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The Cult Dossier

182 groups,
and the people in them.

Who led them, what they taught, how they ended, and who got out and told.

182 groups, from the mystery cults of antiquity to this century, with the people who led them, the people who opposed them and the people who got out and told. Being here is the house's study of a group's record, not a verdict on any member. Kept at home: 7 entries whose subject is a child or a collective file of the dead, and the health of anyone living. Most entries were checked in September 2026; the date is on each person. The entries do not yet list their sources one by one: treat each claim as the house's reading until it is, and correct us with a source.

I. ANTIQUITY — THE MYSTERY CULTS

No. 002 · Ancient Mystery Cult

Atenism

c.1353 – c.1332 BCE

No. 006 · Ancient Mystery Cult

Bacchanalia

c.600 BCE – 186 BCE (suppression)

No. 012 · Christian-Derived

Montanism

c.157 – 6th c. CE

No. 013 · Syncretic / Other Nrm

Manichaeism

c.240 – 14th c. CE in China

II. MEDIEVAL — HERESY, DUALISM AND THE MILLENNIUM

No. 014 · Christian-Derived

Paulicians

c.650 – 12th c.

No. 015 · Christian-Derived

Bogomilism

c.927 – 15th c.

No. 016 · Christian-Derived

Catharism

c.1140 – c.1330

No. 018 · Apocalyptic / Doomsday

The Flagellants

1260; 1348–1349; sporadic to 15th c.

No. 022 · Christian-Derived

Khlysty

c.1645 – 1930s

No. 023 · Christian-Derived

Skoptsy

c.1770 – c.1970s

No. 024 · Occult / Esoteric / Satanic

Thuggee

disputed; alleged 13th c. – 1830s

III. THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY

No. 025 · Christian-Derived

The Shakers

1747 – present (2 members)

IV. THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

No. 037 · Occult / Esoteric / Satanic

I AM Activity

1930 – present

V. THE POSTWAR ERA 1945–1969

No. 047 · Commercial / Therapy / Lgat

Synanon

1958 – 1991

No. 048 · Occult / Esoteric / Satanic

Church of Satan

30 April 1966 – present

VI. THE 1970s — THE GREAT PROLIFERATION

No. 052 · Apocalyptic / Doomsday

Peoples Temple

1955 – 18 November 1978

No. 060 · Apocalyptic / Doomsday

The Family

1963 – 1987

VII. THE 1980s — SIEGE AND SCANDAL

No. 064 · Political / Terror

MOVE

1972 – present

No. 067 · Ufo / Extraterrestrial

Raëlism

1974 – present

No. 068 · Apocalyptic / Doomsday

Aum Shinrikyo

1984 – present (as successors, under surveillance)

No. 069 · Apocalyptic / Doomsday

Branch Davidians

1955 (from 1929 roots) – 19 April 1993

VIII. THE 1990s — THE MILLENNIUM APPROACHES

No. 071 · Ufo / Extraterrestrial

Heaven's Gate

1974 – 26 March 1997

No. 072 · Ufo / Extraterrestrial

Chen Tao

1996 – 2001 (Chen teaching from 1992)

No. 074 · Eastern-Derived

Falun Gong

May 1992 – present

IX. THE FUNDAMENTALIST AND POLYGAMOUS GROUPS

X. RUSSIA, KOREA AND SOUTH ASIA

No. 086 · Christian-Derived

Providence

1980 – present

XI. THERAPY, POLITICS AND THE SMALL GROUPS

No. 095 · Eastern-Derived

Buddhafield

c.1985 – present

No. 098 · Jewish / Islamic-Derived

Lev Tahor

1988 – present

No. 099 · Occult / Esoteric / Satanic

Order of Nine Angles

claims 1960s origins; texts from the 1970s – present

No. 100 · Commercial / Therapy / Lgat

NXIVM

1998 – 2018

No. 101 · Commercial / Therapy / Lgat

OneTaste

2004 – 2018 (as OneTaste)

No. 105 · Political / Terror

QAnon

October 2017 – present

XII. THE WIDER FIELD — CONCISE ENTRIES

No. 113 · Eastern-Derived

Adidam

1972 – present

No. 116 · Syncretic / Other Nrm

Lyman Family

1966 – present

No. 121 · Political / Terror

Mungiki

late 1980s – present (banned)

No. 124 · Eastern-Derived

Dahn Yoga

1985 – present

No. 127 · Syncretic / Other Nrm

Zendik Farm

1969 – 2013

XIII. FILLING THE GAPS — ASIA, AFRICA AND LATIN AMERICA

No. 134 · Apocalyptic / Doomsday

White Lotus

c.12th c. – 19th c.

