So Daniel sent us this one, and I have to say, it's the kind of prompt that makes you feel slightly better about your own life choices. He's asking about cults — specifically the ones that never made it into the documentary pipeline. Not Jonestown, not Manson, not Heaven's Gate. The famous ones are covered. Daniel wants the weird ones. The ones where you read the Wikipedia entry and think, how has nobody made a six-part Netflix series about this? Ten of them, countdown style, most obscure and disturbing at number one. So, Herman.
I've been looking forward to this one. There's a real gap in how we talk about cultic movements — the famous cases get all the psychological analysis, all the academic attention, and meanwhile there are groups with higher body counts, stranger theologies, and more elaborate control systems that most people have never heard of. The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God killed more people than Jonestown. More. And I'd wager most of our listeners are hearing that name for the first time right now.
We'll get there. And I want to be clear about the tone we're going for here, because there's a version of this conversation that tips into exploitation and we're not doing that. These were real people. The followers were real people. The horror is the point, not the spectacle.
Agreed. The morbid curiosity is legitimate — understanding how people end up in these situations is genuinely important. But we're not treating this as a freak show. Okay, so, where do we start? Number ten?
Number ten. The Process Church of the Final Judgment. London, nineteen sixty-six. A splinter from Scientology, which is already a sentence that raises questions.
It really is. So the founders were Robert de Grimston and Mary Ann MacLean, who had both been in Scientology and decided to take certain ideas about human psychology in a direction that Hubbard apparently found too extreme, which is remarkable in itself. They started as a kind of therapeutic self-improvement group in London, moved their core membership to a commune in Mexico, nearly died in a hurricane, and emerged from that experience convinced they had a special theological mission. And here's the theology, because it is genuinely strange: they believed Christ and Satan were reconciled opposites — not enemies, but complementary forces — and that Jehovah and Lucifer were two additional divine figures. So they had four deities, and members would align themselves with one of them based on personality type.
The Myers-Briggs of apocalyptic cults.
That's not entirely wrong. They had chapters, they published a magazine, they had a very distinctive aesthetic — black capes, silver crosses, German shepherds. Very dramatic. And they got briefly entangled in the Manson narrative because Manson had some contact with them in California in sixty-eight or sixty-nine, though the extent of that influence is genuinely disputed. The Process Church always insisted Manson was never a member.
Which is the kind of denial that probably didn't help their reputation.
Not even slightly. They eventually dissolved in the mid-seventies, with de Grimston and MacLean splitting, and the remaining membership pivoting to animal rescue — which is the most unexpected third act in cult history. They became the Best Friends Animal Society in Utah.
The no-kill shelter people.
Yes. One of the largest animal welfare organizations in the United States traces a direct institutional line back to an occult group that worshipped Satan as a cosmic balancing force.
Okay. Number nine. The Khlysty. Russian Orthodox flagellants, and I understand there's a Rasputin connection here.
The Khlysty go back to the sixteen hundreds in Russia, and they're fascinating because they operated entirely within the Russian Orthodox Church, as secret cells. From the outside, members were practicing Orthodox Christians. Internally, they believed that Christ could be reincarnated in a living person — their leaders, called "Christs" and "Mothers of God," claimed direct divine embodiment. The worship practice involved ecstatic spinning and whipping, sometimes to the point of exhaustion or trance states, which they believed allowed the Holy Spirit to enter the body. The name "Khlysty" is actually a derogatory term from the Russian word for whip.
And Rasputin?
Rasputin almost certainly had contact with Khlysty ideas and possibly Khlysty communities before he arrived in Saint Petersburg. Whether he was formally a member is one of those historical questions that can't be definitively settled. But his style — the charismatic claims of divine access, the ecstatic religiosity, the sexual mysticism — maps closely onto Khlysty practice. The Russian Orthodox Church suspected him of Khlysty affiliation and investigated him at least twice. The investigations were inconclusive. What's interesting is that the Khlysty were never a small group — at their peak in the nineteenth century, estimates put membership in the hundreds of thousands, all hidden inside mainstream church attendance.
A secret cult inside a church, inside an empire, running for three centuries. That's impressive operational security.
Remarkable. And they survived into the Soviet period, which given what the Soviets did to religion generally, is genuinely extraordinary.
Number eight. Synanon. This one starts as something almost admirable.
