I founded a cult in middle school
Notes on people and power
My cult was not that big, but hey, what do you expect from an 8th grader?
I want to discuss what I learned from my short-lived but informative adventure as a cult leader. I lost some faith in humanity, but more importantly, I learned aspects of the human religious mentality that are playing out prominently on the world’s biggest stages.
I don’t want to provide a how-to guide, especially because the cult was small, short-lived, and online. However, I’m not sure how else I would’ve learned what I learned from the experience.
Often, we read or see important tell-all stories about cults from the perspective of former cultists, typically framed as victims (whether fairly or not). We rarely read tell-all accounts from the perspective of former cult leaders.
There are many reasons for this asymmetry: one being that cult leaders tend to have a lot at stake in maintaining the power of their cult; another being that, if the cult is famous, it’s probably not in the spotlight because of its founder’s good character or willingness to let go.
Fortunately, I was just a bored teenager when I founded my cult, not a rabid mystic, and I was online, not founding a commune. So it was a relatively low-stakes situation compared to famous cults, and writing about it mostly just makes me cringe, not feel like I’m at risk.
My recruitment methods were unusual and relaxed, which also makes my hindsight less painful.
I don’t recall my motives for founding my cult. It never had a name. I’ll nickname it “Epic Memes” for reasons that will become apparent. Epic Memes lasted, at the longest, two years. I did not extract money from anyone, but it would have been easy to, in slightly different circumstances.
None of what I’m about to discuss, of course, is flattering for me. But again: teenagers (yes I was a teenager at one point too) do dumb things.
When I began using the Internet for more than Barbie and LEGO flash games, fan forums were a big deal, as were Chatroulette and Omegle, both of which had been founded in 2009. In short: niche, anonymous, and sometimes username-based online platforms were thriving.
I certainly had no idea, going in, that people three times my age were so prone to reverence for a random teenager.
Origins
The cult began with me using Chatroulette, Omegle, and some fan forums for a while and trying to pinpoint individuals who seemed likely to be sympathetic to weird new religious ideas and join a cult based on them. The fan forums make more sense as a way to attract cultists because one can make a connection to a fellow poster before linking to the online hubs for the cult (on which more later). Omegle and Chatroulette seemed like hard mode, but because they were so low-stakes, using them for cult-building was an appealing challenge.
The goal was to figure out whether a person was a good candidate and then send them a link to one of the cult’s group pages. Identifying potential cultists required some intuition.
Who would bite? Who would recoil?
Very few people who made it to the point of receiving a link ended up questioning the cult’s doctrines. Even as small as its scale was, my minimal effort was eerily successful.
According to my pitch, I was the demigod offspring of a mother goddess figure whose name varied—something like perennialism suffused the cult’s religious doctrines, because I wanted to cast a wide net.
In sum, I was this alleged messianic-prophetic figure who would deliver the direct communications of my Mother to the world. My ostensible goal was to track down people who had some mystical aura of preparedness to redeem the world, a special class of psychically-inclined and virtuous people.
I had no inkling of how easy it would be to get people to swallow this pill. To swallow the… cultpill? What colour would that pill be? Puce?
When I started spreading Epic Memes’s doctrines, I assumed that people would treat it as an odd and even juvenile joke. The issue was that I was unscrupulous enough to continue selecting people who seemed unlikely to think of me as a jokester.
(My bad!)
The cultists
The idea of a mystical aura wasn’t so far off from how I actually picked potential cultists. There’s just some kind of vibe I would intuit. On average, here are the traits of the former cultists:
Aged 25-50
White
Raised Christian
American or British
The universal vibe they all shared: seeking.
Seeking for purpose, for community, for—perhaps most vaguely—consistent authority to follow. They wanted someone who knew about reality in ways they couldn’t and who knew them in their dismay as wandering souls.
One of the core appeals of any cult is that it provides cultists with a sense of being special. Successful cults amplify the universal religious pleasure of feeling like you’re among the sole knowers of the true nature of reality.
Evangelical Christians are a clear example of this religious appeal: its adherents are the sole souls not going to hell for eternal torture after death. This belief provides adherents with the twinned positive affects that come from a sense of superiority as the sole truth-holders and as the sole bearers of salvific wisdom for the world. Evangelical Christianity’s decentralised organisational non-structure also makes it pretty bulletproof; one pastor’s scandal won’t take down the whole movement.
