Our Skeptical Calendar, where we attempt to find at least one event of skeptical interest from New Zealand for each of the 366 days of the year, is nearly finished now, with just 20 or so days that we don't have an event for remaining. Here are the events that happened on this day in history for the next two weeks:
Content warning: This article will include links to Rama Ranson's blogs which include language, themes, or imagery which can be triggering or upsetting.
In his book, Islands of the Dawn: The story of alternative spiritualities in New Zealand, Robert Ellwood explores why New Zealand is attractive to fringe religious groups/alternative spiritualities, and why early settlers and guru seekers of the 1960s-70s loved those groups right back. However, not all groups caused the same level of headaches for the government like the Ananda Marga and Scientology did, or had the same cultural profile as the sannyasins of Rajneesh movement; Ellwood had a sizable list of secret societies that had gone defunct by the 90s.