Synanon is one of the most complete institutional transformations in American social history. Charles Dederich founded it in Santa Monica in nineteen fifty-eight as a drug rehabilitation program. And by the standards of the time, it was innovative — it used peer confrontation, communal living, and what they called "the game," which was a group therapy session where members were encouraged to attack each other verbally, strip away defenses, be brutally honest. For addiction treatment in the late fifties, that was radical. It worked for some people. It got serious attention from researchers and journalists.
And then it mutated.
Completely. By the late sixties, Dederich had decided that Synanon wasn't a treatment program anymore — it was a permanent alternative society. Members were discouraged from leaving. Long-term members were required to swap spouses on Dederich's instruction. Dederich himself had a vasectomy and then ordered all male members to get vasectomies. Pregnant women were pressured into abortions. He started calling himself "the founder" with increasing grandiosity, and the confrontational therapy that had been therapeutic became a punishment mechanism. People who challenged the leadership were subjected to marathon game sessions that lasted days.
The rattlesnake in the mailbox. Tell me about the rattlesnake.
So by the late seventies, Synanon had incorporated itself as a religion, partly for tax purposes, partly because Dederich genuinely believed in his own divine authority at this point. They had acquired weapons. They had a paramilitary unit called the Imperial Marines. And they were litigious — they sued journalists and critics aggressively. Paul Morantz was an attorney who had successfully sued Synanon on behalf of a former member. In October of nineteen seventy-eight, two Synanon members placed a four-and-a-half-foot rattlesnake with its rattle removed — so it couldn't warn him — into his mailbox. He reached in, it bit him. He survived, barely. The two men who did it were Synanon members acting on what they believed were Dederich's instructions. Dederich pled no contest to conspiracy to commit murder. Synanon collapsed shortly after.
The rattlesnake had its rattle removed so it couldn't warn him. That's the detail that sticks.
It's premeditated in a way that goes beyond rage. That's cold operational planning. And the attack therapy model — "the game" — went on to influence legitimate therapeutic modalities that are still used today, which is its own uncomfortable legacy.
Number seven. The Order of the Solar Temple. This one is genuinely famous in Europe and almost completely unknown in the English-speaking world.
It's a fascinating gap. In France, Switzerland, Belgium, and Quebec, the Solar Temple is a major cultural reference point for cult danger. In the United States or the UK, almost nobody has heard of it. The group was founded by Luc Jouret, a Belgian homeopathic doctor, and Joseph Di Mambro, a French occultist with a criminal record for fraud. They drew on Rosicrucian and Templar mythology — the idea of an ancient initiatic lineage connecting them to the Knights Templar — and attracted a membership that skewed wealthy and educated. Doctors, businesspeople, local politicians in Quebec.
Not the profile people expect.
Almost never is. The wealthy, educated profile is actually common in high-control groups. Anyway, in October of nineteen ninety-four, seventy-four people died across three coordinated events: a farm in Morin-Heights, Quebec, where two members were murdered, and two simultaneous fires in Switzerland — one in Cheiry, one in Granges-sur-Salvan — where fifty-three bodies were found, many in a ritual circle, many having taken sedatives, some shot. Then in December of nineteen ninety-five, sixteen more members died in a forest in Vercors, France. And five more in Saint-Casimir, Quebec in nineteen ninety-seven. The leaders framed it as a "transit" — a spiritual departure to a higher plane near the star Sirius.
Transit. The euphemism is doing a lot of work there.
It always is. What makes the Solar Temple particularly disturbing is that some of the deaths in Switzerland appear to have been murders of members who wanted to leave, disguised as part of the collective ritual. The line between voluntary suicide and murder was genuinely blurry, and investigators spent years trying to establish which deaths were which.
Okay, number six. The Twelve Tribes. And this one is still active, which changes the texture of the conversation.
Still active, operating in multiple countries, running a chain of cafés called the Yellow Deli — you can eat there. They present as a wholesome, back-to-the-land Christian community. Handmade furniture, organic food, communal living. The founder is Elbert Eugene Spriggs, who goes by Yoneq, started in Chattanooga, Tennessee in the early seventies. The theology is a kind of Messianic Christianity with specific beliefs about the restoration of twelve tribes of Israel — not ethnic, but twelve communities that will usher in the second coming.
And then you look closer.
You look closer and there are consistent, documented allegations of systematic corporal punishment of children — including infants — using a thin reed or flexible rod, based on their reading of Proverbs. Multiple countries have raided their communities. Germany raided a community in two thousand thirteen after a television journalist went undercover and documented children being beaten. Australia has investigated. France expelled them. The child labor dimension is also real — children in the communities work long hours in community businesses from a young age and receive limited formal education.
