Cunningham’s death closes an unusual career that stretched from academic psychology to the infamous Synanon cult and, finally, to more than thirty years inside the GCCA. Former members describe her as an important part of the community’s system of psychological control.

Below is an article about Cunningham that we published in April last year.

For more info on the GCCA’s coercive techniques, check out the latest episode of The Inner Empire podcast:

In April 2019, I visited Avalon, the compound of the Global Community Communications Alliance (GCCA) in Arizona. During my stay, I attended their Sunday service held in a sunlit atrium at Salvington House. To call it very long — and boring! — would be an understatement.

The service began with what they called “alternative news” — an hour-long session directed by Marayeh Cunningham, the group’s licensed psychologist. We sat watching YouTube videos showcasing conspiracy theories, natural disasters, and predictions about the impending tribulation. They presented this as their way to combat “fake news” in mainstream media. Then, a couple hours into the service, community members were encouraged to come to the front of the room to pay tribute to Marayeh for her birthday.

Born in Dallas, Texas in 1943 as Linda Lou Waite, Cunningham’s academic journey began at the University of Texas. In 1964, she was nominated to Psi Chi, the national honor society in psychology, as an undergraduate. After completing her Bachelor’s degree that same year, she earned her PhD in Psychology in 1968. Her doctoral dissertation explored “Coping effectiveness as a function of the social environment,” which (judging by the title alone) sounds particularly useful for someone desiring to manipulate others’ minds.

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Synanon was founded in 1958 by Chuck Dederich in Santa Monica. Originally established as a drug rehabilitation program, the community’s practices hinged on group therapy sessions that came to be known as the “Synanon Game.”

Linda Cunningham joined in 1970, during a pivotal period in the organization’s evolution into what Time magazine would later call a “kooky cult.” According to lawyer and author Paul Morantz, she was one of two prominent PhDs who joined Synanon that year, bringing academic credibility to the organization.

By 1976, Linda had married Macyl Burke, the President of AdGap, the business keeping Synanon afloat. Laura Johnston Kohl, a survivor of both Jonestown and Synanon (and a friend of mine), met Linda during this period when she worked in AdGap’s data processing department. She characterized Linda as a “square” — someone who didn’t use drugs or alcohol, but joined because she wanted to play somethint called The Synanon Game — more on that in a minute.

During her time at Synanon, Cunningham authored a paper titled “A Comparative Study of Synanon and Home Reared Children,” applying her academic training to research that supported the community’s practice of taking children away from their parents.

This period coincided with significant changes in Synanon, including the infamous policy of forced partner-swapping instituted by founder Chuck Dederich. According to a Los Angeles Times article from December 1977, Dederich decided that married couples in Synanon should undergo a “shakeup” similar to what he experienced after his wife’s death. This led to the dissolution of 230 marriages, including Linda’s marriage to Macyl Burke. The article quotes Macyl, stating that he “paired off his former wife, Linda, with Julian Kaiser.” In his book From Miracle to Madness, Paul Morantz put it this way: “Macyl Burke … offered his wife to his friend saying it was ‘the deal of a lifetime.’” This policy of changing partners received significant negative press attention, highlighting Synanon’s increasing control over members’ personal lives. This also foreshadows the temporary marriages that are part of life in the GCCA.

Synanon’s most notorious psychological technique was The Synanon Game, an aggressive encounter group therapy practice where members would challenge each other on their shortcomings through radically honest, often confrontational interaction. This practice would later find striking parallels in the psychological methods employed by Marayeh in the Global Community Communications Alliance.

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In 1993, Linda Cunningham left her private practice and husband in La Jolla, California to become a disciple of Gabriel at the Aquarian Concepts Community (as the GCCA was originally known). She was given the cosmic name Marayeh, which was supposed to mean “on the wings of an angel” and “gentleness in the mother circuits.” She would legally change her name to this in 2008.

Her decision to join the community was influenced by her apocalyptic end-times beliefs. Prior to joining GCCA, she later told the San Diego Union-Tribune, Marayeh deliberately lived above an earthquake fault in La Jolla, wanting to be “among the first to perish” in the anticipated end times.

For many years at GCCA, Marayeh Cunningham has served as the community’s psychologist, though former members describe her “counseling” as a tool for control.

Former members of the GCCA describe a range of psychological control methods that bear striking resemblance to practices at Synanon, suggesting Cunningham may have imported and adapted these techniques. Most notable is GCCA’s group therapy practice, in which participants sit in a circle around an individual and spend up to six hours attacking them, naming and shaming their negative traits and flaws. Witnesses report that those subjected to this practice often felt “destroyed.”

Another significant parallel is the “Chip Game,” a surveillance system that requires members to constantly monitor each other and submit written reports of any observed wrongdoing to the leadership hierarchy. David Hall, a former member, described the overwhelming amount of “nonsense” reported through this system. This creates an environment of constant surveillance and judgment similar to the intense group scrutiny cultivated at Synanon.

Information weaponization is another key aspect of GCCA’s psychological control. Former members report that Cunningham uses counseling sessions to extract sensitive personal information, which she then relays to GCCA leadership. This information is subsequently “weaponized” to pressure individuals to conform and submit to the leaders’ wishes. Members who express disagreement with GCCA or its leaders are often referred to Cunningham for “Morontia counseling,” a spiritually elevated form of therapy conducted by individuals with certain spiritual status. Uncredentialed counselors, trained by Marayeh, conduct these sessions and write them up. The reports are then sent up the chain to Gabriel.

The cult’s control extends to relationships as well. If two members form a close bond, it is termed “dio-coupling” and seen as conspiratorial against leadership, leading to separation and counseling.

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Multiple sources detail allegations of sexual abuse at GCCA, with former members describing a pattern of protecting alleged perpetrators, blaming victims, and discouraging reporting to authorities. When counseling children who have been victimized, Cunningham reportedly encourages them to blame themselves, often through references to past incarnations.

Lauri Owen, a lawyer who investigated GCCA, described an instance where a ten-year-old who had been sexually assaulted was “counseled” by Cunningham, who suggested the child deserved this “punishment because you were a Jezebel in a past life.”

Several former members shared similar experiences. One former member (now an adult) recounted being called into a meeting with Cunningham and Gabriel’s wife after disclosing past sexual abuse. While they acknowledged the disclosure, the issue was quickly dismissed, and the victim felt blamed for the incident and was put on a program where she wasn’t allowed to be alone with men.

Another ex-member described going to Cunningham when she was suicidal, only to be coldly told she was to blame because she was “out of God’s will.”

Owen’s report states that children who report abuse at GCCA are blamed and sent to Morontia counseling. With one notable exception, individuals accused of sexually abusing children are never reported to the police nor do they face internal sanctions. The exception involved a schoolteacher who was engaged in a child custody battle with Gabriel’s daughter when the abuse occurred.

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The career trajectory of Linda Cunningham, now Marayeh, provides a remarkable case study in how psychological expertise can be applied in destructive cults. From her early academic achievements to her roles in both Synanon and the GCCA, Cunningham appears to have played a significant role in shaping the psychological control methods used in both organizations.

The striking parallels between The Synanon Game and GCCA Morontia therapy, along with the weaponization of personal information, surveillance systems, and victim-blaming approaches to counseling, suggest a direct line of influence from one community to the other.

In 2020, the GCCA published a new page on its website, describing the past lives of its members. Of course, this is another money-making scheme; a large red banner on top of the page offers to reveal your own past lives (for an undisclosed fee).

According to Gabriel, Marayeh’s “point of origin” is the Pleiades star cluster, 400+ light years from earth. In a past life, she was the half-sister of King Arthur. In another, she was married to Robert E. Lee.

To understand why that system worked, we turn to Stanford anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann and her research into how people learn to hear the voice of God. Her concepts of absorption and “kindling” offer a way to understand how deliberately cultivated inner experiences can eventually begin to feel autonomous — and even external. I then put that theory to the test with our own experiments in ritual and automatic writing. The result is a different way of thinking about brainwashing: not simply as forcing someone to believe something, but as training the mind until a particular reality begins to generate its own evidence.

Below is the adapted transcript of episode 4.

For years, I have been investigating a UFO religion — some call it a cult! — on the Mexican border in Arizona called the Global Community Communications Alliance.

Be sure to check out my book New Age Grifter for the complete story of that investigation.

The group’s leader passed away one year ago, in August 2025. He had many names: Gabriel, TasliasVan, Van, and his birthname, Tony.

Gabriel heard voices, and he claimed that these voices came from extraterrestrials, although I suspect that an undiagnosed mental illness was at play. He called these messages “transmissions.” For years I had been trying to get my hands on a recording of one of Gabriel’s transmissions. The ceremonies were guarded jealously — that’s how his former audio engineer Laird Scott described it to me. (Yes, this is a cult with a sound man.)

Finally, Joshua Lilly — a former member of Tony’s community, the Global Community Communications Alliance — produced a cassette tape.

Wallace Black Elk was a Lakota elder, a descendant of the author of Black Elk Speaks. Gabriel claimed that during a visit to the community in 1993, he and Wallace Black Elk spoke in his native language.

The tape is… something. First of all, the “celestial entity” that speaks through Gabriel needs notes. You can hear the clicks and buzzes where he stops and restarts the tape. He is channeling a so-called “finaliter,” a being who has ascended through successive incarnations, through the local universe, the superuniverse, all the way to Paradise. A being of immense cosmic authority. But on tape, he sounds like Elmer Fudd.

This is unmistakably Gabriel. And this particular finaliter — this ascended being of cosmic stature — needed to read his message from a script.

The question the tape raises isn’t whether Gabriel was a fraud. (That one has a pretty obvious answer.) The question is: How did his scheme work? Over three decades, hundreds of people, an entire institution built around a man making voices in a dark room. What does this actually do to the people inside it?

Laird Scott was Gabriel’s sound man. He spent seven years inside the GCCA, from 2008 to 2015. He lived in the community’s compound, worked in its recording studio. When I visited him in his home in 2018, he described a channeling ceremony to me:

The whole community gathered. Candles were lit. A CD of Tibetan monks chanted in the background, creating ambiance. The community of roughly 120 people then prayed together, out loud: praying for more help with the community’s legal needs, praying for more ways to make money. This went on for twenty minutes or more. Then everybody went quiet and waited for Gabriel to fuse with the extraterrestrial.

Then Paladin arrived. He was loud, stomping, pointing at members, reciting their past lives. He told people things about themselves — things the community had, in many cases, already told Gabriel through confession and counseling and years of daily proximity. But in that environment, these things carried the weight of revelation.

Often, after Paladin, another being came. He (or it) was known as The Bright and Morning Star, the highest being under Jesus, who spoke in a high squeaky voice that was almost impossible to hear. The congregation leaned in. Laird, at the mixer, fought feedback just to get a clean signal.

After the session, Laird burned CDs for the transcription team. They next passed the transcripts to an editing team who polished the grammar of celestial transmissions before distribution. Finished transcripts were disseminated throughout the community.

This is what we’ve called, elsewhere in this series, creating Subjective Synthesis. This is the deliberate cultivation of an inner experience, repeated and reinforced until it stops feeling deliberate. Gabriel had built an entire institution around it.

These full-moon ceremonies happened every month, for years.

Outside the ceremonies, life at the compound was relentlessly scheduled. They’d wake early to work in the garden, or the kitchen, or — in Laird’s case — the studio. Noon meal, followed by an hour cleanup. Work in the afternoon. Dinner at five-thirty. Cleanup rotation, another hour. Classes from seven-thirty to nine. Then back to your house, maybe clean the living room, maybe help an older member with something, maybe write a report. Some members were at the computer until midnight. Then Sunday, a weekly report on top of everything else. Twice a week, mass plantings or harvestings in the garden, sometimes starting at six in the morning.

Laird described it plainly: the work was “full on.” They weren’t sleep-deprived in a dramatic way. They were just never not tired. They were never alone. And they were never, ever not being told how to feel and how to think.

T.M. Luhrmann is an anthropologist at Stanford. She started her career in the 1980s studying ritual magicians in Britain. Her first book, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, came out in 1991. She then spent years inside American evangelical communities, trying to understand how ordinary people learn to hear God’s voice. As she discovered, hearing God’s voice is a skill, and anyone can learn it.

