Sex and Death Cults, Old and New
Gender as religion, part three
In the first part of this series, I wrote about the Gnostics, and their influence on contemporary Protestantism. In the second part, I covered Carl Gustav Jung's weaving of Gnosticism and alchemy into psychotherapy. In this part, I'll tell the story of how cults with esoteric beliefs about sex made themselves notorious. The so-called 'transgender rights' movement is merely the latest expression of irrational sadomasochism.
Since ancient times there have been numerous examples of castration cults and orgiastic ceremonies. While euphemisms such as 'sex reassignment surgery' and 'gender-affirming care' are modern, the surgical modification of sexual characteristics has been carried out for thousands of years, gelding horses as well as human slaves.
The usual reasoning is that eunuchs were safer around high-status women, were prized for their singing voices, or were punished to prevent them having offspring, but that doesn't explain why some people actively seek out this body modification. I believe we need to understand why some people reject or abuse their natal sexed bodies; in particular, the role that supernatural beliefs play in body integrity disorders and queered rituals.
In Skirt Go Spinny's documentary ‘WrongBodies’ Genevieve Gluck relates the story of the Skoptsy, members of a Russian castration cult based on extremist Christianity that lasted for hundreds of years. Skoptsy leader Kondraty Selivanov told his followers that he was both Jesus and the Russian emperor, Peter Fyodorovich, which must have meant a packed schedule.
Eunuchs Not Unique
While male cultists could opt to have either just their testicles or full genitals removed, female members of the Skoptsy had mastectomies, and genital mutilations which sewed up the vulva. These cult practices were therefore a direct antecedent of the smorgasbord of options available in the contemporary gender clinic.
The procedure known as metoidioplasty, now funded by Britain's National Health Service for transmasculine women, optionally sews together the vulva to create a pseudo-scrotum, after re-routing the urinary tract with a catheter surgically inserted through the patient's clitoris. So, before being too judgemental about crazy Russian peasants, let's reflect on the fact that if the Skoptsy were here among us now, they would recognise the significance of what our society does to young lesbians. The injection of testosterone into a young woman is a ritual practice designed to manifest a 'true' self.
Writing in the journal ‘Transgender Studies Quarterly’, Jennifer Wilson noted that the Skoptsy believed that before the Fall, genitals did not exist, and therefore getting rid of these sexed body parts would make believers holy.
Wilson argues that the Skoptsy provided “queer temporality, in that they offer a counterpoint to arguments that the future is the realm of the normative reproducing subject”. This sounds like the transhumanist dogma predicting ordinary breeding humans are rapidly on their way to irrelevance.
As the Skoptsy also believed in the end of the world being nigh, it’s hard to imagine a more doom-laden proposition. That this mad Russian cult is of interest to queer theory as a belief system worth amplifying tells us plenty about the decline of Western academia.
From Spiritualism to ‘Sex Magick’
With the advent of mass literacy in the 19th century, a market arose in esoteric religious books which claimed to unlock the secrets of the universe. Russian aristocrat Helena Blavatsky claimed to have travelled to Tibet, receiving ancient wisdom which inspired her creation of 'Theosophy' in 1875, an occult practice supposedly based on ancient Egyptian and Greek religion and philosophy.
Spiritualism was all the rage when Blavatsky travelled to the USA, England and India to spread her doctrine, with many people believing that they could communicate with the dead in séances, or see ‘real’ fairies in the garden. Blavatsky was exposed as a fraud by disgruntled followers in India, after recruiting them to con credulous people with basic conjuring tricks.
1875 turned out to be an inauspicious year for the generation of woo, as it marked the birth of both Carl Gustav Jung in Switzerland, and Edward Alexander Crowley in England. The latter renamed himself ‘Aleister’, but his mother called him ‘The Beast’, which goes to show that sometimes Mummy really does know best. Crowley’s family were originally Quakers. Following the influence of American mystic Rufus Jones (1863-1948), many Quakers believe they have an ‘inner light’ of God within them, and therefore do not need to follow man-made laws.
Aleister Crowley’s father had converted to an extreme sect within the Plymouth Brethren, which had in turn broken away from the Anglican church. While attending the University of Cambridge from 1895, Aleister joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an upper-class mystic sect, but was frowned upon for being too libertine even for them.