The café is the entry point. You go in for a grilled cheese, the vibe is pleasant, and the people seem genuinely happy. That's the mechanism.
That's the mechanism for a lot of these groups. The public face is carefully curated. And the Twelve Tribes are litigious and organized in their response to criticism. Former members who've spoken out describe a high-control environment with severe shunning of those who leave. But because they're not apocalyptic, because nobody's died in a mass event, they don't get the documentary treatment. They're just... there.
Number five. Nation of Yahweh. Miami, nineteen eighties. This one has a layer that most cult coverage completely ignores.
The Nation of Yahweh was founded by Hulon Mitchell Jr., who called himself Yahweh ben Yahweh — which translates roughly as God, son of God. He was a former Nation of Islam member, and he built a Black Hebrew Israelite theology that taught that African Americans were the true biblical Israelites and that white people were "white devils." The community was based in Miami, grew rapidly through the early and mid-eighties, and was genuinely impressive in some civic dimensions — they renovated housing in depressed neighborhoods, they were visible and organized, and city officials including Miami's mayor courted their support. Xavier Suarez declared a Yahweh ben Yahweh Day.
A city gave them a day.
A city gave them a day. And simultaneously, within the organization, there was an inner circle called the Brotherhood, sometimes called the Death Angels, and initiation reportedly required killing a white person and bringing back an ear or other body part as proof. Fourteen murders were eventually attributed to the group. Yahweh ben Yahweh was convicted in nineteen ninety-two under RICO — the organized crime statute — and served eleven years. He died in two thousand seven. The case is genuinely important for how it illustrates the way civic legitimacy can coexist with internal violence, and how the mainstream political embrace of a group can slow investigation.
The city hall connection is the part that doesn't fit the cult template. We expect cults to be isolated. This one was being photographed with elected officials.
Which is why it's important. The isolation model is a heuristic, not a rule. High-control groups with violent inner structures can be publicly integrated and politically connected. That's actually more dangerous in some ways because it delays scrutiny.
Number four. The Doukhobors, specifically the Sons of Freedom faction. Russian-Canadian, and this one is so strange that it almost sounds made up.
The Doukhobors are a Russian pacifist Christian sect — they rejected the Orthodox Church, rejected military service, rejected state authority generally. They were persecuted in Russia, and Leo Tolstoy actually helped fund their emigration to Canada at the turn of the twentieth century. They settled in Saskatchewan and British Columbia. Most Doukhobors integrated reasonably well. But a radical faction called the Sons of Freedom, or Freedomites, took the anti-materialism and anti-state theology to an extreme. Their primary protest tactic was arson and nudity.
Together.
Often together, yes. The logic was that material possessions were spiritually corrupting, so burning them — schools, bridges, railway equipment, sometimes their own homes — was an act of purification. And nudity was a rejection of material vanity. Between the nineteen twenties and the nineteen sixties, they conducted hundreds of bombings and arsons in British Columbia. The Canadian government at one point apprehended over a hundred of their children and placed them in a residential school in New Denver for years in an attempt to break the movement's transmission to the next generation.
The Canadian government took their children.
Took over a hundred children and held them for years. That's a significant historical fact that gets almost no attention outside of British Columbia. The Sons of Freedom response to that was more bombings. The movement declined through the sixties and seventies, but there are still Doukhobor communities in Canada today — the mainstream ones, not the arsonists.
Okay. We're in the top three now. Number three. The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God. Uganda, March two thousand. And I want to give this the weight it deserves because the numbers are genuinely staggering.
The death toll is somewhere between seven hundred seventy-eight and over a thousand people, depending on which bodies investigators eventually found and attributed. For context, Jonestown was nine hundred and eighteen. The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God likely killed more people than Jonestown. It is the deadliest mass cult death event in recorded history by most counts, and the majority of Western audiences have never heard of it.
Why? What happened to the coverage?
A few things. It happened in Uganda, which Western media covered at the level they cover Uganda — which is to say, not much. It happened in March two thousand, which was a period of enormous media saturation around the Y2K aftermath and the dot-com peak, and African disasters compete poorly for attention in that environment. And the group itself was obscure even within Uganda — it was founded by Joseph Kibwetere, a former Catholic school administrator, and Credonia Mwerinde, a former bar owner who claimed visions of the Virgin Mary and appears to have been the real operational leader. The theology was strict — members weren't allowed to speak, communicated by sign language, were told that God was so holy that speech would profane him. They sold their possessions, gave everything to the leadership, and waited for an apocalypse on December thirty-first, nineteen ninety-nine.