When God Talks Back was published in 2012. In the book, Luhrmann writes that people “train the mind in such a way that they experience part of their mind as the presence of God. They learn to reinterpret the familiar experiences of their own minds and bodies as not being their own at all — but God’s. They learn to identify some thoughts as God’s voice, some images as God’s suggestions, some sensations as God’s touch.”

The central mechanism is what she calls absorption, the capacity to become so fully immersed in mental imagery that it starts to register as perceptually real. Not metaphorically real. Not symbolically meaningful. The brain processes it through the same neural pathways as actual sensory experience. People vary in their natural talent for this.

The Tellegen Absorption Scale has thirty-four statements that you mark TRUE or FALSE. Things like: “I can be deeply moved by a sunset.” “Music evokes images so vivid it is almost like seeing them.” Luhrmann found that people with high scores on this scale were 600 percent more likely to report “supernatural” experiences: hearing God’s voice, feeling God’s touch, or seeing the wing of an angel.

But talent alone is not the whole story. Length of daily prayer practice also played a role. Some people have a natural proclivity and stumble into vivid experiences without much effort. Others have to work for it.

Evangelical prayer groups teach members to use their imaginations proactively. Not to sit passively and wait for God, but to construct a scene with sensory specificity. See the shepherd. Feel the breeze. Smell the grass. Luhrmann’s subjects described sitting in God’s lap, standing in God’s throne room, having back-and-forth conversations with God in their minds during prayer. One book she encountered called these “God-dreams.” Over time, the experiences change character. What started as something constructed became something encountered.

In Luhrmann’s book, one woman described images coming to her mind during ordinary moments. For instance, she might be putting on her pants in the morning when she’s suddenly moved to pray for someone she hadn’t thought of in months. A man described feeling God touch him during prayer, startled to discover that no one was there. Multiple subjects described hearing a voice that was not always inside their heads.

When Luhrmann pressed her on it, one described the distinction this way: “As soon as I become conscious that I am hearing God speak, I hear it. It pops out and becomes more auditory.”

Luhrmann calls this kindling. The body learns to produce these experiences. They become more fluent, more habituated, more automatic over time. What once required deliberate effort to construct eventually arises on its own. At that point it is no longer experienced as something you are doing. It is experienced as something happening to you. As if coming from outside of you.

The content of what gets experienced reflects the “symbolic resources” the practitioner brought to the practice. This pool of symbols can be actively nurtured, in the manner of the Golden Dawn or Jungian depth psychology. Or it can be just sort of soaked up from the ambient culture. Buddhists see the Buddha. Christians hear Jesus. In my own practices, I usually encounter pop culture figures like Gilligan or Marvin the Martian. Members of the GCCA, have reported hearing Jesus, angels, and the celestial entities that speak through Gabriel.

Sometimes, people arrive at these experiences without any deliberate practice at all. High absorbers can stumble into vivid spiritual experience before any institution has gotten to them. The experience feels like a gift, like evidence of something profound. And institutions are very good at finding those people.

Ultimately, Gabriel’s full-moon ceremonies were training sessions. The transcriptions of these sessions extended the training into people’s homes. The relentless schedule at the compound — the exhaustion, the constant company, the absence of alternative ideas — kept the “absorption” state running and the substance of Gabriel’s symbolic language in place around the clock.

There was — literally — no escaping it.

A running theme in this series has been my own experiments. I’ve approached the practice with an open mind. What happens when you deliberately cultivate a relationship with an imagined presence — or possibly, a not imagined presence? When you repeat the same rituals over months, and years, and pay close attention to what your mind starts doing in response.

Beginning in January, I added automatic writing to the experiment, using an old mechanical typewriter during my rituals. For the first few weeks the writing was diffuse. Word association. I’d open myself up to inspiration and stuff would come bubbling up from my subconscious. There were little jokes and so-called profundities that I already had on hand, to be brought out in case conversation slowed. Song lyrics. Bits of books that I’d recently read. Lots of repeating nonsense rhymes.

By February something had shifted. The sessions had acquired a distinct register — terse, sardonic, occasionally obscene, impatient with certain questions. Not necessarily what I would have written if I were writing. Something that felt, in the session, like it was pushing back.

On February 22nd the material gained some depth. It referenced Couliano. It referenced Giordano Bruno’s Of Bonds in General. It referenced Timothy Leary. (No surprise there, my book on Leary was just about to be published.)

In episode one, we covered Ioan Couliano — his argument that Renaissance magicians understood consciousness as a shared medium, something you could reach into and manipulate. The February 22nd session was, somehow, annotating that. Written in a single sitting, on a typewriter, while I was out of my mind.

By May, the sessions had gotten shorter and stranger still, and increasingly aware of themselves. At one point I noted that the goddess had gone off on a riff. The response: “This is how you know your subconscious has taken over.” When I asked how to be an effective magician, Hecate answered with a question of her own: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.”

What started as deliberate effort — sitting down, typing, waiting to see what came — by May was arriving on its own, seemingly with its own agenda. Luhrmann has a word for the process that gets you there: kindling. You strike the match, you feed the fire, you keep blowing on it — session after session, month after month — until it doesn’t need you anymore. It burns on its own.

In Gabriel’s version of this experiment, the members didn’t know they were being trained. And the cost of leaving — of separating themselves from Gabriel’s imposed Subjective Synthesis — is catastrophic. When Laird finally decided to go, he hid boxes in the root cellar of the garden where he worked, a little at a time, over days. He waited behind a tree in the dark for a friend’s car. He had nowhere else to go. The community had been his entire world.

And it still was, in a sense, for years after his daring midnight escape. He researched. Some might say that he obsessed. That’s how we met, actually. It was during one of his late night “research” binges that he found me and decided to reach out.

On the other hand, when I conducted my own experiment, I designed it. I went into it willingly, and I could walk away any time I wished.

The question neither version can settle is: does the source of the transmission matter? Luhrmann doesn’t answer it. She is careful not to. She writes that her account of absorption and training “is fully compatible with both secular and supernaturalist understandings of God.”

In other words, she is not saying that “magic is all in the mind” or that God is a hallucination.

Rather, these processes are how God and, or magickal results, manifest in the mind.

It’s up to you to decide exactly what that means.

In the meantime, here’s one of Gabriel’s classic music videos…

Watch now on TST TV: https://thesatanictemple.tv/programs/wwp-206-putins-geopolitical-satanic-panic

In this episode of Worldwide Panic, we catch up after Lenny's launch of a new podcast, The Inner Empire, an investigation into why people believe what they believe, featuring cult members, magicians, and Christian evangelicals. Lucien discusses the value s…

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This article originally appeared in TruthDig.

The prediction markets were nearly certain: Francesca Hong would win Wisconsin’s Democratic primary for governor on Aug. 11. Polymarket put the upstart’s chances at 96%; Kalshi was only slightly less sure at 95.5%.

Then the votes came in. Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley defeated Hong by nearly 4,000 votes. An embarrassed Polymarket immediately deleted an X post from the previous day that had declared, “BREAKING: DSA’s Hong is a near-lock.” Luana Lopes Lara, one of the founders of Kalshi, was quick to note that the upset did not mean the prediction was wrong, because after all, “5% is not 0%.”

This is true. But Hong’s loss in the face of such confidence was just the latest outcome to cast doubt upon the proposition that betting markets naturally produce better information than governments, media, polls and other institutions. Since this proposition has become a multibillion-dollar industry, its gatekeepers have a clear interest in protecting the myth of what Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan calls a “global truth machine, powered by the people.” But questions about public betting markets’ ability to predict events — never mind debates over the likelihood of massive corruption — are not the only things the industry would prefer the public forget. Far beneath the profiles of industry whiz kids like Coplan and Nate Silver is an origin story that runs through a cast of anarcho-libertarians, proto-Muskean transhumanists, anti-state economists and one of the creepiest carryover figures connecting Iran-Contra and the post-9/11 national security establishment.

The story begins with an anarcho-capitalist and programmer named Timothy May. After retiring from Intel Corp. in his mid-30s, May spent the late 1980s developing a philosophy based on advances in public-key encryption. Because this technology would enable people to communicate and conduct business anonymously, it opened up the possibility for a new political order he called “crypto anarchy.” As he explained in his 1988 treatise, “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto,” encryption would undermine governments’ ability to tax and regulate economic activity — as well as give rise to anonymous markets for every conceivable area of social and political life.

“An anonymous computerized market,” he wrote, “will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy.”

In 1992, May joined programmers Eric Hughes and John Gilmore in organizing the first meetings of a group that would become known as the Cypherpunks. They met monthly in Silicon Valley and communicated on an email list that soon attracted more than 1,000 subscribers. Members ranged from civil libertarians concerned with privacy to hardcore anarcho-capitalists like May, who believed encryption heralded the end of taxation, regulation and, eventually, the states itself.

In 1995, a former Intel engineer named Jim Bell brought an extreme proposal to the Cypherpunk list. His 16,000-word essay, titled “Assassination Politics,” proposed establishing an anonymous pool of funds that would pay out to whoever correctly “predicted” the death of government officials. Bell was not interested in using the machinery of markets as a forecasting tool: He saw the assassination payouts as threats weaponized against the state. The more anonymous donors contributed toward a government official’s death — encrypted communications and digital cash would conceal everyone involved — the greater the incentive for someone to make the “prediction” come true. Bell imagined that, with time, no government official would take the risk of seeking and holding office. No officials, no bureaucracy, no government, no problem.

Bell was convicted in 1997 of harassing government agents and using a fake Social Security number. After serving nearly a year in federal prison, he resumed his feud with the government. In 2000, authorities arrested him again after he was caught conducting surveillance on an IRS agent and his family. Bell was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison on charges that included stalking and intimidating federal agents.

Bell’s crackpot ideas were well-known within the broader libertarian-futurist milieu that anticipated and helped birth today’s billion-dollar prediction market industry. They would find a more palatable expression in Robin Hanson, who joined the Cypherpunk e-list as a CalTech graduate student in the 1990s. In 1991, Hanson published a proposal for an “Idea Futures” in Extropy: The Journal of Transhumanist Thought. It envisioned markets where people could bet on unresolved questions in science and public policy. By aggregating information scattered among many participants, he argued, they would produce better forecasts than traditional institutions. In 1999, his work on prediction markets earned him a post at George Mason University, the nation’s leading intellectual hub of libertarian and free-market economics.

The following year, he was contacted by a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency about applying his work to national security. Hanson agreed, and the result was a project that became known as the Policy Analysis Market, or PAM. The plan was to allow members of the public to bet real money on political, economic and military developments in the Middle East. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the project was folded into DARPA’s newly created Information Awareness Office, which was hatched around the same time to develop technologies for identifying and anticipating terrorist threats. Its director, John Poindexter, had served as Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser and was a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal. Registration for PAM’s first public contracts opened in July of 2003, with trading scheduled to begin that October.

PAM might have remained relatively obscure were it not for Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden and Byron Dorgan, who held a press conference denouncing it as a Pentagon-funded “terrorism futures market.” They pointed to a sample screen that included bets on the assassination of Yasser Arafat and a North Korean missile attack. The Pentagon killed the program with haste and Poindexter resigned the next day.

For the next 15 years, prediction markets survived mostly as a niche theoretical interest among libertarian academics.

Then, in 2019, a 21-year-old New York University dropout named Shayne Coplan discovered Hanson’s work. The potential for prediction markets to identify likely outcomes, he later recalled thinking, was “too good of an idea to just exist in white papers.” The following year, he launched Polymarket, raising $4 million from crypto investors including Polychain Capital, Naval Ravikant and Balaji Srinivasan. After the platform correctly called the 2024 presidential election, Coplan believed he and Hanson had been vindicated, proclaiming, “The global truth machine is here, powered by the people.” By then, Polymarket had brought Silver, the election forecaster, on as an adviser. The industry soon exploded: By April 2026, Polymarket and Kalshi were recording nearly $24 billion in combined monthly trading volume. Prediction markets had completed a remarkable journey from the libertarian-futurist fringe to the mainstream.

Thirty years after Bell imagined anonymous markets around the deaths of public officials, the phenomenon resurfaced in a more respectable form. This year, Kalshi found itself in court over $54 million in bets tied to whether Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, would leave office — a question abruptly complicated when his death by a U.S.-Israeli strike paid out $554,000 to an anonymous bettor with the handle “Magamyman.” One can debate the degree to which today’s prediction markets are the direct descendants of Jim Bell’s more brazenly depraved “Assassination Politics,” but the vast array of contemporary public markets related to war and political violence cannot be dismissed as aberrations. They have been central to the concept from the beginning.