An aside on numbers
When discussing the cult with irl friends, I’ve tended to say that the cult peaked at about 20 members. That’s an under-exaggeration; the core group was maybe 20 members. The rest? I have no idea, since for the most part they could come or go without me noticing. I’ll leave the numbers at that because they bore me and because the nature of an online cult is such that there’s no way of telling who’s adhering to what beliefs without necessarily posting. And I didn’t extort money from anyone, so I wouldn’t have information from duped donors.
What it takes to start a cult
In this section, I will go into what I learned about cult-founding in my stint as an alleged messianic figure. Again, I don’t want to make a how-to guide; my goal is more to unpack the methods that ended up working as a way to examine how cults appeal to cultists.
Gnosis, or, doctrinal hierarchy
Starting a cult from scratch can be tricky when it comes to formulating doctrine. A cult that starts from scratch often needs to be a lot less accessible or populist than, for instance, evangelical Christianity.
Why?
Evangelical Christianity is part of a religion that reached widespread hegemony in much of the world centuries ago. There are many, many established ways to evangelise for any Christian sect.
Evangelicalism’s message is simple and easy to understand. Its missionaries can go into countries where they don’t even speak the native languages and have confidence that they’ll acquire converts. The goal is to rapidly spread a simple doctrine and the doctrine’s simplicity facilitates the goal of its dissemination. The knowledge is supposed to be accessible to the great unwashed.
Beginning a cult from scratch, with doctrines contrary to any major world religion’s, without the infrastructural support of established organisations, is a challenge compared to going around and telling far-flung people the very well-established Good News.
Starting a newborn cult is a) easiest online, as Epic Memes always remained, and b) easiest if the cult has different levels of initiation.
An online cult faces the difficulties of disseminating doctrines in an appealing way while having to essentially generate engagement like a website gathering hits. Stratification ameliorates both issues.
Having stratified benefits is an easy way to maximise appeal, and it’s a tried and true method for cults and mainstream religions, like the Eleusinian mysteries of yore.
Having smaller and smaller in-groups of more advanced initiates is a good way to generate engagement. It appeals to cultists’ need for belonging and approval while encouraging them to stick around.
So a founder needs to have readymade “deeper” knowledge for higher initiates. The hidden gnosis has to have the vibe of being dangerous in the wrong minds, because they might misunderstand it in their ignorance. I’ll get to doctrines a little later.
Leadership
Cults do not have the safety net of decentralisation, at least for a long time after their founding. Cults are high risk, high reward, because they sink or float based on the leader’s individual skill and willpower.
Again, I don’t want this article to be a how-to guide for cult founding. But it’s useful to list some things I learned about being a cult leader that can be communicated without just saying “bee urself.” Because it’s nothing like that.
I recall my disappointment at finding out that Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century isn’t a guide to being a tyrant, so apologies if you (hypothetical reader) were expecting this section to be self-help for cult founders.
Above, I mentioned that cultists are often seeking an authority figure. I figured out through trial and a few errors how to give them that.
You don’t need any conviction
I didn’t believe any of the doctrines of my cult. Again: I was surprised anyone bought into it. So, sincerity isn’t necessary if you can act like it’s genuine.
Seem human—but with a dose of something more
A cult leader needs some kind of foolproof way to seem special without making promises she or he can’t keep. Claiming faultless and crystal-clear access to people’s thoughts or to the future is never going to go well, because you can get, as they say, owned. Or even pwned.
The special status of the leader is crucial, but it’s easy to achieve. Just make vague and wise-sounding predictions, write down “visions,” and drop new-seeming interpretations of spiritual ideas.
The human part of being a cult leader, though, requires some emotional know-how and greater time investment. Because again, cultists are looking for a sense of belonging as well as spiritual gnosis and a mystical dictator.
I don’t find the “cult of personality” aspect of cults all that interesting. It probably takes a certain kind of personality to found an appealing cult, but as I’ll discuss later, I don’t think comparing secular situations to religious ones is always useful. And the type of rizz peculiar to a cult founder is hard to describe.
You need to be an effective mystical rhetor
What I mean by effective mystical rhetor(ic) is this: usual styles of presenting information don’t work for cults. Why? Simply put, they’re boring. Directly stating the future in unambiguous terms is a good way to get owned and delivering a systematic theology is, uh, not very motivational. And in the latter case, too, it’s an easy way to get owned, because if the system is flawed, some nerd will come along and pick it apart. That’s, like, the history of mediaeval philosophy.