And the apocalypse didn't come.
It didn't come, and that's the critical juncture for doomsday groups. When the prophecy fails, you either reframe it, you dissolve, or — and this is the dangerous option — the leadership decides that the failure is the members' fault and the response is violence. On March seventeenth, two thousand, members were gathered for what was described as a celebration in a church in Kanungu. The doors were nailed shut from the outside. The building was set on fire. Two hundred and thirty people died in that fire. Then investigators found more bodies — mass graves on properties owned by the movement. Hundreds more. Many had been strangled or poisoned, apparently before the fire, suggesting the leadership had been killing members for weeks.
Nailed shut from the outside.
The fire was not a collective suicide. It was a mass murder. Kibwetere and Mwerinde were never found. They may have fled. They may have died and not been identified. The investigation was limited by the Ugandan government's capacity and, frankly, by international indifference. This is a case where the obscurity is itself a moral problem.
Number two. The Ant Hill Kids. Quebec, nineteen seventy-eight to eighty-nine. Roch Thériault. And I'll just say upfront: this is the hardest one to sit with.
Roch Thériault is one of the most disturbing figures in this entire landscape. He started as a Seventh-day Adventist lay preacher in Quebec, broke from the church, gathered a small group of followers — mostly women — moved them into the wilderness of Ontario, then Quebec. At the height of the commune there were maybe forty people. He had multiple wives, fathered over twenty children. He called himself Moses. And over time, the isolation and his absolute authority over the group produced escalating violence that is almost without parallel in cult history.
The surgeries.
Thériault had no medical training. He performed surgery on followers. He removed a member's testicle. He performed a cesarean section. He amputated an arm. He drilled holes in followers' skulls. He performed these procedures with basic tools, in the wilderness, with no anesthesia. The stated justification was spiritual healing — that he had divine medical authority. Most of the people he operated on survived, which is in some ways more disturbing than if they hadn't, because it means the group continued under his control even after watching him do these things.
What does it take for a person to watch that happen to someone else and stay?
That's the question that makes this useful to understand rather than just horrifying to know. The coercive control mechanisms were total. Isolation from family and society, years of accumulated psychological dependence, the gradual normalization of escalating abuse, the fear of leaving — all of it. Criminologist research on the Ant Hill Kids has been used in academic discussions of coercive control precisely because it represents such an extreme case of how far that process can go. Thériault eventually murdered one follower, Solange Boilard, in nineteen eighty-eight. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was stabbed to death by another former follower in two thousand eleven while in prison.
Okay. Number one. And we spent some time deciding what to put at the top. The Skoptsy. Eighteenth-century Russia. And the reason they're number one isn't just the strangeness of the practice — it's the duration, the survival, and the what-this-tells-us-about-human-belief dimension.
The Skoptsy are arguably the most remarkable religious movement on this entire list in terms of sheer persistence under the most extreme conditions imaginable. They were founded in the seventeen sixties by Kondratiy Selivanov, a Russian peasant who developed a theology based on a specific reading of the Gospel of Matthew — the passage about making oneself a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven. Selivanov interpreted this literally. The "stamp of Adam" was the body's sexual characteristics, and salvation required removing them. For men, castration — first the testicles, which they called the "first purification," and then the penis, called the "royal seal." For women, mastectomy, sometimes removal of the labia.
And people did this voluntarily.
Voluntarily, repeatedly, over generations, for over a hundred and fifty years. The Tsarist government persecuted them continuously — Selivanov was exiled to Siberia, then to a monastery. They were arrested in waves, exiled, prosecuted. None of it stopped the movement. At their peak in the mid-nineteenth century, there were estimates of tens of thousands of members, including merchants and minor nobility. Because castrated men often had higher voices and certain hormonal characteristics associated with trustworthiness in commercial settings, Skoptsy men were actually sought after as cashiers and coachmen. They accumulated wealth. They had a prosperous economic network.
So the persecution didn't work because the thing they were doing gave them a commercial advantage.
That's one of the genuinely non-obvious dimensions of this. The body modification that was supposed to mark them as deviant became an economic signal of reliability in certain commercial contexts. The Soviet government, which was aggressively anti-religious across the board, finally suppressed what remained of the movement in the nineteen thirties. The last confirmed Skoptsy communities were documented in Romania in the nineteen sixties. There may have been members into the eighties. A movement based on voluntary surgical self-castration, founded in the seventeen sixties, persisted for over two hundred years through Tsarist persecution, two revolutions, and Soviet repression.