In this episode of The Inner Empire, we look at how the Golden Dawn used study, ritual, and initiation to turn those correspondences into a way of perceiving the world, and how Aleister Crowley blew open the system by publishing its once-secret material. What emerges is a model of magic in which learning the symbols is only the beginning; the real transformation occurs when the associations become automatic.

Below is the adapted transcript of episode 3.

There’s a statue at the entrance to my house. It’s been there for a few years now. A robed figure holds two torches; a pair of hounds lie at her feet.

On either side of the statue, I have placed white candles. To the left, an incense holder. To the right, a consecrated dagger and a key. In front, a small cup for wine.

When I first put these items together, they were just objects. The statue was something I bought at a store here in Pittsburgh. The candles were from Ikea. The key came from Hobby Lobby, of all places.

Then something changed.

There was a presence, a palpable presence in the room. Hecate started revealing herself to me.

I told that story — at least, part of that story — in the previous episode of The Inner Empire.

In this episode, we will answer the question: How does a collection of ordinary objects acquire deeper meaning? How does a consciously learned set of associations become automatic — something you no longer have to remember or interpret? Because more than a century before I built this shrine, a group of Victorian occultists developed an extraordinarily elaborate system for doing exactly that.

This is not a metaphysical question. Or — it’s not only a metaphysical question. It’s also a practical one. And to begin to answer it, I have to tell you about a group of Victorian occultists who spent years trying to systematize the entire universe.

In 1887, in London, three men began constructing a technology for transforming human consciousness. The technology was a magical system. They called their occult order the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

The founding members were William Westcott, a London coroner with a serious interest in Kabbalah and a facility for secrecy, and Samuel Liddell Mathers, a broke and brilliant autodidact who would eventually claim to be receiving instructions from disembodied Secret Chiefs in Paris.

At some point Mathers added a third name, “MacGregor,” and he is commonly known as MacGregor Mathers.

A third co-founder, William Woodman, died early and receded into a footnote. But Westcott and Mathers, these two wildly different men — the steady civil servant and the increasingly erratic mystic — together built something remarkable.

The Order claimed its origins in a set of documents called the Cipher Manuscripts: sixty folios of esoteric material written in a simple substitution code, allegedly discovered in a London bookstall.

Westcott decoded them. What they contained were outlines of initiatory ceremonies and fragments of a symbolic system. Whether the manuscripts were genuinely ancient, as the founders implied, or recently fabricated, as is most likely the case, didn’t matter much in the end. What the manuscripts provided was a framework. Mathers proceeded to build it out.

The correspondence system he constructed is almost impossible to convey in its ambition. Imagine trying to build a unified theory of everything — not in physics, but in symbolic meaning. Objects, colors, cardinal directions, planets, every Hebrew letter, every Tarot card, every archangel, every element, every number — all of it mapped onto a single organizing structure called the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

The Tree of Life is a diagram: ten spheres, called sephiroth, connected by twenty-two paths. In traditional Jewish mysticism, it describes the structure of divine emanation, the way the infinite contracts into creation. The Golden Dawn took this diagram and made it a filing system.

Let me give you a concrete example of what this looks like in practice. The ninth sphere on the Tree, Yesod, corresponds to the moon. Its element is air. Its number is nine. Its jewels are pearl and moonstone. Its perfume is aloes. Its archangel is Gabriel. Its Tarot symbols are the nines in each suit. Its divine name, in Hebrew, is Shaddai El Chai.

What we have here is a constellation of associations that all point toward the same underlying quality of existence. And this was replicated, with equal specificity, for every sphere and every path on the Tree. The result was a complete symbolic grammar: a language in which any experience, any dream, any emotion, any coincidence could be located and interpreted within a unified framework.

Éliphas Lévi, the French occultist whose work the Golden Dawn drew heavily from, described the correspondence system as a way to play human emotions. Like an instrument.

“The seven planets,” he wrote, “are none other than hieroglyphic symbols of the keyboard of our affections.”

• Saturn means restriction, and time, and lead.

• Venus equals desire, and copper and green.

• The Sun. Vitality. Gold and orange.

This is an attempt to build a map of everything that matters to a human being. Organized and cross-referenced.

Then there was the linkage of all these correspondences to the Tarot. The twenty-two Major Arcana were assigned to the twenty-two paths on the Tree, which were assigned to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which were divided into three mother letters for elements, seven double letters for planets, and twelve single letters for the zodiac. Everything was connected to everything.

The Tarot card called the Emperor corresponded to the Hebrew letter Heh, which corresponded to the astrological sign Aries, which corresponded to specific colors, incense, metals, angelic names, and ritual gestures.

This system was a genuine intellectual achievement — one whose significance is lost on many of us, occultists and non-occultists alike.

You might assume the point of all this correspondence was divination. You map your question onto the system, you read the symbols, you receive an answer. And certainly the Golden Dawn did that. But divination was a secondary purpose.

Consider what initiation into the Golden Dawn actually required.

New members were immediately set to memorization. The Hebrew alphabet first: not just the names but the forms, practiced until the letters could be drawn accurately. Then the names of the sephiroth, the archangels, the angels, written in Hebrew. Then the correspondence tables — which color belonged to which sphere, which planet to which path, which Tarot card to which letter.

Israel Regardie was emphatic. “This is fundamental,” he writes in What You Should Know About the Golden Dawn. He prescribed spending significant time not just studying but meditating on these attributions, until they became — in his words — “personal property.”

The Order was structured in grades, each grade corresponding to a sphere on the Tree of Life. Advancement required examinations to confirm that the meditations had actually been performed and the material had been genuinely absorbed.

Study material was released slowly, in small doses, monthly. The explicit rationale was to prevent overwhelming the student, to allow them to incorporate the material into their Subjective Synthesis.

Of course, they never used that term. Subjective Synthesis. Joseph Lisiewski hadn’t concocted it yet.

Hell, he wasn’t even born yet.

The initiatory ceremonies themselves were elaborate theatrical productions — costumes, ritual officers, ceremonial speech, symbolic death and rebirth. Regardie described the mechanism: “As a steel placed in close proximity to a magnet receives some degree of its magnetism,” he writes, “and comparable to the electrical phenomenon of induction, so the presence of power induces power.”

And then, after taking a grade, the student was instructed to go back through the ceremony — not physically, but in imagination. To rebuild it internally, in full detail, until they could experience it as vividly as the first time.

T.M. Luhrmann, the anthropologist at Stanford who studies these things, observed something important about this process.

The magicians she studied “begin to live, work and have their being within the symbol system of their tradition. They work with it daily, meditating upon it and interpreting their life in the light of its structure. It brings order to their inner life: both their dreams and their psychism will appear in terms of its symbolism.”

This is worth pausing on. The claim isn’t just that the system gives you a vocabulary for interpreting experience. The claim is that the system shapes what you experience in the first place. Dreams begin organizing themselves around the symbols. Perception reorganizes.

The Golden Dawn fed students a comprehensive symbolic world, slowly, over years, through repetition, memorization, meditation, ceremony, and gradually deepening immersion. When it worked, the student didn’t just know the system — they perceived reality through it.

Associations that had been consciously memorized became automatic. The symbol wasn’t something you had to think about. It was something you immediately felt.

This is exactly Lisiewski’s progression from study to understanding to comprehension to apprehension, as we discussed in the previous episode.

Apprehension is when you stop remembering that you learned something. The belief, as he put it, “runs itself.”

From this perspective, the Golden Dawn was not primarily a religious institution or an intellectual club or a repository of ancient wisdom. It was a training environment for building a specific kind of perception.

Aleister Crowley joined the Golden Dawn in 1898 at the age of twenty-three. He was rich, ambitious, and talented. He rose quickly through the grades, fell out with Mathers, and left the Order for good by 1900.

In 1909, Crowley published a slim book called Liber 777. It contained the Golden Dawn’s correspondence tables — the attributions of Hebrew letters to Tarot cards, the elemental and planetary color scales, the complete symbolic grammar that Mathers had spent years assembling.

Crowley published it anonymously, added some columns of his own, and described his purpose clearly: to give any serious student the tools to analyze any idea in terms of the Tree of Life. To trace the connection between every class of idea. To translate any unknown symbolism into terms of any known one.

The Golden Dawn was, to put it mildly, not pleased. F. Leigh Gardner, a member, wrote in his personal copy that the book was “Borrowed Plumes” — i.e., stolen feathers, dressed up as Crowley’s own work. And there’s something to that. The Occult Review praised the book for publishing what “has been jealously and foolishly kept secret in the past.” Allan Bennett’s Buddhist Review found it obscure.

The Order had maintained its system as something that had to be earned — revealed gradually, absorbed through ceremony and effort. Crowley had put it in a bookshop. Then he went further. Starting in 1909, through a journal called The Equinox, Crowley published the Order’s actual initiation rituals — the ceremonies themselves, the words spoken, the dramatic structure of each grade.

Mathers sued to stop it and the case went to the Court of Appeal. Crowley won.

The argument behind Crowley’s publication was principled. He wrote: “To withhold the Alphabet of Mysticism from the learner is the device of a selfish charlatan.”

Reading a ritual is not the same as being initiated. Knowing a correspondence is not the same as having that correspondence installed in your perceptual structure through years of practice. Information isn’t transformation.

Passing each degree’s ordeal “literally mutates the candidate’s consciousness,” writes Lon Milo DuQuette. You can read every book on the system, memorize every table of correspondences, and still be, as DuQuette said, “laboring eternally within a dream.”

Israel Regardie eventually published the complete Golden Dawn system himself in the 1930s, and people have been complaining about it ever since.

The Golden Dawn still exists today, as do the several offshoots it inspired. It hasn’t suffered at all since its secrets were revealed. If anything, this allowed it to continue to evolve and ensured it will be around for some time to come.

I’m standing in front of my shrine now. The candles are lit. The incense is burning. The statue of Hecate stands between the two flames, attended by her hounds, holding her torches. The dagger is to the right. The key is to the right of that.

Something is different about these objects now. The statue feels different than it did when I first placed it here. What began as a deliberate installation has become something that operates automatically. I no longer have to remember what the key means. I hold it, and something shifts.

The Golden Dawn believed that shift required years of structured training, ceremony, initiation, and mutual immersion in a shared symbolic world. Crowley believed it should be published, democratized, made available to anyone serious enough to use it. I assembled my shrine piecemeal, over the course of several months, enrolled in an online course, and performed the rituals alone at the entrance to my house.

What I’m certain of is this: the objects on my altar are not inert. The associations are real. They are doing something I did not entirely design and do not entirely control.

Exactly how that happened is the question I keep returning to.

There’s a researcher at Stanford who has spent her career studying the communities where this happens. Witches. Evangelical Christians learning to hear God’s voice. People developing the “mental muscles” that allow them to experience imagined content as genuinely perceived.

Her name is T.M. Luhrmann. Her work is the next part of this investigation.

Then we talk about how sports psychology, predictive coding, and ritual magic all describe the same underlying process: repeated symbolic engagement rewires what you notice, what you expect, and ultimately what becomes real to you. Along the way, I put the theory to the test myself, and make $700 in the process.

Below is the adapted transcript of episode 2.

The summer before ninth grade, my cross-country team met in a portable classroom behind the main school building, out near the track. It was morning, so the summer heat wouldn’t get stifling for a few hours yet. I was excited to be around older high school students, and a little nervous. Also proud I’d been allowed to join the team at all.

The coach had us sit down, close our eyes, and be quiet. Then he walked us through the race we were about to run: not the actual race, which hadn’t happened yet, but a version of it inside our heads. The course. The hills. The pace. What it would feel like when we pushed through the second mile. What it would feel like to finish.

We did this before every practice, ten minutes with our eyes closed. After three or four weeks, something changed. He would say “you’re approaching the hill” and the hill would already be there — not as a thought about a hill, but as the hill itself. The grade of it. The way the body would need to lean into it. The imaginary course became as familiar as courses I’d actually run.

The premise of sports psychology is that there are mental practices that enhance physical performance.

The brain processes mental imagery through the same neural pathways as actual sensory experience. If you repeat a visualization often enough, a vivid re-enactment — or pre-enactment — of a physical activity, the nervous system stops distinguishing it from memory. When you eventually do run the race, your body already knows what comes next because it has been there before.

