What are some interesting cults/secret societies/groups of weirdos from history?

Thuggees and Crocodile Men are cool as hell, even if everyone knows about them.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_Order_of_the_Golden_Dawn

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thug_Behram

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magick_(Thelema)
A lot of modern magick/occultism is based on above

Plenty of reading and research in there for a start. The occult can be slippery, don't be an idiot and try ritualistic magick or get too into the subject. Speaking from experience it's..unsettling.
Some nice art here.
Crowley Thoth Tarot Deck
PDF
www.thule-italia.net Aleister Crowley

Sorry man, control the internet and take down all websites that expose them.
in fact, I expect a crack squad of their assassins to take me down any day now

The Circumcellions believed that matryrdom was the way into heaven, and they defined "martyrdom" very loosely. They had a tendency to attack travelers in the hopes that said travelers would kill them in self defense.

Pythagoreanism

the manichaeans are really interesting because they provide a connection between so many things people usually don't think of as connected.
when you read about their history you realize that there were a lot more christian-adjacent cults and religions around in the middle east before roman imperial christianity displaced all that variety. it makes you realize that the founder of "Christianity" as we know it was really Paul and not Jesus.

Their founder Mani called himself an apostle of jesus christ and came from a sect of judeo-christian baptizers. the mythology he developed is extremely intricate and bizarre but it boils down to platonic dualism and a belief that matter is inherently evil though somehow good particles of light became entangled in the world of matter inside humans and the goal is to release them by abstaining from food production and carnal relations which leads to you burping them out eventually. since someone has to produce food to prevent people from starving, the manichaen church was split into the "Elect" who abstained in order for the light to be released and the "Hearers" who did not keep all the commandments but kept the church running and hoped for salvation in the next life. prayer, fasting and almsgiving were basic commandments like later in islam. and during their eastward expansion which eventually brought them all the way to eastern china, they adopted elements of zoroastrianism and buddhism, with jesus eventually being called the "Buddha of Light".

they were more of a world religion than a cult of weirdos though.
(actually maybe those two aren't exclusive.)

neat

Aum Shinrikyo.

>that feel when this crazy bastard's cult probably set off a nuclear bomb in a secret research facility in the Australian wasteland

The Guglemanner. The Bavarian Nationalist secret society that doesnt recognize the legitimacy of the German government and thinks King Ludwig was murdered because he wouldnt bend the knee

They still exist, which is the weirder thing.

I've heard comparisons of Bavaria being a German Texas. Is this true? Or is Saxony more like it?

lel

Source on nuke?

Losing Manichaeism truly left a chasm in world philosophy. Such a shame they don't exist anymore and all of Mani's books were lost.

>all of Mani's books were lost.
Fragments of Cologne Mani Codex and Shabuhragan were translated into English.

The Roman Cult of Mithras / Mithraic Mysteries. A blend of Hellenism, Persian religions, and Roman mythology:

britannica.com/topic/Mithraism
(I highly recommend reading this)

Note, Roman Mithraism has more influence from Persians than it does from Indians.

why does all the weird shit have to come from religion man...

True faith.

Kek, fpbp

Me on the left holding the skull.

Cult of Bona Dea. Only Roman women were allowed to worship and attend ritual until Publius Clodius Pulcher dressed as a woman and infiltrated the ceremony, causing huge domestic uproar.

Well, they are larping hillbillies, so there might be some similarities

thoth is that you?

pfft, not even america can pull something that hilarious off

The Hermetic order of the Golden Dawn
Thelema
Scientology

And the connections among these groups

The Strangite mormons of Beaver Island.

The Mita Congregation

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mita_Congregation

I also have to drive past one of their compounds daily, walls are about 8 to 10 feet tall (that's some 303 cm's I think) compound has 1 main road and you never see anyone along it, they all live in them too and only have a select few who go outside, they are pretty crazy but otherwise don't bother people as far as I know.

i'm obsessed with this cult, their extensive efforts to create biological and chemical weapons is absolutely fascinating- they even attempted to make a manufacturing line for assault rifles. most of their leadership has been imprisoned since the tokyo subway attacks but they still exist under a different name

to the point i actually emailed them for more information on joining

no dice

You know they'll just use you as a test subject for advanced biochemical weaponry as some hidden lab in Asia, right?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Murray_Spear