But if the nerds are occupied with figuring out their own interpretations of mystical cult doctrine, they’ll end up defending the doctrine themselves. Of course, this is because they felt charitable enough toward the obscure doctrines to spend time interpreting them, meaning they’ve interpreted them in a way that they feel is defensible. This aspect of effective cult-building does play out in secular contexts, too.
So the goal is not to rewrite the Summa Theologica, but rather, to rewrite the latter parts of the Book of Daniel. A lot of the influence for my way of going about communication came from Daniel, actually. I’ll highlight two key verses from the last chapter of Daniel that are effective rhetoric but not super doctrinally interesting.
But you, Daniel, keep the words secret, and seal the book until the time of the end. Many will range far and wide and knowledge will increase.
But you, go on to the end; you shall rest, and arise to your destiny at the end of the days.
I like the latter verse for a lot of reasons aside from cult rhetoric, but it’s also a prime example of good cult rhetoric. It highlights individual destiny and the end of days in one sentence while also portraying the prophet as special. And the latter aspect’s effectiveness is boosted by the context of verse 4, because as we discover, the book has to be hidden until the crucial moment and then only the wise will be able to understand it. So the “wise” get roped into adjacency to the prophet’s special status, too.
Of course, the prophetic part of Daniel is extremely complicated and elaborate, rich with apocalyptic imagery and insider views of divinity open to myriad interpretations, for instance in 7:13:
As I looked on, in the night vision,
One like a human being
Came with the clouds of heaven;
He reached the Ancient of Days
And was presented to Him.
The latter half of Daniel is an excellent example of the type of cult rhetoric required to make cultists and influence people.
Answer a question
A cult needs to offer a solution to a problem, to fill a gap in a seeker’s life that other cults and faiths aren’t serving. Bonus points if the upper echelons of initiates learn more answers to more questions.
There has to be a moment of feeling unburdened.
Successful religions fulfil both intellectual and emotional desires. For the nerds, there has to be intellectual stimulation; for normies who don’t need to think twice before dedicating their souls to something based on a feeling, the emotion is enough. In either case, there has to be some amount of both intellect and emotion. Different people have different needs and different corresponding questions.
Why is the world so bad?
How will the world end?
What happens after death?
How did the universe begin?
What’s my purpose?
These are some common questions that people hope to answer through religion.
Now let’s get to a broad description of Epic Memes’s doctrines.
Doctrines
I synthesised Epic Memes-ian doctrine from various traditions that felt exotic but familiar: a more or less symbolic interpretation of Greek polytheism (with particular attention to Aphrodite, my alleged [m/M]other), mixed with Jewish and occasionally Christian ideas. I kind of made up the doctrines as I went along and there was no super clear document that laid them out. Again: avoiding systems. Plus, Epic Memes started as an accident, so I didn’t have an initial phase of planning things out.
Since I’ve always been very invested in learning about religions, some of the first things I’d looked for online and in physical books were obscure-to-me religious works. These notably included Gnostic Christian works in translation.
The Epic Memes cosmology went something, roughly, like this.
In the beginning there was a war between the gods and titans. The gods won, but the evil titanic ruler Kronos remained a lurking issue with some influence over world events. Yes, I was a Percy Jackson fan, how could you tell? (Apparently not many people at the time could tell.)
Over time, the Goddess(es) would dispatch individuals to serve as prophetic leaders. The exact list of prophets wasn’t clear, because settling it would’ve been too limiting, but obviously I was positioned as the final prophet and semi-messiah. Or actual messiah.
The war between good and evil, God(esse)s and titan, was intensifying to a breaking point, so of course Aphrodite would dispatch a final leader.
I would gather initiates who would help facilitate the ultimate victory of the Goddesses over Kronos, and in fact over the cruel progression of history, leaving everyone who was on the right side of the apocalyptic war in a nice, utopian, eternal present.
This doctrinal stuff did have to be pretty loosely laid out for the sake of durability and rhetorical effectiveness. But its mix of urgency, familiarity, and flexibility seemed to appeal to people generations older than me.
Composing scriptures efficiently
I was the sole author and sometimes the final word on interpretation of whatever might be considered Epic Memes’s scriptures. Some of the “sacred” texts were things I’d already written for personal purposes and in my dream diary.
All of the physical copies of them have been destroyed.
One of the more esoteric doctrines, hidden except to high-level initiates, was that certain key religious texts from other faiths were true in a reverse sense: that is, they portrayed actual events from the wrong perspective. The Revelation of John, for instance, was true but at a slant, as propaganda from the other team. The Whore of Babylon was a protagonist, not an enemy.