But imagery is only half of it. The other half is association. A distance runner learns to associate muscular fatigue with endurance rather than defeat. The pain becomes evidence of effort, not failure. You are changing the meaning of certain sensations, and hence changing your physiological response. The visualization is the delivery vehicle. The association is the payload. What gets installed isn’t a picture of the race. It’s a new relationship between sensation and meaning.

(A note on the word “visualization.” Visualization is the word we use, but perhaps “imagination” is better. Many of us, if not most of us, don’t “see” things when we visualize, at least not very clearly. Often, the other senses are much more vividly imagined.)

None of this is an analogy to magic. It is magic: attention is narrowed, associations are hardwired, expectations are installed. Whether it is an athlete visualizing a win or a magician performing a ritual, both are building the cognitive architecture that determines what becomes perceptible, actionable, and real.

Joseph C. Lisiewski had a word for that architecture. He called it Subjective Synthesis.

Lisiewski had a doctorate in applied physics. He also studied directly under renowned alchemist Frater Albertus and counted esteemed twentieth-century occultist Israel Regardie among his colleagues. He lived and worked in rural Beaver Springs, Pennsylvania — coal country. He wrote several books, published by the occult imprint Original Falcon Press, which had also published Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, and Robert Anton Wilson.

He was not popular within the mainstream occult community. If anything, he was contemptuous of it. His contempt had a specific target. Most people practicing magic, in Lisiewski’s view, were engaged in elaborate self-deception: collecting initiations, performing half-baked rituals, explaining away failure with appeals to complexity or the ineffability of spiritual experience.

He had a simple mantra, four words, that he urged practitioners to consider whenever they performed a magical ritual, and he intoned it repeatedly in his books, always written in capital letters: where are the results?

But Lisiewski was not a skeptic. He believed magic worked. He believed he had demonstrated that it worked, repeatedly, under rigorous conditions. His colleague Mark Stavish summarized his standard this way: “For Lisiewski, the physical world is where we live, and so it is here that the results of our actions ought to be felt and measured.” Practical concerns. Physical results. If magick does not produce effects you can name, test, and verify, it is nothing more than a lifestyle or an aesthetic preference.

What distinguished Lisiewski from the skeptics and the credulous alike was that he had a theory of how magick worked. Understanding this concept not only explained magick, but it could help strengthen your magical practice. He called it Subjective Synthesis.

In Ceremonial Magic and the Power of Evocation, published in 2004, Lisiewski defines Subjective Synthesis as “a mental process which leads to an integrated belief system held in the part of the mind below the level of conscious perception, known as the subconscious mind. These ordered sets of beliefs are then used by the subconscious mind during the magical act.”

In other words, even if magic isn’t “all in the mind,” as some modern occultists believe, it is your mind that allows you to practice magic. And through understanding this, you can only become a more effective magician.

Another Lisiewski quote: Subjective Synthesis, he writes, is “the subconscious constellation of beliefs and ideas that govern most of our conscious actions, ideas, and mental perceptions of our personal universe: the outer world we see, act toward and react to, and the inner world of our psychic nature that we are barely conscious of.”

Subjective Synthesis is not what you believe intellectually. It is the underlying structure that determines how the world appears before you even have a chance to articulate a belief about it. It shapes what you notice, what you dismiss, what possibilities even register as possibilities.

Cognitive scientists now call this predictive coding. The brain is not a passive receiver of sensory data. It is a prediction machine that continuously generates expectations and filters incoming information against them. T.M. Luhrmann, a Stanford anthropologist who has spent her career studying how people learn to experience the supernatural, states it plainly: the brain is more likely to sense and experience what it expects to sense and experience.

Lisiewski described building Subjective Synthesis through four stages: study, understanding, comprehension, and apprehension. Study is mere exposure. Understanding means you can recognize the concept when you encounter it. Comprehension means you can apply it consciously. Apprehension is the final stage, the moment the concept stops being something you know and becomes something you are. You no longer remember learning it. It simply is. The belief, in Lisiewski’s phrase, “runs itself.”

He was specific about what undermines this: doubt. Not intellectual doubt — Lisiewski had no problem with rigor. The problem is low-grade doubt operating below conscious awareness, quietly working against what the practitioner has built. “If you have even a grain of doubt about any endeavor,” he wrote, “that doubt will eventually manifest itself as the final result of all of your earlier positive efforts.”

He drew one other distinction that most readers miss. Responding to a reader in his newsletter, Howlings from the Pit, he writes: “You are confusing having faith or belief with your conscious state of Subjective Synthesis, your understanding of how magic works.”

Belief and understanding are opposites. The feeling of conviction is not the same as the installed structure that governs perception and behavior. Someone can believe — can really want to believe — that they have magical abilities. But if their Subjective Synthesis undermines them, all the belief in the world won’t change that. Most of us, raised in a scientific-materialist culture, have a Subjective Synthesis that undermines our magical potential. Therefore, redefining magic as possible is the necessary first step of magical training.

Ritual, in Lisiewski’s framework, is a structured exercise for deliberately engineering this process. Attention is narrowed. Associations are built through repetition. Emotional states are paired with actions. Expectations are rehearsed until they are automatic. The reality test — the phrase “where are the results?” — keeps the system anchored to the physical world. It keeps the practitioner honest. It prevents the installation of delusional belief structures.

What does this actually look like in practice? What happens when someone spends months or years engaging the same symbolic system?

It begins with effort. The symbols are inert. The gestures feel arbitrary. The vocabulary of the tradition — the correspondences, the invocations, the attributions of meaning to objects and directions and times of day — is something you are consciously learning, the way you consciously learn a new language. You have to look things up. You have to remind yourself what they mean.

Then, gradually, something shifts. The associations begin running without prompting. You stop having to remember what a symbol means, and simply register it, the way you register a familiar face — automatic, immediate, carrying emotional weight that arrives before thought. These associations expand beyond your ritual into the world outside the magic circle. Objects, events, coincidences that would have been overlooked before now take on a new relevance.

What is happening, mechanically, is that repeated engagement is building neural pathways. The same route, traveled enough times, becomes a groove. Attention no longer has to force its way through. It moves along the groove automatically, pulling with it the emotional freight the groove has accumulated through repetition and association.

Lisiewski’s four-stage sequence is a description of this process. Study is the first exposure. Understanding is the groove beginning to form. Comprehension is when you can travel the groove consciously and reliably. Apprehension is when the groove runs itself, when the system operates without your having to supervise it. At that point the symbol is no longer an idea. It is a functioning part of your reality.

Here’s an example from the game of chess. While the beginner must consciously work through each element — where are the threats? what are my options? what does this position mean? — the grandmaster perceives the whole board at once. This is known as a gestalt: a unified pattern that arrives complete, understood before any deliberate thought. Years of practice have changed what the grandmaster sees, not just how fast they think. They are not thinking harder. They are perceiving differently.

Lisiewski’s claim is that magical training does the same thing — not to a chessboard, but to the entire sensory and interpretive field of everyday life. Install the proper symbolic architecture, through sustained practice, emotional investment, and repetition, and the world begins to reorganize around it. Certain things stand out from the background. Certain connections become visible. Certain events acquire significance that wouldn’t register to someone operating from a different framework.

Almost everyone has experienced this. The expert who can hear the fault in an engine. The nurse who knows something is wrong with a patient before seeing the numbers. The experienced parent who registers the difference between a cry of pain and a cry of frustration. These are not mystical capacities. They are trained perception.

Lisiewski was making the same claim about magical training. But with one additional step that most people skip: the mechanism is available to deliberate installation. You do not have to wait for expertise to accumulate through passive experience. You can build it intentionally.

Hecate is a goddess from ancient Greek religion: a deity of crossroads, thresholds, the night, and the underworld. She is typically depicted holding two torches, accompanied by hounds, standing at the place where roads diverge. In contemporary paganism and Western occultism she has experienced a significant revival, attracting practitioners drawn to her association with magic, transformation, and what her devotees tend to call liminal space — the in-between, the transitional, the moment before things become something definite.

No one is sure how to even pronounce the deity’s name. Scholars say it’s “HEK-uh-tee.” Modern occultists say “heh-kaw-tay.” In ancient Greek, it was probably “heka-tay.” Shakespeare pronounced it “HEK-it.” Most practitioners I know sort of slip into whichever pronunciation makes sense at the time. However it’s pronounced, I have a shrine to Hecate at the entrance to my house.

I did not choose this deity out of devotion. I was not called to her. I had no prior connection to Greek mythology, no teenage fascination with witchcraft, no sense of being pulled toward her specifically. Hecate carried no real significance for me whatsoever.

I was sitting at home one night when I received an email from a magician named Jason Miller offering an email correspondence course called The Sorcery of Hecate. One of Hecate’s classic offerings is wine. I had drunk a little wine at that point myself, so it seemed like a good idea to sign up. I had been mulling over Lisiewski’s claim, that you can install a symbolic framework the way you’d install software, and then observe what the system does once it’s running.

I began performing rituals to Hecate daily. This was a tradition I had no feelings about. I figured that if it’s a real mechanism, it should work regardless of whether I believe in it going in.

The seven-month course cost $25 a week — seven hundred dollars total. At one point, when I was really hard up for cash (and very upfront with Hecate about it), my employer accidentally overpaid me by exactly seven hundred dollars. Coincidence? No? I’ll take it either way.

The ritual is not particularly elaborate. Light the candles — that alone marks a transition. Burn the incense, which changes the sensory texture of the room. Chant the mantra. Hold the dagger aloft, which functions as a kind of cognitive reset. Then the key, held up, a reminder to notice the opportunities that are already there. Pour wine into the cup — a thanks, of course, and a small bribe. The gestures take five to ten minutes. They are not dramatic. But they are stable, and they are repeatable.

In addition to moaning about my finances, I worked with the goddess to help me cut through the mental clutter, the distractions that made it hard to get anything done — to allow me to see opportunities when they appear, and to have the wisdom to take them.

And after several weeks, I noticed something. Executive functioning — the part of the mind that handles task sequencing, planning, follow-through — had become more dependable. Goals that had resisted action for years began to feel accessible, not through motivation or willpower, but through a kind of uncluttered directness. Less friction. The decision to act led more quickly to action.

The shrine itself changed. The objects had stopped being inert. The statue — a robed figure holding two torches, attended by a pair of hounds — had developed a presence. When I walk past it in the morning, I register it the way I’d register a person I know. Faint, automatic recognition. Not dramatic. But undeniable.

And the coincidences. The seven hundred dollars. A series of small events, each individually explainable, that accumulated into a pattern that was either meaningful or a demonstration of my capacity to find patterns. I could not tell you which. I still cannot. What I can tell you is that the Subjective Synthesis was building. Lisiewski’s description — the groove forming, the associations running automatically, the symbolic framework beginning to organize the field of daily experience — was accurate to what I was observing.

As far as that $700 goes: is that evidence that the magical practice works? Lisiewski had an answer for this. Where are the results? Not feelings. Not coincidences. Verifiable effects in the physical world, traceable to a cause. The reality test doesn’t care how significant something feels. It asks what you can demonstrate.

I’m still collecting data.

What we have been tracking in this episode is a process. Visualization shapes expectation. Expectation shapes perception. Perception shapes behavior. And sustained symbolic engagement — the kind Lisiewski demanded, the kind my coach performed, the kind I was deliberately attempting with a shrine and a seven-month correspondence course — appears to accelerate and deepen this process in ways that are hard to fully account for from inside it.

The system Joseph C. Lisiewski was working from — the grimoires, the correspondences, the ritual structures — had been developed and refined over centuries. There was a lineage behind Subjective Synthesis. A history. A curriculum. A tradition that had been systematizing exactly this process long before Lisiewski was born.

That tradition is the subject of the next episode.

In 1887, in London, a small group of men began constructing what they believed would be a unified map of every symbol in the Western esoteric tradition — not as a scholarly project, but as a technology: a machine for deliberately rebuilding how a person perceived reality. They called it the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. And what they built was more sophisticated, and more strange, than most people know.

In this first episode of The Inner Empire, we trace that idea from Bruno's 16th-century theory of "bonds," through a French king's use of court spectacle to pacify a country at war with itself, to the algorithms currently deciding what shows up in your feed. The techniques haven't changed. What's disappeared is the magician.

Below is the adapted transcript of episode 1.