No. 136 · Apocalyptic / Doomsday

Boxers

1898 – 1901

No. 137 · Syncretic / Other Nrm

Yiguandao

1930s – present

No. 138 · Syncretic / Other Nrm

Tenrikyo

1838 – present

No. 140 · Syncretic / Other Nrm

Caodaism

1926 – present

No. 148 · Jewish / Islamic-Derived

Gafatar

2011 – 2016

XIV. THE OPPOSITION — WHAT WAS BUILT TO FIGHT THEM

No. 152 · Moral Panic / Mass Hysteria

The Satanic Panic

1980 – c.1995 (echoes continue)

XV. THE ASYLUM — WHEN MEDICINE DECIDED WHOSE MIND WAS WRONG

XVI. CONTAGION — SYMPTOMS THAT SPREAD WITHOUT A PATHOGEN

XVII. SHARED PSYCHOSIS AND THE MANDATE TO KILL

No. 171 · Shared Psychosis / Mandated Killing

Folie à Deux

1877 – present

No. 176 · Shared Psychosis / Mandated Killing

Andrea Yates

2001-2006

XVIII. THE SECOND GENERATION — THE ONES WHO NEVER CHOSE

The people

APPENDIX A — THE TAXONOMY USED IN THIS FILE
THE CATEGORIES. The first eleven are kinds of group. The last five, added as the file grew, are the context the groups sit in: the people who opposed them, the institutions that confined people in the name of care, beliefs that spread with no leader at all, the cult at its smallest, and the children raised inside.

ANCIENT MYSTERY CULT — pre-modern initiatory religions, listed in the original non-pejorative sense of cultus. Osiris, Eleusis, Mithras, Cybele.

APOCALYPTIC / DOOMSDAY — organised around a dated end of the world. The most lethal category by a wide margin: Münster, Jonestown, Waco, Solar Temple, Kanungu, Shakahola. Almost every mass-death event in this dossier sits here.

CHRISTIAN-DERIVED — takes its scripture and vocabulary from Christianity while adding a living authority who supersedes it. The largest single category worldwide.

JEWISH / ISLAMIC-DERIVED — the same relationship to the other two Abrahamic scriptures: a group that stays inside the vocabulary of Judaism or Islam while answering to a living authority the parent tradition does not recognise, and which usually disowns it. LEV TAHOR (098) and GAFATAR (148) are the clear cases. Note what is NOT filed here: the Islamic apocalyptic movements — the Grand Mosque seizure (122) and the Mahdist State (139) — sit under APOCALYPTIC, because a dated end of the world is what defines them, exactly as it is for their Christian equivalents.

EASTERN-DERIVED — guru movements from Hindu, Buddhist and Sikh traditions. The characteristic failure mode is not apocalypse but the unaccountable guru: sexual exploitation framed as teaching.

UFO / EXTRATERRESTRIAL — salvation from the sky rather than from heaven. Structurally identical to apocalyptic groups; the rescuers simply have technology instead of wings.

OCCULT / ESOTERIC / SATANIC — hidden knowledge, initiatory grades, magical practice. Note the sharp split between the harmless (Golden Dawn, Church of Satan) and the genuinely lethal (Order of Nine Angles).

COMMERCIAL / THERAPY / LGAT — no deity at all. The product is transformation, sold in tiers. Synanon, est, Landmark, NXIVM, OneTaste. The fastest-growing category and the one modern law has finally begun to prosecute.

POLITICAL / TERROR — the totalist structure without the supernatural. Sicarii, SLA, LaRouche, Newman, QAnon.

RACIAL / NATIONALIST — group identity as the sacred object. Ariosophy, Nation of Islam, Nation of Yahweh.

SYNCRETIC / OTHER — everything that mixes sources without a dominant parent tradition.

THE OPPOSITION / ANTI-CULT — the people and laws that set out to stop these groups: the anti-cult movement and the Cult Awareness Network (150), and coercive control law (151). Included because the response has its own record, including harm done in the name of rescue.

