism. He

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