May 21, 1991. University of Chicago. The Divinity School’s annual book sale. The building is crowded, students and faculty moving through hallways, checking tables, exchanging pleasantries. A seemingly normal day. Somewhere in the middle of all that, someone walks into a second-floor men’s restroom, enters the stall next to a professor named Ioan Petru Couliano, climbs up onto a toilet seat, points a small-caliber pistol down through the gap, and fires once.

One shot in the back of the head. The assassin just walks away. Nobody saw him arrive. Nobody sees him leave.

The FBI and the Chicago Police Department investigate. They have theories: a disgruntled student, a jealous colleague, an occult fanatic, a political assassination ordered from overseas. They consider a homosexual lover, a drug deal gone wrong, a mugging inside a bathroom stall. The police district that handles the case averages around two hundred murders a year. This one was unlike any they had encountered. There was virtually no evidence.

The Cook County medical examiner notes the absence of stippling around the entry wound, which means the gun had been held at least eighteen inches from Couliano’s head. The bullet entered the occipital area, clean enough that it looked like a mob-style assassination. The killer had a remarkably steady hand.

The case has never been solved.

Couliano was forty-one years old. A rising scholar at the University of Chicago Divinity School, he was popular, prolific, and, in the weeks before his death, increasingly outspoken about the failures of post-Communist Romania. He had received death threats. His friends and colleagues, including Andrei Codrescu and Saul Bellow, suspected an assassin from the Romanian Securitate. Others suspected domestic fascists with ties to the old communist security apparatus. Either way, this was the first political assassination of a professor on American soil.

Couliano was a Romanian exile, a protege of the great historian of religions Mircea Eliade, and by the time of his death, one of the more original thinkers in the field of religious studies.

His major scholarly work, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, is not a light read. But it presents an argument so audacious that it has not stopped resonating in the thirty-plus years since he wrote it.

When you set aside spirits, demons, and magical spells, Couliano argued, the magicians of Renaissance Europe were engineers of the imagination. They understood that human beings perceive reality through internal images — what they called phantasms — and that if you could control those images, you could control how the world appeared to them. You could control what people wanted, what they feared, what they believed was possible.

“Magic … is theoretically a science of the imaginary, which it explores through its own methods and seeks to manipulate at will,” the professor wrote.

This was not folk magic. This was not superstition. This was, in Couliano’s framing, an early form of applied psychology — a technology of consciousness.

He focused on three figures: Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine philosopher and translator, who developed an intricate theory of how spirit, or spiritus, mediates between the body and the soul, carrying images inward through the senses; Pico della Mirandola, Ficino’s wealthy disciple; and Giordano Bruno, the most radical of the three, executed by the Inquisition in 1600 for a series of teachings at odds with the Catholic Church — things like reincarnation and the fact that other galaxies had their own suns and, potentially, their own forms of life.

Bruno took the ancient art of memory — the classical technique of placing imagined objects in imagined spaces to retain information — and turned it into something else entirely. He wasn’t trying to remember things. He was trying to restructure how a person perceived reality. In texts like De Vinculis in Genere, which translates as Of Bonds in General, Bruno laid out a system for binding the will, the imagination, and the attention of other people. The “hunter of souls,” as he called the magical practitioner, works through images rather than arguments, through desire rather than logic. The main entrance for all magic processes, Bruno wrote, is phantasy — the imagination, the only gateway for internal mental states.

Ted Anton summarizes the stakes in his biography of Couliano: “Bruno claimed to raise the ancient Greek art of memory to a level of global emotional control. Culianu claimed that Bruno’s lesser-known text [Of Bonds in General] predicted in detail the means by which a modern population could be controlled through imagery. Today, Culianu said, we call this magic psychology, propaganda, corporate public relations, spin control, and advertising.”

The process that sits at the center of our culture, where it manages the flow of information, shapes emotional associations, decides what images get amplified and which get suppressed, is not a new invention. According to Couliano, the Renaissance magician is the prototype of the impersonal systems of mass media, indirect censorship, global manipulation, and the brain trusts that exercise their occult control over the Western masses.

He was writing this in 1987. He had not yet seen the internet.

The Renaissance magicians taught that repeated images, charged with emotional intensity, installed themselves in the imagination. And once they are accepted in the imagination, they begin to shape perception. This is an automatic process. You don’t argue someone into a new reality. You give them images that carry emotional weight — images that connect to desire, fear, disgust, longing — and you repeat them, install them, until reality reorganizes around them.

Another term for this process is subjective synthesis, borrowed from the ceremonial magician Joseph C. Lisiewski — an engineer, alchemist, and ceremonial magician who lived in rural Pennsylvania and spent decades making the same argument Couliano was making, from the opposite direction. Where Couliano was a historian working backward from Renaissance texts, Lisiewski was a practitioner working forward from grimoires. Both arrived at the same mechanism for defining one’s reality: attention, association, and expectation.

Attention determines what enters the system. It shapes what you notice, which means it shapes what is real to you. Association links what you attend to with existing emotional and cognitive structures, building coherent interpretive frameworks. Expectation governs what you anticipate, which in turn shapes what you see, what you do, and what you believe is possible.

Install the right images with the right emotional charge, repeat them consistently, and you don’t have to persuade anyone of anything. The framework runs itself.

Anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann, in her research into evangelical Christian communities, documented this process. Practitioners learned to pray by using their imagination to see, hear, smell, and feel their way through biblical scenes until the content registered as perceptual experience. The technique is called interweaving. It layers religious content with memory until the distinction between the two collapses. Luhrmann found that practitioners with a high capacity for psychological absorption — the ability to become fully immersed in mental imagery — were six hundred percent more likely to report hearing God’s voice or feeling God’s presence. But absorption alone wasn’t sufficient. Practice mattered. The more time someone spent in this type of prayer, the more reliably these experiences occurred.

The brain processes vivid mental imagery through the same neural pathways as actual sensory experience. When an imaginary figure is consistently visualized, supplied with sensory specificity, and emotionally charged, the image stabilizes. The effort required to maintain it diminishes. Eventually, it arises spontaneously, and at that point, it no longer feels imaginary. It feels like an encounter with something outside you.

Couliano understood this. What he was describing in the Renaissance magicians was a systematic method for producing and reproducing exactly this effect — not in one person kneeling in a chapel, but in entire populations.

“Magic action occurs through indirect contact,” he wrote, citing Bruno, “through sounds and images which exert their power over the senses of sight and hearing. Passing through the openings of the senses, they impress on the imagination certain mental states of attraction or aversion, of joy or revulsion.”

Someone is interested in UFOs — he’s been watching videos on the subject for weeks. He also has trouble sleeping. One video mentions that disrupted sleep can be a symptom of “missing time.” He watches it twice. The algorithm notes the replay. It serves another video on missing time, then one on hypnotic regression, then a testimonial from someone who recovered memories of contact after years of unexplained insomnia. A specific narrative of the self has been installed — not through argument, not through persuasion, but through repetition and emotional pairing.

The user did not choose this narrative. They were brought to it.

This is a design outcome, documented in the academic literature and in the public record of internal corporate research. Social media algorithms are designed to increase engagement by surfacing the most emotionally activating content — content that produces what the platforms’ own internal metrics measure as strong emotional responses. Filter bubbles are not accidental. The most inflammatory content achieves the greatest visibility because inflammatory content holds attention.

Yaël Eisenstat is a former CIA counter-extremism analyst who later worked at Facebook because she was worried about the platform’s effect on political discourse. In a TED talk, she explained how social media companies make money: they segment users and feed them personalized content that validates and exploits their biases. Their bottom line depends on provoking strong emotions to keep people engaged, which often means rewarding the most inflammatory and polarizing voices.

TikTok’s “For You” page works the same way. It tracks how long you watch a video, what you skip, and what you replay. That data builds an individualized profile, and the app uses it to deliver content calibrated to you with increasing precision. The feed isn’t a neutral reflection of what exists. It’s a curated sequence engineered to keep you watching.

By 2016, Facebook’s News Feed function depended on one of the world’s most secretive predictive algorithms, drawing on more than one hundred thousand elements of behavioral data, continuously computed to determine the personal relevancy score of thousands of possible posts. One hundred thousand behavioral variables, continuously computed for every user, at all times.

And what does this system do with all that data? It decides what images to put in front of you, in what order, paired with what emotional context, and at what moment. It manages the sequence of your attention. It determines which impressions land and which are filtered out. It shapes what feels obvious, what feels urgent, and what feels real.

The French Wars of Religion ran from 1562 to 1598. The country was a veritable slaughterhouse, split between the Catholic League and the Protestant Huguenots. Neighbors killed neighbors. Massacres wiped out any trust between communities. There was no shared national identity left to appeal to. Military force couldn’t fix this. Cold logic couldn’t fix this. People were gripped by apocalyptic thinking, fear of divine punishment, paranoia. Standard medieval statecraft had nothing for a situation like this.

So King Henry III innovated. What he did lines up almost exactly with Giordano Bruno’s theory of bonding.

Henry knew you couldn’t reason this population into peace. So he went after their imaginations instead. He staged elaborate court spectacles: ballets loaded with esoteric symbolism, massive royal processions into hostile cities known as Joyous Entries, all of it synchronized down to the detail. His Palace Academy studied how music and symbols move people, and he used that research.

He wasn’t just acting as king. He was presenting the monarchy as a living symbol of cosmic order, of reconciliation. He buried the ugly facts of civil war under spectacle, betting that the sheer visual force of unity would hook people’s hunger for peace and pull their loyalty back toward the Crown.

Henry III had invented an early version of modern political propaganda. He treated statecraft as a kind of applied psychology. He studied his court’s specific fears and vanities and used that knowledge to bind them to his agenda, the same way an operator studies a mark. His spectacles didn’t end the violence — that job fell to his successor, Henry IV — but his method showed a real grasp of how the subconscious works.

Centuries before mass media, before modern PR, Giordano Bruno saw how a population locked in ideological war could be redirected, if only for a moment, through a calculated assault on the senses.

Social media platforms run the same basic operation now, just without a king and without anyone deciding to do it. The algorithm doesn’t need to know anything about anyone. It just measures what makes you stop scrolling and serves you more of it. The bonding still happens. The senses still get hijacked before the mind can weigh in.

Nobody is running the Palace Academy anymore. The system runs itself.

Bruno had a method. He worked deliberately. He studied correspondences — the symbolic links between planets, metals, emotions, and images — and he used them consciously, as a practitioner. The system required skill, intention, and practice. There was a magician at the center of it.

Couliano traced how that tradition evolved. The magician became the propagandist, the publicist, the spin doctor, the media executive. The techniques were industrialized. They were scaled. But there was still, somewhere, a person making decisions — a practitioner behind the curtain.

What happened next? The practitioner disappeared. Not because the techniques stopped working, but because the techniques were automated. The feeds, the recommendation engines, the engagement loops: these are magical techniques, running without a magician. Nobody is steering them toward any particular end. They optimize for engagement, which means emotional activation, which means they have automated exactly the mechanism Bruno identified and Couliano theorized — and then kept it running after everyone went home.

Does this explain why I feel so… hollow… after too much time spent doomscrolling on Instagram? Unlike Henry III’s Joyous Entries, there is nothing joyous about my social media feed.

Ioan Couliano was killed on a busy afternoon in a crowded building. No one saw the shooter. The case remains unsolved after thirty years. His friends suspected the Romanian secret police, the Securitate. His colleagues suspected domestic extremists. Chicago detectives suspected a mugging, or perhaps a jilted lover.

What nobody suspected, in 1991, was that the problem he was working on — how to hijack the imagination at scale — would turn out to be the problem. The question Couliano was circling — the question he did not live to answer — was what happens when the mechanism scales past any individual practitioner’s control. What happens when the techniques are so thoroughly embedded in everyday life that they no longer require conscious intent, from anyone? What happens when nobody is running the system, because the system is running itself?

It’s called THE INNER EMPIRE — a podcast that pulls together a lot of what I’ve spent years reporting on and thinking about: cults, the occult, conspiracy culture, and the platforms that have inserted themselves directly into our daily life.

Here’s the simplest way I can put it: for five hundred years, people have known how to install a belief in someone’s mind: magicians did it with ritual and symbol, cults did it with repetition and isolation, ad men did it with images. What’s changed is that the same basic mechanism now runs automatically, every time you open an app, with nobody at the controls. This show is about tracing that mechanism across history and figuring out how it ended up running our lives without anyone deciding it should.

