Fiction permeated the lives of the People Temple with regularity. To understand it wholly as a form of deception, to elicit the control and manipulation of Jones' community and congregation would be to divorce it from its religious and ritualistic functions.
 
David Chidester (Salvation and Suicide, 1991) has suggested that the healings were not merely deception, and that the production of an impure artifact from the body served as a metaphor for healing of the mind from capitalism: Contemporary American society was portrayed as diseased, a cancer of the mind.
 
These medico dramas almost certainly created a placebo effect amongst the rest of the congregation. In this sense the healing was for the benefit of the community, and a way of 'curing' the whole group. In shamanic practices Mircae Eliade has suggested that similar types of healing were to ensure that the spiritual equilibrium of the entire community was maintained.
 
Chichester argues that the healings were "part of a larger strategic project designed to recover and redefine the central religious function of healing for bodies, minds, and social relations that had been diseased by what Jones regarded as the sinfulness of capitalism, racism, and fascism in American Society." (Salvation and Suicide, 1991, P73)
 
Nevertheless Jones did use some of these dramatic techniques for purchasing personal power within the community. Systematically sleeping with the women that comprised his deputies, he would then stage a public meeting with selected members of the 'Planning Committee', where the woman would be denounced by her comrades (also mainly white, educated women) for taking up 'Father's precious time' (Jones was known as 'Father' in the Temple). Over a period of years these denouncements evolved so the accused knew that she had to testify to Jones' great sexual powers. Even when the event was effectively rape, as Deborah Layton recounts in Seductive Poison (1999).
 
These events also appear to have had a ritualistic function; as a form of initiation. Layton describes how, after being subjected to one of these events she was effectively 'promoted' in the Planning Committee hierarchy and subsequently given tasks and responsibilities that Jones would only pass on to his most trusted deputies. In Layton's case her subsequent duties included distributing Temple funds across bank accounts in Switzerland.
 
Later in Jonestown Jones subjected the community to further bouts of representation. Most notoriously, the White Night suicide rehearsals.
 
By then the community was relocated in the heart of the Guyanese rain forest (having cleared about 800 acres of forest), but apparently still under attack from the Temple 'defectors' who over the preceding months had began to organise them selves into an anti-cult organisation, 'The Concerned Relatives'. Jones alleged that the Relatives had hired mercenaries to attack and destroy the Jonestown community.
 
Both Odell Rhodes and Deborah Layton have described hearing gunshots from the jungle during one of the White Nights in April 1978. Later she assessed the situation: "Every White Night Jim sent a different team into the rain forest to fire shots. Each boy was unaware that there had been others before him creating the same panic....No one realised that all of the gunfire was from our guns." (Seductive Poison, P181,1999). These theatrical tactics in turn generated the emotional intensity for the White Nights to reach a crisis point, which over time evolved into a suicide rehearsal.
 
Rhodes describes his first experience of the suicide drill in April 1978 as, "another piece of Jim Jones's theatre of the absurd" (Awake in a Nightmare, P140, 1981). Rhodes found it far less threatening than Layton, who had only arrived in Jonestown several weeks before.
 
Preparing the community for Revolutionary Suicide, martyrdom as Jones saw it, invokes historical comparison with similar religious acts. Most notably the AD 73, Jewish mass suicide at Masada, under siege by Roman troops. Whilst Jonestown does not quite fit the template of a religious sect (because of it's socialist claims). Nevertheless Jones had based the Peoples Temple on an apocalyptic vision of a nuclear holocaust. John R. Hall argues that, "in the end Jones succumbed to the fate of other failed revolutionary millenarians. Rather than successfully establishing the other-worldly sanctuary of a promised land, he could only disclaim the web of "evil" powers in which he was ensnared and search with chiliastic expectation for the imminent cataclysm that would affirm the integrity of his cause" (Gone from the Promised land, 1989).
 
It is well documented that Jones' health deteriorated during the last nine months at Jonestown. He was using a variety of drugs; pain killers and sedatives, which manifested symptoms, including slurred speech and tumultuous mood swings. Whatever role Jones's state of mind played it seems reasonable to assume that his theatrical tactics helped to speed the community towards their violent demise.
 
Jones's theatre of the absurd fictionalised the lives of his community. At different points through the life of the Temple they became both knowing and unknowing participants in an extraordinary and tragic drama.