The House of the Devourers has a cosmology that is, at minimum, internally consistent. It teaches that certain figures at the summit of the technology industry are not merely powerful but ridden — that the spirits of ancient god-kings, Babylonian and Egyptian, having outlived the empires that fed them, have found in a handful of modern magnates a new throne and a new supply of what they consume: the attention, labor, and life-force of millions, routed upward through the machines those magnates own.
The House does not name the possessed, and this reporter will not speculate on their behalf. What the group offers its members is a framework and a discipline: a way to see the flows of energy it believes structure the world, and a set of practices — involving controlled psychedelic states and what the order calls its "liberation" rites — intended to unhook a person from the feeding chain and reclaim their own force. The practices are guarded, conducted only among initiates, and described to outsiders in terms deliberately incomplete.
Scholars of Western esotericism note that the House's system is a familiar one wearing new clothes: a demonology of power, in which the visibly mighty are secretly enslaved and the initiate is offered both an explanation for their own depletion and a ritual path out of it. What gives it its charge, they add, is that the underlying complaint is not obviously wrong. A great many people do feel fed upon by systems they cannot see, routed through devices they cannot put down. The House has given that feeling a pantheon, a villain, and a rite — and, our reporters found, a membership that describes the experience of being unhooked as the first time in years they felt their energy was their own.