Like Friedrich Nietzsche, whom Crowley considered a Gnostic saint, Aleister reacted against a strict Christian upbringing to fully embrace the dark side, being fond of masturbation and using prostituted women. Another thing Friedrich had in common with Aleister was syphilis, which probably drove both of them very, very mad.
Crowley claimed to be in communication with a messenger of the Egyptian god Horus. He believed that his personal ‘guardian angel’ was actually an expression of the ‘inner light’ of the self, its ‘eternal essence’. Crowley had been encouraged in this belief of supernatural visitation by his first wife Rose, who was committed to an institution in 1911, following the death of their child five years earlier. Crowley would advance the theory that the ‘Body of Light’ could be separated from the physical body and travel around the astral plane.
Drawing from Nietzsche, Blavatsky and other mystical frauds, Crowley created his own religion ‘Thelema’, the best known maxim of which is “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”. Its ‘sex magick’ doctrine attempted to achieve transcendence via exhaustion from excessive copulation, among other techniques, which in a forerunner of the ‘free love’ cults of succeeding generations required followers to relinquish any reservations they might have about the ritualised, orgiastic use of their bodies. Disassociation was the name of the game, then and now.
Mixing anarchism and libertinism, and insisting that his doctrine was scientific, Crowley put theory into practice by establishing a commune on the island of Sicily in 1920. This pansexual sadist fathered many children with his female followers; one of these children and a male visitor died at the commune. This ‘abbey’ was shut down by the Italian authorities in 1923, forcing cult members to disperse, inadvertently spreading their magical sex woo.
By 1924, Crowley had assumed full control of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a quasi-Masonic mystic sect, previously led by Theodor Reuss, who had attempted to revive the 18th century genital worship cult of Phallism. You can probably guess what the pseudo-eucharistic ritual performed by Phallists involves imbibing.
Gnosticism Meets Psychotherapy
From 1935 to 1948, the Agape Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis operated around Los Angeles, California, first in Hollywood, then moving to Pasadena. Hugh B. Urban, professor of religious studies at Ohio State University, has written about how Lafayette Ronald Hubbard joined this lodge in 1945 and participated in sexual rituals intended to reincarnate the Whore of Babylon as a ‘moonchild’ messiah.
In Crowley’s belief system of Thelema, ‘Babalon’ is an earth-mother goddess. Because L. Ron Hubbard’s followers are highly litigious, I will state for the record that Lafayette was working as an agent of the US government to infiltrate the Agape Lodge and put an end to its black magic.
Hubbard had written that Crowley was a great friend of his, but the Beast was less complimentary in return. After the Agape Lodge closed, Hubbard launched ‘Dianetics’ in 1950, a blend of self-analytical psychotherapy, Eastern mysticism and science fiction. Hubbard sold his followers a gadget he called the ‘e-meter’ which could supposedly detect and remove problematic ‘engrams’ from the unconscious mind, enabling its users to enter the ‘clear’ state.
Following a less than welcoming response from mainstream psychiatry for his method, Hubbard incorporated Dianetics into his new Church of Scientology venture. This church encouraged followers to be “three feet back of your head”, separating the spirit from the body. In a 1976 study of early Scientology members by Roy Wallis, over half of the believers studied had converted from marginal religions including Theosophy, or Jungian analysis.
The 1950’s also saw the marketing of Marxist psychoanalyst and sexual revolutionary Wilhelm Reich's ‘orgone accumulator’, a metal-lined wardrobe that believers could be shut inside to supposedly heal them from a multitude of ailments. Reich’s original ‘orgasm theory’ had proved too extreme even for Sigmund Freud’s circle, and his sex woo was too perverse for his comrades on the hard left, so he had been a double outcast for decades.
Reich was convicted of consumer fraud in 1956, and imprisoned for contempt of court after claiming that orgone energy could cure cancer. Reich died in prison and his written works were shredded by the authorities. Reportedly, over three hundred orgone accumulators had been sold to his followers in the USA.
Charles Manson studied Scientology while in prison for pimping and other crimes during the early 1960’s, claiming to have reached ‘theta clear’ status. He managed to persuade his followers in ‘the Family’ cult that he was Jesus, and that they were the early Christians reincarnated, with the help of psychological manipulation and a lot of psychedelic drugs.