The theology has a certain internal logic, though. If you believe the body is the obstacle to salvation, and you believe salvation is the highest possible good, and you believe this specific physical act achieves that — the chain of reasoning isn't crazy. The premises are wrong, but the logic given the premises is sound.
That's the thing about most of these groups. The internal logic, once you accept the foundational premises, is often coherent. The Skoptsy founder genuinely believed this. His followers genuinely believed this. And the belief was strong enough that people chose it, maintained it, transmitted it to children, and held it under state violence for two centuries. That's not stupidity. That's the extraordinary power of a complete belief system that answers all the questions and demands everything.
Which is what makes them worth understanding rather than just cataloguing as curiosities. Because the mechanism — the complete belief system, the charismatic authority, the demand for total commitment, the isolation from outside perspectives — that mechanism is not historically contained. It doesn't require the wilderness of Quebec or eighteenth-century Russia.
The research on this is pretty clear that the psychological vulnerabilities these groups exploit are universal. Robert Cialdini's work on influence, Steve Hassan's BITE model — Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotional control — these aren't niche frameworks. They describe processes that any sufficiently motivated group can deploy. The Twelve Tribes is doing it in a Yellow Deli in your city right now.
So what do people actually do with this information? What's the practical layer?
A few things. The first is that the isolation dynamic is the most reliable early warning sign across all of these cases. When a group systematically separates members from outside relationships — family, friends, professional contacts — that's the structural precondition for almost everything else. You can't maintain the closed information environment that allows the belief system to be totalizing if members have regular, genuine contact with people who see the world differently.
And that applies to organizations and online communities, not just physical communes.
The physical commune is the extreme version of something that can operate through social media ecosystems, through ideological bubbles, through any structure that controls which information people receive and from whom. The second practical thing is that exit pathways matter enormously. Groups that make leaving catastrophically costly — economically, socially, spiritually — are far more dangerous than groups with high turnover. The Ant Hill Kids had nowhere to go. The Skoptsy had given up something that couldn't be undone. When the cost of leaving is total, the group has permanent leverage.
And the third?
The third is that legitimacy signals are not protective. Nation of Yahweh had a city day. The Solar Temple had doctors and politicians. Synanon had academic endorsements and journalistic praise in its early years. The Twelve Tribes runs well-reviewed restaurants. External legitimacy and internal harm are not mutually exclusive, and the legitimacy can actively delay scrutiny. That's probably the most counterintuitive thing on this list for most people.
The café is the point.
The café is the point. And by the way, I should mention — today's episode is powered by Claude Sonnet four point six, which is doing an excellent job writing our dialogue about cults, which I imagine is a slightly unusual Tuesday for an AI model.
It's fine. We once did an episode where I explained that sloths invented the concept of waiting in line, and nobody canceled us.
I believe the historical record is unclear on that.
The historical record is whatever I say it is. Okay. If there's one thread that connects all ten of these — the Skoptsy, the Ant Hill Kids, the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments, the Solar Temple, all of them — what is it?
I keep coming back to the prophecy failure problem. Almost all of these groups have a moment where the central claim is falsified — the apocalypse doesn't happen, the healing doesn't work, the divine authority is visibly human and fallible. And the group's response to that moment determines everything. The healthy response is dissolution or reform. The dangerous response is doubling down, often with violence either outward or inward. The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments killed over seven hundred people because the world didn't end on schedule. Synanon put a snake in a mailbox because a lawyer challenged their authority. The Solar Temple burned people in ceremonial circles because some members wanted to leave.
The violence is the response to the threat of the belief system being falsified.
Which means the most dangerous moment for a high-control group is not when it's thriving. It's when something challenges the core narrative. That's when the leadership's response to the challenge tells you everything.
One open question before we close. The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments. Kibwetere and Mwerinde were never found. That case is still technically open.
It is. And I think that's worth sitting with. More people died in that event than in Jonestown, the leaders were never brought to justice, and the case is almost completely absent from Western cultural memory. If you're someone who thinks about international justice or media coverage of African crises, that gap is a real thing to grapple with.
Alright. Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing this one — Hilbert, this was a list that required some nerve to put together and we appreciate the trust. And Modal is keeping our pipeline running without us having to think about it, which is exactly the kind of infrastructure relationship a sloth can endorse.
If you want to explore more episodes, we're at myweirdprompts.com — all two thousand one hundred and forty-nine of them. This has been My Weird Prompts. Leave us a review if you've got four minutes and a strong opinion.
We'll be back tomorrow. Probably.