PSYCHIATRY / THE ASYLUM — institutions that confined people in the name of care, from Bethlem to deinstitutionalisation (153–163): the lobotomy, Willowbrook, MKULTRA, Soviet punitive psychiatry, the Rosenhan experiment. The same questions as the groups: who decides what is real, and what happens to the people who cannot leave.

MORAL PANIC / MASS HYSTERIA — belief and symptoms that spread through a whole community without a leader: the Satanic Panic (152), the dancing plagues, Salem, the Tanganyika laughter epidemic, Havana Syndrome (164–170).

SHARED PSYCHOSIS / MANDATED KILLING — the cult at its smallest: a delusion shared by two people, or held by one alone, that ends in a killing (171–176).

SECOND GENERATION / BORN IN — children raised inside high-control groups, who never chose to join (177–182).
APPENDIX B — THE DIAGNOSTIC FRAMEWORKS
LIFTON (1961), Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism — eight criteria, derived from studying Chinese re-education of Western prisoners: milieu control (control of all communication); mystical manipulation (staged events presented as spontaneous or divine); the demand for purity (an unattainable standard producing permanent guilt); the cult of confession (personal disclosure used as leverage); sacred science (the doctrine is both morally absolute and scientifically true, and cannot be questioned); loading the language (thought-terminating clichés and insider jargon); doctrine over person (your experience is wrong if it contradicts the teaching); dispensing of existence (outsiders are less than fully human).

SINGER (1995), Cults in Our Midst — six conditions: keep the person unaware of the change process; control their environment and time; create powerlessness and dependency; suppress old behaviour and attitudes; instil new behaviour and attitudes; present a closed logical system.

HASSAN, the BITE model — control of Behaviour, Information, Thought and Emotion. The most widely used practical checklist.

FESTINGER, RIECKEN and SCHACHTER (1956), When Prophecy Fails — the study of a Chicago UFO group whose date passed. Established that disconfirmation, under the right conditions, INCREASES rather than decreases conviction, provided the belief was held with commitment, acted on irreversibly, held socially, and the failure is undeniable. Every failed date in this file — 1844, 1975, 1990, 1993, 1998, 2003, 2012, 2021 — is a test of that finding.

THE ACADEMIC OBJECTION. A large body of sociologists of religion (Eileen Barker, James Richardson, Massimo Introvigne, Gordon Melton) reject the brainwashing model outright, arguing that most joiners are volunteers, most leave of their own accord within two years, and that the anti-cult movement has historically been an instrument of religious discrimination. The American Psychological Association declined to endorse Singer’s coercive persuasion report in 1987, a decision that ended the model’s standing as expert testimony in US courts. This dossier takes the middle position that most practitioners now hold: coercive control is real, measurable and legally actionable, but it is a matter of degree and structure, not of an on/off switch in the brain.
APPENDIX C — THE WARNING SIGNS, IN ORDER OF DIAGNOSTIC VALUE
Ranked by how strongly each predicts serious harm. The ranking was drawn up across the first 130 files, before the dossier grew to , and has not been re-derived since.

1. There is no legitimate way to leave. Not disapproval — a structure that makes exit ruinous: shunning, custody of children, seized assets, held confessions. This is the single strongest predictor.
2. The leader is exempt from the rules he sets. Celibacy for members and a harem for the leader appears at Oneida, Taiping, Peoples Temple, Branch Davidians, Sri Chinmoy, Providence, Buddhafield, NXIVM.
3. Collateral is collected on entry. Confessions, nude photographs, signed false statements, transferred deeds. NXIVM formalised it; Peoples Temple and Scientology built files.
4. Contact with family is discouraged, then policed. Nearly universal; the specific mechanism varies from theology (Sullivanians, Bogorodichny) to geography (Colonia Dignidad, Jonestown).
5. A dated apocalypse. Both a recruitment accelerant and a fuse. What happens when the date passes is the whole question.
6. Medical care is discouraged or replaced. Correlates directly with body count: Shakahola, Love Has Won, Church of Wells, the blood doctrine.
7. Children are separated from parents, or educated only internally. The Family, 3HO, Sahaja Yoga, FLDS, Children of God, Twelve Tribes.
8. Aggressive litigation and private investigation against critics. Scientology, NXIVM, Universal Medicine, Landmark, Fellowship of Friends.
9. Escalating financial commitment with tiered secrets. The commercial signature: the truth is always one course further in.
10. Deceptive recruitment. Front organisations, undisclosed affiliation, love-bombing before disclosure. Shincheonji is the current state of the art.
APPENDIX D — WHAT THIS FILE DOES NOT CONTAIN
A SECOND STRUCTURAL FINDING: MOST OF THE PRE-MODERN GROUPS IN THIS FILE ARE KNOWN ONLY BY THEIR ENEMIES' VOCABULARY.

