Helter Skelter (Manson Scenario) - References To The Beatles and The Book of Revelation

References To The Beatles and The Book of Revelation

When The Beatles first came to the United States, in February 1964, Charles Manson was an inmate in the United States Penitentiary at McNeil Island, in southern Puget Sound. He was serving a sentence for attempting to cash a forged U.S. Treasury check; he was 29 years old. His fellow inmates found his interest in the British pop group "almost an obsession." Taught by inmate Alvin Karpis to play the steel guitar, Manson told many persons that "given the chance, he could be much bigger than the Beatles."

To the Family, a few years later, Manson spoke of The Beatles as "the soul" and "part of 'the hole in the infinite.'" When he delivered the Helter Skelter prophecy around the campfire at Myers Ranch, the Family members believed it:

t that point Charlie’s credibility seemed indisputable. For weeks he had been talking of revolution, prophesying it. We had listened to him rap; we were geared for it – making music to program the young love. Then, from across the Atlantic, the hottest music group in the world substantiates Charlie with an album which is almost blood-curdling in its depiction of violence. It was uncanny.

In My Life with Charles Manson, Paul Watkins wrote that Manson "spent hours quoting and interpreting Revelation to the Family, particularly verses from chapter 9." In an autobiography written with assistance some years after the murders, Tex Watson said that, apart from Chapter 9 of the Book of Revelation, the Bible had "absolutely no meaning in our life in the Family." (Even so, Watson stated that "we... knew that Charlie was Jesus Christ.")

For a period in his childhood, Manson lived with an aunt and uncle, while his mother was in prison. He later told a counselor that the aunt and uncle had "some marital difficulty until they became interested in religion and became very extreme."