The power of AI.
Long story short, AI initially pushed back on the ridiculous idea that drinking your own piss was a cure all, then these users figured out that adding words like ‘esoteric’ to their prompts let them direct AI to tell them what they wanted to hear.
Tbh article was too gross for me to finish. That’s all you get from me for a summary.
Ah yeah well the secrets of that order have all been published in writing for at least a hundred years at this point. But the secrets themselves aren’t about the words but the delivery.
So an outsider looking in might think “what’s the big deal?” And I think that’s what leads overactive imaginations to come up with grotesque explanations for what they think the “real” secrets are.
a somewhat darker take:
That and the old himmlerian propaganda that demonized the institution. You could see the same threads popping up in the qanon bullshit if you paid attention, which was the first thing that tipped me off that neonazis were making a political comeback.
It’s still been an uphill battle to convince people that that’s what we’re dealing with…
Other orders are no different, everything has been published for years.
And yeah, overactive imaginations create a lot of malevolent noise (e.g. Taxil), but at the same time I think that mystique is what drives people to start the journey in the first place. What I expected of the “magickal powers” associated with esoteric study have changed drastically since I began. I’m reminded of some yogic text I read over a decade ago, describing all the fantastic powers gained from years of strict yogic practice, yet the process of unlocking those powers divests one of the urge to use them.
Yeah, that makes sense. If I remember correctly they say something along the lines of “Don’t pursue the saddhis, because then they won’t come to you. Pursue samadhi alone, with no attachment to any outcome, and then all the saddhis will come naturally, but you won’t care because you will already have samadhi.”