This was not designed into the dossier. It emerged during the August 2026 audit, entry by entry, until it became impossible to treat as coincidence. Seven confirmed instances:

THE BORBORITES (011) — from the Greek borboros, mud. The name means THE FILTHY ONES. Never self-applied; coined by adversaries, and used by Epiphanius specifically to equate doctrinal error with physical filth. What they called themselves is not recorded at all.
THE CATHARS (016) — called themselves the GOOD MEN, bons omes. ‘Cathar’ is overwhelmingly an outsiders' word, and a major school of scholarship now argues the organised church it names may never have existed.
THE ASSASSINS (017) — the hashish etymology is a hostile nickname, not a description of practice. The entire Western idea of the fanatical death-cult killer is built on it.
THE KHLYSTY (022) — called themselves KHRISTY, ‘Christs’. Opponents twisted Khrist into khlyst, THE RUSSIAN FOR A WHIP, generalising a real but minority practice into the name of the whole sect.
THUGGEE (024) — the category itself was substantially constructed by the colonial officer who suppressed it and then wrote the surviving record.
THE BOHEMIAN ADAMITES (020) — labelled PIKARTI, from ‘Picards’, by hostile Hussites. Everything known about their beliefs comes from the chronicler Laurence of Březová and from one survivor spared from the burning to describe the sect.
MONTANISM (012) — called itself THE NEW PROPHECY. ‘Montanism’, ‘the Phrygian Heresy’ and ‘Cataphrygians’ are all opponents’ coinages, and the movement’s own writings barely survive.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR READING THE FILE. In each case the group's own account is gone and the destroyer's account survived, which means the earliest entries here rest on a source base with a known and consistent bias. That bias does not run randomly. It runs toward making the group stranger, filthier and more organised than it was — stranger and filthier to justify the violence, more organised because inquisitors and officials needed a structure to prosecute. THE ADAMITE CASE (020) SHOWS THE MECHANISM MOST NAKEDLY. The prosecutable offence there was sacramental — denying the real presence — which is dry and rouses nobody; the nudity and free-love charges are what made it mob-ready, and the two best-informed contemporaries, Jakoubek of Stříbro and Petr Chelčický, decline to repeat them. The Cathar case shows both halves working at once: a scattered regional religious life written up as a rival church with bishops and dioceses, on evidence that reduces to one lost document. WHERE THIS FILE COULD ONLY GIVE THE ENEMY’S NAME, IT NOW SAYS SO IN THE ENTRY. That is the honest limit — the alternative would be inventing a self-designation nobody wrote down.
RELIABILITY IS NOT UNIFORM ACROSS THIS FILE, AND THE PATTERN IS MEASURABLE.

During the August 2026 verification sweep every claim that could be checked was checked against live sources, and the results divided sharply by what kind of source the claim rested on.

DOCUMENTARY CLAIMS PROVED RELIABLE. Every legal precedent and every institutional investigation examined was confirmed exactly as written — United States v. Ballard (1944), Malnak v. Yogi (1977/79), the Island Pond ruling, the European Court of Human Rights judgments in Wetjen and Tlapak (2018), the Lanning Report (1992), the Danforth Report (2000), the Australian Royal Commission, the An Olive Branch report (2020) and the Lewis Silkin report (2018). In every case the check added detail rather than correcting error. Court judgments and published inquiries are dated, citable and do not move.

CLAIMS ABOUT LIVING PEOPLE PROVED UNRELIABLE. Of the files asserting the criminal or custody status of a living person, roughly one in three contained something wrong, stale or misleading — including, in one case, a wholly unsupported claim that a named woman was a fugitive at large. Three distinct failure modes appeared: fabrication (specifics that no source supports), staleness (prison transfers, bail, parole and detention move faster than any snapshot), and compression (individually true facts assembled into a false impression — a twenty-day parole written up as a release).