In this way, I could build a vast religious corpus by just giving new approaches to interpreting existing works with which many people would be familiar, and they could go off on their own to build my canon.
Recruitment
What was my opening? After the vague vibes-based selection of potential cultists, how did I go from picking up a vibe to accumulating cultists?
The method varied, is the annoying answer. Like most aspects of the cult, I just kind of stumbled into convincing people. Make them feel special, emphasise the urgency of the cult’s mission, send the link or group name for an online hub.
Give them hope, too.
I’m aware from private conversation with psychologists that my recruitment method is far from the stereotypical method of cult recruitment. It was relatively quite laidback.
Structuring the cult
Aside from the spiritual and gnostic hierarchy, another crucial aspect of an online cult—or any cult, really—is its practical structure, i.e., where and how its adherents gather. In the case of Epic Memes, the cultists gathered in social media groups and DMs. We didn’t exactly move together to Crestone, Colorado.
I won’t give too much detail on this topic, but if I had wanted my cult to only exist on one platform, it might have excluded people who were on the fence about joining. If we only gathered on Facebook and a fence-straddler didn’t have a Facebook account, the inconvenience might lead them to the wrong side of the fence. So the movement had to be accessible and have DMs, as well as a space for long posts.
Having split platforms does also work well, I found, because it meant that different groups could have different vibes. I wouldn’t say that I was conscientious enough of the advantages of split platforms to try out different dynamics across different settings in an intentional, experimental way. However, in hindsight, the method had a lot of potential for trying out new strategies with lower stakes than trying them on the whole cult at once.
The nickname I’ve given the cult for the sake of this post, Epic Memes, is along the lines of two or so of the groups in which the cult gathered. Bland and non-threatening group names didn’t lure anyone in, since membership would always be restricted, but they did make it seem innocuous if a member were spotted visiting the group on their phone or computer irl.
I tried out a small and more LARPy group, perhaps adjacent to life theatre, for people I knew, but it was boring and annoying so I gave up on it very quickly.
Implications
Living in an age of literal cults
I often notice successful and unsuccessful cult-leader behaviour in many contexts, some which might be unexpected. These contexts include the obvious ones: academia, politics, and mainstream religious movements. But they also include normal workplaces, groupchats, and irl friend groups.
However, the relation of cults to culture is not as straightforward as it may seem.
With the much-exaggerated decline of religiosity in the West, it would seem intuitively obvious that interest in proper, religious cults would fade.
Myriad commentators compare secular ideologies and fanbases to cults, with the idea being that the new antiracism is a replacement for religious faith, that gender ideology is a replacement for the belief in the soul, and so on. If it sounds like a cult, it might be filling the psychological hole left by true cults’ absence.
I don’t think this line of thought is all strictly insightful.
I have a perpetual irritation with scholarship and commentary that’s basically just making the argument that one thing is an effective simile for another thing. Gender identity ideology is like pneumatology, the new antiracism is like Original Sin, superheroes are like ancient mythology. Other than that last example, all of those claims are true to some extent.
(People don’t typically believe Diana Prince is real, unlike ancient Mediterranean people who did believe the goddess Diana was real.)
But are such arguments useful? I’m not so sure there’s a tidy yes-or-no answer to that question. Some of the books and articles making such arguments are good in other ways, anyway—I don’t want to seem like I’m claiming otherwise.
Nevertheless, I say we are living in an age of cults. And they’re proper cults, not just secular similes.
Statistics would seem to disagree with me on this observation—atheism is growing at the expense of religion. But I get the sense that religions themselves are becoming more cultlike as time goes on. Perhaps they feel the shrinking of their audiences and are doubling down to maintain the cohesion of what congregations remain. Perhaps it’s somehow another symptom of “modernity,” like everything scholars dislike.
Basically, I have a vague and non-confessional feeling that religiosity is crystallising into more and more vehement cults. One sign of this intensification: progressive religious institutions, lacking the vigour of a cult, lacking a cult’s will to power, are flagging because they can’t match a cult psychologically (for better or worse).
My confessional stance (i.e., the stance that comes from my religious beliefs) is that people are beginning to notice something about reality and about the needs of the soul, en masse.
They certainly don’t need Epic Memes, but the core thing I learned from my brief time as a cult leader is this: Cults meet deep-seated needs in people that nuance, relativism, and equivocation cannot satisfy. Whether you interpret these needs as purely psychological or also rooted in the soul is up to you, hypothetical reader.