In 1852, Spear broke all ties with the Universalist church, and instead turned to Spiritualism. He claimed that he was in contact with ‘‘The Association of Electrizers’’, a group of spirits including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and Benjamin Rush, as well as Spear’s namesake John Murray. Evidence indicates he occasionally faked signatures as a way to gain authority from a "guide from the past;" however, these signatures were dated beyond the lifetimes of the deceased.[3] Spear believed that the purpose of this group was to bring new technology to mankind, so that greater levels of personal and spiritual freedom could be achieved.[1] The following year, Spear and a handful of followers retreated to a wooden shed at the top of High Rock hill in Lynn, Massachusetts, where they set to work creating the ‘‘New Motive Power’’, a mechanical Messiah which was intended to herald a new era of Utopia. The New Motive Power was constructed of copper, zinc and magnets, all carefully machined, as well as a dining room table. At the end of nine months, Spear and the ‘‘New Mary’’, an unnamed woman, ritualistically birthed the contraption in an attempt to give it life.

Not Bacchus/Dionysus?

>ritualistically birthed the contraption in an attempt to give it life
wat

>speaking from experience it's unsettling
>implying it's real

A couple billion people believe God came to a bunch of desert savages a few thousand years ago
LMAO

The aetherius society, the discordians, cult of aten

Sol Invictus

>The aetherius society
cults normies will never understand

You just put a Heaven's Gate UFO cult, the new-age equivalent of the Flying Spaghetti Monster Pastafarian, and an actual ancient Egyptian religious movement, all in the same heading.

I am truly in awe.

Parsis

>Zoroastrians who fled to India when Persia was invaded by Muslims
>bad experience with being a religious minority has made them very insular in terms of new members/proselytizing (hence their declining and relatively small numbers, yet they're the largest cohesive group/community of Zoroastrians today)
>they leave their corpses outside, at 'Towers of Silence', for the vultures to eat/dispose of
>Freddie Mercury and the founders of Tata (one of the biggest conglomerates in India) were of Parsi descent

lel

fedora tipping never gets old

...

Same thing, just like the belief God had to kill himself in a blood magic ritual in order for Him to forgive your sins and not send you to a magic place of fire underground and now you can magically turn wafers and cheap wine into God Himself and literally devour Him.

You can post all the hat porn you like. You know that in a thousand years people will look on your beliefs the same way they do Heavens Gate or believers in the Greco-Roman 'gods' and there is nothing you can do about it but cry.

Fuck off you heretic idiot

there were several substantial dualistic (and I guess Gnostic? some even say Manichaen-influenced) Christian sects up to the Middle Ages
like the Bogomils in the Balkans/Bulgarian Empire and the Paulicians in the Byzantine Empire/Armenia

the most interesting to me is the Cathars, who were concentrated in southern France in the 12th-14th centuries
>two Gods, one good (from the NT) and one evil (the OT one)
>Evil God created all visible matter (which itself was sinful)
>human spirits were the genderless/sexless spirits of angels trapped in our bodies, destined to be reincarnated until they achieved salvation (they were very egalitarian for their time)
>only one sacrament - 'consolation' - removed all sin; refused to baptize or take eucharist
>priests were vegetarians since killing was super bad
>reproduction was viewed as a moral evil to be avoided—as it continued the chain of reincarnation and suffering in the material world; they did not marry
>many were slaughtered by Catholic soldiers in the Albigensian Crusade

Not the same poster, I think that if you go into this occult stuff where you know you're never gonna believe then nothing will happen. However, if you go in with the idea of "meh, I'll pretend to believe and get into it" then it will start to have an effect on you.

I think of the Feynmann story when he was at Princeton and he went to a hypnosis show and volunteered himself. He went in with an open mind and sure enough was hypnotized, the other students who in their mind would never let themselves be hypnotized because hypnosis is "bullshit" or "not possible" weren't hypnotized.

Human brain is a funny thing.

>What are some
why don't you phrase your question normally, redditfag?

you can make anything sound silly if you describe it a certain way, dumb kafir

The perfecti would only represent a small fraction of the population and shunning marriage was also the norm among catholic priests. These things are not so absurd given the context. Anyone who has read the bible will also get the impression of two distinct deities formed by different historical periods, the contradictions between which are somewhat intractable.

Eh? How is that unusual phrasing?

An accurate way, you mean. I'm sure the beliefs of the Heaven's Gate cult didn't sound silly, to them.

The things you had to do to get laid in the 19th century.

The Sophists, the root of all societies today.

Don't you mean "What are some ways you could explain how this phrasing is unusual?"