Manson’s followers carried out at least nine murders during 1969, in a paranoid attempt to start a race war. Several of his devotees were sentenced to death, but escaped that fate due to humanitarian reforms in California. After his conviction, when asked if he missed sex, Manson replied that he could get all the sex he wanted in prison. If Manson were still alive today, he could request a transfer to one of California’s correctional facilities for women.
Wilhelm Reich’s beliefs re-emerged in the counterculture, with military veteran Otto Mühl founding the authoritarian socialist Friedrichshof Commune near Vienna, Austria in 1972. Around 600 communards were required to have sex five times a day, with no time allowed for foreplay, and never twice in the same week with the same person lest attachments be formed.
Sexual performances at Friedrichshof were video-taped for ‘artistic’ reasons, in an offline precursor to OnlyFans. Children were separated from their parents at the commune and raised by other cult members in an attempt to destroy the bourgeois family. Sexual initiation rituals were required for girls from the age of 14 at the commune, with Mühl taking the lead. Somehow he managed to dodge prison until 1991.
One of Aleister Crowley’s surviving children, Randall Gair Doherty, also known as Count Charles Edward D'Arquires, considered himself the true ruler of Great Britain. In 1976, wearing full dress uniform and driven in a limousine to London, Randall attempted to meet with the Prime Minister, but the actual leader of the country was busy that day. This would-be aristocrat was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and ended up living on a park bench.
Of Vegan Trans Cults and School Curricula
In February 2025, the transgender vegan ‘Zizian’ cult came to the world’s attention with an investigation into at least six deaths, including four murders and two cult members killed in shoot-outs. According to Zizian belief, each hemisphere of the human brain has a gender, and sometimes they are different genders. All meat eaters will be put on trial after the Singularity. Naturally, media including the BBC reported on the mad male Zizians using she/her pronouns.
Just as crime can be organised with psychopathic intent, so too can mental illness. A cult leader with a god complex is a danger to anyone they come in contact with. The criminality documented by Reduxx, Andy Ngo and others is a feature, not a bug, of messianic delusion which validates the transgression of societal boundaries.
It's unfortunate for harmless gender non-conforming people that they have been grouped into a socially constructed ‘transgender community’ with zealous individuals who seek to break every man-made law. Perhaps some psychopaths adopt opposite-sex clothing, hormones and surgeries precisely because it is transgressive, not because they really believe in a mystical 'gender essence'.
The Ordo Templi Orientis remains active, and according to Manon Hedenborg White, associate professor of History of Religions at Malmö University, non-binary and genderqueer folx have the option of performing the Gnostic mass in the role corresponding to their birth-assigned gender. The priestess is always naked while the priest and congregation are clothed, according to instructions left by Aleister Crowley. It would appear that the Beast is still in charge.
According to recent coverage of the US Supreme Court case Mahmoud v. Taylor, American parents may yet gain the right to opt-out of gender ideology being required reading for their children.
Arizona attorney Ryan Heath is aiming to go further, by having gender ideology formally classified as a religion. Schools forcing these beliefs on pupils would then be in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the United States constitution which prohibits the government from establishing a religion or favoring one religion over another.
In the meantime, and for those of us who live in countries which don’t have separation of church and state, we will have to remain vigilant about the post-Enlightenment comeback of Gnostic sex and death cults. As the world becomes ever-more complicated and uncertain, I urge all of us not to lose our heads. Or any other body parts.
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This is an extremely interesting review of some of the pathological cults that have arisen in Europe and the U.S. in recent centuries. I have had a longstanding personal and professional interest in gnosticism (I am a psychologist), and during the Eighties I worked with people exiting from cults that were popular at that time. The mind/body dualism that Mr. James discusses pervades the philosophies and delusions promoted by most cult leaders, as well as the philosophies and practices of most Western and Eastern religions regarded as traditional and legitimate. The resulting conflicts about human biological needs, including sex, food, sleep and pain avoidance are the basis for most of the extreme practices of such groups. Given the remarkable persistence of this particular form of craziness over millennia and cross-culturally, I have to conclude that it is a manifestation of some innate defects in human psychology.