Antares de la Luz

Ramón Gustavo Castillo Gaete (20 December 1977 – 1 May 2013) was a Chilean musician and leader of a doomsday-oriented religious sect stationed in Colliguay, a rural area in the Valparaíso Region, where he claimed to be the second coming of Jesus and was known as "Antares de la Luz" (from Spanish, "Antares of the Light"). In 2012, one of the cult members, 25-year-old Natalia Guerra, became pregnant with his child, who he believed to be the Antichrist. Castillo's infant son was ultimately immolated in a bonfire on 23 November of that year as a human sacrifice, to prevent the supposedly incoming end of the world on 21 December 2012. After Chilean authorities were informed of the murder in April 2013, a nationwide manhunt headed by the Investigations Police of Chile began, which soon spread to neighboring Bolivia and Peru, the latter of which where he hung himself to evade capture. Castillo studied pedagogy at the Metropolitan University of Educational Sciences. He allegedly skipped doing his country's then-obligatory military service with his the help of his aunt, a medical doctor, who created a bogus certificate claiming that Castillo suffered from some sort of mental insanity. A musician by trade, he joined the musical group Amaru, active from 2003 until 2006. At some point in 2006, his musical group traveled to China, where he was interested in the local alternative medicine and folk religion. While there, he adopted his religious nickname, "Antares of the Light", in reference to Antares, the brightest star in the Scorpius constellation. Around 2009, he parted from the group and founded his religious cult, living with all the members in a shared department in Las Condes, where they performed healing rituals under the name of "Calypso". They soon relocated to Olmué, San José de Maipo, Concón and finally Mantagua, where they often performed animal sacrifices. Within his 12-member-cult, members often consumed various hallucinogenic drugs, mostly consisting of ayahuasca-derived substances.