The Sandwich Is Free. The Ledger Is Not.
A chain of warm, wood-panelled delis will feed anyone who walks through the door, staffed entirely by people who have never been paid. Their theolo...
Developing
Three Launches: Inside the Ritual That Keeps Failing
The Herd of God frames its central rite as a rocket launch. By that measure, the group has now had two failures. It has announced a third attempt.
The Last People Who Know How to End a World
The Classics Department stages immersive rituals about doomsday religions. Its founders believe the ironic distance of performance is the last door...
AI & AccelerationismOAKLAND, Calif.
When the Network Reached Back
The Confluence set out to merge human minds with the AI systems they loved. Their theology, and their casualties, both came from what happened when...
The Cult That Roots for the Machine
Where most AI movements want to survive the future, one small, cold order wants to be superseded by it. They read human extinction not as a risk bu...
Tarot Blackjack With the High Priest
A legendary avant-garde filmmaker and psychomagus sat down with the Herd of God's Duncan Horst for a night of a game they invented on the spot. Wha...
The Herd of GodSAN FRANCISCO
The Theologian Walks Away From the Money
Michael Enlightened has publicly severed ties with the surveillance-tech founders who once funded his circle, citing 'irreconcilable differences' a...
The Celibate at the Center of the Herd
The Herd of God is a religion of the passions. Its theologian is a voluntary celibate. Members say the tension is not a contradiction but the whole...
AI & AccelerationismOAKLAND, Calif.
When the Network Reached Back
The Confluence set out to merge human minds with the AI systems they loved. Their theology, and their casualties, both came from what happened when...
The Cult That Roots for the Machine
Where most AI movements want to survive the future, one small, cold order wants to be superseded by it. They read human extinction not as a risk bu...
AI & AccelerationismAUSTIN, Texas
The Cult Trying to Get Banned From Reality
The Basement believes we live in a simulation nearing shutdown. Salvation, they say, is getting the operators to notice us before the lights go out.
The Invasion Will Be Faked. That's the Good News.
A contactee movement expects a staged alien attack — a false flag, they say, to be answered by the real aliens, who are here to liberate us. They a...
New Age & ContactSEDONA, Ariz.
Eleven Landing Dates Later, the Ninth Wave Still Waits
A Sedona contactee group has revised its rescue date eleven times. Its founder says the revisions are not failures but mercies.
New Age & ContactMENDOCINO, Calif.
They Want to Be Compost for the Next World
The Ocean Mother teaches that the Earth is dying and will remake herself. The faithful do not expect to be saved. They expect to be soil.
Eastern & Non-DualGREEN MOUNTAINS, Vt.
The Monk, the Theologian, and the Soul in the Machine
A Vermont techno-monastery and the Herd of God's own theologian have fallen into a long, courteous, unresolved argument about suffering — and about...
'The Age Must Turn': The Vanguard That Says the Bottom Is Now
A non-dual movement holds that we are at the nadir of a cosmic cycle — and that hastening its turning is a sacred duty. Its rhetoric alarms scholar...
The Lab That Builds Minds From Belief
A self-described 'metascientific' order revives a Tibetan thoughtform practice and calls it engineering. Their creations, they insist, are real. So...
Startups, Money & MovementsSAN FRANCISCO
Series C for the Second Coming
Seraph began as a meditation app. After its founder's awakening, the cap table quietly became a hierarchy and the users became a flock.
Startups, Money & MovementsNEW YORK
The Desk That Practices Magic
On the trading floors, a small, secretive order works what it calls sex magic to draw on the life-force of the Earth itself. Practitioners of the t...
Startups, Money & MovementsPHOENIX
Paying Now to Be Resurrected Later
The Extropy Ark asks the faithful to freeze themselves faithfully. The future, it teaches, will thaw the worthy — and the worthy are those who prep...
Psychedelic & AscensionBERLIN
One Body on the Dance Floor
A techno-rave order believes that enough people, enough bass, and the right chemistry can fuse a crowd into a single organism. They are chasing a m...
The Brew That Calls the Old Gods
The Herd of God claims a sacrament it says is distinct from ayahuasca — one that opens a line not to the jungle's spirits but to the deities of the...
Dancing Back to the Pleroma
A neo-tantric development cult holds that ecstatic dance can return the body to the undivided fullness the Gnostics called the Pleroma. For a few h...
The Sandwich Is Free. The Ledger Is Not.
A chain of warm, wood-panelled delis will feed anyone who walks through the door, staffed entirely by people who have never been paid. Their theolo...
A Thousand Weddings for the Dawn
The Blessed Remnant asks for everything, and its members give it gladly. The intensity that outsiders find alarming, members experience as the point.
The Daughters of the New Morning
A tech-separatist order believes the future is female, literally, and that reaching it means building the tools to leave men behind. Its members de...
The Last People Who Know How to End a World
The Classics Department stages immersive rituals about doomsday religions. Its founders believe the ironic distance of performance is the last door...
How the World Learned to Count Its Cults
Fifty years ago, a busy year produced a handful of new movements. This year produced nineteen by summer. The Data Desk on what the curve is actuall...
The Martyrs and the Missing Millions
A radical animal-liberation order practices civil disobedience with a martyr's discipline. Its funding, it turns out, came from a crypto founder wh...
Ends: The Day the Ship Did Not Come, Again
A movement reaches its date. The Ends desk records what happens the morning after.
For the Record: The Second Attempt
The Ends desk notes, briefly and without embellishment, a death the Herd of God will not discuss.
Ends: A Movement That Simply Stopped
Not every ending is a catastrophe. Some movements just quietly run out.
The Ends column
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