Enjoy this introduction. Be sure to subscribe so you can hear new episodes when are released.

The transcript of this episode is below.

The algorithm that runs your life is magic. Not metaphorically. Not “like” magic. The same psychological principles that ceremonial magicians have been using for five hundred years — now controlling your imagination, automated, in a way that no Renaissance sorcerer could have imagined.

I’ve spent years investigating true conspiracies, crackpot theories, religious cults, and con artists. And I kept running into the same question, from every direction: how does belief get installed? Not argued into you. Not chosen. Installed. Running in the background before you’ve decided anything.

You’ll meet a woman who built an entirely new identity for herself — with a new name, new face, new birth certificate — one ritual at a time, over years. A Czech magazine put her on its cover in a dark hood, wielding a dagger, and called her the “Witch of the new generation.” She didn’t care that they were also mocking her. She was done hiding. “You need to pick a character and play it,” she said. She meant it as practical advice. She died last year. Estranged from her family, but beloved by people all over the world.

You’ll hear a cassette tape I spent years trying to track down. A cult leader on the Arizona border, channeling a celestial being of supposedly immense cosmic authority, ascended all the way to Paradise. On tape, he needed notes. You can hear him flipping pages. He sounds like Porky Pig. But that doesn’t matter. Behind him was a real production pipeline: a sound engineer, a transcription team, an editing team polishing the grammar of celestial transmissions. Hundreds of people, over three decades, built their entire lives around what came out of that room.

You’ll meet a Pennsylvania ceremonial magician with an affinity for ancient grimoires, a doctorate in applied physics, and a sophisticated understanding of the psychology of belief. You’ll go inside evangelical churches where people are trained, step by step, to hear the voice of God. Researchers who studied these communities found that people with a strong capacity for mental absorption were six hundred percent more likely to report hearing God’s voice directly. Practice mattered too — the more time spent in this kind of prayer, the more reliably it worked. And you’ll sit with a movement of people who’ve spent years waiting for the government to formally disclose the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence — watching congressional testimony, under oath, from a former intelligence officer who says it’s already happened. The disclosure never arrives. And somehow, years later, the anticipation is stronger than ever. The absence of evidence has become its own kind of proof.

Every one of these stories illustrates the same three-part mechanism: attention, association, expectation. Install the right images, charge them with the right emotion, repeat them long enough — and you don’t have to convince anyone of anything. Attention determines what enters the system, shaping what you notice; association links what you attend to with existing emotional and cognitive structures. And once that loop is running, it keeps running whether or not anyone is left standing at the controls.

A Renaissance philosopher named Giordano Bruno described this mechanism five hundred years ago — in detail — and was burned at the stake for it. A scholar named Ioan Petru Couliano spent his career tracing what became of Bruno’s method, and was murdered in a locked bathroom stall in the middle of his research. Nobody has ever been charged.

Couliano wrote that the modern heir to the Renaissance magician “busies himself with public relations, propaganda, market research, sociological surveys, publicity, information, counterinformation and misinformation, censorship, espionage, and even cryptography.” He wrote that this figure follows the principles of magic, but gives them “a technical and impersonal turn of phrase.” Technical. Impersonal. That’s not a description of a man in a robe. That’s a description of an algorithm.

This is a show about murder, magic, machine learning, and the parts of your own mind that are not under your complete control. This is The Inner Empire.

PREMIERES FRIDAY AUGUST 7, WHEREVER YOU GET YOUR PODCASTS

• Joshua Lilly says he built more than 40 buildings on the group’s Arizona compound and ran its roofing business — and never saw a paycheck.

• The lawsuit claims GCCA trapped members with a $50,000 “debt” that only came due if they tried to leave.

• Lilly was expelled after refusing to let elders control access to his own kids.

• Weeks later, his young son Cleson died.

Joshua Lilly had about $500 to his name when his son died. The funeral home quoted him $1,500 to cremate the boy. Cleson was not yet two when he passed. (After an inconclusive autopsy, the cause of death would be categorized SUDC: sudden unexplained death in childhood.) The Global Community Communications Alliance refused to cover any of the costs, even though Lilly had worked for the community, unpaid, for a decade. He talked the price down to $300. The remains came back to the compound in a Ziploc bag.

At the funeral, his own family looked at him like he was a stranger who’d wandered into the wrong room. He’d been expelled from GCCA weeks earlier and was, in the community’s terms, an apostate — a defaulter. The only person who showed him any compassion at the funeral was his wife.

The cult handled all the arrangements, and at first he was told that he couldn’t even speak at his own son’s funeral. Eventually, Gabriel of Urantia relented. Lilly gave the eulogy in front of a room full of people who’d once been his family and now looked at him with eyes full of hatred. It moved Gabriel to tears.

“Wow, I believe you,” Gabriel said. “You can come back. Welcome back to the Kingdom of God.”

That was the summer of 2016. A complaint filed this week in the U.S. District Court for Arizona lays out, in federal legal terms, exactly what that return was worth: forced labor, trafficking, peonage, involuntary servitude, and beneficiary liability under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA). It’s the fifth legal proceeding to hit the Arizona-based UFO cult recently, after two other civil suits, a Pima County custody case, and a juvenile criminal petition alleging felony child sex abuse.

More coverage of the GCCA:

Readers of my book New Age Grifter will recognize Joshua Lilly. He has been an important source for years. He is always on call, and always ready to share his insight and experience with the GCCA. What comes through in the complaint, more than in anything he’d told me before, is how hard he tried to hold onto his family before he was ejected from paradise for good.

Joshua was brought into the community at twelve by parents who went on to become senior GCCA leaders. He was expelled as a teenager for badmouthing the founder, and spent the next twelve years scraping by on the outside — first in Hawaii, then Colorado, where he somehow found a toe-hold with little education and no money.

He and his wife, Jodel Race, were trying to settle down. They’d committed to buying a house, but Lilly had never gone past the eighth or ninth grade, Race had health problems that would need ongoing care, and money was always tight. As the purchase neared completion, Josh’s mother Centria saw an opening: She told him the community was beautiful, that there were no bills to pay, that work was always available — and she encouraged him to walk away from the house he’d just purchased and let his credit collapse, assuring him that inside GCCA he’d never need a credit rating again, and that his lack of education wouldn’t matter. Lilly wasn’t moved, but his wife ultimately was. After attending a GCCA seminar, she told Joshua she was joining, with or without him.

Joshua wasn’t naive about what he was walking back into. He rejoined anyway, in 2006, as an adult, specifically because he could not stand to lose his wife and his parents all over again. As a condition of coming back, the complaint says, he and Race were required to liquidate everything they owned and hand the proceeds over. They arrived with nothing — which was the point. A member with no money, no property, and no one on the outside has a much harder time changing his mind.

Six months later, once the community’s “initiation” ended, GCCA required Josh and his wife to sign a document stipulating that if either of them ever left, their future children would remain in the community’s custody, or with whichever parent stayed behind. It was standard paperwork; every member signed one. Lilly didn’t think much of it at the time.

Lilly held a general contractor’s license and a roofing license, and over the next decade, according to the complaint, he built more than forty structures on the compound, ran GCCA’s roofing business, and generated an estimated $200,000 to $300,000 in outside revenue — every dollar of which went back to the community. He also built out the facilities for Soulistic Medical Institute, GCCA’s Medicare-certified hospice. Technically a separate nonprofit, Soulistic’s officers are the same handful of GCCA leaders named elsewhere in the complaint.

None of this work paid a wage. Strip away the UFOs and the voices in Gabriel’s head, and what’s left is a contractor who spent ten years building an organization’s infrastructure and running its businesses for free.

When most people hear “trafficking” they picture kidnapping, or people smuggled across a border. Federal law defines it more broadly. Under the TVPRA, forced labor doesn’t require physical restraint — it can be obtained through threats of serious harm, the abuse of legal process, or a scheme designed to make someone believe refusing to work will bring consequences they can’t survive. On top of that, the complaint alleges peonage: a disciplinary program called PIRP came bundled with a manufactured $50,000 “scholarship” debt, dormant as long as a member stayed and worked, due in full the moment he tried to leave. This is not debt through an incidental hardship. This is debt, engineered by a destructive cult, as a trap.

Lilly and Race had two children inside the community: Vaycion in 2009, and Cleson in 2014.

As Lilly’s standing with GCCA deteriorated, a representative named Daniel Steinhardt told him that contact with both boys now required leadership approval and elder supervision. (Steinhardt is the same figure at the center of the Pima County custody case I covered earlier this year.) Lilly refused and was expelled, dropped off in Nogales with nothing. Within two weeks, GCCA served him with divorce and custody papers and made any return conditional on surrendering parental rights and paying off the $50,000 “debt” he’d been carrying since 2006.

Josh’s son Cleson died on August 26, 2016. The complaint says he was between eighteen months and two years old at the time.

The GCCA let Joshua back in on September 1, 2016, immediately after his son’s funeral, but not as a full member. He was classified as a “resident visitor,” the lowest rank in the community. There was also a new “three-strikes” policy, and the strikes piled up fast: a pre-approved appointment retroactively counted as a violation, a trip to treat a broken finger without an elder’s sign-off, an offhand comment in an evening class that GCCA’s kids were naive about the outside world. On November 13 — his birthday — elders called him in and told him to leave for good.

GCCA didn’t let him fade into the background after that. According to the complaint, Gabriel of Urantia repeatedly invoked him by name during services, holding him up as a cautionary tale of spiritual failure and apostasy. It backfired. The public denunciation made Lilly known throughout the community as someone who would help members escape. In the years since, he’s helped roughly ten people leave GCCA, including his own father and his ex-wife. The organization tried to make him its villain and, in doing so, advertised him as the way out.

As of last week’s filing, the GCCA is now defending itself on five separate legal fronts. This is the broadest legal challenge the organization has faced in its history.

Joshua Lilly spent years explaining how the community worked. Now he’s asking a federal court to recognize that what happened to him — and many more like him — is the legal definition of human trafficking.

I’m talking to my neighbor, standing outside his front door, when I notice a nest in the rafters over our heads. Before I can say something, he grabs the nest, pulls it down, upsetting whatever these creatures are inside it. There are two of them. They have the heads of humans, but the bodies of insects. Grotesque, but I know that this is just because t…

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I recently spoke to Dan Shearer of the Green Valley News about my book New Age Grifter and my continuing investigation into the Global Community Communications Alliance, a UFO religion (some call it a cult) on the US-Mexico border.

New Age Grifter is available now in a new, up-to-date edition: https://www.amazon.com/New-Grifter-Authors-Joseph-Flatley/dp/B0GZHZ8YVF/

You had heavy pushback from GCCA before the book was published in 2021, likely costing you a lot of sales because of a delay. But you did publish; did you hear anything from them afterward?

Not a peep. I think they realized that, despite their wishes, there is nothing in the book that is defamatory or actionable. It helps to have had lawyers from the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association and the Authors Guild look it over and declare it well within my First Amendment rights to publish. In my experience, the GCCA sends cease-and-desist letters, but they rarely follow up. Your experience may differ.

You recently re-released the book with a new afterword about the founder’s death in August 2025. Do you plan a more extensive new edition in the future?

I’m currently pitching another book about the GCCA. If you are a big-time literary agent, Hollywood producer, or book publisher, feel free to reach out!

Former members filed two lawsuits over the past eight months. Has anything in them surprised you?

I was mostly moved by the legal language, the dry, unemotional tone that really portrays these offenses in stark terms. I had heard most of the stories in each of the complaints before, but to see everything laid out like that — the sexual abuse, the emotional abuse, the emotional toll that abuse takes, the exploitation of people who were small children at the time — to see it all laid out in black and white in a legal document was really striking.

As mentioned, GCCA lost its leader Van/Gabriel of Urantia (Tony Delevin) in August. What do you expect to come of this, and who do you think is calling the shots there now?

I have to assume Gabriel was not doing very well toward the end. Non compos mentis. He always had smart people advising him — whether on how to psychologically manipulate people or how to profit off his followers’ labor. That’s the role of the eldership, and they’re still around. I suspect they’ve held the reins for some time, and I think they’ll be holding them for some time into the future.

