The Church of Astramentics presents itself to newcomers as a self-improvement system with a space-age vocabulary — a ladder of graded courses that promise to clear the mind of ancient damage and unlock latent powers, sold in tiers, guarded by contracts, its higher cosmology revealed only to those who have paid their way up. What our investigation concerns is not the courses. It is the three men who built the thing, and what at least one of them appears to have believed it was for.
The story, assembled from the movement's own archived papers, is stranger than its marketing. Astramentics was authored by a prodigiously prolific pulp science-fiction writer — call him the Author — who had a gift for turning esoteric doctrine into operating instructions a layman could follow. But the Author did not work alone, and his sources were not science-fictional. Before the church, he had fallen in with a brilliant rocket-propulsion engineer — the Rocketeer — who summoned spirits as readily as he calculated thrust, and who, with a notorious English magician known to his followers as the Beast, had attempted a ceremonial "Working" meant to open a door and bring something through it. The Author was present for the aftermath. Some of his church's most guarded doctrines, our reading of the papers suggests, are that ritual translated into the vernacular of engineering.
The claim that will draw the lawsuits is the last one, and we make it carefully: fragments in the archive indicate that at least one of the three regarded the entire enterprise — the church, the courses, the graded cosmology — as cover for a longer project, the reassembly of a scattered occult instrument they called by the old name, the Seal of Solomon, whose completion was meant not to save the world but to end it. Whether this was doctrine, delusion, or a dying magician's flourish, the archive does not resolve. What is documented is that a religion the public files under "self-help" was built by men who were, in their own words, trying to open something. The church declined to comment, citing the confidentiality of its scriptures.