MORTALITY IS THE MOST PREDICTABLE DECAY IN THIS FILE, AND IT WAS MEASURED.
In August 2026 every entry describing a LIVING subject BORN IN 1949 OR EARLIER was identified — 47 files — and the oldest were checked one by one against current sources. Of 18 subjects verified, 2 had died without this dossier noticing: ROBERT JAY LIFTON (L255), who died 4 September 2025 aged 99 while this file described him as ‘living, aged 100’ — the most important theorist in the dossier — and MERRIL JESSOP (L141), who died 28 February 2022 while this file still read ‘sentence served’. That is roughly one death missed for every nine elderly subjects checked, and the remaining ~25 in that cohort are still unverified.

Two related decay patterns were fixed at the same time. Hardcoded ages go stale annually: every ‘aged N’ in the file was recomputed against the subject’s birth date, which found exactly one survivor of earlier sweeps (Dwight York, 80 → 81). And the reverse error exists too — in early August 2026 a widely circulated report of LOUIS FARRAKHAN’s death was false and was debunked within days. The file must be wrong in neither direction.

The rule this yields: for any subject over about 80, ‘living’ is the claim in this dossier most likely to be quietly false, because nothing in the text decays visibly when it happens. A conviction stays a conviction; a death silently invalidates a status line and everything written in the present tense around it.

THE PRACTICAL RULE FOR ANYONE USING THIS FILE: treat the documentary spine — dates, judgments, inquiry findings, convictions, published reports — as solid. Treat anything describing where a living person is now as a snapshot that was true on the date of its verification stamp and may not be true today. The amber LIVE CASE flag marks the files most exposed to this. That is not a caveat about this dossier in particular; it is a structural property of writing down the present.
This dossier holds numbered group files and person files. It is comprehensive for the well-documented cases and it is not, and cannot be, complete. What is missing, and why:

The undocumented majority. The great bulk of groups that meet every criterion here were small, brief, and left no record — a preacher and forty followers in a rented hall, dissolved in eighteen months. Nothing survives of them. This is not a gap that better research closes; the sources never existed.

Non-English-language coverage. The Anglophone literature is heavily weighted to the United States, Britain and Japan. Latin America, Francophone and Lusophone Africa, Indonesia, the Philippines and the Middle East are all substantially under-represented here relative to their actual histories. Entry 109 (Brazil) and entry 121 (Kenya) are two of many that got a fraction of the coverage a comparable American case would receive.

Ancient and medieval groups outside Europe and the Near East. Chinese, Indian, Southeast Asian and Mesoamerican movements before 1800 are barely represented, though the White Lotus rebellions, the Yellow Turbans, the Nizari, the Mahdist state and dozens of others belong in a fuller version.

Groups whose status is genuinely unresolved. Several large modern religions are called cults by their critics and denominations by scholars. Where the evidence supports inclusion with a caveat, it is included with the caveat (entries 038, 044, 054, 074, 130). Where it does not, the group is absent — being unpopular, foreign or new is not evidence of anything.

Live litigation. Some current groups are not named because the allegations against them have not been tested. Everything asserted here rests on convictions, published official inquiries, court findings, or the organisations’ own documents.
APPENDIX E — IF THIS IS NOT ACADEMIC
If any of this is about someone real:

Do not attack the belief. Every file above shows the same result — direct confrontation with the doctrine confirms the group’s prediction that outsiders are hostile, and tightens the bond. This is the single most common mistake families make.

Stay reachable. The most reliable finding in the exit literature is that people leave toward something. Keep one relationship intact, keep it unconditional, and keep it free of arguments about the group. The door has to still be there when they turn around.

Ask questions rather than make statements. The Strategic Interaction Approach and motivational interviewing both work on the same principle: a person defends a position they are attacked on and examines one they are asked about.

Document. Dates, money, names, what was said and when. In every prosecution in this file — NXIVM, Warren Jeffs, Colonia Dignidad, Word of Faith — the case was built on records and on the organisation’s own materials, not on testimony about beliefs.

Do not attempt an involuntary intervention. Forcible deprogramming, common in the 1970s and 80s, is illegal, frequently prosecuted as kidnapping, and has a poor success rate. Exit counselling is voluntary and works better.

Where to go. In the UK, the Family Survival Trust and the Cult Information Centre. In the US, the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA). In France, MIVILUDES, a government body. In Australia, Cult Consulting Australia. Academic starting points: Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism; Janja Lalich, Bounded Choice; Alexandra Stein, Terror, Love and Brainwashing; Eileen Barker, The Making of a Moonie (for the opposing view, which is worth reading).

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