Read to the whole interview (or listen to it) at the Green Valley News website: https://www.gvnews.com/news/author-digs-into-history-drive-behind-group/article_8fbedd32-2e2f-464b-b0cc-a5c472193abf.html

This article was originally published in TruthDig.

On June 30, the U.S. Congress held its first hearings in 49 years on the Cold War-era mind control program known as MKULTRA. Prior to this latest meeting of Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets — titled “Mind Control and Accountability” — Congress had not raised the issue since 1977, during the last gasps of the Church Committee hearings into intelligence agency overreach that began two years earlier.

There was little in Luna’s hearings to suggest a half-century of history had passed. Instead, the witnesses and lawmakers rehashed conspiracy theories that have become a mainstay of social and mainstream media. As with recently conducted hearings on the JFK assassination, they chose to spotlight rabbit holes instead of advancing public understanding or demanding accountability. In the case of MKULTRA, this would have required connecting the program to the interrogation programs that grew from it and remain active today.

Luna’s opening statement laid out the basic facts of the clandestine Cold War-era research program funded by the CIA, and was accurate as far as it went. “MKULTRA,” she said, “was a deliberate, systematic governmental operation that subjected American citizens, prisoners, hospital patients, veterans, ordinary people to LSD, electroshock, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, psychological torture without their knowledge or consent.” The secret program’s purpose was to investigate the potential of “mind control” technologies for use against the Soviets other enemies, external and domestic. Between the hatching of the project by CIA Director Allen Dulles in 1953 and its shuttering 20 years later, the agency burned between $10 and $20 million (over $160 million in 2026 dollars) only to conclude that mind control was not, in fact, possible. Along the way, they also determined that LSD was too unpredictable to be used as a weapon. The CIA quickly destroyed most of the records and took what was useful to develop less exotic, more reliable means of torturing and interrogating people.

Further Reading:

Lucien Greaves on Substack

Incompetent Congressional MKUltra Hearing Was Pointless and Deranged

It is “dissociative,” not “dis-associative…

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2 months ago · 36 likes · 5 comments · Lucien Greaves

By centering last month’s hearing on conspiratorial speculation, it ignored the well-documented second life of the program, and pushed to the margins the legacy of what all that acid, hypnosis and electroshock actually produced.

The backbone of the conspiratorial narrative was provided by the testimony of Tom O’Neill, co-author of the 2019 bestseller, “CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties.” The speculative thesis of “CHAOS” — whose eponymous CIA domestic espionage project targeted American citizens during the same timeframe as MKULTRA — is anchored by the story of a CIA-funded psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West and his (likely) CIA-backed study of the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene at the same time and place as Manson was recruiting the Family. As O’Neill relayed to the task force, he was quite never able to put West “in the same room” as Manson that summer, but he did prove that West had lied for his entire career about ever receiving MKULTRA funds. According to the author, Manson’s techniques for persuading hippies to follow him and kill innocent people were strikingly similar to the mind control research being conducted by MKULTRA-backed researchers. His argument boiled down to this: Since West received CIA funds and worked in San Francisco at the same time as Charles Manson, and since Manson was the CIA’s equal (if not better!) at manipulating people, then the “connections” between the CIA and Manson are too wild to be a coincidence.

As is often the case in conspiracy literature, the word connection is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

There is no doubt that West was a Zelig-like figure in postwar America, and figured prominently in the shadowy Venn overlap between the California counterculture, secret intelligence research and the national security state. But unlike the chameleonic Zelig, West stood out and craved publicity. As the long-time chair of psychiatry at UCLA, he positioned himself as the nation’s premier expert on cults and coercive persuasion, most famously delivering the psychiatric evaluation that deemed JFK-assassin-killer Jack Ruby psychotic. He later served as a lead defense witness to argue that heiress Patty Hearst had been brainwashed by the Symbionese Liberation Army. His public ambition often resulted in controversy. In 1962, he injected a bull elephant named Tusko with a lethal dose of LSD in a reckless attempt to study behavioral psychosis; in the 1970s, he proposed a “Violence Project” at UCLA that critics slammed as a dystopian blueprint for using biochemical testing and psychosurgery on minority youth.

Despite all of this, there is not a single piece of hard evidence “connecting” him to Charles Manson.

There is a Chinese saying that one should not look for a mouse on the other side of the village when there is an elephant sitting on your nose. And what we know about MKULTRA and the programs that followed is damning enough without draping it with speculation about the Los Angeles murder of the century. A CIA program experimented on Americans without consent for two decades, sending officers abroad to request “expendables” from local CIA stations (meaning human beings who, in the program’s own logic, wouldn’t be missed if they disappeared.) At home, MKULTRA scientist Frank Olson died in a fall from a New York hotel window in 1953, days after announcing he wanted out of the project; it was labeled a suicide at the time, but the case has never been fully resolved. The CIA destroyed its own files to dodge accountability, and was never seriously punished for any of it.

MKULTRA’s post-Church committee legacy likewise does not need the sensationalism attached to the UAP hearings held last year by Luna’s Task Force. MKULTRA was not a discrete 20-year episode that started with Dulles in 1953 and ended when Helms burned the files in 1973. It was part of a much longer funding stream into an ongoing research program on how to break the human mind. The mission did not die in 1973; it mutated, resurfacing in each generation’s interrogation practice under a new name.

West’s MKULTRA-era research, for example, continued his work developing the concept of “debility, dependency, and dread,” which he began in the 1950s and was quoted in the CIA’s 1963 KUBARK counterintelligence interrogation manual. When the Baltimore Sun forced the manual’s declassification through a 1997 FOIA fight, it reported that the document “also taught torture.” KUBARK allowed agents to use coercion in interrogations as long as they got approval in advance, including a headquarters sign-off requirement whenever “medical, chemical or electrical methods” were used to break a subject. West’s influence on the CIA’s playbook was also apparent in its 1983 manual used to train Honduran military officers, including members of Battalion 316, a unit responsible for kidnapping, torturing and disappearing suspected leftists throughout the decade. After Congress objected, editors revised the manual by hand, writing “this is a form of torture” next to specific techniques.

The doctrine also featured prominently in the CIA’s post-Sept. 11 enhanced interrogation program, which adapted many of the same principles for use against terrorism suspects. The techniques were used at Abu Ghraib, where documented abuse followed patterns strikingly close to that prescribed in earlier research. Around the same time, the military’s Human Terrain System applied behavioral and social science to counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, a lineage that historians trace back through the same MKULTRA-era well of experimentation.

n the end, the hearings further muddled two competing versions of the MKULTRA story. One is the documented history of an illegal CIA research program whose techniques extended official and unofficial interrogation practices. The other involves the mythology of CIA mind control creating state assassins and programming acid casualties like Charles Manson. The first is supported by records, investigations and decades of scholarship. The second is supported by coincidence, insinuation and the irresistible appeal of unanswered questions.

Judging from the headlines that gravitated toward Charles Manson and Manchurian Candidates, this second version remains ascendant. These stories are more dramatic — and easier to tell — than the story of how MKULTRA helped give birth to KUBARK and the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program. A serious hearing on MKULTRA would have focused on how its experiments shaped state violence for the next 50 years, rather than the wild goose chase of whether a crazed MKULTRA asset may or may not have disemboweled Sharon Tate.

We know MKULTRA failed to deliver mind control. We still need to come to terms with the living legacy of its “successes”— past, present and future. This was the parting warning of Stephen Kinzer, author of “Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control,” who served as an expert witness to Luna’s task force. In one of the hearing’s more serious moments, Kinzer warned that a program built on today’s artificial intelligence and neuroscience might already be running somewhere inside the national security state. But nobody with the power to ask seems to care much about finding out. Instead, the Task Force — a MAGA clown car that does not merit comparison to the Church Committee — focused on a distant past and a matinee mythology that benefits no one more than the contemporary national security state. While politicians, journalists and the public obsess over a program that ended in 1973, they are missing MKULTRA’s true and full patrimony.

Watch this episode on TST TV:

https://thesatanictemple.tv/programs/wwp-205-mkultra-whistleblower-tells-all

In this episode of Worldwide Panic, we discuss the oeuvre of Emma Katherine, host of the Imagination Podcast, a conspiracy influencer who platforms self-described survivors of satanic ritual abuse and “MKUltra programming.” Lucien recounts his own 2024 Twitter clashes with Emma and her followers, who accused him of being secretly connected to the Process Church of the Final Judgment — a defunct 1970s cult he’d researched and appeared in documentaries about — and who labeled him a “pedophile protector” for publicly debunking the Hampstead ritual-abuse hoax. Emma’s work is a case study in how conspiratorial communities validate one another’s claims through anecdote and mutual reinforcement rather than evidence, and how social media’s format rewards volume and repetition of assertion over coherent argument.

From there, the conversation widens into a broader discussion of media credulity around satanic panic and MKUltra mythology, including a detailed takedown of the Netflix Sons of Sam docuseries and its reliance on the late Maury Terry’s evidence-free theory linking the Process Church to the Son of Sam and Manson murders, Greaves’ own testy exchange with the documentary’s filmmaker, and a shared frustration with credentialed figures like Mitch Horowitz lending unwarranted credibility to shaky claims in similar productions.

Subscribe to Lenny’s Failed State Update newsletter:

Failed State Update

Stories from the end of the world.

By Joseph L. Flatley

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Theme music: “Satanic Planet” by Satanic Planet

Watch this program on TST TV: https://thesatanictemple.tv/programs/wwp-204-mk-ultra-is-back-unfortunately

Congress held hearings on the CIA’s MKULTRA mind control program last week, but instead of uncovering new evidence, lawmakers mostly resurrected conspiracy narratives that have been circulating since the 1970s. In this episode of Worldwide Panic, Lenny and Lucien break down what actually happened during the hearing, who the witnesses were, why they were pretty fucking lame, and how documented government abuses have become entangled with decades of speculation about psychic assassins, mind-control slaves, and other enduring myths.

Along the way, they examine the strange political incentives driving today’s “declassification” movement, the difference between genuine historical scandals like COINTELPRO and sensationalized folklore, and why bad evidence remains bad evidence — even when it’s used against bad people.

Lucien Greaves on Substack:

Lucien Greaves on Substack

My personal Substack

Lenny’s newsletter, Failed State Update:

Failed State Update

Stories from the end of the world.

By Joseph L. Flatley

Theme music: “Satanic Planet” by Satanic Planet

Watch this program on TST TV: https://thesatanictemple.tv/programs/wp-203-ringo-tim-leary-colin-ross-and-the-isstd-papers

NOTE: The podcast file has been fixed.

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Watch this episode on TST TV: https://thesatanictemple.tv/programs/wp-202-a-therapist-a-search-warrant-and-a-coverup

A prominent trauma specialist is accused of warning a patient about an impending police search warrant, a decision prosecutors say allowed evidence to be destroyed before investigators arrived. What begins as a bizarre criminal case soon opens onto a much larger story about recovered memories, dissociative disorders and ritual abuse allegations.

From there, Joseph L. Flatley and Lucien Greaves talk about the ISSTD, a professional community that has spent decades defending claims many researchers consider discredited. Along the way, they explore the enduring influence of conspiracy thinking in therapeutic settings, the legacy of the Satanic Panic, and why certain beliefs continue to survive long after the evidence behind them has collapsed.

Also: Feral House has a new series on TST TV! And Lucien catches fire while filming a video for Satanic Planet.

Links:

-Lucien Greaves on Substack:

Lucien Greaves on Substack

My personal Substack

-Subscribe to Joseph L. Flatley’s Failed State Update newsletter: ⁠⁠

Failed State Update

Stories from the end of the world.

By Joseph L. Flatley

⁠⁠Theme music: “Satanic Planet” by Satanic Planet

Watch on TST TV: https://thesatanictemple.tv/programs/wp201-is-it-disclosure-day-already

In this episode of Worldwide Panic, Lucien and Lenny kick off Season 2 with a look at the recent wave of Pentagon UAP file releases and the decades-old “disclosure day” mythology that ufologists have built around the promise of a coming revelation.

The conversation traces how thin, uncontextualized documents get inflated into proof through credentialed-sounding “whistleblowers,” recycled tabloid sourcing, and sloppy AP-wire framing, drawing a direct parallel to recent Epstein files coverage, where a single ambiguous mention becomes a headline regardless of what it actually says.

The episode closes with Lenny discussing his new book The Occult Timothy Leary, and Leary’s own derisive take on UFO believers.