>lmao blood magic ritual xD

>At the end of nine months, Spear and the ‘‘New Mary’’, an unnamed woman, ritualistically birthed the contraption in an attempt to give it life.

Bavaria is the richest part of Germany, but it's also the most Catholic and traditionalist part.

No.

>the alien spaceship will take us to Heaven,trust me xD I learned it on reddit

>Spear and the ‘‘New Mary’’, an unnamed woman, ritualistically birthed the contraption in an attempt to give it life.
Judging by the image, that musta been painful.

>i'm only pretending to be /x/ because it's like inverse reddit! All I care about is how i relate to reddit all day long!

Then why don't you go back to it?

There was that one sect of I think Buddhism that wanted its adherents to reach enlightenment through constant orgies.

Russian had its share of weird sects in the later imperial era

this one counted Rasputin as one of its members
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khlysts

if you believe the rumours, it was essentially a BDSM group
(have orgies - oh looks like we've committed great sin, we should be be punished by mutual whipping)

>have orgies
>punished by mutual whipping

G-got anymore information about the Klhysts

Reading St. Augustine rant for pages about how much he came to hate this religion was well worth it.

What did he say about them?

Suck a boy

sure.....

youtube.com/watch?v=ON8xq0djCRk

this vid was pretty interesting.

Aum Shinrikyo also attempted to buy assault helicopters from Russia IIRC. The deal almost went through, even.

No, this is me.

Scientology has almost zero connection to Golden Dawn aside from the name of a wildly unrelated program Hubbard put forth for the $cilons.

There's more of a synthesis wtih Thelema, particularly in the Axioms & M:TP, but even then it's clear that Frater H didn't really grok Crowley's praxis or intent and at most you can say H ripped off some stuff he didn't understand.

Marjorie Cameron is a really interesting woman; her diaries got published a few years back.

Parsis aren't a cult though, they're a closed ethnic group. If that's the litmus then we can call any language endogamous groups a cult.

That's a hilariously distorted misrepresentation of Vajrayana.

Anyway, cults and secret societies:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachikawa-ryu
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Process_Church_of_The_Final_Judgment
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_Due
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripper_Crew
(Related to the above.... well, fuck. Long story short: Gecht of the Ripper Crew worked for Gacy. Before the recent parole hearing got all the conspiracy nuts hot and bothered there was an old mainstream news source that tried connecting a few dots but I can't find it under the deluge of recent attention. Google judiciously)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalena_Solís

And I guess if anyone wants a copy of the recent English translation of the Bavarian Perfectibilist (Illuminati) rituals, doctrines, and protocols, gimmie a throwaway email.

>And I guess if anyone wants a copy of the recent English translation of the Bavarian Perfectibilist (Illuminati) rituals, doctrines, and protocols, gimmie a throwaway email.
[email protected]

Sent.

it really doesn't

Based Stalin for gulaging these degenerates

That one hecate cult.

It's likely had a revival too.

>castrate yourself
>natural selection takes over

jeez.

>until Publius Clodius Pulcher dressed as a woman and infiltrated the ceremony, causing huge domestic uproar.
Lad.

Imagine causing such mischief it's been passed on for millenia.

The Crete minotaur cult was fucked up.
I'm convinced they deliberately tortured and killed slaves for the purpose of their own "self satisfaction" if you know what I mean.

"Hongmen Society of the Heaven and the Earth"(洪門天地會) ,their branch in Hong Kong is called “Triads三合會” .
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiandihui

Pic here is their founder.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koxinga

I made a similar thread before I saw this thread, it seems dead.

>Cathars
A lot of people today still consider their point of view about God as correct.

I think they fail to realise that this all came from unity because it wanted to happen. They also fail to see that the malevolent nature of this universe is also within themselves.

>one sect of I think Buddhism that wanted its adherents to reach enlightenment through constant orgies.
Does it still exist?
Can I join?

This is one of their secret member, Jesus's brother, Hong Xiuquan.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Xiuquan

>have orgies - oh looks like we've committed great sin, we should be be punished by mutual whipping
There are many people still like that today.

Hell, look at the modern BDSM movement and the "gay masses"

This one of their "Don" of America & Hawaii branches.

This is their biggest branch in HK so far, a major faction of video game Sleeping Dogs.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Yee_On

This is their chief, a famous film producer.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Heung

This guy also relates to them, but in a different group called Green Gang.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Gang
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiang_Kai-shek

[email protected]

No it's gone, the government shut it down
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachikawa-ryu

Aren't the triads religious?