Living in an age of metaphorical cults
There are real ways that knowing about cults can help figure out current events and ideas that don’t have to do with religion (directly). Having stumbled into founding a cult, I know certain moves when I see them.
Read John McWhorter’s book Woke Racism, linked above and here, if you want a mostly useful take on progressive secular religiosity. I’ll discuss the right wing more here.
Here are a few tactics I discussed or alluded to above that connect with how politicians and political operatives work their magic:
Let diehard defenders do the apologetics—making an ideology encompassing enough to fold in all critique isn’t the job of the leader, because the peons do it for them (often for free!). An effective new worldview has to be bulletproof. Making such a worldview can be pretty easy on the leader’s end.
Give followers a sense of unambiguous authority to look up to. The people want a monarch or messiah, not a moderate position. That’s not a new feature of human political psychology, by the way. I’ve written before that nuanced nonpartisanship doesn’t tend to facilitate political engagement.
Meet psychological needs. Make followers feel special, like they have purpose, community, and moral superiority. Offer certainty and authority. Offer moral clarity and role models and a task.
Similarly: Offer an enemy. Kronos or Satan needs defeated, and their forces permeate our world, oh my!
Cast a wide net; don’t make the ideology narrowly appealing. Lately, an effective right-wing move has been to appeal to Christian fundamentalists as well as atheists of the extreme Right and libertarians who should be against strongmen and a variety of crowds in between.
One of the great successes of Manichaeism has been that from the start, it appealed to people from a variety of religious backgrounds and levels of education. Buddhist? Christian? Ancient pagan? Jew? Muslim? Manichaeism has something for ya. It was a paradise with many doors and many ways to participate.
Imply that there’s some degree of awe-inspiring hidden knowledge behind everything that’s happening. “5D chess” is the right-wing equivalent to “gnosis.” Q and Romana Didulo are extreme cases of this type of implied stratification of initiation.
The biggest practical difference between QAnon, or the sport of 4D/5D chess, and cultic gnosis is that nobody is actually at the top of the hierarchy in political gnosis. At the end of the day, President Trump isn’t playing even 3D chess. Q flopped because his flawed predictions and false hope became indefensible. Nonetheless, he did successfully suffuse the GOP with a watered-down version of his bizarre ideology.
It’s hard to express how some of the more vibes-based aspects of cults play out in the political sphere. The above bullet points start to get at what I think of when I watch politicians fumble or win.
After all, I’m but a minor cult founder, who stumbled into a tiny wedge of religious authority by accident as a teenager.
The end of Epic Memes
No huge explosion of drama marked the end of Epic Memes. I more or less ended it out of boredom and laziness. Could I have grown it and gotten money from it? Probably..? But again, I’d never expected the cult to happen, so I wasn’t hugely invested in the outcome. wouldn’t have been able to gather money very well as a minor, anyway.
If I can think of one incident that precipitated my decision to call the experiment off, it was when a person nearing the core group had a freak-out and posted a rant about Jesus being the only god and so on. That wasn’t the only Christian contestation I encountered, but I think I’d just gotten tired of that possibility and didn’t want to bother kicking that person individually. Far be it from me to try to match wills with the Galilean.
I went around quickly (but not urgently) deleting the groups and leaving DMs. I did not post any goodbye messages.
Maybe I should’ve said:
All this gibberish is nonsense that I made up. Please be less gullible, going forward! Bye-bye.
Oh well.
I don’t admire myself for having started the cult (or less importantly, for ending it how I did). But I was a teenager, and the cult has never seemed to reemerge in any way. Epic Memes left no lasting impact on the world.
I assume members and hangers-on just departed in peace or with mild bewilderment, having spent a year or two at the maximum believing in an adolescent’s daydreams. I don’t sneer at them for that, just as I don’t hate my teenage self for founding the cult.
I want to conclude my reflection by saying something positive about cultists—as in, not just the brave whistleblowers, but people who are prone to joining cults or are currently in them.
The same drive that leads people to join cults is what leads people to magnificent displays of bravery and mercy and to overthrow injustice. After all, cults are often the most dedicated and loathed countercultures.
The only difference between cultists and world-renowned heroes is the way they end up directing their instinct.
***
Know that I am no goddess: why do you liken me to the deathless ones? Nay, I am but a mortal, and a woman was the mother that bare me.
Edit, 12/7/25: Minor formatting changes and new subtitle; old subtitle was: “What I learned about politics, power, and our all-too-human need to believe.” And that sucked and sounded self-helpy so, goodbye to it.