Gridley's Death

Gridley Wright died on the morning of December 22, 1979. He died of double pneumonia; complications of an attack by a psychotic Australian man weeks before. Five members of his community were with him when he died. He was cremated Indian style near the sea in Panjim.

This Associated Press report detailing Gridley Wright's death was filed in December 1979.

New Dehli, India (AP) -- Gridley Lorimer Wright IV, former stockbrocker turned stone age visionary, is dead but members of his controversial Shivalila cult do not mourn him. They believe Wright, 45, who died of double pnemonia on Dec. 21, will be reborn, most likely as a child of one of the group's eight unmarried women, cult member Alma Alvarez said Friday. "We are not mourning Gridley's passing," she told the Associated Press. "We are heralding his coming." Wright contracted pnemonia after being stabbed serveral times in the back and chest by an Austrailian traveler in Goa, the former Portuguese colony on the west coast of India, cult members and U.S. embassy sources said. An Austrailian diplomat said the alleged assailant, whom he refused to indentify, was "irrational" at the time and has since returned to Austrailia. It was the fifth death in the cult, composed of 18 Americans and one West German, since it moved to India from California last year. During its first three weeks here, four of the children died of measles and diptheria, medical authorities said.

The cult, founded by Wright five years ago, strove to raise its offspring to be the sort of humans it claimed were found in the stone age. Its models are Zaire's Ituri tribesmen and the tasaday tribesmen of the Philippines. Adults serve as parents to all of the children, males are urged to have sex with at least three different women to avoid them pairing off as couples. Three of the women are now pregnant, one by an unidntified Indian "swami" or "Hindu Holyman" Miss Alvarez said. Shortly after their arrival here, members burned their American passports and asked Indian officials for asylum, claiming they faced persecution in the United States. A home affairs ministry spokesman said that their application for asylum was not considered becasue they did not present valid passports. However, the Indian government has made no move to expel them despite the expiration of their visas, Miss Alvarez said. Wright, who claimed that in previous lives he was Jesus Christ, Lord Krishna, Buddha and the prophet Mohammed, said in an interview last July that his followers desired the same humam relationships of a stone-age society. Wright, a wiry, bearded man who wore homespun clothes during his last year, worked for brokerage houses in New York and Los Angeles before joining the counter-culture in the 1960s.

Hashish and marijuana were widely used in his cult as tools, he once said, "facilitating communitcation with the children." Miss Alvarez, interviewed at a New Delhi apartment, said Wright predicted on his arrival last year that he would die in India. "He was tired of his physical being," she said. "His last incarnation was bothersome to him because people was him as a great Western super-being -- Jesus Christ." "But he didn't die," she went on "Gridley is going through retransmission." Wright is survived by his estranged wife, Deborah, who lives in the United States. The cult, also known as the Children's Liberation Front, moved to a rustic cabin in Manali, Northen India, after being forced to leave the Philippines in March 1978. After spending the winter in Goa, some of the adults and all of the children went to the desert-covered Rajasthan state, in the northwest, where they live in tents. Serveral of the women came to New Delhi, looking for a suitable site and orphans to form what they call a "Children's Republic," Miss Alvarez said.

by Barry Sclachter