Theme music: “Satanic Planet” by Satanic Planet

Subscribe to Joseph L. Flatley’s Failed State Update newsletter: ⁠⁠http://lennyflatley.substack.com/⁠⁠

More info on Lenny’s book The Occult Timothy Leary: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Occult-Timothy-Leary/Joseph-L-Flatley/9798888500842

Lucien Greaves on Substack:

Lucien Greaves on Substack

My personal Substack

I’m very excited to announce that I will be giving a presentation on Timothy Leary and the occult at the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick on Sunday June 28th 5:00 PM

Free & Open to the public. An exploration of the Tarot through the lens of Tim Leary’s eight-circuit model for understanding altered states of consciousness and the potential for transcendent experiences.

No ticket required! RSVP at the Buckland Museum’s Facebook page.

In addition to the Buckland Museum gig, I have been doing tons of press for my book The Occult Timothy Leary. One stand-out interview is this (almost) four hour marathon chat session with Frater R.C. on the Magick Without Fears podcast.

In addition to The Occult Timothy Leary now being available on Amazon, be sure to check out the new edition of New Age Grifter, my expose’ of the Gabriel of Urantia cult. Up-to-date with the latest on the death of Gabriel and the latest lawsuits.

The forces of stupidity and banality struck another low blow on July 6 when an unknown individual bombed the Georgia Guidestones in Elberton County, Georgia. The blast destroyed one…

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UPDATE (5/1/26): Just to clarify, the person who filed this lawsuit — Jane S. Doe — is different from the individual who filed the previous lawsuit covered in this space. Her name was Jane M. Doe. Sorry for the confusion.

The daughter of Gabriel of Urantia and Niánn Emerson Chase has filed a lawsuit alleging decades of physical abuse, sexual exploitation, forced abortion, and even coerced organ donation inside an Arizona religious compound.

• Gabriel of Urantia, born Anthony Joseph Delevin, founded the Global Community Communications Alliance (GCCA) in Arizona and led it until his death in August 2025

• His biological daughter, identified as Jane S. Doe, has filed a 26-count verified complaint in Santa Cruz County Superior Court

• She was repeatedly sexually abused by multiple GCCA members between approximately ages three and fourteen

• At fourteen, her father arranged her future marriage to an adult male member roughly ten years her senior

• In 2010 she was coerced into donating a kidney to her father; post-operatively her pain medication was controlled by a cult authority

• The complaint seeks damages exceeding $12.5 million and invokes federal racketeering statutes typically applied to organized crime

Nancy Emerson Chase had three children with Gabriel of Urantia, who died last year. Members are required to bow in her presence and address her as “Princess Niánn.” After Gabriel, she was the second most powerful person inside the Global Community Communications Alliance.

Stacy Myszka is known as Tiyiendae. She was Gabriel’s other partner, the woman who controlled access to pain medication for post-surgical patients and decided when they had suffered enough to deserve relief.

Catherine Lilly is known as Centria. She was Gabriel’s financial director, the person who oversaw the economic apparatus that made leaving impossible.

Linda Cunningham is known as Marayeh — she had her name changed legally in 2008. She was Gabriel’s head counselor, a PhD psychologist formerly licensed in California and Arizona, the woman who told victims of sexual assault inside the compound that the assault was their own fault.

According to a complaint filed this week in Santa Cruz County Superior Court, all four of them knew what was happening to Gabriel’s daughter — and not one of them stopped it.

Marayeh came to the GCCA in 1993, after years at Synanon — the closed-campus self-help cult that pioneered the model Gabriel would later replicate in the Arizona desert. She brought with her the full suite of control tactics Synanon was known for: taking children away from their parents to be raised by the community, a peer-reporting “snitch” system designed to eliminate privacy, and a counseling program that was never intended to heal anyone. Every victim who disclosed sexual assault was told by Marayeh or her trained counselors that the assault was their own fault. Karmic punishment. Past-life rebellion. Pre-adolescent children were told their “seductive” behavior had caused it. Perpetrators were not reported to police or removed from access to children.

The plaintiff is identified as Jane S. Doe. She is the biological daughter of Gabriel and Niánn — born inside the community, raised inside it, and subjected to what the complaint describes as decades of physical abuse, sexual exploitation, forced abortion, coerced organ donation, and systematic psychological domination. She lived there until April 2022, when she fled with her children after learning that GCCA planned to remove her three-year-old daughter from her care. She is now suing her father’s estate, her mother Niánn, Gabriel’s wife Tiyiendae, GCCA financial director Catherine “Centria” Lilly, Marayeh, and the GCCA itself. The complaint contains 26 counts and seeks damages exceeding $12.5 million.

In February, I reported on three concurrent Arizona proceedings examining the GCCA from different angles — a criminal petition alleging six felony sexual offenses inside the compound, a civil suit filed on behalf of a woman brought to the compound as an infant, and a custody case whose court-appointed advisor concluded that child sexual abuse was routine within the community for decades, known to leadership, and never reported.

Yesterday’s filing — number four — exposes even more secrets that Gabriel, his wives, and his lieutenants have been keeping under wraps.

FURTHER READING

The Global Community Communications Alliance (GCCA) operates a compound in rural Tumacácori, Arizona, surrounded by a high fence with locked gates, inaccessible by public transportation. Members surrender all assets upon entry, sign documents relinquishing custody of their children to GCCA if they ever leave, and apply in writing for permission to spend even ten dollars. Leadership, meanwhile, occupies a separate luxury residence with a garage full of expensive cars, a private chef, and satellite television. Followers were required to bow when encountering Gabriel and Niánn, and to address them as “Prince Melfax” and “Princess Niánn,” respectively. They toil for nothing but to enrich the coffers of the cult’s leadership, and — if they’re lucky — to have a front row seat to the return of Jesus Christ on what Gabriel called a “planetary spacecraft” (that is, a really, really big UFO).

Gabriel taught that men’s sperm was “healing.” At least, his sperm was healing, but only a few would share this honor.

Through adolescence, the complaint alleges, Jane S. Doe was physically abused by her father multiple times a week: punching, slapping, throwing her across rooms and onto objects, bare-bottom beatings. Gabriel authorized other adult male members to administer corporal punishment to her in the same manner. He also subjected her to prolonged rage episodes in which he would chase her, calling her a “slut,” “hussy,” “whore,” and “Jezebel,” threatening to kill her. On at least one occasion, the plaintiff watched Gabriel strangle his wife Tiyiendae while she lay on a couch.

From approximately ages three through fourteen, Gabriel’s daughter was repeatedly sexually abused by multiple GCCA members — a foreseeable consequence in a community where sexual violence was rarely acknowledged, went virtually unpunished, and predators were not removed (their labor was too valuable).

When Jane S. Doe was approximately seven, one abuser began groping her; the conduct escalated over the following years to include digital penetration, occurring multiple times a week, sometimes in a classroom in the presence of a teacher and other students. Leadership knew, or should have known, and did nothing. When she finally disclosed the abuse, Marayeh delivered the standard response: she was a loose woman from a past life, and what had happened to her was her own fault. The perpetrators remained in contact with children.

At approximately age twelve, Doe and her twin sister began documenting the physical abuse in personal journals. When Gabriel, Niánn, and Tiyiendae discovered the journals, the girls were called into a meeting and told that if word of the abuse ever got out, their father would go to prison and they would never see him again. The abuse was justified because the twins were “old souls” who had held positions of authority in past lives and needed to learn submission. They were specifically instructed never to disclose the abuse to anyone inside or outside the community, because the outside world was “fallen” and would not understand. The plaintiff was removed from the family home, separation from her twin, and placement in a communal dormitory where she was required to sleep on the floor with only a blanket and pillow and no personal possessions. Gabriel and his elders described this as a “spiritual apprenticeship program.”

At approximately age fourteen, Gabriel told his daughter that an adult male member named Kazarian — roughly ten years her senior — was her future husband. She was then placed in GCCA’s adult theater troupe, where Kazarian served as director, an arrangement that increased his access to her and authority over her. At approximately age fifteen, alone with Kazarian in his office, he pulled her onto his lap.

Gabriel directed his daughter to engage in written correspondence as a pen pal with adult male prospects, at times explicitly representing that she would be available to them upon reaching age eighteen. She and her twin were called into a meeting with a man in his sixties who had expressed a desire to marry them; rather than protecting the minors, leadership blamed them for giving him the wrong impression and required them to apologize to him. Gabriel required that the children of the community watch Fiddler on the Roof as part of the school curriculum, specifically to normalize the idea of arranged marriages.

This was Gabriel of Urantia engineering the sexual exploitation of his own daughter, with the full participation of GCCA’s leadership structure.

In 2008, after she fled the compound while pregnant, Tiyiendae and Centria retrieved her across state lines, physically manhandling her as she resisted. She was isolated in a hotel and told she must have an abortion to rejoin GCCA; she was also told that the child would be deformed or “retarded” anyways. She underwent the abortion at approximately fourteen weeks. Upon returning to the compound she was subjected to two years of punitive isolation, mandatory group counseling sessions in which she was the designated target, and sustained public humiliation.

In 2010, Doe was pressured to donate a kidney to Gabriel — after months of disciplinary punishment, under secrecy, with no siblings asked and the broader community kept uninformed of Gabriel’s condition. She had no private access to medical providers and no opportunity to ask questions or seek outside help. Post-operatively, her prescribed pain medication was controlled by a GCCA authority the organization called a “soul watcher,” and Tiyiendae decided when she was required to stop taking it regardless of her pain or recovery needs. During the pre-surgery testing period, while she was in acute psychological distress, Tiyiendae came to her room and administered a substance to her rectally without obtaining consent or informing her what it was. She lost consciousness and remained unconscious for approximately seventeen hours. She later learned the substance was Valium.

In 2015, the plaintiff was sexually assaulted at a GCCA-owned restaurant in Tucson by a man who had abused her as a child. Tiyiendae had provided excess alcohol to staff. The plaintiff woke to non-consensual sexual activity. Staff were instructed the following morning not to discuss what had happened. Rather than receiving any protection, she was subsequently punished, demoted as a “rebellious soul,” and placed on a disciplinary program.

In 2021, while pregnant, she refused the anti-nausea medication Zofran due to the medication’s documented risks of birth defects. Despite her refusal, a GCCA leadership member acting on Tiyiendae and Gabriel’s directives physically placed the medication under her tongue and forced her to ingest it after removing her husband from the room.

GCCA removed her child from her care when they were approximately three years old, repeatedly placing them in leadership-controlled households. The plaintiff was prohibited from conducting unannounced welfare checks or spending extended time alone with her child. When the child lived in leadership-controlled housing, an older boy sexually assaulted them hundreds of times. The plaintiff did not learn of the assaults until recently, and criminal charges are now pending against the perpetrator. The complaint alleges that despite knowing of the allegations, GCCA has failed to restrict his access to other children. In early 2022, she was told her three-year-old daughter would also be removed. She escaped that April.

The legal framing is the most ambitious yet brought against the GCCA — and deliberately so. The 26 counts include civil RICO and Arizona’s parallel racketeering statute, a framework typically reserved for organized crime, here applied to argue that GCCA was exactly that: a coordinated criminal enterprise spanning decades, with forced labor, sex trafficking, fraud, and obstruction as predicate acts. The complaint names GCCA’s network of affiliated commercial entities — including Soulistic Medical Institute, Camp Avalon, and Magic Land Realty — as integrated components of that enterprise rather than separate operations. Soulistic receives federal Medicare funding, which establishes the interstate commerce hook RICO requires, and which raises questions that extend well beyond this lawsuit.

The complaint also includes counts under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. That statute carries a ten-year limitations period. For child sex trafficking, there is no limitations period at all.

Marayeh is named as a defendant in multiple counts. A court-appointed advisor in a separate custody proceeding noted earlier this year that she almost certainly understands the mechanics of what she built: that chronically victimized children who cannot escape abuse habituate responses of fawning and freezing, producing exactly the compliance and capitulation the GCCA requires.

The complaint seeks compensatory damages of not less than $12.5 million, treble damages under RICO, punitive damages, and attorneys’ fees. It argues that the plaintiff has been rendered by the defendants’ conduct unable to obtain adequate education or meaningful employment for the duration of her life.

Gabriel is dead. He never answered for any of this. The women who enabled him, protected him, and built the system that made it all possible are still alive. And they are now defendants.